Classical Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Bernard Haitink, Perhaps the Wisest Conductor of Them All

      by

      The unflashy maestro, who died on Thursday, gave orchestras a sound with integrity, weight and gravity, without heaviness.What I can still feel today, almost in my skin, is the warmth. It was July 20, 2009, at the Royal Albert Hall in London; I sat behind the orchestra, all the better to see the conductor.Bernard Haitink had led the London Symphony Orchestra through the first three movements of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. I can’t remember much about them, to be honest, though I’m confident that the portrayal of their carnage, ironies and fear was sure. All memory of that melted in the generosity of the embrace that followed.If a D flat chord can be decent, can be understanding, then the one Haitink drew that evening from the orchestra’s strings near the start of Mahler’s concluding Adagio, the composer’s farewell to life, was that and more.Haitink lay something close to a benediction on that benighted music, and through it on us, as if to say that everything would be all right, that we could accept calmly what was to come. Never had I heard such resolve, such serenity in the face of death as Haitink found in that movement; it sang with empathy, and it seemed to sing the truth.Under no conductor did music so often sound so right as it did under Bernard Haitink, who died on Thursday at 92.You went to a Haitink concert fully aware of what to expect, only for those expectations usually to be surpassed. Whether it was in Brahms or Bruckner, Beethoven or Mahler, at his best, and especially in his later years, Haitink was able to make music emerge as if it was entirely uninterpreted — without it becoming anonymous. Haitink’s conducting was personal, even as it felt impersonal.Plenty of artists say that they want to get out of the way of the music, that they want to let it speak for itself. The claim is always illusory, for the transfiguration of notes on a page into sound in a hall demands that choices be made. But Haitink made the illusion seem real.Other men would have made that talent at conveying naturalness into something doctrinaire, would have rooted it in a claim to be extending some grand tradition, or in a declared attachment to the letter of the score. But Haitink was not obviously an heir to the literalism of Arturo Toscanini, and certainly not to the uncanny subjectivity of Wilhelm Furtwängler or the eccentricities of Willem Mengelberg, the conductor he grew up hearing at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, where he was chief conductor from 1961 to 1988.What Haitink did have was a sound. David Alberman, the chair and principal second violin of the London Symphony, wrote that Haitink had an “unmistakable ability to change the sound of an orchestra with his mere presence,” an ability that even the musicians who adored him could hardly explain.The sound was not flashy, nor did it seem as if it were applied from the outside. It imbued what the ensembles he led already possessed with a deeper integrity, a weight, a gravity, that was nonetheless rarely portentous or heavy. Indeed, in the French repertoire in which he excelled, that careful seriousness of purpose drew a clarity, a beguiling transparency.Haitink offered no insistent interventions in the roiling aesthetic debates of the decades after World War II. Even when he began to move with the times, he arrived at a style that was characteristic for its lack of fuss, as in the leaner Beethoven of the last of his three cycles of the symphonies, in which the influence of the historically informed performance movement was plain, but subtly so.“I have no message to the world,” he told The New York Times in 2002. When pressed, he would deny knowing much about what he was doing; a book of reflections was entitled “Conducting Is a Mystery.” (His master classes suggested otherwise.)This was not the norm among conductors of a domineering, publicity-seeking age, but then again, Haitink eschewed stardom. “I’m not a conductor type,” he frankly told The Times in 1976.Whether it was because of the deprivation of his childhood in occupied, impoverished Amsterdam, or for reasons deeper to his psychology, he was shy, quiet, humble. He came to say little in rehearsals, but he did not need to. Conducting with his eyes and brow, a lean of the head here and a hint of a smile there, he steadily refined his technique down to stabs of time beaten firmly, the left hand offering an utterly exact emphasis when necessary.Haitink could be usefully obstinate amid administrative problems, as when he confronted financial and other difficulties at the Concertgebouw and, most dramatically, at the Royal Opera House in London in the late 1990s, near the end of a tenure that ran from 1987 to 2002. But it is hard to think of another conductor who would have been as willing, at the height of his powers in the 2000s, to take posts he knew were only temporary at ensembles as distinguished as the Dresden Staatskapelle and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as they searched for new leaders.If there was little of the ego about Haitink, there still remained sufficient pride that he made over 450 recordings. Some of them are unnecessarily duplicative, some oddly ill conceived or a tad staid. Many are to be returned to like old, knowing friends.Much of his attention was put to Mahler and Bruckner, the latter’s Seventh being his trademark, the work with which he retired in 2019. Neither his gorgeous 1978 account with the Concertgebouw, nor his marginally more monumental repeat with Chicago in 2007, should be missed.Introductions to his Beethoven and Wagner, his Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich, his Bartok and his Stravinsky remain easily available, but his best work can take some searching: an amazingly convincing set of Liszt’s symphonic poems; a Vaughan Williams survey in which the lows are desperately low but the highs are exceptionally high; Mahler symphonies taped live at a series of Christmases in Amsterdam; cleareyed, sensitive Mozart operas with forces from Glyndebourne, where he was music director for a decade; Ravel, as glistening with the Concertgebouw as with the Boston Symphony Orchestra later on; radio broadcasts that go as far as Henze, Takemitsu and Ligeti; a Strauss “Alpine Symphony” of rare humanity; a Brahms cycle from Boston that unfolds with unforced, unforgettable patience.It was in Brahms that I last heard him, in his final run with the Boston Symphony in 2018, an account of the Second Symphony that, I wrote then, had “nothing wistful or valedictory about it,” just that “familiar, staunch certainty.” It was scrappy, but it glowed with the same warmth as the Mahler I had heard a decade before in London — with that same sanity and wisdom.Apt, for the conductor who might well have been the wisest of them all. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Li Yundi Is Detained in China on Suspicion of Prostitution

      by

      Li Yundi, a famous performer, was accused of soliciting a woman, state news outlets said. Officials often use such accusations against their enemies.A prominent Chinese pianist, Li Yundi, has been detained on prostitution suspicion in Beijing, state-run news outlets in China reported on Thursday.Mr. Li, 39, who had gained celebrity in China as a performer and a reality television personality, was accused of soliciting a 29-year-old woman, according to People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the ruling Communist Party.The authorities in Beijing did not provide many details of the incident, saying in a statement that a 39-year-old man with the last name Li had acknowledged wrongdoing and had been detained “in accordance with the law.”In an apparent reference to Mr. Li’s case, the Beijing authorities later posted a photo of piano keys alongside the text: “The world is not simply black and white, but one must distinguish between black and white. It must never be mistaken.”The Chinese government often uses accusations of prostitution to intimidate political enemies, and it was unclear why Mr. Li had been singled out and what punishment he might face. Mr. Li and his representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Reports of Mr. Li’s detention quickly became one of the most widely discussed topics on the Chinese internet, with hundreds of thousands of people weighing in. Many expressed shock at the detention of Mr. Li, who rose to fame after becoming one of the youngest people to win the prestigious International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 2000, when he was 18.“He has accumulated popularity for many years, and now it has been ruined after 20 or 30 years of hard work,” wrote one user on Weibo, a Twitterlike Chinese site.Under China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, the government has taken a tough line on artists and has led efforts to “purify” the country’s cultural environment, often in pursuit of political goals. The authorities have in recent months tried to rein in China’s raucous celebrity culture, warning about the perils of celebrity worship and fan clubs.Mr. Li, who has more than 20 million followers on Weibo, is a regular guest on the annual Lunar New Year gala on Chinese television, which is watched by hundreds of millions of people. This year, he performed “I Love You China,” a patriotic song.He rose to fame as a pianist and in the West is sometimes called only by his given name, Yundi. But in China he has become known more recently for his work on reality shows, including “Call Me By Fire,” in which male celebrities compete to form a performance group. Several episodes of the show were removed from the Chinese internet on Thursday after news of Mr. Li’s detention spread.Chinese commentators pointed to the case as an example of a lack of ethics among artists.“No matter how skilled he is, he will not be able to convey his sadness through performance once his image is damaged,” People’s Daily wrote in a social media post. “There can only be a future by advocating morality and abiding by the law.”The Chinese government has a history of using charges of prostitution to sideline political enemies, and experts said Mr. Li’s detention should be looked at critically.Jerome A. Cohen, a New York University law professor who specializes in the Chinese legal system, said the lack of transparency about his case was troubling.“Can one be confident that the facts alleged are true?” Professor Cohen said. “Prostitution is such a time-honored Communist Party claim against political opponents that one has to be suspicious of this case.”Claire Fu More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Bernard Haitink, Conductor Who Let Music Speak for Itself, Dies at 92

      by

      Mr. Haitink, who was closely identified with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, drew direct, unaffected interpretations of symphonic works and opera.Bernard Haitink, an unaffected maestro who led Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra for 27 years and was known for presenting powerful readings of the symphonies of Mahler, Bruckner and Beethoven conducting orchestras on both sides of the Atlantic, died on Thursday at his home in London. He was 92. His death was announced by his management agency, Askonas Holt.Along with the Concertgebouw, Mr. Haitink had long associations in Britain with the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Glyndebourne Festival. He was also a prolific recording artist, putting on disc the complete symphonies of nearly a dozen canonical composers — sometimes twice.Mr. Haitink let the music emerge from the orchestra, often transcendently, without imposing a heavy-handed interpretation that a star conductor might.His self-effacing nature was noticed early on.He was “not one of the glamour boys on the podium,” Harold C. Schonberg, the chief classical music critic for The New York Times, wrote in January 1975 after Mr. Haitink’s debut with the New York Philharmonic, conducting Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7.“He does not dance, he does not patronize the best tailor on the Continent,” Mr. Schonberg continued. “But he is a dedicated musician, always on top of the music, getting exactly what he wants from his players.”Reviewing his performance of the same symphony with the Philharmonic in 2011, the critic Steve Smith wrote in The Times: “Some conductors strive for mysticism in late Bruckner; Mr. Haitink, with his unerring sense of shape, transition and flow, lets the music speak for itself, with results that can approach the supernatural and often did here.”Mr. Haitink was so humble as a young man that he almost missed out on his first big break. The Concertgebouw had asked him in 1956 to replace an indisposed Carlo Maria Giulini for a performance of Cherubini’s Requiem in C minor. But he initially turned down the opportunity, despite having conducted the work many times. He said he didn’t feel ready.But he changed his mind, the concert was a success, and so began his long collaboration with the Concertgebouw. He became a regular guest conductor, was appointed co-chief conductor in 1961 and then chief conductor in 1963.Mr. Haitink began conducting opera in the 1960s and made his debut at the Glyndebourne Festival in 1972, leading Mozart’s “Abduction From the Seraglio.” He was music director of the Glyndebourne Opera from 1977 to 1988 and of the Royal Opera from 1987 to 2002.In an opera world where increasingly outlandish stagings were becoming the fashion, Mr. Haitink had a strategy when required to conduct a production he didn’t like. “One closes one’s eyes and lives in the music,” he said in a 2009 interview with the Guardian.That strategy seemed to have worked at Covent Garden for a mid-1990s staging of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle by Richard Jones, in which Brünnhilde wore a body-stocking with a skeleton print and a gym skirt, and the Rhinemaidens sported latex nude-body suits.The critic Rupert Christiansen wrote in The Spectator that the “sketchiness” of the staging “was cruelly shown up by the contrasting finish and maturity of the musical aspects of the performance.”“I have never heard Bernard Haitink conduct anything better than this Götterdämmerung,” he added. “In its combination of fluency and subtlety with blazing grandeur, it was consummate.”In addition to the Concertgebouw, Mr. Haitink held conductorships of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Dresden Staatskapelle. He also regularly led the Vienna Philharmonic, and in 2006 he was hired as principal conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.“These things are never planned, but things just happen to me — I’m not a chess player,” he told the Guardian, regarding the Chicago appointment.His reputation for being unassuming trailed him throughout his career. In 1967, Time magazine described him as “a short, quiet man who likes to take long bird-watching rambles in the woods,” and pointed out that “in a profession where flamboyance and arrogance are often the hallmarks of talent, the diffident Haitink is an anomaly.” A New York Times article in 1976 carried the headline “Why Doesn’t Bernard Haitink Act Like a Superstar?”Mr. Haitink’s colleagues lauded his modesty, integrity and musicianship when he was awarded the prestigious Gramophone Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015. The pianist Murray Perahia, who recorded the complete Beethoven piano concertos with Mr. Haitink and the Concertgebouw, praised him as being “dedicated to a real collaboration: neither dictating an interpretation, nor slavishly following — but a natural give and take.”But Mr. Haitink did not shy away from taking a stand when he thought it necessary. In 1982, he threatened to “never set foot on a Dutch stage again” after learning that the Dutch government planned to reduce the Concertgebouw’s subsidy, a move that might have led to the firing of some two dozen orchestral musicians. The cuts were eventually avoided. And in 1998 he resigned from the Royal Opera in London to protest a yearlong closing that was to take effect in January 1999 after a period of artistic and financial tumult. He rescinded his resignation shortly afterward, however.Mr. Haitink frequently gave master classes. In an event held at the Royal College of Music in London, he wryly advised a class of young conductors not to criticize the orchestra musicians since any flaws might be as much the mistake of the conductor as of the players.“You are there to give them confidence even if things aren’t going perfectly,” he said.“Mr. Haitink, with his unerring sense of shape, transition and flow, lets the music speak for itself,” a critic once wrote, “with results that can approach the supernatural.” He conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Lenox, Mass., in 2006.Michael Lutch for The New York TimesBernard Haitink was born on March 4, 1929, into a well-off family in Amsterdam. His father, Willem Haitink, was a civil servant, and his mother, Anna Clara Verschaffelt, worked for the French cultural organization Alliance Française. Neither were musicians. The family lived under Nazi occupation during World War II, and Willem was imprisoned for three months in a concentration camp.Mr. Haitink referred to his youth as his “lazy days.”“I wasn’t stupid,” he explained, “but I just wasn’t there. Half the time we were taught under our desks because of air raids. But even when things became normal, I wasn’t interested. Maybe this is why now, when I am over 70, that people always ask me why I work so hard.”He began playing the violin at age 9 and later studied at the Amsterdam Conservatory. He joined the second violin section of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra but was insecure about his abilities as a violinist. After taking a conducting course, he was appointed conductor of the orchestra in 1955 at age 26.Mr. Haitink, who once said that “every conductor, including myself, has a sell-by date,” officially retired during his 90th year after an acclaimed farewell tour of European summer festivals. Reviewing his concert with the Vienna Philharmonic at the Royal Albert Hall in London on that tour, the critic Erica Jeal wrote that the “last word had to be from Bruckner.”“Haitink, as ever, emphasized beauty over structure,” she wrote, “yet did not allow the music’s sense of shape to slacken for a moment.”His extensive recordings include, for the Philips label, the complete symphonies of Bruckner, Mahler, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn and Schumann; the complete symphonies of Elgar and Vaughan Williams, for EMI; the complete symphonies of Shostakovich, for Decca; the complete Debussy orchestral works, also for Philips; and Beethoven and Brahms symphony cycles for the London Symphony Orchestra’s LSO Live label.Mr. Haitink was married four times and had several children and grandchildren. Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.In 2011, in another interview with The Guardian, Mr. Haitink mused on the strange life of a conductor. “I have been doing this job for 50 years,” he said. “And, you know, it is a profession and it is not a profession. It’s very obscure sometimes. What makes a good conductor? What is this thing about charisma? I’m still wondering after all these years.” More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Review: At the Philharmonic, Contemporary Is King for a Week

      by

      Music by Missy Mazzoli, Anthony Davis and John Adams was conducted by Dalia Stasevska, in her debut with the orchestra.You could hear a tantalizing possible future for the New York Philharmonic on Wednesday evening at Alice Tully Hall — as well as some of the orchestra’s present difficulties. The program at Tully, one of the Philharmonic’s bases as David Geffen Hall is renovated this season, featured three contemporary works. One was by the safely canonized John Adams, the other two by names newer to Philharmonic audiences: Missy Mazzoli and Anthony Davis.Not that either of the two is really unknown. Both have been tapped for premieres at the Metropolitan Opera in the coming years — for Davis, the belated Met debut of his “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” from the 1980s, and for Mazzoli, a new adaptation of George Saunders’s novel “Lincoln in the Bardo.” But until this week, neither had been played on a Philharmonic subscription program.Their works landed with persuasive panache on Wednesday, aided by powerful but never overly brash conducting by Dalia Stasevska, also making her Philharmonic debut. But there were some problems with the overall sound. The sonic glare of Tully, generally a home for chamber music rather than larger-scale contemporary symphonic repertory, sometimes worked against the haunted sensuality of Mazzoli’s “Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres),” written in 2013 and revised three years later.Stasevska fostered warmth whenever possible, shaping the 12-minute piece’s transfers of elegantly gloomy melodic ornaments from section to section of the ensemble with care and relish. And when a small army of harmonicas gently peeked out from behind the work’s often mournful textures, they glimmered delicately. Stasevska also found moments to collaborate with the bright harshness of Tully’s acoustic, allowing herself a leap and a stomp on the podium during one transition between a string glissando and a full-orchestra blast. Call it fighting the hall to a draw.Davis’s 25-minute, four-movement clarinet concerto “You Have the Right to Remain Silent,” written in 2006 and revised in 2011, fared more unevenly. The superbly varied work was inspired by a time that Davis, who is Black, was pulled over by the police while driving in Boston in the 1970s. Amid the dense music, he sometimes asks the players to recite portions of the Miranda warning. (On a recording by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, this is done in a deadened Sprechstimme.)On Wednesday, the Philharmonic did well by the concerto’s debt to Charles Mingus in passages of gravelly extended technique and others of deceptively breezy swing — and, as with Mingus, at the intersection of the two.But the initial vocalization of the Miranda text wasn’t quite crisp enough, slightly deflating the dramatic stakes. And the frenetic cello figures that followed lacked the tight ensemble necessary to suggest the first movement’s title: “Interrogation.”Yet the soloist, the Philharmonic’s principal clarinetist Anthony McGill, excelled in the grave material for contra-alto clarinet in the second movement, “Loss,” while his sound turned more arid amid more assaultive music in the third movement, “Incarceration.” The sly final movement, “The Dance of the Other,” felt the most inspired. There’s a satirical edge to this music, but in lingering, affecting phrases McGill also evoked a fully sincere yearning to travel from the grimness of interrogation, loss and incarceration.With its febrile mixture of influences from Minimalism, Hindemith’s pellucid peculiarity and classic cartoons, Adams’s 22-minute Chamber Symphony for 15 musicians, from 1992 — which the Philharmonic has played just once before, in 2000 — needs subtlety as well as brio. On Wednesday the middle movement, “Aria With Walking Bass,” was more plodding than witty. But an energetic “Roadrunner” finale was a saving grace. (And McGill deserves plaudits for playing the fiendish piece right after the Davis concerto, and without any intermission.)Philharmonic audiences will get more Adams soon, and in more welcoming acoustics, when the orchestra plays his Saxophone Concerto at Carnegie Hall in January. But here’s hoping we also hear more of Davis’s music; how about his piano concerto “Wayang V,” with its composer as soloist? And more Mazzoli, too. Hopefully both will be frequent presences once the Philharmonic returns to Geffen Hall next season. Refreshed acoustics do only so much; Davis and Mazzoli can be part of a refreshed repertoire.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Two New York Orchestras Return With Acts of Renewal

      by

      Classical music’s live performance comeback continued with concerts by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.How should classical music ensembles return to live performance after 18 months of pandemic closures and a nationwide reckoning with racial injustice?It’s a question that has loomed as programmers decide whether to open their seasons with statements of purpose. Recently, two major New York groups — the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra — returned with what appeared to be mostly standard fare that could come across as timid missed opportunities, yet offered exceptionally fine and committed music-making that felt like acts of renewal.At Carnegie Hall last Thursday, Bernard Labadie, the music director of St. Luke’s since 2018, warmly greeted the audience and explained that when he and the players started planning their program, “one word jumped out: joy.” This concert was all about having some fun, he added, and Handel’s “Water Music” is “the happiest music I know.”He led the orchestra in a lively, stylish account of the complete “Water Music,” 22 pieces lasting some 50 minutes. Handel wrote this score to provide entertainment for King George I and his entourage during a river trip in 1717 from Whitehall Palace in London to the borough of Chelsea. “Water Music” is best known for the various suites drawn from it — which, for me, more effectively show off the allures of the music and the rich intricacies Handel subtly folded into each piece. But, judging by their enthusiastic ovation, the audience seemed happy to go along for the entirety of Handel’s musical river ride.This Baroque program began with a vigorous account of the Prelude from Charpentier’s “Te Deum,” music that deftly mixes martial-like rigor and sparkling ebullience. Next came a Bach novelty, a “weird creature of my imagination,” as Labadie described it, titled “An imaginary Concerto for Violin.” During his busy years in Leipzig, Germany, Bach often recycled existing movements from instrumental pieces into large sacred scores, Labadie explained. So, with respect and plucky daring, Labadie fashioned a concerto from three Bach movements that feature a solo violin: two sinfonias sandwiching an adagio from the “Easter Oratorio.” The result was a sort-of concerto, with an industrious first movement, a mournful slow one and a fleet finale, made to order for the splendid violinist Benjamin Bowman, who played beautifully.The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra began its season with works by Mozart and Boulogne at the 92nd Street Y on Tuesday.Joe SinnottAt the 92nd Street Y on Tuesday, two Mozart staples dominated the program by Orpheus, which in 2022 celebrates its 50th anniversary as a proudly conductor-less ensemble. (The evening was also the start of the venue’s classical music season.) Opening the concert was a short work by the 18th-century composer and violinist Joseph Boulogne, whose life and musical achievements have been gaining renewed attention. The ensemble gave a vibrant account of the beguiling, three-movement Overture to “L’Amant Anonyme,” Boulogne’s only surviving opera.Then the distinguished pianist Richard Goode, who has collaborated with Orpheus since the mid-1970s, including recordings of Mozart concertos, appeared as the soloist in the Piano Concerto No. 25 in C, a majestic and virtuosic score. Goode was at his best, in a sensitive, crisply clear and supremely musical performance. The orchestra ended with an exciting account of Mozart’s “Linz” Symphony. With just 25 players in the Y’s intimate hall, the music came across grandly, but also with revealing detail.I wish someone from Orpheus had spoken, as Labadie had for St. Luke’s, about the ensemble’s reasons for choosing the works it had for this significant return. There were not even program notes available. Some artists prefer to let music speak for itself. But maybe this is a time when classical musicians need to speak directly about what they are playing, and why. More

    • 75 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Review: Chamber Music Society Returns, Unchanged

      by

      The organization opened its season with a program encapsulating a persistently conservative vision of the repertory.Out of the crucible of the past year and a half — a brutal pandemic, shuttered theaters, a renewed push for racial justice — major arts institutions have by and large emerged transformed, or at least chastened. Even in the persistently backward-looking classical music realm, there has been a sense of fresh beginnings, of the extension of earlier ventures toward the new and untried.The Metropolitan Opera reopened with its first work by a Black composer. The New York Philharmonic has returned promising premieres and rarities — including, this week, a program of contemporary pieces on which John Adams’s Chamber Symphony, from 1992, is as close to the standard repertory as it gets. Go to Carnegie Hall or the 92nd Street Y, and on any given night you’re likely to hear something other than chestnuts.Then there’s the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.This 52-year-old organization came back on Tuesday with a well played, depressing concert of Beethoven, Hummel, Schubert and Mendelssohn at Alice Tully Hall. Depressing because the program’s blinkered view of music encapsulates what the society has presented for some time — and what’s on the agenda for the rest of its season.Of the nearly 100 works being offered on its main stage at Tully through next spring, just two are by living composers. One of those, George Crumb’s “Ancient Voices of Children,” was written over 50 years ago; the other, Wynton Marsalis’s quartet “At the Octoroon Balls,” in 1995. (And we’ll only get selections from the Marsalis.)Not that programming should be a question of new-music quotas. There are some artists whose main gifts are for astonishing revivals, not premieres. And there is value in providing older but unfamiliar sounds to audiences. The Philharmonic, for example, has already this season presented a Haydn symphony and a Brahms serenade — neither a rarity, but both rarely played by that orchestra.Chamber Music Society, by contrast, rarely ventures off the beaten path, and almost never into work of our time. (It’s true, you don’t often hear Beethoven’s Op. 104 quintet, his arrangement of one of his early trios, which comes in January.) This is particularly frustrating given that the chamber music field is exploding with new work and, relatively inexpensive to present, offers far easier opportunities for experimentation than orchestras or opera companies.Some caveats are in order. The society’s performances are generally of unimpeachable quality. On Tuesday, Beethoven’s Trio in C minor (Op. 9, No. 3) received an airy reading from the violinist Arnaud Sussmann, the violist Matthew Lipman and the cellist Nicholas Canellakis. Hummel’s Piano Quintet in E flat (Op. 87), the least known work on the program, features a double bass instead of a second violin, a witty minuet and a brief, aching slow movement; Lipman, Canellakis, the pianist Wu Qian, the violinist Richard Lin and the bassist Blake Hinson played it stylishly.Wu Qian and Wu Han — who is, with David Finckel, the society’s artistic director — were graceful in Schubert’s Rondo in A for piano, four hands (D. 951). And Wu Han, Lin, Sussmann (now on viola), Lipman, Canellakis and Hinson came together for a warm, lively performance of Mendelssohn’s Op. 110 Sextet in D, with its unusually heavy complement of low strings and its raucous climax.The society has also given stalwart support over the years to rising musicians. It actively streamed while theaters were closed. It honorably paid artists 50 percent of their promised fees after pandemic cancellations, and will add 75 percent more when those dates are rescheduled.And its performances at Tully are not the sum total of its offerings. Its concerts in the Rose Studio nearby seem to come from another universe, one far more contemporary and creative. The first “New Milestones” program of the season there, on Oct. 28, includes works — the oldest from 2008 — by Marcos Balter, Shih-Hui Chen, George Lewis, Alexandre Lunsqui and Nina Shekhar.But there are just a handful of those performances, and the Rose Studio seats only about 100, versus nearly 1,100 in Tully. For the vast majority of the organization’s audience, the Tully season is the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center — and that audience is being handed a profoundly limited product.It feels like kicking an institution when it’s down to criticize it so sharply as it reopens after such a devastating period. But a conservatism extreme even by classical music’s low standards was a problem with the society before the pandemic. That it seems to have viewed the past 19 months not as an opportunity to re-evaluate and reorient, but as a moment to double down, is unfortunate.Chamber Music Society of Lincoln CenterPresents a program of Puccini, Brahms, Webern and Shostakovich on Sunday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; chambermusicsociety.org. More

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      At 90, a Composer Is Still Sending Out Blasts

      by

      Sofia Gubaidulina and her richly colored, rhythmically adventurous music are being celebrated around the world this season.APPEN, Germany — The composer Sofia Gubaidulina, who turns 90 on Sunday, lives in a humble brick bungalow in this small town outside Hamburg. She receives guests in the dining room; to get there, they are led through the kitchen to a small round table decked out with a spread of strong tea, something sweet and the Russian Orthodox icon known as Our Lady of Kazan.It’s all modest and unassuming. But there are clues everywhere of an eminent career in music. A Steinway grand piano, a gift from Rostropovich, has pride of place in the living room. On a bookshelf is a recent CD of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, conducted by Andris Nelsons, who will lead Gubaidulina’s 2003 work “The Light of the End” with the Boston Symphony Orchestra this week. A gong hangs on a wall and a set of bamboo wind chimes hovers near a sliding-glass door — reminders of the kind of instruments that mark her richly colored, rhythmically adventurous compositions.Gubaidulina’s bright eyes are undiminished by age. A neighbor usually helps her prepare for guests, but couldn’t come on a recent afternoon. “Is the tea all right?” Gubaidulina asked. Then the conversation turned toward faith, which stands at the center of her work.“I am convinced that religion is the kernel of all art,” she said, a hint of generous fervor in her voice.Her birthday is being celebrated with a sustained burst of high-profile events. On Friday Nelsons and Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig, Germany, will release a Deutsche Grammophon recording of “The Light of the End” and two more recent pieces: her third violin concerto, the angst-filled “Dialogue: I and You,” which suggests a fracture between the soloist, Vadim Repin, and the orchestra, and “The Wrath of God,” which begins with a blast of Wagner tubas and, 17 minutes later, abruptly ends.Excerpt from ‘The Wrath of God’Gewandhaus Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon)At the Gewandhaus, where Nelsons is the music director, she is the featured composer through next season. In the coming months, her music — already common on programs around the world — will be played in cities including Moscow, where she lived for decades; Munich; Berlin; Cleveland; Tallinn, Estonia; Katowice, Poland; and Utrecht, the Netherlands.And in her native Tatar region of Russia, some 600 miles east of Moscow, where Russian and Central Asian influences overlap, a festival in Kazan celebrates her with a week of chamber and orchestral works starting Monday. There, she studied piano and composition before continuing her studies in Moscow, starting in her early 20s; her talent was recognized by Shostakovich, whose encouragement in the late 1950s was a key event in her life.She found a home in Moscow’s musical scene but was kept perilously at the edges of the Soviet Union’s conservative musical establishment. She made a living writing film scores while experimenting with non-Western percussion instruments.“I give a lot of importance to percussion instruments,” she said. “They contain the essence of existence.”Gubaidulina in her home outside Hamburg. A festival in Kazan, Russia, where she studied, celebrates her with a week of chamber and orchestral works starting Monday.Mario Wezel for The New York TimesIn 1970, she was baptized into the Russian Orthodox faith, but came to see her heritage as cosmopolitan, citing her Tatar father’s Muslim background (her grandfather was an imam), her Jewish music teachers and what she described in a 1990 BBC documentary as “the spiritual nourishment” from German cultural heroes like Bach and Beethoven.In the early 1980s, she had a breakthrough in the West with “Offertorium,” a concerto written for the violinist Gidon Kremer. Consisting of a Webern-like disintegration of a theme by Bach — which is later reconstituted, but in reverse — the moving piece established Gubaidulina’s international reputation as something of a spiritualist.By that point, she had also developed an arcane compositional technique with her companion (and later third husband), the music theoretician Pyotr Meshchaninov. Relying on numerical sequences to plot out structure and rhythm, Gubaidulina uses devices such as Fibonacci numbers to generate a series of cryptic sketches, which eventually result in a score. Though much of her home feels wide open, her composing studio, fashioned out of an attic space, is a “secret room,” said Hans-Ulrich Duffek, the director of Sikorski, her German publisher since the 1980s.Initially grouped with her fellow late Soviet-era composers Alfred Schnittke and Edison Denisov, Gubaidulina never settled on a definitive or identifiable style. “She uses a great variety of musical styles,” Duffek said. “Tonality may be predominant, but you will find dodecaphony, atonality, pentatonic scales, quotations, aleatoric passages and tonality.”“Sometimes,” he added, “side by side.”In the 1980s, Gubaidulina had a breakthrough in the West with “Offertorium,” a concerto written for the violinist Gidon Kremer.SPUTNIK/AlamyWhat her longer, single-movement concertos tend to have in common is “an ongoing narrative,” said the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, for whom Gubaidulina wrote her second violin concerto, “In Tempus Praesens,” in 2007. Her pieces often seem to move from disorder or conflict to something akin to sanctification.In “Glorious Percussion,” a 2008 concerto for orchestra and percussion ensemble, the five featured percussionists use a dizzying array of instruments — including marimbas, xylophones, sleigh bells, glass chimes, bamboo chimes and tuned gongs — to stage “a bit of a tussle,” said the percussionist Colin Currie, who helped organize the British premiere in 2019.“The ensemble try to build up enough of their own momentum to come out on top,” he said, adding: “The orchestra fights back with large forces, with crescendos going back and forth. My feeling is they’re all trying to work it out.” Then the climax is “a moment of reconciliation, consolidation and redemption.”Gubaidulina and Meshchaninov made their way west in the early 1990s, in the wake of the chaos following the Soviet Union’s dissolution. Her only child, Nadia Gubaidulina, a biochemist from her first marriage, stayed in Russia.The ’90s were for her a period of major commissions from leading soloists and ensembles, and an expanding use of unusual instrumentation and unconventional sounds. In her 1996 Viola Concerto, written for Yuri Bashmet and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, she introduced the rumbling power of Wagner tubas. The piece “develops the very high register for the viola,” said Antoine Tamestit, who has been playing it since 2006, “and then opposes it with the tubas.”In 1997 she composed “The Canticle of the Sun” for Rostropovich; written for cello, a small choir and percussion, the piece calls for the soloist to retune a string between phrases, to use a stick instead of a bow, and to eventually replace the cello with a flexatone, which can sound like a musical saw. Based on a song by St. Francis of Assisi that thanks God for the splendors of creation, it has become one of her most performed works.“Dialogue: I and You,” the violin concerto, concludes with the soloist’s long, slowly depleting, sky-high A, which Duffek said might suggest “the soul having risen to heaven after a long earthly fight.” Some Gubaidulina watchers sense a new darkness entering her recent work. Nelsons described “The Wrath of God” as “really scary.”Speaking over tea, she used the word “tragic” to describe the effects of pieces of music or individual instruments, but it might also be applied to her own life. In 2004 her daughter died of cancer at 44, and Meshchaninov died in 2006 after suffering an aortic aneurysm.“Sofia’s tragedy is that she wasn’t able to be at their bedsides when they died,” Duffek said, though he said he doesn’t believe she responded to the losses in her music. A photograph of her daughter sits across from Gubaidulina’s dining room table.“My daughter is always with me,” she said, “always supporting me.”Her birthday celebrations will culminate in a planned premiere next season of a new piece commissioned by the Gewandhaus and Boston Symphony. It will have the same instrumentation as “The Wrath of God.”“I love the sound of Wagner tubas,” she said, smiling broadly. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Review: Sphinx Virtuosi Bring an Intriguing Vision to Carnegie Hall

      by

      An ensemble of 18 string players who are Black and Latino set a reflective and spirited tone on Friday, with solos by the charismatic bass-baritone Davóne Tines.“Tracing Visions” was the intriguing title of the program Sphinx Virtuosi, an ensemble of 18 top-notch string players who are Black and Latino, presented at Carnegie Hall on Friday. As Afa S. Dworkin, the president of Sphinx, explained in comments to the audience, that phrase spoke both to the organization’s mission and the music played so impressively on this night.You have to have a vision, to conceive one carefully, before you can write it out and realize it, Dworkin suggested. Sphinx began in 1997 as a “social justice organization dedicated to transforming lives through the power of diversity in the arts,” an ambitious mission statement more essential at this moment than ever. Based in Detroit but with nationwide reach to some 100,000 students and artists, Sphinx puts string instruments in the hands of children and provides them training; sponsors a national competition that awards stipends, scholarships and performance opportunities; and has a development project for emerging artists, among other initiatives.Sphinx Virtuosi, which is in the midst of a national tour, is the most prestigious outlet of the organization; and the splendid performances showed why. A beguiling account of the opening work, Xavier Foley’s “Ev’ry Voice,” set a reflective tone. The music is like an episodic rumination on “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often called the “Black national anthem.” At first, segments of the melody are played in tentative, harmonically rich strands. Then, while violins ascend to high, softly tender lines, in lower registers other strings begin stirring, as if to get this piece up and running. There are passages of bustling riffs, hard-edge chords, a burst of swing and, finally, a fanfare. This led to Florence Price’s wistfully lyrical Andante cantabile movement from her 1935 String Quartet No. 2, which came across with glowing richness in this version for string ensemble.Various players took turns introducing works. One member explained that the Brazilian violinist and composer Ricardo Herz had adapted “Mourinho,” a bracing dance song in the Brazilian forró style, especially for Sphinx. Since the original was alive with percussion, the string players here slap and tap their instruments to evoke the rhythms that capture the festive vibe of the music, as indeed they did in this arresting performance.The cellist Thomas Mesa performed a searching, intense and elegiac tribute to essential workers.Jennifer TaylorThe Cuban American cellist Thomas Mesa spoke at some length before playing Andrea Casarrubios’s “Seven” for solo cello, a searching, intense and elegiac tribute to essential workers during the pandemic. The title alludes to the communal ritual of applauding, shouting and banging pots and pans every night at 7 p.m. for those heroes. Mesa played it magnificently.Jessie Montgomery’s “Banner,” which received its New York premiere by Sphinx Virtuosi at Carnegie in 2014, has become almost her signature piece. The music takes “The Star-Spangled Banner” and explores, fractures, transforms and comments upon the tune and its complex associations. Scored for a solo string quartet both with and against a background string ensemble, the piece received a vibrant, assured performance here.The charismatic bass-baritone Davóne Tines was the soloist in the two next pieces: The British composer Gerald Finzi’s “Come away, come away, death,” a sternly beautiful musical setting of a Shakespeare poem (from the song cycle “Let Us Garlands Bring”); and Carlos Simon’s “Angels in Heaven,” an arrangement of a spiritual sung during baptisms (“I know I’ve been changed”). Tines invited the audience to join in the final refrains of the church song. Many members of this audience clearly knew it well, judging from the vigor of the response.The program ended with the breathless, wild and wailing “Finale furioso” from Alberto Ginastera’s Concerto for Strings. The prolonged ovation that followed was no surprise. More