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      Before Lockdown, This Super Fan Went to 105 Shows in One Season

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeFall in Love: With TenorsConsider: Miniature GroceriesSpend 24 Hours: With Andra DayGet: A Wildlife CameraAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHe Went to 105 Shows in One Season. Now He Watches TV.What has this year been like for the most voracious of culture vultures? A super fan in Chicago lets us into his life without the arts.Edward T. Minieka, a 77-year-old arts enthusiast, in the doorway of the Chicago apartment where he has spent much of his time during lockdown, unable to take in live events.Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesMarch 11, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETEdward T. Minieka was 5 years old when his parents started taking him to see shows.The Miniekas lived in Bridgeport, on Chicago’s South Side, and hopped a streetcar to get downtown. They watched “King Midas and the Golden Touch” at the Goodman Children’s Theater, plus family programs at Symphony Center and the Civic Opera House. On good days, there might be a visit to the Woolworth’s lunch counter; on really good days, the Walnut Room at Marshall Field’s.Minieka is now 77 years old. He still lives in Chicago. And he still loves the arts.In the last prepandemic season, he bought tickets for 105 live performances — symphony, opera and lots of theater.Then, thanks to the lockdown, he got a TV.With his new (to him) TV, Minieka is watching British shows and the occasional movie. But he has no use for digital theater.Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesThe performing arts depend on people like Minieka — culture vultures, often retired, who fill the seats at many a show. And that dependence is mutual. There are lots of people, many of them older, for whom the arts are a way to stay connected to the world — intellectually, emotionally and socially.This last year, when live performance before live audiences has been largely banned, has hit the most devoted especially hard.“What I miss most of all is the community,” Minieka said in one of a series of telephone interviews from the antiques-filled downtown apartment where he has been holed up for most of the year, but for the occasional walk, weather permitting, and a weekly early morning trip to the grocery.A former professor of management and statistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he is accustomed to solitude, having lived alone for a long time. “I tried living with boyfriends off and on,” he said, “but I’m better off having my own space.”He pauses to reflect. “It’s OK,” he added. “I have a nice apartment. I’ve got the TV set up. I just got a new phonograph — my old one died after 25 years — and I’ve been listening to some of the old opera recordings my father gave me just before he died.”Opera recordings, antique English furniture and old master paintings fill Minieka’s art-filled apartment. (Maria Callas is one of his favorite sopranos.)Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesHe’s been quite intentional about maintaining social ties. He doesn’t like video chatting, but schedules one to three phone calls a night. He makes lists of what he wants to talk about, just to jog his memory.But it’s not the same. One day, taking the bus to a doctor’s appointment, he ran into a woman he knew from the art world, and it hit him, the absence of serendipity. “A phone call is arranged,” he said. “I don’t run into chums, and get some buzz from them — that someone who has just come home from New York, and tells you about what show they saw. That’s gone, and there’s no way to replace that.”The Same Seat at the SymphonyIn the before times, Minieka would put on a coat and tie every Thursday and take a bus to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, settling into the same seat in the back corner of the sixth floor where he’s sat for years. “I close my eyes and listen,” he says. “I just want to hear them.” During intermission, he and his gang would meet in the Symphony Center’s ballroom, saying hello and trading gossip.He’s been a regular attendee since his undergraduate days at Illinois Tech, when he’d buy $1 tickets; he still remembers seeing Fritz Reiner conduct. “They didn’t have an elevator then, but I didn’t mind walking up six floors,” he said, “and the sound in the top gallery is sublime.”More than anything, Minieka (sitting before a prized and rare 19th century piano) says he misses the community that comes with attending cultural events.Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesMinieka began grad school at Stanford, and while there he’d visit the San Francisco Opera; he finished up at Yale, where he learned to love plays at the drama school, and where he organized a car pool to New York to see productions at the Metropolitan Opera.He’s not interested in Broadway in Chicago or the big nonprofits — too commercial. But he subscribed to the Court and TimeLine and Steep and Redtwist and A Red Orchid, key pieces of the city’s thriving small and storefront theater scene, as well as to the Lyric Opera.He’s a pensioner, and money is tight, so he bargain hunts — balcony seats, discounts, last-minute tickets. “It’s my own fault, buying antiques,” he shrugs. “There were smarter things to buy.”There are so many memories — just last season, there was the Pride Films and Plays production of the musical “A Man of No Importance,” which Minieka attended with 20 friends, and the series of short plays by women at the Broken Nose Theater’s summer Bechdel Fest.During the live performance shutdown, he has visited one museum. “I went once during the last year, to see the El Greco show,” he said, “but the problem was people were congregating around the captions. It was just too risky.”He’s also stopped, after 40 years, going in person to the solemn high Mass at the Church of the Ascension, known for its music. “Now they have reservations, but I don’t want to do it,” he said. “It’s not going to be the same.”Will Minieka return to live performance? “I’ve kind of gotten used to sitting at home, and not paying for tickets, or spending a couple of nickels to have things streamed,” he said.Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesArt fills his life, literally. He lives in a vintage apartment filled with his collection of English furniture and old master paintings, plus, of course, shelves of opera on vinyl. “I like to pull out some of the old ones,” he said. “You come to a new level of understanding.”Before the pandemic, he enjoyed playing host. Every winter since 1978, he had convened a series of Wednesday night salons, inviting curators, collectors, artists and art lovers to gather at his apartment. “It’s amazing the conversations that happen around midnight,” he said.His final night out was March 9, 2020, when he went with friends to Petterino’s Monday Night Live, a cabaret showcase. “It was full throttle,” he said, “as if everyone knew the lockdown was coming.”A few days later, he dressed up and boarded the bus to watch the symphony perform “Rhapsody in Blue” and “Boléro.” He arrived, found out the performance had been canceled, and went back home. That was March 12.Late to Binge WatchingMinieka never had much use for television. For years he had a hand-me-down black-and-white he used to watch the Oscars and the elections, but when the tubes started leaking, he threw it out. At the start of the pandemic, a friend offered him her old TV — she was upgrading — and he decided it was time to hook up cable and figure out streaming.He’s bingeing “Downton Abbey,” “The Crown” and “Brideshead Revisited.” He watches the occasional movie. But he has no patience for digital theater. “I just don’t enjoy it,” he says. “I’ve been to the real thing.”Now he’s had both vaccine doses, and he’s planning to celebrate by seeing a Monet exhibit at the Art Institute. But will he go back to live performance? He’s not sure.“I’ve kind of gotten used to sitting at home, and not paying for tickets, or spending a couple of nickels to have things streamed,” he said. “And it used to be you had an 8 o’clock curtain, and if I wasn’t there they’d close the doors. Now I can start whenever I want, and I don’t have to wear a matching tux.”“I was running at full steam, going out every night,” Minieka said. “Suddenly it all stops, and I adjust.”Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesHe describes this period as a “sabbatical,” and ponders what he would want to see next; at other times, he says he thinks of this as a second retirement, and that he might just move into a retirement community and stop going out. After all, he has a heart condition, he takes 16 pills a day, he uses a cane for balance, so maybe it’s time?“I was running at full steam, going out every night,” he said. “Suddenly it all stops, and I adjust. In a way, it puts a coda on that part of my life.”As for his annual salons? “March 4, 2020 was the last one,” Minieka said. “I’m too old to do it. It’s a lot of work. And it’s nice to end something when you don’t know it’s the closing night.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      A Composer’s Notes Echo After His Death

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA Composer’s Notes Echo After His DeathThe violinist Hilary Hahn has released the premiere recording of two serenades by Einojuhani Rautavaara, who died in 2016.“The audience was so quiet throughout the whole premiere,” the violinist Hilary Hahn said of the new Rautavaara works. “We all felt that these notes will never be new again.”Credit…Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesMarch 5, 2021When the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara died in 2016, at 87, a voice of rare lyricism in contemporary music fell silent. His death severed a link to the past: Rautavaara had been a protégé of Sibelius, Finland’s master composer, and one of the pallbearers at his funeral in 1957. Rautavaara’s music, too, conjured the past. Though he entertained some modernist techniques, at core his style was seductively, if idiosyncratically, Romantic.This week, he has delivered an unexpected posthumous greeting. A new album, “Paris,” by the star violinist Hilary Hahn and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, features two gleaming serenades — one addressed to love, the other to life — that were the last pieces he wrote. Hahn said in an interview that when she heard of their existence, it felt like receiving “a letter from the beyond.”“We thought there wasn’t anything else,” she added. “And he left us this gift.”The gift was intended for Hahn. In 2014 she had performed Rautavaara’s soaring Violin Concerto, written in the 1970s, with the Radio France orchestra. She was so taken by the piece that she told the ensemble’s Finnish music director, Mikko Franck, that she wanted to commission another concerto from him.Franck agreed to broach the subject, though he knew Rautavaara’s health had been fragile since he suffered a ruptured aorta in 2004. When they spoke, Rautavaara said he did not want to write another concerto, but that he was drawn to the idea of a suite of serenades. The conversation ended inconclusively, and Franck and Hahn came to believe the project had fallen victim to Rautavaara’s weakened condition. Another work for violin and orchestra, “Fantasia,” written for Anne Akiko Meyers and completed in 2015, appeared to be his final composition.Hahn wanted to commission a new work by Rautavaara, but the project seemed to have fallen victim to his weakened condition in his final years.Credit…John McConnico for The New York TimesAfter Rautavaara’s funeral, his widow, Sinikka, took Franck aside and showed him the manuscript of two serenades for violin and orchestra. “Serenade to My Love” was complete; for “Serenade to Life,” the solo violin part had been finished, but the sketches for the orchestra cut off near the end, as if in midsentence. Franck noted that the titles for the pieces were in both Finnish and French; they were clearly intended for Hahn and Franck’s Paris-based orchestra.The composer Kalevi Aho, a student of Rautavaara’s, completed the orchestration, and in February 2019 Hahn and Franck performed the serenades in Paris. “The audience was so quiet throughout the whole premiere,” Hahn said. “We all felt that these notes will never be new again.”In fact, there are few truly new notes in these un-self-consciously rhapsodic pieces. Rather, they sublimate themes from earlier Rautavaara vocal works, weaving a web of memory and longing. One source he drew on was a set of serenades for male a cappella choir from the 1970s — one of them addressed to beer. The melody of “Serenade to My Wife,” on a text by Stefan George about the fading glow of late summer, is the blueprint for the searching, self-absorbed solo line in “Serenade to My Love.”“It’s lush despite itself,” Hahn said of the music. On the new album, which also features works by Chausson and Prokofiev, she plays it with luminous tone and sustained intensity, her part soaring above a string orchestra that swells and falters.“Serenade to Life” quotes from Rautavaara’s 1991 opera “The House of the Sun,” a tragicomedy about two Russian aristocrats who die in exile, clinging to dreams of past grandeur. This serenade begins with a slinky and fluid line for the solo violin, complemented by playful woodwinds that give the music an expansive and sociable feel. In the final moments, a frantic, percussive energy takes over and drives the piece to an abrupt ending.Sinikka Rautavaara said in an email that in this final serenade, “the feeling remains that life was too short after all.”Hahn said that in performing a composer’s last works she felt the weight of responsibility, “knowing that we were finishing the things that he had started to say.” The premiere, she added, “was the end of something, but it also felt like a beginning.”“Now the piece is out in the world; it’s almost like a birth,” she said. “The entire catalog is there, and it can become this living legacy.”That first performance is the one captured on the new album. “Everyone onstage felt the significance,” Hahn said. “You are completing a composer’s catalog. There will be no more new notes after this.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Roger Englander, Producer of ‘Young People’s Concerts,’ Dies at 94

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRoger Englander, Producer of ‘Young People’s Concerts,’ Dies at 94He collaborated with the charismatic conductor Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic for 14 years of programs aimed at educating children about the joys of music.Roger Englander, foreground, in 1955. He was the production force behind Leonard Bernstein’s televised Young People’s Concerts beginning in 1958. Credit…University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research CenterMarch 4, 2021, 5:56 p.m. ETRoger Englander, the Emmy Award-winning producer and director of the acclaimed Young People’s Concerts, which featured the magnetic Leonard Bernstein leading the New York Philharmonic, died on Feb. 8 at a hospital in Newport, R.I. He was 94.The cause appeared to be pneumonia, said Michael Dupré, his companion and only survivor.Mr. Englander was a staff director at CBS in 1958 when he and Mr. Bernstein began collaborating on the Young People’s Concerts, embracing the mission to educate children about the joys of music. Mr. Englander had years earlier helped stage operas by Gian Carlo Menotti.“Lenny totally trusted Roger,” said the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Corigliano, who was an assistant to Mr. Englander for the Young People’s Concerts. “If he weren’t comfortable with the director, it would have been impossible. But he didn’t have to worry.”He added, “Lenny adored him.”The concerts, initially mounted at Carnegie Hall and later at Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center, have become a classic of educational programming and a powerful presence in the lives of many musicians, and musically minded people, even today.Mr. Bernstein was their undisputed star. He wrote his own scripts; talked to guest musicians like the pianist Andre Watts; played the piano to illustrate his commentary; and led the Philharmonic in classical, folk, jazz and pop music.But he left the TV production to Mr. Englander, who regarded the scores selected by Mr. Bernstein as his directing guide.“The choice of pictures — wide views, close-ups, tracking shots, rapid-fire montages or slow, languorous dissolves from one shot to another — is determined by the music itself,” he wrote in an essay for “Leonard Bernstein: The Television Years,” a 1985 exhibition at the Museum of Broadcasting in New York (now the Paley Center for Media). “The orchestra score becomes the shooting script, and the music holds all the answers for the director’s task of translating sound into picture.”Using shots from as many as eight cameras — two of them on the stage and one trained, from behind the orchestra, on the emotive Mr. Bernstein — Mr. Englander directed all 53 hourlong episodes of the concerts, which were staged and broadcast intermittently over the years through 1972.A reviewer for The New York Times wrote in 1964 that Mr. Englander had “again demonstrated that although confined to the limits of the concert stage, he is extremely adept at mobile camerawork, which always keeps the viewer interested.”His work on the concerts brought him an Emmy in 1965.Mr. Englander, left, with the conductor Andre Kostelanetz at Avery Fisher Hall, which was formerly Philharmonic Hall and is now David Geffen Hall, at Lincoln Center. Credit…Dan J. Coy/New York Philharmonic Leon Levy Digital ArchivesRoger Leslie Englander was born on Nov. 23, 1926, in Cleveland. His father, William, owned a men’s clothing store, where his mother, Frieda (Osteryoung) Englander, also worked.At Cleveland Heights High School, Roger studied piano, French horn and trumpet and achieved an early ambition — to be a conductor — by leading the school’s band and orchestra. He studied drama, composition and theory at the University of Chicago and graduated in 1945.He quickly became associated with opera. In 1946, he was the stage manager for the debut of Mr. Bernstein’s production of Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes” at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Lenox, Mass. He also worked briefly at the Chicago Opera Company for its conductor, Fausto Cleva.Over the next few years, he staged several of Mr. Menotti’s operas, including two, “The Telephone” and “The Medium,” in 1948, on WPTZ-TV in Philadelphia, an NBC affiliate. He distilled his knowledge of opera into a book, “Opera: What’s All the Screaming About?” (1983).Mr. Englander started at CBS in the early 1950s, working on news, sports and public affairs programs. He also directed episodes of the cultural program “Omnibus” about the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, the Vienna Boys Choir and the French horn.In 1957, he had an idea for a musical series for children and pitched it to a CBS executive, but the interview did not seem to go well. A few days later, he learned that the executive “had actually been interviewing me for a totally different music series that his boss, William S. Paley, had cooked up with Leonard Bernstein,” Mr. Englander wrote in his essay for the 1985 Bernstein exhibition, referring to the chairman of CBS.Leonard Bernstein conducting a Young People’s Concert in 1958 with the New York Philharmonic. One of the eight cameras involved in the productions was always trained on him.Credit…CBS Photo Archive/Getty ImagesThe Young People’s Concerts debuted in January 1958 with a program called “What Does Music Mean?,” and the reviews were favorable. Without a commercial sponsor, though, Mr. Englander worried that the series would not last long.But when Newton N. Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, famously excoriated television as a “vast wasteland,” CBS saw an opening to demonstrate that not all its programming was drivel. It moved the concerts from Saturday afternoons to Sundays at 7:30 p.m. More people tuned in, and Shell Oil signed on as the first sponsor.During and after his tenure on the Young People’s Concerts, Mr. Englander worked on musical segments for NBC’s “Bell Telephone Hour” — which earned him a Peabody Award in 1959 — and the Emmy-nominated “Vladimir Horowitz: A Television Concert at Carnegie Hall” (1968), which CBS carried. He recalled how that virtuoso pianist had to be persuaded to give his first recital on television.“I think what finally broke down Horowitz’s resistance,” he told The Evening Sentinel of Carlisle, Pa., “was the question: ‘Don’t you wish there had been film in Franz Liszt’s time so you could see him play the piano?’”After his CBS years, Mr. Englander staged Stravinsky’s “L’Histoire du Soldat” (“The Soldier’s Tale”), a theater piece conducted by Leon Fleisher, narrated by John Houseman and mimed by Bil Baird’s marionettes at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan; wrote an interactive CD-ROM musical guide to Mozart’s “The Magic Flute”; and produced a series of videotapes for Music Theatre International in which writers and composers of Broadway musicals described their production techniques.But Mr. Englander understood that the concert series with Mr. Bernstein was the acme of his career. He called them “53 of the best hours that music on television had ever seen — to this day.”Mr. Englander in 1990. He directed all 53 of the Young People’s Concerts and remained active in music productions in later years.Credit…Michael DupreOne of the young people who paid rapt attention to him was Jamie Bernstein, one of Mr. Bernstein’s three children. When she was 12, she recalled in a phone interview, she would observe Mr. Englander in the production truck outside Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall).“He was like a wizard, with the score marked up in front of him, calling the shots,” she said. “He’d say, ‘Ready, Camera 3’— the one on the French horn — and he’d snap his fingers and Camera 3 came up on the central monitor. It was exciting to watch.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Yuval Waldman, Bridge-Building Violinist, Is Dead at 74

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyYuval Waldman, Bridge-Building Violinist, Is Dead at 74A conductor as well as a skilled soloist, he liked to spotlight music composed in times of oppression, including the Holocaust.The violinist and conductor Yuval Waldman in 1977. Performing the music of composers who had been persecuted for their beliefs, he once said, was “not just a privilege but a calling.”Credit…Tyrone Dukes/The New York TimesFeb. 27, 2021Updated 4:00 p.m. ETYuval Waldman, an accomplished violinist and conductor with particular interests in building musical bridges between countries and rediscovering neglected works composed under oppressive circumstances, died on Feb. 1 in Brooklyn. He was 74.His son, Ariel Levinson-Waldman, said that the cause was coronary artery disease and that Mr. Waldman had also tested positive for the coronavirus shortly before his death.Mr. Waldman, who lived in Brooklyn, was the son of Jewish parents who survived the purges in Ukraine during the Nazi occupation of World War II, and his childhood involved several dislocations before the family eventually settled in Bat Yam, a Tel Aviv suburb. His career in some ways reflected his multinational upbringing and his sense of music as a lifeline in a turbulent world.He conducted the New American Chamber Orchestra, an ensemble formed in the 1990s and made up of Jewish émigrés from the former Soviet Union. In 2004 he founded Music Bridges International, which fostered concerts and educational programs that included music from different cultures — one program, for instance, featured American and Kazakh composers.He also played and conducted programs of music that had been composed under duress. Among them was a solo program titled “Music Forgotten and Remembered” and that featured works by Eastern European Jews, many of whom died in World War II or were silenced by the repressive practices of the Soviet Union. Another was “The Music of Oppression and Liberation,” featuring composers of various nationalities who were persecuted for their beliefs.“I feel it’s my duty to revive the memory of these composers by performing their music,” Mr. Waldman told The Oklahoman in 2011 when he performed the “Liberation” program at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma in Chickasha. “It’s not just a privilege but a calling.”Vladimir Waldman was born on Dec. 21, 1946, in Lvov, which was then part of the Soviet Union (and is now in western Ukraine, with the name usually rendered Lviv). He changed his first name to Yuval after the family had settled in Israel, taking the name of a figure from the Hebrew Bible associated with music.His father, Eliezer, was a lumber worker who was at one point conscripted into the Soviet Army; his mother, Chaya (Spivack) Waldman, was a teacher. As a boy in Lvov, Yuval was entranced by the violin music he heard at the movies and asked his parents for an instrument. He proved to have a gift for it. At the age of 7 he performed on Soviet radio.During a period of relaxed policies toward Jews after the death of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1953, the family left the country, living in Poland for a time and then in immigrant camps in Austria and Italy before reaching Israel in 1957. Eventually Yuval’s musical skills came to the attention of Isaac Stern, the great violinist, who became a mentor.Mr. Waldman studied at the Samuel Rubin Israel Academy of Music in Tel Aviv and played with Israel’s national orchestra as a teenager. After he graduated from the academy, Mr. Stern helped arrange for him to continue his studies in Geneva and then the United States, at both Indiana University and the Juilliard School. In 1969, at 22, he made his Carnegie Hall debut.Mr. Waldman’s musical career took off thanks to performances like one in 1970 at Riverside Park in New York City, where he was a soloist in a program by the West Side Orchestral Concerts Association. “Eloquent tribute to Mr. Waldman’s virtuosity in the finale was the spontaneous chorus of bravos that went up from his colleagues in the orchestra,” Robert Sherman wrote in a review in The New York Times.In July 1973 Mr. Waldman interrupted his career to join the reserves of the Israel Defense Forces. Because of all of the languages he had mastered through his multinational upbringing and touring, he was assigned to the intelligence unit. His musical skills had gotten him assigned to the entertainment unit as well. When the Yom Kippur War broke out that October, his son said, he was assigned to play for tank units in Sinai.Mr. Waldman’s son said he told the story of the time he clambered onto a tank when a commander ordered him to play something to soothe the troops after a particularly intense bombing. He played Bach. Many in the unit were recent Moroccan immigrants to Israel and had not heard Bach before.“My father remembered a moment when he was playing the Chaconne of Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor,” Ariel Waldman said, “and looked up to see tears streaming down their faces in the dust.”By 1974 Mr. Waldman had returned to his musical career and was performing to acclaim in recitals and with orchestras. He had married Cathy Walder, a pianist and composer, in 1970, and they often performed together. But he also began branching out, serving as concertmaster for ensembles including the Kansas City Philharmonic and music director for events like the Madeira Bach Festival. He conducted and recorded with numerous orchestras, and he was a founder of several quartets and other ensembles.His first marriage ended in divorce in 1997. In addition to his son from his first marriage, he is survived by his wife, Lyudmila Sholokhova, whom he married in 2010; a sister, Rina Weiss; a stepdaughter, Valeriya Sholokhova; and two grandchildren.One of Mr. Waldman’s many activities was directing the Mid-Atlantic Chamber Orchestra in the 1980s and ’90s. At an online memorial service a few weeks ago, Mr. Levinson-Waldman told about a time when that ensemble was going to small towns, performing and bringing along experts to talk at schools, including a singer who would instruct the school choirs about breath-control techniques.“My dad spoke with an accent,” Mr. Levinson-Waldman said. “English was, depending on how you count it, his eighth or ninth language.”And so when he proposed the program to the town of Pulaski, Va., “unfortunately, some of the town leaders heard the wrong thing.” They were outraged, Mr. Levinson-Waldman said, that these out-of-town musicians wanted to instruct their students about birth control.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      From Easter Island, a Pianist Emerges

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFrom Easter Island, a Pianist EmergesMahani Teave, 38 and likely the only professional classical performer from the remote island, has released her first album.The pianist Mahani Teave playing on Rapa Nui, known as Easter Island, in 2018.Credit…via Mahani TeaveFeb. 26, 2021, 10:00 a.m. ETFrom her home, halfway up the highest hill on Rapa Nui, Mahani Teave was describing the power of nature there to overwhelm.“On one side, I have an almost 180-degree view of the ocean,” she said in a recent interview. “A big fog is coming in from the hill on the other side.”The profusion of stars gives the black of the sky a seemingly “papier-mâché texture,” she said. When the sounds of crickets cease, profound silence completes “a stunning experience for the senses.”Teave, 38, learned to appreciate such stirring encounters while growing up on Rapa Nui — also known as Easter Island, the name imposed by European interlopers in 1722. From there, one of the remotest inhabited islands on the planet, this pianist went on to earn a place on the international concert stage. But rather than press on with a career of incessant touring, and quite possibly the only professional classical performer to emerge from Rapa Nui to date, she decided to return and establish the first music school on the small island nearly a decade ago.But she hasn’t stopped playing. Teave’s debut album, “Rapa Nui Odyssey,” was recently released on the British label Rubicon Classics. The recording project inspired “Song of Rapa Nui,” a new documentary streaming on Amazon Prime, directed by the Emmy Award-winning producer and filmmaker John Forsen and narrated by Audra McDonald.[embedded content]It was at Teave’s island school that the Seattle-based musician, rare string instrument collector and arts patron David Fulton had a chance encounter with her as part of a world cruise with his wife in the spring of 2018.“After we had visited the moai” — the monolithic statues of revered ancestors that symbolize Rapa Nui — “we were taken to the school to hear a performance,” Fulton said. “The kids had flowers in their hair and used the back porch of the school as a stage.”Then Teave began playing on a wobbly upright piano. “It was so moving and unexpected, even surreal,” Fulton said. “She played a serious program. I thought: This is not a good pianist; this is one of the world’s greatest pianists.”Fulton was shocked to discover that Teave had never released a recording. He invited her to Seattle to put down some of her favorite repertoire at Benaroya Hall, engaging the Grammy Award-winning engineer Dmitriy Lipay, who works with the Seattle Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.Lipay recalls that he was concerned about whether there would be sufficient studio time for the challenging program Teave had conceived — Bach, Liszt, Handel, Scriabin, Chopin and Rachmaninoff — with a musician who had never before recorded in the studio. “With Mahani we were in for a big surprise,” he said. “The recording process with her was very similar to the golden years, when artists were willing and able to give a complete performance in one take.”Forsen, with whom Fulton had collaborated on four previous films, was asked to tape the recording sessions. As they learned more of Teave’s story, they realized it merited a full documentary.Teave’s debut album, “Rapa Nui Odyssey,” inspired “Song of Rapa Nui,” a new documentary streaming on Amazon Prime.Credit…Miguel Sayago/Alamy PhotoTeave’s first exposure to the classical repertory came from an itinerant ballet teacher, and for years her favorite work was “The Nutcracker,” which she listened to incessantly on a cassette, practicing her steps at home.“There were no classical radio stations on the island when I was a little girl,” she said. “Nobody even knew about classical music, except for tidbits they might catch from some movie.”When a retired violinist later settled temporarily on the island, bringing along a piano, Teave became fascinated by the instrument and persuaded the woman to give her lessons. Teave also wrote to the Chilean pianist Roberto Bravo, pleading with him to visit Rapa Nui. He did, and invited her to make her public debut; she was 9. On his advice, Teave’s mother, an American who had settled on the island and married a native of Rapa Nui, took her daughter to Valdivia, in the south of Chile, to study at the conservatory.She went on to teachers in Cleveland and Berlin, a city where she felt especially at home and which became her base for almost four years.“There’s a respect there for history, for lessons learned, that’s very much like being on the island,” she said.Her decision to return to Rapa Nui after launching a potentially stellar career was part of a slow process. Teave said she felt she had devoted “the right amount of time” to each stage of her formation up to that point — “like a musical phrasing.”“A little door opened and I decided to go through it because nobody else will,” she added. “I realized we need a school, and I am the tool of this universe to do what has to be done at this moment.”Rather than press on with a career of incessant touring, Teave returned to Rapa Nui and established the first music school on the small island nearly a decade ago.Credit…via Mahani TeaveWith Enrique Icka, a construction engineer with a parallel career performing traditional music who sings on one of the album’s tracks, Teave founded a school for music and the arts. They named it Toki, the Rapa Nui word for “tool” — the same word that denotes the objects used to carve the mysterious moai statues.“It’s a very symbolic word,” she said, “because we believe the present carves the future.”That vision extends to social concerns and the environment. Toki is self-sustainable, using rainwater collectors and solar panels. The building was constructed from recycled tires and the glass and plastic bottles left behind by hordes of tourists. Teave conceives of it as a kind of reversal of the traditional pattern of colonialist exploitation. She believes the school — and Rapa Nui, which has already been hit by the effects of climate change — can be a model for the outside world, showing the urgency of taking action on environmental issues.Normally about 100 students, from 2-year-olds to teenagers, study each year, enrolled in classes in both traditional Polynesian and Western classical music that meet after regular school hours. The classes were free until 2018, funded mostly through philanthropy, with supplements from Chilean government grants; the Fundación Mar Adentro; and the island’s cultural corporation. During the pandemic, the student body has dwindled to 60. Rapa Nui has been especially hard hit because of its reliance on tourism — the chief engine, along with farming, of the island’s economy. But even before 2020, a general lack of opportunities has led to high rates of alcoholism, drug abuse and domestic violence.“If the children want to be musicians, they get the possibility to study here and later continue off the island when they are old enough,” she said. “But the others who will not pursue music as a career learn values that come just with learning an instrument. I see it as a tremendously necessary element, especially in a community which is as vulnerable as ours.”Given the ills that historically have come from the West, did people on the island greet Teave’s interest with suspicion? “Quite the opposite,” she said. “Because of the history, everything which is brought in from outside is always looked on with great skepticism. But when it’s born from the community, it’s accepted wholeheartedly. I performed two concerts before we ever started the school, and the people were moved and so grateful.”Teave said she would like to travel a bit more to concertize. But whenever she leaves the island, Rapa Nui remains a part of her music.“All of these experiences are in my playing and the pieces that have accompanied my life,” she said. “Always.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      10 Classical Concerts to Stream in March

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeWatch: ‘WandaVision’Travel: More SustainablyFreeze: Homemade TreatsCheck Out: Podcasters’ Favorite PodcastsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story10 Classical Concerts to Stream in MarchMitsuko Uchida, the Louisiana Philharmonic and a performance organized by Teju Cole are among the highlights.The pianist Mitsuko Uchida will stream a Schubert program this month through Cal Performances.Credit…Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesFeb. 25, 2021, 10:00 a.m. ETAs the live performing arts continue to struggle through the coronavirus pandemic, here are 10 highlights from the flood of online music content coming in March. (Times listed are Eastern.)‘Die Tote Stadt’Feb. 28 at 1 p.m.; operavision.eu; available through March 28.Korngold’s breakthrough opera has not been well served on DVD. Some productions emphasize the plot’s salaciousness at the expense of its musical beauty. For others, the problem is the reverse. If anyone can achieve the delicate balance of the two elements, it’s the experienced director Robert Carsen, whose production of the rapturous, late Romantic score — a precursor to Korngold’s influential Hollywood work — appeared at the Komische Oper in Berlin in 2018, and is streaming now. The soprano Sara Jakubiak stars, and has made something of a specialty of Korngold in recent years, including appearing in another recent Berlin staging, at the Deutsche Oper, of “Das Wunder der Heliane.” SETH COLTER WALLSTeju Cole and Orchestra of St. Luke’sMarch 3 at 6:30 p.m.; oslmusic.org; available until March 10.This ensemble, which has responded robustly and creatively to the constraints of streamed performance, begins a new words-and-music series, “Sounds and Stories,” with a program organized by the writer Teju Cole and hosted by the actor David Hyde Pierce. Cole will read selections from his work alongside visual elements and pieces by an eclectic array of composers: Caroline Shaw, Yvette Janine Jackson, Henryk Gorecki, Unsuk Chin, Kaija Saariaho and Hildegard von Bingen. Oh, and Beethoven. ZACHARY WOOLFEAnthony McGill will collaborate with the Catalyst Quartet on a performance presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Credit…Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesAnthony McGillMarch 9 at 7 p.m.; Facebook and YouTube; available indefinitely.“Cadence: The Sounds of Justice, the Sounds of a Movement,” presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been organized by Anthony McGill, the New York Philharmonic’s principal clarinet and the latest winner of the Avery Fisher Prize. Inspired by the Great Migration and works in the museum’s collection, McGill is joined by the Catalyst Quartet, with whom he collaborated on the group’s album “Uncovered, Vol. 1: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.” They will play Coleridge-Taylor’s Clarinet Quintet in F sharp minor alongside Kerry James Marshall’s 2014 painting “Untitled (Studio),” and a premiere by Richard Danielpour, in front of Philip Guston’s “Stationary Figure” (1973). Closing the concert will be Adolphus Hailstork’s solo “Three Smiles for Tracey,” juxtaposed with Joel Shapiro’s sculpture “Untitled” (2000-01). JOSHUA BARONESteven BanksMarch 10 at 7:30 p.m.; Facebook and YouTube; available indefinitely.This adventurous saxophonist and composer presents his debut recital for the organization Young Concert Artists, which named him the winner of its prestigious international auditions competition in 2019. The program, with the pianist Xak Bjerken, includes premieres by Carlos Simon and Saad Haddad and Banks’s own new work “Come As You Are.” He will also perform Mozart’s Oboe Quartet in F (with members of the Zorá Quartet) and Schumann’s “Fantasiestücke” for Clarinet and Piano — both arranged for saxophone. And why not? The sax, after all, is a latter-day cousin of both those instruments. ANTHONY TOMMASINILouisiana Philharmonic OrchestraMarch 12 at 8 p.m.; lpomusic.com; available through September.There are two Copland works on this program: “Appalachian Spring” and the Clarinet Concerto. But the bigger news is the performance of Courtney Bryan’s violin concerto “Syzygy,” featuring Jennifer Koh as soloist. The Louisiana players have a longstanding connection with Bryan’s music; having performed her orchestral work “Rejoice,” they’ve also named this composer-pianist a “creative partner.” So they may well have a feel for her take on Americana, which often includes elements of spirituals and the blues. (Bryan’s “Blessed,” a commission for Opera Philadelphia’s online channel, is also streaming from Feb. 26.) SETH COLTER WALLSThe mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey performs Kurt Weill at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesKate LindseyMarch 14 at 2 p.m.; teatroallascala.org, as well as YouTube and Facebook; available through March 21.One of my favorite albums in recent years has been “Thousands of Miles,” a program mostly of Kurt Weill songs performed by the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey and the pianist Baptiste Trotignon with cabaret-like cool; Lindsey brings to these works both the radiant lyricism of Teresa Stratas and the raw Sprechstimme of Lotte Lenya, two iconic Weill interpreters. That album is the basis for this recital with Trotignon at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, where Lindsey will also appear in March for a double bill of Weill’s “The Seven Deadly Sins” and “Mahagonny-Songspiel,” conducted by Riccardo Chailly and streaming on RaiPlay on March 18. JOSHUA BARONEMitsuko UchidaMarch 18 at 10 p.m.; calperformances.org; available through June 16.For Mitsuko Uchida, Schubert’s piano works have been a lifelong work in progress, which is why, years after she recorded the bulk of them, they are still well worth hearing anew — lately, in online recitals. From Wigmore Hall in London she recently streamed the Sonata in C (D. 840) for the Cleveland Orchestra. Next is this program for Cal Performances, featuring the forlorn yet tender Impromptu in A flat (D. 935); the famous Impromptu in C minor (D. 899), with its spare, enigmatic opening march embellished through chords and variations; and the Sonata in G (D. 894), a font of serenity that’s as good a spiritual balm as anything right now. JOSHUA BARONESarah CahillMarch 20 at 10:30 p.m.; YouTube; available indefinitely.A champion of American music and living composers, this pianist is also known as host of the popular program Revolutions Per Minutes on KALW in San Francisco. This recital, presented by the Community School of Music and Arts in Mountain View, Calif., is a celebration of the 19th Amendment, and includes works by female composers from the 18th century to the present day, among them Clara Schumann, Amy Beach, Margaret Bonds and Vitezslava Kapralova. ANTHONY TOMMASINICaramoor will stream a recital by the bass-baritone Dashon Burton, left.Credit…Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesDashon BurtonMarch 21 at 3 p.m.; caramoor.org; available until March 23.Known as a member of the contemporary vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth as much as for trumpeting performances in Handel’s “Messiah,” this burnished-tone bass-baritone appears in recital with the pianist David Fung under the auspices of Caramoor. The program includes Schumann’s “Dichterliebe” as well as spirituals and works by Dowland, Margaret Bonds, Florence Price and William Bolcom. ZACHARY WOOLFELouisville OrchestraMarch 27 at 7:30 p.m.; louisvilleorchestra.vhx.tv; available until May 23.The exuberance of this ensemble and its young music director, Teddy Abrams, is captured in its name for its streaming series: Louisville Orchestra Virtual Edition, or LOVE. Installments explore Classical and folk styles, and, on March 27, the legacy of Black traditions. Abrams conducts from the keyboard in Ravel’s jazz-influenced Piano Concerto in G, and the local rapper, activist, teacher and Louisville Metro Council member Jecorey Arthur performs. ZACHARY WOOLFEAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Love Classical Music? Anthony Tommasini Recommends Contemporary Composers

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyLove Classical Music? Anthony Tommasini Recommends Contemporary ComposersThe New York Times’s Culture editor has questions. Our chief classical music critic has answers.San Francisco Symphony performing a Stravinsky program at Carnegie Hall in 2018.Credit…Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesFeb. 23, 2021As the editor of the Culture department at The New York Times, Gilbert Cruz relies on critics, reporters and editors in every field of the arts for their expertise. Now we’re bringing his personal questions — and our writers’ answers — to you. Currently on his mind: his constant struggle with how to learn more about everything that Anthony Tommasini, the chief classical music critic, writes about.Gilbert asks: I’m very open when it comes to my lack of knowledge about classical music and opera. And through conversations over the years, you’ve been gracious enough to try to explain to me that I shouldn’t feel overwhelmed by this. I’m also a fan of working through groups of works — all of a pop artist’s albums, all the movies from a particular director, et cetera. Walk me through how I (or someone else) might want to start doing this when it comes to classical music.Anthony answers: If someone has a natural inclination to go through a body of works, classical music certainly invites that approach. Take Beethoven’s nine symphonies: There they are, nine numbered scores spanning nearly 25 years of his adult life. Of course it can be fascinating to go through them in order. Or Brahms’s four; or Sibelius’s seven.Yet, too often, I’ve found, newcomers to classical music feel they have to take a music survey class before they can “get” certain pieces or composers. My only caution would be to avoid that mind-set and just go on an immersive exploration. My general preference is for programs where, say, Beethoven’s amazing Seventh Symphony is performed alongside contemporary scores, including, ideally, a new piece by a young composer who is indebted to Beethoven but unintimidated by the big guy and eager to share the stage with him.Also, I’d recommend exploring whole groups of pieces if possible through attending live concerts (when they return, of course). For example, last February, over 12 days at Alice Tully Hall the Danish String Quartet played Beethoven’s 16 quartets in chronological order, on six programs. Now that was an exhilarating way to plunge into those incredible pieces. The series was one of the last momentous classical music events in New York before everything stopped in mid-March.Gilbert asks: I want to ask you about this extended absence of live music, but first — please pair me a few contemporary scores with Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony!Tony answers: Well, back in 2002 at Carnegie Hall Christoph von Dohnanyi led the Cleveland Orchestra in a program that offered Wolfgang Rihm’s Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra (2000). That piece, written in a pungently modernist musical language, unfolded as a long, uninterrupted, strangely riveting but very elusive single movement.Then, after intermission, came Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. Maybe because the Rihm was still in my ears, the slow, extended introduction to the first movement seemed unusually elusive, almost evasive. Beethoven is toying with us here, I realized. I listened thinking: “What’s going on? Where is this heading? When does the ‘real’ first movement start?” I’m sure that’s the way Dohnanyi wanted me to hear it.When I was a teenager, I heard Leonard Bernstein conduct the New York Philharmonic in Beethoven’s epic, intrepid “Eroica” Symphony, followed by Stravinsky’s still-shocking “The Rite of Spring.” Hearing those works juxtaposed emphasized the pathbreaking qualities of each score. The “Eroica” sounded utterly audacious; the “Rite” seemed elemental and timeless. Beethoven and Stravinsky emerged like fellow radicals.Gilbert asks: I have to say, hearing you describe those performances makes me miss the grandeur of a concert hall, sort of in the same way I miss the largeness of a movie screen. Part of experiencing art outside my home is the potential to be overwhelmed, and as many speakers as I might have, or as big as my TV might be, it obviously doesn’t feel the same. I’ve only started to go to see live classical music in earnest in the past three or four years. You’ve been doing it for much longer, and I have to imagine the longing is deeper.You recently wrote a wonderful piece, “Notes Toward Reinventing the American Orchestra,” which is full of smart suggestions for how classical music organizations might change post-pandemic. What don’t you want to change?Tony answers: Ah, what I don’t want to change in classical music, what will never change, I’m convinced, is the sheer sensual pleasure, ecstasy even, of being immersed in the sound of a great orchestra, a fine string quartet, a radiant soprano. And to experience that you must experience this art form live.As a kid, I first got to know countless pieces through recordings. And during the pandemic it often feels like recordings are all we have. But growing up, what finally hooked me on classical music was hearing the pianist Rudolf Serkin and the New York Philharmonic under Bernstein at Carnegie Hall in Beethoven’s mighty “Emperor” Concerto; and having a standing-room ticket as a young teenager to hear the celebrated soprano Renata Tebaldi, with her sumptuous voice, as Desdemona in Verdi’s “Otello” at the Metropolitan Opera; or, a little later, hearing Leontyne Price’s soft, sustained high notes in “Aida” soar upward and surround me in a balcony seat at the Met. I only vaguely knew what these operas were about. I didn’t care.And what I’m saying goes for more intimate music, too. Only when you hear a terrific string quartet performing works by Haydn, Shostakovich or Bartok in a hall that seats just a few hundred do you really understand what makes “chamber music” so overwhelming. But it makes a huge difference to hear a symphony, whether by Mozart or Messiaen, in a lively, inviting concert hall.Gilbert asks: You’ve proven this to me several times over the past three years — I’m thinking of the time you took me to hear “The Rite of Spring” at Carnegie Hall and I walked out gobsmacked. (I know, such a rookie.) Or the time I found my eyes welling up at the end of Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville, Summer of 1915” at David Geffen Hall. I just don’t think I would have felt those same emotions listening to those pieces at home.But there is something I really do want to listen to at home, and it was my initial reason for wanting to have this exchange with you. In reading your wonderfully personal piece from a few weeks ago about the pianist Peter Serkin, you mention his recording of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations. And I’ve heard about the “Goldberg” Variations hundreds of times, but I’ve never actually heard them. (I know, such a rookie!) Help a colleague out?Tony answers: The sheer vitality and ingenious inventiveness of Bach’s music in the “Goldberg” Variations — moment to moment, section to section — surely accounts for the enduring popularity of this monumental work. But the overall structure of the composition is also captivating even to listeners who may not consciously perceive it. In a typical theme and variations form, a theme is heard straight through and then followed by a series of variations that spin off, play with, tweak or elaborate upon it.Mozart wrote a playful set of piano variations on the tune known today as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” The “Goldberg” Variations is more unusual: The theme is a lovely, mellow “Aria,” as Bach calls it. It’s followed by a set of 30 variations. It’s not really the aria’s melody, as such, that’s put through variations; it’s the bass line and the series (or progression) of harmonies (the chords) suggested by the bass line that Bach plays around with in each variation.So the allure of the piece, I think, is that the individual variations sound strikingly fresh and boldly contrasted, yet they all seem to go together, to emanate from the same place. There’s another element to it in that every third variation is written as a specific kind of canon, a strict contrapuntal form that’s like what’s commonly called a round (think “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”).But you can be a huge “Goldberg” Variations fan without really understanding the technique involved. I’d suggest listening carefully to the opening aria a few times, concentrating on the bass line in the piano. Then I bet you’ll sense how the sequence of bass notes and harmonies permeates the subsequent variations, even when the music goes through exciting contrasts. And, yes, the young Peter Serkin is a wonderful guide.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Peter G. Davis, Music Critic of Wide Knowledge and Wit, Dies at 84

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPeter G. Davis, Music Critic of Wide Knowledge and Wit, Dies at 84He wrote with passion and bite about classical music, and especially opera, over a 50-year career at The Times and New York magazine.Peter G. Davis in 1990 on a visit to Sissinghurst Castle Garden in England. As a student years earlier he toured  Europe’s summer music festivals.Credit…Scott ParrisFeb. 19, 2021, 2:43 p.m. ETPeter G. Davis, who for over 30 years held sway as one of America’s leading classical music critics with crisp, witty prose and an encyclopedic memory of countless performances and performers, died on Feb. 13. He was 84.His death was confirmed by his husband, Scott Parris.First as a critic at The New York Times and later at New York magazine, Mr. Davis wrote precise, sharply opinionated reviews of all forms of classical music, though his great love was opera and the voice, an attachment he developed in his early teens.He presided over the field during boon years in New York in the 1960s and ’70s, when performances were plentiful and tickets relatively cheap, and when the ups and downs of a performer’s career provided fodder for cocktail parties and after-concert dinners, not to mention the notebooks of writers like Mr. Davis, who often delivered five or more reviews a week.He wrote those reviews with a knowing, deadpan, at times world-weary tone. During a 1976 concert by the Russian violinist Vladimir Spivakov, an activist protesting the treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union threw a paint bomb at the stage, splattering Mr. Spivakov and his accompanist. Mr. Davis wrote, “Terrorists must be extremely insensitive to music, for tossing paint at a violinist playing Bach’s ‘Chaconne’ is simply poor timing.”He maintained faith in the traditions of classical music not for the sake of perpetuating the past but for their intrinsic power, and he looked askance at those who tried to update them just to be trendy.In a 1977 review of the Bronx Opera’s staging of “Fra Diavolo,” by the 19th-century French composer Daniel Francois Auber, he decried what he saw as a “refusal to believe in the piece by treating it as an embarrassment, a work that needs a maximum of directorial gimmicks if the audience is to remain interested.”He could be equally dismissive of new music and composers who he thought were overhyped. The minimalist composer Philip Glass and Beverly Sills (early on “a dependable, hard-working but not especially remarkable soprano” who became a star, he felt, only after her talents had peaked) were regular targets.In a review of a performance of Mr. Glass’s work at Carnegie Hall in 2002, he wrote, “It was pretty much business as usual: the same simple-minded syncopations and jigging ostinatos, the same inane little tunes on their way to nowhere, the same clumsily managed orchestral climaxes.”Which is not to say that Mr. Davis was a reactionary — he championed young composers and upstart regional opera companies. His great strength as a critic was his pragmatism, his commitment to assess the performance in front of him on its own terms while casting a skeptical eye at gimmickry.“He was a connoisseur of vocal music of unimpeachable authority,” said Justin Davidson, a former classical music critic at Newsday who now writes about classical music and architecture for New York magazine. “He had a sense that the things he cared about mattered, that they were not niche, not just entertainment, but that they cut to the heart of what American culture was.”Peter Graffam Davis was born on March 3, 1936, in Concord, Mass., outside Boston, and grew up in nearby Lincoln. His father, E. Russell Davis, was a vice president at the Bank of Boston. His mother, Susan (Graffam) Davis, was a homemaker.Mr. Parris, whom he married in 2009, is his only immediate survivor.Mr. Davis fell in love with opera as a teenager, building a record collection at home and attending performances in Boston. During the months before his junior year at Harvard, he took a tour of Europe’s summer music festivals — Strauss in Munich, Mozart in Salzburg, Wagner in Bayreuth.He encountered European opera at a hinge point. It was still defined by longstanding traditions and had yet to fully emerge from the destruction of World War II, but poking out of the wreckage was a new generation of performers: the French soprano Régine Crespin, the Austrian soprano Leonie Rysanek, the Italian tenors Franco Corelli and Giuseppe di Stefano. Mr. Davis got to see them up close.Mr. Davis’s 1997 book is exhaustive, exhilarating and often withering history of opera in America.He graduated from Harvard in 1958 with a bachelor’s degree in music. After spending a year at a conservatory in Stuttgart, Germany, he moved to New York to complete a master’s degree in composition at Columbia University.Mr. Davis wrote a number of musical works of his own in the early 1960s, including an opera, “Zoe,” and a pair of Gilbert and Sullivan-esque operettas. But he decided that his future lay not in writing music but in writing about it. He became the classical music editor for both High Fidelity and Musical America magazines, as well as the New York music correspondent for The Times of London.He began writing freelance articles for The New York Times in 1967, and in 1974 was hired as the Sunday music editor, a job that allowed him to supplement his near-daily output of reviews — whether of recordings, concerts or innumerable debut recitals — with articles he commissioned from other writers. “He had a superb memory,” said Alex Ross, the classical music critic for The New Yorker. “Anything you threw at him, he was able to speak about precisely and intelligently.”Mr. Davis moved to New York magazine in 1981. There he could pick and choose his reviews as well as occasionally stand back to survey the classical music landscape.Increasingly, he didn’t like what he saw.As early as 1980, Mr. Davis was lamenting the future of opera singing, blaming an emphasis on “pleasing appearance and facile adaptability” over talent and hard work and a star system that pushed promising but immature vocalists past their physical limits.The diminished position of classical music in American culture that he documented did not spare critics, and in 2007 New York magazine let him go. He went back to freelancing for The Times and wrote regularly for Opera News and Musical America.For all his thousands of reviews, Mr. Davis seemed most proud of his book “The American Opera Singer” (1997), an exhaustive, exhilarating and often withering history in which he praised the versatility of contemporary American performers while taking many of them to task for being superficial workhorses.“I can’t think of a music critic who cares more deeply about the state of opera in America,” the critic Terry Teachout wrote in his review of the book for The Times. “Anyone who wants to know what is wrong with American singing will find the answers here.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More