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      Even the Tuning Up Gets an Ovation as Tanglewood Reopens

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      The mood was festive as the Boston Symphony returned to its summer home for its first in-person performances since March 2020.LENOX, Mass. — If you were brave enough, there was a time last summer when you could still turn into the drive of Tanglewood, the idyllic summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra here. There were the usual local teenagers to direct you to your parking space, one pointing the way every few yards; the usual state troopers, patrol cars idling, there to tip a hat; the usual flowers, lining the path through the pristine white gates.But the familiarity stopped there. Walking through the grounds, kept open and manicured even in the absence of performances, the loneliness was overwhelming. No volunteers, overeager to help. No ice creams. No parents fretting, wondering how far from the stage to set up, safe to settle their infant when the time came. Nothing to see, the Koussevitzky Music Shed boarded up, disconsolate; no music to hear, only the birds.Well, music is coming home.The Boston Symphony opened its shortened, little-short-of-miraculous summer season here with a concert on Saturday night, the orchestra’s first in-person performance since the dark, fearful nights of March 2020, and its first with its music director, Andris Nelsons, since the January prior.Andris Nelsons conducting the Boston Symphony in a Beethoven program on Saturday night.Jillian Freyer for The New York TimesThe program was made to please, and please it did, but the atmosphere would have been festive regardless. There were standing ovations for the orchestra, standing ovations for the conductor, standing ovations for Mark Volpe, the orchestra’s just-retired president and chief executive. The players, not normally given to outward expressions of emotion, stomped their feet when their leader, Tamara Smirnova, found the right key on the piano to invite them to tune.The authorities had set attendance at half the norm, but the rolling grounds hummed with chatter, lawn chairs crammed close; the front rows of the Shed felt full, three-foot distancing or not. There would be no intermission, though the concert still lasted nearly two hours; there would be no “Ode to Joy,” with singing still banned. I saw a single mask, amid thousands of faces.By Sunday afternoon, when a second concert took place, it all felt oddly normal: students wandering in and out of the Shed, hearing a piece then leaving to practice, or not; spectators darting for cover as the rain came down, giving up on their defenses against the bugs; the whole place glowing, despite the gloom, with the bright green tarps that were on offer at the door, some protecting bottoms from the mud, others shielding picnics from the rain. Priorities.“Reconnect, Restore, Rejoice,” the front of the program book declared. Nelsons, in his halting, earnest way, spoke from the stage of how the pandemic — seemingly thought of in the past tense, even as the world counts over four million lives lost — reminded us of “how much we need art, how much we need culture,” and of music being “comfort for our souls.”The whole place glowed and felt like normal, our critic says, with people worried about typical things, like rain and bugs.Jillian Freyer for The New York TimesThere would be no revolutions here, and no memorials either, just a restoration of the ancien régime: an orchestra playing what it has long played, and playing it pretty well. Beethoven it would have to be, and the Fifth Symphony, too — the Beethoven of triumph over disaster, of the human spirit, indomitable.Near enough, at least. Surely it will take time for players, even of this quality, to form a collective again, to fill out their sound, to find the attack and the togetherness that mark the best ensembles. An improvement from Saturday night was already audible on Sunday, in a peppy run-through of Dvorak’s Sixth Symphony.Before that, there were slack moments in the Beethoven, bars when balances were set aside in pursuit of sheer exuberance, passages that were allowed to drift by a conductor who has seemed to grow more standoffish as an interpreter since his arrival in Boston in 2014.But the effect was still potent, surprisingly not so much for the impact of the whole, but for glimmers of the players set free: the clarinet of William R. Hudgins, so mellow, such a balm; the flute of Elizabeth Rowe, so unusual in its woodiness; the trumpet of Thomas Rolfs, so rousing at full stretch.Nelsons conducts Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto with Emanuel Ax at the piano.Jillian Freyer for The New York TimesThe same fine subtleties appealed in the work of the soloists on offer, too, neither of them ostentatious. Emanuel Ax is nobody’s idea of a spotlight-hugging pianist, preferring to share it or give it away wholesale, but what a delight it was to hear such discretion in his “Emperor” Concerto — such care taken over the voicing of a chord, such sensitivity in the way his right hand shaped phrases in response to the orchestra. Baiba Skride took much the same approach to the Sibelius Violin Concerto, an affecting account of deep, even forlorn introspection, much of it played inward, toward the violas on her left.Comfort for the soul, indeed.The question remains, however, whether this orchestra will decide to attempt more, even as salaries recover from 37 percent cuts and losses of more than $50 million in revenue cast a shadow over the budget. It has brought in a new president and chief executive, Gail Samuel, from the ambitious Los Angeles Philharmonic; an encouraging amount of its streaming energy over the past year was spent exploring music that it has for too long ignored; and the Symphony Hall season will offer new works by Julia Adolphe, Kaija Saariaho and Unsuk Chin.But that season looks dreary compared with those being offered by similarly tradition-bound orchestras elsewhere. It speaks volumes that scant time was dedicated here to anything contemporary, even if Carlos Simon’s “Fate Now Conquers” made its mark, throbbing with frantic energy while seeming to run on the spot, with its brief response to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.The Boston Symphony returns, then — and continues merely to abide. More

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      A Festival Has a Monumental Premiere (and Some Other Operas, Too)

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      At the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, it was hard for even beloved classics to live up to the elegant intensity of Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence.”AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — I mean it as high praise when I say that at this summer’s edition of the Aix-en-Provence Festival, none of the operas come close to Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” which premiered here on July 3.Ushering new work into the world is perhaps an operatic institution’s most difficult task. This is an art form so stubbornly lodged in the past that it always feels like a miracle when a “création,” as the French call it, succeeds.And “Innocence,” which explores the aftermath of a deadly school shooting, does more than succeed. With riveting clarity and enigmatic shadows, and through a range of languages in different registers of speaking and singing, it captures both the promise and darkness of cosmopolitanism itself.It is a victory for Saariaho and her collaborators, and for the Aix Festival and Pierre Audi, its director since 2018. He managed to hold rehearsals with just a piano last summer, when all festival performances were canceled because of the pandemic, and to shift the premiere seamlessly to this year.“I have a long career in commissioning,” Audi told The Times recently. “And this is one of the five greatest pieces that I’ve ever been involved with.”It is hard for even the most beloved works in the repertory, some of which are on offer at Aix through July 25, to measure up to that. It felt symbolic that a moment that was devastating in “Innocence” — a character crushing a handful of cake onto another — returned as a silly, passing bit of slapstick the following evening in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.”The carnivalesque staging of Mozart’s “Le Nozzi di Figaro.”Jean-Louis FernandezLotte de Beer’s “Figaro” production is an intentional, endearing mess — an eclectic, attention-deficit explosion practically vibrating through different aesthetics, as though on a candy high. The overture is staged as traditional, raucous commedia dell’arte; the first act is a raunchy multi-cam sitcom, on a set that gradually (and literally) collapses into a demented carnival amid the confusions of the Act II finale, complete with human-height penises strolling around.After intermission, though, the curtain rises on almost nothing — a bed inside a cube defined by white neon bars — and the acting is equally restrained and gloomy. Then the fourth and final act enacts a kind of utopian, queer-feminist knitting collective led by a minor character, Marcellina, the cast draped in garments of Day-Glo yarn. Out of the bed, which has come to be the site of male authority and adultery, an enormous, inflatable fairy-tale tree slowly grows.Thomas Hengelbrock led the Balthasar Neumann Ensemble in a crisp but sensuously phrased reading of the score. Lea Desandre was a bright, alert Cherubino; Jacquelyn Wagner, a Countess cooler than the norm.In the title role of Barrie Kosky’s staging of Verdi’s “Falstaff,” Christopher Purves was also different than the norm, at least at the start. In the first scene, Purves’s Falstaff is shown not as the usual gorging grotesque in a fat suit, but as a careful master chef, sensitively relishing his creations — and with, at best, a dad bod.Christopher Purves’s incarnation of Falstaff is not the usual gorging grotesque in a fat suit. As a careful master chef, he relishes his creations.Monika RittershausWhile Falstaff is often likable, Kosky’s implicit promise is that we’ll admire him, too. This never quite happens, as the production settles into a more well-worn groove, abounding in this director’s trademark vaudevillian touches: men pulling off wigs and dancing in skirts, the works. The title character’s seductions are barely more sophisticated than in a thousand “Falstaff” productions; the merry wives of Windsor’s revenge, little crueler.The conductor, Daniele Rustioni, led the orchestra of the Lyon Opera with a pacing that was genial but less than diamond-precise. The voices, including that of the game, hard-working Purves, were a touch too small for the roles. The test of a “Falstaff” is the effect of the great final ensemble fugue; here the sequence was pleasant rather than cathartic.There was musical catharsis to spare in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” with a supreme cast and the London Symphony Orchestra conducted with lithe flexibility by Simon Rattle. But Simon Stone’s staging — an almost comically realistic evocation of contemporary Paris, from a high-rise apartment to a Métro car — is perplexing, as it purports to explain the brunt of the plot as a woman’s fantasies after learning her husband is cheating.From left, Dominic Sedgwick, Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” directed by Stone, who moved the opera to modern-day Paris. Jean-Louis FernandezPerhaps intentionally, but still frustratingly, the production’s line between reality and fantasy keeps getting blurrier, until it’s hard to know who’s really betraying whom, who’s getting stabbed and who survives. But if Nina Stemme’s voice has lost a touch of sumptuousness, she’s never been better as Isolde — singing fearlessly, and ardently invested in the production. Stuart Skelton sings rather than barks Tristan, a tenor’s Everest, and Franz-Josef Selig is a commandingly melancholy Marke.Aix has long been notable for placing smaller pieces, including new ones, amid canonical titans and grand-scale premieres like “Innocence.” In an enormous former ironworks at Luma — the new art complex in Arles, about 50 miles from Aix — “The Arab Apocalypse” was created as part of the festival’s heartening commitment to connecting southern France and the greater Mediterranean world.But based on Etel Adnan’s direly expressionistic poems about the Lebanese civil war, with music by Samir Odeh-Tamimi and a sketched staging-in-the-round by Audi, “Apocalypse” was dreary — the score alternating between shivering and pummeling, the action busy but bland.“Combattimento: The Black Swan Theory” was a grab-bag of early Baroque Italian music, with rich helpings of Monteverdi, Cavalli, Luigi Rossi and more. Silvia Costa tried to corral this gorgeous material into a kind of stylized pageant, a loose trajectory of war, mourning, society-building, more war, more building.From left, Julie Roset, Valerio Contaldo and Etienne Bazola in “Combattimento: The Black Swan Theory.”Monika RittershausHer images were more mystifying than evocative. But the performance, led by Sébastien Daucé, was musically exquisite, with eight superb young singers ideally blending purity and passion, and 13 members of Ensemble Correspondances filling the jewel-box Théâtre du Jeu de Paume with the visceral force of a symphony orchestra.Audi’s ambitions are to expand Aix, implicitly taking on the Salzburg Festival in Austria, which opens at the end of July, and is classical music’s most storied summer event. (While Salzburg is redoubtable, the mood, clothing and ticket prices in Aix are significantly more relaxed.)The program of concerts — which, in Aix, has long been an afterthought to opera, but is a Salzburg powerhouse — will grow, as will the scope of the festival’s productions. With “Tosca,” Aix’s first Puccini, in 2019, it declared that it could cover the red-meat Italian hits. In addition to Luma, Audi has his sights on other unconventional spaces in the region.Commissions are also central to his agenda; “Innocence” is resounding proof. Seeing it a second time, on Saturday, confirmed the initial impression of its intensity and restraint, its emotional pull and intellectual power.The production — like “Tristan,” directed by Stone — keenly depicts both the shocking reality of the central tragedy and its surreal reverberations, which carry years into the future. I question only one directorial intervention: The shooter, a student at the school, is eventually shown onstage, played by a silent actor, even though he is not in the libretto.This dilutes the mystery of the piece, in which all the characters revolve around, and run from, a figure who is absent, a kind of god against whom everyone’s innocence (and culpability) is measured. When he appears in the flesh, the opera’s impact wavers.But only slightly. This is a quibble with a staging that, in general precisely, aligns with an elegant yet savage work. While recalling the starkness of Greek tragedy, “Innocence” is also among the first operatic barometers of our globalized age’s travails. More

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      The ‘Prince of Opera’ Bids Munich Farewell

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      The charismatic and canny Nikolaus Bachler, who has kept the Bavarian State Opera a world capital of music theater, is stepping down.MUNICH — Half an hour before the opening of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” Nikolaus Bachler took a final stroll backstage.Bachler — who has run the Bavarian State Opera here since 2008, during which time it has been the world’s opera capital for artists and audiences alike — stopped by the dressing room of his Isolde, Anja Harteros, asking whether she had slept well the night before. With a traditional “toi toi toi,” he wished her good luck.He waited to check in on Jonas Kaufmann, who was singing Tristan, because through the door he heard the conductor Kirill Petrenko — the company’s music director during much of Bachler’s tenure and a crucial ingredient of his success — giving some last-minute notes.Then more blown kisses and “toi toi toi” wishes, and Bachler took a seat in his box alongside the proscenium. He looked out at the audience, which, though dotted with chessboard-like spaces for social distancing, was as full as possible after a year of uncertainty about capacity and closures. The lights dimmed. Petrenko stepped onto the podium; paused briefly, as if in prayer; and gestured for the first note.By the opening night of “Tristan und Isolde,” the opera house was able to fill about half of its seats because of coronavirus safety measures.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesWith that, the end of an era began. The house that Bachler built with Petrenko — one of artistic excellence, destination programming and, during the pandemic, fearless advocacy — will soon undergo a major shift. “Tristan” is the last new production for Petrenko, who is now the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, and Bachler’s tenure concludes with this year’s Munich Opera Festival, an end-of-season marathon that has adopted the bittersweet theme “Wendende Punkte”: “Turning Points.”In the fall, the house will be managed by Serge Dorny, most recently chief of the Lyon Opera in France, and under the baton of Vladimir Jurowski. Many of Bachler’s artistic and administrative colleagues will leave, some following him to his new post, running the Salzburg Easter Festival.“We are now looking into a future that is maybe less, shall we say, written,” Kaufmann said in an interview. “You see the list of international stars — compared with not only the house’s history, but other houses of this rank — and Bachler somehow made it into one that everyone wished to be a part of.”The tenor Jonas Kaufmann, left, with the soprano Anja Harteros in “Tristan.”Wilfried HöslAudiences, too, were eager. Before the pandemic, the company’s ticket sales hovered around 98 percent capacity. Wolfgang Heubisch, the Bavarian culture minister during Bachler’s early years in Munich, said that the house was an important contributor to the city’s economy, and that “we as an audience were always excited about the next performance.” (The company is supported by extravagant government subsidies, in 2019 to the tune of 71.8 million euros, or $85.2 million, from Bavaria and the city of Munich — nearly two-thirds of its budget.)“You can sum it up in a nutshell,” Heubisch added. “Nikolaus Bachler was a true stroke of luck for Munich and the State Opera.”It is rare for the leader of an opera company to be described in these terms. In Paris and New York, for example, such managers have recently been openly criticized by colleagues and embroiled in labor disputes. Elsewhere, they may be respected, but are seldom described with the loving language that singers, directors and others use for Bachler. But he is confident it’s time for change.“You shouldn’t stay too long,” said Bachler, who is 70 but has the appearance and energy of someone much younger. “I got a lot of offers for other opera houses, but it was clear for me not to go into another big institution.”By departing now, he can look back on his achievements without feeling like he ended stuck in routine, which he considers “against art.” He is proud of his insistence on marrying the prestige of directors and singers, with high-profile names from top to bottom on most billings and small roles taken by a superb ensemble of rising artists.Bachler gained the respect of directors by not interfering too much in their work. (“My job is to take the consequences and learn from the failures,” he said.) And he won over the world’s most important singers with a personality that they have described as nurturing, honest and committed. For example, he made the Bavarian State Opera the home company of Kaufmann, who despite being raised and trained in Munich had only sung a handful of times in the house before Bachler joined.When they first met, Kaufmann recalled, Bachler asked why he didn’t want to sing in Munich. “On the contrary,” Kaufmann responded, “I would love to.” He just wasn’t getting any work there under Peter Jonas — Bachler’s predecessor, whose risk-taking laid the groundwork for what followed — and Kaufmann eventually moved to Zurich.Bachler changed that, quickly casting Kaufmann in a variety of parts, including his sensational role debut as Wagner’s “Lohengrin” alongside Harteros in 2009. Since then, Kaufmann said, “I believe we haven’t gone a year without a new opening, and Klaus has been there to help and support me.”The baritone Christian Gerhaher described Bachler as “the prince of opera”; Dmitri Tcherniakov, who directed this season’s new production of Carl Maria von Weber’s “Der Freischütz,” called him “the king of Munich”; and the soprano Marlis Petersen, onstage this summer in “Salome,” said he was “the Ariadne thread” running through each production.Among those who believe in Bachler the most may be Petrenko, a publicity-shy conductor with a monastic style, who said in an email that Bachler “is living proof that trust is possible in our profession.”Kirill Petrenko, the music director during much of Bachler’s tenure, has been an essential ingredient of the house’s success.Wilfried HöslThe two met in the late 1990s, when Bachler was at the Volksoper in Vienna. Petrenko had come recommended by an agent and was brought on as an assistant conductor. Bachler was stunned by his talent, and they developed an odd-couple relationship — Bachler the charismatic public face and Petrenko happy to let his work speak for itself.When Bachler started at the Bavarian State Opera, he prioritized bringing in Petrenko as a guest and scheduled a run of Janacek’s “Jenufa” for him. Later, when Kent Nagano’s contract was set to expire, Bachler persuaded Petrenko to become the company’s music director, even though at the time, having held a similar post at the Komische Oper in Berlin, the conductor was ready to be a freelancer.Petrenko has routinely drawn the loudest applause after performances — even during a 2018 run of “Parsifal,” when he was bowing alongside stars like Kaufmann, Gerhaher and the soprano Nina Stemme. In a news conference before his final season, he said, “My time here was and will be the highest thing that can happen to an artist.”If Bachler appears to charm everyone in his orbit, it may come from his background as an actor. (That’s also his guess for why he has enjoyed such success as an administrator: He approaches the job from the perspective of an artist.) Born to a middle-class family in Austria, and raised in a musical home, he took an early liking to theater — sometimes acting out Catholic Mass as if he were a priest.He thought he would study medicine, but on a lark applied to the Max Reinhardt Seminar for acting in Vienna and was accepted. His career as a performer took him to a troubled theater in Berlin, where he was vocal about how it could improve. So he was asked to be its artistic director.“I said yes because for me it was like acting,” Bachler said. “My new role was ‘the artistic director.’”More administrative work followed, including as the leader of the Vienna Festival, the Volksoper and the Vienna Burgtheater. From that distinguished playhouse, he returned to opera in Munich.Tcherniakov said that “as a true actor, he virtuously uses different masks to communicate.” And Bachler believes that he still approaches his job from that angle.“I feel I am the last inheritance of Molière,” he said. “I would go home and steal my mother’s chair if I needed it onstage.”Bachler backstage after “Tristan,” where he congratulated the cast between their curtain call bows.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesBachler runs his house with subtle command. Observed over the first week of the festival, when his workdays can easily stretch beyond 12 hours, his meetings were conversational yet efficient and never ran more than a half-hour. He wandered through the building for check-ins because, he said, it’s best to not wait until problems arise to solve them, and while “in a meeting people don’t ask so much, in front of the toilet they are much more honest.”Before the “Tristan” opening, he gave a brief address to donors, and he hosted politicians and power brokers in his box over Champagne and canapés during the first intermission. During the second act, he took a short break in his office; more socializing would come in the next intermission.Despite the hectic schedule, Bachler’s job can be lonely. He said that he thinks often of when Germany once won the World Cup. The broadcast was full of fireworks and the players celebrating — but then the camera panned to the team’s famed coach, Franz Beckenbauer, walking alone on the field.“This is exactly what I feel,” Bachler said. “I have a lot of closeness with people, but it’s always about work. You have to accept it.”But that closeness became truly familial during the pandemic. Bachler never accepted closure as an option, first by continuing rehearsals for Marina Abramovic’s project “7 Deaths of Maria Callas,” even when Abramovic’s hotel closed and she was put up in Kaufmann’s apartment near the theater.Then the company started putting on “Montagsstücke,” which amounted to weekly variety shows — chamber performances and even a reading by Bachler — broadcast from the empty theater.“Suddenly,” he said, “there was so much energy in the house, and so much value in the work.”Eventually, orchestra, singers and staff were able to gather in large enough numbers to livestream new productions without an audience. All the while, Bachler was working with physicians and scientists on research — including a study showing that with safety measures in place, zero coronavirus cases could be traced to the house — that he took to politicians in an effort to bring back traditional programming as soon as possible.“Bachler,” Gerhaher said, “was a wonderful defender of the arts in these horrible times.”Bachler said his job, while busy, can also be lonely. “You have to accept it.”Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesBachler is already at work on fund-raising for his debut season in Salzburg. He also had a hand in the succession plan for the Bavarian State Opera, initially assembling the team of Jurowski and Barrie Kosky, who is concluding his tenure at the Komische Oper. In the end, Kosky chose to go freelance.His appointment in Salzburg caused a minor scandal in the classical world; the Easter Festival’s administrators brought Bachler on while also pushing out the conductor Christian Thielemann. The two will share leadership duties for the 2022 edition, which Bachler said has not been as awkward as people might expect: “All these intrigue things, they vanish immediately when you start to work.”His impact in Salzburg — which will coincide with a return to Vienna, where he has friends and family — won’t be fully seen until 2023. Some familiar faces will appear, like Kaufmann. But he also plans to bring a different orchestra-in-residence every year, a break from tradition, and perhaps to integrate the Felsenreitschule venue (a stalwart of the older and far larger Salzburg summer festival) and add dance to the programming.“I like the idea of going from this huge thing to 10 days,” Bachler said. “How to make, in such a short time, an identity, and what I can do if I can concentrate only on this.”But first, he still has to get through his final Munich Festival — including another new production, of Mozart’s “Idomeneo,” and a star-studded, livestreamed farewell concert.And “Tristan.” After Harteros sang the closing “Liebestod” on opening night, Bachler rushed backstage, congratulating the performers between their curtain call bows. He smiled at Petrenko, and the two hugged.“It was quite a good finale,” Bachler whispered into the conductor’s ear.“No,” Petrenko responded. “It was a turning point.” More

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      Mimi Stern-Wolfe, Presenter of Socially Conscious Concerts, Dies at 84

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      The range of programs she staged on the Lower East Side and in nearby neighborhoods included an annual concert devoted to composers lost to AIDS.Mimi Stern-Wolfe, a pianist and conductor who specialized in music programs with a social-justice or political theme, most notably an annual concert that featured music of composers lost to AIDS, died on June 21 at a care center in Manhattan. She was 84.Her daughter, Laura Wolfe, said the cause was complications of a series of strokes.In the late 1970s Ms. Stern-Wolfe, a fixture on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for most of her adult life, founded Downtown Music Productions, which in the years since has presented a wide range of programs, including performances by and for children, eclectic shows by the Downtown Chamber and Opera Players, and concerts featuring works by women, music of the Holocaust and more. Ms. Stern-Wolfe played and conducted at many of the performances, often leading from the piano bench.In 1990, moved by the death of her friend Eric Benson, a tenor claimed by AIDS in 1988, Ms. Stern-Wolfe started the Benson AIDS Series, concerts held almost every year since then to, in the words of her organization’s website, “promote the work of gifted composers and musicians who are fighting H.I.V./AIDS and to preserve the creative legacy of those who have already died.”In the early years, with the disease still defying treatment, the concerts were charged with emotion; the audience included people who were visibly sick, emaciated and weeping as the music was played. In later years, she viewed the concerts more as a way to keep the music alive and to convey to a younger generation the trauma of those early years of the epidemic.Rohan Spong, a documentary filmmaker, captured the preparation for the 2010 concert in “All the Way Through Evening,” a film released in 2012.“Mimi felt passionately that the wider community remember the talented music composers affected by H.I.V./AIDS in the early years of the pandemic,” Mr. Spong said by email, “many of whom were felled at young ages, and whom she had known personally.”“As she did with so many other issues,” he added, “she was able to synthesize her humanist values with her love of music and her dedication to her community.” The music she presented, he said, “seemed to cross space and time, communicating the beauty of these men’s lives and the tragedy of their deaths with an immediacy that was felt by audiences over two decades later.”Miriam Stern was born on May 27, 1937, in Brooklyn. Her father, Bernard, was a pharmacist, and her mother, Emma, was a homemaker. She grew up in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens and in the Rockaways. Her parents were both immigrants — her mother, she said, had come from Chernobyl, in Soviet Ukraine — and they kept a lively household, which had an effect on young Mimi.“They were not activists; they were sympathizers,” she said in a 2015 interview with the nonprofit group Labor Arts, which named her a recipient of the Clara Lemlich Award for social activism that year. “They were Jewish immigrant sympathizers and had friends who were both Zionists and Communists, and they all used to come to birthday parties and stuff, and argue. A lot. And I remember being kind of fascinated by that when I was a child.”By age 6 she was taking piano lessons. She graduated from the High School of Performing Arts in 1954, earned a bachelor’s degree in music at Queens College in 1958 and received a master’s degree in music and piano performance at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston in 1961. She lived and studied in Paris for a time before settling on the Lower East Side.She had two passions, as she put it: classical music and “my political proclivities.” But she found that they rarely overlapped; people who were passionate about the causes she cared about didn’t generally have much use for classical music.“What I wanted to do with my music was to find a way to synthesize my political ideas and my music,” she said.Ms. Stern-Wolfe in her apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 2013. Most of the concerts she presented took place in that neighborhood or nearby. Michael Nagle for The New York TimesAnd so she organized concerts like “War and Pieces,” featuring music highlighting the consequences of war. She presented concerts devoted to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Langston Hughes and Harriet Tubman. After the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations of 2011, she organized a concert of protest songs.Other programs were more whimsical, like a 1987 concert titled “Notes From the Underground: Music as Satire.” And then there was “A Toast to the Steins,” with music by Jule Styne and Leonard Bernstein and a poem by Gertrude Stein set to music.Ms. Stern-Wolfe’s marriage to Robert Wolfe in 1961 ended in divorce. In addition to her daughter, a singer-songwriter and child of that marriage, she is survived by her partner of 30 years, the poet Ilsa Gilbert, and a grandson.Although Ms. Stern-Wolfe performed in many places, most of her productions were staged on the Lower East Side or in surrounding neighborhoods, by choice. She wanted to make classical music and other forms accessible to the people who were her neighbors.“I didn’t want to go to the Upper West Side every time I went to a concert,” she said in a 2006 interview, “so I made a vow to bring the music down here. If I’d lived uptown, life would’ve been very different. Perhaps I’d have a job with City Opera.” More

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      Louis Andriessen, Lionized Composer With Radical Roots, Dies at 82

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      After challenging the Dutch musical establishment as a young man, he went on to write a series of large and loud symphonic works that grappled with big ideas.Louis Andriessen, who as a young iconoclast disrupted the Dutch classical music scene before becoming one of Europe’s most important postwar composers with a series of large-scale, often brash works, died on Thursday in Weesp, the Netherlands. He was 82. His death, at his home near Amsterdam in a specialized village for people with dementia, was announced by his music publisher, Boosey & Hawkes.Mr. Andriessen’s musical influences included Stravinsky, bebop and American minimalism, different styles that he often presented in gleeful confrontation. His music was a unique blend of American sounds and European forms, the composer Michael Gordon said in a phone interview.“These pieces are really constructed like big symphonic works, but using the materials of the vernacular,” he said. “The music was the bridge between European formalism and an almost hipster riffing on American jazz and minimalism.”In the latter part of his career Mr. Andriessen created monumental pieces that probed big ideas. “De Tijd,” meaning time in Dutch, took on that subject. “De Staat,” set to the text of Plato’s “Republic,” was about political organization. “De Materie” (“On Matter”) began with a 17th-century treatise on shipbuilding and ended with excerpts from Marie Curie’s diaries.He collaborated with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway on a movie, “M is for Man, Music, Mozart” (1991), and two operas, “ROSA The Death of a Composer” (1994) and “Writing to Vermeer” (1999). In his book “The Art of Stealing Time,” Mr. Andriessen wrote that in Mr. Greenaway’s films, “I recognize something of my own work, namely the combination of intellectual material and vulgar directness.”The opera director Pierre Audi said that each of Mr. Andriessen’s works for the stage “could fly away into fantasy and extreme freedom of structure, with collages of different musical idioms.”“But what characterized them all,” he added, “was an inner architecture. He managed to build operas like cathedrals.”Mr. Andriessen’s early career was fueled by Marxist ideals and the desire to upend traditional practices in classical music. He founded two ensembles in the 1970s. De Volharding (Perseverance) consisted of players who were equally versed in improvised and experimental music, with the idea of giving them greater influence over the musical material they performed. Hoketus, which disbanded in 1987, was named after a medieval technique that splits a single musical line among multiple players.Mr. Andriessen used that technique in “Symphony for Open Strings” (1978), in which musical phrases are painstakingly pieced together from single notes. The players use only open strings, meaning that their left hands, which change the notes on the fingerboard, are rendered useless. It is a way to handicap the very instruments that in traditional symphonic writing receive almost all the expressive material.Mr. Andriessen in 2018 after a performance of his “Symphony for Open Strings” by the New York Philharmonic at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Appel Room. The orchestra’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, is at left.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesIn later decades he accepted commissions from major orchestras, including the San Francisco Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic, which gave the premiere of his tone poem “Agamemnon” in 2018 during its two-week festival devoted to Mr. Andriessen.In large-scale works his sound was typically strident and bold. His signature orchestration combined beefed-up woodwind and brass along with keyboards, electric guitars and clanging percussion.Most of all, he liked it loud.Mr. Gordon recalled a rehearsal of one of Mr. Andriessen’s orchestral works at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony in Lenox, Mass., in 1994. Mr. Andriessen felt that the piece had come out sounding too polite. The musicians said they had trouble finding the notes.“I would rather you play the wrong note very loud then the right note very soft,” Mr. Andriessen responded.Louis Andriessen was born on June 6, 1939, into a Roman Catholic family in Utrecht, the Netherlands. His father, Hendrik Franciscus Andriessen, was a composer and organist who became the director of the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. His mother, Johanna Justina Anschütz, was a pianist. Louis was the youngest of six children, all of whom were musical. (Two brothers also became composers.)From 1956-1962 he studied composition, music theory and piano at the conservatory, then traveled to both Milan and Berlin for advanced studies with Luciano Berio. While studying in The Hague he met the guitarist Jeanette Yanikian who became his partner. They married in 1996, and she died in 2008. Mr. Andriessen is survived by his second wife, the violinist Monica Germino, whom he married in 2012 and for whom he wrote several works. Beginning in 1966, Mr. Andriessen and a group of fellow Dutch musicians pushed for Amsterdam’s storied Concertgebouw Orchestra to engage more vigorously with contemporary music. In 1969, they led what became known as the Nutcracker Action, when activists sabotaged a Concertgebouw performance with frog-shaped metal clickers. That year he collaborated on an opera, “Reconstructie” (“Reconstruction”), which decries American imperialism as it pulls together various styles, including pop, jazz, Mozart pastiche and a speaking chorus. A weeklong run of sold-out performances of the work forced the Dutch culture minister to defend the spending of taxpayer money to finance what was called anti-American agitprop.From 1972 to 1976 Mr. Andriessen composed “De Staat,” a work that would come to define his combination of intellectual rigor and brash sonic exuberance. In “De Tijd,” he played with the listener’s perception of time by manipulating repetition and silence. The frantic, clanging “De Snelheid” (“Velocity”), composed in the early 1980s, investigated the perception of speed and its relationship to harmony.In 1985 he completed “De Stijl,” a Mondrian-inspired piece that would become part of the massive stage work “De Materie,” which sets scientific, historical and mystical texts to a powerful score teeming with sonic hues. Reviewing a 2016 production at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan directed by Heiner Goebbels, which featured a flock of live sheep, Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times described it as “colorful, exciting and, during reflective episodes, raptly beautiful.”Mr. Andriessen with the Philharmonic in 2018 after a performance of his “Agamamnon.” His signature orchestration combined beefed-up woodwind and brass along with keyboards, electric guitars and clanging percussion.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesAs Mr. Andriessen’s fame grew, the classical establishment he had once heckled embraced him. Beginning in 1978 he taught composition at the Royal Conservatory. Yale University invited him in 1987 to lecture on theory and composition. The arts faculty of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands appointed him professor in 2004. He held the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall during the 2009-10 season.Among other honors, he won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Composition in 2011, for “La Commedia,” a polyglot romp through hell anchored in Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” and the 2016 Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music.One of his last major works, “Theater of the World,” centering on the Jesuit philosopher Athanasius Kircher, received its premiere in Los Angeles in 2016. The music blends children’s songs, Serialism and baroque influences into what The Guardian called a “superb, surreal journey.”Having developed dementia, Mr. Andriessen moved to the village in Weesp for people with memory loss last year. The village, called Hogeweyk, has multiple pianos, and Mr. Andriessen would improvise on them for hours. More

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      China’s Communist Party Turns 100. Cue the (State-Approved) Music.

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      A wave of nationalistic music, theater and dance is sweeping China, part of Beijing’s efforts to improve the party’s image and strengthen political loyalty.Yan Shengmin, a Chinese tenor, is known for bouncy renditions of Broadway tunes and soulful performances in operas like “Carmen.”But lately, Mr. Yan has been focusing on a different genre. He is a star of “Red Boat,” a patriotic opera written to celebrate the 100th anniversary this week of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. Mr. Yan has embraced the role, immersing himself in party history and binge-watching television shows about revolutionary heroes to prepare.“I feel a lot of pressure,” Mr. Yan said in an interview between rehearsals. “The 100th anniversary is a big occasion.”A wave of nationalistic music, theater and dance is sweeping China as the Communist Party works to ensure its centennial is met with pomp and fanfare.Prominent choreographers are staging ballets about revolutionary martyrs. Theaters are reviving nationalistic plays about class struggle. Hip-hop artists are writing songs about the party’s achievements. Orchestras are performing works honoring communist milestones like the Long March, with chorus members dressed in light-blue military uniforms.The celebrations are part of efforts by Xi Jinping, China’s authoritarian leader, to make the party omnipresent in people’s lives and to strengthen political loyalty among artists.Mr. Xi, who has presided over a broad crackdown on free expression in China since rising to power nearly a decade ago, has said artists should serve the cause of socialism rather than become “slaves” of the market.In honor of the party’s centennial, Mr. Xi’s government has announced plans for performances of 300 operas, ballets, plays, musical compositions and other works. The list includes classics like “The White-Haired Girl,” a Mao-era opera about a young peasant woman whose family is persecuted by a cruel landlord. There are also new productions like “Red Boat,” which chronicles the party’s first congress in 1921 on a boat outside Shanghai.Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, has said that artists should serve the cause of socialism.Xinhua, via Associated PressThe outpouring of artistic expression comes amid rising nationalism in China. Many artists have little choice but to comply with the government’s demands for more patriotic art, with officials in China’s top-down system wielding considerable influence over decisions about financing and programming.“It has become very important for artists to follow the political line,” said Jindong Cai, director of the U.S.-China Music Institute at Bard College. “The government wants artists to focus on Chinese works that relate to people’s lives and positively reflect China’s image.”Critics have denounced the so-called “red” works as propaganda. But Chinese artists say that is partly the point.“China is very strong now and people should respect that,” said Warren Mok, a Chinese tenor who is embarking on a national tour to celebrate the centennial.Mr. Mok said he hoped to use music to remind people about the party’s success in improving living standards in China. Still, he said it was important that patriotic works are balanced with Western music and other art forms.“Anything you do should not be too extreme,” he said. “If you’re so insecure about your own culture, your own nationalism, you close your door. Isolation is not good for any country.”Hundreds of performances related to the party’s centennial have already taken place, and scores more are expected by year’s end.In Suzhou, a city west of Shanghai, the choreographer Wang Yabin recently staged “My Name is Ding Xiang,” a new ballet about a 22-year-old martyr who died during the Second Sino-Japanese War. In Nanjing, an eastern city, an orchestra recently performed “Liberation: 1949,” a symphony about the Communist revolution by the composer Zhao Jiping.Some works deal with contemporary themes, including the party’s efforts to eliminate extreme poverty and its success in fighting the coronavirus, which Mr. Xi has held up as evidence of the superiority of China’s authoritarian model. A play called “People First” depicts the heroism of medical workers in Wuhan, where the coronavirus emerged in late 2019.By reviving older works, Mr. Xi appears eager to remind the public of the party’s glory days.Kevin Frayer/Getty ImagesPropaganda art has a long history in China, and some of the country’s most celebrated works emerged during periods of intense political control, including the decade of bloody upheaval in the 1960s and 1970s known as the Cultural Revolution. During that time, classical music was attacked as decadent and bourgeois, and many Western composers and instruments were banned.In modern China, music and dance from the Cultural Revolution still resonates with the public, including works such as the “Yellow River Piano Concerto” and “The Red Detachment of Women,” a revolutionary ballet.“These cultural products have their own artistic value,” said Denise Ho, assistant professor of history at Yale University who studies 20th century history in China. “For many Chinese, there is a nostalgia for certain aspects of the Mao era.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}By reviving older works, Mr. Xi appears eager to remind the public of the party’s glory days. His government has redoubled efforts to fortify ideological loyalty among artists. This year, a government-backed industry association released a moral code for performing artists — dancers, musicians and acrobats included — calling on them to be faithful to the party and help advance the socialist cause.Mr. Xi, in a ceremony this week at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, handed out centennial medals to 29 party cadres, including Lan Tianye, an actor often described as a “red artist,” and Lu Qiming, a patriotic composer known for the piece “Ode to the Red Flag.”“For Xi, as for Mao, art is first and foremost a political instrument,” Professor Ho said.The Chinese government has tried to use music, dance, television and movies in recent years to improve its image, especially among young people, many of whom have no direct connection to the Communist revolution of 1949.A rap song celebrating the centennial, titled “100 Percent,” has been widely shared on the Chinese internet in recent days. But the 15-minute track, featuring 100 artists, has been mocked for its wooden propaganda slogans.“Our spaceships are flying in the sky,” says one lyric. “The new China must get lit.”Performers say they hope the high caliber of the centennial productions, including elaborate costumes, sets and visual effects, will appeal to younger audiences.A gala performance about the Long March. Some of the country’s most celebrated works emerged during periods of intense political control.Ng Han Guan/Associated PressWang Jiajun, 36, a principal dancer at Shanghai Dance Theater who plays a martyr in a revival of the dance production “The Eternal Wave,” said young people could identify with the work.“These heroes were only in their teens, 20s or 30s when they lost their lives,” Mr. Wang said. “The stories of young people will attract young people.”For artists taking part in the centenary, the effort has at times been laborious.Xie Menghao, a Chinese-born graduate student in music composition in Germany, spent six months repurposing a suite of Red Army songs into a piano concerto about the Long March, a 6,000-mile retreat of Communist forces that began in 1934 and established Mao’s pre-eminence. He said he was proud of the piece, which the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra premiered last month, but added that the experience was “more like a job.”“I just did what they said,” he said in an interview. “Every composer just thinks about the music.”Mr. Yan the tenor starring in “Red Boat,” said he has found it easy to connect with his character, Chen Duxiu, a founder of the party. But he said rehearsals have not always been easy. Younger performers, for instance, have needed help better understanding the emotional experience of being part of the early communist struggle, he said.“They don’t have the ideas to fight or sacrifice for the nation’s destiny,” Mr. Yan, 56, said. “I can do it in one take.”Mr. Yan said he was confident that the show would have success in China and perhaps beyond.“We’re depicting history, not just lecturing how great the Communist Party is,” he said. “This isn’t a communist slogan-type performance. It’s plain storytelling.”Javier C. Hernández reported from Taipei, Taiwan, and Joy Dong from Hong Kong. More

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      The Conductor Transforming Period Performance

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      Mahler, Stravinsky, Debussy and more: François-Xavier Roth and his ensemble, Les Siècles, are pushing historically informed practice into the 20th century.Think of the “period” or historically informed performance movement, and the mind probably turns to Monteverdi, Bach, Handel. The first advocates for performances on original instruments — post-World War II insurgents like Nikolaus Harnoncourt — concentrated their initial work on the Baroque and then Classical repertories, the music in which their findings were most audibly different compared with then-standard practices.It would take until the 1980s for Roy Goodman, Roger Norrington and others to push period performance into Beethoven, before John Eliot Gardiner led the march through Berlioz, Schumann and Brahms in the 1990s.Despite those advances, though, “period” has mostly remained a synonym for “early.”Step forward François-Xavier Roth, 49, a former assistant to Gardiner whose Parisian ensemble Les Siècles, which he founded in 2003, has released a number of period-instrument recordings on Harmonia Mundi since 2018, all of them excellent.Les Siècles playing at the Philharmonie de Paris in 2019. The ensemble plays even music of the 20th century with instruments of the period of creation.Holger TalinskiThere has been Beethoven, yes, accounts of the Third and Fifth symphonies that illustrate the thoughtful interpretive style of a conductor who has proved himself a progressive programmer as the director of the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne, Germany, and of that city’s opera company. (He is also a principal guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra.). Roth and Les Siècles have done Berlioz, too, not least a “Symphonie Fantastique” that matches Charles Munch’s for unhinged intensity.But it is highly unusual to hear period performances, like theirs, of later music, using instruments and approaches fitting for the late 19th or early 20th century. The orchestral works of Ravel? An early version of Mahler’s First? Stravinsky’s trilogy for the Ballets Russes, including “The Rite of Spring,” reissued recently? Debussy’s “Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune,” the symphonic poem that Pierre Boulez once described as breathing life into modernity?Early music this is not.Debussy’s “Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune”Roth conducting London Symphony Orchestra (LSO Live)“Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune”Roth conducting Les Siècles (Harmonia Mundi)On the surface, Roth’s exploration of the fin de siècle — which also includes a cutting interpretation of Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande” with Les Siècles for the Lille Opera from this spring, free to stream until October and due for release on disc after that — might seem to be just another instance of the period movement’s endless obsession with novelty. The movement’s detractors have often described it as merely gimmicky.It’s true, Les Siècles can produce sounds that amply reprise the shock of the new: the serrated edges of their “Orgie de Brigands” in Berlioz’s “Harold en Italie”; the fluttering airiness of parts of Stravinsky’s “Firebird”; the sultry, almost menacing haze of their “Nuages,” from Debussy’s “Nocturnes.”But Roth is more than just a provocateur, and he has big dreams for Les Siècles. The composer George Benjamin has asked the group to look into Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, hoping that its trademark transparency might shed new light on crucial, still obscure modernist works. And Roth wants to use the ensemble to perform premieres.As comfortable in Rameau as it is in Ravel, in Lully as in Ligeti, Les Siècles shows that it has finally become possible for a single orchestra to perform “all the different repertoires on all the appropriate instruments,” as Roth put it in a recent interview. If that is true, the ensemble might well represent, after half a century or more, the final fulfillment of the period movement’s dream.Here are edited excepts from the conversation with Roth.Why did you decide to found Les Siècles? Was it intended to be what it has become?It’s an old dream. I studied the flute at the Paris Conservatory, and, after that, conducting. When I was a teenager, I read this book by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, “The Musical Dialogue.” Harnoncourt announces that in the future, the modern type of violinist would be someone who could play a Bach sonata on a period instrument in the morning, and a “Sequenza” by Berio on a modern instrument in the afternoon, with the same level of quality and expertise. I thought it would be a dream to have an orchestra like that.Harnoncourt, of course, never got as far as Berio. His interest in early music was a symptom of the problems he saw with composition after World War II; instead, he wanted earlier music to sound contemporary — clear, clean, agile.When I was a teenager, I had lots of different tastes in music. I was lucky enough to grow up in Paris, hearing all the big premieres by Pierre Boulez with the Ensemble Intercontemporain. And at the same time, I was fascinated by the work of Harnoncourt and John Eliot Gardiner. I didn’t want to choose either one or the other. I loved both.It was really the purpose of the orchestra, a little bit selfishly, to go with my musical tastes. It was a garage band at the beginning; we literally rehearsed in my house. It was just after my years as an assistant conductor with the London Symphony Orchestra, and I called some friends who were a little bit crazy, like me. There were lots of players with modern instruments, and, on the other side, people coming either from Baroque or Classical instruments. When we started to experience for the first time the Beethoven instruments, and later on the Berlioz and Bizet instruments, it was always for the first time as a collective.“The virtuosity of the players of our time is not to play fantastically fast, but to change instruments, like an actor changing his costume.”Jonas Unger for The New York TimesIs putting together an instrument library that covers such a long period of time difficult, or expensive?Yes and no. Sometimes it’s chance; sometimes it’s on the internet. One of my trumpeters found in Australia a little French trumpet from 1901, and he bought it for, I don’t know, 200 euros [about $240], and restored it. For the more modern period, we are talking mostly about instruments that belonged to our grandfathers, or one generation before. When I was 15 or 16, I thought these instruments were just not as good as the one I had; we wouldn’t use them. We didn’t, in a way, value the quality of these instruments.You didn’t think they had historical interest yet — that they qualified as “period”?Exactly. This was a little bit arrogant. We think: Stravinsky and Ravel, it’s already modern music. When we not only restored these instruments — I’m mainly talking about winds, percussion and brass — but started to rehearse Stravinsky and Ravel for the first time, “The Firebird” on gut strings, or “Daphnis et Chloé,” I can’t describe the shock. You understand why Stravinsky chose this combination of instruments and not another.Stravinsky’s “Firebird”Boulez conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon)Stravinsky’s “Firebird”Roth conducting Les Siècles (Harmonia Mundi)It’s important not only to talk about the period, but also geography. Paris was not at all the same as London or Berlin. When we started to look at the richness of instruments in Paris in 1909, it was fabulous, and nothing to do with the instruments we know today. The size of a trombone in Paris — it looked like a trumpet, it was not at all the big, fat instrument we know today, or the one that used to play in Vienna or Dresden. So when you start the beginning of “The Firebird,” the double basses with gut string pizzicato, and then suddenly the chorale of the trombones, with these tiny, trombones — my God!There are so many choices involved here. When you play Beethoven, as on two of your most recent recordings, do you play on Viennese instruments from his time, or French ones?We don’t have originals, so we perform on copies of old German instruments from the time of Beethoven. We try to be as close as we can. I’ll give you an example. I was contacted because there was a new edition of “Titan,” the first version of Mahler’s First Symphony. Mahler was very active in Vienna, so you could say, Let’s go for Austrian instruments from the end of the 19th century. But the premiere of “Titan” was in Budapest, and the second performance was in Hamburg. Then we discovered that Mahler himself discovered German clarinets and wanted to bring them to Vienna. So at some point you have to make a decision; there is not one truth.Are the players also doing research into contemporary performance practice? How far do you go in recreating a sound, in other words?For sure, the common point of these musicians is that they research something, not only the aesthetics but the style, the sound. With Les Siècles it’s more extreme, because I ask the musicians to present programs of Mozart combined with Lachenmann, Debussy with Boulez, Rameau with Ravel. The virtuosity of the players of our time is not to play fantastically fast, but to change instruments, like an actor changing his costume.But nobody taught them how to play Berlioz instruments. The instrument becomes the teacher. It shows its advantages, its richness, but at a certain point it doesn’t respond anymore; you can’t blow that loud into it. This was the purpose of the orchestra and this is a goal for me as a performer, to rehearse the music as if it was written yesterday. One of my mottos is that I love contemporary music from all periods.So at what point in history do you jump to modern instruments as we would think of them? Is it with Boulez? Earlier? Later?I was close to Boulez in the last five years of his life, because I was in Baden-Baden [as the music director of the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden Baden und Freiburg]. When he was a young musician, he had to deal with things he didn’t like at all. For example, I often conduct his “Le Marteau Sans Maître.” When you listen to the first performance, you hear an old vibraphone with a huge vibrato; you don’t recognize the piece. Pierre would say that the instruments were awful. He would dream that the instruments would change.So it’s not a question of which year, but more a question of what the composer wanted, or what the composer expected music to sound like. More

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      Violinist Apologizes for ‘Culturally Insensitive’ Remarks About Asians

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      Pinchas Zukerman was criticized for invoking ugly stereotypes about Asians during a master class at Juilliard, which called his remarks offensive.A master class by the renowned violinist Pinchas Zukerman was supposed to be the highlight of a recent virtual symposium hosted by the Juilliard School.Instead, Zukerman angered many of the roughly 100 students and teachers in the class on Friday when he invoked racist stereotypes about Asians, leading Juilliard to decide not to share a video of his master class afterward with participants, as it had initially intended.At one point, Zukerman told a pair of students of Asian descent that their playing was too perfect and that they needed to add soy sauce, according to two participants in the class. At another point, in trying to encourage the students to play more lyrically, he said he understood that people in Korea and Japan do not sing, participants said. His comments were reported earlier by Violinist.com, a music site.Zukerman’s remarks were widely denounced by musicians and teachers, with many saying they reinforced ugly stereotypes facing artists of Asian descent in the music industry.Juilliard tried to distance itself from the matter, describing Zukerman as a guest instructor and saying his “insensitive and offensive cultural stereotypes” did not represent the school’s values. Zukerman apologized Monday for what he called his “culturally insensitive” comments.“In Friday’s master class, I was trying to communicate something to these two incredibly talented young musicians, but the words I used were culturally insensitive,” he said in a statement. “I’m writing to the students personally to apologize. I am sorry that I made anyone uncomfortable. I cannot undo that, but I offer a sincere apology. I learned something valuable from this, and I will do better in the future.”Asian and Asian American performers have long dealt with racist tropes that their playing is too technical or unemotional. A wave of anti-Asian hate in the United States in recent months has heightened concerns about the treatment of Asian performers.Zukerman is a celebrated violinist and conductor whose career has spanned five decades. He was the biggest name at the Juilliard event, known as the Starling-DeLay Violin Symposium, which is focused on violin teaching and attracts promising young musicians, many of them teenagers, to take part in master classes.He made the remarks on Friday while offering feedback to a pair of sisters of Japanese descent.After the sisters played a duet, Zukerman told them they should try bringing more of a singing quality to their playing, according to participants in the class. When he said that he knew Koreans did not sing, one of the sisters interrupted to say that they were not Korean, adding that they were partly of Japanese descent. Zukerman replied by saying that people in Japan did not sing either, according to participants.His remarks prompted an outcry among Asian and Asian American musicians, with some sharing stories on social media about their experiences dealing with stereotypes and bias..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media 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a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Hyeyung Yoon, a violinist who last year founded Asian Musical Voices of America, an alliance of artists, said Zukerman’s remarks represented a type of thinking that “dehumanizes a group of people without actually getting to know who they are.”“It’s so prevalent in classical music, but also prevalent in the larger society,” she said in an interview.Keiko Tokunaga, a violinist, said she and many other Asian musicians had heard comments similar to Zukerman’s.“We are often described as emotionless or we just have no feelings and we are just technical machines,” she said in an interview. “And that is very offensive, because we are as human as anyone else on the planet.” More