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      Broadway Meets the Avant-Garde in a Juilliard Music Festival

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      Focus, a weeklong event starting Sunday, delves into the broad range of American sounds in the first half of the 20th century.Does “People Will Say We’re in Love,” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1943 musical “Oklahoma,” have anything to, well, say to Lou Harrison’s shimmering Six Sonatas for Cembalo, completed the same year? How does Edgard Varèse’s pensive “Octandre” sound alongside Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag”?These aren’t questions most audiences have ever been asked to consider. But the answers might permit a fuller understanding of the broad range of American music in the first half of the 20th century, a period when this country began to export its own brand of sound.Unusual but telling juxtapositions abound in “The Making of an American Music, 1899-1948,” this year’s Focus festival at the Juilliard School, which opens for a week of performances on Sunday. Each year Focus zeros in on a specific topic in modern music; the 2022 iteration brings together — and demonstrates the substantial overlap between — worlds not often united in the history books or on concert programs: ragtime, jazz, Broadway, Americana, global music, dance and the Europe-descended avant-garde.Joel Sachs, the festival’s organizer and the longtime doyen of new music at Juilliard, said that “The Making of an American Music” emerged out of brainstorming for the 2021 festival. With a presidential inauguration then looming, he thought of 1921, the start of Warren G. Harding’s term, and its implications for international affairs.“Music in times of trouble” was to have been the theme, Sachs said by phone recently, with a week focusing on the two decades from the end of the First World War to the eve of the Second, including politically charged pieces by the likes of Charles Ives, Stefan Wolpe and Hanns Eisler. But Sachs hadn’t gotten past rough plans before the festival was canceled because of the pandemic.“Then came 2021,” he said, “and things beginning to look better, and a sense we might be getting out of this situation, which turned out to be not quite right. But I started to think that was too gloomy a subject.”He turned his attention specifically to the American repertory, and, using the enormous New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, put down all the composers writing in the first 50 years of the 20th century; there were almost 300 names. He and David Ludwig, the new dean and director of Juilliard’s music division, then independently drew on that for lists of 15 “musts” and 15 “maybes.” (Their top tiers, as it happened, were almost identical.)Mei-Ann Chen rehearses the Juilliard Orchestra in Ives’s Symphony No. 2, which they will play on the festival’s closing night.George Etheredge for The New York Times“It blossomed into a kind of monster,” Sachs said, chuckling. “The program book is 88 pages. But it’s a really interesting period.”These are the six Focus programs, starting on Sunday evening:SundayA set of Joplin’s rags — the phenomenally popular sheet music for “Maple Leaf Rag” helped put American music on the global map — leads directly into two of Ives’s bustling, changeable Ragtime Dances, performed by Sachs’ New Juilliard Ensemble. The rapidly shifting moods of the dances will offer a new context for the similarly jittery “Octandre,” written for a small group of winds and brasses and ending in a bright scream. Varèse, a native Frenchman, spent the last 50 years of his life in America, and his influence here made him a natural for this Focus.Sachs wrote a biography of Henry Cowell, who was part of a circle of experimental composers with Varèse, and whose brooding Sinfonietta follows “Octandre.” Ruth Crawford was also part of the group, and the program includes her angular “Three Songs to Poems by Carl Sandburg,” before closing with Ives’s Third Symphony, “The Camp Meeting,” a characteristically Ivesian explosion of European styles and 19th-century Americana.MondayThe military marches of John Philip Sousa, a major American presence in Europe during this period, are rarely heard alongside modernists like Milton Babbitt and Leon Kirchner, and Amy Beach’s String Quartet is rarely heard, period. Beach’s warm, thickly chromatic, intensely elegant single-movement quartet — which incorporates, after the model of Dvorak, the Native American melodies “Summer Song,” “Playing at Ball” and “Ititaujang’s Song” — looks both backward and forward.The quartet and chamber works by Babbitt, Kirchner, Conlon Nancarrow (best known for his wild player-piano studies) and Virgil Thomson lead, however unexpectedly, to Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” represented by Vladimir Horowitz’s virtuosic — and, in this company, truly progressive-sounding — piano arrangement.TuesdayAmong the week’s most intriguing rediscoveries is “Deep Song,” a Martha Graham solo that she first danced in 1937 as a cri de coeur during the Spanish Civil War. The score, by Cowell, was lost, so when the dance was revived in the 1980s, it was with another Cowell piece.Terese Capucilli dancing Martha Graham’s solo “Deep Song” in 1988. As part of this year’s Focus, Capucilli is helping to remount the dance with its original Henry Cowell score.Nan MelvilleThe correct music — created using an innovative technique that let the choreographer rearrange modular phrases as needed — was rediscovered in the early 2000s. So this collaboration with Terese Capucilli, a Graham expert who teaches at Juilliard, will be the modern premiere of a substantial re-creation of the original, set alongside chamber works by John Cage, Walter Piston, Roger Sessions and Aaron Copland.WednesdayA very brief history of the transition from ragtime to jazz — including pieces by Eubie Blake, Mary Lou Williams, James P. Johnson and Duke Ellington — is the climax of a program that also includes an aria from Gian Carlo Menotti’s popular opera “The Medium,” William Grant Still’s eloquent “Incantation and Dance” for oboe and piano, and works by Vincent Persichetti, Wolpe and Elliott Carter.ThursdayRefractions of other cultures by Colin McPhee (drawing on Balinese melodies) and Alan Hovhaness (on the kanun, an Armenian zither) join a two-piano arrangement of Carl Ruggles’s “Organum” and the slow movement of Samuel Barber’s Op. 11 String Quartet, which he later arranged as the famous Adagio for Strings.The “Festival Prelude” for organ by Horatio Parker, Ives’s teacher at Yale, is delightfully paired with Ives’s own nutty organ variations on “America”; Harrison’s cembalo sonatas; and a sampling of Broadway songs by Berlin, Kern, Porter and Rodgers — capped by a two-piano version of Gershwin’s variations on “I Got Rhythm.”FridayThe culminating event features, as usual, the Juilliard Orchestra, the school’s main symphonic ensemble; Mei-Ann Chen, the music director of the Chicago Sinfonietta, conducts. Joplin is once again on the program, in the form of the lively overture to his 1910 opera “Treemonisha,” which was first staged in 1972 and for which he was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize.Another long-overlooked composer, Florence Price, is represented by her lyrical Violin Concerto No. 1, with Timothy Chooi as soloist. And Ives, that great masher of genres, closes this genre-mashing festival with his grandly impassioned Second Symphony, which weaves American songs and hymns throughout. More

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      Everett Lee, Who Broke Color Barriers on the Conductor’s Podium, Dies at 105

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      He was known as the first Black conductor on Broadway and the first to conduct a white orchestra in the South. Mr. Lee went on to a successful career in Europe.Everett Lee, a conductor who broke down racial barriers but then fled the prejudice that Black classical musicians faced in the United States to make a significant career in Europe, died on Jan. 12 at a hospital near his home in Malmo, Sweden. He was 105.Mr. Lee’s daughter, Eve, confirmed the death.Already a concertmaster leading white theater orchestras by 1943, Mr. Lee made a significant breakthrough on Broadway when he was appointed music director of Leonard Bernstein’s “On the Town” in September 1945. The Chicago Defender called him the first Black conductor “to wave the baton over a white orchestra in a Broadway production.”In 1953, Mr. Lee conducted the Louisville Orchestra in Kentucky, a nerve-shredding afternoon for him because of little rehearsal time and the pressure of history. United Press reported that Mr. Lee’s concert was “one of the first” at which a Black man led a white orchestra in the South; other outlets went further, claiming that it was the very first such time. The Courier-Journal critic said that he “made a most favorable first impression.”Then, in 1955, shortly after Marian Anderson had made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera, Mr. Lee conducted the New York City Opera, another first. (His wife, Sylvia Olden Lee, a vocal coach, had been appointed the first Black musician on the Met’s staff around that time.)“Not only was his conducting expert in all its technical aspects,” a New York Times critic wrote of his “La Traviata,” “but it was informed with musicianship and an exceptionally keen grasp of the character of the opera.”Despite the breakthroughs, racism constrained Mr. Lee’s U.S. career, though he refused to let it define his work. “A Negro, standing in front of a white symphony group?” the artist manager Arthur Judson asked him, according to Ms. Lee, in the late 1940s, declining to sign him up. “No. I’m sorry.”Judson suggested that Mr. Lee follow other Black musicians into exile abroad. Mr. Lee didn’t leave at first, but eventually did so in 1957 and prospered in Germany, Colombia and especially Sweden, where he succeeded Herbert Blomstedt as music director of the Norrkoping Symphony Orchestra, from 1962 to 1972.Mr. Lee frequently said that he longed to return to the United States but would only do so to become the music director of a major orchestra.“I did not have very much hope at home, despite some success,” he told The Atlanta Constitution in 1970, saying that racism was less of a factor in his life and work in Europe. “It would be nice to work at home. I’m an American — why not?” If he could make it in Europe, he concluded, “I should be able to make it here.”Only one top ensemble, the Oregon Symphony, has ever given such a post to a Black conductor: James DePreist.Everett Astor Lee was born on Aug. 31, 1916, in Wheeling, W. Va., the first son of Everett Denver Lee, a barber, and Mamie Amanda (Blue) Lee, a homemaker. He started the violin at age 8, and his talent prompted the family to move to Cleveland in 1927.Mr. Lee ran track in junior high, a few years behind the Olympian gold medalist Jesse Owens, and led the Glenville High School orchestra as concertmaster. He came under the mentorship of the Cleveland Orchestra’s conductor, Artur Rodzinski, after a chance meeting at the hotel where Mr. Lee worked as an elevator operator. He studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music with the Cleveland Orchestra’s concertmaster, Joseph Fuchs.Graduating in 1941, Mr. Lee enlisted in the Army and trained to become a Tuskegee airman in Alabama, but he injured himself and was released.Mr. Lee moved to New York in 1943 to play in the orchestra for “Carmen Jones,” an Oscar Hammerstein II rewrite of Georges Bizet’s “Carmen” that had an all-Black cast but a primarily white orchestra. When the conductor was snowed in, early in 1944, Mr. Lee stepped from the concertmaster’s chair to conduct Bizet’s music. Spells conducting George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” followed, before Bernstein hired him as concertmaster and later music director of “On the Town.”“In an era of Jim Crow segregation in performance,” the musicologist Carol J. Oja has written, “Lee’s appointment was downright remarkable.”Mr. Lee then played in the violin section of the New York City Symphony for Bernstein, who arranged a scholarship to Tanglewood in 1946, where Mr. Lee studied conducting with Serge Koussevitzky of the Boston Symphony; he conducted the Boston Pops in 1949.Mr. Lee with with the coloratura soprano Virginia MacWatters preparing for a concert of the Cosmopolitan Little Symphony at Town Hall in New York City in 1948.The New York Times“Like most young people,” Mr. Lee told New York Amsterdam News in 1977, “I thought I could go out and conquer the world.”But there was a color line Mr. Lee could not cross. Rodzinski, now conductor of the New York Philharmonic, refused to let him audition for its violin section, knowing the inevitable result. Hammerstein considered him for a touring production but told him that “if a colored boy is the conductor, and we go into the South,” it would cause an uproar and cause bookings to be canceled.Mr. Lee responded by creating the Cosmopolitan Little Symphony in 1947, an integrated ensemble that rehearsed at Harlem’s Grace Congregational Church. It made its downtown debut with him on the podium at Town Hall in May 1948, with a bill that included the premiere of “Brief Elegy” by Ulysses Kay, one of many Black composers Mr. Lee programmed during his career.By 1952, the Cosmopolitan was giving a concert performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” before 2,100 people at City College, with the Met’s Regina Resnik as Leonora.“My own group is coming along fairly well,” Mr. Lee wrote Bernstein, suggesting “it may be the beginning of breaking down a lot of foolish barriers.” But starting any ensemble was hard then, let alone an integrated one. Recruitment had been difficult because trained Black musicians now believed “that there was ‘no future’ in achieving high standards of proficiency,” Mr. Lee wrote in The Times in December 1948.Despite signing with the New York City Opera staff in 1955, Mr. Lee left for Europe. He moved to Munich in 1957, founding an orchestra at the Amerika Haus and leading a traveling opera company. Guest spots came quickly; he led the Berlin Philharmonic in June 1960, one of many European dates.Like Dean Dixon, a Black conductor who led the Gothenburg Symphony from 1953 to 1960, Mr. Lee found sanctuary in Sweden. He maintained an ambitious repertoire in Norrkoping, performing operas from “Aida” to “Porgy,” conducting vast quantities of Swedish music, with Hans Eklund’s “Music for Orchestra” a favorite, and often collaborating with jazz players led by the saxophonist Arne Domnerus. It was a balance of new and old, local and otherwise, that Mr. Lee repeated as chief conductor of the Bogotá Philharmonic from 1985 to 1987.Even so, Mr. Lee never quite gave up on U.S. orchestras. He started to make guest appearances again. “The inescapable conclusion is, he should be around more often,” a Times critic wrote in 1966. In 1973, he took command of the Symphony of the New World, a New York ensemble that had been founded in 1965 as an integrated orchestra, like his now defunct Cosmopolitan. After an association with the Philadelphia-based Opera Ebony, he took a last bow, with the Louisville Orchestra, in 2005.Mr. Lee at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Marian Anderson Theater in New York in 1994. From left are Jessye Norman, Max Roach, Martina Arroyo and the City Council member C. Virginia Fields.Associated PressAlthough Black conductors such as Mr. DePreist, Paul Freeman and Henry Lewis had become more prominent by the 1970s, Mr. Lee saw little real improvement.“There has been no major change in my field,” he told The Afro-American Newspaper in 1972. “Orchestra companies feel if they had a Black orchestra leader last year, they don’t need one this year.”Mr. Lee fulfilled a dream of conducting the New York Philharmonic on the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1976, leading Sergei Rachmaninoff, Jean Sibelius and David Baker’s “Kosbro” — short for “Keep on Steppin’ Brothers.” Mr. Lee’s marriage to Ms. Lee ended in divorce. He married Christin Andersson in 1979. She survives him, as does Eve Lee, his daughter from his first marriage; a son from his second, Erik Lee; two granddaughters; and one great-granddaughter.Despite the barriers that Mr. Lee faced, he said in an interview published in 1997 that he was not “bitter.”He recalled being denied violin auditions at two major U.S. orchestras.“I then made up my mind that if I can’t join you, then I will lead you. I did make good on that promise to myself. Those two orchestras that denied me even an audition, I have conducted,” he said. “I just had to. I just had to show them that I was there.” More

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      Singing Will Return to Tanglewood This Summer

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      The Boston Symphony Orchestra plans to go back to full-scale programming at its bucolic warm-weather home in the Berkshires.After three years, the “Ode to Joy” will be sung again at Tanglewood.In 2020 there was only silence at the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s annual warm-weather retreat in the Berkshires. And last year, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and its grand choral finale — the traditional ending of the summer there — weren’t heard. During a shortened 2021 season, with limited crowds and distancing requirements, no vocal music was programmed, to reduce the risk of aerosol transmission of the coronavirus.But with a surge of virus cases, driven by the Omicron variant, seeming to ebb in Massachusetts, Tanglewood is set to return this summer — at full length and in full cry, the Boston Symphony announced on Thursday.So Beethoven’s Ninth will be there on the official closing night, Aug. 28. And the main season, which opens July 8, will also feature concert performances of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and George Benjamin’s “Lessons in Love and Violence,” in that 2018 opera’s American premiere. Among the singers appearing over the summer will be Susan Graham, Christine Goerke, Nicole Cabell, Julia Bullock, Ying Fang, Shenyang, Ryan McKinny, Will Liverman and Paul Appleby — along with the return of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus.The Boston Symphony said it would announce health protocols closer to the start of the season, when the state of the pandemic will be clearer.Andris Nelsons, the orchestra’s music director, is scheduled for frequent presences on the podium. John Williams, who turns 90 this year and served as director of the Boston Pops, will be feted with a gala performance on Aug. 20. Garrick Ohlsson plays Brahms’s complete works for solo piano over four programs; Paul Lewis joins the orchestra for all five Beethoven piano concertos. There will be a host of free concerts featuring the young fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center.Familiar guests like Emanuel Ax, Joshua Bell, Yo-Yo Ma and Michael Tilson Thomas will be joined by debuting artists such as the conductors JoAnn Falletta, Cristian Macelaru and Earl Lee, the pianist Alexander Malofeev and the violist Antoine Tamestit. Classics by Rachmaninoff and Ravel will be served alongside new music from composers including Helen Grime, Fazil Say, Richard Danielpour, Jessie Montgomery, Julia Adolphe, Caroline Shaw and Elizabeth Ogonek.Beginning on June 17 with Ringo Starr and ending on Sept. 3 with Judy Collins, pop artists return for the first time since 2019 — also including the Tanglewood favorite James Taylor, Brandi Carlile and Earth, Wind & Fire.The absence of Tanglewood, a regional staple and huge moneymaker for the Boston Symphony, which has summered there since 1937, was keenly felt in 2020, even by an orchestra with secure finances and the largest endowment in its field.The thinned-out 2021 season drew a respectable attendance of 148,000, versus more than 340,000 in 2019. But it is hoped that the bucolic campus will be altogether more alive this year. Ozawa Hall will reopen, joining the main concert space, the Shed. So will the Linde Center, which was inaugurated in 2019 as a site for master classes, lectures, rehearsals and recitals — among them, this summer, the pianist Stephen Drury playing the mighty set of variations on “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!” by Frederic Rzewski, who died in June.Full programming information is available at bso.org/tanglewood. More

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      Listen to Keyboard Music by Bach (No, Not That One)

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      The extraordinary range of C.P.E. Bach, a son of J.S., is on display in a new album from the pianist Marc-André Hamelin.The subject of the pianist Marc-André Hamelin’s latest album is Bach — no, not that one.Hamelin — ever inquisitive in exploring the outer reaches of the repertoire, with recent releases of music by Sigismond Thalberg, Samuil Feinberg and Erno Dohnanyi — has now turned to the extraordinary range of keyboard works by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Johann Sebastian’s second surviving son.C.P.E. Bach was a prolific composer and an important pedagogue, a significant influence on Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. (Hamelin’s new album is a welcome companion to the three volumes of solo Haydn that he set down, with ideal panache, a decade and more ago on the Hyperion label.) But if he was more widely appreciated than his father well into the 19th century, that has certainly not been the case more recently.In part, that’s because C.P.E.’s category-defying scores challenge preconceptions of the history of music as it has come to be written — coming off as stunningly, even unnervingly, experimental. When did the “Baroque” end, and the “Classical” begin? What constitutes “early music”? The work of C.P.E. Bach invites us to consider these questions anew, suggests the harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani, who has recorded some of this music and wrote the booklet notes for Hamelin’s two-disc set.Hamelin is known for delving into rarely played corners of the keyboard repertory.Kayana Szymczak for The New York TimesHamelin takes us from a juvenile march C.P.E. wrote before 1725 to two of the extended, improvisatory fantasies he composed just before his death, in 1788. Asked in an interview to pick a favorite page from the scores, Hamelin chose the “Abschied von meinem Silbermannischen Claviere, in einem Rondo” (“Farewell to My Silbermannischen Clavier, in a Rondo”), a haunting tribute to a favorite clavichord in 1781. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Even for adventurous pianists like yourself, the music of C.P.E. Bach is not exactly common. How did you pick it up?My wife, Cathy Fuller, is one of the hosts at WCRB radio in Boston, and back in either 2008 or 2009 she played one cut from Mikhail Pletnev’s Deutsche Grammophon recording of C.P.E. Bach. It was a little sonata in E minor; it’s three movements, very compact, about seven or eight minutes. The piece ends suddenly, in the middle of a phrase. Bach just decides to end it on a tonic first inversion, which was a total shock to me. You just have to look at Gesualdo to see how far some composers could go even very early in history, but this was really quite a shock.By coincidence, I had just inherited a collection of scores which included six volumes of music that C.P.E. published very late in life, in the 1780s, for “connoisseurs and amateurs.” So I ran to the music, and, sure enough, that’s exactly what C.P.E. was asking for — no diminuendo, no rallentando, nothing. Naturally I wanted to find out more, so I started reading from the six volumes, and then I bought everything I could find. I became very, very enthusiastic; the idea to record some of these things was always in the back of my mind, but it took a while for me to get the wheels in motion.When I started talking about this project, with no recording date in mind, I got a very nice email from Paul Corneilson of the Packard Humanities Institute. He said, “We have an 18-volume set of the complete keyboard works in urtext editions; would you like one?” What had been a project involving one CD became two, because of the embarrassment of riches I was confronted with.Above everything else, I wanted to underline the richness of Bach’s imagination. I would like to plead with pianists to look him up; it’s never been easier.So what distinguishes his music?The element of angularity, and surprise, and constant delight in the unexpected was very much a part of Haydn, and he confessed that he owed a great debt to C.P.E. Bach. There are some extremely daring modulations, and what I mentioned before is not the only time he just decides to end a piece. In the slow movement of the F minor sonata I recorded, the middle section keeps modulating, keeps modulating, keeps modulating — and then suddenly cuts off at a very tense moment, very foreign to the home key. Then there’s three long beats of silence, and he just decides to go back to the beginning, with no clear relationship between the two keys.I’ve seen editions which have “corrected” this to make it more palatable, more normal. One that I found, actually, was by Hans von Bülow, and you wouldn’t believe the butchery job he performed on C.P.E.’s music; it’s unbelievable. For a while, there wasn’t much more than that available.Bach was writing at a time of great technological change, as harpsichords and clavichords were giving way to fortepianos, a shift that allowed composers to develop new means of expression. How would you respond to those who might argue that this music should therefore only be performed on the instruments of its time, rather than a concert grand?I grew up with the modern piano, and it affords me all the pleasure, all the fulfillment, all the musical results I want. So, as much as I appreciate sometimes playing an old instrument — and I have, not necessarily in public — the music survives being played on the modern piano. For me, that’s enough; I don’t need anything else. There are so many possible sonorities on the modern piano that, for me, that’s perfectly fulfilling.Technological change is in fact the subject of your favorite page, the middle page of a rondo that Bach wrote in 1781 as a farewell to his long-serving clavichord.It’s an extremely affecting piece; I remember during the recording session I must have been in a hurry to get to it, because it was the first piece that I put down.In the exact middle of it there is a moment: There’s a fermata, and then suddenly this E major chord. This E major chord is not something really outlandish, because you’re coming out of B minor. But if you leave the right amount of silence before it, and if you pay particular heed to the quality of the attack of this chord, that’s one of the most magical moments that I’m aware of in all of music.I read that C.P.E. apparently said to the gentleman to whom he gave this Silbermann clavichord it’s absolutely impossible even to play the piece on a clavichord other than this one. (C.P.E. had had it for around 35 years, I think, so it was a very sad farewell.) But fortunately I paid no attention to that. It’s interesting to know, and it shows you the power of his convictions, but it’s a denial of the possibilities that are obtainable on something like the modern piano, or any other instrument.Funnily enough, the score repeatedly notates an ornament that simply can’t be achieved on a modern piano: a bebung, which is a form of vibrato. Do you just have to ignore that, and accept that the piano will make amends in other ways?I just tried to compensate elsewhere. What carried me through is the image of C.P.E. possibly improvising this piece, and then later notating it, because it really does sound like an improvisation — like playing for himself. More

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      Review: A Pianist Makes Carnegie Hall His Home

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      Igor Levit returned to New York after streaming dozens of concerts from his apartment during the pandemic.When the pianist Igor Levit streamed dozens of performances from his apartment in Berlin during the first pandemic lockdown in 2020, he wore neat but casual clothes: closefitting sweaters, hoodies over T-shirts. He was inviting you to a concert, yes, but also into his home; he offered, in milieu and music, both elevation and comfort.Carnegie Hall, Levit made clear from the moment he walked onstage there Thursday evening, is like home for him, too.Appearing for his first solo recital in the gilded Stern Auditorium, he came on wearing a dark, slouchy collared shirt, left unbuttoned to reveal a crew neck underneath, and black jeans. The impression, as usual with him, was of an artist who dispenses with formalities and fripperies to focus — with relaxation but also intense seriousness — on the music.It was, also as usual for him, an elegantly organized program. A Beethoven sonata that ends in a suite of variations led into the premiere of a new set of variations by Fred Hersch. A transcription of the prelude to Wagner’s opera “Tristan und Isolde” was followed without pause by the B minor Sonata of Liszt, Wagner’s champion and eventual father-in-law — which ends, as “Tristan” does, in the key of B.Building to a mighty climax in a grand account of Liszt’s sprawling sonata, Levit projected a kind of burning patience through the evening. His playing is changeable, but never comes across as improvisatory; there is always a sense of deliberation, sometimes in tempos but always in approach, a palpable sense that everything has been thought out. Yet the results feel confident and fiery, not merely or coolly analytical.From its gently rocking opening — here a mistiness out of which emerged quiet clarity — Beethoven’s Sonata No. 30 in E (Op. 109) received a dreamier, and eventually more explosive, rendition than on the recording Levit released in 2013.He has a gift for gentleness, shaping soft, tender melodies that ache without slackening. In the third movement, he built the final variation to furious, ecstatic runs. But the greatest impact came when those runs dropped out, leaving the remnants of a barely audible trill as the path back to the theme.Hersch is best known as a jazz pianist, but he also writes poised concert works. While Levit has played some of his short pieces, this new Variations on a Folk Song is substantial, a bit more than 20 minutes long.The theme here is the plaintive “Shenandoah,” and Hersch gives sober, subtle, respectful treatment to a song that, as he writes in a program note, “I learned as a child and has so much emotional resonance for me.” One of the 20 variations is slightly skittish; another is slightly robust; the most memorable sprinkles tiny quivers in the pauses of a mild piano line. But the mood is consistent, and kindly.Levit is one of classical music’s most politically outspoken figures, which is one reason that the untroubled sincerity of Hersch’s interpretation of “Shenandoah” is so striking. The song is thought to have its roots among the fur trappers of the early American Midwest and their relations with the Indigenous population; it is a melody that touches the core of our country’s history, in all its complexity. But these unvaried variations are a musical vision of nearly unbroken serenity and benevolence — notably, curiously nostalgic.The “Tristan” prelude was here, in Zoltan Kocsis’s arrangement, far more progressive, its opening almost surreally elongated by Levit so that his eventual landing on flooding chords offered some of the shock this work held for its first listeners. Kocsis’s arrangement ends in shadows, out of which Levit’s Liszt emerged; a rough contemporary to “Tristan,” the sonata was here a stand-in for the opera.It had the time-bending effect “Tristan” often does, its contrasting sections seeming to float alongside one another in a vast expanse. The sense of scale was memorable, as was Levit’s touch: densely liquid low rumbles; charcoal-black stark chords; extremely soft passages that sounded candied, like snow glittering in moonlight.The coherence of his conception of the evening extended to the encore: the actual ending of “Tristan,” the “Liebestod,” in Liszt’s transcription. Its climax — which Liszt achieves by working the extreme ends of the piano simultaneously, to delicately epic effect — spoke for the recital as a whole, judiciously balanced yet thrilling.Igor LevitPerformed on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      He Was an Important Conductor. Also a Great One.

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      Hans Rosbaud was renowned as a modern-music specialist. But newly released archival recordings demonstrate his gifts were far broader.There is precisely one famous story about Hans Rosbaud — though, like its subject, it is not quite as famous as it ought to be.This Austrian conductor was asleep at his home in March 1954 when the telephone rang. On the line was a producer at Hamburg Radio, a little desperate. Could Rosbaud come to cover for the injured Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, and oversee the premiere of Arnold Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron,” a gargantuan opera unperformed since being left unfinished in 1932?Rosbaud had never seen the score. His mind likely drifted to the 1930s: Back then Schoenberg had told Rosbaud forebodingly that he had “not imposed at all any reserve concerning difficulties of execution” in writing the opera. He clearly assumed no one would dare perform it.When was the premiere scheduled, Rosbaud asked the radio producer, fearfully? In exactly one week.This was a difficult prospect, but not the impossible one it would have been for almost anyone else. “One is almost forced to apply the word genius to Hans Rosbaud’s masterful control of the work,” The New York Times later reported of the performance. Genius enough, indeed, that the broadcast was released on record in 1957, the year Rosbaud led the staged premiere of “Moses und Aron” in Zurich — surpassing “even himself,” as a critic wrote.The recording still holds up, a fire coruscating through its lucidity. Had Schoenberg lived to hear it, he might have repeated the thanks he had offered Rosbaud in 1931 for a performance of his “Variations for Orchestra,” when he wrote in awe at having heard his work performed “with clarity, with love, with design.”Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron”NDR Symphony Orchestra, 1954 (Sony)No musician of Rosbaud’s generation did more to canonize its avant-garde. Igor Stravinsky offered a letter of recommendation for “this high-minded musician, this aristocrat among conductors.” Paul Hindemith was a classmate and lifelong friend. Anton Webern was a house guest.“When a composer speaks of Rosbaud the conductor,” Pierre Boulez wrote of the man to whom his masterpiece, “Le Marteau Sans Maître,” is dedicated, “he is speaking in the first place of a friend.”Joan Evans, a musicologist and Rosbaud biographer, has listed 173 premieres that he gave from 1923 until his death in 1962, the beneficiaries running from Fritz Adam to Bernd Alois Zimmermann by way of Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Gyorgy Ligeti and Luigi Nono. The Musical Times of London eulogized him simply as “the greatest conductor of contemporary music.”Webern’s “Sechs Stücke” (Op.6, No. 4)SWF Orchestra Baden-Baden, 1957 (Universal Music France)But this “dream figure” who would “always give the future the benefit of the doubt,” as Boulez wrote, chafed at his formidable reputation.“I am not a modern music specialist,” Rosbaud told a German newspaper in 1956. “In Aix-en-Provence I am characterized as a Mozart expert; in Munich, I am regarded as a specialist of Bruckner. It is dangerous to classify musicians in this manner.”Particularly so, for Rosbaud’s own fate. His public stature has never approached the private respect in which musicians held him, in part because of his advocacy for music that has never really caught on. Quiet and scholarly, this “grim, Lincolnesque” man, as a writer once described him, seemed to be the antithesis of a celebrity maestro. His major positions were not with big-name symphonies, but less-prominent radio ensembles. He made few commercial records, superb though those few were. He had no interest in fame.Few conductors, then, have more to gain from an opening of the vaults. More than 700 of Rosbaud’s performances have been languishing in archives, most of them at SWR, the successor to Southwest German Radio in Baden-Baden, his artistic home after 1948.Rosbaud leading his radio orchestra in Baden-Baden, his artistic home after 1948.SWRSince 2017, SWR has released 59 CDs from those tapes, in a project that covers Rosbaud’s work in composers from Mozart to Sibelius. Much remains still to materialize, not least what should be essential boxes of 20th-century music. But despite variable, usually mono sound, what has already emerged is plenty to prove he was far more than his legend. Without question one of the most important conductors of his century, Rosbaud was also one of the finest.He saw his task as primarily to help composers state their own case. But unlike others who have aimed for a similar interpretive modesty, Rosbaud’s approach was never clinical or didactic. It always had at its core that love that moved Schoenberg. His Bruckner had humanity as well as structure; he took Haydn seriously, early and late alike; his Schoenberg, Berg and Webern were not just intelligible, but blazed with intensity.Claudia Cassidy put her pen on Rosbaud’s typical style in 1962. “Rosbaud gave us a blueprint,” this ordinarily truculent Chicago Tribune critic wrote after hearing him lead Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” “Not the kind that lies inert on the drafting table, but the kind that sets skyscrapers soaring, flings bridges into space and sends imagination spinning into orbit.”Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7SWF Orchestra Baden-Baden, 1957 (SWR)Rosbaud had music in his blood. He was born in Graz, Austria, on July 22, 1895, to Anna Rosbaud, a piano teacher who had taken lessons from Clara Schumann. A single mother who died in 1913, Anna never told her four children who their father was; Arnold Kramish, the biographer of Hans’s brother, Paul, traced their paternity to Franz Heinnisser, at one point the choirmaster of the Graz cathedral.Growing up in a musical family, if a destitute one, Hans played at least four instruments. He attended the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, and his first appointment as a conductor came in 1921. He later recalled getting used to “the whistling, ranting and raging” with which audiences would greet his Hindemith, Stravinsky and Schoenberg with the Mainz Symphony in Germany.Rosbaud’s main task in Mainz was to run its music school, and he continued this educational approach to his career after 1929, as conductor of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. Rosbaud gave talks on the orchestral instruments, writing pieces like a fughetta for three bassoons as illustrations, and he lectured on Wagner before giving act-by-act broadcasts of the “Ring.” Bartok, Stravinsky and other composers came to perform; Schoenberg spoke on his “Variations,” with Rosbaud giving examples, and also sent in thoughts on “Brahms the Progressive.”Stravinsky, left, and Rosbaud, who was one of that composer’s most devoted interpreters in the Germany of his era.SWREven before Hitler took power in 1933, Rosbaud’s tastes were drawing the attention of what he told Stravinsky was a “chauvinistic movement.” Forced to enlist a family friend in Graz as a fake father to demonstrate his Aryan ancestry, Rosbaud found his once-lauded support for a certain strand of new music now brought him trouble, not least when a disgruntled subordinate reported him to the Gestapo in 1936 for seeing music “in a Jewish sense.” He reassured banished composers that he remained on their side, and tried, without success, to find a job in the United States. He left Frankfurt in 1937 for Münster.Rosbaud despised Nazism, and he likely knew that Paul, his brother, was spying on the German nuclear program for Britain. Still, Hans put his abilities to work for the Nazis, reconciling himself to that service with small acts of resistance. To Berlin, he seemed sound enough to be appointed general music director of occupied Strasbourg, a city that the Nazis sought to turn into a colony for their idea of German art, in 1941. But Rosbaud endeared himself to the Alsatians, speaking French, protecting the musicians and acting with sufficient decency that even Charles Munch, the fiercely antifascist Strasbourgian conductor, thought him beyond reproach.Despite Rosbaud’s work in occupied territory, the American military rushed to clear him in denazification proceedings. Shorn of any unfortunate ideological associations in either his politics or his aesthetics, he was general music director in Munich before 1945 was over: a brief, frantic tenure that saw him give Beethoven and Bruckner cycles in bombed-out halls, and reconnect German musical life to its international context, with Schoenberg, Shostakovich and Stravinsky given pride of place.That work would go on, but not primarily in Munich. An offer in 1948 from Baden-Baden could not be refused, coming as it did with the opportunity to imagine an ensemble from scratch and to fulfill a special mandate for new music, which after 1950 included the Donaueschingen Festival, a hotbed of the avant-garde. An energetic Beethoven Violin Concerto with Ginette Neveu from 1949, as well as a lacerating Hartmann Second and a courageous Messiaen “Turangalîla” shortly after, show that Rosbaud quickly brought the orchestra to a high standard.Haydn’s Symphony No. 104SWF Orchestra Baden-Baden, 1952 (SWR)But he never aspired to the ensemble virtuosity of the more commercially-driven orchestras of the day. His vivacious 1957 account of Haydn’s “London” Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic might be crisper than his 1952 and 1962 efforts in Baden-Baden, but what matters about them all is how their warmth and drive enliven Haydn’s structures, without drawing attention to themselves.The joys of what SWR has unearthed are subtle, not sensational. Those who need grand statements in their Beethoven might be disappointed, whatever the grinding insistence of his Fifth Symphony, the liquid flow of his Sixth, the effervescence of his Eighth. Those who want bombast in their Tchaikovsky will doubt his unmissable Fifth, so full of dark psychological shadows that it is almost redolent of Mahler. And in Mahler, Rosbaud’s early advocacy for whom was characteristic of a conductor so often half a beat ahead of his time, he comes close to ideal.“Mr. Rosbaud does not cut it to pieces or disguise it by ‘interpretation,’” Cassidy wrote of a Mahler Ninth in Chicago in December 1962, in words that also apply to Rosbaud’s Baden-Baden recording from 1954. “He gives it clarity, precision and understanding, which is to shed light on it without blinding its mysteries.”Mahler’s Symphony No. 9SWF Orchestra Baden-Baden, 1954 (SWR)The Chicago Symphony, where Rosbaud had long spells as a guest conductor between 1959 and 1962, considered him to succeed Fritz Reiner as music director. This offered American recognition for the first time, and a chance to develop a craft honed not just in Baden-Baden, but also in Zurich, where he held positions with the Tonhalle Orchestra, and in Aix-en-Provence. There he directed the annual summer festival from 1948, leading operatic Mozart that Virgil Thomson once called “perfection” in its “animation and orchestral delicacy,” and venturing into Gluck and Rameau.But Chicago was not to be. Rosbaud had been weakening since kidney surgery several years before, and after that Mahler Ninth and a brief stop in Baden-Baden, where he gave a serene farewell with Brahms’s Second, he died on Dec. 29, 1962, near Lugano, Switzerland. He was 67. More

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      Dale Clevenger, Chicago Symphony’s Fearless Horn Master, Dies at 81

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      Mr. Clevenger, who played his notoriously treacherous instrument with daring, was an anchor of the Chicago orchestra’s famed brass section for 47 years.Dale Clevenger, whose expressive, daring playing as the solo French horn of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for 47 years made him one of the most respected orchestral instrumentalists of his generation, died on Jan. 5 at a hospital near his home in Brescia, Italy. He was 81.The cause was complications of Waldenstrom’s disease, a form of lymphoma, his family said.Mr. Clevenger was a pillar of the famed Chicago brass section, which has long been renowned as an unrivaled force for its clean, majestic sound, fearless attacks and sheer might. Working with his equally enduring fellow principals, Adolph Herseth on trumpet, Jay Friedman on trombone and Arnold Jacobs on tuba, Mr. Clevenger helped shape that section into the envy of the orchestra world, and the joy of its conductors.In a statement, Riccardo Muti, the orchestra’s music director, called him “one of the best and most famous horn players of our time and one of the glories of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.”Mr. Clevenger’s willingness to take risks on his notoriously treacherous instrument, and his ability to surmount those risks seemingly with ease, were symbols of the brash quality of his orchestra. He was a technical virtuoso, but he was also capable of producing an enormous range of colors on his instrument, Mr. Muti’s predecessor, Daniel Barenboim, said. He was also a frequent chamber music partner and soloist.The Chicago ensemble was already full of idols when Mr. Clevenger joined in 1966, but Mr. Herseth and Mr. Jacobs were inspirations for him, both for their excellence and for their longevity.When the Boston Symphony offered Mr. Clevenger a post in the mid-1970s, he asked his mentors if they intended to perform in Chicago for as long as they physically could. They said yes. He resolved, he later recalled, that “as long as they were in the orchestra, there is nothing that would lure me away from Chicago.” Mr. Herseth went on to be principal for 53 years, Mr. Jacobs for 44.Mr. Clevenger was, however, a more versatile musician than that might imply. For 17 years he had a regular Tuesday-night date playing jazz with a group called Ears, which he said made him a stronger orchestral player. “Within the confines of symphonic structure,” he said in 1978 about the lessons he learned from improvising, “I can make music in a more relaxed, freer way.”Jazz was a side gig, but Mr. Clevenger was serious about leaving his seat on the stage to stand on the podium. “My dream is eventually to become a respected conductor of a major orchestra anywhere in the world,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 1986. That was not to be, but he did direct the Elmhurst Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble in the Chicago suburbs, from 1981 to 1995.The Chicago Symphony’s horn section in the late 1970s. From left, Frank Brouk, Richard Oldberg, Norman Schweikert, Mr. Clevenger and Daniel Gingrich. Robert M. Lightfoot II/Chicago Symphony Orchestra Michael Dale Clevenger was born on July 2, 1940, in Chattanooga, Tenn., the third of four children of Ernest Clevenger, a sawmill manufacturer who was briefly the president of the Chattanooga Opera Association, and Mary Ellen (Fridell) Clevenger, a homemaker. He started learning piano at age 7 and went to concerts with his father.“I kept my eye on this shape of metal, which was the French horn,” Mr. Clevenger recalled of attending those concerts in a video interview for Abilene Christian University in 1984. “I was infatuated with the way they looked. The more I looked, the more I became infatuated with the way they sound. I had a dream, a vision, to play one of those things.”Unable to afford a horn, Ernest Clevenger bought his 11-year-old son a trumpet instead, but Dale persisted. At 14, after making do with a school instrument for a year, he had his own horn, and his life.Mr. Clevenger performed in the Chattanooga Symphony and the Chattanooga High School band, under the bandmaster A.R. Casavant, who played him records of the Chicago Symphony during his lunch hour.He enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1958 to study with Forrest Standley, the principal of the Pittsburgh Symphony.After graduating in 1962, he freelanced in New York, joined Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra and spent a year as principal of the Kansas City Philharmonic.He failed his first audition with the Chicago Symphony, in May 1965, but succeeded at a second, in January 1966. On his first week on the job, he was a soloist in Frank Martin’s Concerto for Seven Wind Instruments, Timpani, Percussion and String Orchestra.“For his initial time out,” The Chicago Tribune reported, “he seems a capable addition to our superb first chair lineup.”The Martin concerto was recorded and later released. As well as appearing countless times on record as an ensemble player, Mr. Clevenger was a soloist on several later Chicago Symphony recordings, including a glowing account of Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings under Carlo Maria Giulini and a disc of Strauss concertos that won a Grammy in 2002. Mr. Clevenger also set down Haydn and Mozart concertos with the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra, and earned a further Grammy for the quintets for piano and winds by Beethoven and Mozart, sharing the bill with the Chicago principal clarinet Larry Combs (a fellow jazz player on Tuesday nights), two members of the Berlin Philharmonic and Mr. Barenboim.The composer John Williams wrote a concerto for Mr. Clevenger. Mr. Williams conducted its premiere with the Chicago Symphony and Mr. Clevenger in 2003. Todd Rosenberg /Chicago Symphony Orchestra In his final years in Chicago, music critics began raising questions about whether Mr. Clevenger was performing up to his usual standards. In 2010 Andrew Patner, writing in The Chicago Sun-Times, called for him to place “a cap on a unique orchestral career that should be noted for its many triumphs and not a late struggle against time.”Mr. Clevenger retired from the orchestra in 2013 and joined the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. He had also taught at Northwestern and Roosevelt Universities.Mr. Clevenger married Nancy Sutherland in 1966; they divorced in 1987. Alice Render, a hornist and sometime section partner in the Chicago Symphony, became his wife that year; she died in 2011. He married Giovanna Grassi in 2012. She survives him, as do a son, Michael, and a daughter, Ami, from his first marriage; two sons, Mac and Jesse, from his second marriage; a sister, Alice Clevenger Cooper; and two grandchildren.Mr. Clevenger, for whom John Williams wrote a concerto in 2003, always maintained that the purpose of his playing was to delight.“I realize that I have been given a gift, by God, to make music, to perform music, and to give people joy,” he said in the 1984 video interview. “I have the pleasure, the privilege, of making people happy — and in doing so, making my own self happy.” More

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      Review: A Conductor Adds Her Name to Philharmonic Contenders

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      As the orchestra searches for a new music director, Susanna Mälkki was given the distinction of leading it at Carnegie Hall.It’s auditions season at the New York Philharmonic — and not for a seat among its players. With Jaap van Zweden, the orchestra’s music director, having announced in September that he will depart in 2024, every guest conductor now takes the podium with the search for his replacement looming.This game of Fantasy Baton is complicated by the fact that the Philharmonic is wandering while David Geffen Hall is renovated, playing sometimes unfamiliar repertory in unfamiliar (and perhaps uncongenial) spaces. But the fall brought good reviews for Dalia Stasevska, Simone Young, Giancarlo Guerrero and Dima Slobodeniouk.No guest so far, though, has received a platform like Susanna Mälkki got on Thursday. Making her fourth appearance with the Philharmonic, she is the only outsider to be granted one of the orchestra’s four dates this year at Carnegie Hall, its home until Lincoln Center was built in the 1960s and where it had not appeared since 2015. (Van Zweden leads the other three Carnegie concerts, this spring.)The chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, Mälkki presided over a program tailor-made for a Finnish conductor’s tryout with an ensemble across the Atlantic: two beefy, brassy American works followed after intermission by one of Finland’s most famous symphonic exports, Sibelius’s Fifth.Adolphus Hailstork’s 1984 overture “An American Port of Call” depicts Norfolk, Va., as a mixture of bustling activity and sweet nocturnal relaxation. Mälkki brought out piquant touches, like some characterful wails of clarinet, and the tidal undercurrent of the low strings at certain moments even anticipated the grand “swan call” climax of the Sibelius.She patiently, persuasively built that symphony’s fitful first movement, and the whole work had a feeling of straightforwardness, lightness and modesty; neither tempos nor emotions were milked; the performance was more lovely than intense. Ensemble sonorities in the winds and brasses were clean, if not pristine or particularly atmospheric — though Judith LeClair, the orchestra’s principal bassoon, brought gorgeously buttery foreboding to her important solo.A former section cellist before embarking on her conducting career, Mälkki was unafraid of encouraging some aggression in the strings: a few forceful accents in the first movement and, most arresting, a slapping spiccato burr in the double basses during the stirring swan motif in the finale. But the chords at the end, in some performances slashing and stark, were here warm, resonant, full, even mellow.John Adams’s Saxophone Concerto is almost the same half-hour length as the symphony, but felt far longer on Thursday. The distinguished soloist, Branford Marsalis, made a tender sound in some lullaby-like passages, but often Adams’s virtuosically burbling fabric of alto-sax notes seemed to vanish into the dense orchestral textures — sometimes inaudible, sometimes just bland in color and bite. Occasionally rousing for some of this composer’s trademark peppy rhythmic chugging, and a fun section riffing on “The Rite of Spring,” the 2013 work as a whole felt muted and glum, with a tinkling celesta nagging.This was my first time hearing the piece live, so I can’t be sure whether these balance and energy problems are common. But the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s recording under David Robertson — with Timothy McAllister, for whom the concerto was composed, as soloist — makes a far better, more seductive and varied case for it than Thursday’s performance.As for the Philharmonic’s future, Gustavo Dudamel — whom the orchestra’s chief executive, Deborah Borda, recruited in her last job to lead the Los Angeles Philharmonic — conducts two weeks of Schumann in March. He and others appearing in the coming months, like Jakub Hrusa, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Tugan Sokhiev and Long Yu, could all be considered music director contenders.Mälkki deserves to be on that list, too. But perhaps the best indication of the field will come soon, when the orchestra announces its lineup for next season, its return to the renovated Geffen Hall. Game on.New York PhilharmonicPerformed on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More