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      Joyce DiDonato Wants Music to ‘Build a Paradise for Today’

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      The star mezzo-soprano’s album and concert program “Eden” addresses climate change by planting seeds both real and metaphorical.What are the duties of an artist toward society? As Russia invades Ukraine, as racism persists in the United States, this age-old question remains very much of the moment. And the list of issues to take a political stand on, whether by choice or suggestion, grows ever longer.The one taken up by the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato in her latest project, an album and concert program called “Eden,” is climate change.Employing a broader repertoire than DiDonato’s typical focus on the Baroque — Wagner, Mahler and a new commission from Rachel Portman in counterpoint with Cavalli, Gluck and Handel — the program reflects on what this star singer sees as humanity’s disconnect from nature. If the result is more mystical than activist, DiDonato’s aim remains, as her liner notes say, a prompt for her listeners “to build a paradise for today.”Touring since early March and arriving at Carnegie Hall on Saturday with the period-instrument ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro under the conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, the concerts are staged by Marie Lambert-Le Bihan. At performances, plant seeds are handed out to audience members, and, as part of an educational initiative, local children’s choirs — some ongoing, others formed for the occasion — sing “Seeds of Hope,” a song collated by the teacher Mike Roberts from lyrics and melodies written last year by 11- to 13-year-old students at a school near London.In an interview, DiDonato spoke about her project and the issues it raises, picking a favorite page from Portman’s “The First Morning of the World,” which features text by Gene Scheer. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.What were the origins of this project?It emerged about five years ago from the last big project I did with Il Pomo d’Oro, “In War and Peace.” I struggled for about two years to try to reconcile how to put climate change onto the stage in a way that made people want to come and experience it. I’m essentially an optimistic person, and I think my biggest strength is to prompt people to relief and hope, which is hard to do when you’re looking at a pretty dire situation.In a naïve way, it falls under that category of a disconnect, from me to you and me to the world that I’m living in: When I look at music and the natural world; I see harmony; I see balance; I see all kinds of forces working together to create an ecosystem, to create a symphony, to create an environment where everything has the chance to thrive. So, I’ve married those two, and I’m putting it out under the invitation to say, in a really simplistic way: What seeds are you planting with your words, with your actions, with your tweets, on your balcony?You start the program by singing the trumpet part to Ives’s “The Unanswered Question.” How did you select the repertoire?We knew that it had to start in a mystical and magical way. The Ives is infinite, but you have this insistent question that keeps coming back, and you have a progressively complicated and chaotic non-answer. I just don’t know of anything that summarizes the 21st century more accurately than that.That piece was on Gene’s mind in writing the poetry for “The First Morning of the World.” His line “there is a language without question marks” is a bridge from the Ives. We’re hoping to demonstrate what it is to be fully connected to nature, which happens in Mahler’s “Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft,” certainly in Handel’s “Ombra mai fu,” but also to demonstrate that ripping apart, that complete disconnect from nature that the Myslivecek warns about. We feel deeply in the “Piante ombrose” of Cavalli a sense of desolation and despair. The answer finally comes in the Mahler and the Wagner — and the Handel.What do you admire in the music of Rachel Portman, which has predominantly been for film?She wasn’t necessarily on my radar as a composer, but her name came up from several different sources. I listened to her “Leaves and Trees,” and it was clear that she had a very personal connection to the natural world.What she gave us I wouldn’t classify as cinematic at all, but it feels perfect for trying to create the nurturing and tranquil side of nature. There’s an unease because the singer hasn’t yet learned to speak this language of nature that is in the text, but the language is present from the beginning in the flute.Rachel Portman’s ‘The First Morning of the World’EratoThere’s something comforting about that first bird sound that you hear in the morning. You’ve gone to bed reading all the headlines, and right before you pick up your phone to see the horror of the day, you hear the bird. There’s something primal in us that goes, “Well, here comes another day.”The Portman song ends with “Teach me to sing notes that bloom like a canopy of leaves,/Meant to do nothing but feel the sun.” That would seem to imply that music can’t do much in the world, but you write that the album is a “call to action.” What can your audience really do in the face of climate change?I think they can do extraordinary things, personally, but the extraordinary things are at a local level. I get completely overwhelmed if I’m trying to solve world peace or climate change. But when I do little things, and again I know this sounds so naïve, I’ve come to believe that it’s really the only way forward.Literally, the call to action in this is planting seeds. We are giving seeds to every concertgoer who comes, and if everybody takes a pot of dirt, puts them in, gives them a little bit of water, we will have planted thousands and thousands of plants across the course of this tour.The other huge part of this project is planting seeds of music in kids. I don’t know of very many more effective ways to grab kids and to empower them than choral music. That is one practical way in which this project is calling people to action.So what do you think the role of an artist should be in politics?I think some artists embrace more humanitarian aspects, and some are just called to get through the day and do the best they can — and I think all of it is OK. You can’t put one stamp on an artist and say, “Because you call yourself an artist, you’re required to do X, Y and Z now.” But you also can’t pretend that art and politics are not intertwined.I don’t think we can make a blanket statement about what artists should and shouldn’t do, but if they want to talk about politics, and they want to use their music as it has been done for centuries, then they are allowed to do that.You want to get your message out to as many people as possible, understandably, but you are touring this program on five continents. Has this project led you to question the priorities of your own industry?For sure, what has been heavy on my mind is that I want people to take care of the environment and I’m getting on a plane to travel around the world. But I don’t think it’s enough to just do a 90-minute drive-by concert for people who can afford the tickets and move on to the next. That’s why we are leaving behind a green souvenir in the hands of everybody who comes to the concert. I think even more profoundly of the effect that it’s going to have on these kids, to join a world-class artist on the stage.Of course, we’re finding more ways to travel on the ground if we can, and finding ways to do carbon offsetting. I know it’s not a perfect solution. The biggest thing is, the impact that we leave behind has to be lasting. More

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      With ‘Waiting for the Sibyl,’ Kentridge Looks Into the Future

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      The South African artist developed a piece about how difficult it is to see around the next corner. Ironically, the work anticipated the uncertainties of pandemic life.LONDON — Billions of us have spent the past two or so years trying to divine the future. Will I get Covid-19? How bad will it be? When will the coronavirus pandemic end? Will it ever end? Reliable answers have been scant; even if we’ve been cushioned from the worst effects, many people have been camping in a sort of existential waiting room, living in near-permanent uncertainty.Appropriate timing, then, that the Barbican arts center in London is about to stage a chamber opera, by the South African artist William Kentridge, about how difficult it is to see around the next corner. Titled “Waiting for the Sibyl,” it retells the myth of a Greek prophetess whom mortals once pestered with exactly these sort of exasperating questions.A scene from “Waiting for the Sibyl,” which premiered at the Teatro Dell’Opera di Roma, in Italy, in 2019.Stella OlivierThat prophetess, the Cumaean Sibyl, was said to have spit out her written answers on oak leaves, but there was a catch: If the wind scattered the leaves, she would not help put them in the correct order, leaving her clients none the wiser. The opera is a reminder that humans have been trying to get a jump on what’s coming next for perhaps as long as we’ve existed — and that maybe we’d be better served by living in the present instead.In a recent interview in London, Kentridge said that, ironically, he hadn’t seen the piece’s relevance coming: He had begun work on “Waiting for the Sibyl” more than two years before the pandemic.“Those questions of mortality, fate, who are we in this world, have been the bread and butter of artists for millennia,” he said. “But that’s been brought right to the forefront now.”Commissioned by the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma in Italy and debuted there in September 2019, the roughly 40-minute piece consists of short, fragmentary scenes without dialogue. At first, it seems as cryptic as anything produced by a Greek oracle. A cast of nine singers and dancers enact moments from the legend. In one, a performer writhes in stuttering flashes of light in front of a screen displaying messages like, “I have brought NEWS” and “THE MOMENT HAS GONE.” Later, the cast dances while surrounded by scraps of prophecies on leaves of paper.The prophecies themselves are wry: “Resist the THIRD MARTINI,” “DISCARD LAST YEAR’S SOCKS.” But the parallels with our pandemic experience are often eerie. “FRESH GRAVES are everywhere,” reads one. Another is even more plangent: “My turn is when?”Making the opera had been an intricate process, Kentridge explained. The work was compiled from odd phrases he’d seen in books of English, Russian and Hebrew poetry and from a 1916 book of proverbs compiled by the South African writer Solomon Plaatje, which he made into a libretto of sorts.“A libretto is a straitjacket: You put it on willingly, but nonetheless it is a restriction,” Kentridge said. This opera “is a totally different experience.”Alex Ingram for The New York TimesThese scraps of text were then workshopped with the singers alongside the composers Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Kyle Shepherd. Together, they translated the phrases into African languages including Zulu, Setswana and Sesotho and Xhosa, and developed an improvised musical score.Sometimes, the music refers to traditions such as call-and-response isicathamiya choral singing; elsewhere it is deliberately jumbled. To draw all of this together, Kentridge created art work — drawings, ink washes, sculptures, palimpsests of old letters and reference books — which he turned into animated projections and stage designs.Like so many of his works, the result is a “collage,” Kentridge said. While he has designed and directed operas before — notably a madcap spin on Shostakovich’s “The Nose” (2010) and a brutally monochrome version of Berg’s “Wozzeck” (2017) — being able to create his own universe was liberating, he added.“A libretto is a straitjacket: You put it on willingly, but nonetheless it is a restriction,” he said. “This is a totally different experience.”Mahlangu said that, for himself and the singers, the Greek source material seemed remote at first. Yet as they developed the piece, it began to resonate with African mythologies and storytelling traditions. “Many people in South Africa believe that when people die, they don’t actually die,” he said. “They continue to look after the living. There is a sibyl in each and every one.”He added that this story of prediction and counter-prediction also resonated with the volatile politics of contemporary South Africa, which became even more turbulent amid the pandemic, as the country’s unemployment rate climbed to a dizzying 35 percent. “Here we are constantly in the state of wonder and worry,” Mahlangu said: “‘What is the next step? Where will we be?’”Now 66, Kentridge is unusual — almost unique — among contemporary artists in having achieved as much acceptance in theaters and opera houses as in museums and contemporary art spaces. He began his career in the mid-1970s as a Johannesburg-based illustrator and printmaker, but his practice has expanded to include whimsical short films, elaborate installations and majestic pieces of public art.A still from “City Deep,” an animated film by Kentridge about South Africa.William KentridgeOften his subjects reference classical literature or art history; almost always they reflect on South Africa’s bitter legacy, as in his new animated film “City Deep” (2020), a response to Johannesburg’s contentious history. A documentary on the making of the movie will be screened at the Barbican alongside “Waiting for the Sibyl.”In an era of conceptual and digital art, Kentridge has remained defiantly figurative and analog: His hulking charcoal drawings, loose sketches in Indian ink and flickering projections are immediately recognizable. Even when working on collaborative projects, the bulk of his time is spent laboring alone with ink, or charcoal, and paper, the artist said. “The physicality is essential. It’s the medium through which the thinking happens.”Much as he enjoys making gallery-based shows, he loves the challenge of theatrical commissions, he added. “The opera house says, ‘We’ll give you a canvas, 17 meters wide, 11 meters high. And we’ll give you another 18 meters of depth,’” he said. “And I get to make an hour-and-a-half drawing in the space.”With opera houses and concert halls closed, he hunkered down in Johannesburg and made a series of nine films about his studio practice, which are now being edited. He has also been preparing a career retrospective at the Royal Academy in London (set to open in September after pandemic-related delays), and making an animated film response to Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, which will be performed live at the Lucerne festival, in Switzerland, in June.“There are always a few too many projects,” he said with a laugh. “But I can’t blame anyone but myself.”In an era of conceptual and digital art, Kentridge has remained defiantly figurative and analog: His hulking charcoal drawings, loose sketches in Indian ink and flickering projections are immediately recognizable.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesRe-encountering “Waiting for the Sibyl” in light of the coronavirus had been salutary, he added: Though the opera was partly about the limits of human knowledge, partly about mortality itself, it also contained seeds of hope.“In the long run, none of us are going to get out of this alive, but while we are here, we can acknowledge that,” he said. “We can still work wisely and optimistically. Comfort must be taken where it can be found.” More

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      Nicholas Angelich, Ocean-Straddling Pianist, Dies at 51

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      American-born and Paris-based since he was 13, he performed on both sides of the Atlantic, winning acclaim specializing in Germanic repertory.Nicholas Angelich, an American-born pianist best known for his soulful interpretations of the Germanic repertory, which he performed with elegant virtuosity and expressive intimacy, died on Monday in Paris, where he had lived since he was 13. He was 51.The cause was degenerative lung failure, according to his manager, Stefana Atlas.A soft-spoken man with a gentle demeanor, Mr. Angelich performed most frequently in Europe, but when he made appearances at American concert halls, they were almost invariably praised.Reviewing a recital at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2011, Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times wrote that Mr. Angelich’s performance of Bach, Chopin and Schumann “consistently challenged my thinking about this repertory.”“But his playing,” he added, “was so deliberate in its intentions, alternately refined and feisty, and so intriguing that I was affected and impressed.”Mr. Angelich had a particular affinity for Brahms, in particular the second piano concerto, which he performed with many orchestras and conductors on both continents. In 2016 he wrote an essay for Gramophone magazine about the piece and his relationship to it, at one point commenting: “I was more attracted to it because I had listened to it much more at home with my parents. I was very familiar with it and had several recordings I really loved.”Reviewing a performance of the concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Jeremy Eichler wrote in The Boston Globe that Mr. Angelich had conjured “unusual veiled sonorities, drawing out inner lines that often go unnoticed, and dispatching rapid passagework with remarkable lightness and dynamic control.”“Pianissimos,” he added, “floated effortlessly into the hall.”Mr. Angelich also frequently performed Bach, Beethoven and Romantic composers like Schumann and Liszt, whose “Années de Pélerinage” was another of his signature pieces.But while dedicated to the core 19th-century repertory, Mr. Angelich believed musicians should be adventurous; he thought it essential that they explore varied repertory for creative growth. He performed 20th-century composers like Bartok, Messiaen, Stockhausen and Boulez and gave the premieres of music by Bruno Mantovani, Pierre Henry, Eric Tanguy and Baptiste Trotignon.Mr. Angelich receiving an honor at the Victoires de la musique classique awards ceremony in 2019 at the Seine Musicale Auditorium in Boulogne-Billancourt, outside Paris.Geoffroy Van Der Hasselt/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Angelich’s own music making was notable both for its muscular power and for its delicacy. He disputed the idea that musicians tend to offer performances that are either cerebral or emotional.“There are people who say that it is one way or the other, it is either expressive or intellectual,” he said in an interview, “but I think that you need to have both. All great musicians offer that unique mix of spontaneity and thought.”Nicholas Angelich was born on Dec. 14, 1970, in Cincinnati, the only child of two professional musicians. His mother, Clara (Kadarjan) Angelich, who was Russian, attended the Academy of Music in Belgrade, where she met and married the Yugoslav violinist Borivoje Andjelitch. The couple emigrated to America in the 1960s.Clara taught piano, and her husband was a member of the violin section of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra for 46 years. He anglicized his name to Bora Angelich after arriving in America.Nicholas began studying piano with his mother at age 5 and made his debut at 7 performing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 21. At 13, he and his mother moved to Paris so that he could study at the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique, where he won multiple prizes for piano and chamber music. His teachers included Aldo Ciccolini, Yvonne Loriod and Michel Béroff.In 1994, Mr. Angelich won the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition and made his New York recital debut in Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center the following year. In 2003, Leon Fleischer, one of his mentors, gave him the Young Talent Award at the Ruhr International Piano Festival in Germany. Mr. Angelich made his debut with the New York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur at Lincoln Center in May 2003, performing Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto.Mr. Angelich, a committed chamber musician, was a frequent guest at the Verbier and Lugano festivals in Switzerland. He frequently collaborated with the violinist Renaud Capuçon and the cellist Gautier Capuçon, with whom he recorded the Brahms piano trios, violin sonatas and piano quartets for the Virgin Classics label.Reviewing the trio’s performance at the Wigmore Hall in London, Martin Kettle wrote in The Guardian: “Though the French brothers provide the celebrity element, it is Angelich’s piano which is the constant in these varied programs. Angelich is a master Brahmsian.”Mr. Angelich made eight recordings for Warner Classics, including Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” a disc of Prokofiev, Brahms Piano Concertos with Paavo Jarvi and the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra, and Beethoven’s fourth and fifth piano concertos on a historic Pleyel piano. His catalog also includes a recording of music by Baptiste Trotignon on the Naïve label.In the 2018-19 season, Mr. Angelich began his first season as soloist-in-residence with the Orchestre Métropolitain de Montreal, working with the conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, a frequent collaborator who described him on Tuesday in the Montreal Gazette as “a generous soul and a pianist like no other.” Mr. Angelich was scheduled to close the orchestra’s 2021-22 season with two concerts in June.Mr. Angelich, who died in a hospital, left no immediate survivors.In an interview in 2019 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, Mr. Angelich explained that even when playing pieces he had performed for decades, he always studied the score again. “You will find a detail or several details which will make you understand something in a totally different way about the entire structure of the piece,” he said. “And this is something I find necessary and fascinating.” More

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      Lincoln Center Announces ‘Summer for the City’ Festival

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      A festival, Summer for the City, which includes elements of Mostly Mozart, is part of an effort to attract younger, more diverse audiences.After more than two years of upheaval brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, Lincoln Center will stage a festival this summer aimed at helping New York City heal.Called Summer for the City, the festival will take place across 10 outdoor spaces and three indoor stages at the campus from mid-May to mid-August and will be programmed around themes of rejoicing, reclaiming and remembering. It is also part of Lincoln Center’s efforts to recalibrate its image as an exclusive bastion of classical music and appeal to a younger, more diverse crowd.The center plans to feature more popular music and install a large disco ball, 10 feet in diameter, that will hang over a dance floor at the center’s main plaza.“My hope is that we’re making space for people to find their neighbors again, to find each other again and to find their own inner performer,” Shanta Thake, the center’s chief artistic officer, said in an interview. “And to really be in their whole body with other New Yorkers and come back together again as a city.”The festival, which is expected to include over 300 events and 1,000 artists, is the first under Thake, who joined Lincoln Center last year with a mission of broadening its appeal beyond classical music and ballet into genres like hip-hop, poetry and songwriting.This year’s programming will open with a mass singalong on the Josie Robertson Plaza, featuring the Young People’s Chorus of New York, under the direction of Elizabeth Núñez, and including classics like “This Little Light of Mine” and Elton John’s “Your Song.”In August, two versions of Mozart’s Requiem will be on offer — a traditionally presented one, by the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, and a reimagined dance version, “Requiem: Fire in the Air of the Earth,” choreographed by Kyle Abraham and performed by his company, A.I.M, featuring the electronic musician Jlin.Summer in the City will unite the center’s festivals — including the discontinued Lincoln Center Festival and the Mostly Mozart Festival, which has largely been put on hold since 2020.The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra will perform six pairs of concerts this summer, including a free opening program in July under the ensemble’s longtime music director, Louis Langrée, with Conrad Tao as the soloist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17 in G and Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” (Tao will also play the William Grant Still solo “Out of the Silence” from “Seven Traceries.”)Thake, a former associate artistic director at the Public Theater, where she spent a decade managing the cabaret-style venue Joe’s Pub, said that she hoped to broaden the audience for Mostly Mozart by integrating it with Lincoln Center’s other summer offerings.“What we’re experimenting with this year is really the breaking down of our internal silos,” she said. “They’re all under the same banner, and this is one Lincoln Center audience that is very broad, and we’re going to see how that works.”Summer for the City aims to build on Restart Stages last year, when the center hosted small-scale performances outdoors, to help get artists back to work after months of pandemic cancellations. According to Lincoln Center, that series attracted more than 200,000 people, nearly a quarter of whom were first-time visitors.The disco ball is the centerpiece of the Oasis, an outdoor stage designed by the costume and set designer Clint Ramos, that will host live music and dance parties throughout the summer.In June, Jazz at Lincoln Center, embracing a New Orleans tradition, will lead a second-line processional from Columbus Circle to Lincoln Center, to mourn those who have died since the pandemic started. And in July, the center will host “Celebrate LOVE: A (Re)Wedding,” as a ceremony for couples who canceled or scaled back nuptials in the past two years, with live music and a reception on the dance floor.The arts, Thake said, “speak to all of the deep trauma that we’ve all collectively been through and also bring so much of the joy and revitalization that the city needs.” More

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      Radu Lupu, Pianist Who Awed Listeners, Is Dead at 76

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      Preferring the stage (and an office chair) to the recording studio, he enthralled audiences with ruminative performances that evoked the otherworldly.Radu Lupu, a pianist of rare refinement whose ruminative, enigmatic performances and recordings wove spells over his listeners, induced awe among his colleagues and confirmed him as one of the finest musicians ever to have graced his instrument, died on Sunday at his home in Lausanne, Switzerland. He was 76.His manager, Jenny Vogel, confirmed the death. She did not specify a cause but said that Mr. Lupu had struggled with a series of prolonged illnesses.The Romanian-born Mr. Lupu was no ordinary virtuoso. He was a conjurer of sounds, a spontaneous and sometimes eccentric player of patient lyricism and hypnotic tone, distinguished as much by his control over the ebbing of notes as by his fastidious initial touch.Uninterested in showmanship, with a wary stage presence and an allergy to public relations, Mr. Lupu shone in the music of the twilight, his rapt poetic sensibility working wonders in the shadowy ambiguities of Schubert and, above all, Brahms. The critic Fiona Maddocks once wrote that he appeared to take “aural dictation from the ether.”Quickly abandoning the dazzle of the Prokofiev Second Concerto with which he won the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition as a young musician in 1966, Mr. Lupu reportedly said that he would have liked to have made a career playing “nothing but slow movements.” He settled on a repertoire of the more reflective music of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, with Debussy, Franck, Janacek and Bartok among the few other composers he added in concert.“The decision has nothing to do with music I like, but rather music that likes me,” Mr. Lupu explained to The Chicago Tribune in a rare interview in 1994. “I love Chopin, but when I play it, it has always sounded like Brahms or something. I play it more for myself.”Mr. Lupu in concert at Carnegie Hall in 2008. His fellow pianist Daniel Barenboim noted Mr. Lupu’s “ability to improvise as if he was discovering what he is doing at the spur of the moment.” G. Paul Burnett/The New York TimesWhatever Mr. Lupu played, he evoked the mystical, the otherworldly. He sat on an office chair rather than a piano bench, and he leaned ever so slightly back; he seemed less to produce his sound than to elicit it, though thunder was always available for him to summon when necessary.Critics marveled at the intimacy this apparently diffident figure could create. Writing in The New York Times in 1974, Allen Hughes called it “alchemy” — “that mysterious something that goes beyond technique, erudition and general musicality to reach into the sensibilities of listeners.”Mr. Lupu’s performances did not always come off, but his was playing of such an exalted quality that it intoxicated fellow pianists: Daniel Barenboim noted Mr. Lupu’s “ability to improvise as if he was discovering what he is doing at the spur of the moment.” Mitsuko Uchida called him “the most talented guy I have ever met.”For the pianist Kirill Gerstein, hearing Mr. Lupu was an experience that approached transcendence. “The instrument, the craftsmanship, even the compositions themselves recede into the background,” Mr. Gerstein wrote in The New York Review of Books in 2015, “and there remains a lone figure communicating not just music, but something deeply humane.”Radu Lupu was born on Nov. 30, 1945, in Galati, a city on the Danube near Romania’s border with the Soviet Union. He was the only child of Meyer Lupu, a lawyer, and Ana (Gabor) Lupu, who taught French.Radu barely spoke a word until he was almost 3; as he tended to sing rather than speak to express himself, his parents gave him a piano when he was 5. He took lessons from the age of 6.“But I did not really play the piano as an end in itself,” Mr. Lupu told The Christian Science Monitor in 1970. “I made tunes on it, and from the very beginning I regarded myself as a composer. I was sure, and everybody else was sure, that one day I would become a famous composer.”He gave up composing only when he was 16, four years after his professional debut as a pianist in Brasov, Romania. He trained at the Bucharest Conservatory with Florica Musicescu, who had previously taught another cultivated Romanian, Dinu Lipatti, to whom Mr. Lupu was sometimes compared. Mr. Lupu attended the Moscow Conservatory for much of the 1960s; his professors there included Heinrich Neuhaus, tutor to two temperamentally different artists, Sviatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels.“I found even the most elementary rudiments of piano technique very difficult,” he confessed to The Monitor, “because this needed great self-discipline, and as for years I had imagined that I would one day become a composer, I had always felt that this sort of perfection wasn’t going to be needed.”Even so, Mr. Lupu placed fifth at the International Beethoven Piano Competition in Vienna in 1965 before sweeping to victory at the Cliburn finals in Fort Worth the next year. “I really do not like competition at all,” he told the press then; he nonetheless shared first prize at the George Enescu International Competition in Bucharest in 1967 and triumphed at the Leeds International Piano Competition in England in 1969.Fanny Waterman, the founder of the Leeds, recalled Mr. Lupu inviting the jury to tell him which of the Beethoven concertos to play; they declined, and he won with the first movement of the Third. He recorded that Beethoven with Lawrence Foster and the London Symphony Orchestra in 1970 — a prelude to his later complete survey of the five concertos with Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic.Despite such successes, he already struck listeners as anything but a standard-issue product of the competition circuit. “He is somewhat different from the regulation contest winner, in that he is not primarily a brilliant and impeccable technician,” Raymond Ericson wrote in The Times of Mr. Lupu’s Carnegie Hall debut in April 1967. Harold Schonberg, also in The Times, thought the Brahms First Concerto, with which Mr. Lupu returned to the hall in 1972, “willful, episodic and mannered,” but allowed that it at least had “the virtue of not being stamped from the same old cookie cutter.”Mr. Lupu, who retired in 2019, made few recordings for a pianist of his stature; he admitted to tensing up in the presence of studio and even radio microphones. A boxed set of his solo releases on Decca runs to a mere 10 discs, the last from the mid-1990s. As well as further concertos, including Mozart, Schumann and Grieg, Mr. Lupu recorded duets with the violinists Szymon Goldberg and Kyung Wha Chung, and two-piano or four-hand works with Mr. Barenboim and Murray Perahia.If Mr. Lupu’s solo records capture only a hint of the aura he exhibited in concert, his ethereality is made close to tangible on several of them, including one of Schubert’s Impromptus from 1982 that draws impossible tension from the natural flow of its singing lines; a pair of Schubert sonatas that won a Grammy Award in 1996; and a collection of late Brahms from the 1970s that is suffused with such understanding, such light and shade, that the result, as the critic Alex Ross put it, comes “as close to musical perfection as you could ask.”Mr. Lupu married the cellist Elizabeth Wilson, a fellow student in Moscow, in 1971; their marriage ended in divorce. He was married to Delia Bugarin, a violinist, for 32 years. She survives him, along with a son, Daniel, and two grandchildren.Mr. Lupu’s critics sometimes accused him of looking aloof onstage, such was his focus on the music at hand. But speaking to The Chicago Tribune in 1994, he denied that he was playing only for himself.“The audience element is the most important element in the concert,” he said. “But it is also true that if I can make music for myself, even while practicing, and be moved by it, then that will project to the audience. So it may seem I am playing for myself, but it’s not quite like that.“Why should I make a big show of the whole thing?” More

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      Citing Ukraine War, an American Resigns From Russia’s Mariinsky

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      “There’s no way I could ever be in denial of what is happening,” said the conductor Gavriel Heine, a fixture at the prestigious Russian theater.The American conductor Gavriel Heine has been a fixture at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Russia, for 15 years. He has led hundreds of performances of classics like “Swan Lake” and “The Rite of Spring.” And he has done so as a protégé of the company’s leader: Valery Gergiev.On Saturday, Mr. Heine went yet again to the Mariinsky, but not for an evening at the podium. He was there to inform Mr. Gergiev — a longtime friend and supporter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — that he was resigning from his post as one of the state-run theater’s resident conductors. Mr. Heine gathered his possessions, including a few white bow ties and scores for “La Bohème” and “The Turn of the Screw,” and prepared to leave the country.Mr. Heine, 47, had been increasingly disturbed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “There’s no way I could ever be in denial of what is happening in Ukraine,” he said during a series of interviews over the past week. “Russia is not a place where I want to raise my son. It’s not a place where I want my wife to be anymore. It’s not a place I want to be anymore.”His resignation comes as the war continues to upend performing arts. Cultural institutions in Europe and North America, vowing not to hire performers who support Mr. Putin, have severed ties with some artists — most notably Mr. Gergiev — as well as orchestras, theaters and ballet companies. Many artists, citing the invasion, have canceled appearances in Russia.Mr. Gergiev, the theater’s general and artistic director, was once one of the world’s busiest conductors, but his international career has crumbled. Carnegie Hall, for example, canceled a pair of concerts of the Mariinsky Orchestra under his baton that had been planned for May, after he had been dropped from a series of Vienna Philharmonic performances in February. He has returned in recent weeks to St. Petersburg to focus on that company and his domestic cultural empire, which encompasses several stages, thousands of employees and tens of millions of dollars in state financing.Valery Gergiev, a mentor of Mr. Heine’s and a longtime friend and supporter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.James Hill for The New York TimesMr. Heine found Mr. Gergiev at the Mariinsky on Saturday, where he was leading rehearsals and performances of Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” and Verdi’s “Attila.” He described repeatedly trying to catch his mentor backstage to inform him of his resignation, finally cornering him in an elevator.It was a quick conversation: five minutes while Mr. Gergiev was rushing to a meeting. Mr. Heine said that Mr. Gergiev seemed surprised but accepted his decision.“He was very nice to me,” Mr. Heine said. “He gave me a handshake and a hug and wished me well. And of course I thanked him for giving me such a huge chance pretty early in my career.”The two conductors also spoke about recent tensions between Russia and the West. Mr. Gergiev — who was fired from engagements in the United States and Europe, as well as from the podium of the Munich Philharmonic, over his refusal to publicly condemn the war — defended his decision, saying that he was not a child, Mr. Heine recalled.The Mariinsky declined to comment on Monday, and said it could not yet confirm Mr. Heine’s resignation. However, the company removed Mr. Heine’s biography from its website Monday evening.Mr. Heine’s departure from the Mariinsky is an unexpected conclusion to his three-decade career in Russia, where he studied with renowned teachers and rose to become a conductor at one of the country’s most prestigious houses. And his exit is another blow to Russian cultural institutions, which are grappling with boycotts and cancellations by foreign groups as the country’s arts increasingly turn inward under Mr. Putin. Mr. Gergiev remains a critical figure in Mr. Putin’s campaign. Mr. Putin, during a televised meeting last month, asked Mr. Gergiev whether he was interested in the idea of uniting the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow with the Mariinsky, an arrangement that would take Russia back to the days of the czars.“Russia is just going to be more and more closed,” said Simon Morrison, a music professor at Princeton University. “It’s going to revert more and more to its own true self, harsh as that might seem — a sealed-off, angry, paranoid and resentful feudal realm.”Mr. Heine, who grew up in Cherry Hill, N.J., became interested in Russian culture as a teenager. He accompanied his mother, a pianist, to a performance in Moscow, and while there took cello lessons with a professor at the Moscow Conservatory.After high school, he returned to Russia for language and cultural studies. In 1998, he became one of the Moscow Conservatory’s first American graduates, then began to study with the eminent Russian conductor Ilya Musin, who also taught Mr. Gergiev.Mr. Heine leading the Mariinsky’s orchestra in 2017.Irina TumineneHis break came in 2007, when Mr. Heine approached Mr. Gergiev during a rehearsal in Philadelphia and asked him whether the Mariinsky had any openings. Mr. Heine was invited to make his debut at the theater later that year with Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro,” and soon began to lead performances there regularly. In 2009, he was named a resident conductor.During his time at the Mariinsky, Mr. Heine was at the podium for over 850 performances and watched as the company grew in power and size under Mr. Gergiev. The arts and the state, Mr. Heine said he came to understand, were inexorably linked in Russia. He was in the theater on two occasions when Mr. Putin, the house’s main benefactor, appeared for awards ceremonies and other events.“I just assumed that culture is a priority for this government, for whatever reason,” he said. “And they feel very strongly about it, and that’s the relationship.”How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 6Gavriel Heine. More

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      Harrison Birtwistle, Fiercely Modernist Composer, Dies at 87

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      His labyrinthine, theatrical works placed him in the first rank of 20th-century English composers, though his music was often tagged as “difficult.”Harrison Birtwistle, whose intensely theatrical compositions and uncompromising modernism made him the most prominent British composer since Benjamin Britten, died on Monday at his home in Mere, England. He was 87.His death was announced by a spokesman for his music publisher, Boosey & Hawkes.Mr. Birtwistle’s granitic, earthy works revealed their secrets slowly, and their structures were labyrinthine. Dissonant, weighty and to some ears forbidding, they often dwelled on similar themes from piece to piece, interrogating kindred ideas from different angles, developing ideas touched on earlier.“I can only do one thing, and there is nothing else,” Mr. Birtwistle, who was active mainly in Europe, said in 1999.What Mr. Birtwistle did, however, he did in a unique style of indelible permanence. Reviewing “The Shadow of Night,” the critic Paul Griffiths wrote in The New York Times in 2002 that that orchestral work was “like all its predecessors: something strikingly new but heavy with echoes from the past and, indeed, the future.”“This is music made to speak now, authoritatively,” he added, “and (like little else in our time) made to last.”Myth provided much of Mr. Birtwistle’s subject material. In “Gawain,” which was given its premiere at the Royal Opera House in 1991, the legend was Arthurian. Greek sources wove a more constant thread, from instrumental works that borrowed ancient structures like the early “Tragoedia” (1965), to his most successful operas: “The Mask of Orpheus,” a massively complex expansion of the tale that won the prestigious Grawemeyer Prize in 1987, and “The Minotaur,” an unsparingly graphic work with baying crowds and a rape scene; it had its premiere at Covent Garden in 2008.“Birtwistle’s score is relentlessly modernistic, its astringency serving to underscore the opera’s violence and unremitting tension,” the critic George Loomis wrote in The International Herald Tribune.“One did not expect this crusty composer to turn mellow at 73, and he has not done so,” Mr. Loomis continued, adding that “this is not music from which one derives much sheer pleasure, but it is intently theatrical.”Mr. Birtwistle’s interests were always primarily in drama and form, whether writing for the opera house or the concert hall. His compositions tended to be deeply ritualistic, as blocks of material were etched and etched again in sounds dominated by woodwind, brass and percussion.Orchestral players were sometimes treated as if they were akin to characters in a theater. In such works as “Verses for Ensembles” (1969), “Secret Theatre” (1984) and “Cortege” (2007), instrumentalists played musical and dramatic roles, moving between ensembles and around the stage. The moving “Concerto for Violin and Orchestra” (2009-10) engaged the soloist Christian Tetzlaff in a series of duets with individual players, dissecting and reforming the genre even while extending it.Mr. Birtwistle was inescapably an English composer, taking inspiration from distant predecessors, such as the Renaissance musician John Dowland, and incorporating even old techniques like the medieval hocket. He had no time for the pastorals of more recent forerunners like Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose influence on his earliest works was quickly abandoned.Mr. Birtwistle delved instead into the more harrowing side of nature, as in his unearthly “The Moth Requiem” (2012) for female voices, and the volcanic “Earth Dances” (1986), a vast score that divided the orchestra into six bubbling, geological “strata” of instruments, each erupting over separate time scales. It was often compared to Stravinsky’s classic “Rite of Spring.”“You can find Birtwistle’s music ‘difficult’ or not, or like one piece more than another,” the composer Oliver Knussen said in “Wild Tracks,” a diary of conversations between Mr. Birtwistle and the journalist Fiona Maddocks. “But it seems to me that you can’t be indifferent to it. And that’s the mark of a great artist, I think.”Mr. Birtwhistle, right, with the Hungarian conductor Péter Eötvös in London in 1988. Some performances of his work drew heckling.Neil Libbert/Camera Press LondonHarrison Birtwistle was born on July 15, 1934, in the mill town of Accrington, England, north of Manchester. He was the only child of Fred and Madge (Harrison) Birtwistle, who together ran a bakery.Harry, as Mr. Birtwistle was universally known, trained not as a composer but as a clarinetist, taking up the instrument at age 7 and first playing in the local military band and in small theaters. At the Royal Manchester College of Music, which he entered in 1952, he played clarinet in small contemporary music ensembles, some of the work written by his fellow students his fellow students Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr, who went onto significant careers of their own.The gritty urbanism and industrial brass of Mr. Birtwistle’s youth drew him to sounds he heard in avant-gardists like Stravinsky and Varèse, Messiaen and Pierre Boulez, who all became strong influences. (Mr. Boulez himself later conducted and recorded many of Birtwistle’s works.) But few of Mr. Birtwistle’s own early pieces survive, and his first published composition, “Refrains and Choruses,” was not given its premiere until 1959.After national service, for which he played in the band of the Royal Artillery from 1955 to 1957, Mr. Birtwistle took teaching jobs while continuing to compose. His breakthrough came in 1965, with the premiere of “Tragoedia” and the awarding of a Harkness Fellowship to study in the United States. As a visiting fellow at Princeton University he completed “Punch and Judy,” a murderous operatic take on puppet shows that premiered at the 1968 Aldeburgh Festival in England. Britten, who died in 1976, reportedly left halfway through.Following spells teaching at Swarthmore and the State University of New York at Buffalo — the latter at the invitation of the composer Morton Feldman — Mr. Birtwistle was appointed the music director of the National Theater in London from 1975 to 1983. His scores for “Hamlet,” “Volpone” and Peter Hall’s production of the “Oresteia,” among other plays, were lost.Mr. Birtwistle cemented his reputation in the 1980s with an extraordinary series of scores that included the orchestral “Secret Theatre” and “Earth Dances” as well as “The Mask of Orpheus,” a four-hour masterpiece with a libretto by Peter Zinovieff. It was so elaborate that it took its composer more than a decade to write.“For Mr. Birtwistle, there is no ‘main action,’” John Rockwell of The New York Times wrote after the premiere of “Orpheus” at the English National Opera in 1986. “He has deliberately thwarted the narrative flow, or even the epic progression, of normal opera in favor of a dizzying montage of flashbacks, repetitions, reconsiderations and parallel actions.”The music was “unrelentingly dense and driven” on a first hearing, Mr. Rockwell added. “But if one allows oneself to start accepting the opera’s gnomic conventions, its earnest search for the underlying truth behind our culture’s notions of music, poetry, sex, love and death take on an undeniable power.”Mr. Birtwistle’s work was always controversial. His “grim, raw, amorphous soundscapes make few concessions to narrow ears,” as the critic Alex Ross wrote in 1995. For the 1994 revival of “Gawain” at Covent Garden, two antimodernist composers coordinated a heckling campaign against what one called Mr. Birtwistle’s “sonic sewage.”The following year, “Panic,” a raucous work for saxophone, drum kit and orchestra, was featured in the Last Night of the Proms. Its appearance in that traditionally jingoistic ceremony caused some in the press and the public to sputter with rage.“I was treading on a sacred cow and the attendant manure,” Mr. Birtwistle later joked. He denied that his music was all that difficult, and refused the premise of questions about the accessibility of his compositions. “Panic,” he laughed, was “the nearest piece I’ve got to fun!”Mr. Birtwistle, who was knighted in 1988, married Sheila Duff in 1959. She died in 2012. He is survived by three sons, Adam, Silas and Toby, and six grandchildren.Asked by Ms. Maddocks in 2013 whether there was a continuity in his life from his childhood to his years as a composer, Mr. Birtwistle, whose gruff public persona hid a warm and witty personality, said that he had “achieved much more than I ever imagined.”“I’ve never felt I had ambitions for myself, only for my idea, and for it materializing into something worthwhile,” he added, laughing.“But I’m still here, still trying. And I’m still exactly the same.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      Review: ‘Ten Thousand Birds’ Turns the Armory Into an Aviary

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      The ensemble Alarm Will Sound spread throughout the Park Avenue Armory’s drill hall for the installation-like music of John Luther Adams.By now, the Park Avenue Armory’s Recital Series concerts are a known quantity: art song and chamber music in ornate, intimate spaces.Whether the programming is classic or contemporary, the packaging is the same, with only a few surprises — as when the soprano Barbara Hannigan turned Erik Satie’s music into semi-staged monodrama. But there hasn’t been a performance quite like the one by the ensemble Alarm Will Sound on Thursday.Abandoning the traditional Recital Series rooms, the group’s members spread throughout the Armory’s capacious drill hall for John Luther Adams’s characterful and moving “Ten Thousand Birds,” an installation-like project that’s as much environmental — in presentation, but also in its preoccupations — as it is musical.Brandon Patrick George played flute and, here, piccolo.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesAdams, our reigning musical ambassador of the natural world, hasn’t written a score here in the usual sense. It is an Audubon book in translation: each page, the portrait of a bird in sound. Together the sketches form an open-ended and modular folio, with minimal guidance. “The size of the ensemble and the duration of a performance may be tailored to the specific site and occasion,” Adams writes in a note for the published version. “It is not necessary to play all the pieces in this collection. It’s not even necessary to play all the musical material within a particular piece.”He also calls for “the largest possible physical space”; the drill hall is about 55,000 square feet, which Alarm Will Sound occupied with both freedom and precision in a staging by Alan Pierson, the group’s artistic director, and the percussionist Peter Ferry, its assistant artistic director. (Early in the pandemic, Pierson and these players made a short video adaptation called “Ten Thousand Birds / Ten Thousand Screens”; imaginative and often funny, it remains a high point of a low moment in classical music.)At the Armory, Alarm Will Sound arranged “Ten Thousand Birds” into a roughly 70-minute experience that follows the cycle of the day: Beginning with a gentle breeze, it traces the awakening accumulation of morning, the liveliness of afternoon and the long pauses of night before returning to that peaceful wind. Overhead the lights gradually dimmed, and on the floor, the audience was invited to move among the musicians. Just as there is no one way to present this work, there are no rules for how to hear it.The horn player Laura Weiner among audience members, who were free to move among the musicians throughout the work.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesOn Thursday, people weren’t entirely prepared for the piece to begin, with some preshow chatter lingering alongside the wind. But it’s difficult to miss a breathy bassoon being waved around, and audience members more clearly understood what was happening as other musicians took their places. A flute, hazy and lightly arpeggiated, introduced melody to the mix, which grew richer: percussion in the familiar falling interval of bird song in classical music, and harmonic runs in the strings.Adams has in the past evoked immense natural forces — such as in his “Become” trilogy, which includes the Pulitzer Prize- and Grammy Award-winning “Become Ocean” — and here he balances both abstraction and transcription. For every passage of lyricism that emerges from instrumental dialogue, there is a phrase with the uncanny exactitude of Messiaen: a piccolo call, an agitated piano flutter.And, as staged at the Armory, there was a subtle sense of drama. Zoomorphic in their movement, the players shifted throughout the space less like musicians and more like characters. A timpani rumble dispersed a small ensemble that had been crowded around it. Some performers were elusive or difficult to place, perched in the mezzanine or in the frame of a Juliet balcony but obscured by darkness. Strings zipped through listeners in a buzzing swarm. By the time the work reached its nocturnal scenes, though, that kind of levity gave way to serene patience — long silences punctuated by passing song.Some in the audience lay as if in meditation while others paced around the drill hall. Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesAs in “Inuksuit,” another of Adams’s installation works, the audience’s engagement varied. Curiosity kept me in constant motion; some people stayed in chairs, or sat in groups on the ground like picnickers. A few lay flat, eyes closed, as if in meditation. David Byrne strolled with a bicycle helmet in hand, scrutinizing unattended percussion instruments. One man knitted, while another played Scrabble. Many — too many — pulled out their phones to take photos or record, their flashes distracting in the dark.Which is unfortunate because what “Ten Thousand Birds” offers, above all, is an opportunity to marvel, not document. If I were to attend again, I would be in the camp of those who rested in one place and let sounds come to them, the way they might during a day at the park. Regardless, focus is all it takes for this piece, and Alarm Will Sound’s thoughtful realization of it, to achieve its aim: a heightened aestheticization of nature, and perhaps a renewed connection with it.Whether Adams accomplishes something more with this work — whether its spirit of appreciation rises to the level of advocacy — is, like the experience of the music itself, up to the audience.Alarm Will SoundRepeats on Friday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. More