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      Top Orchestras Have No Female Conductors. Is Change Coming?

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      At the largest American ensembles, one of music’s most stubbornly homogeneous spheres, a shift might be on the horizon.For years, they have worked their way to the top of the classical music industry. They have confronted stereotypes that they are too weak to lead. They have shared advice about how to deal with sexist comments and even how to dress.Now a group of women could be on the cusp of breaking barriers in one of music’s most stubbornly homogeneous spheres: the male-dominated world of orchestral conducting.In the history of American orchestras, only one woman has risen to lead a top-tier ensemble: Marin Alsop, whose tenure as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra ended last month. Her departure has ushered in an unsettling era for the country’s musical landscape. Among the 25 largest ensembles, there are now no women serving as music directors.Only one woman has risen to lead a top-tier American ensemble: Marin Alsop, whose tenure as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra ended last month.Schaun Champion for The New York TimesAlsop, 64, said in an interview that she was surprised the statistics remain “so shockingly brutal.” When she assumed the top spot in Baltimore in 2007, she expected more women would soon be appointed at other orchestras.They never were. Instead, she said, she met resistance when she tried to bring in more women as guest conductors.Alsop said she feels the current moment could be different, since the #MeToo movement and a broad reckoning over severe gender and racial disparities in classical music are putting pressure on arts leaders.“I hope that we’re past the tipping point,” she said. “It feels that way. But I’ve been naïve in believing that before.”For women in conducting, there are reasons to be optimistic. Administrators at major ensembles in cities like Atlanta, Minneapolis and Cincinnati, as well as Baltimore, are vowing to ensure that women are serious contenders.The Finnish conductor Susanna Malkki is considered a serious contender for a major American position.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesSo is Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, who leads the City of Birmingham Orchestra in England.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesSearch committees are looking at a mix of established artists and rising stars, according to interviews with 20 committee members, administrators, players and conductors.Among the most frequently mentioned names are Susanna Malkki, 52, the chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, and Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, 35, who leads the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in Britain.Mark Volpe, the former president and chief executive of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, said that while “progress has been painfully slow,” orchestras were likely to appoint more women over the next several years.“People respond to pressure,” he said. “There is heightened awareness of the imperative to be more inclusive.”Women are winning plum jobs as assistant and guest conductors, typically steppingstones to prestigious posts. Eun Sun Kim has just begun her tenure at the San Francisco Opera, becoming the first woman to serve as music director of a major American opera house.“You’re going to see an acceleration,” said Deborah Borda, the New York Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, who also serves as chairwoman of the jury at La Maestra, an international conducting competition for women. “The foot is on the gas.”The German conductor Ruth Reinhardt, 33, a former assistant conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, said, “My generation is maybe the first one who got equal opportunities to develop and grow.”Still, she said she feels there is a perception that there is only space for a small number of women to rise. “We have thousands of male conductors, and there’s good male conductors and bad male conductors and everything in between,” she said. “There should be a right to have just as many women conductors.”Jeri Lynne Johnson leading the ensemble she founded, Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra.Ed A. Kennedy IIIRuth Reinhardt leading the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.Sylvia ElzafonOpenings loom: Roughly a third of the music directors at the top 25 largest orchestras in the United States are planning to step down over the next several years. That includes veterans like Louis Langrée, 60, at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Robert Spano, 60, at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. The contract of Riccardo Muti, 80, at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra ends in 2022. Baltimore’s podium is currently empty, and at the Minnesota Orchestra, Osmo Vanska, 68, is stepping down after the coming season. There are current or coming openings in Indianapolis, Kansas City and Salt Lake City.But some women describe an uphill battle. They continue to face stereotypes that only men can serve as maestros. They also grapple with the perception that they do not have enough experience to lead elite ensembles. This can lead to a paradox: While top orchestras demand their conductors be seasoned, particularly if they’re going to appear on prestigious subscription series, it is hard to get that experience if you do not already have it.Jeri Lynne Johnson, the founder and artistic director of the Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra in Philadelphia, said that earlier in her career orchestras turned her down for conducting positions because they said she was not what audiences expected a music director to look like.Johnson, who is Black, said she felt ensembles seemed more willing to take chances on young men than young women. While the average age of music directors skews older, American orchestras have shown a willingness to hire charismatic young men, such as Gustavo Dudamel, who was named to lead the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2007, when he was 26. Yannick Nézet-Séguin was 35 when he was hired by the Philadelphia Orchestra in 2010; Andris Nelsons, 34 when he was named music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2013.“Female leadership is more necessary now than it ever was,” Johnson said. “We need to allow the insight and perspective of someone who has been kept out of the halls of power, to create more inroads for other people.”Across 174 American ensembles of all sizes, about 9 percent of music directors were women in 2016, the last year for which data is available, according to the League of American Orchestras. Experts say a lack of role models has contributed to gender disparities in conducting. Orchestras also have historically given women fewer opportunities to lead ensembles as guests, making it difficult for them to practice and to build relationships with administrators and players.Xian Zhang is the music director of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra.Cherylynn TsushimaDalia Stasevska leading the First Night of the BBC Proms earlier this summer.Chris ChristodoulouThe talent pool has widened in recent years. Competitions, master classes and fellowships geared toward women have become more popular. Veteran conductors like Alsop and JoAnn Falletta, the music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in New York since 1999, have started programs to mentor rising artists.Falletta, 67, said she helps women navigate a variety of issues, including what to wear while conducting and how to build trust with boards of directors dominated by men.“You have to find your own authority,” she said. “You don’t have to imitate anyone. You don’t have to be like a Toscanini. That actually doesn’t work anymore, to be a conductor with totalitarian power.”Orchestra leaders say they are working to include more women and people of color on hiring committees — a critical step, they say, in ensuring that female candidates are fairly considered.Jonathan Martin, the president of the Cincinnati Symphony, said he believed systemic discrimination in orchestras had kept women from attaining music director posts for decades. He said he rejected the idea that women have only in recent years gained enough experience to be considered for positions at large ensembles.“It was an issue of opportunity,” he said. “It was never an issue of talent.”A lack of diversity among board members has contributed to the dearth of female conductors, many say. Across the industry, boards are about 58 percent male and 92 percent white, according to the League of American Orchestras.Jeannette Sorrell started her own ensemble, Apollo’s Fire, a Baroque orchestra based in Cleveland, in part, she said, because she encountered bias while trying to navigate a traditional career. She said a lack of diversity on boards is a major obstacle.“A lot of orchestras are still led by boards of directors who see their role as the guardians of tradition,” said Sorrell, 56. “That is a very important role for a board, but it’s not the only role.”Orchestras, hoping to expand the pool of experienced, viable candidates for when vacancies arise, have made an effort in recent years to appoint more women as assistant conductors and guests.At the Los Angeles Philharmonic, leaders say change will come only when women are allowed to build long-term relationships with orchestras. Of 40 young conductors who have participated in the Philharmonic’s conductor fellowship program since 2009, about a quarter have been women.Lina González-Granados is among the rising conductors creating buzz.Chris LeeGemma New is the principal guest conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.Sylvia Elzafon“Conducting doesn’t happen overnight,” said Chad Smith, the Philharmonic’s chief executive. “There’s a lag time here, which is something we’re all struggling with.”Malkki, who serves as the Philharmonic’s principal guest conductor, said orchestras sometimes focused too much on hiring charismatic figures instead of those with solid technical abilities.“Some artists are just put aside because they are not glamorous enough,” she said. “There is talent, and if we give the dedicated people opportunities, then these people will also grow into greater artists.”While search committees at many orchestras are just beginning to convene — Cincinnati announced the members of its panel on Sept. 2 — the wish list for some includes stars like Malkki and Grazinyte-Tyla.Other frequently mentioned names include respected artists like Sorrell; Barbara Hannigan, 50, a Canadian soprano and conductor; Anna Skryleva, 46, a Russian who leads the Theater Magdeburg in Germany; Debora Waldman, 44, the director of the Orchestre National Avignon-Provence in France; the Australian conductor Simone Young, 60; and Xian Zhang, the music director of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra.Up-and-coming conductors like Reinhardt; Karina Canellakis, 40, the chief conductor of Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra; Elim Chan, 34, the chief conductor of the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra; Lina González-Granados, 35, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s conducting fellow; Gemma New, 34, a New Zealand-born conductor who is the principal guest conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra; Dalia Stasevska, 36, the principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra; and the Austrian conductor Katharina Wincor, 26, are also creating buzz.While it may take several years for widespread change to come, some women say they are already noticing a shift. They are getting more invitations to appear with top orchestras, and they say their fan bases are widening.Speranza Scappucci, 48, an Italian conductor who is rising in the opera world, said ensembles should move swiftly.“There are some really amazing women out there,” she said. “I look at it and I think, ‘Wow, it’s 2021. What are we waiting for?’ ” More

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      The Met Opera Races to Reopen After Months of Pandemic Silence

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      The company, which faced steep losses after the pandemic forced it to shut down on March 12, 2020, is working to lure operagoers back to its 3,800-seat theater. Tera Willis was backstage at the Metropolitan Opera, painstakingly adding strand after strand of salt-and-pepper hair to a half-finished wig — one of dozens she and her team were racing to finish in time for opening night later this month after the pandemic had kept performers from getting measured until mid-August.“I would love about six months,” Ms. Willis, the head of the company’s wig and makeup department, said. “We have six weeks.”The chorus was back at work, singing through masks.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesA performer warmed up at a rehearsal for Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which will open the season.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesIn the Met’s underground rehearsal rooms, chorus members were straining to project through the masks they must rehearse in, a few pulling the fabric a couple of inches from their face for a moment or two. Just outside its gilded auditorium, which has been empty since the pandemic forced the opera house to close a year and half ago, stagehands were reupholstering some worn red velvet seats. Beneath the arched entry to the opera house, an electrician was installing wiring to make some of the heavy front doors touchless.Reopening after the long shutdown was never going to be easy for the Metropolitan Opera, the largest performing arts company in the nation. Unlike a Broadway theater, which must safely bring back one show, the Met, a $300-million-a-year operation, is planning to mount 196 performances of 22 different operas this season, typically changing what’s on its mammoth stage each night.The financial stakes are high: The Met, which lost $150 million in earned revenues during the pandemic, must now draw audiences back to its 3,800-seat opera house amid renewed concerns about the spread of the Delta variant. Will people return in force, after getting out of the habit of spending nights at the opera? Will the Met’s strict vaccine mandate — it will ban audience members under 12, who cannot yet be vaccinated — reassure operagoers, especially older ones? How much will travel bans hurt the box office, where international visitors made up as much as 20 percent of ticket buyers?The Met is warily watching sales. It has sold about $20 million worth of tickets for the season so far, the company said, down from $27 million at the same point in the season before the pandemic. Subscriptions, which have been steadily eroding at American symphony orchestras and opera companies in recent years, are down by about a quarter from before the pandemic, but officials expect more subscribers to renew when they feel safe about attending. Strong recent sales, and the speed with which the Met sold out an affordably priced performance of Verdi’s Requiem on Saturday to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, offered hope that audiences will come back.The financial uncertainty led the Met to seek concessions from its unions, some of which will be restored if and when the box office approaches prepandemic levels. The ensuing labor disputes further complicated the reopening: The company did not reach a deal with its stagehands until July, delaying summer technical rehearsals, and only settled another, with its orchestra, late last month, removing the last major barrier to reopening.Riyo Mitsui, one of the Met’s wigmakers, at work.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesSo now the company is gearing up quickly, preparing to marshal the forces of roughly 1,000 singers, orchestra players, conductors, dancers and actors scheduled to perform this season. It started with two free performances of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection,” outdoors at Lincoln Center last weekend; will perform Verdi’s Requiem on Saturday, its first performance back inside the opera house, a concert that will be broadcast on PBS; and it will finally open the opera season on Sept. 27 with Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” its first opera by a Black composer. The company is hoping that “Fire” and another contemporary opera — “Eurydice,” by Matthew Aucoin — will draw new audiences. The whole organization is getting ready to reopen. Keith Narkon, a ticket seller, was with his colleagues behind the Met’s box-office windows, stuffing tickets into envelopes — and happy to be back after the virus had taken away their jobs for more than a year.In the box office, employees are getting the tickets ready for opening night.Krista Schlueter for The New York Times“It was just this numbness,” Mr. Narkon, a self-described opera fanatic, said of the long shutdown. As the opera house buzzes with preseason anticipation, there are still bruised feelings from the labor battles, but there is also a palpable sense of relief to finally be back in the building together and working again after so many months of unemployment checks and uncertainty.“You don’t realize how much you respect the job until you don’t have it,” said Phillip D. Smith, a stagehand who has worked at the Met for over 20 years, as he ripped the worn velvet off a seat cushion.“You don’t realize how much you respect the job until you don’t have it,” Phillip D. Smith, a stagehand who has worked at the Met for over 20 years, said as he reupholstered a chair.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesThe doors to the auditorium got a fresh coat of paint.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesBut life backstage is still far from normal, as company officials keep a close eye on the Delta variant, and the steps they must take to keep the company and the audience safe..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The company’s vaccination mandate is so strict that an unvaccinated telecom worker who arrived for a job was turned away. A special patron’s entrance area has been turned into a testing center where people in rehearsals must get nasal-swab tests twice a week. And to keep audience members apart from the performers, the first two rows of seats in the auditorium will be blocked off through the end of the year.“On one hand, it’s frightening and frustrating to see the rate of infection,” said Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met. “But it’s so thrilling to see the possibility within grasp of actually opening performances.”Workers cleaned one of the stairways at the opera house.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesSome bitterness lingers over the labor disputes, which were resolved when the company’s three biggest unions agreed to new contracts that cut their pay modestly, saving the company money by moving some workers to a different health care plan and reducing the number of guaranteed full-time members of the orchestra and chorus.In the props department, where scenic artists were working to create corn on the cob and a pat of butter for a Thanksgiving dinner in the upcoming production of “Fire,” Ryan Hixenbaugh, an artist, lamented that some of the work had been finished in California, where Met management outsourced work after locking out its stagehands in December in the fight over pay cuts. “We had the capability of making all the scenery for all of these operas here,” Mr. Hixenbaugh said.With the opera house empty for more than a year, there was sprucing up to do: Keishla Nieves cleaned a brass railing.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesWith no audiences and no crowds for a year and a half, there was no need for stanchions to direct people to the Box Office. But they will soon be put in service again.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesSome stagehands made ends meet during the shutdown, and the lockout, by building outdoor shelters for the city’s new al fresco dining spots. Others got work in television production, which rebounded before live performance.When they returned to the Met in July, the stagehands found an enormous amount of work. For more than a year, the opera house had sat still, as if frozen in time. The decades-old machinery that makes the Met’s stage run was not built for such dormancy.Two scenic backdrops that had been hanging for months had fallen to the ground earlier in the year. The wheels on the Met’s wagon system — which is powerful enough to quickly shuttle its mammoth sets of Ancient Egypt, Imperial China or Fin-de-Siècle Paris on and offstage — were flattened by the weight of the sets that had been left on top of them. And parts of the fly system, made up of wire rope lines and riggings, had rusted.“To leave it sitting still for that length of time was terrifying,” said David Feheley, the Met’s technical director. “So many of these systems have lasted as long as they have because of constant attention.”Stagehands built sets backstage. When they returned to the opera house, they found that the stage machinery needed a great deal of maintenance work.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesTo accommodate all the urgent maintenance work, the Met’s technical rehearsals were pushed from the beginning of August to the end of the month. One opera, Gluck’s “Iphigénie en Tauride,” was canceled.The orchestra saw 11 of its 96 regular full-time members retire or leave their jobs during the pandemic, according to the orchestra committee, which negotiates labor issues on behalf of the musicians. A number of veteran stagehands retired too.The company hopes the excitement of working together again will outweigh any residual resentment.“The Met is maybe slightly fractured,” Mr. Gelb said, “but it is a family.”The Met is planning 196 performances of 22 different operas this season, which means a lot of ironing.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesPaul Tazewell, the costume designer for “Fire,” said that it was odd not to be able to see the faces of performers, who have been staying largely masked.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesAt this stage of the pandemic, it’s a family that can’t have any members under the age of 12, and not just in the audience. The Met’s performers cannot be young, either. In “Boris Godunov,” which is scheduled to open on Sept. 28, a part that is often sung by a boy soprano will be given to an adult mezzo-soprano. And in “Fire” — which is based on a memoir by Charles Blow, an Opinion columnist for The New York Times — a 13-year-old, Walter Russell III, will play the role of young Charles, who is supposed to be 7.“I have been trying to get into the mind of a 7-year-old kid,” Mr. Russell said.In the props department, scenic artists prepared a Thanksgiving dinner for the upcoming production of “Fire.”Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesTo reopen smoothly, the Met’s staff members still have numerous battles to wage.Everything from fabrics for costumes to machinery for stage lights to basic materials like plywood and steel are proving difficult to obtain because of pandemic supply-chain problems. And booking the international performers opera relies on has become a mess of unpredictable red tape, between visa troubles and virus-related travel restrictions.One of the few times performers can take their masks off these days is when they are being fitted in the costume shop, for photos that are taken to help designers take in the effect of each costume.“If there’s an unspoken feeling, normally I would be able to see that on a performer’s face, but I can’t access that,” said Paul Tazewell, the Tony-winning costume designer for “Fire.”A model of the “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” set.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesBut, come Sept. 27 — if all goes as planned — the masks will come off, the Sputnik chandeliers will ascend, the curtain will go up and live opera will be back onstage.Zachary Woolfe contributed reporting. More

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      Igor Oistrakh, Soviet-Era Violinist (and a Son of One), Dies at 90

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      His father, David, was one of the 20th century’s finest violinists, but Igor more than held his own as a musician and interpreter performing throughout the West.Igor Oistrakh, a noted violinist who was part of a violin-playing family that included his father, David, one of the 20th century’s finest exponents of the instrument, died on Aug. 14 in Moscow. He was 90.His son, the violinist Valery Oistrakh, said the causes were pneumonia and heart problems.Though much of his career coincided with the Cold War, Mr. Oistrakh was well known in New York and elsewhere in the West, since the Soviet Union sent its best musicians on tour. He made his New York debut at Carnegie Hall in February 1962 performing with Symphony of the Air under Alfred Wallenstein. Harold C. Schonberg, reviewing the concert in The New York Times, noted that few could measure up to David Oistrakh and pronounced Igor “a good violinist, though far from a great one.”But by December 1963, Mr. Oistrakh had performed several more times in New York and had established himself as an admirable musician independent of his father.“Little can be said about the 32-year-old Soviet musician’s superb artistry that has not already been said again and again,” Howard Klein wrote in The Times in a review of a Carnegie Hall recital that month. “His beautiful, silky tone, his effortless execution in devilish passages, his restrained yet powerful emotional thrust, were in evidence and were as stunningly projected as ever.”Father and son frequently played together. When David Oistrakh made his American debut as a conductor, leading the Moscow Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 1965, Igor was the soloist for the Tchaikovsky violin concerto.“David Oistrakh conducted like a proud father,” Theodore Strongin wrote in The Times, “giving his son all the leeway in the world and pacing the last movement up into a mad virtuoso fling. The sold-out audience loved it.”After his father’s death in 1974, Igor Oistrakh sometimes performed with his son. He was often accompanied in performances by his wife, the pianist Natalia Zertsalova, and critics often remarked on their like-mindedness.“One can sense them weighing every phrase,” James Allen wrote in The Scotsman, reviewing a 1999 performance at the Music Hall in Aberdeen, Scotland, “making minute adjustments, effortlessly setting up contrasts of tone and texture.”The Oistrakhs, father and son, in the United Kingdom in 1966. David Oistrakh died in 1974.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesIgor Davidovich Oistrakh was born to David and Tamara Ivanovna Oistrakh on April 27, 1931, in Odessa, Ukraine. He was studying violin by the age of 6. The household was, of course, immersed in music, and young Igor witnessed bits of history, including the time the composer Aram Khachaturian dropped by in 1940 to unveil the violin concerto he had written for David Oistrakh.“He came to play it on our piano,” Igor Oistrakh told The Times in 2001. “He did not take his overcoat off. He did not even sit at the piano. He just played, very vigorously. He was so loud that my great-great-grandmother, my father’s grandmother, was scared awake from her nap.”Mr. Oistrakh studied at the Central Music School and then at the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory. In 1949 he won top prize at an international youth violin competition in Budapest, and in 1952 he won the International Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition in Poland.He made his Western debut at Royal Albert Hall in London in 1953 and continued to perform all over the world in the Cold War era. International tensions occasionally intruded on his concerts, as they did in 1971 when, The Times wrote, a performance at Philharmonic Hall in Manhattan “was interrupted after the first piece by an unscheduled intermission during which security forces searched the hall for harassment devices that might have been planted by the groups that have been protesting the treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union.”Mr. Oistrakh made many recordings and was a conductor and teacher, taking a post at the Moscow Conservatory in 1958. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, he became a professor at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels for a time. At his death, he lived in Moscow.His wife died in 2017. In addition to his son, he is survived by a grandson.Mr. Oistrakh’s physical resemblance to his father was striking, so much so that Tamara Bernstein, reviewing a 1992 performance with the Toronto Philharmonic for The Globe and Mail of Canada, began by saying, “It is unnerving, to say the least, to see a late lamented violinist stride on stage to wild applause.”In 1998 The Miami Herald asked him a question he must have confronted frequently: Did he feel overshadowed by his father?“I think I’ve had a wonderful career of my own, playing with the best orchestras and conductors in the world,” he answered diplomatically, “and that I was lucky to have had such a great and wonderful father.” More

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      10 Hours Gives Us (Almost) All of Schumann’s Songs

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      Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber, peerless in lieder, have released an 11-disc set of Robert Schumann’s songs, many overlooked.Back in 1988, it was hearing the lieder of Robert Schumann that convinced Christian Gerhaher, then a philosophy student in Munich, to ask a pianist he knew from school, Gerold Huber, whether they might start playing some songs together.Three decades later, Gerhaher and Huber have long since become the greatest partnership in singing, and they come full circle this month with the release of an 11-disc box set of Schumann on Sony. As its cover announces, it contains “All the Songs.”“Gerold and I have worked on singing Schumann for 33 years,” Gerhaher, 52, said in an interview. “He composed nearly 300 songs, but what is astonishing is that every song is amazing, a revelation of possibilities, of thoughts, of beauty. There is maybe only one song I don’t like so much.” (It’s “Der Handschuh.”)Schumann has had an uncertain presence in the art song repertoire. While cycles like “Dichterliebe” are touchstones, much of his output remains overlooked. Gerhaher can cite only two prior attempts at anything comparable to a complete set, neither of them as cohesive as his new release.The baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, among the leading lieder advocates of the 20th century, taped about half the songs in the 1970s. Graham Johnson, an accompanist with encyclopedic tastes, compiled a very full set on Hyperion from 1996 to 2009. But he split the songs among different vocalists.That makes Gerhaher the first singer to finish a complete survey of his own (albeit with the help of colleagues in works written for the female voice or for groups). Huber is at the piano throughout, and the goal is finally to give Schumann his due as a connoisseur of lyrics — according to Gerhaher, “one of the best-read composers that there has ever been.”Gerhaher believes that Schumann took a far more literary approach to songs than, say, Schubert — an approach that was intended “to make these poems even more complicated than they are.” He did this not just in introducing tensions between text and music (and vocalist and pianist), but also by writing almost exclusively in cycles, combining disparate poems into coherent sets.That has always been obvious with cycles like the Eichendorff “Liederkreis” (Op. 39), or the “Kerner Lieder” (Op. 35). But it is true, too, Gerhaher said, of less monumental groupings with innocuous titles like “Three Songs” (Op. 83) or “Six Songs” (Op. 107) — their texts (sometimes by the same poet, sometimes drawn from different ones) freighted with deeper, often darker meaning when set together.Gerhaher is the first singer to finish a complete survey of his own (albeit with the help of colleagues in works written for the female voice or for groups).Daniel Etter for The New York Times“He doesn’t want to finish thinking about a poem,” Gerhaher said. “By putting them into music and then combining them into cycles, he stretches the semantic nature of a poem, in order to create something very different and new. This is what I love.”Schumann composed his songs in two spells. The first period, from 1840, has been seen as the epitome of Romanticism. The second has been heard skeptically, if at all, but Gerhaher has increasingly found it the richer. Schumann wrote these songs from 1849 to 1852, not long before he jumped into the Rhine in 1854 and died in a psychiatric asylum two years later. Like most of his later works, the late songs have been lesser to some ears, as antiquated prejudices about mental health have led to misunderstandings of their experimental tone.Gerhaher dissents, citing the Violin Concerto and the “Ghost Variations” as further evidence that this view is wrong. “Saying that the late Schumann was a sick Schumann, mentally and spiritually weak, is an assumption which is dangerous,” he said. “The assumption that we understand something as being weak is always combined with the assumption that we understand something else very well. Both are wrong, I think.”With that in mind, Gerhaher chose five late songs to introduce his new recording. Here are edited excerpts from his comments.‘Schneeglöckchen’ (Op. 96, No. 2)In Op. 96, you have five songs. Two and four are very disturbing, about human sorrow. The third, in the middle, is an August von Platen poem that explains that words can’t convey what they try to convey. These three describe humanity’s horrible situation: being thrown into the world and not even being able to talk to each other properly.There is another “Schneeglöckchen” (“Snowdrops”) in the “Liederalbum für die Jügend” (Op. 79), where it means something nice, because it’s a sign of the end of winter. But the anonymous poem Schumann sets here in Op. 96 is harder to understand. A voice comes to a snowdrop and says, you have to leave, a storm is coming. But why? It’s the end of winter; the flower has nothing to fear. The voice answers that the snowdrop’s “Liverei” — its uniform — is white, with a green trim.Why does it talk about a uniform? I looked through some uniform books, and found a similar one for a cavalry called the Scheither Corps, part of the Hanover regiment in the Seven Years’ War. There was a battle at Moys, near Görlitz, where the corps was defeated by Austria. There was one snowdrop rider left hurt, who couldn’t get home. And in the poem the voice says you have to go home. This is so disturbing, even if I can’t prove the connection.‘Himmel und Erde’ (Op. 96, No. 5)This last song, “Heaven and Earth,” is a resolution for the Op. 96 cycle. The first song is Goethe’s “Nachtlied”; it starts with the two nouns “Gipfel” (“hills”) and “Wipfel” (“treetops”). This last one, by Wilfried von der Neun, starts with the reverse, with “Wipfel” then “Gipfel.” You are confronted with these opposites, then you are confronted with heaven, and you see that these oppositions are not important anymore; they come together. It reminds me of the medieval German philosopher Nicholas von Kues, who wrote about the “coincidentia oppositorum” — the falling together of opposites.‘An den Mond’ (Op. 95, No. 2)At first you can’t understand this cycle at all. You see number one, “Die Tochter Jephtas” (“Jephthah’s Daughter”), and number three, “Dem Helden” (“To the Hero”). All three are Byron texts. What does it mean?In 1847, Fanny Mendelssohn died, and Felix Mendelssohn shortly after, and Schumann wrote some Byron into his book of poems. The first song is a memorial to Fanny. Jephthah’s daughter was this warrior without a name; she fought for her father, the king, but she didn’t get a name. This was Fanny’s fate: She was a composer, but she didn’t make a name as one. “To the Hero” is about Felix’s role in these years, especially to Schumann: the splendid hero of music.In the middle is “To the Moon.” It says, look, moon, you are kind of a star, but you are a cold star, because you reflect warm light from the sun — you are only a memory, sad, cold, hard memory. This is how Schumann combined the deaths of his two friends.‘Die Blume der Ergebung’ (Op. 83, No. 2)This cycle so abstract. You have three songs, and they represent three ways to set a poem. The first song, “Resignation,” is the most advanced and through-composed; the second is a varied strophic song; the third, “Der Einsiedler” (“The Hermit”), is a perfect strophic song. In “The Flower of Resignation,” you have five strophes, and in the middle of the third strophe, you see this word “Liebesschalen” (literally “love bowls”). This is the center of the middle strophe of these three songs, the creation of a third person by a couple. It can’t be an ongoing error that Schumann had this maniacal tendency to conceive of combinations.“Requiem” (Op. 90, No. 7)Op. 90 is maybe my favorite cycle overall. There is a downward spiral. It’s very dark, about accepting the vanity of the world and the sadness of being alone. We start with a framing song again, the song of a blacksmith who is helping Faust on his travels, naïvely unaware that Faust is seducing his wife. In the middle you have two song couples, which are examples of losing faith in life. The fourth is a wonderful song about love vanishing and death taking over.Then Schumann added this “Requiem” as a requiem for the poet, Nikolaus Lenau, whom he thought was dead but in fact only died around the day of the first performance of these songs. You have these illusions of eternity, of never-ending life. It’s so full of feeling, a coming-together of spirituality and sensuality. More

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      Classical Music Looks Ahead to a Fall in Flux

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      How will performances feel in the midst of pandemic regulations? Will institutions respond in actions, not just words, to calls for racial equity?Normally, when I look ahead to a new season, I have a pretty good idea of what the performances will be like.But it goes without saying that this is not a normal time. So even with usually sure bets — a new piece by a composer who has excited me in the past; recitals by performers I cherish; great casts in operas old and recent — it’s hard to know what the performances this fall will feel like. The very experience of gathering in concert halls is in flux with the lingering challenges of the pandemic.It looks as if vaccine mandates for audience members will be routine; I’m with those who see this move as the only way to make performances feel safe. But will masks be required or optional? Will there be full capacity, or some spacing in the audience? Will children be allowed, even if they’re still unvaccinated?And even with precautions, will audiences — especially ones that tend to be older, like those for many orchestras and opera companies — feel safe enough to come back? Will musicians gathered together on stages and in cramped pits convey confidence?Again, what will it feel like?And other crucial issues loom. Just months into the pandemic, when nationwide protests against racial injustice broke out after the killing of George Floyd, classical music was forced to grapple anew with questions of relevance, diversity and inclusion. One major institution after another issued statements condemning discrimination and pledging to do better at connecting with the diverse people they serve. Will these words be reflected in policies and programs?The Metropolitan Opera is speaking to the moment while addressing a gaping hole in its history. It will open its return season with “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” by the composer Terence Blanchard and the librettist Kasi Lemmons, based on a memoir by the New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow about growing up poor and Black in rural Louisiana. This will, shockingly, be the first opera by a Black composer to be presented by the company since its founding in 1883.In this case, I know what to expect, having reviewed the work’s 2019 premiere at Opera Theater of St. Louis, and can eagerly recommend this musically original, dramatically affecting and wrenchingly personal opera. Blanchard, a jazz trumpeter who has written acclaimed film scores, describes “Fire” not as a jazz opera, but as an opera in jazz. What he means, I think, is that jazz naturally permeates his compositional voice, but his score is symphonic — subtle, intricate, complex — taking an essentially traditional approach to opera as drama, with some inventive strokes.The Met’s vaccination policy means that it will not allow children under 12, which might threaten its holiday presentation of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Met is requiring proof of vaccination from everyone in the audience, and will not allow children under 12, since they are not yet eligible for the vaccines. Will this affect the company’s abridged, English-language version of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” this holiday season? The production typically attracts lots of parents with children. The company’s website says that, should young children be able to be vaccinated this fall, they will of course be welcome. If not, it would seem untenable for the Met to go forward with a family-friendly entertainment in December.Nagging concerns like these — along with the threat of cancellations because of virus outbreaks — may well linger in all the performing arts..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}As for the New York Philharmonic, this season it will not have access to David Geffen Hall, which is in the midst of an extensive, long-awaited renovation. The orchestra will perform mostly at Alice Tully Hall, the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall.Some intriguing programs reveal serious attempts to bring in composers from underrepresented groups and to showcase exciting younger artists, without neglecting the core repertory. Dalia Stasevska will lead a program (Oct. 20-23) featuring works by Missy Mazzoli, John Adams and, of special interest, Anthony Davis, the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his opera “The Central Park Five.” Davis’s “You Have the Right to Remain Silent,” a clarinet concerto written in 2007 and revised four years later, is its composer’s autobiographical depiction of an encounter with the police, and is therefore more timely than ever. Anthony McGill, the Philharmonic’s superb principal clarinetist (and the orchestra’s only Black player) is the soloist.Earlier in the month (Oct. 14-16), the Philharmonic’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, leads a seemingly more traditional program — but with a twist that shows the subtle ways in which concerns about racial and gender representation are affecting the concert experience. At the Rose Theater — more intimate than Geffen Hall — Leif Ove Andsnes will play Robert Schumann’s beloved Piano Concerto, but will open the concert with Clara Schumann’s solo Romance in A Minor, a nod to a composer slowly getting her long-belated due.Jaap van Zweden, the New York Philharmonic’s music director, will lead the orchestra at different venues as David Geffen Hall is closed for renovations.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesYou might have thought that a powerhouse institution like Carnegie Hall would want to come roaring back. It says much about this still-dicey moment for classical music, in terms of both financial and public health, that the hall is pacing itself and keeping its fall season relatively light. Its opening night on Oct. 6 offers Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who leads the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra, in a program that attempts to be both a gala celebration and a statement of purpose.The program, featuring the Philadelphians, opens with Valerie Coleman’s new “Seven O’Clock Shout,” written during the pandemic, followed by Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2, with the dazzling Yuja Wang as soloist. Next comes that gala standard, Bernstein’s Overture to “Candide.” The Iranian-Canadian composer Iman Habibi’s “Jeder Baum spricht” (2019), commissioned by the orchestra for Beethoven’s 250th anniversary last year, was written in dialogue with Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth symphonies. Here it will lead into an account of Beethoven’s Fifth, setting off a full Beethoven symphony cycle with Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra, originally planned for last year.These classic symphonies will be interspersed with contemporary pieces — which, though not a novel idea, is a good one. It feels all too familiar for a complete Beethoven symphony cycle to dominate Carnegie’s season.But will it in practice? It may well be that for some time yet, hearing even standard works played beautifully will feel restorative, almost miraculous.Yet given the crises we have endured and the urgent challenges that remain, I hope my wish wins out that institutions try harder to connect and engage, to foster living composers and new generations of artists. I’ve long believed that many classical ensembles, especially major orchestras, spend too much time thinking about how they play and not enough about what they play and why they play it. We all love the standard repertory. But an ensemble puts more on the line and fosters classical music as a living art form when it presents a new piece, champions a neglected older work or takes a risk with unconventional programming.These things have always mattered crucially in my thinking — now, more than ever. If this results in what some may see as grading on a curve — by giving extra credit, in a sense, to artists who reach out and take risks — so be it. The status quo will no longer suffice. More

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      The Changing American Canon Sounds Like Jessie Montgomery

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      This composer’s music — improvisatory, open to influence, personal yet resonant — will be hard to miss in the coming season.The history of classical music in the United States is one long identity crisis: the search for a homegrown sound, free from European influence. That anxiety has manifested itself time and again as self-sabotage, with some composers — almost always white men — exalted as pathbreakers, while truly original work coming from artists of color has been overlooked.That has changed in recent years: in fits and starts, then suddenly, with the wave of Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Classical institutions en masse have made earnest, if sometimes clumsy, efforts to rise to the moment and grant overdue attention to the marginalized composers who have always had answers to the question of America’s musical identity.One composer the field has especially turned to is Jessie Montgomery, whose often personal yet widely resonant music — forged in Manhattan, a mirror turned on the whole country — will be difficult to miss in the coming season.The number of times Montgomery’s orchestral works were programmed more than doubled each year from 2017 to 2020, said Philip Rothman, her publishing agent. (And that’s just a corner of her output.) Several years ago, that number was about 20; in 2021, it is expected to be nearly 400, including at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and the Minnesota Orchestra. And her calendar is booked with commissions far into the future, including as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s new composer in residence.Some of the spotlight on Montgomery is a product of pandemic restrictions; many ensembles have made cautious comebacks with small-scale pieces for strings, which are the heart of her body of work. But her swift rise to prominence is also the result of orchestras overhauling their repertoires to more prominently feature composers of color — an achievement that can sometimes feel like a burden on a single artist to speak for a whole race or nation.A new portrait of American sound has nevertheless emerged, with Montgomery’s music providing some of the latest, crucial touches.“She’s pretty much changing the canon for American orchestras,” said Afa S. Dworkin, the president and artistic director of the Sphinx Organization, which promotes racial and ethnic diversity in music. “The true language of American classical music is something that will distinguish our canon, and she is shaping its evolution.”Montgomery’s sound was influenced by her artistically rich and culturally diverse upbringing in New York.Tamara Blake Chapman for The New York TimesMONTGOMERY, 40, is a child of the Lower East Side, born to artistic parents. Her mother, Robbie McCauley, made theater that interrogated the country’s racial history; her father, Edward Montgomery, ran a studio where the young Jessie would sometimes hand-operate the elevator for jazz, punk and opera musicians.With Montgomery studying violin in one room; her father composing in another; and her mother rehearsing or writing in a home studio, their apartment had the feel of an artist residency. “There was no routine,” Montgomery said in a recent interview. “Everyone was sort of in their own modules doing their own thing. But I was always in a state of wonder.”She was exposed from an early age to the downtown milieu of her parents, while learning violin techniques and repertoire suited to both the uptown establishment and the world of improvisation.Her teacher Alice Kanack, Montgomery recalled, “created these improvisation games with the philosophy that each child has their own individual, innate, creative voice, and that it has to be encouraged while they’re young.” Those games provided a natural segue to composing, which she began in earnest at 11.By the 1990s Montgomery was a serious student who also spent her nights with friends raving in Queens to house music and hip-hop; there were, she said, “a lot of drugs.” But violin was something of a salvation for her, and she followed it to the Juilliard School. (Leaving the city was never a question because, she said, “I was still in the mind-set that there’s no other place like New York.”)Violin also led Montgomery to the Sphinx Organization’s annual competition. It was the first time she had been asked to play a piece by a Black composer.“I lived in New York, so I was always used to having all different kinds of cultures in my friend group,” Montgomery said. “So that was not unusual. But this was purely Black and Latino kids. And how we all stayed in touch and continue to collaborate with each other is really the strength of the organization.”She has been associated with Sphinx for years, performing in the Sphinx Virtuosi chamber ensemble and eventually building a relationship that extended to teaching at the Sphinx Performance Academy and, shortly before the pandemic, being awarded the organization’s medal of excellence.“Jessie was a beautiful chamber musician from the beginning,” Dworkin said. “Then she had a voice as a composer. It wasn’t until several years in that I knew there was this other side.”There was a third side to her artistry as well: teaching. Shortly after graduating from Juilliard, she joined Community MusicWorks in Providence, R.I. — inspired in part by her own education at the Third Street Music School Settlement in New York, and by her mother’s community-based practice.“I use the word rigor a lot, but I think the thing that makes anything valuable is the amount of rigor, the amount of focus. The amount of energy that you’re putting into it is the thing that really counts,” she said. With that guiding her, she added, “I watched kids’ lives in some cases change from really, really challenging situations to — you know, five or six of the students were the first in their family to go to college, and some of them to Ivy Leagues. It was intense, but beautiful.”Throughout her career, Montgomery has tried — with mixed success for her sanity — to balance pedagogy with performance and composing. She was a founding member of the chamber group PUBLIQuartet and later joined the Catalyst Quartet.“When Jessie joined, it felt like Catalyst became what we always envisioned it to be,” said Karla Donehew Perez, a fellow violinist in the group.Catalyst became a sounding board for Montgomery’s writing. For the 2015 album “Strum: Music for Strings,” the group recorded some of her most widely played works: the spirituals-inflected “Source Code”; the vivid “Strum”; and “Banner,” which deconstructs and builds on the American national anthem. With Imani Winds, the quartet also premiered the nonet “Sergeant McCauley,” about one of Montgomery’s great-grandfathers and the Great Migration.Together, the Catalyst players also undertook major projects — most recently, the series “Uncovered,” which devotes albums to composers who have been overlooked because of their race or gender. But Montgomery felt increasingly unable to devote the time the quartet needed from her, which she described as “24/7, 365 attention.”“That doesn’t feel balanced within the quartet,” she said, “especially when they’re performing my pieces and I’m reaping the benefits of that.”Last year, Montgomery announced her departure from Catalyst — a difficult decision that made for a tense conversation. “It’s not a fully repaired relationship,” she said, “but it’s mostly repaired.” (Donehew Perez said that Montgomery is like a family member to her, and remains “a great, lifelong friend.”)Montgomery continues to perform, including as part of her improvisation duo Big Dog Little Dog, with the bassist Eleonore Oppenheim. She also played her music in the Pam Tanowitz dance premiere “I was waiting for the echo of a better day” this summer and has a new collaborative project in the works, with exploratory rehearsals beginning in September.But the bulk of her work in the future — with commissions currently planned until 2024 — will be her writing, which with its improvisatory spirit, embrace of widely varied influences and preoccupation with personal history reflects her upbringing.“I have this idea in my mind that there’s something beyond fusion,” Montgomery said. “There’s this other sound I’m going for that is a culmination, like the smashing together, of different styles and influences. I don’t know that I’ve achieved that yet.”Observers might disagree; the composer Joan Tower described Montgomery’s music as having “a real confidence” and a blend of references that “intertwine in a cohesive way.” And Alex Hanna, the Chicago Symphony’s principal bass, noted the “richness in sonority and color” in her scores.“You have the feeling she wrote the music in an afternoon,” he said, “because it has the honesty of improvisation.”Works like “Source Code,” “Sergeant McCauley” and the recently premiered “Five Freedom Songs,” written for the soprano Julia Bullock, reflect the fact that Montgomery is “a multiracial person living and breathing and telling stories that are quintessentially American,” Dworkin said.“Banner,” she added, is a “shining” example. “There is music in there that borrows from the Mexican anthem, Puerto Rico, blues and jazz idioms galore. That’s American music, and American history.”But trying to capture the soul of a country in music is a level of pressure that Montgomery tries to avoid when considering a new commission. She said she doesn’t see her works as particularly political.“I think people sometimes consider Blackness or a projection of Blackness as a political statement, that to be Black is to in yourself embody politics and culture,” she said. “And that’s a burden, actually.”A burden that’s been especially acute during the past year. “I’ve been talking with my colleagues of Black descent, and we’re all feeling that sort of thing of being put on,” she said. “I’ve been realizing that there’s this shared desire to just be able to create without that kind of pressure or expectation that you’re going to be the spokesperson for the race or for classical music being better or more diverse or whatever.”She would like to see programmers not just hiring Black artists, but doing so in a thoughtful, flexible way. “A commission that addresses the injustices on Black people, as a way for the institution to admit or confront their own compliance in the atrocities against Black people, doesn’t allow that composer to express total joy, for example,” she said. “It boils down to the simple fact that Black people — any people, probably — want to own our own narrative, and not necessarily be put on to be responsible for undoing institutional crimes.”In her own music-making, Montgomery is more interested in supporting her peers through her actions — whether as a curator, performer or pedagogue — rather than public statements.“I think the work shows what you want to show,” she said. “And that’s what’s important. The work comes first, and then the declarations come later.” More

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      Review: The Met Opera Reunites, With Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’

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      After a year and a half, the company’s forces came together for an outdoor performance of the sprawling, ecstatic symphony.The Metropolitan Opera hardly ever plays concerts at home at Lincoln Center. But before Saturday evening, the company had opened its season with Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, the “Resurrection,” once before.In 1980, a bitter labor battle kept the Met closed more than two months into the fall. When peace was re-established, Mahler’s sprawling journey of a soul, ending in ecstatic renewal, seemed just the thing — and the symphony, with its enormous orchestral and choral forces working in intricate lock step, is nothing if not a paean to cohesion.“The ‘Resurrection’ Symphony almost chose itself,” James Levine, then the Met’s music director, said at the time. It was, he added, “a way for the company to get in touch with itself again.”If there has ever been another time this company needed to get in touch with itself, it is now. That two-month hiatus four decades ago seems like child’s play compared with the situation today.Twenty twenty-one has, like 1980, brought contentious labor struggles — on top of a pandemic that has threatened the core conditions of live performance and kept the Met closed for an almost unthinkable 18 months. Its orchestra and chorus, as good as any in the world, were furloughed in March 2020 and went unpaid for nearly a year as the financially wounded company and its unions warred over how deep and lasting any pay cuts should be.The “Resurrection” Symphony brought the full company and its audience back together in grand style: 90 minutes; an orchestra of 116; a chorus of 100; and 2,500 attending in the park.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesJeenah Moon for The New York TimesJeenah Moon for The New York TimesJeenah Moon for The New York TimesInstituting a vaccine mandate and gradually coming to terms with the unions, the Met inched closer to reopening as the summer dragged on. And on Aug. 24, it removed the final barrier by striking a deal with the orchestra, paving the way for a resurrection — and a “Resurrection.”The company scheduled a pair of free Mahler performances outdoors at Damrosch Park, in the shadow of its theater, on Labor Day weekend, at the start of what has become an opening month. On Saturday, the Met will return indoors for Verdi’s Requiem, in honor of the 20th anniversary of 9/11. And on Sept. 27 the opera season begins in earnest with the company premiere of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” its first work by a Black composer, and, the following evening, a revival of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov.”Led by the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the “Resurrection” Symphony brought the full company and its audience back together in grand style: 90 minutes; an orchestra of 116; a chorus of 100; and 2,500 attending in the park, as well as hundreds more listening from the street. The mood was a blend of parks concert — one woman tried to muffle the crinkling of her bag of potato chips — and serious focus; a man sitting on the aisle followed along with the score, brightly lit on his tablet.With so much to celebrate, this was indeed a celebratory, smiling reading: Punchy and taut at the start, yes, but without the neurotic, feverish quality that some conductors sustain throughout. There was an overall sense of gentleness and soft-grained textures. The second movement was more sly than sardonic; the climactic burst of dissonance in the third movement was beautiful, not brutal. The chorus, facing the audience in front of the stage and getting its cues from screens, sang with mellow sweetness.It goes without saying that outdoor classical performance is never ideal. (Speaking from the stage, Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, claimed, tongue perhaps in cheek, that Lincoln Center’s president had promised no helicopters in the area for the duration of the symphony. Well. …)Ying Fang, the soprano soloist, is a symbol of the company’s present and future.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAmplified violin sections are inevitably harsh; woodwinds tend to get swamped by the strings and brasses, even more than usual in Mahler’s dense orchestration. And so much of this and every symphony’s power depends on musicians massed in a room together with their audience. Under the open sky, even on a gorgeous, mild evening like Saturday, the visceral and emotional impact of the music is diffused.But the offstage percussion and brasses finally sounded like they were coming from a real distance, as they rarely do in a concert hall. And there is special resonance in a great opera company performing this score, so redolent of the music-theater repertory, especially Mahler’s beloved Wagner. The stormy start of “Die Walküre”; the motif of the sleeping Brünnhilde from the end of that work; the mystically stentorian choruses of “Parsifal”; the sighing winds as Verdi’s Otello dies — all echo through the visionary excess of the “Resurrection.”It was moving to see Denyce Graves, a classic Carmen and Dalila at the Met 20 or 25 years ago, onstage and dignified in the great alto solos, even if her voice is a shadow of its former plush velvet. The soprano soloist, Ying Fang, a radiant Mozartian, was a symbol of the company’s present and future.While no one is ever hoping for distractions during Mahler, there was something heartwarming about the siren wailing down 62nd Street and tearing into the symphony’s majestic final minutes. What would a New York homecoming be without noise, and more noise? More

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      For Music, a Fall Deluge of Performances Is Beginning

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      Summer has been quiet, but the weekend brought some brilliant concerts. (Delta variant be damned.)The summertime classical calendar tends to be light even under normal circumstances — so during a lingering pandemic, it can seem almost nonexistent.But now comes the deluge, Delta variant be damned. Over the past few days, New York audiences had the chance to catch live sets from two well-regarded groups presenting fresh repertoire. And those sets had connections to even more worthy ensembles debuting new material.On Saturday the Attacca Quartet played a heavily amplified yet lovingly textured program for hundreds in Prospect Park, as part of the Celebrate Brooklyn festival. (The pop group San Fermin headlined the evening.) In a half-hour sprint that managed not to feel rushed, the group played excerpts from its July debut on the Sony Classical label: the dance music-suffused (but somehow not schticky) “Real Life.”Joined for some selections by the percussionist Shayna Dunkelman, Attacca performed propulsive arrangements of music by Flying Lotus, and an excerpt from Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 3 — featured on the group’s next Sony album, out in November. The set was balanced with tender movements from Caroline Shaw’s “Plan and Elevation,” which the quartet recorded for the Nonesuch and New Amsterdam labels in 2019.Sunday evening brought the New York City premiere of the composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey’s “For George Lewis,” performed by Alarm Will Sound on the final night of this year’s Time Spans festival, at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in Manhattan. The group’s recording of the work came out nearly simultaneously on the Cantaloupe label, so “For George Lewis” registered not only as a clear highlight of the concerts I caught during the final week of Time Spans, but also of the year in albums.The piece stands on its own, though here’s a bit of context. When Lewis, a composer, improviser and scholar, released the electroacoustic “Homage to Charles Parker” in 1979, his tribute didn’t waste any time imitating Parker’s quicksilver sound. With Lewis playing trombone, organ and electronics, his austere then emotive work managed to honor its dedicatee by generating new stylistic possibilities within an existing tradition — just as Parker had done.Now Sorey, long mentored by Lewis, has echoed the favor. Largely constructed from slowly but steadily alternating pools of close-harmony dissonance, “For George Lewis” doesn’t immediately recall Lewis’s recent wry, riotous music for orchestra and chamber ensembles. And though its overall arc moves gradually from grit to melodic flowering, Sorey’s aesthetic also remains distinct from Lewis’s Parker homage.Instead, as “Homage to Charles Parker” was true to Lewis, so “For George Lewis” is true to Sorey. The fully notated piece has close connections to the music that Sorey has composed for his own improvising trio, on albums like “Alloy.” The first minute and change of “For George Lewis” is dominated by sustained flute tones, and brooding piano figures redolent of somber ritual. But the subtle addition of a pair of vibraphonists quickly banishes any sense of things being on autopilot. Nearly (but not quite) synchronous hits from each mallet-wielding player give the still-quiet dynamics a crucial edge.

      For George Lewis | Autoschediasms by Alarm Will Sound & Tyshawn SoreyThese are the kinds of details that keep “For George Lewis” feeling urgent over its nearly hourlong duration. On Saturday, in the intimate room at the DiMenna Center, I savored evidence of Sorey’s catholic tastes. Pungently vibrating violins were reminiscent of early Minimalist pioneers like Tony Conrad; occasionally plunging complexity in the woodwinds had the dramatic verve of later Stockhausen; toward the end, lines for a mellow fluegelhorn recalled the Miles Davis of “Miles Ahead.” But the pacing — and the attentiveness to timbral blends — was pure Sorey.The rest of Alarm Will Sound’s new album is no less striking. A second disc is devoted to Sorey’s “Autoschediasms” pieces. Inspired by the “Conduction” system developed (and trademarked) by Butch Morris and the “language music” of Anthony Braxton, these improvisational pieces, cued by Sorey as conductor, need the right interpreters. And Alarm Will Sound has become, to my ear, one of his greatest partners for such exercises — whether live or over videoconferencing software.“Autoschediasms” wasn’t the only reminder of Butch Morris’s influence over the weekend. Before the Attacca Quartet’s set, I saw the veteran avant-rock, funk and jazz outfit Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber perform twice at the Brooklyn Museum, part of the opening celebration for the touring exhibition of Barack and Michelle Obama’s official portraits.The veteran avant-rock, funk and jazz outfit Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber performed at the Brooklyn Museum on Saturday.Kolin MendezA group of 15 instrumentalists and vocalists were led by the group’s co-founder and conductor, Greg Tate, the pathbreaking cultural critic who cites Morris’s “Conduction” style as the glue that holds together Bunt Sugar’s post-everything aesthetic. Aspects of Sun Ra and Funkadelic commingled from one moment to the next, with Tate using Morris-inspired gestures to spur sudden deviations from the band’s recorded versions. During the final minutes of “Angels Over Oakanda,” the title track from the group’s coming Sept. 23 release, Tate sped up the already heated rendition into a new realm of fervid frenzy.Veterans of both the Time Spans festival and of Burnt Sugar’s past lineups appeared together on another album released over the weekend.The Wet Ink Ensemble cellist Mariel Roberts (who premiered a new piece at Time Spans) and the former Burnt Sugar violinist Mazz Swift have each contributed strong solo features to the composer and saxophonist Caroline Davis’s stirring new album “Portals Vol. 1: Mourning,” released by the Sunnyside imprint.Roberts’s scabrous then lyrical cello can be heard on “Hop On Hop Off,” while Swift’s improvisatory contributions help start the track “Left.” But as with both Sorey and Burnt Sugar, improvisation is only part of the draw. The rest comes from Davis’s supple compositional art — which mixes muscular dexterity with emotional vulnerability in a way that’s rare in both the contemporary chamber music and improvisational scenes.A version of the group heard on “Portals” — which incorporates a string quartet plus Davis’s regular improvising quintet — will appear at the Jazz Gallery on Sept. 10. But even for those who are not yet comfortable attending concerts, the album version is a sign among many that at-home listening, too, is gaining energy with the coming of fall. More