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      Eva Coutaz, a Record Label Force for Quality, Dies at 77

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyEva Coutaz, a Record Label Force for Quality, Dies at 77An executive with the respected label Harmonia Mundi, she shaped classical music careers and public tastes in turning out incomparable recordings from a French farmhouse.Eva Coutaz, the driving force behind the record label Harmonia Mundi, rehabilitated forgotten composers and nurtured some of the leading figures in early music.Credit…Josep MolinaFeb. 4, 2021, 3:13 p.m. ETEva Coutaz, who in more than four decades at the highly respected record label Harmonia Mundi shaped musicians’ careers, rehabilitated forgotten composers and expanded the tastes of record collectors, died on Jan. 26 in Arles, France. She was 77.Jean-Marc Berns, the label’s head of marketing, said the cause was complications of renal failure.Ms. Coutaz joined Harmonia Mundi in 1972 at the invitation of its founder, Bernard Coutaz, whom she would go on to marry. Her first job was to oversee publicity and to organize concerts to promote the label’s artists, but she quickly proved her business acumen and artistic sensibility.Ms. Coutaz nurtured long-term relationships with a stable of musicians that included some of the leading figures in early music, among them the countertenor Alfred Deller and the performer-conductors René Jacobs, William Christie and Philippe Herreweghe. Later she brought in another generation of recording stars, including the violinist Isabelle Faust, the pianist Alexandre Tharaud and the baritone Matthias Goerne.She built a catalog of more than 800 recordings as head of production starting in 1975. On the death of her husband in 2010 she became chief executive of the company and remained in that post until 2015, when she sold the label.At its most prolific, Harmonia Mundi released more than 50 new recordings a year. Industry publications frequently crowned it label of the year, and collectors came to trust it as a guide to hidden gems and illuminating interpretations of the classics. With their beautifully designed covers and thoughtful liner notes, Harmonia Mundi albums stood for a listening culture that was both meticulous and meditative.Ms. Coutaz was “the great guiding force” behind the label, Mr. Christie said in a phone interview. As a businesswoman, he said, she could be “tough as old boots.”“She had a strong will and an extraordinary sense of rightness about repertory,” he added. “And she was going to take risks.”In the 1970s and ’80s, those risks paid handsome dividends in a market buoyed by fresh interest in early music and historically informed interpretations. Ms. Coutaz recognized, for example, the market potential of the French baroque composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier at a time when his ilk lagged far behind the popular appeal of their German and Italian counterparts, Mr. Christie said.Costly productions of unknown oratorios and operas remained a gamble, and Ms. Coutaz greenlighted some projects against her own better financial judgment. In a 2018 radio interview with the Belgian station RTBF, she spoke about a recording, led by Mr. Jacobs, of the opera “Croesus” by the northern German baroque composer Reinhard Keiser — a footnote in music history books.“I thought it would be a loss for us,” she said. But she was so taken by the music that she told herself, “I want to record it — it would be a shame if people don’t hear it.” “Croesus” sold more than 25,000 copies, a triumph for classical music.Mr. Jacobs said that Ms. Coutaz had encouraged his conducting career when he was still known mainly as a countertenor. After he had gained fame as a champion of Baroque music, she urged him to record Mozart operas. His Harmonia Mundi recording of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” won a Grammy Award in 2004 and became a best seller.“She pushed me to go further,” he said.Eva Schannath was born in Wuppertal, Germany, on Feb. 26, 1943. Her father was a cabinetmaker. After attending a Roman Catholic school in Düsseldorf, she took on an apprenticeship as a bookseller. Eager to experience France, she went to Marseille in 1964 as an au pair, then stayed on, working first at a book shop in Montpellier and then for a cultural center in Aix-en-Provence.It was there, in 1972, that she met Mr. Coutaz, who was then running Harmonia Mundi from Saint-Michel-l’Observatoire, a remote village in Provence. Mr. Coutaz founded the company in 1958.Jean-Guihen Queyras, a boy studying the cello, was living in a nearby hamlet, and his parents befriended the couple. When he was 10 he received his first taste of a Harmonia Mundi recording session when Ms. Coutaz invited him to work the organ bellows for Mr. Christie in a tiny Romanesque mountain chapel.Years later Mr. Queyras joined the label as a soloist. “What was different to other labels was her vision and her very human and organic way to bring together musicians in a way that really feels like a family,” he said.He recalled her strong emotional reactions to music. “Sometimes she would talk to you after a concert, and you could see there had been tears,” he said. “She really made all this out of pure, intense love for music.”Eva and Bernard Coutaz worked closely together even as they married, divorced and remarried. They had no children. Information on her survivors was not immediately available.The couple moved the label to an old farmhouse in Arles in 1986. It became the creative and logistical hub for a company that at its height employed more than 350 people. Its influence spread through subsidiaries in Spain and the United States, a publishing arm and a network of record boutiques.In the early 2000s, the rise of streaming started to put the recording industry in crisis and forced painful cuts at Harmonia Mundi. In the radio interview, Ms. Coutaz spoke of a 70 percent drop in CD sales over a span of 10 years. She warned that as earnings plummeted, high-quality studio recordings would become a thing of the past. “If digital sales are not monetized, the moment will come when you can no longer produce,” she said.In 2015, she approved the sale of Harmonia Mundi’s catalog to PIAS, a Belgian group of independent labels. She remained involved as a consultant for another year, to help maintain quality. In 2018, Gramophone, a leading classical music publication, named Harmonia Mundi label of the year.Reflecting on Ms. Coutaz, Mr. Christie said his generation had known a recording industry led by “strong-minded and intensely committed individuals who had an extraordinary sense of the rightness of what they were doing and how to create markets.”“And she stood out among them.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      A Critic and a Pianist, Close but Not Quite Friends

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookA Critic and a Pianist, Close but Not Quite FriendsA 35-disc set of Peter Serkin’s remarkable recordings rekindles our critic’s memories of their intersecting careers.The pianist Peter Serkin in the late 1980s. A new collection of his recordings features music by Beethoven, Berio, Chopin, Mozart, Takemitsu, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and more.Credit…Donald DietzFeb. 4, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETThe pianist Peter Serkin made his New York debut when he was just 12. But his real introduction to the public — as an artist of his own special merits, not just as the renowned pianist Rudolf Serkin’s son — came six years later, in 1965, with his recording of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations.Critics praised the vibrant, elegant and clear playing. Many singled out the exceptional maturity of this teenager’s interpretation.That recording made a powerful impression on me. Just a year younger than Serkin, I was then a serious pianist planning to pursue music in college. But our backgrounds couldn’t have been more different. There were no musicians in my family; my talent and passion had seemed to come out of nowhere. Serkin had inherited the mantle of classical music as a birthright going back generations, and received the best training imaginable.Still, I felt he and I were kindred spirits, though at the time I couldn’t explain why. Listening today to that remarkable Bach recording, I understand better what affected me so deeply.Serkin, in the foreground, playing with his father, the eminent pianist Rudolf Serkin.Credit…Gjon Mili/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty ImagesFrom his serenely lyrical shaping of the opening theme, and then his lilting yet subtly restrained playing of the bouncy first variation, he approached this formidable masterpiece with unspoiled directness and sincerity. His performance combined an almost spiritual equilibrium with soft-spoken joy. He dispatched the brilliant variations crisply and cleanly, without a trace of showiness.That breakthrough has been reissued as part of a 35-disc box set of his complete recordings on the RCA label (and some on Columbia), made in the first three decades of his career. It was released last year, just four months after he died, that February, of pancreatic cancer. The collection offers a rich variety of solo pieces, chamber works and concertos by Beethoven, Berio, Chopin, Mozart, Takemitsu, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and more — in probing, lucid, often exhilarating performances. Some of these recordings I didn’t know; others I’d not listened to in years. The set has rekindled strong memories of Peter — as I came to know him — and his great artistry, and the intersection of our lives and professions.As his recordings kept coming out after that “Goldberg” Variations, I bought them eagerly and followed Peter’s journey. There was his spacious, searching yet beguilingly playful account of Schubert’s late, lengthy Sonata No. 18 in G, recorded during the same sessions as the Bach but released in 1966. There were exciting collaborations with Seiji Ozawa and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Bartok’s First and Third Piano Concertos and Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto, a piece that clobbered me at the time. That 1968 Schoenberg album included the Five Piano Pieces (Op. 23). Peter’s compelling performance inspired me to learn that work, which I eventually did, with enormous effort, for my senior recital in college.Peter Serkin was sensitive about his complicated relationship with his famous father.Credit…Bettmann/Getty ImagesRudolf Serkin was a childhood hero to me, and I will always cherish his formidable artistry. But in my early 20s a generational shift was coaxing me toward solidarity with his son. Peter seemed like the unintimidated pianist-leader of our emerging generation, claiming classical music on his own terms. I wanted to meet him, to hang out. I had a hunch we could become friends.We didn’t meet, though, until the summer of 1987, just weeks before he turned 40. By then I was a freelance critic for The Boston Globe and he was teaching young artists at the Tanglewood Music Center. He was known to be interview-shy, burned by the snide reactions of critics during the 1970s, when he sported a ponytail and stringy goatee; often performed wearing Nehru shirts and love beads; and disdained the touring virtuoso circuit, which he compared to a “monkey doing his trained act with the same pieces over and over.”In 1973, he and three like-minded young musicians had founded Tashi, an ensemble that focused on contemporary music. These adventurous players gave dozens of mesmerizing performances and made a top-selling recording of their signature piece, Messiaen’s mystical “Quartet for the End of Time.”Peter wanted to shake up classical music, which he felt was far too beholden to old repertory and traditional protocols. Still, it was hard for him to shrug off being seen as “the counterculture’s reluctant envoy to the straight concert world,” as the critic Donal Henahan put it in a 1973 profile in The New York Times. And he was sick of being asked about his complicated relationship with his father.I knew all this going into our interview and was a little wary. But from the moment we met, I felt at ease. We sat on the grass under the sun on the grounds of Tanglewood and talked for a couple of hours about everything: his memories of how intensely he experienced music as a child; his travels to India, Thailand and Mexico in his early 20s, when, for a while, he stopped performing and even practicing to “find out who I am without it”; the satisfaction he was deriving that summer from coaching a fresh generation of musicians who seemed to share his innate curiosity about new music; and his excitement over an ambitious project he was planning, to take on tour a program of 11 works newly written for him. Learning to deal with difficult fathers came up, too. Over the following week at Tanglewood, we did hang out — which was, as we would have said back then, really cool.Serkin was thought of as “the counterculture’s reluctant envoy to the straight concert world,” as the critic Donal Henahan put it in a 1973 profile for The New York Times. Credit…Gjon Mili/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty ImagesBy that point, though, our relationship was defined and, to some extent, constrained by our respective roles as performer and critic. (Actually, I was still actively performing then, and Peter wanted to know all about my work and hear some concert recordings, which I shared with him.) Had I not been a critic, we might have developed a true friendship; yet had I not been a critic, I might never have met him at all. In a way, I already sensed that I could do more for music, and for Peter, by being an informed observer of his remarkable work.For years after that first meeting, he and I spoke on the phone now and then, exchanged emails, and sometimes found occasions to meet. He enjoyed teaching in the summers at Tanglewood so much that he bought a house in the Berkshires and lived there with his wife and children. He invited me to come visit. Right now I wish I’d accepted. But even he understood, I think, that it was better to keep some measure of professional distance.People may assume that as a critic, I can’t possibly be objective about an artist I feel warmly toward. Yet just as a novelist can tell a writer friend the truth about problematic aspects of a manuscript, perhaps I, who admired Peter’s playing so much, was able to see when his take on a piece didn’t quite click.For example, the new collection includes three albums of Chopin works recorded between 1978 and 1981, when Peter was looking afresh at a composer he was not known for performing. He brought out the ruminative, poetic elements of the music, even in mazurkas and waltzes that might seem lithe on the surface. His recording of the 14-minute Polonaise-Fantasie, one of Chopin’s most elusive and original scores, is overwhelming. Peter makes the piece seem like a dark, restless, fantastical musing on the deeper heritage of the polonaise, a defining dance of Chopin’s war-torn homeland.But he also applied this pensive approach to the Andante Spianato et Grande Polonaise Brillante, with less success. This may have been the closest Chopin came to writing an unabashed virtuoso showpiece. I get what Peter was going for, and it’s fascinating. But the performance is so probing it feels a little grounded. You want the effortless dazzle of a Vladimir Horowitz.Serkin’s extraordinary 1973 recording of Messiaen’s “Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésu” remains, for our critic, definitive.Credit…Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times, via Getty ImagesPeter’s extraordinary 1973 recording of Messiaen’s “Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésu” remains, for me, definitive. This two-hour work, structured as a set of 20 pieces, poses astounding technical challenges as the music shifts between meditative timelessness and exuberant, near-frenzied spirituality, run through with bird calls. Peter took it on tour, playing it complete and from memory, sometimes accompanied with mood-setting lighting. When we spoke that first time he recalled Messiaen hearing him perform the piece. Afterward, the composer was “really too kind,” Peter said: “He told me that I respected the score, but that when I didn’t it was even better.”The album that may have meant the most to Peter was “… in real time,” featuring works written for him, including several of the 11 scores he played on that program of commissions by Henze, Berio, Takemitsu, Kirchner, Alexander Goehr, Oliver Knussen and Peter’s childhood friend Peter Lieberson. He makes the swirling busyness and tart sonorities of Berio’s “Feuerklavier” sound like a crackling blaze; he delves below the undulant grace and tenderness of Lieberson’s “Breeze of Delight” to reveal the music’s eerie undertow.Peter started teaching at the Bard College Conservatory of Music in 2005 and loved working with the inquisitive students the program attracted. Even while enduring debilitating cancer treatments, he tried to keep teaching and playing. In an email to me from April 2019, he wrote of feeling “terrible pain and exhaustion, much worse than last time.” Yet he had forced himself to participate in a performance of Brahms’s C minor Piano Quartet because the cellist, Robert Martin, a close colleague, was playing his final concert as director of the conservatory. “It went well enough,” he wrote. Actually, it’s a profoundly affecting performance, as a video makes clear.I had arranged to visit him at his home near Bard that August, on my way back to New York after several days covering Tanglewood’s contemporary music festival. But the morning of our planned get-together Peter texted to say he felt wretched. He texted again the next day to tell me how sad he was to have canceled.“I got a little four-hand music out in case you wanted to play but I guess I’ll bring it back downstairs now for possibly some other time,” he wrote.There was no other time. We tried to reschedule, but his health was too shaky. The last email he sent me, some three months before he died, was a short reply to a note I’d sent. “Yes, we are good friends,” he said, “and I look forward to seeing you.”Friends, indeed, in our own way.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Times's Five Minutes Series on Classical Music a Hit

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeExplore: A Cubist CollageFollow: Cooking AdviceVisit: Famous Old HomesLearn: About the VaccineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHooking Readers on Classical Music, Five Minutes at a TimeDrawing on the passion of experts, a Culture desk series has doubled its audience for the genre.CreditCredit…Angie WangFeb. 3, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETMark Hamill was spellbound by a Mozart composition, but he couldn’t remember its name. The haunting choral masterpiece played near the end of the Broadway production of “Amadeus” more than 40 years ago, in which he performed the title role.So when Mr. Hamill, the actor who portrayed Luke Skywalker in “Star Wars,” was approached in June 2020 by Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times’s classical music editor, to suggest an irresistible Mozart piece, he responded with one request: Can you track it down?With some help from the team at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Mr. Woolfe identified the mystery earworm: a section of Mozart’s Requiem. Mr. Hamill played the composer hundreds of times on Broadway and in the first national tour of “Amadeus” in the early 1980s. But, he told Mr. Woolfe, “I never got tired of the sound.”Mr. Woolfe chatted with Mr. Hamill for the Mozart installment of The Times’s classical music appreciation series, “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love _____.” Once a month online, about 15 musicians, pop-culture figures and Times writers and editors each select the piece they would play for a friend tied to a theme, be it an instrument, composer, genre or voice type. This month’s theme, published today, is string quartets.The series aims to make classical music as accessible to readers as a Top 40 track, Mr. Woolfe said. You don’t need to know the difference between a cadenza and a concerto. “It’s about pure pleasure and exploration,” he said.Now two and a half years and a dozen segments into the project, Mr. Woolfe said he had been surprised at readers’ appetite for the series, regardless of the theme. “It’s like, ‘OK, ‘5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Mozart’ is super appealing,’” he said. “But ‘5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Baroque Music’? Or ‘5 Minutes That Will Make You Love 21st-Century Composers’? But those both did terrifically as well.”The name for the series came to him in the shower in 2018 as he was pondering ways he could make The Times’s classical music coverage accessible to a broader audience. “I was thinking about being at a concert or listening to a recording, and being like, ‘OMG, that note she hit!’” Mr. Woolfe said. “Then I had the idea of asking different people to pick their favorite little five-minute nuggets and presenting them like a playlist.”The first installment, in which he asked artists like Julia Bullock, the young, velvety-voiced soprano, and Nicholas Britell, the composer of the Oscar-nominated score for “Moonlight,” to choose the five minutes they would play to make their friends fall in love with classical music, became a runaway hit with readers, racking up more than 400,000 page views in its first week alone.That reception inspired him to expand the series — first to individual instruments like the piano, then to genres like opera and composers like Mozart and Beethoven. And the pandemic motivated him to ramp up the pace: Since last April, new segments have published on the first Wednesday of every month.“It has doubled our audience for classical music,” Mr. Woolfe said. “It’s gratifying that whatever we do, people are willing to explore and be into it.” But he added that he had been happy to hear that classical aficionados have enjoyed the series, too.David Allen, a freelance critic for The Times and a frequent contributor to “5 Minutes,” said he targeted both novices and experts with his selections. “I sometimes have thought deeply about finding pieces that are off the beaten track,” he said, like a little-heard piece from Bach’s organ music or a movement from a Mozart serenade.Mr. Woolfe also credited the appeal to the series’s vibrant, eye-catching animations, like pulsating cello strings or a silhouette of Mozart caught in a colorful confetti storm. “They enhance the playfulness and accessibility of the series,” he said.Angie Wang, the freelance illustrator who creates them, said she watched videos of the musicians and noted their characteristic movements, paying particularly close attention to wrist and elbow articulation. “I wanted to render them with delicacy,” she said. “The animations are a kind of visualization for the music.”One of Mr. Woolfe’s favorite aspects of working on the series has been getting to know artists outside the performance context in which he typically encounters them (“Renée Fleming is a really good writer,” he said), as well as talking to notable names outside the classical music world about a subject they are rarely, if ever, asked to discuss.“I get to see how people think in addition to how they perform,” he said. “It’s another facet of the personalities of artists.”Although the series was not conceived as an antidote to the polarization that has gripped politics and public health in the past year, Mr. Woolfe is glad it has worked out that way. “I’m so happy it’s been counterprogramming for people during the pandemic,” he said. “And I hope they’ll keep listening.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      5 Classical Albums to Hear Right Now

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story5 Classical Albums to Hear Right NowA Salieri opera, the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and the pianist Stephen Hough are among the highlights.Credit… Feb. 2, 2021‘A Record Of …’Buke and Gase and So Percussion
      A Record Of… by Buke and Gase and So PercussionThe indie-rock duo Buke and Gase has long found champions in the contemporary classical world, at least as far back as the 2010 iteration of the annual marathon organized by the new-music collective Bang On a Can. In recent years, the duo’s lead singer, Arone Dyer, has also started writing for other performers, like Bec Plexus. On this new collaborative set with So Percussion, Buke and Gase’s rhythmically surprising, grungy work occasionally takes on a newly warm tinge. (Most of the album’s tracks were composed collaboratively by members of both groups.)Dreamy vibraphone, mellow kalimba and pinging glockenspiel offer enchanting support for Dyer’s siren-song refrains on the first track, “Diazepam.” Buke and Gase’s characteristic use of kick drum, overseen by Aron Sanchez, the duo’s other member and a multi-instrumentalist, provides gentle yet dramatic propulsion. So Percussion’s contributions aren’t solely subtle; they also make more galvanic numbers — like “Wake for Yourself” and “Ancient Tool Gadget” — thrum with unexpected accents and harmonies. The result is a fusion that’s fluid instead of forced. SETH COLTER WALLS‘Beethoven Odyssey’Colin Davis, conductor (Eloquence)[embedded content]Whether it was the coronavirus or a coincidence, Beethoven’s 250th anniversary year, 2020, was a bit of a disappointment when it came to recordings. Of the mighty symphonies, for example, only a few new interpretations made much of a mark.Rereleases have been another matter. Hermann Scherchen’s bracing cycle from the 1950s made our annual list of best albums, and there’s a valuable set here as well. Colin Davis would go on make a refined survey with the Staatskapelle Dresden in the 1990s, one that recalled Otto Klemperer in its power and strength. If you can already hear something of its breadth in these earlier accounts — taped mostly with the BBC and London symphonies in the 1970s and long unavailable — there is an extra alertness that often pays dividends, despite lesser orchestral playing.Bundled with a host of overtures, sparkling piano concertos with Stephen Kovacevich and even a pair of Masses, the “Eroica” is vibrant, grand but not imposing; the Fourth is amiable, yet convincing; the Fifth has force and the Seventh has fire. Best of all are a pair of Sixths that unfold steadily and generously, bringing a smile to the face — like so many of this conductor’s understanding, uniquely humane performances. DAVID ALLEN‘Occurrence’Iceland Symphony Orchestra; Daniel Bjarnason, conductor; Pekka Kuusisto, violin; Mario Caroli, flute (Sono Luminus)[embedded content]ISO Project, the Iceland Symphony’s three-album survey of its country’s contemporary music, comes to a close with “Occurrence.” Like the other installments, “Recurrence” (2017) and “Concurrence” (2019), it’s approachably packaged, a handful of likable works clocking in at the length of a modest concert — which is how they’ve been presented, conducted by Daniel Bjarnason in Reykjavik.“Occurrence” opens with Bjarnason’s Violin Concerto, composed for Pekka Kuusisto and toured widely since its premiere in 2017. One of those stops was the New York Philharmonic, where the piece seemed so tailored to Kuusisto, his daring yet graceful shifts between singing melodies and extended technique, that it was difficult to imagine anyone else as the soloist. The album strips away Kuusisto’s stage presence — so compelling in the introduction’s charismatic whistles and pizzicato, like something out of an Andrew Bird song — and leaves only the notes. What remains is overlong, perhaps, but includes some of the finest violin writing in recent years.Veronique Vaka’s “Lendh” (2019) operates on a geologic scale, with tectonic bass textures and a slowly changing shape that can appear amorphous in the moment but reveals itself over time. Thuridur Jonsdottir’s flute concerto “Flutter” (2009) is similarly grounded in nature, sampling crickets and introducing its soloist, Mario Caroli, with an airy, primeval sound. Haukur Tomasson’s “In Seventh Heaven” (2011) makes ecstatically full use of the orchestra, which is later reduced to a whisper in Magnus Blondal Johannsson’s “Adagio” (1980), the album’s closing track and a farewell of lyrical mystery. JOSHUA BARONESalieri: ‘Armida’Les Talens Lyriques; Christophe Rousset, conductor; Lenneke Ruiten and Florie Valiquette, sopranos; Choeur de Chambre de Namur (Aparté)[embedded content]Over the past few years, the distinguished, prolific conductor Christophe Rousset and his ensemble Les Talens Lyriques have delved into the underplayed operas of Antonio Salieri. They’ve focused on his French works of the 1780s, but in this taut, elegant recording they turn to “Armida,” the Italian-language hit that helped make Salieri’s career when it premiered in Vienna in 1771.With its juicy central romance — a classic battle between love and duty, fidelity and betrayal — and magical milieu, the plot, drawn from Tasso’s 16th-century epic “Gerusalemme Liberata,” inspired many operas. Salieri’s version, with its darkly atmospheric overture and densely massed choruses, shows the influence of his teacher, Gluck, who would write his own adaptation, “Armide,” in 1777.The two lovers — Armida, a sorceress of Damascus, and the enraptured Christian crusader Rinaldo — are here both sopranos, which gives a “Rosenkavalier” feel to their early idyll. As their spell breaks and their suspicion turns mutual, Lenneke Ruiten is particularly subtle in the title role, singing with an undercurrent of vulnerability that renders these two characters true partners in suffering. The opera overall is tense and passionate — well worth performing if a company has two excellent, well matched singing actresses on hand. ZACHARY WOOLFE‘Vida Breve’Works by Bach, Busoni, Chopin, Liszt and Stephen Hough; Stephen Hough, piano (Hyperion)Death has long been a central subject of the arts, resulting in “the most exalted and inexhaustible expression,” as the pianist Stephen Hough writes in the liner notes to “Vida Breve,” his remarkable new solo album offering arresting accounts of works that touch on death.The longest piece is Chopin’s “Funeral March” Sonata in B flat minor — a lucid, lyrical performance. There are two formidable Liszt works: the dark, mysterious “Funérailles,” suitably demonic here, and the harmonically radical “Bagatelle Sans Tonalité” (“Mephisto Waltz”). The program opens with a stunning account of the Chaconne from Bach’s Partita No. 2 for solo violin, thought by some to be Bach’s memorial piece to his first wife and played in Busoni’s colossal arrangement for piano, a “cathedral of sound,” as Hough describes it.Busoni’s “Carmen” Fantasy is here an eerie transfiguration of music from Bizet’s opera. The album’s title work is Hough’s own Piano Sonata No. 4, “Vida Breve,” referring to a life cut short, a sensation its composer conveys in an episodic, nine-minute work in one movement. The music shifts from lacy, harmonically wandering passages to stern proclamations with thick chords to stretches of industrious counterpoint, which build to a climax of teeming intensity before abruptly stopping. ANTHONY TOMMASINIAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How Classical Music Can Help You Hear the Open Road

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      @media (pointer: coarse) { .at-home-nav__outerContainer { overflow-x: scroll; -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch; } } .at-home-nav__outerContainer { position: relative; display: flex; align-items: center; /* Fixes IE */ overflow-x: auto; box-shadow: -6px 0 white, 6px 0 white, 1px 3px 6px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.15); padding: 10px 1.25em 10px; transition: all 250ms; margin-bottom: 20px; -ms-overflow-style: none; /* IE 10+ */ […] More

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      Two Friends, Two Continents, Very Different Pandemics

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTwo Friends, Two Continents, Very Different PandemicsSteven LaBrie is a freelance baritone in New York. Jarrett Ott has a full-time job singing in Germany. As the coronavirus spread, that made all the difference.The singers Jarrett Ott (left, in Stuttgart, Germany) and Steven LaBrie (right, in New York City) are friends whose careers were hit very differently by the pandemic.Credit…Roderick Aichinger for The New York Times; Michael George for The New York TimesJan. 13, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETAs two singers rising through the close-knit world of Philadelphia’s most acclaimed conservatories, Steven LaBrie and Jarrett Ott knew each other in passing. But on one raucous night in 2009, when Mr. Ott joined the celebration of Mr. LaBrie’s 21st birthday — an evening of tequila, dancing and after-hours pizza — their friendship was sealed.Both baritones, Mr. LaBrie, now 32, and Mr. Ott, 33, stayed close as their opera careers began to blossom. They and their partners lived near each other in Astoria, Queens, for a time, and Mr. LaBrie and Mr. Ott worked out at the same gym. In 2018, with fellow baritone Tobias Greenhalgh, they released “Remember,” an album of songs by American composers.That year, their paths split. Mr. Ott started a full-time job in the ensemble at the respected opera house in Stuttgart, Germany. Mr. LaBrie remained based in New York, a freelance artist with a growing reputation.This divergence made all the difference when the coronavirus hit. With performances canceled around the world, Mr. LaBrie’s income fell to nothing; he hasn’t had health insurance for years. But across the Atlantic, support from the German government meant that Mr. Ott’s position was safe, his pay almost unchanged and his benefits secure.In separate interviews, they spoke about the impact of the pandemic — and political responses to it — on their lives and future plans. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.Steven LaBrieA freelance baritone, Mr. LaBrie made his European debut in late 2019 in “Rusalka” at the Erl Festival in Austria. Plans to have him return to the festival were canceled because of the pandemic.Credit…Xiomara BenderI started when I was a teenager as a mariachi singer. My mother is Mexican, and she encouraged it. We would drive around Dallas to all these restaurants, and there were bands you could go up and sing with. And once I became a professional singer, I loved the lifestyle. I loved traveling; I loved being different places with different colleagues.A year ago, in December 2019, I was making my European debut. (I had sung in Paris, but on tour with New York City Ballet, so I’m not counting that.) I had gone on a German audition tour, and the head of the Erl Festival in Austria hired me to sing the Hunter and Innkeeper in “Rusalka” at the end of 2019.At the opening night party, I was immediately rehired for an obscure opera by Offenbach that hadn’t been performed since its premiere in Austria. It was a huge role, a huge thing for me. But since Covid happened, they decided that because of budgetary reasons they were cutting the show. And my hope for my singing career in Europe dwindled away. I was going to make my debut on the main stage at Carnegie Hall, and that flew away, too. A career is built one milestone at a time, so what now? I streamed a video performance, but I found it’s really difficult to get people to commit to watching any self-produced online content.I’ve been a lucky person in some ways. I have a partner, who’s also a musician but has a steady income as a coach at Juilliard, a pianist on the Met’s music staff and a recitalist. And losing my income — most years I probably made about $50,000 before expenses and paying my manager — wasn’t as much of a blow as some people who have a house they own, or children. I qualified for pandemic relief, and got the $1,200 stimulus.I don’t feel like the government has ever supported the arts. I pay high taxes, because I’m a self-employed person. That comes with many expenses and it’s difficult to get ahead financially when there are so many people a singer needs to employ to help him succeed. Since the beginning of my career, I’ve been told that the opera industry has been facing hardships and that fees have gone down, which makes me wonder if opera at some point will just be a hobby for people who already have a safety net.I kept thinking, what can I do with this time? I went straight to the Academy of Vocal Arts after high school; I’ve only ever known singing. What can I do with no degree? What the coronavirus has shown is that we’re not confined to staying put in one location anymore. We can do anything from anywhere in the world. I read a lot about people who made a career transition into tech. And I began looking into software engineering. I started learning a coding language, and did that the entire summer.Now I’m what they call a “resident” at a software engineering immersive program called Codesmith. It’s an intensive program for three months that takes you up to being hired at a high level, mid to senior.I’m not leaving singing. I’m preparing myself for having a skill set in an industry with a lot of opportunities and straddling both worlds. This idea people have, that you’re either a singer or not a singer, it’s just not the truth. And now, more than ever, it can’t be the truth.I really do believe I’m coming out of this feeling so much more empowered. I’m relying on myself to invent my future, as opposed to feeling I’m the victim of a system. I’m not saying I’m always at the computer with glee. I have shed a tear or two for my life and career. But at the same time, you have to keep moving forward. My dream has always been, and will always be, to be a singer. But now I have more than one dream.Jarrett OttMr. Ott, center, as Chou En-lai in John Adams’s “Nixon in China,” part of his full-time job as a member of the ensemble at the State Opera in Stuttgart, where government support has maintained his position, pay and benefits.Credit…Matthias BausThe main thing when you’re in an ensemble is to get so many roles under your belt. You can be singing three at the same time. No matter what training you get in the United States, nothing prepares you to be a full-time singer at a single company. A freelancer can hop among companies, but you’re never rehearsing one show in the afternoon, going into another show at night and in the morning a third. One time, someone got to perform in another house, so I was asked to do two Marcellos in the same day in “La Bohème.” It’s not always ideal circumstances, but it’s such a life-changing experience.It’s a full-time position, salary based. Full health benefits. Singers in Europe can afford to live off this salary, but it’s assumed that you’re also going to have some contracts at other opera houses. But this year, I watched my American engagements go in a dumpster, and I was still able to completely put food on the table and pay my bills. After taxes — about half is taken out — I earn about €2,500 ($3,050) a month.I did my first performance ever of the Count in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” on March 8. Our next performance was going to be the 13th, and we were locked down on the 11th. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to be locked down away from my husband and my dog, in New York City, so I flew there on the 13th and did the initial lockdown there.I got the call, I think it was in the middle of May: “Would you want to come back and do a recital?” And at that point I was going crazy in a New York apartment, so it was: “Dear God, yes.” I arrived on June 1 and did a very strict 14-day quarantine. June 15 I could leave that, and the recital was June 19, in front of 100 people. It wasn’t even in the opera house; they didn’t have that figured out yet. It was at the Liederhalle, another performance space which the opera sometimes uses for concerts.Mine was one of the very first recitals. I think three or four other people got to do it, and then they started reducing the audience again slowly. And they did two almost-productions here before another lockdown started in the fall. We thought we might be able to do concert versions of “Madama Butterfly” in December; obviously that went away. We’re hoping to do them in mid-February, but that is also not looking like a possibility right now.But through this uncertainty, we are all paid — by the opera house, but also by the state. None of our benefits have gone away. For two months, we’re on what’s called “Kurzarbeit” — “short work” — when the government pays about 80 percent of our wages and then the opera makes up a various amount for each individual. I’m making 98 percent even during Kurzarbeit. I canceled my American health insurance in June. I’ve been going to the doctors here whenever I’ve needed. And I don’t have to pay extra for that; there are no co-pays or after bills.It’s hard to see my colleagues in the United States not have hope for the spring. Here we luckily still do. And a lot of my friends are doing what Steven is: They haven’t jumped shipped completely, but they’re in the tech world right now, while I haven’t had to really re-evaluate my career.Could I use some extra income? Sure. There was a lot of money lost last year. But I am so incredibly grateful to have this position here. It’s a lot of work, but man, is it worth it.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More