Classical Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares179 Views

      in Music

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

      by

      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

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Scrapped Plans for London Concert Hall Sour Mood for U.K. Musicians

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyScrapped Plans for London Concert Hall Sour Mood for U.K. MusiciansThe decision comes as classical musicians struggle to deal with the impact of the pandemic and Britain’s departure from the European Union.A computer-generated rendering of the proposed London Center for Music, by the architects Diller Scofidio & Renfro. London authorities announced Thursday that the project would not go ahead.Credit…Diller Scofidio + RenfroFeb. 19, 2021, 11:11 a.m. ETLONDON — Back in 2017, London music fans had high hopes for a reinvigoration of the city’s classical music scene.That year, Simon Rattle, one of the world’s most acclaimed conductors, became the music director of the London Symphony Orchestra, and Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the architects behind the High Line in New York, were appointed to design a world-class 2,000-seat concert hall in the city.Now, the situation couldn’t be more different.On Thursday, just weeks after Rattle announced he would leave London in 2023 to take the reins at the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich, London officials announced that plans for the new hall had been scrapped. Rattle had been the driving force behind the project.In a news release announcing the decision, the City of London Corporation, the local government body overseeing the proposal, did not mention Rattle’s departure; the new hall would not go ahead because of the “unprecedented circumstances” caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the release said.The announcement was not unexpected. Few private funders came forward for the project, and Britain’s government was reluctant to back the project, which critics had decried as elitist, after years of cuts to basic services.But some musical experts say the news is still a blow to Britain’s classical musicians, already suffering from a pandemic-induced shutdown of their work, and Brexit, which has raised fears about their ability to to perform abroad.“It’s a further confirmation of the parochialization of British music and the arts,” said Jasper Parrott, a co-founder of HarrisonParrott, a classical music agency, in a telephone interview.The mood among musicians was low, Parrott said, especially because of changes to the rules governing European tours that came about because of Brexit. Before Britain left the European Union, classical musicians and singers could work in most European countries without needing visas or work permits, and many took last-minute bookings, jumping on low-cost flights to make concerts at short notice.Classical musicians now require costly and time-consuming visas to work in some European countries, Parrott said. Changes to haulage rules also make it harder for orchestras to tour, he added: Trucks carrying their equipment are limited to two stops on the continent before they must return to Britain.Deborah Annetts, the chief executive of the Incorporated Society of Musicians, said on Tuesday during a parliamentary inquiry into the new rules that she had been “inundated with personal testimony from musicians as to the work that they have lost, or are going to lose, in Europe as a result of the new visa and work permit arrangements.”A British musician who wanted to play a concert in Spain would have to pay 600 pounds, or about $840, for a work permit, she said, adding that this would make such a trip unviable for many. She called upon the government to negotiate deals with European countries so cultural workers could move around more easily.Parrott said he expected many British classical musicians would retrain for other careers, or move outside Britain for work, if the rules were not changed.High profile departures like Rattle’s have only contributed to the impression of a sector in decline. On Jan. 22, Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, a young Lithuanian conductor seen as a rising star, announced she would leave her post as music director of the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at the end of the 2021-22 season. “This is a deeply personal decision, reflecting my desire to step away from the organizational and administrative responsibilities of being a music director,” she said in a statement at the time.Manuel Brug, a music critic for Die Welt, the German newspaper, said in a telephone interview that, viewed from the continent, classical music in Britain seemed in a bad way, “with all this horrible news.”The new London concert hall “was always a dream, but at least it was a dream,” he said.Given recent developments, many British musicians and singers may have to consider moving to Europe if they wanted to succeed, he said.Yet not all were downbeat about the future. British musicians could cope with the impact of the coronavirus, or Brexit — but not both at the same time, unless the government stepped in to help, said Paul Carey Jones, a Welsh bass baritone who has campaigned for the interests of freelance musicians during the pandemic.“British artists are some of the best trained, most talented and most innovative and creative,” he said. “But what we’re almost completely lacking is support from the current government. So we need them to grasp the urgency of the situation.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Boston Symphony Orchestra Names First Woman Chief Executive

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBoston Symphony Orchestra Names First Woman Chief ExecutiveGail Samuel spent nearly three decades at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, part of a management team that helped make it the envy of the orchestra world.“There is no other orchestra in the world that I would have left to be part of,” Gail Samuel said of leaving the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the Boston Symphony Orchestra.Credit…Emily Berl for The New York TimesFeb. 18, 2021, 9:30 a.m. ETThe Boston Symphony Orchestra announced Thursday that Gail Samuel, the chief operating officer of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, would become its next chief executive, making her the first woman to lead the institution in its 140-year history.In picking her, the orchestra looked west, to one of the most successful American orchestras of recent years, for its choice to succeed Mark Volpe, who led the Boston Symphony for 23 years. Samuel will be responsible for steering the organization out of one of its most dire crises: The pandemic has left the Boston Symphony, one of the nation’s wealthiest orchestras, struggling after months of lost revenues and deep uncertainty around when live audiences will return.Samuel will become Boston’s president and chief executive in June. By the time she leaves Los Angeles, she will have worked at the Philharmonic for nearly three decades. She said in an interview she had not imagined leaving Los Angeles until she started having conversations with the Boston Symphony.“There is no other orchestra in the world that I would have left to be part of,” Samuel said in an interview. The company is exceptional for its breadth of activities, she said, which include the core symphony orchestra; the Boston Pops, its lighter alter ego; and Tanglewood, its thriving summer music festival in the Berkshires.Samuel was part of the management team that helped make the Los Angeles Philharmonic the envy of the classical music world. She was named the orchestra’s acting president and chief executive when Deborah Borda, its longtime leader, took a brief sabbatical in 2015 to teach at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and she was given the acting position again after Borda left to take over the New York Philharmonic. Samuel had hoped to succeed Borda, but the Philharmonic’s board went outside the organization, choosing Simon Woods, who had led the Seattle Symphony. (When he stepped down in 2019 after less than two years in the post, the Philharmonic elevated Chad Smith, who had been its chief operating officer.)She is also president of the Hollywood Bowl, the band shell that serves as the Philharmonic’s lucrative summer home, supplying much of its revenue.Samuel grew up in Los Angeles in a musical family; her parents were public school music teachers, and the violin became her instrument of choice. She studied music and psychology at the University of Southern California, where she later got an M.B.A.Although she spent the vast majority of her career on the West Coast, Samuel has a strong connection to Tanglewood. She remembers stopping there on a family road trip in 1986 and seeing a concert conducted by Leonard Bernstein. That concert became famous when the violinist Midori, then 14 years old, had to swap instruments twice after the E string broke on her violin, then again on the borrowed violin.“I fell in love with that place,” Samuel said. She soon sought a way to return, and found her way back there one summer as a student, and two summers as a staff member.In Boston, Volpe leaves behind a legacy of financial stability, despite the struggles of the classical music industry, and artistic evolution. During his tenure the orchestra’s endowment — the largest in the classical music field — more than tripled, to $509 million. Its music director, Andris Nelsons, is among the most sought-after in the world.But when the orchestra returns to performing live in the concert hall, it will be in a different world: The musicians there have already agreed to steep pay cuts that will only revert to normal if the orchestra meets financial benchmarks.“This is a difficult time for everyone and I think every organization is going to be thinking about how to come out of this,” Samuel said. “It’s a long path, but there’s also an opportunity to think about things differently.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      The Thrill of a Contemporary Classical Concert, Captured on Disc

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookThe Thrill of a Contemporary Classical Concert, Captured on DiscWith live performances still largely shut down, the group Klangforum Wien has released a five-album set of solos and premieres.Members of Klangforum Wien at the Vienna University of Economics and Business in 2019.Credit…Tina HerzlFeb. 17, 2021, 12:33 p.m. ETIt’s easy to focus on large institutions when bemoaning the loss of classical music in New York during the pandemic; their concerts were big-ticket items, planned (and planned for) far in advance. Yet the charm of cultural life in this city has often been found in evenings that came together on a shorter timeline, and at smaller venues.I remembered this while listening to five new albums recently released on the Kairos label — all featuring members of Klangforum Wien, an Austrian chamber orchestra with a strong reputation in contemporary classical music.They’re the kind of group you could find, before the pandemic, playing a free concert in the small recital hall at the Austrian Cultural Forum in Midtown. You might R.S.V.P. a couple of hours before the performance, where sterling renditions of rarely heard repertoire would lend a vivid, unexpected charge to the evening. Existing somewhere between the informality of the pop-up concert and the pomp of the major symphonic or operatic showcase, these are sorely missed, too.In some ways, though, a similar experience is possible with these new recordings, which are centered on individual composers — Olga Neuwirth, Toshio Hosokawa, Rebecca Saunders, Salvatore Sciarrino and Georges Aperghis — and their works for soloists. The albums, recorded last summer and each featuring a premiere commissioned by the ensemble, feel like experimental-business-as-usual, executed at a typically high level; the players sequence vistas of extremity and alarm next to furtive glimpses of more traditional instrumental beauty. Few listeners will thrill to every single piece. But that’s normal, even useful. (Remember risk-taking? The cultural kind, not the taking-your-life-in-your-hands-to-buy-groceries kind?)A chancy overall approach helps the programming of the five albums resonate. Each comes with the subtitle “Solo,” Klangforum’s only reminder of the limitations put on pandemic recording practices. Otherwise, they all offer a welcome release from recent productions that promise good-enough amiability for the moment. Even if you’re unfamiliar with these composers, you can get started with the tracks below.Olga Neuwirth: ‘Magic Flu-idity’It’s a little bit of a cheat to call “Magic Flu-idity” a solo. This work for flute — heard in New York, when Claire Chase played it as part of her “Density 2036” project in 2019 — requires a percussionist to join in, on an Olivetti typewriter. (On Klangforum’s release, that percussionist is Lukas Schiske, joining the flutist Vera Fischer).Still, Neuwirth earns the extra instrumental voice. The typewriter’s punchy carriage return — and its associated pinging sound — has a way of punctuating the end of barreling motifs in the flute writing. There’s a wit in these moments that leavens some of the aggression found elsewhere. It’s a balance Neuwirth has also struck in her “Lost Highway Suite.”If you find yourself won over by “Magic Flu-idity,” make time for the first track on the album: “CoronAtion I: io son ferito ahimè” (2020), a work for percussion and sampled audio commissioned by the group.Toshio Hosokawa: ‘Falling Cherry Blossoms’Hosokawa emphasizes his interest in Western experimentalism, traditional Japanese musical forms, as well as in calligraphy — which he has used as a metaphor for his own compositional approach. The first of his “2 Japanese Folk Songs” for harp, written in 2003, contains peculiar timbres and percussive fillips. But it also features a transporting melodic gracefulness, particularly in Virginie Tarrête’s recording.His diverse reference points are also identifiable in other works on the album. A piano solo, “‘Haiku’ for Pierre Boulez” contains the sort of heady modernism that its dedicatee specialized in; yet it also has a Zen-inflected calm — what the ensemble’s liner notes describe as “an almost ego-less ‘Path of Awareness’” — that is rare in Boulez’s body of work.Rebecca Saunders: ‘Dust’A mysterious play with texture and spare melodic materials form the core of Saunders’s aesthetic; just listen to the recent release of her orchestral works in the Musica Viva series (one of my favorite albums of 2020). Klangforum’s tour of her writing for solo instruments is not as consistently thrilling. Though played well by the pianist Florian Müller, Saunders’s “Shadow,” from 2013, seems less distinctive than the composer’s best pieces — its rapid changes in dynamics familiar from vintage experimental trends.But other entries in this solo set deliver. One is “Dust,” a percussion piece performed here by Björn Wilker. Saunders’s imagination is well represented within the work’s wealth of sonic effects. The movement between uneasy, wobbling tones and steadier, more mournful harmonies for pitched percussion elements is both persuasive and ravishing. And the album’s closing work — another piano solo, commissioned by Klangforum and performed by Joonas Ahonen — shows a composer fully in command of her voice. (That solo, titled “to an utterance — study,” may whet appetites for her larger piano concerto of the same name, set to premiere later this year.)Salvatore Sciarrino: ‘Due notturni: I’Sciarrino is perhaps the best-known composer represented in this Klangforum set, but the album devoted to his solos still contains surprises. The leadoff pair of nocturnes, composed in 1998, have a relaxed air, particularly when compared with the more harried “Notturni crudeli” piano solos. Another highlight is “Canzona di ringraziamento,” a quivering and arresting “mutation” for alto saxophone.Georges Aperghis: ‘Lopsided Sob’Save the most dramatic, intense album in the “Solo” series for the end. Aperghis’s experimental sound world is famously theatrical; and “Lopsided Sob,” a 2015 piece for accordion, shows that he was losing none of his febrile flair as he approached age 70.There’s a gamboling quality in the dense first figures. The drama increases, paradoxically, as the music transitions into quieter dynamics. Will the opening aggression return? While you wait to find out, the coexistence of Aperghis’s dissonant harmonies and the effervescence embedded in Krassimir Sterev’s performance produces a pleasingly dizzying effect.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      A Young Pianist Learns Liszt From Listening

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA Young Pianist Learns Liszt From ListeningFor his new album, Benjamin Grosvenor delved into historical recordings of the daunting Sonata in B minor.“This is music that’s probably not supposed to be played cleanly,” Benjamin Grosvenor said of Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor, the centerpiece of his new album.Credit…Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesFeb. 15, 2021How do the great musicians prepare to play the great works? Each has his or her own methods, and tends to keep the strategy quiet, a secret key to success.One thing that distinguishes the subtle Benjamin Grosvenor, 28, from the rest of the pack of young star pianists is his extensive knowledge of historical recordings. This listening has paid off in a spellbinding Liszt recording out on Decca on Friday, crowned with a typically thoughtful account of the treacherous Sonata in B minor.“I almost feel like you should know the notable recordings of a work like this,” Grosvenor said of the sonata in a recent interview. “More than anything, it helps you understand what works and what doesn’t work. You react to some things positively and you react to some things negatively, and that fuels your imagination.”Close listening brought out the enormous range of possibilities in a work that presents an intellectual challenge of interpretation as much as a punishing test of technique. The piece is a Faustian struggle between the diabolical and the divine; the question is how to make it cohere over more than 30 minutes.“You react to some things positively and you react to some things negatively,” Grosvenor said, “and that fuels your imagination.”Credit…Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesThere is no single answer. The example of Radu Lupu points in one direction. “It has this great inevitability about it,” Grosvenor said of Lupu’s interpretation. “In terms of the way he controls the pulse it’s quite symphonic, and also in the kinds of sounds he produces.”Shura Cherkassky, a figure beloved of pianophiles whose impulsive, visionary performances were so idiosyncratic that Grosvenor said he would never dare imitate them, offers something else in a live recording from 1965. “Sometimes it feels kind of improvisatory and sometimes he doesn’t quite do what’s written in the score,” Grosvenor said. “But he somehow makes this miracle of his own unique narrative from it.”Perils lurk whichever way a pianist turns. “The danger in pursuing this symphonic, quite rigid, controlled outlook is that it could quite easily become something more of an academic exercise than the fantastical piece that it is,” Grosvenor said. “And obviously if you go along the Cherkassky route, you could make it sound like something that doesn’t make much sense.”If Grosvenor successfully traces a course between those extremes, he also takes inspiration from how his forebears have resolved the many difficulties in a work of this scale. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What do you think about the opening bars of the sonata, which are so spare compared to what follows?It’s foreboding, and mysterious, and a little bit threatening. It would be quite interesting to just line up eight recordings of the first bar. For someone who is a music lover but who is not that acquainted with putting a piece together, it might just be interesting to hear how two notes can essentially be interpreted in so many different ways.Vladimir Horowitz’s opening(Sony Classical)Shura Cherkassky’s opening(Live, 1965)Alfred Brendel’s opening(Philips)Benjamin Grosvenor’s opening(Decca)There are many valid approaches. What Vladimir Horowitz does in a large hall in his Carnegie recording, this kind of demonic thing, works very well. Cherkassky’s is interesting; it sounds like he’s improvising, like it’s something that’s just come to him in the moment, but it’s obviously conscious because he executes it in the same way at the end of the slow movement as well.I was aiming for something mysterious, almost — so the notes are not too present. They’re quite soft, very much like plucked strings, the bass more in it than the treble, like what Alfred Brendel does.So comparisons with orchestral sounds help you define what you are trying to achieve, even in a work as pianistic as this?As a pianist you’ve been playing the piano all of your life; you have a natural association with piano sound. So it’s only when you’re forced to put it into words that you try to make those associations. But it is an appropriate way to think, because, for most composers, the piano is always trying to imitate other instruments, because of its nature as a percussion instrument. Again, it’s a line of thought that adds fire to the imagination, and the colors that you then draw out.One of the challenges in the piece is how to create tension over the whole, or even just over shorter periods of double octaves, or continuous fortissimo dynamics. You picked out a section near the start as an example.In this double-octave passage there is a lot of fortissimo playing, and you vary that in terms of dynamics, but the meter is the same for a while, with these continuous quavers.Horowitz’s octaves(Sony Classical)Radu Lupu’s octaves(Live, 1990)Grosvenor’s octaves(Decca)Horowitz, in the final rise and descent, just pushes through. There’s lots of wrong notes, but it’s raw. It’s exceptionally difficult because of the octaves, but if you can push through it in that way I think it’s very effective, all the way to the lowest note on the piano.So when you are playing the piece live, does atmosphere matter more than precision in passages like this?Yes, this is music that’s probably not supposed to be played cleanly. Part of the struggle is, it is technically difficult, but that’s what makes it exciting. Someone said of Horowitz that his playing is not exciting because he plays fast, but because he plays faster than he can. In this music there’s an element of that. Lupu generates the tension in a different way; it’s tension by holding back, by creating a limit that you’re working against.Then the slow movement poses quite different challenges.Claudio Arrau’s slow movement(Philips)Grosvenor’s slow movement(Decca)It’s magical music. The most incredible bit for me is this ascending line in the right hand, the scales after the climax. It’s the most static point of the piece, and a groove needs to be found between static to the point of no motion, and finding the magic that’s in it. Not to play it too casually. Claudio Arrau there is very special; it’s such a wonderful moment with these triple pianissimos — finding that beautiful color, and where to take the time.Then comes the fugue, a moment when I’m always wondering how fast a pianist is going to try to play. Is this another place where aura matters more than accuracy?The counterpoint needs to be clear. So it’s the point at which you can still characterize it, and that point is different for each pianist, as long as it builds and builds gradually to the right point.Cherkassky’s fugue(Live, 1965)Grosvenor’s fugue(Decca)Intellectually speaking it’s not necessarily correct, but I quite like the idea of treating the first five bars as a kind of fanfare. They don’t carry enough to push forward out of the slow movement, so to me they inevitably sit somewhere in between if you are going to take it at that tempo. I like the change of pace there.The magic, and the music, of the slow movement return on the very last page.Grosvenor’s ending(Decca)It’s this final transition from darkness to light: the rumbling in the left hand, then the way that it ascends to the top of the piano. Those diminished chords are little shards of light, then it comes away to the very low notes, then these transcendent last chords. That’s what the last page is about: transcendence. You can’t help but think that the last note is an awakening from a dream.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      3 New Albums Retell the History of Black Composers

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story3 New Albums Retell the History of Black ComposersRecordings by the pianist Lara Downes, the Catalyst Quartet and the baritone Will Liverman aim to correct the canon.Among the artists using recordings to advocate for racial equity in classical music are, from left, Lara Downes; the Catalyst Quartet: Karlos Rodriguez, Karla Donehew Perez, Abi Fayette and Paul Laraia; and Will Liverman.Credit…Max Barrett; Ricardo Quiñones; Jaclyn SimpsonFeb. 12, 2021Music can’t survive on its own. Composers not entrenched in the canon need support: from publishers, from foundations, from performers. Without these champions, it’s all too easy to slide into obscurity.Three projects — by the Catalyst Quartet; the baritone Will Liverman; and the pianist Lara Downes — consider another avenue for maintaining a legacy: recordings. Gone are the days when classical albums could be relied on as moneymakers. But in the age of streaming, they are endlessly accessible, easy to disseminate and, in the case of these new releases, ideal for spreading the word about overlooked composers of color, whose music often exists in varying states of disrepair.Recordings have helped propel the recent revivals of Julius Eastman and Florence Price, whose works are held up by scholars and critics today but languished for decades — neglected for a variety of reasons, including race.When a friend of mine, the musicologist Jacques Dupuis, programmed Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Endymion’s Dream” a few years ago for the Boston ensemble Calliope, the only full score of it he could find was a rare holograph at the Library of Congress. So he traveled to Washington and spent dozens of hours transcribing it and creating a performing edition. A video of the resulting concert is the only available recording of the piece.“I’m not sure that would be sustainable as a regular practice without robust institutional support,” he said, “which speaks to some of the hurdles in bringing equity and diversity to music programming.”Similar labor went into the creation of these albums, made with the goal of highlighting music by Black composers and offering new possibilities for the classical canon.‘Uncovered, Vol. 1: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’[embedded content]The Catalyst Quartet’s Uncovered project began in 2018, growing from an initial idea of performing and recording a program of works by a few underrepresented composers. That quickly blossomed into something more ambitious: a series of focused surveys, beginning with music by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.Coleridge-Taylor, born to a white mother and Black father in Britain in 1875, wrote the pieces on “Uncovered, Vol. 1” while he was a student at the Royal College of Music in London. Although they reflect the influence of Brahms and Dvorak, as the violinist and scholar Matthew Leslie Santana observes in the album’s liner notes, they have the feel of “a new music project,” said Karlos Rodriguez, the quartet’s cellist.“Except it of course isn’t new, and now it’s redefining the canon,” Rodriguez added. He pointed to the Clarinet Quintet in F-sharp minor: “You think of Brahms and Mozart clarinet quintets, but this is up there. It holds its own.”“Uncovered, Vol. 1,” released earlier this month on the Azica label, features Catalyst — the violinists Karla Donehew Perez and Jessie Montgomery, the violist Paul Laraia and Rodriguez — in three early Coleridge-Taylor works, including quintets performed with the pianist Stewart Goodyear and Anthony McGill, the New York Philharmonic’s principal clarinet. (Montgomery, increasingly in demand as a composer, left the quartet last month and was succeeded by Abi Fayette.)Preparation for the Coleridge-Taylor album — and future installments of Uncovered, which continues with a Florence Price recording — didn’t come as easily as, say, a recording of Beethoven quartets. The scores were not always readily available, and there wasn’t an established interpretation history.“These pieces are not in your blood,” Donehew Perez said.Some of the music had never been recorded, or there was only a single record, and, as Laraia said, “None of these pieces should exist in one recording.” The members of the quartet are hoping that “Uncovered, Vol. 1” prompts more Coleridge-Taylor performances.“I think this is an interesting way for presenters to move in an interesting direction, but there doesn’t have to be shock,” Fayette said. “You can hear the Classical era and Romantic era; it’s not like you’re throwing audiences into the deep end. And I think this year has proven to us that classical music is ready for a shift.”‘Dreams of a New Day: Songs by Black Composers’[embedded content]Will Liverman’s “Dreams of a New Day,” a program of American art songs by Black composers out Friday on Cedille Records, has been in the works for two years. But, Liverman said, the album “is coming at a good time.” Because of pandemic delays, he found himself recording it with the pianist Paul Sánchez last summer, a time of widespread Black Lives Matter demonstrations and renewed urgency for racial equity in classical music.At the heart of the album — its roster includes both living composers and older ones like Margaret Bonds and Harry Burleigh, known for his influence on Dvorak and the threading of spirituals with classical idioms — is the premiere recording of Shawn Okpebholo’s “Two Black Churches.” It is an affecting setting of poems about the bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., church in 1963 and the 2015 shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.Liverman, who is scheduled to sing this fall in the Metropolitan Opera’s season-opening production of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” — the company’s first opera by a Black composer — said that he has been performing these works in recitals, but that the recording is a way to “normalize” them.“When I was starting off as a student, I kept seeing people like Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau because they had made so many recordings,” he said. “There’s something very important about having music that’s out there and accessible.”Rising Sun Music[embedded content]About two years ago, Lara Downes wanted to record an album of unearthed piano works by Florence Price. She took the project to three labels; none were interested.“But it needed to happen,” she recalled. “So I just did it.”A similar spirit led to the creation of Rising Sun Music, a digital label that debuted this month with the EP “Remember Me to Harlem” and will continue to release recordings of works by Black composers. “If you’re independent,” Downes said, “you can move a lot faster.”Downes has been working to develop a community of scholars and musicians to help with the project, which seeks to highlight the work of composers of color going back more than 200 years. Two of those collaborators appear on “Remember Me to Harlem”: the oboist Titus Underwood, in William Grant Still’s “Song for the Lonely”; and the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, achingly gentle in Margaret Bonds’s “When the Dove Enters In.”As part of the initiative, Downes also intends to release new — in some cases, the first — editions of scores, to make them more accessible to performers and students. The shaky state of these works, she said, reflects the history of American music, and of the country more broadly.“Every story you uncover, there’s a question of, ‘Why was this covered?’” Downes said. “You’re talking about Black life and an imbalance. Part of this is bigger than the music. We can look at our art and culture as a microscope of us.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 75 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Notes Toward Reinventing the American Orchestra

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeMake: BirriaExplore: ‘Bridgerton’ StyleParent: With ImprovRead: Joyce Carol OatesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyNotes Toward Reinventing the American OrchestraFlexible programming, broader racial representation and welcoming spaces would go a long way in recovering from pandemic closures.Credit…Gizem VuralFeb. 12, 2021, 10:00 a.m. ETJust think how overwhelming it will be to see the New York Philharmonic onstage at Lincoln Center this fall — when, we hope, it returns after an 18-month absence. The coronavirus pandemic has taught us never again to take live music for granted.Yet simply a return to normalcy in the music world will not do. The closures of concert halls and opera houses have revealed how fragile the economic support system for classical music actually is. Freelance artists have lost most of their work. Major institutions have been grappling not just with survival, but also with questions of mission, relevance and inclusion, issues that became even more acute when nationwide demonstrations for racial justice broke out last year.These questions are driving talks and planning at all American performing arts institutions. But I’ve been thinking especially of our orchestras, which, for all their many admirable yet scattered efforts at innovation and outreach, remain reluctant to make fundamental changes to how their seasons are presented. It’s 2021, and we are still debating how to reinvent the orchestra for the 21st century.“For next season, we must question ourselves,” Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s chief executive, said in an interview. “How have we changed, in light of the internal and external journey our nation has been on?”Now is the moment for orchestras to think big and take chances — yes, even as many players have agreed to salary reductions and administrators are coping with crushing deficits. Conceptually it’s not so hard. Approaching programming with exciting new ideas; fostering music by living composers; finding looser ways to organize a season; educating audiences both in the halls and in communities — all have been kicked around for decades.The composer Tania León, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic as part of its Project 19, takes a bow in February 2020.Credit…Chris LeeIt starts with creative programming, which isn’t just important; it’s everything. I’ve long argued that American orchestras think too much about how they play, and not enough about what they play and why they’re playing it. Programming an orchestra season is usually presented as a balancing act between maintaining the standard repertory while fostering contemporary music. But this makes it seem like old and new music exist in separate realms. Music is music; old and new music should be part of an integrated approach.The most dynamic American orchestras have understood this for years. The San Francisco Symphony, under the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, brought renegade “American mavericks” like Ives, Cage, Ruggles and Harrison into the orchestra’s bloodstream. The Los Angeles Philharmonic is more or less alone in giving contemporary work an equal platform. I was heartened by the pluck the New York Philharmonic showed in taking a pass on a massive celebration of Beethoven’s 250th anniversary last year. Instead, the orchestra chose to focus on another milestone, the centennial of the 19th Amendment, by inaugurating Project 19, a multiyear venture to commission works from 19 female composers.And after last year’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations and protests against police brutality, American arts institutions felt compelled to look within, including — especially — the white-dominated field of classical music. There were calls for the art form to immediately grapple with a legacy of neglect. Orchestras have a responsibility to commission composers of color, to program works by such composers from earlier times, and to hire Black and Latino conductors and soloists — and empower them to leave their mark on programming.But perhaps the biggest impediment to creative programming and fresh thinking — including broader racial representation — remains the subscription-series schedule that prevails at all major American orchestras and locks them into standard-issue, week-after-week programs loaded with the classics and sprinkled, at best, with unusual or new choices. This structure has continued even as subscriber numbers have fallen. Most people, and not just younger ones, have become accustomed to more flexibility in planning their entertainment. The idea of committing yourself to a regularly scheduled night at your local concert hall feels odd and constraining.Alan Gilbert, who chafed at the Philharmonic’s strict programming structures, conducting the orchestra in 2017.Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York TimesIn 2014, Alan Gilbert, then the Philharmonic’s music director, tried to put a hopeful spin on this shift. “It’s forcing our planning to be inspired and compelling,” he said. “We have to sell individual events. It’s hard, but there’s a great part of that.” He lamented the rigidity orchestras must contend with when subscription programs are scheduled years in advance.He added, “I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve torn our hair out during meetings, saying, ‘If only we could be nimble on our feet, change a program on a dime.’”Why can’t orchestras be nimble and respond to sudden inspiration, or current events? If the Pittsburgh Symphony has a hit with a premiere, why must audiences in other cities wait years to hear it? When a major composer dies, imagine if an orchestra were able to organize, on short notice, a mini festival of his or her scores. If halls had been open during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, I’d like to believe that some scheduled programs could have been altered to present recent and long-overlooked pieces by Black composers.The subscription model need not be discarded completely. Portions of a season could be planned in advance and sold as a series. Imagine a survey of the six Tchaikovsky symphonies on six consecutive programs, each paired with a mid-20th-century Russian score, or a new piece composed in response to Tchaikovsky. But this series, in my mind, would be offered not over six weeks, but over a week or two, festival style.Most subscription programs are repeated three, sometimes four times. But certain programs could actually run longer, if not for the tyranny of subscription scheduling. I bet Riccardo Muti conducting the Chicago Symphony in a concert performance of a Verdi opera could sell 10 performances. On the other hand, the Boston Symphony could offer a concentrated celebration of Boston composers, with 10 programs over two weeks, each performed just once, pairing composers who once loomed large in the city — Leon Kirchner, Gunther Schuller, Donald Martino — with diverse emerging composers from the region.When imaging how orchestras could thrive in the future, the spaces they perform in are pivotal. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, the “most important orchestra in America — period,” as my colleague Zachary Woolfe argued convincingly in 2017, would doubtless have been less successful at tying its mission to education and social justice without having Walt Disney Concert Hall, a Frank Gehry-designed masterpiece, as its home. In addition to its gleaming, glorious auditorium, Disney Hall has all sorts of smaller spaces, even nooks and crannies in the winding lobbies, where visitors can be engaged by talks and intimate performances.An artist rendering shows the Philharmonic’s plans for the renovation of David Geffen Hall, its home at Lincoln Center.Credit…New York Philharmonic, via Associated PressBorda, who oversaw the creation of Disney Hall, is now working on a major renovation of the New York Philharmonic’s David Geffen Hall. When the pandemic put an end to concerts, it seemed possible that the Geffen project might be put on hold. But implicitly acknowledging the challenges of seeing the renovation through, Borda doubled down, ceding some day-to-day operations to colleagues so she could focus on leading the Geffen effort.The larger goals of the project are more important than ever, she insists. “How can we amplify, employ and design a space so it truly is a gateway, a welcoming port for the community?” she said in the recent interview. The new Geffen Hall will have, she added, a “new flexibility to allow us to produce events we haven’t dreamed of yet.”There will be a welcome center and expanded lobbies; a Sidewalk Studio where passers-by will be able to see performances and activities taking place. Best of all, the expanded front lobby will have a wall devoted to screening performances. And it will be possible to open three sides of the lobby to the plaza to allow people to wander in and out.I’d go further. Why not broadcast the orchestra’s rehearsals during the day to show the public what musicians’ work entails? The lobby could also be a space where players from the orchestra, composers and conductors present short performances and talks during the day.Borda emphasized that any increased programming flexibility won’t matter if the Philharmonic doesn’t transform its hall into an acoustically vibrant, intimate-feeling and appealing space. Giving concerts, after all, is what orchestras do.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      ‘Mastery and Transgression’ in Music That Bridges Genres

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Notebook‘Mastery and Transgression’ in Music That Bridges GenresA new box set showcases Julius Hemphill’s work as a composer, saxophonist and flutist on the boundary between jazz and classical styles.“The Boyé Multi-National Crusade for Harmony,” issued by New World Records and named after one of Julius Hemphill’s touring projects, shows how thoroughly he adapted and reinvigorated his early influences.Credit…George Rose/Getty ImagesFeb. 5, 2021Julius Hemphill was a vigorous force in American music from his first public performances and recordings in the late 1960s until his death, at 57, in 1995. Whether playing saxophone or flute — or even, as on his overdubbed solo “Blue Boyé,” both at once — he blended folk traditions with a joyous avant-garde edge.Growing up in Fort Worth, he heard R&B-infused jazz and country twang. The booklet included with a new seven-disc set of Hemphill’s compositions, many previously unreleased and drawn from his archive at New York University, quotes from an interview about those early years: “It was musically rich,” he said. “I could hear Hank Williams coming out of the jukebox at Bunker’s, the white bar. And Louis Jordan, Son House and Earl Bostic from the box at Ethel’s, the Black bar across the street.”[embedded content]Hemphill may have started with those related, if segregated, reference points. But the widely varied recordings on the new set — “The Boyé Multi-National Crusade for Harmony,” issued by New World Records and named after one of Hemphill’s touring projects — show how thoroughly he adapted and reinvigorated those early sources.The first two discs contain some formative late-’70s small-group recordings, as well as an astonishing duo set (date and location unknown) by Hemphill and the cellist Abdul Wadud, one of his crucial collaborators. On the track “Rhapsody,” you can hear Hemphill’s alertness on soprano saxophone, as Wadud switches between thick, strummed playing and lyrical bowing. Hemphill’s melodic sensibility, supple even when spare, is present throughout, even when his sound production turns piping or frenzied.Before Hemphill’s emergence as a bandleader, he came into contact with other inquisitive, improvising players like the trumpeter Lester Bowie. Hemphill began experimenting with theatrical works, too. He started his own label, and in St. Louis helped launch the Black Artists Group (known as BAG) alongside poets, dancers and other saxophonist-composers, like Oliver Lake. After a 1971 BAG performance was interrupted by a bomb threat, it was a Hemphill score that was heard after the all-clear had been given. (That episode is recounted in Benjamin Looker’s book “Point From Which Creation Begins,” a crucial history of BAG and resource about Hemphill’s work.)Hemphill later joined forces again with Lake in the World Saxophone Quartet, which played open-minded, poly-genre spaces like the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Devoted to jazz but not exclusively defined by it, Hemphill wrote solo and chamber works for the virtuoso pianist Ursula Oppens, his partner toward the end of his life. (Search out the Tzadik release “One Atmosphere” to hear the vivacious piano quintet that gives that album its title.)The New World box set also contains a disc of Hemphill chamber music. In addition to a work written for Oppens, it includes the premiere release of a 2007 Daedalus Quartet performance of “Mingus Gold,” a 1988 composition in which Hemphill arranged tunes by Charles Mingus.These are not straight transcriptions, as the take on “Better Get Hit in Your Soul” proves. During its opening, the cello part occasionally comes close to Mingus’s own bass motifs, though it also diverts from the source material, with the other strings pausing to meditate before the quartet digs into Mingus’s theme with gusto.Hemphill’s experimental yet songful approach connected him to adventurous pop artists; he joined Lake on tour with Björk in support of her album “Debut” in 1993-94. And like Lake, Hemphill was apt to say that his varied pursuits were not evidence of a scattershot sensibility, but rather of a complex, integrated purpose. The liner notes for the new box set include one of his better known statements: “Well, you often hear people nowadays talking about the tradition, tradition, tradition. But they have tunnel vision in this tradition. Because tradition in African-American music is wide as all outdoors.”Since his death, Hemphill’s influence has continued to make that vista ever wider. His most famous composition, “Dogon A.D.,” with its addictive, loping 11/16 percussion groove, was memorably covered by the pianist Vijay Iyer on his breakout 2009 trio album, “Historicity.” Player-composers like Tim Berne and Marty Ehrlich, who wrote the liner notes for the new release, also swear by Hemphill.The World Saxophone Quartet in 1978.Credit…Deborah Feingold/Getty ImagesSo why aren’t his contributions better known? One reason is that his most celebrated album, also called “Dogon A.D.” (1972), has spent long stretches out of print. (It was available on CD for a brief period, in the 2010s, but now that version and the original LP command high prices on the secondhand market.) Another reason likely has to do with the policing of the border between jazz and classical traditions (a subset of the larger issues of racial exclusion in classical music). Most classical programmers are likely unaware of the breadth of Hemphill’s legacy. His music has occasionally been played on predominately classical series like the Composer Portraits at the Miller Theater at Columbia University, but he is usually perceived as a jazz artist, full stop.But while his music can swing hard, he also explored airier, less propulsive realms. One lengthy track on New World’s disc of chamber music, “Unknown Title No. 1,” documents a 1981 performance by a wind and brass quintet Hemphill conducted.The unhurried, pungent material heard at the outset is far away from “Dogon A.D.,” “Rhapsody” or the glosses on Mingus. After detours into riotous improvisation, the performance eventually hurtles into a bumptious, tuba-driven conclusion. But its route there is distinctive in the available Hemphill catalog.Back when Vijay Iyer’s cover of “Dogon A.D.” was earning him plaudits, he described in a profile how seeing Hemphill in concert in 1991 had been a transformative experience. Hemphill’s 1988 album “Big Band” “dazzles me as much today as it did then,” Iyer said in an email, also noting Hemphill and BAG’s important contributions during the “period of Black artists’ self-determination initiatives,” which also included the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in Chicago.Hemphill, devoted to jazz but not exclusively defined by it, in 1990.Credit…Michael WildermanRelating the experience of watching a 1992 duo performance by Hemphill and Wadud, later released as the album “Oakland Duets,” Iyer wrote, “I was astonished by the sense of simultaneous mastery and transgression. I think that describes his music in a nutshell.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More