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      An 18th-Century Phenom Arrives at Lincoln Center

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      The Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center will play Marianna Martines’s Symphony in C, a milestone for a composer whose music mostly fell silent after her death.The composer Marianna Martines grew up in Vienna when the city was teeming with towering figures in classical music. Haydn was her neighbor and teacher. Mozart sought her out as a duet partner.Born in 1744, Martines began her remarkable career at just 16. At 38, she became the first female composer programmed by the Society of Musicians, whose elite concert series also gave Beethoven his Viennese performance debut. But after her death, in 1812, Martines’s music mostly fell silent, a fate shared by so many female composers of her era.This week, though, the Summer for the City festival at Lincoln Center will perform Martines’s Symphony in C major (1770), a work composed decades before it was common for women to write orchestral music. The performances are a significant step in the reclamation of her music.“It was an easy decision to present this fantastic piece,” said Jonathon Heyward, the music director of the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center. “The whole piece is filled with wonderful interplay within the strings and the wind parts.” The first movement, he added, “is light and spirited.”The pianist Sandra Mogensen found similar qualities in Martines’s piano music, calling it “sparkly, wonderful and vibrant.” She and her colleague Erica Sipes have played through all of Martines’s available keyboard works as part of Piano Music She Wrote, an online project they founded in 2020 to encourage performances of public domain piano music by women. Martines’s Piano Sonata in A major (1765) was one of the first pieces Sipes recorded. “It pulled me in,” she said. “Every movement has something different to say.”This past spring, Elizabeth Schauer, director of choral activities at the University of Arizona, led what was likely the first performance since Martines’s death of her Mass No. 3 (1761). When she wrote it, “she was only 17,” Schauer said. “My students and I found it astonishing and beautiful.” Schauer used a new score reconstructed by her student James Higgs from manuscripts. For Higgs, Martines’s style reflects her teachers and supporters in Vienna, who were Italian.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At 97, This Conductor Is Modest and Extraordinary

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      When Herbert Blomstedt, the oldest major conductor active today, led the Vienna Philharmonic, age was only one factor in his remarkable artistry.If you’ve been reading news about the U.S. presidential election, you might be forgiven for thinking that age has something to do with ability.But it doesn’t work that way in classical music, a field in which artists often go on as long as they can. Conductors tend to retire only when they decide it’s time. And Herbert Blomstedt, who recently turned 97, clearly doesn’t want to just yet.The oldest major conductor still keeping a regular performance schedule, he was forced to take a break after a fall in December, but was back onstage by the spring and, this week, conducted the Vienna Philharmonic at the Salzburg Festival in Austria. Hardly pushed aside because of his age, he was at the podium of one of the world’s greatest orchestras, at one of classical music’s most prestigious events.Blomstedt has garnered a lot of attention for his longevity and vitality, but that is just one aspect of what makes him a remarkable conductor. As the critic Alex Ross wrote when Blomstedt was 94, equating age with wisdom is a dubious belief, and what he enjoys now is “a belated reward for a resolutely unshowy musician who has gone about his business decade after decade.”Even Blomstedt doesn’t spend too much time making sense of his age in interviews. He values routine, and cooks for himself when he’s not on the road. And he has mentioned that, as a Seventh-day Adventist, he doesn’t eat meat or drink alcohol or coffee; without missing a beat, though, he often adds that Winston Churchill made it to 90 liberally drinking and smoking cigars.Wisdom may not be a given with Blomstedt’s age, but it’s undeniable in his artistry. Perhaps because of physical limitations or personal preferences, or both, his conducting in recent years has had the kind of economy that comes with experience. (You can hear it, too, on the recordings he continues to release, with ensembles including the Philharmonic and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.) He is also a maestro with roots in musicology, who thrills at returning to scores; he has mentioned that it took 66 years to notice a detail in Schubert’s “Great” Symphony for the first time.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Richard Crawford, Leading Scholar of American Music, Dies at 89

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      American Music was a marginal subfield in the 1960s when he began his research as a student, and then as a faculty member, at the University of Michigan.Richard Crawford, a longtime professor of musicology at the University of Michigan who helped legitimize and popularize the study of American music, died on July 23 in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was 89.His wife, Penelope (Ball) Crawford, said the cause was congestive heart failure.“He was a pioneer who shaped the scope of American music research,” Mark Clague, a musicologist and professor at Michigan who studied with Mr. Crawford, said in an interview. “It wasn’t about celebrating an unchanging canon, but about opening up the magic of musical experience.”While studying at Michigan in the early 1960s, Mr. Crawford began examining a trove of papers that had been acquired by the school’s library concerning the 18th-century musician Andrew Law, who taught singing and compiled hymnals in Connecticut. The study of American music was a marginal subfield at the time; most scholars considered music history to be about the European classics. (The “American” part of the American Musicological Society, founded in 1934, referred to the nationality of its members, not their subject of inquiry.)Whereas Mr. Crawford’s adviser, H. Wiley Hitchcock — also a major force in American music studies — had traveled to Europe for his doctoral research on Baroque opera, Mr. Crawford preferred not to uproot his young family.So despite the potential career risk, he wrote his dissertation — and then a 1968 book — on Law, becoming one of the first scholars to dedicate his life’s work to music of the United States.His timing was fortuitous: Preparations for the 1976 U.S. bicentennial celebration spurred a new public interest in reviving early American music, and Mr. Crawford helped build its scholarly infrastructure. He was a founding member of the Sonneck Society, later renamed the Society for American Music; wrote the first biography of the Revolutionary-era composer William Billings, with David P. McKay in 1975; and, through painstaking bibliographic work, excavated large swaths of repertory from the beginnings of American sacred music.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hannah Kendall Writes Music With a Vocabulary of Her Own

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      This composer’s latest work, for Lincoln Center, is in conversation with Robert Schumann’s music and mental health struggles.“Violent congestion, inexpressible terror, failure of breath, momentary unconsciousness — these overtake me in quick succession, though I am better than I was,” the composer Robert Schumann wrote in a letter to his mother in 1833. He was 23, and the recent deaths of his older brother and sister-in-law surely cast a pall on his state of mind. “If you had any notion of the lethargy into which melancholia has brought me,” he continued, “you would forgive my not writing.”Hannah Kendall, a prominent young British composer based in New York, was struck by that passage a little more than a year ago, while reading Schumann’s letters, which provide glimpses of a decades-long struggle with mental illness, diagnosed during his life as exhaustion, and posthumously as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.“It felt as though there was a very direct, personal connection to his state at the time, which I found particularly fascinating as a composer,” Kendall, 40, said in a recent interview at Lincoln Center — where her new work, “He stretches out the north over the void and hangs the earth on nothing,” will premiere on Aug. 9. The Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center will play Kendall’s piece on a program that also includes Schumann’s Second Symphony.What it takes to be an artist today, Kendall explained, is a regular topic of discussion among her circle of friends and peers. “Our well-being, mental and physical, is something that crops up on a daily basis,” she said. Some composers, like Julia Adolphe, Nico Muhly and Aaron Helgeson, have begun to air mental-health concerns and struggles in public, in blog posts and on podcasts.Kendall was urged to read Schumann’s letters by a longtime friend, the conductor Jonathon Heyward, the music director of the Festival Orchestra, who admittedly had an ulterior motive. For his first summer with the ensemble, he had her commissioned to write a piece for a concert that would also feature Schumann. He envisioned Kendall responding to not only Schumann’s music, but also issues of mental health and this moment when performing arts organizations are still struggling to lure back audiences lost during the pandemic.The coming program, which also includes two works by Bach, is surrounded by contextual offerings. “Ghost Variations,” an augmented-reality installation piece in the lobby at David Geffen Hall, explores how Schumann found solace in Bach’s music. And a preconcert discussion will address the question “Can music express mental health?”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Wolfgang Rihm, Prolific Contemporary Classical Music Composer, Dies at 72

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      Likened to a “court composer” for Germany, he wrote more than 500 pieces and was considered one of the most original and independent musical voices in Europe.Wolfgang Rihm, a composer whose forceful, shape-shifting output reinvigorated contemporary classical music, died on Saturday in Ettlingen, Germany. He was 72.His death, in a hospice outside the city of Karlsruhe, where he lived, was announced in a statement by his publisher, Universal Edition. It did not specify a cause, but Mr. Rihm had been treated for cancer since 2017. His illness and his efforts to compose despite it were the subject of a 2020 German documentary.Mr. Rihm was considered one of the most original and prolific musical voices in Europe and the most performed German composer of contemporary classical music. Among his prominent commissions was “Reminiszenz,” an “arresting, broody orchestral song cycle,” as Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim described it in The New York Times. The work, for a tenor and large orchestra, premiered at the 2017 opening of the Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg.Mr. Rihm composed more than 500 works, though the exact number remains unclear because some pieces have not yet been published.He received the 2003 Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, the 2010 Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale and the 2014 Robert Schumann Prize for Poetry and Music, among many other awards. He was named composer in residence for the 2024-25 season at the Berlin Philharmonic.“At times he was even like a court composer” for Germany, the music critic Manuel Brug wrote in Die Welt.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: ‘The Righteous’ Brings Stirring Prayer to Santa Fe Opera

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      Gregory Spears and Tracy K. Smith’s new work about an ambitious minister’s rise in the 1980s is that rarity in contemporary music: an original story.We’ve had “The Shining” and “Cold Mountain,” “The Hours” and “Dead Man Walking,” and works based on the lives of Steve Jobs, Malcolm X and Frida Kahlo. “Lincoln in the Bardo” and “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” are coming soon.Opera audiences, traditionalists even before the pandemic, have ventured back warier than ever about buying tickets for anything other than the standards. So as companies try to present contemporary pieces alongside “Aida” and “La Bohème,” they bank on familiar titles and subjects.Many classic operas were adaptations; “Bohème,” for example, was inspired by a collection of stories. But lately the results have tended to feel less like great art than like bending over backward to coax a cautious public. Something special comes from being truly original: It’s no coincidence that perhaps the best opera of our time, Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence” (2021), was that rarity, a brand-new story.So is “The Righteous,” commissioned by Santa Fe Opera from the composer Gregory Spears and the poet Tracy K. Smith. Spears and Smith also created from scratch their first full-length collaboration, “Castor and Patience” (2022). They deserve great credit for this. These days it’s remarkable to sit at a premiere and be able to think, with admiration, “Here are imaginations at work” instead of “I’d rather be watching the movie.”Taking place over a few weeks, “Castor and Patience” was an intimate family drama — though one with larger societal implications. While a family is also at the center of “The Righteous,” which opened on July 13, the new opera is in every way a more sprawling piece, stretching from 1979 through the early 1990s, with a large cast and chorus and booming climaxes to match its impassioned lyricism.At its core is a man’s progress from youthful idealism to profound moral compromise. The main character, David, is a talented, devoted preacher who’s grown up close to a wealthy, well-connected oil family in the American Southwest. He marries the family’s daughter and, as his scrappy ministry grows in size and influence, he’s tempted more and more by the prospect of political power. As he climbs, he leaves betrayals both personal and ideological in his wake.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘Seeing Through,’ by Ricky Ian Gordon

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      In “Seeing Through,” the prolific composer Ricky Ian Gordon shares the heroes, monsters, obsessions and fetishes that drive his art and fuel a dizzying life.SEEING THROUGH: A Chronicle of Sex, Drugs, and Opera, by Ricky Ian GordonEven devotees of symphony orchestras sometimes struggle with the opera — its muchness and pomp. “The uproar,” my father called it, and he was a serious amateur chamber musician who collected and played the works of obscure composers on a Montagnana violin that he most certainly would have saved from a fire before my guinea pig, Percolator.But enough about my daddy issues — let’s discuss Ricky Ian Gordon’s. Gordon is one of our foremost composers of modern opera (for what that’s worth, as he notes mournfully, to Generation iTunes), including works based on “The Grapes of Wrath” and “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.” Now he’s also the author of a messy and mesmerizing new memoir called “Seeing Through.”“If I had my way, the whole world would look like a carnival,” writes Gordon, who has a synesthesiac “thing about color,” and this book is certainly pinwheels, sideshows and waxy litter scattered on the ground. Very entertaining; a little dizzying.Ricky was the youngest of four children and the only boy born to Eve and Sam Gordon, né Goldenberg, a dishonorably discharged World War II veteran — he’d punched an officer who’d made an antisemitic remark — who became an electrician and Masonic master, prone to lightning bolts of rage at home.This overstimulated family’s struggles were previously documented in the excellent 1992 book “Home Fires,” by Donald Katz — you can listen to it on Audible, which Katz, in one of those intriguing pieces of life-arc trivia, founded — and a year later in “Take the Long Way Home,” by Susan Lydon, the eldest daughter, a successful journalist who descended into serious addiction.Here, Sam’s neglect and maltreatment of his children, especially Ricky — who failed to be the expected “mirror” to his brute-force masculinity — comes in for more uncomfortable scrutiny. Sam never bothered to learn birthdays or look at schoolwork, cruelly beat his son and demanded sex from Eve multiple times a day, even when she didn’t want it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More