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      James Levine, Former Met Opera Maestro, Is Dead at 77

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      Mr. Levine was the longtime musical leader of the Met and orchestras in Boston and Munich. But his career ended in a scandal over allegations of sexual improprieties.James Levine, the guiding maestro of the Metropolitan Opera for more than 40 years and one of the world’s most influential and admired conductors until allegations of sexual abuse and harassment ended his career, died on March 9 in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 77.His death was confirmed on Wednesday morning by Dr. Len Horovitz, his physician. He did not specify the cause, and it was unclear why the death had not been announced earlier. Mr. Levine had been living in Palm Springs.After investigating accounts of sexual improprieties by Mr. Levine with younger men stretching over decades, the Met first suspended and then fired him in 2018, a precipitous fall from grace at the age of 74. He fought back with a defamation lawsuit.Before the scandal emerged, Mr. Levine was a widely beloved maestro who for decades helped define the Met, the nation’s largest performing arts organization, expanding its repertory and burnishing its world-class orchestra. And his work extended well beyond that company. For seven years, starting in 2004, he was the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, earning high praise during his initial seasons for revitalizing that esteemed ensemble, championing contemporary music and commissioning major works by living composers.After investigating accounts of sexual improprieties by Mr. Levine with younger men stretching over decades, the Met first suspended and then fired him in 2018.Damon Winter/The New York TimesMr. Levine also served as music director of the Munich Philharmonic for five years (1999-2004). He had long associations with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, as music director of its Ravinia Festival for more than 20 years.His final years as a maestro were dogged by health crises, including a cancerous growth on his kidney and surgery to repair a rotator cuff after he tripped on the stage at Symphony Hall in Boston in 2006. The problems forced Mr. Levine to miss weeks, even months, of performances. In March 2011, facing reality, he resigned the Boston post.Despite the stark break with the Met Opera, it is at that institution where Mr. Levine’s musical legacy will be mainly defined. He had a 47-year association with the house and served in various positions of artistic leadership there. “No artist in the 137-year history of the Met had as profound an impact as James Levine,” Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, said in a statement. “He raised the Met’s musical standards to new and greater heights during a tenure that spanned five decades.”Most conductors of Mr. Levine’s generation maintained international careers, jetting from one appearance to another and not getting tied down for too long at any one post. Mr. Levine’s commitment to the Met was a throwback to the era of conductors like his mentor George Szell, who was the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra for 24 years.From the beginning, his association with the Met seemed an ideal match of musician, art form and institution. A few weeks before turning 29, he made his debut in Puccini’s “Tosca” on June 5, 1971, a matinee for which he had had no stage rehearsals with the starry cast, headed by Grace Bumbry as Tosca and Franco Corelli as Cavaradossi. Reviewing the performance, Allen Hughes of The New York Times wrote that Mr. Levine “may be one of the Metropolitan’s best podium acquisitions in some time.” Mr. Levine was named the company’s principal conductor, the first person to hold that post, for the 1973-74 season. The next year, with the departure of Rafael Kubelik, who had a brief and uneasy tenure as music director, Mr. Levine took over that title, beginning with the 1976-77 season, and settled in for what turned out to be 2,552 performances — far more than any other conductor in its history — as well as the creation of an extensive catalog of recordings and videos, including some landmark Met productions. He confidently led both early Mozart and thorny Schoenberg, and he brought works like Berg’s “Wozzeck” from the outskirts to the center of the company’s repertory.At 5 feet 10 inches, with a round face, unkempt curly mane and portly build, Mr. Levine did not cut the figure of a charismatic maestro. His father used to nudge him to lose weight, cut his hair and get contact lenses, but Mr. Levine balked.“I said that I would make myself so much the opposite of the great profile that I will have the satisfaction of knowing that I’m engaged because I’m a musician, and not because the ladies are swooning in the first balcony,” he said in a 1983 Time magazine cover article. Indeed, Mr. Levine expanded the public’s perception of what a conductor should be and, through dozens of “Live From the Met” broadcasts on public television, became one of the most recognized classical musicians of his time, even sharing the screen with Mickey Mouse in Disney’s “Fantasia 2000.”He was neither a podium acrobat like Leonard Bernstein nor a grim-faced technician like Szell. His movements were nimble but never attention-grabbing. He encouraged orchestra players to watch his face, which beamed with pleasure when things were going right and signaled an alert when called for. “Give me some eyes” was his frequent request.A Sense of Musical DramaSome critics said Mr. Levine’s work lacked an identifiable character. Though his interpretive approach, even in matters as basic as tempos, fluctuated markedly throughout his career, certain qualities were consistent. His performances were clearheaded, rhythmically incisive without being hard-driven, and cogently structured, while still allowing melodic lines ample room to breathe. Not surprisingly given his immersion in opera, he had a keen sense of drama that carried into his accounts of symphonic literature. Above all, Mr. Levine valued naturalness, with nothing sounding forced, whether a stormy outburst in a Wagner opera or a ruminative passage of a Mahler symphony.By the late 1980s, the Met Orchestra was considered among the top opera house ensembles in the world. That was not enough for Mr. Levine. He instituted a regular series of orchestra concerts at Carnegie Hall and transformed what had been periodic chamber music programs with Met musicians into the popular Met Chamber Ensemble.A proficient and elegant pianist, he forged close musical ties with the Met players by performing chamber works with them. In time, many critics came to consider the Met Orchestra on a par with the leading symphonic ensembles of the world.Mr. Levine began his career in opera at a time when the genre was perceived to be in decline. “The farther we get from the living tradition of opera, the more difficult it is to come up with the voices and personalities to perform it convincingly,” he said in a 1985 article in The New York Times Magazine.Mr. Levine in about 1971. He had a 47-year association with the Metropolitan Opera and long ones as well with orchestras in Boston, Vienna, Munich and elsewhere.Hastings-Willinger & Associates/Met Opera ArchivesTo contend with this situation, he argued, it was essential for the Met to place artistic matters under the guidance of a maestro steeped in the tradition — namely himself. Soon he was conducting as much as one-third of the Met’s performances each season, claiming for himself most of the major works, the new productions and the biggest stars. His quick rise at the Met was viewed by many as a power grab. There were frequent complaints that giants of opera like Claudio Abbado, Carlos Kleiber, Georg Solti and Riccardo Muti had little presence or were absent from the conducting ranks.In its defense the Met explained that given the company’s repertory system, with multiple works in performance simultaneously during a week, conducting an opera involved a commitment that many leading maestros were unwilling to make. Besides, it was hard to argue with success. Perhaps Mr. Levine was hogging the podium and keeping rivals at bay, but audiences and critics were excited by the artistic results.Rumors of Mr. Levine’s alleged sexual misconduct with younger men had trailed him for decades. Though periodically news organizations had looked into the story, nothing concrete turned up until December 2017. Amid the tide of allegations against powerful men in what came to be called the #MeToo movement, four men went public with accusations that Mr. Levine had sexually abused them. The acts were alleged to have taken place as far back as 1968 and began, the accusers each maintained, when they were teenagers.After their accusations were reported in The New York Post and The Times, the Met hired an outside law firm to investigate and suspended Mr. Levine pending the results. In March 2018, after the investigation found what the Met called credible evidence that Mr. Levine had engaged in “sexually abusive and harassing conduct,” the company fired him.Days later Mr. Levine sued the Met for breach of contract and defamation. The suit claimed that Peter Gelb, who had been general manager since 2006 and in public had been a steadfast supporter of Mr. Levine, had “brazenly seized” on allegations of misconduct as “a pretext to end a longstanding personal campaign to force Levine out.” The company responded in May of that year with a countersuit, releasing evidence that, according to a company statement, Mr. Levine had “used his reputation and position of power to prey upon and abuse artists,” citing examples of misconduct that it said had occurred from the 1970s through 1999.Mr. Levine’s suit sought at least $5.8 million. The Met sought roughly the same amount. The two sides settled in the summer of 2019, agreeing that the Met and its insurer would pay Mr. Levine $3.5 million.In July 2020, the Maggio Musicale festival in Florence, Italy, announced his return to the podium the following January, but those performances were canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.A Young TalentJames Lawrence Levine was born on June 23, 1943, in Cincinnati. Though his heritage was German, Latvian and Hungarian, all of his grandparents were born in the United States. His father, Lawrence Levine, under the name Larry Lee, was a bandleader and pop crooner in Los Angeles during the 1930s; he later returned to Cincinnati, his hometown, to work in his father’s clothing business. Mr. Levine’s mother, the former Helen Goldstein, had been an actress in New York under the name Helen Golden and had a leading role opposite John Garfield on Broadway in “Having Wonderful Time” in 1937.By the age of 2 Mr. Levine was picking out tunes on the family’s Chickering piano. Formal lessons with Gertrude Englander began when he was not quite 5. Thor Johnson, the conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony, took an interest in young Jimmy, who advanced quickly and made his debut with the orchestra at 10, playing Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1.His teacher persuaded his parents to take him to New York for an evaluation at the Juilliard School. The renowned piano pedagogue Rosina Lhevinne heard him play and urged the dean of the school to offer him a scholarship.Mr. Levine in 1962. At Juilliard he studied with the conductor Jean Morel.Howard Sochurek/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty ImagesBut Mr. Levine’s parents did not want to disrupt his childhood in Cincinnati. There were more things in the world than music, his mother said. Jimmy needed to learn how to be a full person and to live with his two younger siblings: Thomas, an artist, who in later life became an assistant to his brother; and Janet, who became a clinical psychologist.He is survived by his sister; his brother died in April.Instead of setting their son up in New York, the Levines arranged for him to take regular trips to the city, usually every other week. He would fly to New York on Friday night, have lessons with Ms. Lhevinne on Saturday morning, take in the Met matinee or an evening orchestra concert, have another lesson on Sunday, then return home that afternoon.In 1956, Mr. Levine went to the Marlboro Festival in Vermont, where he worked with the pianist Rudolf Serkin and was the chorus master for a performance of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” put on by the resident musicians and singers. The next year he spent the first of 14 summers at the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado, where he committed himself to a conducting career.Mr. Levine was a powerful force at the Met Opera over five decades.Calle Hesslefors/Ullstein Bild, via Getty ImagesIn 1961, after graduating from high school, he moved to New York and enrolled in Juilliard’s college division, where he studied with the conductor Jean Morel. At a summer program in Baltimore in 1964, the American Conductors Project, he was heard by Szell, who invited him to come to Cleveland to be his assistant. Mr. Levine left Juilliard without completing a degree and spent the next six years working closely with Szell.Mr. Levine’s debut with the Cleveland Orchestra came in 1967, conducting Strauss’s tone poem “Don Juan.” While there he met Suzanne Thomson, a young oboist from Detroit, who put aside her own career to become his personal assistant and living companion, sharing his Upper West Side apartment from the early 1970s.Mr. Levine was circumspect about his private life, refusing to discuss his sexual orientation or romantic relationships. In a 1998 interview with The Times, he explained why he had refused to comment on rumors and “such nonsense” over the years. “I’ve never been able to speak in public generalities about my private life,” he said. “Day by day, my world is filled with real music, real people, real interactions.” He added almost plaintively: “How much do you have to give? How good do you have to be?”In 1966, while still working under Szell in Cleveland, Mr. Levine founded the University Circle Orchestra, an ensemble of young musicians interested in contemporary music. The next year he conducted the orchestra in the premiere of Milton Babbitt’s “Correspondences,” a formidably difficult 12-tone work, winning its composer’s lasting admiration. Opening night at the Met Opera for the 1997-98 season, when Mr. Levine was at the height of his powers.Jack Vartoogian/Getty ImagesIn March 2018 The Boston Globe published a long exposé of Mr. Levine’s years with this student ensemble in Cleveland, drawing on some two dozen interviews with former students and musicians, who described a cultlike atmosphere around Mr. Levine, even though he was not much older than they. The participants, who became known as “Levinites,” recalled belittlement by their mentor, loyalty tests and even group sex.Just 15 years after his Met debut, Mr. Levine’s leadership role there was formalized in 1986, when he became the house’s artistic director, a title that was scaled back to music director in 2004, when he began his tenure with the Boston Symphony.He had other important associations as well. He made his Salzburg Festival debut in 1976 conducting Mozart’s “La Clemenza di Tito” in a landmark Jean-Pierre Ponnelle production. In 1982 he made his debut at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, conducting the centennial production of Wagner’s “Parsifal.” At the time, Bayreuth was still tainted by the anti-Semitism of Wagner and certain of Wagner’s descendants, who ran the festival during the rise of the Nazis and hobnobbed with Hitler. The festival directors purposefully entrusted this milestone production to Mr. Levine, who was Jewish. “Parsifal,” a work he conducted with spacious, luminous eloquence, became a Levine specialty.Though he made 20th-century operas like Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron,” Berg’s “Lulu” and Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” central to the Met’s identity, Mr. Levine could not turn the company into a house that nurtured new opera. For such a prestigious international institution, the Met’s list of premieres during the Levine era, including works by John Corigliano, John Harbison, Philip Glass, Tobias Picker and Tan Dun, was not long.In interviews over the years Mr. Levine asserted that he tried to commission new works but that the Met was a monumental, slow-moving institution. He once also lamented the dearth of good-enough new operas.In the 1990s, Mr. Levine’s relationship with Joseph Volpe, the Met’s effective, pugnacious general manager, was sometimes fraught. Mr. Volpe respected Mr. Levine and gave him most of what he wanted, but put the brakes to financially risky projects (like a concert performance of Mahler’s daunting “Symphony of a Thousand”) and several commissioning ideas.As supertitles became popular at other opera companies, including the New York City Opera next door to the Met in Lincoln Center, Mr. Levine argued that his house’s informed patrons would find them distracting. Supertitles would come to the Met “over my dead body,” he said in a 1985 interview, a comment he came to regret.Mr. Volpe, who disagreed, prevailed, and in 1995 the house introduced its innovative technology, Met Titles, which employed individual screens mounted on the back of the seat in front of each audience member. The titles could be individually turned on or off, a feature that Mr. Levine said had ameliorated his objection.Podiums in Munich and BostonMr. Levine was eager to leave his mark on the legacy of symphonic music and to cultivate a major orchestra. This led to what many saw as a curious career move: becoming principal conductor of the Munich Philharmonic.His selection was hotly debated in the German press, in part because of his salary ($1.2 million), at a time when cultural institutions in Germany were being forced to accept smaller government subsidies. Though the orchestra made strides under Mr. Levine’s leadership, the relationship proved disappointing. He was unwilling to cut back his Met schedule to spend more time in Munich. When the Boston Symphony came calling, he was receptive.Mr. Levine conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where he commissioned important works.Michael Lutch/Boston Symphony OrchestraMr. Levine began his Boston tenure in the fall of 2004 with a commanding performance of Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand,” the piece he had longed to perform with the Met’s orchestra and chorus. Initially, Mr. Levine was able to maintain full involvement and high standards at the Met while thriving in Boston, where he could finally commission significant works from major composers, especially Elliott Carter and Charles Wuorinen, and build a legacy. But concerns about his health soon surfaced.Starting in the 1990s, Mr. Levine had been afflicted with tremors in his left hand and left leg. To compensate, he developed a technique with minimal hand motions and eventually conducted while sitting in a tall, swiveling chair. In 1996, for the 25th anniversary of his Met debut, he conducted the Met orchestra and chorus in a gala concert that lasted eight hours and involved some 60 acclaimed singers performing 42 selections. As the author Johanna Fiedler recounted in “Molto Agitato,” a history of the Met, Mr. Levine’s detractors considered the gala an unseemly act of self-celebration. Others felt inspired to see Mr. Levine marking the occasion by working so hard.Still, overweight and overworked, he often moved with hesitancy. In an article in The New York Times in the spring of 2004, several members of the Met orchestra complained anonymously that Mr. Levine’s baton cues were getting hard to read and that his attention sometimes flagged during long performances.In 2008 Mr. Levine had surgery to remove a cancerous cyst from a kidney, causing him to withdraw from most of that season at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony’s summer home. By the time he resigned, the symphony calculated that he had missed one-fifth of his scheduled performances.At the Met, with Mr. Gelb’s encouragement, Mr. Levine limited his schedule to the projects he most cared about and ceded some major productions and important revivals to guests, including Mr. Muti, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Simon Rattle, who made long-awaited Met debuts.By the time he resigned, the Boston Symphony calculated that he had missed one-fifth of his scheduled performances because of health issues.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Gelb kept Mr. Levine on as music director even during a two-year period when health problems prevented him from performing. When, in May 2013, he conducted a Met Orchestra concert at Carnegie Hall, a triumphant return, Mr. Levine used a motorized wheelchair, which he continued to employ at the house. In April 2016, Mr. Gelb eased him into a new position as music director emeritus.Mr. Levine’s final appearance at the Met, on Dec. 2, 2017, was a Saturday matinee performance of Verdi’s Requiem with the orchestra, chorus and four vocal soloists. He looked fatigued that day, and the performance was somewhat lackluster. That evening, the news of the allegations against him broke.Michael Cooper contributed reporting. More

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      The Met Opera’s Musicians, Unpaid Since April, Are Struggling

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      About 40 percent of the players have left the New York area, and a tenth have retired. Now the Met is seeking long-term pay cuts, and offering them partial pay if they come to the bargaining table.As the months without a paycheck wore on, Joel Noyes, a 41-year-old cellist with the Metropolitan Opera, realized that in order to keep making his mortgage payments he would have to sell one of his most valuable possessions: his 19th-century Russian bow. He reluctantly switched back to the inferior one he had used as a child.“It’s kind of like if you were a racecar driver and you drove Ferraris on the Formula One circuit,” Mr. Noyes said, “and suddenly you had to get on the track in a Toyota Camry.”The Metropolitan Opera House has been dark for a year, and its musicians have gone unpaid for almost as long. The players in one of the finest orchestras in the world suddenly found themselves relying on unemployment benefits, scrambling for virtual teaching gigs, selling the tools of their trade and looking for cheaper housing. About 40 percent left the New York area. More than a tenth retired.After the musicians had been furloughed for months, the Met offered them reduced pay in the short term if they agreed to long-term cuts that the company, which estimates that it has lost $150 million in earned revenues, says it will need to survive. When the musicians resisted, the Met offered to begin temporarily paying them up to $1,534 a week — less than half their old pay, but something — if they simply returned to the bargaining table, a proposal the musicians are weighing.Now the Met’s increasingly rancorous labor battles — it has locked out its stagehands, and outsourced some set construction to Wales — are adding more uncertainty to the question of when the opera house can reopen after its long pandemic shutdown.Joel Noyes, a cellist in the orchestra, reluctantly sold his treasured 19th-century bow so he could continue to make his mortgage payments. Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesThe toll on the players has been steep.Benjamin Bowman, 41, is one of the orchestra’s two concertmasters — a leader of the first violin section who serves as a conduit between players and maestros. He and his family moved to Stuttgart, Germany, where he took a temporary job with the state orchestra. Daniel Khalikov, 37, a violinist, has been struggling to make the $2,600-a-month loan payments for his two fine violins. Angela Qianwen Shen, 30, a violinist who is not able to collect unemployment because she is in the United States on a visa, picked up some translation work to make ends meet.And Evan Epifanio, 32, the orchestra’s principal bassoonist, put his belongings in storage in June and left the city for the Midwest, where he said he and his husband have been dividing their time between the homes of his parents and his in-laws.“I’m living in my in-laws’ basement at the peak of my career,” Mr. Epifanio said. “I’m a one-trick pony, and now I can’t even do that.”Over the past year, 10 of the orchestra’s 97 members have retired, a stark increase from the two to three who retire in an average year, said Brad Gemeinhardt, the chairman of the orchestra committee, which negotiates labor issues on behalf of the musicians. Prominent figures in the music world are sounding warnings about the peril the orchestra faces: Riccardo Muti, the revered conductor, said in a statement earlier this year that the “artistic world is in disbelief that the very existence of a great orchestra like the Met’s could be in danger and even at risk of disappearing.”The Met, which was financially fragile even before the virus, was forced to shut its doors on March 12, 2020, and it furloughed most of its workers, including those in its orchestra and chorus, in April. (It continued to pay for their health coverage.) In the fall, the Met presented an offer to its employees: it would resume partial payments in exchange for significant long-term pay cuts and concessions. The unions resisted. By the end of the year the Met orchestra was the only major ensemble without a deal to receive pandemic pay, according to the International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians.Then, in December, the company locked out its roughly 300 stagehands after their union, Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, rejected the Met’s proposed pay cuts. (In a letter to the union last year, Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, wrote that the average full-time stagehand cost the Met $260,000 in 2019, including benefits; the union disputes that number, saying that when the steady extra stage hands who work at the Met regularly, and sometimes full-time, are factored in, the average pay is far lower.)Mr. Gelb said that the company had no choice but to seek cuts when the pandemic left it in a perilous financial situation.“Suddenly we had no revenue, we had shut our doors and we had to do immediate triage so that the company would not fall apart and fold,” Mr. Gelb said. “We are doing the best we can in terms of keeping the company viable so that they will have jobs to return to.”At the end of last year, the Met offered the unions that represent the orchestra and chorus an olive branch: reduced paychecks for simply coming to the bargaining table. The American Guild of Musical Artists, which represents choristers, dancers and others, accepted the arrangement in January, and its members are receiving paychecks. Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians has not yet accepted the offer, Adam Krauthamer, the union’s president, said, but it is in the final stages of reaching a deal that the orchestra is voting on.Jeremy McCoy, who rose to assistant principal double bass while playing in the orchestra for 35 years, retired in May. Mr. McCoy, 57, said that he had been contemplating an early retirement, but not quite this early. When he realized that the Met’s furlough could last a long time, he said, he put in his papers, a decision that would allow him to begin collecting his pension rather than having his expenses eat into his savings indefinitely.Mr. McCoy said he was repelled by the idea of returning to an adversarial relationship between the musicians and management.“I don’t want to go back to big concessions and to a toxic environment,” he said.The opera house has been closed for more than a year, and the orchestra pit empty. Victor Llorente for The New York TimesThe Met said it was seeking to cut the payroll costs for its highest-paid unions by 30 percent — the change in take-home pay would be approximately 20 percent, it said — and that when ticket revenues and core donations returned to prepandemic levels, it would restore half of what had been cut. The Met declined to disclose the current average pay of its musicians, but during the run-up to contentious labor negotiations in 2014, officials said that the players had been paid an average of around $202,000 the prior year.Lincoln Center, with the Met in the middle, has been eerily empty. Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesMany orchestras have reached agreements for substantial, lasting pay cuts, including the New York Philharmonic, whose musicians agreed to 25 percent cuts to their base pay through August 2023. Mr. Krauthamer said that the Met Orchestra’s union had put forward its own proposal, which would cut pay but preserve work rules that the Met was seeking to change.Some orchestra members have said that they felt betrayed that the opera was not using its musicians in “Met Stars Live in Concert,” the pay-per-view recitals it has been producing from opulent settings in Europe. Most feature only piano accompaniment. A Met official with knowledge of the situation said that for the other performances, members of the company’s orchestra were not included because of the difficulties of travel during the pandemic and because of ongoing labor negotiations.The Met Orchestra has started staging its own virtual concerts and collecting donations to distribute to musicians in need. The most recent, starring the soprano Angela Gheorghiu, singing from Romania, began by clarifying that the performance was “not affiliated with the Metropolitan Opera.”Tanya Thompson, a carpenter who has worked at the Met for 15 years, says she will be back, but during the pandemic she has become an overnight home health aide. Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesBetween stagehands and management, the temperature is even higher.Since the lockout, the work of preparing sets for the coming season has gone to nonunion shops elsewhere in this country and overseas. The Met regularly commissions set-building outside the institution, but these jobs had been slated to be done internally.Sets for two operas scheduled to premiere at the Met next winter, “Rigoletto” and “Don Carlos,” are being built by Bay Productions, a company in Cardiff, Wales; the set for “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” will be built in California. With the sets being built elsewhere, the Met’s scenic painters are losing work even though they have not been locked out because there is nothing for them to paint, so they remain on furlough, said Cecilia Friederichs, a national business agent for the United Scenic Artists union.But the company will still need stagehands if it wants the show to go on this fall, said James J. Claffey Jr., the president of Local One.“You don’t even get to an opening night without us,” he said.The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees has launched a lobbying effort urging lawmakers to support a measure that would block stimulus funds from going to arts organizations that, like the Met, have locked out union employees.Mr. Gelb said that the effort seemed “self destructive” and that “any attempt to damage the institution will only make it harder for the employees once we return.”Tanya Thompson, a union carpenter who has worked at the Met for 15 years, had planned to return to work there in December. When Local One was locked out, she decided to continue in the new job she had taken over the summer to make ends meet: as an overnight home health aide for elderly patients.Ms. Thompson, 52, said she plans to go back to the opera house as soon as there’s a deal.“I’m a lifer,” she said. “We care about what we do and we want the Met to succeed.” More

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      Met Opera Musicians Accept Deal to Receive First Paycheck Since April

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      The Metropolitan Opera offered its orchestra temporary payments of up to $1,543 a week in exchange for simply coming to the bargaining table.The musicians of the Metropolitan Opera orchestra have voted to accept a deal that will provide them with paychecks for the first time in nearly a year in exchange for returning to the bargaining table, where the company is seeking lasting pay cuts that it says are needed to survive the pandemic.The musicians, and most of the Met’s workers, were furloughed in April, shortly after the pandemic forced the opera house to close. Months later, the Met offered the musicians partial pay in exchange for significant long-term cuts, but their union objected. Then the Met softened its position: Since the end of December, it has been offering to pay the musicians up to $1,543 a week on a temporary basis if they agreed to start negotiations. While the union representing the chorus agreed to the deal more than a month ago, the orchestra’s union took longer to accept the deal.On Tuesday, the musicians in the orchestra, which became the last major ensemble in the United States without a deal to receive pandemic pay, agreed to take the offer, according to an email sent by the Met orchestra committee to its members.“We’re very pleased that our agreement with the orchestra has been ratified and that they will begin receiving bridge pay this week,” the Met said in a statement, “along with the start of meaningful discussions towards reaching a new agreement.”The orchestra committee, which represents the players in negotiations, declined to comment. The Met’s relationship with its musicians has been contentious during the pandemic months. Musicians have been frustrated by the extended period without pay, and worried that even when they returned to the opera house, their pay would be significantly reduced.The Met has insisted that economic sacrifices need to be made because of the financial impact of the pandemic, which it says has cost the company $150 million in earned revenues. For its highest-paid unions, the company is seeking 30 percent cuts — the change in take-home pay would be approximately 20 percent, it said — with a promise to restore half when ticket revenues and core donations return to prepandemic levels.Under the deal, musicians will receive up to $1,543 for eight weeks; money they get from unemployment or stimulus payments is deducted from that total. If, after eight weeks, the musicians and the Met have not reached an agreement but the negotiations are productive, the partial paychecks will be extended, according to an email from the Met to the orchestra explaining the offer. The musicians’ labor contract expires at the end of July.The Met offered the same deal to its choristers, dancers, stage managers and other employees who are represented by a different union, the American Guild of Musical Artists. That union accepted the deal at the end of January, and its members have been receiving paychecks for roughly five weeks.The opera company is hopeful that it can start performing for the public in the fall, but opening night will be determined by where the virus and vaccination rates stand, as well as the outcome of the Met’s labor disputes. The company locked out its stagehands in December after their union rejected a proposal for substantial pay cuts.In a note to Met employees sent on Friday, one year after the Met shut its doors, the company’s general manger, Peter Gelb, wrote that there was a “light at the end of the tunnel” because of the accelerated pace of vaccinations that President Biden had announced. Still, Mr. Gelb wrote, the Met needed to “come to terms with the economic necessities” that the pandemic has demanded.“Even before the pandemic, the economics of the Met were extremely challenging and in need of a reset,” Mr. Gelb wrote. “With the pandemic, we have had to fight for our economic survival.” More

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      A Timeline of James Levine's Final Years

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      The conductor’s last years at the Metropolitan Opera included a comeback, health woes and the sexual misconduct allegations that ended his career.In the final years of his life, the conductor James Levine, who had shaped the Metropolitan Opera for more than four decades and who died on March 9, returned to his podium after a career-threatening injury; was eased out as music director after health woes made it difficult for him to fulfill his duties; and was fired from his new position as music director emeritus after multiple allegations of sexual misconduct with young men and teenagers surfaced.2013: The ComebackAfter injuring his spine in a fall and being sidelined for more than two years, Levine returned in triumph to his podium at the Met. The company welcomed him back with fanfare, making the orchestra pit wheelchair accessible and installing new lifts and ramps and a rising mechanical podium called the “maestro lift.” He allowed a reporter to watch his rehearsals.2016: Worsening Health and an Emeritus RoleAfter declining health related to Parkinson’s disease made it difficult for musicians and singers to follow his conducting, the Met tried to get him to step down as music director, but he resisted. By the end of the season, the company announced that Levine would step down and take an emeritus role that would allow him to conduct regularly.2017: Accusations of Sexual Misconduct SurfaceLevine was conducting regularly as music director emeritus, and being given high-profile assignments by the company, when several men came forward to say that Levine had sexually abused them when they were teenagers. The Met suspended him and started an investigation.2018: Levine Is Fired by the MetThe Met fired Levine, saying that an investigation it commissioned “uncovered credible evidence that Mr. Levine engaged in sexually abusive and harassing conduct toward vulnerable artists in the early stages of their careers, over whom Mr. Levine had authority.”2018-2020: Dueling Lawsuits and a SettlementLevine sued the Met for breach for contract and defamation; the Met countersued, detailing some of the abuse its investigation uncovered. Almost all of Levine’s defamation charges were dismissed, but the contractual case continued. The Met and its insurer eventually agreed to pay Levine $3.5 million; his contract as music director emeritus lacked a morals clause.2021: Levine Dies at 77 More

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      Elliott Carter’s Early Flops Reveal a Budding Musical Master

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      A composer of famously thorny music had two failed forays into ballet, given fresh reconsideration on a new album.The composer Elliott Carter, looking back on his early ballet “Pocahontas,” wrote that it was “full of suggestions of things that were to remain important to me, as well as others which were later rejected or completely transformed.”“Rejected” is putting it lightly. The approachable “Pocahontas” — one of Carter’s first scores, from the late 1930s — bears almost no resemblance to the thorny and unpredictable works that would come to define his long career, which continued until shortly before his death in 2012, at 103.Carter, a composer who always seemed more interested in the future than the past, was no champion of “Pocahontas,” which despite its likability quickly fell into obscurity — never a repertory staple and never recorded. That is, until now, with the release of a new album by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project that also includes “The Minotaur” (1947), Carter’s only other ballet.The recording offers an opportunity to reconsider what on the surface were early failures. “Pocahontas,” written for Lincoln Kirstein’s touring Ballet Caravan, was panned by the New York Times dance critic John Martin for a score that was “so thick it is hard to see the stage through it.” “The Minotaur” was meant to be choreographed by George Balanchine, for the company that would become New York City Ballet. But instead the job fell to John Taras, and — as David Schiff, the composer and former Carter student, observes in the album’s liner notes — the mythological work was overshadowed by Balanchine’s similarly minded collaborations with Igor Stravinsky, which became classics.After “The Minotaur,” Carter was on the cusp of both a crisis and a breakthrough with his First String Quartet (1950-51). “I had felt that it was my professional and social responsibility to write interesting, direct, easily understood music,” he wrote. “With this quartet, however, I decided to focus on what had always been one of my musical interests, that of ‘advanced’ music, and to follow out, with a minimal concern for their reception, my own musical thoughts along these lines.”Carter didn’t care to dwell on his early period, but if there’s an ensemble up to the task of making a fresh case for “Pocahontas” and “The Minotaur,” it’s the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, which in the past decade has released nearly 100 recordings of both premieres — including Andrew Norman’s “Play” — and overlooked gems. (It’s something like classical music’s equivalent of New York Review Books.)“Pocahontas,” composed in the late 1930s, was one of Carter’s first scores and showed an early master of orchestral writing.George Platt Lynes“In both of these ballets, the sophisticated use of harmony and rhythm foreshadows the stuff to come,” Gil Rose, the group’s artistic director and conductor, said in a recent interview. “He’s obviously a brilliant composer.”Rose took a break from editing an album of John Adams’s two chamber symphonies to discuss the ballets — their importance within Carter’s output and what they share with his later masterworks. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.What are the hallmarks of Carter’s early sound?His music had not become as stark. “The Minotaur” isn’t so much padded with a sonic cushion, but “Pocahontas” is. He could really write a lush orchestration, and with a big string section. In that way its inspiration is more a Romantic ballet than a 20th-century ballet. So it’s more like Prokofiev than anything else — nothing like the Neo-Classical stuff that does take him by storm down the road. “The Minotaur” is more like that. There’s a big pas de deux in it that could have come out of any middle-period Stravinsky ballet.What does looking at these ballets together reveal about Carter’s progression as a composer?His sound gets more angular. That’s probably also because a lot of Stravinsky’s middle-period works start to get known in the United States. Rhythmically, it gets less flexible — more repeated patterns and spiky rhythms. And harmonically, it’s more dissonant. The orchestration has this brashness, and a lot of clashes and disjunct that shows itself already in “Pocahontas.” It is interesting though: If you play “Pocahontas” for someone and say, “Name that composer,” it would take a lot of people who know a lot about music to get through a lot of composers to get to Carter.I would say the time is easy to place, but definitely not the composer.If you hear the Piano Sonata (1945) and the “Holiday Overture” (1944), they’re of the same ilk. He sort of didn’t advocate for his early music very much. But I think it’s important to know where he came from. If you pair this with his late music, it’s a hell of a journey. And this is how it started.Can you point to anything that survives the turn Carter takes after the First String Quartet?It’s a little hard to compare “Pocahontas” with a piece like the String Quartet. But I would look at the Pavane at the end, the way he starts to lay harmonies on top of each other. It’s clear at this moment he’s not writing “Billy the Kid,” or any other kind of Copland Americana, even though it has an Americana subject. He doesn’t stick a folk tune in, or nod to Native American music. He writes in a sense like Prokofiev: He writes the music that he wants to write.At the same time, it’s not at all juvenilia. You know it’s a piece that was done by a gifted and skilled composer. The writing is quite sophisticated. Even talented orchestrators make mistakes in their early pieces, but you get into a movement like “Princess Pocahontas and Her Ladies” — that’s really subtle writing. Most young composers on their first orchestra piece couldn’t pull that off. When we think of Carter, we don’t think of orchestration as one of his main strengths. But with this piece it clearly is.It reminds me of early Joyce, straightforward yet showing a total mastery of prose.That’s a great example. Because nobody understands any of James Joyce at the end. You have to read every sentence like 16 times, but it’s still worth it. The early things that have a more direct communication line to the accepted musical syntax of the time can still be interesting. The quality of his mind and music is apparent even in a form that’s digestible by the normal concert-going audience. And just because it’s digestible doesn’t mean it’s not musical, or not interesting. In fact, it’s sometimes harder to write music that functions on both planes. Those are the pieces that I really love. More

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      Let’s Make the Future That the ‘New World’ Symphony Predicted

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      To grasp in full this classic work’s complex legacy would allow us to move beyond it, fostering new paths for artists of color.The last live performance I attended before the lockdown last year featured excerpts from Nkeiru Okoye’s gripping 2014 opera “Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed That Line to Freedom.” The score takes listeners on a journey through Black musical styles, including spirituals, jazz, blues and gospel.“I am Moses, the liberator,” Harriet proclaims in her final aria, pistol in hand as she urges an exhausted man to continue running toward freedom. “You keep on going or die.”With its themes of survival and deliverance, Okoye’s work would make a fitting grand opening for an opera company’s post-pandemic relaunch. But the American classical music industry has too often chosen familiarity and homogeneity over the liberating power of diverse voices.To help break this inertia, we must confront a work that has left indelible marks on music in this country: Antonin Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony. To grasp in full the complex legacy of this classic piece would allow us to move beyond it, fostering new paths for artists of color.In 1893, the year of the symphony’s premiere, Dvorak argued in print that Black musical idioms should form the basis of an American classical style — not an entirely new position, but far from the norm at the time. Some white musicians were so scandalized that they accused reporters of misrepresenting Dvorak’s ideas. Of course, he meant exactly what he said, for he consistently reiterated his views, eventually adding Indigenous American music to his recommendations.Janinah Burnett in the title role of Nkeiru Okoye’s 2014 opera “Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed That Line to Freedom.”Richard Termine for The American Opera ProjectDvorak was true to his word in the “New World.” After finishing the symphony, he explained in an interview with the Chicago Tribune that he had studied certain songs from Black traditions until he became “thoroughly imbued with their characteristics” and felt “enabled to make a musical picture in keeping with and partaking of those characteristics.” Musical gestures inspired by these songs pervade the piece, such as the melodic contour of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” in the first movement and the second movement’s famous, plaintive Largo theme, which has often been mistaken as a direct quotation of a spiritual — but which actually was only later given words and turned into a spiritual, “Goin’ Home.”Echoing segregationist Jim Crow policies in force at the time, several white critics bent over backward to deny Black influence on the “New World” — despite Dvorak’s own words — as if African origins would preclude the piece’s place in the national musical fabric. Black writers, on the other hand, acknowledged the importance of his advocacy. Richard Greener, a former dean of what is now Howard University School of Law, suggested in 1894 that if Black musicians heeded Dvorak’s recommendations, they would “become greater than the lawgiver” — a clear challenge to the prevailing social order.Composers from a variety of racial backgrounds, including R. Nathaniel Dett, Amy Beach, Henry Gilbert, Florence Price, Dennison Wheelock, John Powell and Nora Holt, followed in Dvorak’s footsteps during the first quarter of the 20th century, writing a cascade of pieces invoking Black or Indigenous folk styles.White writers attacked Black composers like William Dawson for writing under the influence of Black idioms.W.E.B. Du Bois Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, UMass Amherst Libraries.White composers frequently earned praise for their music’s engagement with these idioms, which often included direct quotation. A critic for the magazine Musical America wrote, for example, that Powell’s “Rhapsodie Nègre” had a “savage, almost brutal polyphonic climax yielding gradually to a more peaceable slow section reared on a lyrical phrase with Dvorakian loveliness.” But white writers attacked Black composers like Florence Price and William Dawson for using similar approaches.When Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra performed Dawson’s “Negro Folk Symphony” at Carnegie Hall in 1934, another writer for Musical America wrote that “the influence of Dvorak is strong almost to the point of quotation, and when all is said and done, the Bohemian composer’s symphony, ‘From the New World,’ stands as the best symphony ‘à la Nègre’ written to date.”What was sophisticated and lovely when Powell did it was plagiarism when Dawson did.Dawson responded in The Pittsburgh Courier, a major Black newspaper, to defend his stylistic choices. “Dvorak used Negro idioms,” he said. “That is my language. It is the language of my ancestors, and my misfortune is that I was not born when that great writer came to America in search of material.”Over the decades, the “New World” steadily grew in popularity but never shed the aura of controversy surrounding its connections to Black music. A New York Philharmonic program annotator remarked in 1940 that “Dvorak, in his enthusiasm for Negro music, overlooked the fact that there exists in our diversified population a rich heritage of folk music brought hither by white colonists.” Around the same time, Olin Downes of The New York Times called the origin and inspiration of the symphony “a question for academic argument.”For many Black musicians, though, the “New World” was galvanizing precisely because of its ties to the African diaspora. In June 1940, a little over a year after the release of Billie Holiday’s anti-lynching protest song “Strange Fruit,” Artur Rodzinski and the New York Philharmonic premiered Still’s heart-rending “And They Lynched Him on a Tree.” A somber English horn solo early in the piece recalled the famous “New World” Largo, which directly preceded it on the program.A New York Philharmonic program from 1940 included the text for William Grant Still’s “And They Lynched Him on a Tree.”New York Philharmonic Leon Levy Digital ArchivesAfter Rodzinski discouraged the violinist Everett Lee from auditioning for the Philharmonic because of his race, Lee formed one of the nation’s first racially integrated orchestras, the Cosmopolitan Symphony Society, and became its conductor. During its third season, in 1951, he programmed Dvorak’s Ninth, which he would later direct at engagements around the world in an illustrious career spanning nearly seven decades.At the height of the Civil Rights Movement, in the mid-1960s, a group that included the conductor Benjamin Steinberg and the composer Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson founded another major integrated orchestra in New York called the Symphony of the New World — an optimistic nod to Dvorak. When Everett Lee returned from Europe to conduct the group in 1966, his program included its namesake, and his favorite: the “New World” Symphony. And the piece has remained a staple in the repertoire of many other prominent Black conductors, including A. Jack Thomas, Rudolph Dunbar, Dean Dixon, Jeri Lynne Johnson, Thomas Wilkins and Michael Morgan.Over the last 50 years, the “New World” has become perhaps the keystone in epochal American orchestral concerts abroad, including the Philadelphia Orchestra’s 1973 tour of China and the New York Philharmonic’s trip to North Korea in 2008. But ensembles have rarely paired it with pieces by living composers of color; instead, Dvorak alone becomes the international spokesman for the whole multiracial American experience.Everett Lee conducted the “New World” at engagements around the world in an illustrious career spanning nearly seven decades.New York Philharmonic Leon Levy Digital ArchivesThat should change. To start, organizations should reject the uncritical valorization of white composers of the past who appropriated Black or Indigenous musical styles — Dvorak, for example, or George Gershwin — as if programming their work comes at no cost to composers of color, past and present.Like Okoye. Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” has its strengths, but unlike it, Okoye’s deeply researched opera offers singers ample opportunity to engage with our national past while being liberated from the burden of embodying distorted stereotypes. Okoye’s evocative “Black Bottom,” premiered by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra at its annual Classical Roots celebration last March, is one of the most engrossing musical portraits of Black history in the available repertoire. (The performance was an especially memorable moment for an artist who attributes her decision to continue a career in composition in part to the Detroit orchestra’s tradition of inclusivity.)Beloved and moving, the “New World” Symphony has a secure place on programs well into the future. But Dvorak, and the white composers who followed in his footsteps, should not be the loudest voices speaking on behalf of all Americans.At the Detroit Symphony’s first Classical Roots celebration, in 1978, the conductor Paul Freeman programmed the “New World” alongside music by Hale Smith, William Grant Still and José Maurício Nunes Garcia — a rich musical cross-section of living and historical Black composers from diverse backgrounds. To continue reckoning with Dvorak’s legacy today, Detroit has commissioned a piece by James Lee III that will premiere alongside the “New World” next season. Lee’s work, “Amer’ican,” presents a lavish tapestry of musical images drawn from over six centuries of Indigenous and Black history.Lee said in an interview that he found it “quite gratifying” to join Dvorak in weaving Black and Indigenous musical materials into a work. According to the notes accompanying the piece, it closes with “music representing memories of unbridled freedom and exhilaration.”Lee added that his work had been set alongside Dvorak’s by other orchestras, but that in Detroit he would join a tradition of true creative dialogue between past and present.“Being programmed with the music of Dvorak is nothing new to me,” he said. “But this case is special.”Douglas W. Shadle is an associate professor of musicology at Vanderbilt University and the author of the book “Antonin Dvorak’s ‘New World’ Symphony.” More

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      The Arts Are Coming Back This Summer. Just Step Outside.

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      The return of Shakespeare to Central Park is among the most visible signs that theaters, orchestras and opera companies aim to return to the stage — outdoors.The path back for performing arts in America is winding through a parking lot in Los Angeles, a Formula 1 racetrack in Texas, and Shakespeare’s summer home in New York’s Central Park.As the coronavirus pandemic slowly loosens its grip, theaters, orchestras and opera companies across the country are heading outdoors, grabbing whatever space they can find as they desperately seek a way back to the stage.The newest sign of cultural rebound: On Tuesday, New York City’s Public Theater said that it would seek to present Shakespeare in the Park once again this summer, restarting a cherished city tradition that last year was thwarted for the first time in its history.“People want to celebrate,” said Oskar Eustis, the theater’s artistic director, who is among the 29 million Americans who have been infected with the coronavirus. “This is one of the great ways that the theater can make a celebration.”New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio (center) at a press event inside the Delacorte on Tuesday, detailing plans for the reopening of Shakespeare in the Park.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLarge-scale indoor work remains a ways off in much of the country, as producers wait not only for herd immunity, but also for signs that arts patrons are ready to return in significant numbers. Broadway, for example, is not expected to resume until autumn.But all around the country, companies that normally produce outdoors but were unable to do so last year are making plans to reopen, while those that normally play to indoor crowds are finding ways to take the show outside.This is not business as usual. Many productions won’t start until midsummer, to allow vaccination rates to rise and infection rates to fall. Limits on audience size are likely. And attendees, like those visiting the Santa Fe Opera, will find changes offstage (touchless bathroom systems) and on: Grown-ups (hopefully vaccinated), not children, will play the chorus of faeries in the opera’s production of Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”There remain hurdles to overcome: Many of the venues still need to win permission from local officials and negotiate agreements with labor unions. But the signs of life are now indisputable.In Los Angeles, the Fountain Theater is about to start building a stage in the East Hollywood parking lot where it hopes in June to open that city’s first production of “An Octoroon,” an acclaimed comedic play about race by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. Austin Opera next month aims to perform outdoors for the first time, staging “Tosca” in an amphitheater at a Formula 1 racetrack, while in upstate New York, the Glimmerglass Festival is planning to erect a stage on its lawn.Usually presenting shows inside, the Phoenix Theater Company has set up an outdoor stage in the garden at a neighboring church.Reg Madison PhotographyAt that outdoor venue, the armrests have QR codes, one to read the program, and one to order food and drink. Reg Madison PhotographyOrganizations that already have outdoor space have a head start, and are eager to use it.Mark Volpe, the president and chief executive of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, said that later this month he will ask his board to approve a plan to hold performances once again this summer at Tanglewood, the company’s outdoor campus in Western Massachusetts. The season, if approved, would be just six weeks, mostly on weekends, with intermissionless programs lasting no longer than 80 minutes, and no choral work because of concerns that singing could spread the virus.The audience size remains unknown — current Massachusetts regulations would allow just 12 percent of Tanglewood’s 18,000-person capacity — and Volpe said that, even if the regulations ease, “we’re going to be a tad conservative.” Nonetheless, the prospect of once again hearing live music on the vast lawn is thrilling.“Having the orchestra back onstage with an audience,” Volpe said, “I can only imagine how emotional it’s going to be.”The Muny, a St. Louis nonprofit that is the nation’s largest outdoor musical theater producer, is hoping to be able to seat a full-capacity audience of 10,000 for a slightly delayed season, starting July 5, with a full complement of seven musicals, albeit with slightly smaller than usual casts.“Everyone is desperate to get back to work,” said Mike Isaacson, the theater’s artistic director and executive producer. “And our renewal numbers are insane, which says to me people want to be there.”An artist’s rendering of the Fountain Theater’s planned new stage in its parking lot, where the Los Angeles company expects to present “An Octoroon” in June. Fountain TheaterThe St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, which performs in another venue in that city’s Forest Park, has much more modest expectations: It is developing a production of “King Lear,” starring the Tony-winning André De Shields of “Hadestown,” but expects to limit audiences to 750.The Public Theater, which has over the years featured Al Pacino, Oscar Isaac, Meryl Streep and Morgan Freeman on its outdoor stage, is planning just one Shakespeare in the Park production, with an eight-week run starting in July, rather than the usual two-play season starting in May.“Merry Wives,” a 12-actor, intermission-free version of “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” adapted by Jocelyn Bioh and directed by Saheem Ali, will be set in Harlem and imagine Falstaff as an African-American seeking to woo two married women who are immigrants from West Africa.How many people will be able to attend? Current state regulations would allow the Public to admit 500 virus-tested people, in a Delacorte Theater that seats 2,000, but the theater is hoping that will change before opening night. And will there be masks? Testing? “We are planning on whatever needs to happen to make it safe,” Ali said.For professional theaters, a major potential hurdle is Actors’ Equity, the labor union, which throughout the pandemic has barred its members from working on any but the small handful of productions that the union has deemed safe. But the union is already striking a more open tone.“I am hopeful now in a way that I could not be earlier,” said Mary McColl, the union’s executive director. She said the union is considering dozens of requests for outdoor work, and has already approved several. As for Shakespeare in the Park, she said, “I’m very excited to see theater in the park. We are eagerly working with them.”E. Faye Butler starred in “Fannie: The Music and Life of Fannie Lou Hamer,” a one-woman show on the new outdoor stage at the Asolo Repertory Theater in Sarasota, Fla.Cliff RolesA few theaters already have union permission. Utah’s Tuacahn Center for the Arts starts rehearsals next week for outdoor productions of “Beauty and the Beast” and “Annie.” Tuacahn, which stages work in a 2,000-seat amphitheater in a southern Utah box canyon, is planning to use plexiglass to separate performers during rehearsals, but expects not to need such protections by the time performances begin in May.“I’m extremely excited,” said Kevin Smith, the theater’s chief executive. “We had a Zoom call with our professional actors, and I got a little emotional.”Because Broadway shows, and some pop artists, are not ready to tour this summer, expect more homegrown work. For example: the 8,000-seat Starlight Theater, in Kansas City, Mo., which normally houses big brand tours, this summer is largely self-producing.In some warm-weather corners of the country, theaters are already demonstrating that outdoor performances can be safe — and popular.The Phoenix Theater Company, in Arizona, and Asolo Repertory Theater, in Sarasota, Fla., both pivoted outdoors late last year; the Arizona company borrowed a garden area at the church next door to erect a stage, while Asolo Rep built a stage over its front steps.The audience seems to be there. Asolo Rep’s six-person concert version of “Camelot” sold out before it opened, and the Phoenix Theater’s current “Ring of Fire,” featuring the music of Johnny Cash, is also at capacity.Now others are following suit. There are big examples: Lincoln Center, the vast New York nonprofit, has announced that it will create 10 outdoor spaces for performance on its plaza, starting next month, while the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Playwrights Horizons are planning to stage Aleshea Harris’s play, “What to Send Up When It Goes Down,” in June in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.And on Monday, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association said it anticipates limited-capacity live performances at the Hollywood Bowl this summer.The finances are complicated so long as there are capacity limits imposed by health officials. For some, performing outdoors promises more revenue than working indoors with social distancing.“I was sitting in my theater alone, looking out at the empty seats, and realized that if audiences were forced to sit six feet apart, it reduced my audience size from 80 to 12, which is not a robust financial model to present to your board of directors,” said Stephen Sachs, a co-founder and artistic director of the Fountain Theater. “So why not go outside?”But for larger organizations that cost more to sustain, capacity limits pose a different challenge. In San Diego, the Old Globe says that, at least in the near term, it might only be allowed 124 people in its 620-seat outdoor theater.“Just to turn on the lights requires an investment that will eat up most of what those seats will yield,” said the theater’s artistic director, Barry Edelstein. “It’s just incredibly challenging to figure out what we can afford to do — maybe a little cabaret, or maybe a one-person performance of some kind.”Nonetheless, Edelstein said he expects, like his peers, to present work outside soon. “There is a lot of stuff happening outdoors — dining, religious services, sports,” he said. “We’re not really fulfilling our mission if we’re sitting here closed.” More

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      Online, Simon Rattle Gives a Preview of His Future in Munich

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeRoast: Thick AsparagusVisit: National ParksRead: Shirley HazzardApologize: To Your KidsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookOnline, Simon Rattle Gives a Preview of His Future in MunichThe British conductor will take the helm of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2023. But he got a head start with three livestreamed concerts.Simon Rattle shocked the classical music world in January by saying he would leave the London Symphony Orchestra to take the helm of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. He recently conducted livestreamed concerts there.Credit…Astrid AckermannMarch 14, 2021In an evening of back-to-back concerts recently, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra played music that asks the big questions: Is there a God? What are we to make of war and death? How do we perceive the world around us?But perhaps the biggest question was the one raised by the concerts themselves: What will the future of this orchestra look like under its new chief conductor, Simon Rattle?These livestreamed performances, along with a third last Friday — all available on demand from BR-Klassik — were his first with this ensemble since he was named to the post in January. And while they offered glimpses of the Rattle era to come in 2023, they more urgently provided an assurance that this excellent orchestra, previously led by Mariss Jansons until his death in 2019, will be in good hands.The news of Rattle’s hiring came with an announcement that shocked the classical music world: He would also be stepping down from the helm of the London Symphony Orchestra, where his arrival in 2017 had been heralded as a homecoming for a globally acclaimed British conductor. (He will stay on, partially, in an emeritus position.)Rattle opened the series of concerts with a world premiere: Ondrej Adamek’s “Where Are You?”Credit…Astrid AckermannThe reason for the move to Munich, Rattle has said, is personal: He wants to spend more time with his wife, the mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozena, and their children, at home in Berlin, where he was the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic from 2002 to 2018. But it’s difficult to ignore the coincidence of Brexit, which he has sharply criticized and which took effect in January, threatening the livelihoods of British musicians who had benefited from the ease of open borders. (Not for nothing did he also announce that he had applied for European citizenship.) And it’s maybe not so coincidental that last month, London officials scrapped plans for a much-needed new concert hall there — a project with no greater champion than Rattle.The construction of a new hall, and the headaches that go with it, await him in Germany. But, like the start of his tenure with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, that is years away. In the meantime, there was something of a preview in the three recent livestreams — contemporary-minded programs for the Musica Viva series, and a deceptively traditional one of works by Brahms, Stravinsky and Haydn. Rattle is a clever programmer, with an open ear and an unrelenting commitment to living composers. And he has a gift for, even an insistence on, clarity within chromaticism and complexity.Crucially, the musicians appear to respond well to Rattle’s direction, an affinity that probably was honed during his appearances with the orchestra since his debut with the orchestra in 2010. Since then, he has recorded three albums with them: a sometimes frustrating take on Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde” and burning accounts of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold” and “Die Walküre.”Rattle made more of a statement, though, with his latest concerts, which covered roughly 325 years of music history and opened at the Philharmonie in the Gasteig with a world premiere: Ondrej Adamek’s “Where Are You?,” an unruly song cycle for mezzo-soprano and orchestra. It was written for Kozena, and began with her waving her arms in what looked like a breathing exercise, then revealed itself as extended technique — her vocalise matched by the primeval airiness of a flute.In 11 songs that flow together in an unbroken monologue, the soloist continuously wrestles with questions of faith, drawing on sources in Aramaic, Czech, Moravian dialect, Spanish, English and Sanskrit. Words are stripped down to elemental syllables, repeated with chattering anxiety or prolonged with wide, sirenlike vibrato. Occasionally the work’s modernist tropes, which peak with the use of a loudspeaker, are pierced by stylistic interjections: a fiddling folk song, Eastern idioms. There may be a point here about universal experience, but it’s too often muddled by the work’s impatient focus.The mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozena, who is married to Rattle.  “Where Are You?” was written for her.Credit…Astrid AckermannWho’s to say what effects Adamek’s contrasts would have had in person? Unlike soloists and chamber groups, orchestras are particularly ill-suited for the virtual performances made necessary by the pandemic. Large ensembles are complex organisms, at constant risk of being flattened online. Video is fine as a document, but it remains a poor substitute for the concert-going experience.That was especially evident in the piece that followed, Messiaen’s “Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum.” Premiered within the Gothic grandeur of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris and intended for vast spaces, this work can be overwhelming, a vision of the apocalypse. But its resonance — acoustic and otherwise — felt stifled here, clearly recognizable but inaccessible.After that concert, Rattle hopped across the Isar river to the Herkulessaal, the orchestra’s home at the Residenz in central Munich, for a program of Purcell’s 17th-century “Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary” and Georg Friedrich Haas’s “in vain” (2000), which Rattle, during a pretaped interview, described as “one of the few pieces from this century that we already know will have a life for all the centuries afterwards.”Rattle’s reverence for the Haas shone through in what amounted to a faultless reading of the score, which calls for a lighting scheme to match the shifting tones and textures, rendering any performance more of an installation — at times, in total darkness. The experience of “in vain” is specific to the point of exploring, and raising questions of, the relationship between a composer and musicians, and in turn the audience. Yet as I watched the players navigate their instruments blindly, I was sitting near an open window, bathing in the warmth of the midday sun and enjoying the freshness of spring’s awakening.If there is a benefit to pandemic-era programming, it’s scale. Because of their relative safety, works traditionally overlooked because of their small size have flourished. Hence Friday’s livestream from the Herkulessaal, a program of familiar names and less-familiar music: Brahms’s Serenade No. 2 in A, sweetly plain-spoken and elegiac; Stravinsky’s “Symphonies of Wind Instruments,” its distinct threads gracefully and harmoniously entwined; and Haydn’s Symphony No. 90 in C, a little smushy at first but settled into with crisp playfulness.The Haydn has a false ending: a joke at the expense of the audience members, who often applaud then laugh at themselves as the music goes on. With no one in the hall, the punchline fell flat, more of a “heh” than a “hah.” But, as Rattle said in an interview with BR-Klassik, he is just getting started on a long journey with the Bavarians, and he plans to program Haydn, a personal favorite, more in the future. When that happens, the symphony can tickle its listeners again. Because they know that after the pause, the orchestra comes back. It always does.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More