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      William Kraft, Percussionist and Force in New Music, Dies at 98

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      A mainstay of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he also composed music that elevated overlooked instruments like the timpani.Lamenting the abundance of what he called “rat-a-tat, boom-boom” music for drums, William Kraft set out to create more sophisticated offerings that would bring greater respect to instruments he felt were too often taken for granted in orchestras.“The days of percussionists being second-class citizens in the musical society are clearly over,” he wrote in 1968. “The last of orchestral families to be exploited, they have come of age in the 20th century.”Mr. Kraft, who as both a composer and a percussionist became a force in contemporary music, elevating overlooked instruments like the timpani and developing a style that drew on jazz and Impressionism, died on Feb. 12 at a hospital in Glendale, Calif. He was 98.His wife, the composer Joan Huang, said the cause was heart failure.A spirited performer, Mr. Kraft was acclaimed for his work with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he spent 26 years, 18 of them as principal timpanist.But he was perhaps best known as a composer. A frequent collaborator with Igor Stravinsky, Mr. Kraft helped lend legitimacy to contemporary music in the United States, founding ensembles to showcase modern composers at a time when many classical musicians were skeptical of straying too far from the traditional canon.“The days of percussionists being second-class citizens in the musical society are clearly over,” Mr. Kraft wrote.Carlos Chavez/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesPlaying his music — deliberate yet freewheeling, flashy but spiritual — became a rite of passage for percussionists, and his works were heard in band rooms and concert halls alike.William Kraft was born in Chicago on Sept. 6, 1923, the son of Louis and Florence (Rogalsky) Kashareftsky, Jewish immigrants from Russia. (His father changed the family name from Kashareftsky to Kraft upon arriving in the United States.) When William was 3, the family moved to San Diego, where his parents opened a delicatessen and, at his mother’s urging, he began studying piano.While he adored the music of French Impressionist composers like Debussy and Ravel (“my great idols,” friends say he called them), he did not initially anticipate making composition a career.“I just thought they were gods and not to be touched,” he said in a 2020 interview with Ching Juhl, a producer and violist. “They were influences, but I never thought I could write the style.”During World War II, when he worked as a drummer and pianist in American military bands stationed in Europe, he began exploring composition more seriously.His roommate at the time, a trumpet player, asked him to produce an arrangement of the Hoagy Carmichael standard “Stardust.” Mr. Kraft agreed, but he wanted to do it his way, composing an elaborate introduction based on the musical interval of the fourth.Mr. Kraft earned a master’s degree in composition at Columbia University in 1954. He joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic the next year and rose through the ranks, becoming principal timpanist in 1963. On the side, he continued writing his own works, including percussion pieces in the style of Baroque suites and a series of compositions that he called “Encounters,” pairing percussion with a variety of other instruments, including trumpet and harp. He called himself an “American Impressionist.”Mr. Kraft, center, in Los Angeles in 2008 after a concert by the ensemble Southwest Chamber Music honoring him on his 85th birthday. He was joined by the ensemble’s John Schneider, left, and Ricardo Gallardo.Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesZubin Mehta, who served as the Philharmonic’s music director from 1962 to 1978, described Mr. Kraft as a nimble musician. He recalled Mr. Kraft rearranging the timpani part for Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” for one player, rather than two as was standard, making it easier for the Philharmonic to perform while on tour.“He knew the pieces so well,” Mr. Mehta said in an interview. “It just came naturally.”Mr. Mehta elevated Mr. Kraft to the post of assistant conductor, which he held from 1969 to 1972. Mr. Kraft sold his instruments and retired from playing in the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1981 to become the orchestra’s composer in residence.Stravinsky, who moved to California in the 1940s, had a significant influence on Mr. Kraft. (Mr. Kraft once said hearing “The Rite of Spring” for the first time as a teenager “changed my life.”) The two men worked together often. Mr. Kraft played timpani in Stravinsky’s ensembles and helped edit the percussion parts for Stravinsky’s musical play “The Soldier’s Tale.”Mr. Kraft’s music, with its emphasis on rhythmic freedom, often seemed to pay homage to Stravinsky. Mr. Kraft was also fond of virtuosic feats; one of his concertos demands the performer play 15 timpani.“He was one of the few atonal composers who really somehow wrote very uplifting music,” said the composer Paul Polivnick, a friend. “While he had his mathematical formulas, he let his music be based in creating a sense of emotional and dramatic power.”In 1956 he organized the First Percussion Quartet, made up of players from the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The ensemble, which later grew in size and changed its name to the Los Angeles Percussion Ensemble and Chamber Players, promoted works by composers including Stravinsky, Alberto Ginastera and Edgard Varèse.In 1981, Mr. Kraft founded the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group. He also had a busy teaching career, serving as chairman of the composition department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 1991 to 2002.“He put Los Angeles on the map as a hot spot for contemporary music,” said Joseph Pereira, the current principal timpanist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “We are still reaping the benefits of Kraft’s impact on the Philharmonic, and on the new music community.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Kraft is survived by a son, Patrick; a daughter, Jennifer; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.He composed until the end of his life, sitting at the piano each day to sketch out ideas. At his death he was working on a piece called “Kaleidoscope” as well as a rearrangement of a piano concerto.The day before he died, Ms. Huang said, Mr. Kraft asked about his unfinished pieces, and she promised to complete them.“He just loved composing,” she said. “It was his language.” More

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      The Philharmonic Plans Its Return to Geffen Hall, With Fanfare

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      The New York Philharmonic announced its 2022-23 season, a celebratory slate of about 150 concerts to inaugurate its renovated home.For the past two years, the only sound coming out of David Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, has been the clamor of construction. That will change in October, when it reopens after a $550 million renovation.And the Philharmonic will announce its return there with fanfare: Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” which is the first work of the orchestra’s 2022-23 season, a celebratory slate of about 150 concerts and events unveiled on Monday.Among the season’s highlights are a monthlong festival to inaugurate the hall; a series of premieres by composers, including Julia Wolfe and Caroline Shaw; concerts exploring issues like racism and climate change; and appearances by conductors who could replace the Philharmonic’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, after he steps down in 2024.After losing more than $27 million in anticipated ticket revenue during the pandemic lockdown, and spending much of the past year without a permanent home during the Geffen Hall renovation, the Philharmonic hopes the coming season will restore a sense of normalcy and rebuild its audience.The renovated Geffen Hall will feature wavy beech wood walls and vineyard-style seats that wrap around the stage.Diamond Schmitt Architects“It’s a moment for us not only to reunite with people who have come before, but as we look to the future, to develop and nurture new audiences,” Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said in an interview. “We can’t just expect people to come. We have to invite them.”The Philharmonic recently announced that the renovation is fully funded and on track to finish in October, a year and a half ahead of schedule, after construction was accelerated during the pandemic. The new space will bring both aesthetic and acoustic improvements, with wavy beech wood walls and vineyard-style seats that wrap around the stage.There will also be additions meant to draw people in, including a 50-foot digital screen in the lobby that can broadcast concerts to the public, and a studio looking out onto Broadway. The goal, Borda said, is for the hall to be a “home for music and a home for New Yorkers.”The season begins Oct. 7 with a program called “Thank You Concert,” led by van Zweden, for an audience of emergency medical workers and construction workers who took part in the hall’s renovation. Two galas, and an open house weekend, will follow later that month.Opening festivities include the world premiere, performed at two free concerts, of “San Juan Hill,” a work by the trumpeter Etienne Charles, who is known for blending jazz with the music of his native Trinidad. Several other contemporary works will be featured, including the American premiere of a piece by Shaw; and the world premiere of “Oyá,” a work for light, electronics and orchestra by the Brazilian composer Marcos Balter.Some of the new works were written specifically for the renovated hall. “The early weeks are designed to be an exploration,” Borda said.Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said that the renovated hall should be a “home for music and a home for New Yorkers.”Tod Williams Billie Tsien ArchitectsAs the Philharmonic continues its search for a new music director, guest conductors will get more attention than usual.Several familiar names will take the podium, including Gustavo Dudamel, the music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who will lead Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. In March, another prominent contender, Susanna Mälkki, the outgoing chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, will conduct the New York premiere of a double concerto by Felipe Lara, featuring the flutist Claire Chase and the bassist Esperanza Spalding, in their Philharmonic debuts.Santtu-Matias Rouvali, the Philharmonia Orchestra’s young principal conductor, is the only guest who will get two weeks of concerts, leading the New York premiere of Magnus Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No. 3, featuring Yuja Wang, in January. The following week, he will shepherd the American premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Catamorphosis,” in a program that also includes Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.”Given the dearth of female conductors among the largest American orchestras, some have argued that the Philharmonic should choose a woman as its next music director. Several rising conductors, many of them women, will make their debuts with the ensemble next season, including Karina Canellakis, the chief conductor of Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra; Ruth Reinhardt, a former assistant conductor of the Dallas Symphony; and Nathalie Stutzmann, who takes the podium of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra next season.Borda declined to comment on the music director search, except to say that the upcoming season was “obviously an opportunity to see some returning talent and some wonderful new talent as well.”Soloists appearing for the first time with the orchestra include the Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson, who will play Ravel’s piano concerto in November, and Cynthia Millar, playing the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument, in Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-Sinfonie,” alongside the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, in March.The season includes concert series designed to address modern issues, including “Liberation,” about social injustice; “Spirit,” about “humanity’s place in the cosmos”; and “Earth,” about the climate crisis.As part of “Liberation” in March, the Philharmonic will premiere a work by Courtney Bryan and Tazewell Thompson. “Spirit,” that same month, will include Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” which the Philharmonic has not performed since 2008.“Earth” will close out the season in June, with the world premiere of Wolfe’s “unEarth,” a multimedia oratorio that explores forced migration, loss of nature and adaptation. John Luther Adams’s “Become Desert,” the sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Become Ocean,” will get its New York premiere.Borda said that throughout the new season, the Philharmonic wants people to feel that “their lives have been touched and changed.”“If we accomplish that,” she added, “we could all be very proud.” More

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      Planned Before War, a Festival Embraces New Ukrainian Music

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      Marked by performer absences because of the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival returned for its third edition.The Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival returned for its third edition this weekend, with a slate of works related to themes of nature and mythology. During an introduction at Merkin Hall, the audience was told that while the event may have become newly relevant in recent weeks, its spirit remained unchanged. (Indeed, it was planned long before the Russian invasion.)Yet the war loomed over these performances: Some artists couldn’t leave Ukraine, and the concerts were adapted to accommodate their absences. And the festival’s very existence has always been a rejection of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia’s assertion that there is no real Ukrainian culture.Our critics were at two of the three programs: “Forest Song” on Friday, and “Anthropocene” on Sunday.‘Forest Song’The festival’s first concert was a travelogue through the trees, fields and mountains of Ukraine: an agriculture-rich landscape that has inspired the months of the country’s calendar; been the subject of Hitler’s envy; and suffered under modern disasters like Chernobyl and the recent invasion.Some of the works were transcription-like tributes. Ivan Nebesnyy’s “Air Music 1” (2001-04), paired the vocal group Ekmeles with four flutes and Sean Statser — the evening’s busiest player, on percussion — for variations of extended technique that rendered entirely human something intangible. The percussion’s lingering final note was a reminder of how indebted music, or any sound, has always been to air.There was imitation, too, in Zoltan Almashi’s “An Echo From Hitting the Trunk of a Dry Mountain Spruce in Rycerko Gorna Village” (2015), whose prepared piano recalled the tapping of a dead tree. A slowly screeching violin was like a bending branch; the clarinet, a melancholy folk tune performed in its shadow. And Ostap Manulyak’s “Trees,” from 2012, was an arboreal examination from the ground up, with ever-higher pitches airily played by a violin and cello where their strings meet the tailpiece — and, at the top, piano tinkling like birdsong.The other two pieces were more abstract, and more haunting. Anastasia Belitska’s “Rusalochka” (2019), a purely electronic work of distorted found audio from the Chernobyl zone, recounted a traditional Mermaid’s Easter celebration as warped as the ecosystem there. Alla Zahaykevych’s “Nord/Ouest” (2010) accomplished much of the same, its search of vanishing folklore in northwestern Ukraine documented over 50 discursive minutes whose flashes of folk song — in voice and violin — felt like precious discoveries.“Nord/Ouest” normally features percussion, voices and live electronics. But, because its creators could not leave Ukraine, it was reworked on Friday for Statser, alone with his drum kit, next to a laptop carrying the sounds of his fellow performers. This spectacle, like the music’s ghostly dispatches from a fading history, spoke for itself. JOSHUA BARONESteven Beck performing Alexey Shmurak’s “Greenland,” a solo piano reflection on the climate crisis.Caitlin Ochs for The New York Times‘Anthropocene’Sunday afternoon’s program, too, was disrupted: Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko, the composers who had planned to perform their post-apocalyptic “Chornobyldorf Partita” on the second half of the concert, could not travel to New York. So they sent a 45-minute film, a selection from a seven-hour performance of “Mariupol” that they streamed on March 16 from Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine, where they are sheltering.Conceived as a new part of “Chornobyldorf Partita” and named after the city currently under siege, “Mariupol” is written for dulcimer and a microtonally retuned bandura, a lutelike folk instrument. The two men sat facing each other, their instruments nearly touching, the bandura’s strings facing up like the dulcimer’s.With both instruments struck with drum sticks, the sound evolved from a rustling metallic crunch to a shimmering coppery drone to clattering, astringent industrial noise. This was defiant, ritualistic music — aggressive and forlorn, but with poignant warmth from its creation as a duo.On the first half of the program, the pianist Steven Beck played Alexey Shmurak’s “Greenland” (2020-21), a reflection on another crisis, that of the planet’s climate. In the Minimalistic first two sections, repeating figures worked through gradual but unexpected transformations, often turning — thawing — from chilly to warmly nocturnal and back again and, in the opening “Railway Étude,” taking on some of the relaxed swing of a rag. By far the longest section of this 45-minute work is the third and final one, “Icy Variations,” which stretches a Bach-style chorale theme to glacial expansiveness, wandering through subtle, organic shifts. ZACHARY WOOLFE More

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      Review: Gustavo Dudamel Wraps Up a Philharmonic Audition

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      The superstar conductor, a possible successor to the New York Philharmonic’s podium, led a cycle of Robert Schumann’s symphonies and two premieres.If concerts had the “previously on” introductions of television, on Thursday the New York Philharmonic would have recapped last week’s installment of its Robert Schumann symphony cycle: lithe yet energetic, hardly Romantic yet fully alive.This week we are in the same series but what feels like a new story arc. The First and Second symphonies, on the earlier program, have been followed by readings of the Third and Fourth that, on Thursday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, were for better and worse grander and more emotive, with swerving contrasts — and a premiere to match by Andreia Pinto Correia.The symphonies are being presented as a festival called “The Schumann Connection,” led by Gustavo Dudamel, the superstar music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and a contender for the podium here in New York when Jaap van Zweden departs in 2024. That series is also an oblique exploration — through two new works by women — of Robert’s relationship with Clara Schumann, his wife, a notable pianist and composer who largely stopped writing after they married.Clara haunts this festival, and not just in the title of last week’s premiere, Gabriela Ortiz’s “Clara.” Although the series has relegated her music to appearances on chamber programs far from the main stage, she looms over her husband’s major works.Robert’s Piano Concerto in A minor, played by the Philharmonic in October, bears the mark of her earlier one in the same key. And elements of her concerto subtly inform his Fourth Symphony — in its through-composition and fantasia form, in its Romanze second movement and in a first one characterized by its abandonment of the traditional recapitulation. A more satisfying “Schumann Connection” might have paired these two pieces.To the Philharmonic’s credit, though, the concerts have featured those premieres, even if the fact that both are based on Clara and Robert sets off a Bechdel test alarm. Pinto Correia’s “Os Pássaros da Noite” (“The Birds of Night”) is inspired by the sadness shared by the couple in their correspondence, and by a letter to a friend in which Robert wrote that “the melancholy birds of night still flit round me from time to time.”The 15-minute work is the account of one harrowing night, in which strings, droning or in a haze of harmonics, underlie the sorrowful cries of a trumpet. A wearying set of nocturnal episodes, it would be a fitting horror soundtrack, its mood transparent in gestures like upward runs in the winds — a sinister curlicue of moonlit fog — accompanied by matching upward glissandos in the violins. As in any night of sleepless anxiety, the darkness lingers, seemingly interminable, until it doesn’t.“Os Pássaros da Noite” was a sharp contrast to the preceding symphony: the Third, nicknamed the “Rhenish” for its tonal tributes to the Rhine River — where in 1854, just a few years after it was written, Schumann would attempt suicide. But that gloom is absent from the score’s buoyant, dancing mood, and from Dudamel’s conducting. The heroic opening heralded a propulsive interpretation, guided by hemiola rhythms but emphasized in mighty sforzando accents and thrillingly veering dynamics.The Philharmonic’s playing was warmest in the ländler-like Scherzo. But its tendency toward excessive expression made for a Feierlich (“solemn”) movement strangely heavy on vibrato. Schumann’s music here is a portrait of the awe-inspiring Cologne Cathedral, with a chorale and orchestration that, if articulated correctly, closely resembles the sound of an organ. A little of that came through, but for the most part this was a scene with more emotion than solemnity.The Fourth Symphony, in D minor, was composed nearly a decade earlier, in a wave of productivity that included Schumann’s First; but he withdrew it, later revisiting it and premiering the revision in 1853. This version had more darkness and heft, but retained the elegance of the earlier one, which the scholar John Daverio captures in his claim that “Beethoven may have been primarily a ‘dramatist’ and Schubert a ‘lyricist’; Schumann straddles both categories by treating his fundamentally lyric themes with a dramatic urgency.”Dudamel sensitively wove that belief throughout, with strands of melody emerging from the opening chord that were by turns fiery and gentle — especially in the second movement’s flowing violin solo from the Philharmonic’s concertmaster, Frank Huang. In its extremity, its grand finale, this was Schumann at his most Romantic of the cycle.When “The Schumann Connection” concludes on Sunday, so will a long stretch of programs led by guest conductors, many of whom are being watched as potential successors to van Zweden. Of them, there is immense promise in Dudamel — charismatic, eager to lead new works and, crucially, followed by the Philharmonic players with apparent ease.In terms of programming, he fared better than two other contenders, Susanna Mälkki and Santtu-Matias Rouvali, who have triumphed with the Philharmonic in the past but in recent months had mixed outings in repertory of mixed quality. It’s difficult to avoid imagining what impression they would have made with a platform like Dudamel’s festival.Any of the three, though, would be a welcome change at the Philharmonic. And they are just a selection of the talent that has passed through this season. It’s still far too early to guess who the orchestra’s next music director will be. But regardless, its future seems one worth looking forward to.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Sunday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      What Happened to One of Classical Music’s Most Popular Pieces?

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      César Franck’s only symphony was a pillar of the repertory for decades. But it’s now a rarity.Whatever Leopold Stokowski’s thirst for celebrity, he was not known for caving to audience pressure. During his long tenure conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, from 1912 to 1938, Stokowski gave the American premieres of scores as challenging as Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” and Berg’s “Wozzeck,” with little concern for box office.But near the end of most of his seasons in charge, this great showman did bow to mass taste. Philadelphia’s subscribers were invited to vote for their favorite works, with the promise that Stokowski would lead the winners on a closing “request program.”For years, the victor was Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique,” a sorrowful symphony so popular that other orchestras had been, the critic Lawrence Gilman wrote in 1925, “so sure of the outcome of similar voting contests that they sent their programs to press before the date of the election.”But at the end of the 1923-24 season, a challenger dealt the Tchaikovsky a knockout blow: César Franck’s Symphony in D minor.“Is it inflating the symphony of the lovable Belgian,” Gilman wondered in the New York Herald Tribune, “to rank it above the dolorous swan song of Tchaikovsky?”Probably, Gilman concluded. But the Franck, which the composer completed in 1888, would not be downed.Stokowski leading the openingPhiladelphia Orchestra, 1927 (Music & Arts)“What is there in the texture of the music itself to explain its popularity?” Gilman pondered, reporting another landslide in 1929, when the Franck beat Beethoven’s Fifth, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth and Sixth, and Brahms’s First. In 1924, Gilman had scorned “the more than occasional triteness and inferiority of its musical expression,” and though he admitted that it had an “unforgettably noble distinction of contour and gesture,” it was in his view no match for the greats.Perhaps, Gilman wrote, “the public taste is itself part of the problem.” Yet, he added, “the interest and the oddity of the verdict remain.”Quiet, sincere and more famous in his lifetime as an organist and teacher than as a composer, Franck celebrates the bicentenary of his birth this year. But it’s unlikely that American orchestras will bring to the celebration the fervor with which they once performed his sole symphony. In one of the stranger stories in the history of the canon, the work — which from the 1920s until the ’60s was such a hit that the New York Philharmonic thought it a solid bet to fill Lewisohn Stadium on a hot summer’s night — is now all but absent from concert halls.Decline of a Once-Popular SymphonyPremiered in 1889, Franck’s Symphony in D Minor surged in popularity during Germany’s World War I occupation of the composer’s native Belgium. But interest has tapered off in the last 50 years. More

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      Russian Conductor Will Not Appear With New York Philharmonic

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      Tugan Sokhiev, who resigned from two posts after facing pressure to condemn the invasion of Ukraine, will not perform with the orchestra because of the war.The Russian conductor Tugan Sokhiev, who recently resigned from two high-profile posts after facing pressure to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, will no longer lead a series of concerts with the New York Philharmonic because of the war, the orchestra announced on Friday.Sokhiev, who until this month was the music director of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow and the Orchestre National du Capitole in Toulouse, France, had been scheduled to appear with the Philharmonic starting on March 31 for three concerts featuring the music of Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev. Instead, the concerts will be led by Anna Rakitina, a rising conductor who was born in Moscow to a Russian mother and Ukrainian father, in her Philharmonic debut.The Philharmonic described the change as a mutual decision, saying in a statement that it was made “out of regard for the current global situation.” The orchestra said Sokhiev would appear next season.In a statement, Sylvie Bouchard, Sokhiev’s manager, said, “The decision with the New York Philharmonic was made mutually and Tugan Sokhiev is looking forward to his future engagements with the orchestra.”The cancellation of Sokhiev’s appearance in New York comes as the Russian invasion continues to rattle the performing arts. In recent weeks some cultural institutions have put pressure on artists to denounce President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and his attack on Ukraine.Sokhiev had faced demands from French officials earlier this month that he clarify his position on the war before appearing again with his Toulouse orchestra. In response to the demands, he resigned, and announced at the same time that he was also stepping down from the Bolshoi Theater, saying he felt he was being forced to pick between the two ensembles.“I am being asked to choose one cultural tradition over” another, Sokhiev said at the time. “I am being asked to choose one artist over the other.”Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said in an interview that the orchestra had a “wonderful relationship” with Sokhiev, who led a week of performances in New York in 2018.“We pray for peace,” she said. “We pray for peace for him.”Borda added that the Philharmonic was committed to presenting Russian musicians and works by Russian composers. But she said that the orchestra would not present artists if they had direct ties to Putin or his government.“These are very nuanced decisions,” she said. “One cannot make blanket decisions about this. It’s not black or white.”Rakitina is an assistant conductor at the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a former Dudamel Fellow at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. She will make her debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra next week.The program that Sokhiev was set to lead, which features the Chinese pianist Haochen Zhang playing Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto alongside Lili Boulanger’s “D’un Matin de Printemps” and Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, will remain unchanged. More

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      Heather Christian’s Choral Work Is a Study of Time. Patience, Too.

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      The composer’s “Oratorio for Living Things,” forced to shut down because of the pandemic, returns to the Ars Nova stage in Manhattan.On a strangely comforting morning in early March, the composer Heather Christian made her way to Ars Nova’s space in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, for the first time in two years. The bright sun, radiating the warmth of a spring day, was enough to momentarily make her forget she was freezing. Once inside, she re-encountered the set for her delicately epic choral piece “Oratorio for Living Things,” which had two preview performances before the pandemic hit, and is back, running through April 17.“I felt the weight of time,” she said during a recent conversation over Zoom, reflecting on her return to the theater. “It was the weight of expectation or even the grief of the last time I was in that space.”It was only fitting that time felt like Christian’s companion, since “Oratorio for Living Things,” in the words of its creator, is a study of time “in three different scales: the quantum scale, the human scale and the cosmic scale.”To achieve this, she said she tried to find parallels between the ways in which particles move, for example, and the way in which a fugue is structured, or by examining cosmic violence (the Big Bang) and linking it to human trauma.Gerianne Pérez, center, in “Oratorio for Living Things” at Greenwich House Theater in March 2020, shortly before the premiere run shut down.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThen, to explain these concepts on an emotional level, she collected hundreds of voice mail messages that she had solicited from strangers, inviting them to share a memory anonymously. (“I left business cards everywhere!” she said with a laugh.) These delicious recollections — of transporting bags of groceries on a sleigh in Moscow, or knowing that someone’s mother “will bring my baby brother with her” when she leaves the hospital — make up the second act.As for the musical composition, performed by an orchestra of six, “Oratorio” layers myriad genres — gospel, jazz, Baroque and a range of pop styles — to create harmony where cacophony might otherwise exist.“The more we sing these songs and say these words,” said Onyie Nwachukwu, one of the 12 singers who bring the piece to life, “the more I’m acutely aware of the almost fantastic nature of humans and everything that’s around us.”The show’s director, Lee Sunday Evans, envisioned the production as if set in a Quaker meeting house “where there’s no pulpit or proscenium and so the music wants to be amongst us.” Performers move throughout the space gently interacting with audience members, almost inviting them to sing along.“I knew I wanted to do a piece about time,” Christian, 40, explained. “Music itself is a study of time, a dissertation on how time moves in a specific way.” She tried dissecting Carl Orff’s cantata “Carmina Burana,” a celebration of earthly passions that she describes as “spaghetti exploding out of the bowl.” It has been a favorite of hers since high school because of its mysteriousness — it asks big questions without offering an answer.A self-described cultural omnivore who finds as much wisdom in “The Golden Girls” as Bach’s compositions, Christian revisited Orff while reading Carlo Rovelli’s “The Order of Time,” about time in physics, and rewatched old episodes of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos.” Her fascination with how they all explained complex subjects in digestible ways eventually resulted in an eureka moment: She would do the same with a musical piece. And that’s when she started working on “Oratorio.” (The libretto is dedicated to the three Carls.)Christian composes by ear. “Things come to me all at once,” she said. But lacking a consistent practice for transcribing her work, she found a priceless collaborator in the music director Ben Moss, who also performs in “Oratorio.” Moss came in during an early workshop of the piece in 2018 and offered to help with the transcription. At the time, Christian had the skeleton of the work, Moss added the minutiae. He said it felt as if he were “crawling inside of her mind and her musical and poetic imagination.”Using voice notes and memos, Christian conveys her intentions to her collaborators, making them an essential part of the process. “I wish we recorded some of the sessions of her explaining things and her whys and hows because it in and of itself is artistry,” said Nwachukwu, who also appeared in a 2019 workshop of Christian’s “Annie Salem: An American Tale” at Vassar’s Powerhouse Theater. She said she found herself approaching theater from a new perspective: “less restrictive and structured” than what she was accustomed to in opera and more traditional musicals. “What Heather asked of me was to go to a place that was somewhat uncomfortable,” she recalled, “where the first thing I had to do was throw away convention.”From left, Amber Gray, Christian at the piano and Libby King and Brian Hastert embracing in “Mission Drift” at the Connelly Theater in Manhattan.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesRachel Chavkin, the Tony-winning director of “Hadestown” who oversaw the workshop of “Salem,” described Christian’s music as “somewhere between a creature howling at the moon and the sound of the moon itself.” Her music, she continued, “isn’t about furthering story, each song is a bit more like a spiritual or emotional happening than a story beat.”Chavkin began collaborating with Christian in 2008 when they created a musical called “Mission Drift,” a show about the recession and America’s rapacious brand of capitalism. Every time they work together, Chavkin said, “I can see my own experience with the possibilities of these forms.” She added: “Heather is inventing the wheel for herself.”FOUR DAYS BEFORE theaters in New York shut down, I attended the last dress rehearsal for “Oratorio.” I distinctly remember leaving the theater feeling as if I had witnessed a work that successfully established a dialogue between the sacred and the mundane, between the invisible and what we grasp with our senses. In many ways, it left me open to viewing the pandemic as an opportunity to find wonder and solace in the things we often take for granted.During that forced break in 2020, Christian herself found and made music out of things she’d never tried before. “I was swimming in a sea of first drafts,” she said, laughing, “but I also got chickens and decided to learn how to garden in a serious way.” Spending time with her husband at home in Beacon, N.Y., she also took to self-reflection. “I tried to investigate my relationship to ambition and slow down, especially because all my shows are about exactly those things,” she added.Born in New Orleans, Christian was raised in what she called “avant-garde Catholicism.” At 11, she became a cantor in Natchez, Miss., where her family had moved when she was 3. But soon “the functional magic of religion lost its mysticism,” she explained. She recalled being behind the scenes and a time when she saw “a priest pick a wedgie in the middle of the consecration of the host.” Suddenly, it was all theater, a new kind of sacred space.“I honestly think it’s going to take a little bit of work for me, and for people, to reimagine the performance space as a womb and a safe space,” Christian said.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesShe sought formal education in musical theater at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where her acting teacher observed she was quite complex and wisely encouraged her to join the experimental theater wing.Christian describes herself as someone who “would go insane if you took away my pens and microphones.” During lockdown, she found new channels for her creativity in projects like “I Am Sending You the Sacred Face,” a one-person musical about Mother Teresa in collaboration with Joshua William Gelb, and even became a foley artist in order to adapt her show “Animal Wisdom,” an autobiographical cabaret, for film, which she hopes will be picked up by distributors. “I’m incredibly prolific, and I don’t say that as a brag,” she confessed, “it’s just how I function.”She explained that she needs to find functionality in her art, returning to work in “Oratorio” presents a new set of challenges. “Initially I made a Rorschach test for whatever people brought into it,” she said, but now she wants to “provide people with some optimism.”“I honestly think it’s going to take a little bit of work for me, and for people, to reimagine the performance space as a womb and a safe space,” Christian said. “The lucky thing is that with theater all it takes is lighting and sound and bodies to completely transform a space.”She added: “I forgot how much I love people, how much I thrive around people.” More

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      Metropolitan Opera’s Concert Honors Ukraine

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      A concert to benefit relief efforts featured a young Ukrainian singer, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” and the Met’s prima donna of the moment.Vladyslav Buialskyi stood center stage at the Metropolitan Opera, his hand on his heart, and sang the national anthem of his country, Ukraine.That was on Feb. 28, when the house reopened after a month off from performing and the Russian invasion of Ukraine was just a few days old. The company’s chorus and orchestra joined Buialskyi, a member of the Met’s young artists program, in a message of solidarity with him and his suffering people.Exactly two weeks later, on Monday, Buialskyi, a 24-year-old bass-baritone from the besieged port city of Berdyansk, stood center stage once more, his hand again on his heart, and sang the anthem with the orchestra and chorus.This time it wasn’t a prelude to Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” but the start of “A Concert for Ukraine,” an event hastily organized by the Met to benefit relief efforts in that country and broadcast there and around the world.Banners forming the Ukrainian flag stretched across the travertine exterior of the theater, bathed in blue and yellow floodlights. Another flag hung above the stage; a few in the audience brought their own to unfurl from the balconies. Seated in the guest of honor position in the center of the parterre, Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations, responded to an ovation at the start by raising his arms and making resolute V-for-victory signs.The Ukrainian bass-baritone Vladyslav Buialskyi, a member of the Met’s young artists program, was featured in a performance of Ukraine’s national anthem.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThe Ukrainian flag hung above the Met’s chorus and its orchestra, led by the company’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesIt has been a trying time for the Met, which broke with Anna Netrebko, its reigning diva, over her unwillingness to speak against the war and distance herself from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.But the conflict has also given the company — still bruised by labor battles despite remarkable success staying open during the Omicron wave — a sense of unity and moral purpose. Who would have predicted a few months ago that the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, broadly reviled within the ranks for imposing a long unpaid furlough on many employees during the pandemic, would get applause from some in the orchestra as he declared from the stage that they were “soldiers of music”?His remarks had a martial tinge, saying that the Met’s work could be “weaponized against oppression.” But much of the concert, led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director, was consoling, with favorites like Barber’s Adagio for Strings, here fevered and unsentimental, and “Va, pensiero” from Verdi’s “Nabucco,” with its chorus of exiles longing for their homeland, “so beautiful and lost.” Most powerful was Valentin Silvestrov’s delicate, modest a cappella “Prayer for the Ukraine,” written in 2014 amid the Maidan protests against Russian influence.The soprano Lise Davidsen, the company’s prima donna of the moment, sang Strauss’s “Four Last Songs.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesRichard Strauss’s “Four Last Songs” wasn’t quite on message, with its autumnal vision of accepting death’s imminence. But it provided a vehicle for the Met’s prima donna of the moment: the young soprano Lise Davidsen, currently starring in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos.”At opening night of “Ariadne” two weeks ago, Davidsen kept inundating the theater, seeming intent on proving just how much vibrating sound can flow out of her. It was thrilling, and a little much. At the performance of the opera on Saturday afternoon, she seemed consciously trying to restrain herself — even a bit tentative, fumbling a phrase in her opening aria and only gradually building to a true compromise of power and nuance.On Monday, Davidsen again seemed to be finding her way. Her high notes in the first of the “Four Last Songs,” “Frühling,” had a steely edge rather than soaring freedom; in “September,” she sounded muted in lower registers; and in “Beim Schlafengehen,” her phrasing was stiff. But she began “Im Abendrot” with a soft cloud of tone and proceeded with unforced radiance to an ending that felt light and hopeful.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 7Olga Smirnova. More