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      Review: Young Concert Artists Is Back, With a Superb Pianist

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      Zhu Wang played an unusually interesting and adventurous set of pieces at Zankel Hall.Since its founding in 1961, Young Concert Artists has supported emerging musicians who win its annual competition — including offering a coveted New York recital. But during the pandemic, these recitals had to go virtual.On Thursday the organization became the latest New York institution to resume in-person concerts when Zhu Wang, a 24-year-old pianist from China, gave an impressive recital at Zankel Hall. Zhu, making his New York debut, played a demanding 90-minute program without an intermission.With an unusually interesting and adventurous set of pieces, Zhu proved a thoughtful, sensitive performer. He began with Bach’s arrangement for keyboard of Alessandro Marcello’s Oboe Concerto in D minor; this was Bach’s pragmatic way of getting to know the latest currents in Italian music from the inside. A lithe, flowing first movement leads to a plaintive Adagio, followed by bustling Presto finale. Zhu balanced lyrical warmth and crisp clarity.He then turned to Schumann’s “Humoreske,” a 30-minute suite in seven movements. Performances of this remarkable piece are relative rarities, perhaps because its constant shifts of mood and flights of fancy can seem baffling. Zhu fervently conveyed the rhapsodic sweep and mercurial fervor of the music, while bringing out the inner structure that holds it together. He was especially impressive during episodes of wistful, poetic tenderness.He then spoke to the audience about the next work: Zhang Zhao’s “Pi Huang (Moments in Beijing Opera),” which he said offered impressions of Chinese opera, which combines music, dance and even martial arts and acrobatics. The short, fantastical piece was alive with trills and tremolos, rustling arpeggios, beguiling tunes and jittery dance segments driven by Bartokian cluster chords.Daniel Kellogg, who became president of Young Concert Artists when Susan Wadsworth, its founder, retired in 2019, appeared onstage with Nina Shekhar, the organization’s composer in residence, to introduce her “Vocalise.” (Shekhar will have an orchestral work played by the New York Philharmonic in May.)The term vocalise refers to a song without words. In this premiere, she adapted that concept to the piano. This ruminative 12-minute score begins and ends with an elegiac melody, inspired by Hindustani musical styles. There are stretches of thick, tart block chords, searching lyrical lines, mysterious washes of sound and delicate strands, brought together compellingly in Zhu’s account.He ended with Liszt — choosing not some overtly virtuosic piece, but that composer’s teeming, imaginative “Réminiscences de Norma,” a fascinating reflection on Bellini’s opera in which its melodies are transformed into piano music, by turns contemplative and exciting.Zhu played it brilliantly. And Young Concert Artists is back.Young Concert ArtistsThe bass-baritone William Socolof appears on Dec. 9 at Merkin Concert Hall, Manhattan; yca.org. More

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      Review: The Cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason Makes an Entrance

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      A young star made his New York Philharmonic debut in an evening of bold, charismatic musical storytelling.It takes a long time for the soloist to enter in Dvorak’s Cello Concerto: three and a half minutes of orchestral music with the force and sweep of a symphony. But when that entrance finally comes, it’s marked in the score as “risoluto” — resolute, bold, declarative.And it could hardly have been more so than it was at Alice Tully Hall on Thursday, when the cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason made his debut with the New York Philharmonic. Having sat patiently at his instrument during the introduction, Kanneh-Mason, 22, became suddenly animated, matching the ensemble’s grandeur with his own: fiery vibrato, dramatic phrasing, richly voiced yet crisp forzando chords.This wasn’t the Kanneh-Mason whom nearly two billion people saw perform at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in 2018. Then, he was more restrained — with the occasional expressive, searching look in his eyes, but generally measured as he played three short pieces. One of them, Fauré’s “Après un Rêve,” has racked up millions of streams on Spotify.The streaming numbers for his latest album — “Muse,” with the excellent pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason, his sister — are much smaller so far. But that recording is far more revealing than the wedding performance of his sound and style, proving his gift as a compelling musical storyteller in sonatas by Barber and Rachmaninoff, whether charting thorny passages or soaring to emotional heights.That was recognizably the musician who played the Dvorak concerto on Thursday: a charismatic protagonist and a generous collaborator in chamber-like passages. But Kanneh-Mason could also be a bit of a ham, his extremities of expression sometimes tipping into an unwieldiness that, as he maintained the overall shape of a phrase, sacrificed intonation along the way. These passing errors, though, were less memorable than the grace of his bow gliding over harmonics, or the control and tension with which he was able to build long crescendos.After the standing ovation that followed, he announced that his encore would be a premiere: “3-Minute Cello Concerto,” by the 11-year-old Larissa Lakner, part of the Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers program. Delivered with the same sincerity afforded Dvorak, this work was a dialogue between soloist and orchestra, in varied episodes of Mozartean tidiness and melodies that wouldn’t be out of place on a “Harry Potter” soundtrack; Kanneh-Mason had his share of pyrotechnics in agile fingering, double stops, octaves and passionate legato. It has been heartening to see ever-greater attention given to the children in this initiative, whose work has been featured in widely attended outdoor concerts, pandemic Bandwagon performances and, here, a high-profile subscription program.The concert was conducted by Simone Young, lately a more regular presence at the Philharmonic.Chris LeeThe conductor was Simone Young, who stepped in two years ago after a long absence to lead the orchestra because its music director, Jaap van Zweden, burned himself with an ice pack, and is thankfully becoming a more regular presence at the podium here. Preceding the Dvorak was a brief opening in the form of the “Fuga (Ricercata)” from Bach’s “Musical Offering,” arranged by Webern in a modernist showcase of 18th-century complexity; after intermission came Brahms’s First Symphony.With an ear for easily overlooked details and dramatic instincts that gave the whole evening a sense of drive and accumulation, Young subtly threaded elements of the Bach through the pieces that followed. By slightly emphasizing the section cellos in the opening of the Dvorak, she lent their part the brightly articulated counterpoint of individual voices in the “Fuga”; later, in the first movement of the Brahms, Webern’s arrangement was echoed as a leading line was passed from oboe to flute and cello.Young led the orchestra with decisive urgency and refreshingly little over-the-top physical extroversion. (She had that combination of qualities in common with another star of the evening, Sheryl Staples, the principal associate concertmaster, who was heavily featured as a soloist in the Dvorak and Brahms.) Most impressive was the reserve Young employed in the opening movements of those two works. Substantial, and with spectacular endings, each could almost be a stand-alone piece.But Young withheld somewhat in both, preferring a slow burn that built toward truly stirring finales — the galloping Brahms blossoming into a radiant chorale and popping chords that sent the audience, once again, standing to greet the music with enthusiastic applause.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats Friday and Saturday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Chamber Music Society’s Leaders on Balancing Old and New

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      Wu Han and David Finckel take a conservative course navigating passionate feelings about the future of classical music.Inside the offices of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center hangs an old letter from an alarmed listener.“The accordion is not a chamber music instrument,” huffs the letter, written in the wake of a concert featuring a Bach sonata transcribed for cello and accordion. “Please do not impose that on your loyal audience again.”The sentiment gives a sense of the grand passions aroused by even tiny tweaks to the society’s programming. Since becoming the organization’s artistic directors in 2004, the husband-and-wife team of David Finckel and Wu Han have faced those passions, which fuel an often fiery debate about the future of classical music.Some quail whenever the society, which presents more than 100 concerts per year in New York and beyond, veers even slightly from traditional crowd pleasers, including works by Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. Others have said the organization should be more adventurous and do more to highlight the work of living composers, who are rarely featured on its main stage at Alice Tully Hall. (Of nearly 100 works on its Tully series this season, two are by living composers; neither was written in the 21st century.)Reviewing the society’s opening night last month in The New York Times, Zachary Woolfe chided the organization for “a conservatism extreme even by classical music’s low standards.”In an interview, Finckel, a cellist, and Wu, a pianist, discussed that criticism, as well as the impact of the pandemic and the return of live concerts. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Wu (on piano, third from left) played Mendelssohn last month with, from left, the violinist Richard Lin, the violists Matthew Lipman and Arnaud Sussmann and the bassist Blake Hinson.Cherylynn TsushimaWhile several of your concerts in New York this season have been crowded, it’s unclear whether audiences will show up for culture as they did before the coronavirus. Are you concerned about the future for arts organizations?WU HAN The future of the arts is actually brighter than before. The appreciation for music has grown tenfold because you realize how important it was in your life. For me to walk onstage now is still incredibly emotional. I don’t see how it will ever be the same after this pandemic.How did the pandemic change you and your organization?WU People know that in hard times we have each other’s backs. We support each other. The musicians know that. There’s incredible bonding.DAVID FINCKEL In Soviet Russia, in Communist China, people were literally prevented from hearing music — not by a disease, but by governmental laws and censorship. It’s the way that I, as a privileged American, can feel an even deeper kinship with people having lived in Germany during the 1930s, or the 1940s and 1950s in China, and certainly the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.The pandemic wreaked havoc across the arts and forced the cancellation of dozens of your concerts. You made the decision to pay artists 50 percent of their promised fees and to add 75 percent more when those dates are rescheduled. How have you approached planning going forward?FINCKEL Now we have a couple of sort of hybrid seasons where there are programs carried over. It never occurred to us to say, “Oh, because we couldn’t do it, it’s no good, it’s old, it’s like food you throw out in the fridge.” These programs don’t go stale. They’re still there waiting for new life.Wu and Finckel (on cello, at right) played in 2015 with, from left, the violinist Daniel Hope and the violist Paul Neubauer.Tristan Cook/Chamber Music Society of Lincoln CenterYou have been criticized for not doing more to feature new music, especially in concerts at Tully Hall, your main stage. Can you explain your approach to programming?FINCKEL We never want to force people to listen to music that they don’t want to listen to because we think it’s good for them. We will make educated guesses as to what we think they might like and latch onto. And in those instances, we stick our necks out.There’s plenty of adventurous programing on the stage of Alice Tully Hall; one has to just study the brochure a little more carefully. But there are definitely programs for people who don’t want to have anything to do with the 20th century, and there are programs for people who don’t want to have anything to do with the 18th century. So it’s all there.Does Chamber Music Society do enough to champion new music, almost all of which is played in far smaller venues than Tully?WU You should have old music, you should have new music, you should have the best musicians playing, then you should shoot for as many places to play as possible.I don’t really care about having a premiere. The main idea is to have new music played as much as possible. New music should be thriving, should live forever, and should be played as much as possible.In a recent review in The Times, Zachary Woolfe, while praising your performances as “generally of unimpeachable quality,” said that the programming of your opening night last month showed a “blinkered view of music” that “encapsulates what the society has presented for some time.” What is your response?FINCKEL I just feel very sorry for this point of view. The person is missing so much opportunity for enjoyment. I mean, there is more variety and diversity in a single string quartet of Haydn than you can find in about a hundred works of other composers. Our repertoire spans 500 years of music. You know how much variety there is in that 500 years?How do you judge the success of your concerts?FINCKEL We use ourselves to judge, because we know when we hear a concert whether it came up to our expectations and our hopes as a good program or not. We know whether we played well or not. We know whether our artists played well. We consider ourselves experienced enough to be the ultimate judge of that and to build upon that experience, to take the organization forward. We take the blame.WU When the hall is completely empty, when nobody wants to come hear our programming, when we finish playing and there’s no applause, when people hate it so much that they don’t want to come to see C.M.S. — that’s the time we have a problem. We are far from there.What do you see as your main challenges in the years ahead?FINCKEL People have a hard time sitting still. Attention spans are getting shorter. The only thing this doesn’t change is the length of a Schubert trio. You can’t make it shorter, and you can’t play it faster. You can’t cut sections out of it. The art is what it is.We have this religious faith in the power and the quality of the art form — that it will grow up like grass grows up through concrete. It doesn’t matter how much concrete you put down; the grass is always going to come up. More

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      Review: Michael Tilson Thomas, a Podium Hero, Returns

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      The eminent conductor appeared with the New York Philharmonic, his first public performance since brain surgery this summer.In early August, the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas announced that, following surgery to remove a brain tumor, he was withdrawing from his upcoming performances to receive treatment. “I look forward,” he said, “to seeing everyone again in November.”Even coming from such an indefatigable musician, still dynamic at 76, that promise seemed optimistic.But on Thursday at Alice Tully Hall, looking a little weather-beaten but still vigorous and bright-eyed, Thomas took the podium to lead the New York Philharmonic in inspiring performances of demanding works by Ruth Crawford Seeger, Berg and Beethoven.This was his first public performance since his announcement, as well as his first time with the Philharmonic in 10 years, and he was clearly determined not to miss it. He is scheduled to lead two upcoming programs with the San Francisco Symphony, where he ended a quarter-century tenure as music director last year. But returning to the Philharmonic at this difficult time was very meaningful, he said in a short video released this week.What moved me most about the video was that Thomas said nothing directly about his illness. Instead, ever the educator — the best explainer of music to general audiences since his mentor, Leonard Bernstein — he shared keen insights into the works he was offering. He kept it all about the music.On Thursday at Tully, the hearty ovation that greeted his appearance might have gone on longer had Thomas not quickly taken the podium to get to work — standing to conduct and looking alert and immersed, his cues a deft combination of precision and flexibility.He began with Crawford Seeger’s visionary Andante for Strings, written in the 1930s but anticipating experimental styles of 30 or 40 years later. The quasi-atonal music unfurls in small recurring motifs that overlap and build into outbursts of intensity. It was gripping.Thomas, with the superb Gil Shaham as soloist, then turned to Berg’s Violin Concerto, one of the greatest works of the 20th century. Berg dedicated the piece to “the memory of an angel” — the 18-year-old daughter of Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler Werfel, who had died of polio. In the video Thomas says that the piece contemplates death, but “goes beyond that to a really big and beautiful vision of what the totality of life is, in our whole planet, and in the whole universe.”Berg drew upon 12-tone techniques here, though the first movement deftly folds in musical evocations of a young woman’s youth in Vienna, with bits of waltzes and folk songs. From the start, Shaham (with glowing sound and, when called for, spiky intensity) and Thomas (drawing rich, lucid sonorities from the orchestra) brought out the lyrical elements that run through the score.In the second movement, which begins with wrenching expressions of grief and anger, Shaham dispatched the tangles of skittish lines and blocks of heaving chords with eerily controlled vehemence. The strains of “Es ist genug,” one of Bach’s most harmonically daring chorales, gradually enter as a gesture of consolation. Yet this performance remained alert to the unresolved, searching strands that linger until the end.During the bows that followed, Thomas interrupted the applause. “I forced Gil to learn this piece,” he told the audience, smiling. “Good idea, wasn’t it?”After intermission — the Philharmonic’s first this season, after a run of shorter performances — Thomas led a compelling account of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony. In the first movement, rather than just going for stirring energy and grandeur, he seemed intent on bringing out the intricacies and inner textures of the music.Perhaps overly so — though the performance gained in sweep and determination as it went on. The slow movement, a noble funeral march, was magnificent, almost Mahlerian. And the Scherzo showed that Thomas was in no slow-tempo mode: The music whisked by with fleetness and crackling rhythms. The Finale was joyous — majestic and exciting, even teasing out the touches of silliness.At one point, between movements, Thomas unabashedly pulled up his visibly sagging pants, which elicited some good-natured laughter from the audience. He turned around and said, “Post-pandemic waistline,” prompting more laughter.But in general he looked fit and lively. Beethoven famously scratched out the original dedication of his “Eroica” — to Napoleon — and instead titled it in honor of a nameless hero. On Thursday, that hero was Michael Tilson Thomas.New York PhilharmonicThis program is repeated through Sunday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Marian Anderson: A Voice of Authenticity and Justice

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      A new box set explores the singer whose Lincoln Memorial concert was a 20th-century civil rights milestone.The night before Marian Anderson’s 1939 concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, she called Sol Hurok, her manager, to ask if she really had to go through with it.Earlier that year, Howard University had tried to book Anderson for a recital at Washington’s only large concert stage, Constitution Hall, which was run by the Daughters of the American Revolution. The organization, which maintained a whites-only policy for performing artists, refused. A public pressure campaign to get the group to reverse its decision came to nothing, but Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her membership in protest, and through the efforts of Harold L. Ickes, the secretary of the interior, the Lincoln Memorial was approved as a new location.But the controversy surrounding the event swirled in newspapers around the country. No longer just a concert, it had become a civil rights battlefield. The pressure on Anderson was overwhelming.The Daughters’s discriminatory actions had stung Anderson deeply, taking her back to formative events in her life — especially when, at 17, she went to the Philadelphia Musical Academy seeking admission and a snippy secretary would not even hand her an application.But that was then. She had spent five rewarding years in Europe in the early 1930s, with more welcoming audiences and institutions. She found mentors, coaches and supporters; she began performing to acclaim. During one seven-month tour of Scandinavia, she gave more than 100 concerts.When the Daughters of the American Revolution would not allow her to sing at Constitution Hall, Anderson received permission to give a concert on the steps on the Lincoln Memorial in 1939.Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesReturning to the United States in 1935, she began performing extensively, doing circuits of colleges and concert halls where she was welcomed, starting with a crucial recital at Town Hall in New York. The New York Times critic Howard Taubman wrote, “Let it be said at the outset: Marian Anderson has returned to her native land one of the great singers of our time.” She made recordings, and she became wealthy: In 1938 her income was $238,000 (roughly $4.5 million today), though she was still a second-class citizen in her own country who on tour often ate dinner alone in her hotel room to avoid segregated restaurants.Anderson feared that her Lincoln Memorial concert would come to define her. And to a large extent, it did. But the full breadth of her artistry is newly evident with the release, from Sony Classical, of a new commemorative book, offering her complete RCA Victor recordings from 1924 to 1966 on 15 discs — timed to the 125th anniversary, coming in February, of Anderson’s birth in Philadelphia.The recordings are magnificent. There is her 1950 account of Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder” with the San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Pierre Monteux. Her splendid voice — a true (and rare) example of a contralto, the lowest-range female voice — is ideal for this music, Mahler’s settings of five piercing ruminations on the death of children.Deep, mellow tones provide the foundation of her voice. Even when she shapes midrange lyrical phrases and soars up to high passages with soprano-like radiance, the sound still somehow emanates from those awesome low tones. Her slightly tremulous vibrato can sometimes seem like shakiness. Yet the wavering more often exudes richness and warmth, and a touch of vulnerability. The feelings and emotions she draws from the words are overwhelming.Deep, mellow tones provided the foundation for Anderson, a true (and rare) example of a contralto, the lowest-range female voice.Afro American Newspapers/Gado, via Getty ImagesArturo Toscanini heard Anderson in 1935 in Salzburg, Austria — when, excluded from official Salzburg Festival performances because of her race, she performed in a hotel ballroom. Afterward the imposing maestro approached her and said, famously, that what he had just heard “one is privileged to hear once in a hundred years,” responding to the singular shadings and textures of her deep-set sound, and the extraordinarily nuances she could create through her wide range. (Naturally, Hurok seized Toscanini’s words and thereafter billed Anderson as the “voice of the century.”)Those qualities run through a recording of Schubert lieder, paired here with a sternly beautiful account of Schumann’s cycle “Frauenliebe und -leben,” mostly recorded in 1950 and ’51 and accompanied sensitively by the German pianist Franz Rupp, Anderson’s recital partner from the ’40s on. In Schubert’s “Ständchen” the long melodic arcs flow with wistful grace while never sacrificing tautness. In “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” Anderson truly becomes the young woman in the Goethe text, both terrified and thrilled at the desire a handsome stranger has aroused in her. There is a haunting, internal quality to Anderson’s performance, suggesting an innocent girl brooding over her confusions.There are many finely detailed lieder singers, though. What finally made Anderson so exceptional is a quality hard to define but impossible to miss: the authenticity that permeates her singing. In this regard, the most revealing recording in the new set may be a program featuring arias by Bach and Handel, mostly dating from the mid-1940s. (Robert Shaw and Charles O’Connell are the conductors).The pianist Franz Rupp, Anderson’s frequent collaborator, accompanying her in concert.Bettmann/Getty ImagesIn “Erbarme dich, mein Gott,” a sublimely sad aria from Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” Anderson’s singing is direct and honest, steady and true, at once calm and intense. Her performance of “He was despised” from Handel’s “Messiah” comes across as a fully lived-in experience. Indeed, when she sang this solo in a “Messiah” performance in Philadelphia in 1916, when she was still in her teens, a critic wrote that Anderson “felt with her soft, strong voice the sorrows of God.”Anderson grappled with hardships in her youth, especially the death of her father following a severe head injury while selling ice and coal at a train terminal, leaving a wife and three daughters. Just 12 at the time, Anderson, the eldest, was forced to delay high school for several years and take odd jobs. Her beloved grandfather — who was born enslaved in Virginia and, once freed, became a farm laborer and the first Anderson to settle in Philadelphia — died the following year.These events stayed with her as she learned to confront every challenge with affecting dignity. Was this the source of what I’m calling authenticity? It’s hard to say. But it surely accounts for her identification with spirituals — repertory she sang on every recital she gave, and works she invested with the same care she brought to German art songs. Several of the recordings in the new set offer her in affecting performances of spirituals. There are also collections of Christmas carols; an album titled “Songs of Eventide”; and more.Anderson’s way of confronting racism had been to offer herself as a model of Black excellence, rather than speaking out explicitly about politics. But by the 1950s, a new generation of activists began challenging segregation more directly. In 1951, the N.A.A.C.P. called for a boycott of a recital she was to give in Richmond, Va., because the audience was to be segregated.Anderson’s Met debut, as Ulrica in Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera,” was a success but came late in her career.Bettmann/Getty ImagesThe action worked: Three-quarters of the seats in the hall were empty. And soon after, Anderson became more outspoken and vowed not to appear before segregated audiences. (The roiling social, racial and political currents that affected her life and career are presented in an insightful documentary, “Voice of Freedom,” broadcast earlier this year and part of PBS’s American Experience series.)There was one more milestone to come. In 1955 Anderson broke the color barrier for soloists at the Metropolitan Opera, singing the small but crucial role of the fortune teller Ulrica in Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera.” In earlier years, European houses had approached her about performing in opera, but she declined, having had no opportunity to learn the repertory or develop her acting skills.But as the civil rights movement gained headway in America, Rudolf Bing, the Met’s general manager, realized that the company had to respond. He wanted an artist without controversy to be the first. And by then, who didn’t admire Marian Anderson?She was very hesitant. But, after some encouraging work with opera coaches, she decided to proceed; received $1,000 per performance, the highest fee at the house at the time; and came to embrace her pioneering role.When the production opened, the starry cast included Zinka Milanov, Richard Tucker, Leonard Warren and the young Roberta Peters, with Dimitri Mitropoulos conducting. Recalling the moment when the curtain went up, Anderson later wrote, “I trembled, and when the audience applauded and applauded before I could sing a note I felt myself tightening into a knot.”She was almost 58, past her vocal prime. But she did it, won solid reviews and a place in history. Sony’s set includes an album of excerpts from the opera recorded in a studio around the same time (though Jan Peerce replaced Tucker). Compelling moments in Anderson’s singing of the role suggest what her career in opera might have been.The American Experience documentary opens with poignant footage of Anderson on the morning of her Lincoln Memorial concert, going though sound checks on the platform, looking nervous and wary. For all her fears, the concert was a triumph. A mixed crowd of 75,000, more people than had ever gathered on the Mall, heard Anderson sing a 30-minute program that opened with “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” included Schubert’s “Ave Maria” and a Donizetti aria, and ended with a group of spirituals. Millions more heard it broadcast on the radio.In time, the Daughters of the American Revolution dropped its exclusionary policy at Constitution Hall. Anderson performed there in a war relief benefit in 1943. And it was sweet justice when, in 1964, she began an extended farewell tour with a recital there, too. More

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      Nelson Freire, Piano Virtuoso of Warmth and Finesse, Dies at 77

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      Hailing from Brazil as one of the great pianists of the last half of the 20th century, he recalled masters of the first half in his virtuosity. But he shunned the limelight.Nelson Freire, a reclusive pianist whose fabled technique and sensitive, subtle musicianship made him a legend among pianophiles, died on Monday at his home in Rio de Janeiro. He was 77.His manager, Jacques Thelen, confirmed the death. He said Mr. Freire had been suffering from trauma after a fall in 2019, which led to surgery on his upper right arm and left him unable to play.Mr. Freire was one of the greatest pianists of the past half century, possessing a gift that, in its grace of touch and its ease of virtuosity, recalled playing from the great masters of the half-century before that.“You will be hard pressed to find a recital of comparable warmth, affection and finesse,” the critic Bryce Morrison wrote of a Debussy album from Mr. Freire in 2009, in words that might also have spoken for his artistry as a whole. “Here, there is no need for spurious gestures and inflections; everything is given with a supreme naturalness and a perfectly accommodated virtuosity that declare Freire a master pianist throughout.”That Mr. Freire was indeed a master pianist had never been in doubt. A child prodigy, he gave his first performance at 4 and was attracting attention at international competitions before his teens. His playing had a wisdom that critics rarely failed to describe as innate.“There was hardly a single forced or teasing effect, not a sigh of sentimentality, not a line of hectoring rhetoric,” Richard Dyer of The Boston Globe wrote of a recital of Franck, Ravel, Chopin, Villa-Lobos and Liszt in 1977. Mr. Freire, the critic continued, possessed “one of the biggest natural talents for the keyboard that I have ever heard.”Even so, his profile remained relatively limited. Comparisons to Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz abounded, but Mr. Freire was an uncommonly reticent artist, giving fewer concerts than many of his peers, recording only rarely early in his career and remaining indifferent to publicity.“There is a big difference between music and the music business,” he was quoted as saying in a 1992 profile in The Baltimore Sun. “It’s a completely different language, and when I get too involved in talking it, I get a little bit sick. As for talking about myself, it actually bores me.”For much of his career, such reticence reduced aficionados, as The Sun put it, to treat “pirate Freire tapes with the veneration an art historian might accord to a recently rediscovered Rembrandt.”But that began to change in Mr. Freire’s last two decades, when a series of recordings brought him wider attention.“Whether Mr. Freire is shy or merely introspective, it is impossible to say,” Allen Hughes of The New York Times wrote of the pianist’s New York recital debut in 1971. He noted that Mr. Freire had “projected little of his own personality to the audience.”“He was there, he played splendidly and that was it.”Mr. Freire at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2009. Critics often noted his self-effacing quality. “He was there, he played splendidly and that was it,” one wrote of a 1971 recital.Rachel Papo for The New York TimesNelson José Pinto Freire was born in Boa Esperança, in southeastern Brazil, on Oct. 18, 1944. His father was a pharmacist, and his mother was a teacher who bought a piano for Nelson’s sister, Nelma, one of four older siblings. Nelson began to play from memory what he had heard Nelma practice. After 12 lessons of his own, each of which involved a four-hour bus ride down dirt tracks, his first teacher said that he had nothing left to teach the boy.The family moved to Rio de Janeiro to find a new mentor; his father gave up his career to work in a bank there. But Nelson, then 6, was an unruly child, unwilling to be taught. With his parents about to give up, they found Lucia Branco, who had trained under Arthur de Greef, a pupil of Franz Liszt’s. Branco placed the boy with her student Nise Obino. “My relationship with her was very strong,” Mr. Freire said of Ms. Obino in 1995, “the strongest in my life.”His break came in 1957, when he entered Rio’s first international piano competition and emerged a finalist. Brazil’s president, Juscelino Kubitschek, offered him a scholarship to study wherever he wanted to. He chose Vienna, and moved there at 14 to work with Bruno Seidlhofer, joining a class that included Rudolf Buchbinder and Martha Argerich, both of whom would go on to major international careers.Ms. Argerich and Mr. Freire became frequent duo partners (and lifelong friends), both in concert and on record, her impulsive, electrifying style blending well with his tonal palette and impeccable timing.“I didn’t do much work,” Mr. Freire nonetheless recalled of his two years in Vienna. He initially spoke no German and remained, after all, a teenager far from home.Little success followed his return to Brazil, until he won first prize at the Vianna da Motta International Music Competition in Lisbon and the Dinu Lipatti Medal, presented in London, in 1964, accelerating his career in Europe.Mr. Freire began recording for Columbia in the late 1960s, taping solo works by Schumann, Brahms and Chopin, as well as a double album of concertos by Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Grieg and Schumann, with Rudolf Kempe conducting the Munich Philharmonic. That album, Time magazine reported in 1970, “caught the critics by surprise and sent them scurrying for superlatives.”Mr. Freire would scarcely return to the recording studio until 2001, after which he embarked on a golden period with Decca that produced nuanced, masterly releases of everything from Bach to Villa-Lobos, one of several Brazilian composers whom he played with pride.Perhaps most valuable were standard-setting discs of the Chopin études, sonatas and nocturnes, as well as Brahms concertos with Riccardo Chailly and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.“This is the Brahms piano concerto set we’ve been waiting for,” the critic Jed Distler wrote in Gramophone in 2006, praising it for fusing “immediacy and insight, power and lyricism, and incandescent virtuosity that leaves few details unturned, yet always with the big picture in clear sight.”Mr. Freire is survived by a brother, Nirval. His parents were killed in 1967 when a bus they were using to travel to hear Mr. Freire perform in Belo Horizonte, in their home state of Minas Gerais, plunged into a ravine.Whatever repertoire Mr. Freire turned to, he had a depth of tonal variety, a poetry of phrasing and a natural, almost joyous refinement.In “Nelson Freire,” a 2003 documentary film, he is shown watching a video of a joyous Errol Garner playing jazz piano. “I’ve never seen anyone play with such pleasure,” he said.“That’s how I found the piano,” Mr. Freire continued. “The piano was the moment, when I was little, when I felt pleasure. I’m not happy after a concert if I haven’t felt that kind of pleasure for at least a moment. Classical pianists used to have this joy. Rubinstein had it. Horowitz had it, too. Guiomar Novaes had it, and Martha Argerich has it.”What about you, the interviewer asked?Mr. Freire lit a cigarette, looked up shyly, and smiled. More

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      She Was an Organist for the Ages

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      Jeanne Demessieux, born 100 years ago, was an astonishing player and a virtuosic composer.Few musicians have faced a debut more intense than did the organist Jeanne Demessieux. For years before her first concert — one of six she gave at the Salle Pleyel in Paris early in 1946 — her teacher Marcel Dupré had stoked rumors of her outlandish talent.“Jeanne Demessieux is the greatest organist of all generations,” Dupré, then practically the god of the French organ world, had declared in 1944. She would be, he predicted, “one of the greatest glories of France.”There was tremendous pressure, then, on this shy, workaholic, perfectionist prodigy, who had lived under what Dupré said was his “artistic protection” since 1936 — winning first prize in his class at the Paris Conservatory in 1941 and remaining his student and assistant after that.Pressure, too, from the imposing program of the first of her “six historic recitals,” as the publicity announced them: the Bach C Minor Passacaglia; a Franck chorale; a Dupré prelude and fugue; the premiere of her own, impossibly challenging Six Études; and a symphony in four movements — one she improvised.Yet Demessieux, who was born in Montpellier, France, in 1921 and whose centenary is being celebrated with performances of her complete organ works at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan Nov. 6, 13 and 20, exceeded expectations. Dupré waxed “of a phenomenon equal to the youth of Bach or Mozart.” Maurice Duruflé, then finishing his Requiem, declared that “next to Jeanne Demessieux, the rest of us play the pedals like elephants.” Le Figaro wrote that she was a fairy tale that could be believed in, for she had been “irresistible absolute perfection.”“She certainly earned her place,” Stephen Tharp, the organist for the St. Thomas concerts, who released a recording of Demessieux’s complete organ compositions in 2008, said in an interview. “You like her interpretations, you don’t like her interpretations — but the amount of skill, focus, intelligence it took to play programs of that stature at the Salle Pleyel, in her 20s, and to compose, to improvise, in the way and at the level that she could, was really without equal.”Demessieux became the first female organist to sign a record deal, setting down a fleet run through Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor for Decca in 1947, and paving the way for women such as Marie-Claire Alain and Gillian Weir. Tours began, taking her around Europe and on to the United States, where the critic Virgil Thomson, praising her “taste, intelligence and technical skill of the highest order” in 1953, would think of “masters” like Charles-Marie Widor, Louis Vierne and Olivier Messiaen as the only possible equals of this “extraordinary musician and virtuoso.”Demessieux seemed destined to take a top liturgical position, at Dupré’s St.-Sulpice or even at Notre-Dame. But shortly after her debut, Dupré, who appears to have been fed unfounded rumors that Demessieux had been disloyal, cut off contact with his pupil and resolved to sabotage her career.Instead, Demessieux stayed with her family’s parish church, where she had been organist since she was 12, until she succeeded Camille Saint-Saëns and Gabriel Fauré as titulaire, or chief organist, at the church of the Madeleine in 1962. She prospered at a Cavaillé-Coll instrument with which she had a rare bond, having recorded a transcendent Franck cycle on it in 1959, the high point of an invaluable eight-disc set from Eloquence that came out earlier this year, amply documented with notes by the organist D’Arcy Trinkwon.Although Demessieux was a star in the 1940s and ’50s, when she kept up a punishing concert schedule alongside her liturgical work and her teaching in Liège, Belgium, her status faltered after her death from cancer in 1968, at just 47. The Eloquence set gives her Decca tapes their first release on a major label in the CD era.Part of the reason for Demessieux’s ebbing fortunes can be traced to the rise of neoclassical and period performance practices, which made her impulsive, lyrical, heartfelt style — one that brought a singular lightness of touch to a grand symphonic tradition — seem outdated, especially in the Bach and Handel with which she often opened her concerts.Part of the reason, too, was the difficulty of her compositions, some of which were unpublished until recently and were promoted mostly by students like Pierre Labric. Although her whirling “Te Deum” from 1958, inspired by the Aeolian-Skinner organ at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, has had sustained success, works like her études, her “Triptyque” and her late Prelude and Fugue pushed the frontiers of the possible, and they remain “ferociously hard” even now, Tharp said — “things she really wrote for herself.”While Demessieux sometimes wrote with moving simplicity, as in chorale preludes like “Rorate coeli” and “Hosanna filio David” that speak to the devotional quality of her Catholic faith, many of her pieces have an angst to them, a gnarled bleakness, though they stop far short of atonality.“She uses a voice that I don’t think women were often allowed to use in other ways, and she puts it all into her music,” the organist Joy-Leilani Garbutt said in an interview.Predictably, Demessieux faced sexist stereotypes throughout her career. There were critics who wrote ill of the high heels that were an intrinsic part of her pedal technique, or that she was “too young and attractive to be an organist of the first rank,” as The Boston Globe put it in 1953. Some churches still barred women from their organ lofts, not least Westminster Abbey, which had to give her special dispensation to perform in 1947. Perhaps most scurrilous was the slur that she was merely the creation of Dupré, not an artist in her own right.But Garbutt, a scholar and a founder of the Boulanger Initiative, which advocates women composers, has found in her research that prejudices came with a twist in this case. Demessieux emerged from a tradition in which women organists could and did shine, though she might well have dazzled brightest of all.“She wasn’t the only woman international virtuoso, she wasn’t the only woman composer for the organ, and she wasn’t the only woman professor of organ, or the only woman to hold a major church position,” Garbutt said, mentioning Joséphine Boulay, the earliest woman to win first prize in organ at the Paris Conservatory, in 1888; Renée Nazin, a student of Vierne’s who did three world tours in the 1930s; and Rolande Falcinelli, who succeeded Dupré as professor at the Conservatory in 1955.“But I think Demessieux may have been the only woman to do all of those things in her lifetime,” Garbutt said.This was an era when women had greater opportunities to succeed, Garbutt argues, suggesting that they found grudging acceptance when jobs needed filling after so many men had died in the world wars. The spatial configurations of French churches played a role, too, with organists seated high in the gallery, unseen during Mass. While there were Parisian priests who tolerated or even supported women, others banned them, a rule that some artists used their invisibility while performing to flout. Henriette Puig-Roget, for instance, simply submitted her name as Monsieur Roget, cross-dressed, and substituted for Charles Tournemire at Ste.-Clotilde.Even so, the opportunities were fleeting. “The invisibility was a privilege or a tool that could be used to create their music,” Garbutt said, “but on the flip side it made their work disappear almost as soon as it had been created.” Women have since occupied major organ posts — Sophie-Véronique Cauchefer-Choplin, for instance, has shared Dupré’s old position at St.-Sulpice with Daniel Roth since 1985 — but equal representation remains a distant ideal.In achieving that ideal, though, it may well be helpful to have historical material like the new Demessieux set. It is a revelation, from the incandescence of her Toccata from Widor’s Fifth Symphony to the jazzy angularity of Jean Berveiller’s “Mouvement”; the reverence of her Bach chorale preludes to the fury of her Liszt. The playing invites superlatives, even as it defies the complexity and artificiality of the organ to such an extent that it allows a rare focus on the music itself.“Who is the greatest organist of the 20th century?” Tharp said. “I really think it’s fair to say she’s a contender.” More

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      Bruce Gaston, American Maestro of Thai Music, Dies at 75

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      A transplanted Californian and former conscientious objector, he infused Thai music with Western sounds as a prominent composer and performer based in Bangkok.Bruce Gaston, a transplanted Californian who helped revolutionize Thai classical music by injecting it with Western instruments and forms and who became one of Thailand’s leading performers and composers, died on Oct. 17 at his home in Bangkok. He was 75.The cause was liver cancer, his son, Theodore, said.Together with two Thai musicians, Mr. Gaston founded Fong Nam, which means “bubbles,” an ensemble that worked to revive forgotten Thai classical pieces as well as to create modern forms, performing in concerts and in recording studios. Mr. Gaston played a piano or an electronic synthesizer among the gongs and woodwinds of a piphat percussion orchestra.He was a prominent and respected figure in Thailand as a composer, performer and teacher. In 2009, he became the only foreigner to receive the Silpathorn Award, which honors artists who make notable contributions to Thai arts and culture.“I want to find a form that transcends this polarity between East and West, between the we’s and the they’s,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1987. “It’s silly to talk about East and West now. Technology has brought us all together.”Mr. Gaston argued that infusing traditional Thai music with new forms was vital to its health, but that those new elements “must grow out of that tradition, or you risk losing everything that reminds you of who you are and who you were.”Somtow Sucharitkul, a prominent Thai-American writer and musician, called Mr. Gaston’s music a “new fusion” in which “traditional Thai ideas and Western structures were fluid, and could blend back and forth and fuse and have a uniquely Thai sensibility.”Writing in The Bangkok Post, he said, “If anyone can lay claim to the title of ‘He who lit the revolutionary torch,’ it is Bruce Gaston.”Mr. Gaston developed a compositional language, informed by his training in Western classical and contemporary music, that “evoked but did not imitate Thai music,” said Kit Young, an American pianist, composer and artistic adviser who is the co-founder of Gitameit Music Institute in Myanmar and who lived in Thailand for many years.Bruce Gaston was born on March 11, 1946, in Los Angeles to Marcus and Evangelin Gaston. His mother was a schoolteacher, and his father was a pastor. He graduated from the University of Southern California with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and earned a master’s degree in music in 1969. He received a draft deferment during the Vietnam War as a conscientious objector and was assigned to alternative service as a teacher overseas.Mr. Gaston traveled to Jamaica before moving to Thailand, where he became entranced by Thai music that was played during cremation ceremonies at a temple near his home, Theodore Gaston said. In 1971 he developed a curriculum in music at Payap College, in the northern city of Chiangmai.Mr. Gaston began experimenting with combining Thai and Western forms and wrote an opera on Buddhist themes called “Chu Chok” in 1976. It was performed at the Goethe Institute in Thailand and in Germany during 1977-1978. He studied in Bangkok with Boonyong Kaetkhong, a master of the ranat, which is similar to a xylophone.Mr. Gaston and another musician, Jirapan Ansvananda, founded Fong Nam in 1981.“If you want to have influences from the West, great,” his son said, “but better to use it as a flavor and not the main thing. That is the Fong Nam way. If you listen, you can tell that it’s pretty much Thai.”Fong Nam recorded a series of CDs of traditional music for the Nimbus, Celestial Harmonies and Marco Polo labels, said John Clewley, a Bangkok-based British professor of music who writes a column in The Bangkok Post called World Beat.Mr. Gaston became fluent in Thai and applied his talents widely, lecturing on music at Chulalongkorn University, composing for movies and theatrical shows and performing for years at a famous Bangkok beer hall, the Tawan Daeng Brewery.Early on he had a thriving business with other musicians writing jingles for Thai television commercials. “We sell banks, beer, all kinds of food, soft drinks, cars, perfumes, soaps and dishes,” he told The Times in 1984. “I’d say we have the majority of the market in Thailand.”He married Sarapi Areemitr in 1976. Along with his son, she survives him.Mr. Gaston said his music aimed to bridge gaps between generations as well as cultures.“Sometimes we can’t understand each other, the old and the young,” he said in 1987, when he was 41. He added: “In changing and discovering new forms, the old members of the orchestra have the hardest time. There are moments when the old boys play better than we ever will in the traditional style, and moments when they just can’t keep up with us.“But you just play together. — that’s the most important thing,” he said. “You don’t just say, ‘Forget it.’”Muktita Suhartono contributed reporting. More