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      Met Opera Players to Meet an Old Friend for a Gig, and Aid

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      The musicians, who went unpaid for nearly a year, have been invited to join Fabio Luisi, their former principal conductor, and his Dallas Symphony for two benefit concerts.The musicians of the Metropolitan Opera’s orchestra, who went unpaid for nearly a year, are getting a hand from one of their old maestros, Fabio Luisi.Luisi — who was the Met’s principal conductor for more than five years, and was seen as a candidate to succeed James Levine as its music director before the post went to Yannick Nézet-Séguin — has invited the musicians to Texas at the end of the month to join the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, which he now leads, for two benefit concerts.The Dallas Symphony announced on Monday that the Met musicians would join its players for performances of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 on April 30 and May 1. The orchestra noted in a news release that the concerts would present the first opportunity in over a year for many of the Met’s musicians — who recently began receiving partial pay as they negotiate a new contract — to perform together for a live audience.A spokesman for the Dallas Symphony said that roughly 40 to 50 Met musicians were expected to travel to Dallas for the concerts, and added that they would be paid for the performances. The joint concerts will act as fund-raisers for the Met Orchestra Musicians’ Fund and the Dallas players’ union’s DFW Musicians Covid-19 Relief Fund; a filmed recording will be released.“As one of the few orchestras fortunate to be able to perform all season to live audiences, we are painfully aware that many of our colleagues around the country were not able to play concerts due to restrictions in their cities or the financial situation of their organization,” Kim Noltemy, the president and chief executive of the Dallas Symphony, said in a statement.Luisi said in a statement that he sought to “gather musicians together to make music” as a “symbol of solidarity.”“During my time with the Met,” he added, “I became close to many of the members of the orchestra. It is devastating that these incredible musicians have not had an opportunity to perform together in over a year.”Brad Gemeinhardt, a Met Orchestra hornist who is the chair of the committee which represents the musicians in negotiations with management, offered thanks to the Dallas orchestra. “We cannot overstate the impact this unprecedented collaboration will have on our members, both financially and artistically, after this long year of cultural famine,” Gemeinhardt said in a statement.After going without paychecks for nearly a year, members of the Met Orchestra voted last month to return to the bargaining table in exchange for temporary pay of up to $1,543 a week. The Met, which has said that the pandemic has cost $150 million in lost revenue, and its general director, Peter Gelb, are insisting on long-term pay cuts to offset those losses — cuts a number of other leading orchestras have agreed to.In January, Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, agreed to give up to $50,000 in matching donations to the orchestra and chorus. After the musicians and the company reached their deal on temporary pay, he sent a letter to the Met’s leaders urging them to “find a solution to compensate our artists appropriately.”“I am finding it increasingly hard to justify what has happened,” he wrote.The Met said at the time that it shared his frustration and that all parties had been “working together for new agreements that will ensure the sustainability of the Met into the future.” On Monday afternoon, the company added in a statement that it hoped the musicians would “have an increasing number of performance opportunities between now and the fall, when we will once again be able to come together at the Met.” More

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      When Boston Ruled the Music World

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      Three recent recordings conjure the mid-20th-century moment when the city was a center of innovative composition.When I moved to Massachusetts in the mid-1970s to start a doctorate at Boston University, there was a specific professor I wanted to study with: the formidable pianist Leonard Shure.But Shure was hardly the only renowned pedagogue in Boston. The city had at that point long been a hub of academic music, with distinguished programs at Harvard, Brandeis and Boston universities, the New England Conservatory, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Until I arrived, though, I didn’t realize what a center the Boston area was for contemporary music; from afar, the city had seemed to me too staid and traditional for that. But in its own buttoned-up New England way, it was a modernist hotbed. Each of those institutions was like a little fief, with eminent composers on the faculty. Each maintained active student ensembles, including many devoted exclusively to new music.If you wanted to be on the front lines of the battle between severe “uptown” music and rebellious “downtown” postmodernism, you headed to New York. If you were drawn to mavericks and intrigued by non-Western cultures, especially Asian music, you probably found your way to Los Angeles or San Francisco.But if you wanted a classic education, studying with a true master composer — and at that time, almost all the major university composers were white men — you went to Boston. But the music that emerged there in those decades has faded in favor of work from other American cities.Not entirely, however. Keeping that legacy alive is part of the mission of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, and its record label BMOP/sound. The ensemble champions modern and new music from all over. But according to its founder and artistic director, Gil Rose, 40 or 45 percent of its recordings have been of works by Boston-area composers.Schuller in the late 1970s. His overlooked operatic collaboration with John Updike, “The Fisherman and His Wife,” has been recorded the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.Fletcher DrakeSeveral recent releases have brought me back to my first years in the city, when composers at those various academic institutions loomed large. Three recordings are especially exciting: Gunther Schuller’s overlooked opera “The Fisherman and His Wife” and albums of orchestral works by Leon Kirchner and Harold Shapero.Schuller, who died in 2015 at 89, once described himself as a “high school dropout without a single earned degree.” Technically that was true. But he was a protean musician who in his late teens won the principal horn position at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and then, two years later, moved on to the Metropolitan Opera, where he held the same post until 1959. Yet, he also played and recorded in jazz groups with the likes of Miles Davis.When I moved to Boston, Schuller was in the final years of his transformative tenure as president of the New England Conservatory. There he had established the first degree-granting jazz program at a major American conservatory — bringing in the pianist Ran Blake to chair it as well as hiring giants to teach, including Jaki Byard and George Russell.Anticipating by decades creative practices that are commonplace today, he had coined the term “third wave” to describe music that drew from both classical and jazz genres. Schuller, who as a composer was drawn to 12-tone idioms, though not in the strictest sense, also appointed the brilliant modernist Donald Martino to lead the composition faculty. He had all the bases covered. Schuller also taught for two decades at the Tanglewood Music Center, serving as artistic director for 15 of those years, until 1984.For all his formidable skills and vision as a composer, Schuller may have been more consequential as a teacher, mentor, conductor and a tireless (sometimes shrill) agitator on behalf of contemporary music and living composers than as a writer of music himself. That perception has long seemed unfair, but it persists. Though fine pieces from his large catalog have been gaining attention, “The Fisherman and His Wife” has languished.It was commissioned as a children’s opera by the Junior League of Boston, and first performed in 1970 by Sarah Caldwell’s Opera Company of Boston — though Caldwell had another composer in mind for the project when she found herself working with the imposing Schuller.The 65-minute opera, based on a familiar story by the Grimm brothers, boasts a libretto by none other than John Updike. As the story unfolds, a lowly fisherman makes repeated trips back to the restless sea to summon a magical fish he has caught and released — the fish is actually an enchanted prince — and to ask for the granting of yet another of his wife’s increasingly grandiose wishes. Schuller inventively, yet subtly, organized the score like a theme and variations. Most boldly, he wrote whole stretches of the score in his trademark modernist language — steeped in, but not beholden to, the 12-tone approach, with some jazz chords folded in.A 12-tone opera for children?Yet Schuller was on to something. The story is full of darkness, strangeness, magic, evocations of a threatening sea and cloudy skies, bitter confrontations between the wife and husband. Why not convey it through flinty, atonal music? The voice lines are written with skill to make the words come through clearly. Updike introduced the character of a cat that both meowed and talked, a charming role that Schuller assigned to a high soprano. The orchestration, for a smaller ensemble, is alive with myriad sonorities and captivating colors.Though released last year, the BMOP/sound recording was made in 2015 in collaboration with Odyssey Opera, founded by Rose, following a semi-staged concert performance. The commanding mezzo-soprano Sondra Kelly as the wife, the plaintive tenor Steven Goldstein as the fisherman and the sturdy baritone David Kravitz as the magic fish are excellent — and Rose draws glittering, swirling, mysterious playing from the orchestra. I could be wrong, but with a vivid staging, I think an audience of children would respond well to it.Schuller, an accomplished, exacting conductor, wrote a comprehensive book about conducting. Across the river in Cambridge, the respected composer and Harvard professor Leon Kirchner also had a following as a conductor back then, though he was not the most efficient technician. He was, however, a skilled pianist and a probing musician who understood how pieces were supposed to go.Leon Kirchner, a composer and conductor based at Harvard, in 1982.John GoodmanIn 1978, with the support of a dean at Harvard, Kirchner founded the Harvard Chamber Orchestra, a professional ensemble of freelance players organized purely so that Kirchner could conduct free, routinely packed concerts. With those dedicated players, he led scores like Debussy’s “La Mer” and Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony as if he had written them. A remarkable 1984 account of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, with Peter Serkin as soloist, was issued recently on a Verdant World Records release, and it’s just as exhilarating and profound as I remembered.As a composer, Kirchner was powerfully influenced by his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg. Like Schuller and others of their generation, Kirchner adopted the aesthetic and approach of 12-tone music but with freedom and flair, unbound by strict rules. I do remember him being narrow-minded about composers who stuck essentially to tonal harmonic languages — let alone to Minimalism, which he could not abide.But I’ve always admired the depth, imagination and engrossing complexity of his music. Those qualities abound in five orchestral pieces on a riveting BMOC/sound recording from 2018 — particularly the 11-minute “Music for Orchestra,” from 1969. It’s a transfixing score that feels subdued in a lying-in-wait way, as if at any moment pensive stretches of lyricism could break out. And sometimes do, through cascades of skittish riffs and teeming bursts.Harold Shapero, born in Lynn, Mass., in 1920, may have been the most precociously gifted American composer of his generation, which included his friend Leonard Bernstein. As a student at Tanglewood, Shapero deeply impressed Aaron Copland. He earned the attention of his idol, Stravinsky, when that composer came as a guest to Harvard, where Shapero was a student.Harold Shapero, born in Lynn, Mass., in 1920, may have been the most precociously gifted American composer of his generation.Gordon Parks/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty ImagesShapero set about adapting Stravinsky’s Neo-Classical style, giving it a jolt of American spunk and unfettered intricacy. From 1940 to 1950, he produced a breakthrough series of ambitious works, including his daunting 45-minute Symphony for Classical Orchestra, composed in 1947. Bernstein adored the piece and led the premiere in 1948 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He recorded it in 1953 on a single hectic day with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra. Then the work disappeared until André Previn discovered it and led a triumphant performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1986, and later recorded it. You could make a case for the piece as one of the great American symphonies.The BMOC/sound album includes Shapero’s Serenade for String Orchestra from 1945, a 35-minute, five-movement score that vividly demonstrates how Shapero, while writing in a Neo-Classical idiom, was attempting to make essentially tonal music modern and challenging. The first movement is an engrossing jangle of counterpoint, yet somehow transparent. The Menuetto is like a diatonic retort to Schoenberg’s 12-tone minuets. The slow movement is weighty and searching, yet harmonically tart and suffused with tension. The finale is frenetic, pointillist and wonderfully jumpy.In 1950, Shapero helped start the music program of the newly founded Brandeis. That department soon became the unofficial headquarters of the “Boston School” of composers, as it was called, which included Irving Fine (who died in 1962, at 47) and Arthur Berger. All three began as Stravinsky-influenced Neo-Classicists. But over time, Fine and Berger slowly adopted their own brands of the 12-tone writing that was taking hold in universities, for better or worse, as the de facto language of modernism. Shapero, who died in 2013, explored the technique but never went along. He composed less and less, until he had a renewed burst of creativity running Brandeis’s electronic music studio.But he was a great mentor to countless student composers. And his life offered a lesson, a kind of warning: Stick to your guns; don’t be intimidated; write the music you want to write. They were lessons eagerly learned in the explosion of creativity happening in Boston. More

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      Tanglewood Is Back This Summer, With Beethoven and Yo-Yo Ma

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      Closed last year, the Boston Symphony’s warm-weather home in the Berkshires will host an abbreviated six-week season.There won’t be the traditional, grand closing-night performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with its stage full of singers. In fact, to reduce the risk of aerosol transmission of the coronavirus, there will be no vocal music at all at Tanglewood this summer.But there will still be a lot of Beethoven, along with crowd-pleasing tributes to the composer John Williams and familiar guests like Emanuel Ax, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Joshua Bell and Yo-Yo Ma.Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s warm-weather home in the Berkshires, announced in March that after remaining closed last year because of the pandemic, it would open this summer for a six-week season — about half the usual length — with limited crowds and distancing requirements. On Thursday, the orchestra filled in the programming: heavy on appearances by its music director, Andris Nelsons, and with a focus on Beethoven, whose 250th birthday last year was muted because of widespread concert cancellations.Nelsons will lead eight orchestral programs, including a Beethoven opener on July 10 featuring the “Emperor” Piano Concerto, with Ax as soloist, and the Fifth Symphony. On July 23, the Boston Pops will honor Williams, who turns 90 next year and is the Pops’ laureate conductor; the following evening, Mutter gives the premiere of his Violin Concerto No. 2, and on Aug. 13 Williams shares the podium for a night of film music. On July 30, the violinist Leonidas Kavakos does Beethoven trios with Ax and Ma, who also plays with the Boston Symphony under Karina Canellakis on Aug. 8. (Details are available at bso.org.)Throughout the summer, performances will last no longer than 80 minutes, without intermissions, and all concerts will take place in the Koussevitzky Music Shed, which is open on the sides. The space, which usually holds thousands, will have a reduced capacity, as will the lawn that surrounds it — a favorite spot for picnicking. Tanglewood is waiting to announce what might go forward in late summer of its well-loved series of pop performers like James Taylor.Students at the Tanglewood Music Center, the orchestra’s prestigious summer academy, will play chamber concerts on Sunday mornings and Monday afternoons, and programs are planned for the Tanglewood Learning Institute, a series of lectures, talks and master classes that began with great fanfare in 2019. The orchestra will host a two-day version of its annual Festival of Contemporary Music, July 25-26.The Knights, a chamber orchestra, will be joined on July 9 by the jazz and classical pianist Aaron Diehl for Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and selections from Mary Lou Williams’s “Zodiac Suite.” Among the Boston Symphony’s guest conductors will be Thomas Adès (the orchestra’s artistic partner), Alan Gilbert, Anna Rakitina and Herbert Blomstedt; soloists include the pianists Daniil Trifonov, Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Kirill Gerstein, and the violinists Baiba Skride and Lisa Batiashvili.The Tanglewood season is part of the nationwide thawing planned for this summer of a performing arts scene that has been largely frozen for over a year. The Public Theater has announced that its venerable Shakespeare in the Park will go forward, as will Santa Fe Opera and the Glimmerglass Festival in upstate New York. On Thursday, the Aspen Music Festival and School in Colorado said it would move forward with a nearly two-month season.But as they reopen, institutions are reckoning with sharp losses. As it celebrated the return of Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony said its current operating budget was $57.7 million, down from its prepandemic budget of over $100 million. The orchestra estimated that it has lost over $50 million in revenue in the last year. More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Brahms

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      Listen as Carlos Santana, Branford Marsalis and others pick their favorites of the moody master of 19th-century music.In the past, we’ve chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, the piano, opera, the cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, the violin, Baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, the flute, string quartets and tenors.Now we want to convince those curious friends to love the music of Johannes Brahms (1833-97), master of stirring symphonic exclamations and moody piano solos. We hope you find lots here to discover and enjoy; leave your favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Isata Kanneh-Mason, pianistThe beginning of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 is one of my favorite concerto openings. It’s got drama, intensity and emotion — and that’s before the piano even joins! The soloist doesn’t come in for almost four minutes while the orchestra has a long, thrilling introduction illustrating the themes of the movement. Brahms uses the full orchestra, with a lot of grandeur, so the entrance of the piano is always a beautiful surprise, coming in very lyrical and soft. And after such a long wait!Piano Concerto No. 1Krystian Zimerman, piano; Berlin Philharmonic; Simon Rattle, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)◆ ◆ ◆Carlos Santana, guitarist and songwriterWhen my father died in 1997, I made a resolution that I wouldn’t listen to music for two months. And after two months, my father’s voice said to me, “I need you to play music now.” So I turned on the radio. I was taking my son to school, and as soon as I turned it on, I heard that melody. My father played the violin, and I felt a connection, that he was directing me to this song; it turned out it was Brahms. Not long after, we were working on “Supernatural” with Dave Matthews, and this song came up again. I shared it with Dave, and the next thing you know, it went on the album as “Love of My Life.”Symphony No. 3New York Philharmonic; Leonard Bernstein, conductor (Sony Classical)◆ ◆ ◆Branford Marsalis, composer and saxophonistUnlike a lot of modern musicians who are hellbent on this individuality thing, I openly admit to thievery. I steal. And I steal a lot from Brahms. There are times it’s unintentional, and times it’s quite intentional. This was 50/50. I did some music for “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” and I wrote a melancholy piece for Toledo, the piano player in the movie, and string orchestra. I’m writing the melody and I resolved it in the third and fourth bars. I stole that second half from somewhere, but it took weeks for me to figure out where. Of course, I took it from one of Brahms’s intermezzos.Intermezzo in A minor (Op. 76, No. 7)Glenn Gould, piano (Sony Classical)◆ ◆ ◆Barbara Hendricks, sopranoMy introduction to Brahms came in 1975 at Carnegie Hall, where Herbert von Karajan was conducting the Second and Fourth Symphonies with the Berlin Philharmonic. I had just auditioned for him; he asked me to prepare the soprano solo from the “German Requiem” so that I could sing it at the end of the tour, and he invited me to the concert. It was an unforgettable experience. I later recorded the “Requiem” with him and the Vienna Philharmonic: I dedicate that solo to all who have lost loved ones or are suffering because of this pandemic, essential workers, and victims of conflicts and tragedies all over the world.“A German Requiem”(Deutsche Grammophon)◆ ◆ ◆Tania León, composerDedicated to Clara Schumann, this intermezzo is emotional and intense. It has a magical spell, a loving aura that gently touches the heart. The power of this music sends you to a world of introspection and intimate tranquillity. It is a piece that never dies; it alludes to something you can never grab. You listen to its poetry, and it compels you to listen again and again.Intermezzo in A (Op. 118, No. 2)Murray Perahia, piano (Sony Classical)◆ ◆ ◆Anthony Tommasini, Times chief classical music criticI love the spacious, probing, moody Brahms; the Brahms of breadth and depth; the progressive composer whose mature harmonic language anticipated the atonality of Schoenberg. But Brahms, a virtuosic pianist in his prime, also has a wild side, a showy streak. And no music better captures him in that vein than the dancing, dizzying finale of his Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, which he calls a rondo “in the Gypsy style.” On this exciting recording from 1967, Artur Rubinstein, then a month shy of 80, joins far younger members of the Guarneri Quartet.Piano Quartet No. 1(Sony Classical)◆ ◆ ◆Zachary Woolfe, Times classical music editorHere’s more of that jovial Brahms: the finale of his Violin Concerto, a dance with one foot in a sumptuous ballroom, the other in a down-and-dirty village square. After the concerto’s tender slow movement, it’s an irresistible explosion. The soloist here is the silver-toned Janine Jansen; I heard her play this not long before the pandemic began, so for me it’s a precious reminder of what came before — and what will come after.Violin ConcertoOrchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia; Antonio Pappano, conductor (Decca)◆ ◆ ◆Bongani Ndodana-Breen, composerBrahms gave us music of great emotional depth that forces us to pause and reflect. On the whole, his musical demeanor is serious and beautifully melancholic. His “German Requiem” has lived with me since my teens in South Africa, when I first heard it at an arts festival. Three years later I would turn to it when mourning the devastating loss of my grandmother. Instead of the traditional Latin Requiem, Brahms assembled his own beautiful text from biblical sources, in a setting that gave them new meanings. From the opening motif in the cellos to the first words sung by the chorus — “Blessed are they that mourn” — we are embraced with warmth, comfort and, dare one say, love. I have had to turn to it again during this pandemic to quietly grieve the loss of close friends.“A German Requiem”WDR Symphony Orchestra; Jukka-Pekka Saraste, conductor◆ ◆ ◆Peter Pesic, pianist and scientistWhen I was 11, I went deaf from ear infections. After an operation, I was taken to a concert to try out my recovering hearing. The effect of this music was overwhelming. Later, I realized that no other piece of music begins like this: at the crisis, the critical moment. Over the insistent throbbing of a drum, the orchestra soars slowly upward, straining against gravity, struggling so hard yet falling short. It spoke to me even as a child. How could something so heart-rending be so beautiful? Where did this immense struggle lead? I had to know.Symphony No. 1Columbia Symphony Orchestra; Bruno Walter, conductor◆ ◆ ◆Iman Habibi, composerBrahms’s most intimate emotions manifested themselves in his final sets of piano pieces, Op. 116 to 119. My appreciation for them grew with each encounter: first, when I learned some of them as an undergraduate piano student; later, when I had the opportunity to study them in graduate school; and, most recently, as this composer’s last thoughts resounded through our home as my wife, Deborah, performed and recorded the Op. 119 set. These pieces feel personal and remarkably mature in their simplicity, teeming with an abundance of beauty and intricate detail.Intermezzo in E minor (Op. 119, No. 2)Deborah Grimmett, piano◆ ◆ ◆Hyeyung Sol Yoon, violinistI think back to my ornithologist father-in-law wondering aloud, “How was Brahms able to create music that sounds like the vastness of nature?” And to my former teacher ruminating that Brahms was always trying to write textures that were too big for a given ensemble. I listen to the slow movement of the Clarinet Quintet, and I hear, at a microscopic level, that he is creating a boundless world. It’s like seeing the sinew of the body, the veins of the leaves. There’s so much to take in: richness of the harmonies, rhythm of duplets and triplets rubbing against each other. They all gather to bind the sadness and beauty of this revelatory work.Clarinet QuintetAnthony McGill, clarinet; Pacifica Quartet (Cedille)◆ ◆ ◆Valerie Coleman, composer and flutistBrahms’s Fourth Symphony never fails to fill concert hall seats with its charm and familiar interplay between strings and woodwinds. I love it because of how it makes me feel. It’s an old friend who visits. Together we walk along a woodsy trail, laughing and reminiscing in a constant dialogue of all the happy memories of summer festivals gone by.Symphony No. 4Philadelphia Orchestra; Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor◆ ◆ ◆Jeff Scott, hornistWhen I went to Manhattan School of Music in the mid-1980s, I’d go to the library to do my listening homework. One day I was preparing for a reading of the Brahms Op. 40 Trio; one version looked interesting because it had been recorded at the Marlboro Festival, which I knew, even as a freshman, was prestigious. The horn player was Myron Bloom, one of the greats — though I had no idea who he was at the time. The pianist Rudolf Serkin and the violinist Michael Tree were also legends. This recording changed my perception of what classical music is — and how beautifully the French horn could fit into the canon.Horn Trio(Sony Classical)◆ ◆ ◆Simon Halsey, choral conductor“Music for the soul,” “medicine for the voice”: These are two of the comments from my singers when we made this recording of “A German Requiem.” To go deep into the text — its phrasing, diction and meaning — was part of a fascinating journey with this great choir and orchestra, savoring the instinctive understanding of the tradition; the warm, velvety choral sound; and the virtuosity of the Berlin Philharmonic. Everything came together. This piece is so well known in Germany that you can feel the audience singing along in their imaginations; it’s music that elevates us as we share it.“A German Requiem”Berlin Radio Choir and Berlin Philharmonic; Simon Rattle, conductor (Warner Classics)◆ ◆ ◆Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, Times music writerIt’s not just strange, the change from major to minor: In this breathless ride of a Scherzo, it feels violent, with existential stakes, as the two modes tussle for control with the gritted urgency of antagonists fighting atop a runaway train. The rhythm, too, veers sharply between duple and triple forms, even as the momentum barrels forward. The sense of unity and propulsive flow that grows out of this destabilizing mix of elements is uncanny — Brahms at his intoxicating and brainy best.Piano Quintet in F minorQuatuor Ébène; Akiko Yamamoto, piano (Erato)◆ ◆ ◆Seth Colter Walls, Times music writerWas Brahms a classicist or a progressive? Why not both? Wilhelm Kempff’s restrained, artful approach to the late piano works serves as a reminder of how to bring it all together. Gorgeous melodic lines are shaped with a singing quality; surprising ruptures have a teasing playfulness. And not long after the three-minute mark in a recording of Op. 119, No. 4, Kempff honors some stray, crunchy low-end notes that trouble the otherwise lilting passage — balancing Brahms’s strangeness with his grace.Rhapsody in E flat (Op. 119, No. 4)(Deutsche Grammophon)◆ ◆ ◆Hélène Grimaud, pianistWith and in music, one can withstand the ambient chaos of life and rediscover a possible harmony which doesn’t speak of lost paradise but of paradise found. Romanticism is a way of being. It is a fight for wholeness, for what is essential. It is to go toward that goal with empty hands and an open heart. Music is passion which has found its rhythm. With Brahms, the music’s inner pulse is very close to that of the human heart. Through his signature “Rückblick,” this sense of longing and looking back, his language becomes poignant beyond words.Symphony No. 3Vienna Philharmonic; Carlo Maria Giulini, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)◆ ◆ ◆Joshua Barone, Times editorIf anyone ever tells you that Brahms is boring or unemotional — and, bafflingly, that’s bound to happen — just respond with any of the three intermezzos of his Opus 117. After the first, a lullaby of crushing beauty, comes No. 2, in B flat minor. It too is a lullaby, with a lilting melody — as simple as the two-note phrases that open his Fourth Symphony — emerging from gently flowing runs. Despite the cascading architecture, it is not so much a passionate outpouring as an invitation, from one lonely soul to another, for five minutes of deeply felt intimacy.Intermezzo in B flat minor (Op. 117, No. 2)Radu Lupu, piano (Decca)◆ ◆ ◆David Allen, Times writerIt took me a long time to love Brahms, whose music once struck me as all too sleepy — “autumnal,” we critics often call it. It wasn’t until time forced me to learn that to live is to lose, I think, that I came to obsess over the dark side of his scores: the grief and sorrow, the loneliness and guilt, the desperation, even the anger. Nowhere is that darkness more engulfing than in his fourth and final symphony, a work with rage at its heart, whatever face it might try to maintain. And no conductor has made its horrors more consuming than Wilhelm Furtwängler.Symphony No. 4Berlin Philharmonic (Pristine Audio)◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      With Open Ears, Indian Ragas and Western Melodies Merge

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      Amit Chaudhuri charts his musical journey in a new book, “Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music.”Amit Chaudhuri, an author and vocalist, blends memoir and music appreciation in “Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music,” out now from New York Review Books. In it, Chaudhuri charts a personal journey that began with a Western-oriented love for the singer-songwriter tradition, followed by a headlong immersion into Indian classical music.That heritage remained supreme for him until an accident of what he calls “mishearing” made him conscious of the elements shared by ragas and Western sounds — a realization that led to his ongoing recording and performance project “This Is Not Fusion.”In the book, Chaudhuri reflects on the raga, the framework of Indian classical music. Resisting the urge to find an analogue to Western tradition, he writes: “A raga is not a mode. That is, it isn’t a linear movement. It’s a simultaneity of notes, a constellation.” Elsewhere he adds that it is neither a melody nor a composition, neither a scale nor the sum total of its notes. In an interview, Chaudhuri gave a brief introduction to the raga and described the evolution of his musical life, from childhood to “This Is Not Fusion.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.One of the first musical experiences I had was my mother singing Tagore songs. Growing up in Bombay, I remember the tranquil energy of her style; it wasn’t sentimental, but it was vibrant. Without realizing it, I was being drawn deeply into the sensuous immediacy of tone and tempo, and also a style that is precise, whose emotion lies in tone rather than in added sentiment.Of course, there was also “The Sound of Music” and “My Fair Lady.” I spent a while infatuated with Julie Andrews. Then, when I was 7 or 8, my father bought a hi-fi record player, which came with a couple of complimentary records that I probably played a part in choosing without being informed in any way. I think one of them was by the Who, which I liked a lot; “I Can See for Miles” was one of my favorite songs. I also had a taste for the early Bee Gees, and of course the Beatles.At 12, I started to play the guitar, and by the time I was 16, I was composing songs in a kind of singer-songwriter mold. Yet at the same time I began to be drawn to Hindustani classical music for the first time.There were a few reasons. I had a teenage attraction to difficulty, and I was becoming more interested in complex tonalities. I was listening to Joni Mitchell, and I loved the fact that she could be melodious, kind of open-ended in her harmonic compositions, while at the same time quite complex. I also knew of people like Ravi Shankar, partly because of the Beatles. When we thought of Indian classical music, we basically thought of instrumental music: tabla players playing really exciting rhythmic patterns, getting applause at the end of their improvisatory spells, and of course the sitar and sarod. Vocal music seemed to be a little out of the way, arcane.But then I heard Vishmadev Chatterjee — what an amazing voice. And at this time, there was also this man, Govind Prasad Jaipurwale, who began teaching my mother Hindi devotionals. I realized that while teaching her, he was doing tiny improvisations with his voice, which pointed to a different kind of imagination and training. I began to be receptive to the kind of Indian classical music that had always been there, but which I had shut out. I asked my mother whether I could learn classical music.For some time, different types of music lived alongside one another. I played a bit of rock guitar. And I worked on an album that I thought was my way of becoming a singer-songwriter. My song “Shame” comes from that time. Its tune begins with the note C-sharp, then with the word “shame” in the chorus returns to C-sharp. It goes to that note after touching C — so chromatic notes are introduced at the end of the chorus, with a degree of estrangement, as the chords are C major and A major. Here, I think I was already responding to the way notes in North Indian classical music create a hypnotic effect through small shifts.Then I began to practice Indian classical music a lot, about four and a half hours a day. And I spent a lot of time listening to music, trying to comprehend what is happening with the time cycles, then trying to sing to them and improvise. So obviously that began to take over some of the other musical activity.I should say that a raga is not a tune. It’s not a note, not a scale, not a composition — although the raga is sung in the framework of a composition. But you can identify the raga from a particular arrangement of notes that have to do with the way they’re ascending and descending; a particular pattern in the ascent and a particular pattern in the descent identifies the raga.You cannot introduce notes which aren’t there in the raga, but you can slow it down. You can evade presenting the delineation immediately. That evasion is partly where the imagination and the creativity lie. You could climb up to the octave, and then you are done with what’s basically a cluster of notes that could be sung in a minute in a song. But doing this over 30, maybe even 40, minutes — that becomes an expansive idea of creation, not just delineating or stating, but finding different ways of saying. That’s what’s at work here, in the khayal form especially.The expanded time cycle allows you to explore these notes, to make the ascent and descent very slowly. The ear might recognize the fast version of the ektaal rhythmic system, which sounds like the normal version.The fast ektaalAmit ChaudhuriNow, when that added space occurs, you don’t keep time in an ordinary sense, but you are aware that the 12 beats of the ektaal have been multiplied, each one by four beats, until it ends, and you come back to the beginning.The slow ektaalAmit ChaudhuriSo there’s this kind of time remaining to sing and elaborate a bit on the progression. That’s an extraordinary modernist development. You can hear it in the raga Darbari by Ustad Amir Khan. It’s an amazing recording.Ragas are basically found material. Indians might say there are 83 of them, or a thousand; I don’t know. No more than maybe 50 ragas are sung today in the North Indian classical tradition. And maybe there are 30 that you hear over and over again, taking into account the fact that we don’t hear the morning and afternoon ragas because concerts are in the evening.That’s because ragas have specific times and seasons. The raga Shree is associated with twilight and evening.And the raga Basant, which has almost the same notes, is sung in the spring.If architecture is a language with which to understand space and time, so is the raga. It’s also like language. For instance, you don’t use the word evening to refer to morning. Similarly, you don’t sing the morning raga Bhairav in the evening. With recordings, though, you can, if you wish, listen to ragas at any time of the day. Until the recording studios came along, ragas came to life only ephemerally.So this was primarily the music that I practiced. The singer-songwriter had gone into permanent retirement. But by the late 1990s, that zeal of the convert that had possessed me when I was younger had passed, and I began to return to my record collection and listen to Jimi Hendrix. Bent notes, the blues, the raga Gujri Todi — all of that came together as I was listening. A moment of “mishearing” occurred when I thought I heard the riff to “Layla” in that raga.A week or two later, it happened again. I was standing in a hotel lobby and someone was playing this Kashmiri instrument, and suddenly it seemed to launch into “Auld Lang Syne.” Of course, it wasn’t. But then I thought: Is it possible to create a musical vocabulary — not to bring things together consciously, East and West, but to capture the kind of instability of who I am and the richness of what I had discovered in that moment. And that’s why I call it “not fusion.”“Summertime” happened around the time that I was creating these pieces. In it, I’m improvising on the raga Malkauns, but within the form of “Summertime,” an early kind of jazz composition based on the blues. I’m showing that it’s possible to improvise on Malkauns according to this form, which is what a jazz pianist does. But I’m bringing in another tradition.The same thing is happening in “Norwegian Wood.” I’m taking the raga Bageshri and improvising on the space that each bit gives me. “I once had a girl, or should I say she once had me” — that gives me space to improvise on those notes. What I’m doing is a feature of khayal. That’s why I would say again, it’s not fusion, because fusion artists don’t do that. What they do is, they sing their own stuff in a Western setting.Exploring these ideas has been deeply satisfying. Has my musical journey come full circle? I have not gone back to becoming a singer-songwriter, but I have brought together everything I know. If you’re a creative artist, the things you know tend to come back to you in some way. I’m very lucky that happened to me. More

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      Listening to Music in the Desert at Dawn

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      Terry Tempest Williams, an author and environmental activist, on bird song, Keith Jarrett and slowing down.For a series of conversations about music with nonmusicians, I am swapping songs: exchanging pieces with my interlocutors to spark ideas about how their areas of expertise might relate to organized sound.Terry Tempest Williams is an author and environmental activist whose work celebrates the red-rock deserts of Utah, where she calls home. Her most recent book, “Erosion: Essays of Undoing,” describes the personal and political repercussions of the depredation of public lands.For our chat, I chose the “Abyss of the Birds” section from Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time.” She picked “First (Solo Voice)” from Keith Jarrett’s “Invocations.” These are edited excerpts from the interview.In your book “When Women Were Birds,” you describe childhood memories of your grandmother creating candlelit listening parties, where she would play records for you and your brother. They included classical music, but also field recordings of bird song.That’s why I picked the clarinet solo from Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time,” first performed in a German prisoner-of-war camp in 1941; it has stretches of desolate, sustained long notes alongside transcriptions of bird song.I hear it as breath. I knew the story before I knew the music, and I was struck by how, in the presence of war, you could have two minds: one watching out for the enemy and one listening for the call of a blackbird or a mockingbird. And when I first heard it, I was just devastated by the beauty.That first note appears to come out of nowhere and then builds through the power of one breath. Especially now, in the time of coronavirus, as a country we can’t breathe. We can’t breathe because of the virus. We can’t breathe because of politics, because of the Black and brown bodies that are being killed on the streets. And here, there is that one opening breath, and at the beginning, it feels like melancholy, it feels like a lament. But then as it progresses, there is that building of the silence to voice that becomes a lighter voice, the voice of birds, a fluttering and flourishing.The clarinet sets vibrations in motion so subtly that by the time we notice them as sound, they’ve already wormed their way into us.It also felt like light. I had heard that the piece was created at dawn, so this morning, I took my music outside and sat in the desert. As light spread, against that building of voice, it felt like the music mirrored the dawn itself. And I was absolutely stunned by the birds that were drawn in. The robins were the first ones. At moments, I couldn’t tell: Was that a fluttering from Messiaen or a fluttering from the robins? Then starlings came in, and it was almost like they were trying to copy the music, and then the desert mourning doves came in. And then the larks took over.Sitting in this grove of junipers, I thought about Messiaen and his musicians creating this music in a time of such confinement — and that is the power of community.Messiaen was a Catholic who believed in eternity as something both comforting and terrifying. As someone who fights for the preservation of wilderness, to what extent do you also have to think of time outside of how it is measured by humans?I was a child in 1962, when my grandmother read Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.” We were in her garden putting seeds in bird feeders. And she said, “Terry, can you imagine a world without bird song?” It was a terrifying thought. Birds allow us to be present in the moment, but they also link me to a time before the human record and to what will be as we live our own apocalypse in terms of climate collapse. So they’re an arrow pointing in both directions.Messiaen said, “It is in a spirit of no confidence in myself, or I mean in the human race, that I have taken bird songs as a model.” And he goes on to talk about the “sovereign freedom” of birds.That is a beautiful paradox I hear in his music. Birds are the ultimate symbol of freedom. They are also the symbol of presence. They hold their past, and we pray that they will carry the earth into the future. Here he was a devout Catholic, and yet he sought his spiritual source not from God but from God’s creation.The classic instrument to represent a bird would be the flute, but here it’s brought down a few octaves. It’s mediated, or translated.He slows their song down so we can really hear. And birds feel like they are the mediators between us and heaven. I also think that since birds travel within the realm of air, to choose a clarinet, a single reed instrument that requires breath, is such a beautiful manifestation.I was really touched by the piece you chose. While the Messiaen exists in this pure darkness with no echo coming back, Keith Jarrett’s saxophone solo plays with the acoustics of the German abbey where it was recorded, a man-made space designed for transcendence.The two pieces feel interlinked. They’re both single-reed, solo voices. One is highly composed, the other born of improvisation. And both of them felt like invocations. With Keith Jarrett’s solo, it was the echo that moved me most. This energetic vibration that I feel especially attuned to now as we are a year into a pandemic that we first thought was a pause and we now know is a place. The echoes we feel in our isolation, our own solo voices.Jarrett invites us to ask how well can we live with uncertainty. He offers us a path of improvisation, and the echo turns it into a call and response.At the heart of improvisation is listening. Jarrett is listening to the echoes, to the spaces in between his notes. You can almost hear him wondering: What happens if I push this note through the resonance trail of the last one, like concentric smoke rings? Can I smudge the difference between the note I play in this moment and the residue that’s still lingering from the previous one?It’s in the listening that you open up creative space. I was astonished by a passage about two minutes and 50 seconds in, where the music builds to this fullness. For a while, I lost all track of time.That’s where he stays on one note and bends the pitch. It develops these microtonal inflections that no longer belong to Western music. He allows the note to wilt and revive. He seems to be exploring the spaces in between notes.If someone were to say, “Tell me where you live, what do you experience,” I would point to this piece. It is this spaciousness. It is the echo of wall against wall in the narrow confines of these red-rock canyons.Both of these pieces are filled with memory. How do we access that? For me the bridge is silence and stillness.As harrowing and as grief-filled as this pandemic has been, it has brought us to this place of slowing down and listening. And that has been part of the blessing. If we are going to survive, that is what is required. More

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      Members of the Paris Opera Take Their Talents to a Different Stage

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      The singers, dancers and musicians played on, serenading their phones, pirouetting in masks and performing, faceless, on the radio.PARIS — For the past year, opera lovers worldwide have had little choice but to revisit favorite productions and performances via their screens at home, but the singers, musicians and dancers at the Paris Opera have continued, all while making their peace with pandemic life. Three members of the company described their experiences.The Chorus MasterFor José Luis Basso, chorus master at the Paris Opera since 2014, not even France’s penchant for strikes had prepared him for the government-ordered lockdown imposed here on March 17 last year.“From one day to the next, we found ourselves stuck at home,” he recalled in a telephone conversation. “It was dramatic. A singer needs to practice and vocalize every day, and that’s not so easy in a city like Paris where you have neighbors and building rules. So out of a certain despair, they did these little videos as a way of expressing their anguish about being without work.”For the most ambitious video, Mr. Basso, who rehearses and sometimes directs the group, brought together 52 of the chorus’s 110 members to record individual videos of “Nessun dorma” from Puccini’s “Turandot.” The performances were spliced together, renamed “To Say Thank You” and dedicated to health and other frontline workers. Then, in September, following a temporary reduction of infections in France, the chorus was called back to the company’s two theaters, the Palais Garnier and the Opéra Bastille.“At first there was real fear, almost hysteria, about passing on the virus,” Mr. Basso said, “but people are more relaxed now. No operas were programmed in the fall, so we began preparing for the new productions of ‘Aïda’ and ‘Faust,’ which involved a lot of work since the chorus plays a big role in both operas.”Despite a second wave of infections, which began in the fall and continues, “Aïda” and “Faust” have now been staged and streamed, with all but the lead singers wearing masks. “At first we didn’t know what masks to use,” Mr. Basso said, “but eventually we opted for two — one for walking around the theater and another for singing that allows projection of the voice and understanding of words.”Yet, with some medical experts saying that we must learn to live with Covid, even when “normal” opera performances resume, masks onstage and in the orchestra pit may not be disappearing soon. “I’ve asked myself,” said Mr. Basso, 55, who in June returns to the San Carlo opera house in Naples, Italy, to become chorus master, “in the future will our choral work have to be like this?”l’Opéra de ParisValentine Colasante, a prima ballerina at the Paris Opera Ballet, performing a passage from Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” in her kitchen. The dance became part of a video to thank frontline workers.l’Opéra de ParisThe BallerinaValentine Colasante, 32, a prima ballerina at the Paris Opera Ballet, was greatly relieved when lessons from her usual teachers resumed, albeit online, as soon as the lockdown began. “This enabled us to keep up our routines,” she explained in a telephone interview, “with morning classes for coaching, dancing, muscle strengthening, and in the afternoon more specific exercises. This also meant we were in good physical condition when we could resume work.”That came in September when the ballet corps returned to its home at the Palais Garnier, although it is still not allowed to perform before a full house. Rather, as with opera productions, performances of “La Bayadère” in December, the annual gala in January and “Le Parc” this month were recorded for rebroadcast. “One is very aware that there’s no one there,” Ms. Colasante said, “But you try to adapt like everyone else who’s having to work online.”Covid precautions have also required wearing masks for rehearsals and for the gala’s “Ballet Parade.” “It’s the only solution we have if we want to keep on training,” she said. “When some very intense effort is called for, we can remove the mask, but we keep them on most of the time. It’s restricting, but it means we can return to the Palais Garnier to train. We are artists and we have to be ready when things return to normal.”Like members of the Paris Opera chorus and orchestra, the ballet company found its own way of saying “merci” to health and other frontline workers. In this case, some 60 dancers were invited to improvise at home — in kitchens, halls or gardens — to a passage from Prokofiev’s ballet “Romeo and Juliet.” Using smartphones, they recorded themselves or, as in Ms. Colasante’s case, were recorded by a partner. The movie director Cédric Klapisch then edited their moves into a charming four-minute, 39-second video.“Everyone was very enthusiastic about doing this as a sincere homage to health workers,” said Ms. Colasante, who appears briefly in a red dressing gown. “I think we all wanted to convey our emotions, to share what we were living through, to tell a story with our bodies. And I have my own four minutes as a permanent record for myself.”Members of the Paris Opera orchestra performing “After the Storm.” The final video that was created included images of nurses, doctors, hospital wards and ambulances. l’Opéra national de ParisThe MusicianWith last March’s lockdown coming soon after a lengthy strike at the Paris Opera, “we were already spending too much time at home,” Nicolas Chatenet recalled. Still, resigned to a new stoppage of perhaps three months, as the opera’s first solo trumpeter he decided to make good use of the time “to do what I couldn’t do when I was in the orchestra.”So when orchestra members decided that they, too, would make a video dedicated to health workers, he was eager to participate. “We wanted to do something that would convey musically and emotionally how we at home were feeling about those who were working,” Mr. Chatenet, 35, explained.The question of what to play was resolved when the orchestra welcomed a short piece called “Storm” that Mr. Chatenet had composed in 2014 for a brass ensemble. After a colleague orchestrated and trimmed the score, there came the challenge of recording 71 instrumentalists live on smartphones.“I thought we’d have to help the sound, but we were astonished that it sounded really good,” he said. Images of nurses, doctors, hospital wards and ambulances were then spliced into the final video called “After the Storm.”In the summer, restrictions on movements were relaxed, and Mr. Chatenet joined the opera orchestra for a live Bach concert in September and two concerts of Richard Strauss and Schönberg in October before a limited audience and under the baton of the company’s outgoing music director, Philippe Jordan.The orchestra’s main scheduled event for the 2020-21 season, however, was Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. When a planned stage production directed by Calixto Bieito was canceled by Covid, the cycle was broadcast on the radio, again conducted by Mr. Jordan. Mr. Chatenet’s bad luck was to catch the virus at the music conservatory where he teaches, and he was forced into isolation just when his trumpet should have been sounding the “Ride of the Valkyries.”His chance to rejoin his orchestra came last month with “Aïda.” “It was strange to be together again,” he said, “to recapture the feeling that we had when we played together every week.” But even though Mr. Chatenet never stopped practicing, the break brought an unexpected plus. “We have a 7-month-old baby,” he said, “so it’s given me a lot of time to get to know her. I was pretty lucky about that.” More

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      Paul Laubin, 88, Dies; Master of Making Oboes the Old-Fashioned Way

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      He learned the craft from his father and continued to make his instruments by hand. Laubin oboes are cherished for their dark and rich tone.Paul Laubin, a revered oboe maker who was one of the few remaining woodwind artisans to build their instruments by hand — he made so few a year that customers might have to wait a decade to play one — died on March 1 at his workshop in Peekskill, N.Y. He was 88. His wife, Meredith Laubin, confirmed the death. She said that Mr. Laubin, who lived in Mahopac, N.Y., had collapsed at his workshop at some point during the day and the police found his body there that night.In the world of oboes, his partisans believe, there are Mr. Laubin’s oboes and then there is everything else.Mr. Laubin was in his early 20s when he began making oboes with his father, Alfred, who founded A. Laubin Inc. and built his first oboe in 1931. He took over the business when his father died in 1976. His son, Alex, began working alongside him in 2003.Oboists in major orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the St. Louis Symphony, have played Mr. Laubin’s instruments, cherishing their dark and rich tone.“There is something that strikes a chord deep in your body when you play a Laubin,” said Sherry Sylar, the associate principal oboist of the New York Philharmonic. “It’s a resonance that doesn’t happen with any other oboe. It rings inside your body. You get addicted to making that kind of a sound and nothing else will do.”In a dusty workshop near the Hudson River, lined with machines built as long ago as 1881, Mr. Laubin crafted his oboes and English horns with an almost religious sense of precision. He wore an apron and puffed a cob pipe as he drilled and lathed the grenadilla and rosewood used to make his instruments. (The pipe doubled as a testing device: Mr. Laubin would blow smoke through the instrument’s joints to detect air leaks.)His father taught him instrument-making techniques that date back centuries. As the decades passed and instrument makers began embracing computerized design and factory automation, the younger Mr. Laubin steadfastly resisted change. As far as he was concerned, if it took 10 years to build a good oboe — well, so be it.“What’s the rush?” Mr. Laubin said in an interview with The New York Times in 1991. “I don’t want anything going out of here with my name that I haven’t made and checked and played myself.”Mr. Laubin would store the blocks of his rare hardwoods outdoors for years so they could acclimate to extremes of weather and become more resilient instruments, resistant to the cracks that are the bane of woodwind players. After he drilled a hole that would become the instrument’s bore, the chunk of wood sometimes needed another year to dry out.Mr. Laubin, who was a professional oboist as a young man, constantly played each oboe he worked on in search of imperfections. “Every key is a struggle,” he told News 12 Westchester in 2012.When a Laubin oboe was finally completed, its unveiling became a cause for celebration. One customer arrived at the Peekskill workshop with a bottle of champagne, and as he played his first few notes, Mr. Laubin raised a toast.Mr. Laubin learned oboe-making from his father, who made his first instrument in 1931.via Laubin familyPaul Edward Laubin was born on Dec. 14, 1932, in Hartford, Conn. His father, an oboist and music teacher, started making oboes because he was dissatisfied with the quality of the instruments that were available; he built the first Laubin oboe as an experiment, melting down his wife’s silverware to make its keys. Paul’s mother, Lillian (Ely de Breton) Laubin, was a homemaker.As a boy, Paul was enchanted by the instruments he saw his father making, but Alfred initially did not want his son to pursue music. Paul kept pestering him; when he was 13 his father reluctantly gave him an oboe, a reed and a fingering chart, and Paul taught himself how to play.Mr. Laubin studied auto mechanics and music at Louisiana State University in the 1950s. Before long, his yearning to perform got the better of him, and he landed a spot in the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Soon after that, he finally joined the family business and began to build oboes with his father in the garage of their home in Scarsdale, N.Y.In 1958, they moved their workshop to a clarinet factory in Long Island City in Queens, and for a time the business was churning out (relatively speaking) 100 instruments per year.Mr. Laubin married Meredith Van Lynip, a flutist, in 1966. He moved the company to its current location in Peekskill in 1988. As time passed, Mr. Laubin’s team got smaller, and so did his production.By the 1990s, A. Laubin Inc. was producing about 22 instruments a year. By around 2005, the average was down to 15. Over time, the scarcity of Laubin oboes only added to their legend. The company has rarely advertised, relying on word of mouth. A grenadilla oboe costs $13,200, and a rosewood instrument costs $14,000.In addition to his wife and son, Mr. Laubin is survived by a daughter, Michelle; a sister, Vanette Arone; a brother, Carl; and two grandchildren.Mr. Laubin was well aware that selling so few instruments a year, no matter how exquisite, did not necessarily make financial sense. “I chose to follow my father even though I knew I’d never get rich on it,” he told The Times in 1989. “I would have to think twice about starting it today.”The company’s fate is now undetermined. Alex Laubin served as office manager and helped with some aspects of production but did not learn the full process. He often urged his father to modernize their operation — to little avail.“No one sits down anymore and files out keys,” Meredith Laubin said. “No one turns out one oboe joint at a time. This is all automated now, like how robots make cars. But Paul wasn’t endorsing any of these things. To him, there was no cheating the family recipe.”But Mr. Laubin knew the old ways would come to an end. In recent years, he was finding it harder to ignore the stark realities of being an Old World artisan in the modern era.“Paul got to have one part of his dream, which was to be able to work with his son,” Ms. Laubin said. “But the other part of his dream, knowing that his work would continue on in the way he did things, he knew that wasn’t going to happen.”Nevertheless, he hewed to tradition. On his work table the day he died lay the beginnings of Laubin oboe No. 2,600. More