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    Maestro Accused of Striking Singer Won’t Return to His Ensembles

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    John Eliot Gardiner is stepping down from three renowned period groups he founded, after he was accused of hitting a singer last year.John Eliot Gardiner, an eminent conductor who was accused of striking a singer in France last year, will not be returning to three renowned period ensembles he founded, the board overseeing them announced Wednesday.Gardiner, 81, who is one of the world’s most celebrated conductors, will no longer lead the three groups: the Monteverdi Choir, the English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique.The board of the Monteverdi Choir & Orchestras, the nonprofit that oversees all three ensembles, said Wednesday that it had decided that Gardiner, who had been on leave since the incident in France last summer, “will not be returning to the organization.”“The M.C.O. takes seriously its obligations to protect victims of abuse and assault and preventing any recurrence remains a priority for the organization,” the group said in a statement.Gardiner sought to frame the decision as his own, saying in a later statement on Wednesday that it came after “a great deal of soul-searching since the deeply regrettable incident” in France.He drew widespread criticism after he was accused of striking the singer, William Thomas, a rising bass from England, on the face last summer after a performance of the first two acts of Berlioz’s opera “Les Troyens” at the Festival Berlioz in La Côte-Saint-André. Gardiner was apparently upset that Thomas had headed the wrong way off the podium at the concert, people at the festival said at the time.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lincoln Center’s Audiences Deserve Music Worthy of Them

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      When listeners were given the power to program an orchestral concert, the results were surprising.I love the classical music canon, and I hate it.To be precise, I hate the way we assume audiences will invariably choose it over what’s new and unusual. If you listen to marketing departments, there may be grudging tolerance for some fresh sounds at the start of a concert, but basically, people want the standards — more than ever, as their ticket-buying behavior over the past few years suggests they are only more enamored of chestnuts like “The Planets” and Beethoven’s Ninth.So it was a small but sweet triumph over this narrative when, on Saturday at David Geffen Hall, an audience did exactly the opposite. Finally, the familiar and the less so were put to a fair fight — and who do you think won?The battlefield was Symphony of Choice, a kind of preview performance at the start of the three-week, 13-concert season of the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center. That’s the slightly awkward name of what was once the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, before the center’s warm-weather offerings were consolidated as Summer for the City two years ago.Streamlining previously competing series and festivals has made the schedule clearer. But it has also meant the disappearance of ambitious classical programming in favor of the sort of smaller-scale, pop-culture-oriented events that Shanta Thake, Lincoln Center’s chief artistic officer since 2021, produced when she ran Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater.Amid the silent discos, mindfulness sessions and comedy nights, you get the sense that classical music is now viewed with faint irritation, as a stodgy and expensive waste of resources. People already know Lincoln Center for operas and symphonies during the regular season, the thinking goes, so the center’s audience isn’t going to be expanded in the summer through more of that — especially if those symphonies aren’t packageable as “experiences.”Which is why Symphony of Choice gave me pause when I first heard about it. The goal was for the Festival Orchestra, newly under the direction of the young conductor Jonathon Heyward, to offer a taste of its programs over the next few weeks. The gimmick was a crowdsourced popularity contest.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Serge Koussevitzky Bent Music History to His Will

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      There is a passage in Serge Koussevitzky’s final recording of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony that some listeners might hear in horror, but others with a degree of awe.He recorded the piece in 1949 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, during the last weeks of his 25 years as its music director. About two minutes from the end of the first movement, the symphony is doing its best to keep calm. Flutes and clarinets arc gently, then oboes and horns; the cellos and basses stay constant beneath the nervous skittering of the other strings.But then the bass begins to pull down. Suddenly the higher strings start to dominate, as anxiety takes hold; that sinking bass becomes inescapable. Tchaikovsky asks for a crescendo. Koussevitzky gives him that, but he also accelerates dramatically into the darkness, as fateful motifs blare. A few seconds later, just as the music seems ready to meet its destiny, Koussevitzky decides to make us wait. Fanfares blaze, entirely out of tempo, only to announce an unwritten silence. And then, savagery. As Tchaikovsky himself described this coda, “no haven exists.”Tchaikovsky: Symphony No.4, first movementBoston Symphony Orchestra (Pristine)This is the kind of moment that, in the wrong hands, gives Tchaikovsky a bad name. Koussevitzky was hardly alone in taking liberties with the composer, but many other conductors have at least tried to contain the drama here, rather than let hysteria hang out. Even Wilhelm Furtwängler, who like Koussevitzky sought to follow the spirit implied in a score as much as its explicit text, stayed truer to what Tchaikovsky actually wrote.But in Koussevitzky’s hands, the effect is shattering. This Tchaikovsky Fourth is irresistible evidence of just how much he and the Boston Symphony achieved in their quarter of a century together. Conviction resounds. The playing is virtuosic, yet not for the sake of display. Every phrase sings. There is formidable power and intensity, but also enough elegance that it feels apt for the writer Harris Goldsmith to have described the Boston strings as “one of the hedonistic delights of Western civilization.” In 1944, the New York Times critic Olin Downes said that Koussevitzky had refined his orchestra into “the most highly perfected and sensitized symphony ensemble in the world.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The ‘Converse Conductor’ Fighting Elitism in Classical Music

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      The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra had just finished performing Respighi’s “Pines of Rome” on a recent evening when the ensemble’s new music director, Jonathon Heyward, returned to the stage at Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.Rugs and chairs had been brought out to evoke a living room, for an intimate, late-night conversation with the audience about music and life. Wearing Converse sneakers and sipping from a glass of Scotch, Heyward, 31, discussed Respighi, his first season as music director and becoming a father. (His daughter, Ottilie, was born in May.) It was the kind of casual gathering that Heyward, who takes the helm of the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center this month, has championed as he works to expand the audience for classical music.“This art form is for everyone,” he said in an interview later. “We want everyone to feel welcome here.”Heyward’s efforts to break down barriers in the concert hall have earned him a nickname: the Converse conductor. He is part of a generation of young maestros, including Teddy Abrams in Kentucky and Anthony Parnther in California, who are trying to shed classical music’s elitist image. These rising stars are also hoping to help their orchestras get beyond the disruption of the pandemic by embracing a diverse array of artists and genres, and bringing more music into the community.Those ideas were on display on a recent night in Baltimore, when about 3,000 people gathered at Fort McHenry, a national monument, to hear Heyward lead a concert that paid tribute to construction workers killed in the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. The Baltimore Symphony performed somber works like Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, and Florence Price’s “The Deserted Garden,” as well as pieces by local artists, including the hip-hop performer Anthony Parker, who goes by the stage name Wordsmith.Heyward, the son of a Black father and a white mother — and the first person of color to lead the Baltimore Symphony in its 108-year history — says that orchestras have an obligation to reflect their communities.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At Salzburg Festival, a Polarizing Composer Brings Artists Together

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      A concert series at the Salzburg Festival, along with other events, will celebrate Arnold Schönberg’s 150th birthday and bring his music to new audiences.The composer Arnold Schönberg revolutionized the course of Western classical music. By dismantling the tonal system of major and minor keys as he self-consciously placed himself in the German tradition, he is also one of the 20th century’s most polarizing figures.The 150th anniversary of his birth is being celebrated this year with exhibits, concerts and workshops. The official birthday concert is scheduled for Sept. 13 at the Musikverein in Vienna, with the monumental “Gurre-Lieder” (“Songs of Gurre”) performed by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and conducted by its music director, Petr Popelka. Also in September, the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York will unveil an exhibit to commemorate the anniversary.And from July 27 to Aug. 24, the Salzburg Festival will present the concert series “Time With Schönberg,” juxtaposing the composer with everyone from his contemporary Maurice Ravel to his disciple Alban Berg.Schönberg’s theories emerged from a forward-looking intellectual climate in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century that included Sigmund Freud and painters such as Oskar Kokoschka and Gustav Klimt. The composer would write some of his most important works in Berlin, however, which he also established as a home base starting in 1912. After Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933, Schönberg emigrated to Los Angeles, where he spent the last two decades of his life.In Salzburg, the soprano Anna Prohaska, 42, will sing in the expressionist String Quartet No. 2, a work that she has been performing since 2007 and considers a “cornerstone of her career.” Georg Nigl, 52, a bass-baritone, will take on the song cycle “The Book of the Hanging Gardens,” a score that has been sitting on his shelf for three decades, and will return to the satirical, late-period work “Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte.” The pianist Tamara Stefanovich, 51, will (together with Nenad Lecic) perform the Second Chamber Symphony in a version for two pianos written by the composer after he left Germany.The following conversations have been edited and condensed. Prohaska and Stefanovich were interviewed by phone from Aix-en-Provence, France, and Berlin; Nigl was interviewed in person in Vienna.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      New York Philharmonic Chief Abruptly Steps Down Amid Tensions

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      Gary Ginstling, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, is leaving after just a year on the job.Gary Ginstling, the New York Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, abruptly resigned on Thursday after just a year on the job, leaving the orchestra in limbo as it grapples with challenges including heated labor talks and an investigation into its workplace culture after two players were accused of misconduct.Behind the scenes, there were rising tensions between Ginstling and the Philharmonic’s board, staff and musicians, according to someone familiar with the situation who was granted anonymity to describe private conversations. The person said Ginstling also had disagreements with the star conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who, in a major coup, was tapped to become the Philharmonic’s next music and artistic director.Some Philharmonic employees found Ginstling to be opaque, the individual said, and they complained that he was away from New York during critical moments, including at times when the administration was dealing with an outcry among musicians over the players accused of misconduct. Ginstling, 58, the former executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, maintained a home near the capital, where his family lives, and had been shuttling between there and New York, where he rented an apartment. (A friend said that he only spent weekends away from New York, and worked long hours for the orchestra.)A final flare-up occurred during an orchestra tour in China this summer, the individual said, with some players blaming Ginstling for several logistical problems. The orchestra had trouble fitting all of its musicians onstage at an opera house in Guangzhou. A planned speech from the stage by the American ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, was unexpectedly scrapped. (He later spoke at a reception for the orchestra.) In the end, large swaths of the opera house, which seats more than 1,800 people, were empty, an embarrassment for an ensemble of the Philharmonic’s caliber.In a statement released by the Philharmonic, Ginstling said: “The New York Philharmonic is an extraordinary institution, and it has been an honor to be a part of it. However, it has become clear to me that the institution needs a different type of leadership, and I have tendered my resignation.”He declined to comment further in a message on Thursday.The Philharmonic said that it would convene a “transition leadership team” that includes the chairmen of the Philharmonic’s board, Peter W. May and Oscar L. Tang, and Ginstling’s predecessor, Deborah Borda, who had held the post from 2017 until last year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A ‘Simpsons’ Joke Comes True for Cypress Hill

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      The famed California hip-hop group played with the London Symphony Orchestra — 28 years after “The Simpsons” dreamed up the collaboration.There is now an answer to at least one chicken-or-egg “Simpsons” prophesy: The episode did come first.But then, 28 years later, came the concert.“Simpsons” fans mixed with Cypress Hill fans on Wednesday at the Royal Albert Hall, a stately concert venue in the English capital, for a one-night-only collaboration between the London Symphony Orchestra and the American hip-hop group. Some were there for beats. Others had come to see a joke become a reality.“We came for the meme,” said Nick Brady, 30, who was with his brother. “We stayed for the music.”The evening had been foretold by a 1996 episode of “The Simpsons,” called “Homerpalooza,” in which Homer Simpson takes his family to a festival and then falls in with the stars.In the TV show, a festival employee arrives in a backstage area flanked by tuxedo-clad musicians. “Who is playing with the London Symphony Orchestra?” he calls out. “Somebody ordered the London Symphony Orchestra … possibly while high? Cypress Hill, I’m looking in your direction.”The hip-hop group huddles, whispering. Then, thinking fast, one says: “Uh, yeah, yeah, we think we did. Uh, do you know ‘Insane In The Brain’?”“We mostly know classical,” one orchestra member says, in a posh British accent. “But we could give it a shot.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At 75, the Aldeburgh Festival Is Bigger Than Benjamin Britten

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      When the composer Benjamin Britten died in 1976, it wasn’t clear how the public would remember him.There was Britten the rooted composer, firmly set in his native Suffolk, England, and the Aldeburgh Festival with his life partner, the tenor Peter Pears; Britten the establishment composer, friendly with the “Queen Mum,” the creator of “Gloriana” and the first composer to receive a peerage; and Britten the immediate composer, whose belief in art’s purposefulness meant he consciously avoided what he called writing for posterity.Others, however, were committed to the posterity of Britten’s work on his behalf. Rosamund Strode, a Britten assistant since 1964, became the founding archivist of the Britten Pears Foundation, and set the guidelines for one of the most comprehensive composer archives in existence.What, though, of his festival?The Aldeburgh Festival program from 1948.via Aldeburgh FestivalPeter Pears, left, and Britten.George Roger, via Aldeburgh Festival“Understandably, particularly after Britten’s death, and later after Pears’s death, there were people who wanted to properly protect what they felt were the sacred flames, because they were nervous of whether this thing was going to carry on after the two founders of this organization,” Roger Wright, the departing chief executive of Britten Pears Arts, said in an interview. Those people “needn’t have worried,” he added, “but there were bumpy times, and it’s very easy to forget that.”In the end, the Aldeburgh Festival, which recently celebrated its 75th edition, has produced many more editions without Britten than with him.The festival has gained a reputation for consistency, with well-attended, well-reviewed and richly programmed seasons. This year was no exception, including a new production of the church parable “Curlew River” alongside “Sumidigawa,” the Noh play that inspired it. (The show was filmed for a future BBC broadcast.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tanglewood Opens for the Summer, With Change in the Air

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      The Boston Symphony Orchestra gave its first concerts of the Tanglewood season, which is already showing signs of its new leader’s ambitions.Tanglewood, the lush summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, opened its season this past weekend, and it did so with one of the most Tanglewood programs imaginable.James Taylor was present to celebrate July 4, of course, and he was celebrating five decades of singing at the venue this year. On Friday night, the orchestra gave an evening of Beethoven under its music director, Andris Nelsons; on Sunday, Renée Fleming, no less, was on hand to cap a matinee of Strauss.In between, the Boston Pops offered a glorious review of recent Broadway musicals, with Victoria Clark bringing down the house as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s George III in “Hamilton.” Fellows attending the Tanglewood Music Center gave their first concerts, joining a lineage that stretches back to 1940.The crowds chattered amiably, the grounds were resplendent, and the music was good. What could feel more timeless than this?Sneaking through the shrubbery, however, was the light breeze of change. Chad Smith, the Boston Symphony’s ambitious new president and chief executive, plans to return this august institution to its most radical roots. Should Smith have his way, Tanglewood will see its creaking theater refurbished and put to good use, its Linde Center for Music and Learning pressed into service year-round, and Seranak, Serge Koussevitzky’s old home in the hills, restored as a meeting place for artists and the public.This will take years, and tens of million of dollars, but for now, even one of the coloring sheets that volunteers offer eager children has heard the message: a butterfly, yet to be filled in, with the tagline “A Summer Tradition Transformed.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More