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    Review: At Caramoor, a Concert Signals Return and Remembrance

    The performance, by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, felt like normal again, while the music looked back on a year of upheaval.KATONAH, N.Y. — Before a concert by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s on a steamy Sunday afternoon here at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, a jubilant James Roe, the ensemble’s executive director, told the audience that these musicians had not presented a live, in-person performance in 472 days.This return meant more than a mere visit from a Caramoor fixture. In recent months I’ve attended orchestral concerts around New York City. But these events played to very limited, mask-wearing audiences. At Caramoor the capacity wasn’t restricted to a mere 150 or so people. Hardly any of the 400 people in attendance wore masks (only the unvaccinated were asked to do so).It felt like a real return to normal for classical music.With its bucolic grounds and open-air Venetian Theater, where most programs are being presented, Caramoor is an ideal venue for summer concerts, especially during this still-challenging time. And it has planned an adventurous summer season, running through Aug. 8. This Orchestra of St. Luke’s program was conducted by Tito Muñoz, the Queens-born music director of the Phoenix Symphony, and offered works that spoke to the larger social issues of the past year.The afternoon began with the premiere of Valerie Coleman’s “Fanfare for Uncommon Times.” The idea for the piece, as Coleman explained recently in a video interview on the Caramoor site, came from Roe, who invited her to write a piece that grappled not just with the pandemic, but the tumultuous “political landscape,” as she put it.Yet, hanging over every American composer who writes a fanfare, Coleman said, is Aaron Copland’s iconic 1942 “Fanfare for the Common Man.” In an inspired idea, this 75-minute program, after opening with Coleman’s fanfare, ended with Copland’s, and included, in the middle, Joan Tower’s plucky “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman” (1987). In a nod to Copland and Tower, Coleman also scored her piece for brass and percussion.Yet, while writing something that offered affirmation to people emerging from unimaginably “uncommon times,” Coleman said, as a Black woman she wanted to “bring the Black experience in,” the “turmoil, the upheaval,” the complexity of recent conversations about race in America.These threads — and the emotions entwined with them — come through vividly in Coleman’s six-minute piece. It begins not with a typical fanfare salute, but a quizzical, searching line for solo trombone that soon is cushioned by pungent, soft-spoken brass chords. Unrest amid determination stirs as the music shifts into agitated episodes for percussion. The mood seems at once reflective and restless, uplifting and ominous. The elements of the Black experience during a challenging time that Coleman described come through during a passage alive with riffs for mallet percussion instruments, hints of dance and bursts of anxious frenzy. By the end, with spurts of four-note brass motifs, echoes of Coplandesque affirmation arise, but also a breathless flurry that feels bracing yet challenging.The program included a premiere by Valerie Coleman that was put in conversation with Joan Tower’s “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman” and Aaron Copland’s famous “Fanfare for the Common Man.”James Estrin/The New York TimesIt made for a surprisingly good contrast to follow the Coleman with Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “The Lark Ascending,” a “romance,” as the composer described it, for violin and orchestra, with the superb Tai Murray as soloist. This glowing, pastoral, somewhat bittersweet piece is enormously popular, but it doesn’t turn up as often as it should in concerts. Murray’s playing abounded in radiant sound, arching lyricism and delicacy. During moments when the violin writing turns intricate with evocations of fluttering birds, she dispatched the passagework with effortless grace.Tower’s short, feisty “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman,” dedicated to the pioneering female conductor Marin Alsop, the outgoing director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, is the first in a series of six such fanfares she has written. This short but packed, muscular piece is like a respectful retort to Copland.Muñoz then led an elegant account of Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” Suite, capturing the melancholy of the music while letting the players cut loose in dancing, near-frantic episodes. And Copland’s fanfare on this day proved the fitting conclusion: a way to usher in a moment that signals a return in more ways than one.CaramoorThe festival continues through Aug. 8 in Katonah, N.Y.; caramoor.org. More

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    Jeanne Lamon, Who Led an Early-Music Ensemble, Dies at 71

    A violinist, she directed Tafelmusik for 33 years, striving not only to present centuries-old music as it was originally heard but also to reach modern audiences.Jeanne Lamon, an accomplished violinist who was music director of the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Chamber Choir for 33 years, helping to build it into one of the world’s most acclaimed baroque ensembles, died on June 20 in Victoria, British Columbia. She was 71.A spokeswoman for the ensemble said the cause was cancer.Ms. Lamon, who lived in Victoria, took the helm of Tafelmusik in 1981, just two years after the group, based in Toronto, was founded by Kenneth Solway and Susan Graves. Under her guidance — and with her often leading from the first-violin chair — the group developed an international reputation, performing all over the world in major concert halls, at universities, in churches, even in pubs.Tafelmusik also became known for its recordings, releasing dozens of albums on Sony Classical and other labels during her tenure.Ms. Lamon and the ensemble pursued a goal of rendering the works they played as their composers would have envisioned them, employing period instruments in the process. One of Tafelmusik’s earliest New York appearances was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Ms. Lamon played the museum’s 17th-century Stradivarius.The results could be striking, as in a 1995 recording of Bach violin concertos.“Beyond its impeccable discipline and luminous textures, the group displays an expressive sensibility that transcends the instruments, whether strung with gut or wire,” Lawrence B. Johnson wrote in a review of that album for The New York Times. “That expressive empathy is most powerfully conveyed in the Adagio of the E major Concerto, where, over a measured tread, Jeanne Lamon spins out a radiant, sad line that might be a wordless aria from a Bach Passion.”Yet Ms. Lamon was not content simply to recreate centuries-old music; she wanted to make it appealing to a modern audience.Never was that more evident than in “The Galileo Project: Music of the Spheres,” a multimedia performance piece featuring the music of Vivaldi and others, projections of astronomical and other scenes, an actor providing narration, and an unfettered orchestra. For the piece, conceived and scripted by Alison Mackay, the ensemble’s bassist, and unveiled in Calgary in 2009, which the United Nations had declared the International Year of Astronomy, Ms. Lamon had her players memorize their parts so they could move around the performance space, including into the audience, while playing.“Simply put, this is one of the best, most imaginative shows based on classical music seen here in years,” John Terauds wrote in The Toronto Star when the work was performed in that city later that year. “Including intermission, these two hours pass as if they were 10 minutes. There isn’t a single dull moment or off note.”Ms. Lamon, foreground, performing the multimedia piece “The Galileo Project: Music of the Spheres” with Tafelmusik in 2010. “There isn’t a single dull moment or off note,” one reviewer wrote of the two-hour work.Glenn Davidson, via TafelmusikMemorizing a full evening’s worth of music was a tall order for Ms. Lamon and the other players, but she found the experience liberating.“I’m starting to see music stands as a wall between myself and the audience,” she told The Houston Chronicle in 2014, the year she stepped down as music director, when “The Galileo Project” was performed at the Wortham Theater Center in Houston.The piece also traveled to Pennsylvania State University that year. In a video interview pegged to that performance, Ms. Lamon said she thought the work showed a path to broadening the audience for early music and other classical genres.“You don’t just have to play pops concerts, which is what some symphony orchestras resort to when they want to fill the seats,” she said.“I believe dumbing it down is not the way to go,” she added. “I think people just want to feel more a part of it.”Jeanne Lamon was born on Aug. 14, 1949, in Queens and grew up in Larchmont, N.Y. Her father, Isaac, was in real estate, and her mother, Elly, was a teacher. Ms. Lamon said whatever musical genes she had probably came from her mother, who played piano.She was entranced by the violin at an early age.“I remember at the age of 3 seeing Isaac Stern playing on television,” she told The Toronto Star in 1986, “and I wanted to do what he was doing. I told my parents immediately I wanted a violin.”She had to wait until she was 6 before her parents bought her an instrument, and it was a recorder, not a violin. But she kept after them, and at 7 she got the instrument she wanted.“Learning to play an instrument is very much like learning a foreign language,” she said. “If you learn it young, it becomes part of your body.”“I remember at the age of 3 seeing Isaac Stern playing on television,” Ms. Lamon once said, “and I wanted to do what he was doing.” She got her first violin when she was 7.Dean Macdonell, via TafelmusikHer father, though, thought a general education was important, so instead of going to a conservatory she attended Brandeis University in Massachusetts, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in music. Then she went to Amsterdam to hone her violin skills, studying under Herman Krebbers, concertmaster of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. While there she heard a concert by baroque players.“I instantly fell in love,” she said.She began to study with Sigiswald Kuijken, one of the world’s leading baroque violin players.Back in the United States, she was performing with various ensembles when Mr. Solway and Ms. Graves asked her to come to Toronto to direct a guest program with their new group. They made her music director.Among her legacies is the Tafelmusik Baroque Summer Institute, which trains musicians in baroque performance. In 2006 the organization established the Jeanne Lamon Instrument Bank, which loans period instruments to students.Ms. Lamon’s many awards included the Order of Canada. She is survived by her partner of many years, the cellist Christina Mahler; a brother, Ed; and a sister, Dorothy Rubinoff.Ms. Lamon said part of the appeal of playing early music was that it involved a certain amount of detective work and guesswork, since composers of old often left only the sketchiest of scores.“We are expected to do a lot of interpreting, such as adding dynamics, phrasings and ornaments,” she told The Globe and Mail in 2001. “That’s what attracts a lot of us to playing this music. It’s a very creative process. You do a lot of research to figure out what a composer might have done, but in the final analysis you do what you do, because no two people would do it alike.” More

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    For a Major Debut, a Young Violinist Gets Personal

    Randall Goosby’s first album, “Roots,” is a survey of music by Black composers that includes several premiere recordings.In another life, Randall Goosby would have been a pianist.When offered the opportunity to learn an instrument as a child, he chose the violin but was told he was too small for it. So he started on piano instead. He struggled, and his mother, who had nudged him and his siblings toward lessons in the first place, could see that his self-esteem was beginning to wane.Then they decided to give the violin another try, and something clicked.“I would come home from school, and whereas my brother and sister wanted to play, I would throw open the violin case,” Goosby, now 24, recalled in a recent interview. “I was pretty much playing violin all the time.”He breezed through the first several books of the Suzuki method at a pace that would make an average violin student feel inept. All signs pointed to something more promising than a simple love for a new instrument.Goosby took to violin naturally as a child, breezing through the books of the Suzuki method and happily playing, he said, “all the time.”Elias Williams for The New York TimesAt 13, Goosby became the youngest winner of the Sphinx Competition’s junior division, then was invited to appear in a Young People’s Concert with the New York Philharmonic. It wouldn’t be long before he was a protégé of the legendary violinist Itzhak Perlman. And now, not even done with his education at the Juilliard School, Goosby is making his major label debut with the album “Roots,” released Friday on Decca.The album, Perlman said in an interview, demonstrates that Goosby “knows who he is, and he wants to make sure everybody does as well.”It’s not the usual debut. Where many young musicians might make their mark with a war horse concerto by Mendelssohn, Bruch or Beethoven, Goosby instead assembled a sweeping recital program of works by Black composers — including a premiere written by the bassist Xavier Dubois Foley and first recordings of Florence Price discoveries — as well as by Dvorak and Gershwin, two white composers whose music on the album reveals an indebtedness to their Black peers.“A debut recording has to express the signature of the artist, and that’s exactly what this is, from someone who is a perfect advocate as a performer, but also a perfect advocate as a communicator of what this music means,” said Dominic Fyfe, the director of Decca. “It’s always exciting to see young artists which are right at the beginning of the runway.”GOOSBY’S MOTHER, Jiji Goosby, a Korean woman who grew up in Japan passionately loving music and dance, was the linchpin of Randall’s early violin education. When he outgrew his first teacher, she bribed him to take a lesson with Routa Kroumovitch-Gomez, promising that if he gave it a try, she would take him out for sushi afterward.He took his mother up on the offer and stayed with Kroumovitch-Gomez as a student for three years. From here he had his first taste, he said, of serious violin instruction. More teachers would follow, including Philippe Quint, whom Goosby and his mother would fly to New York to see once a month for six hours of intensive study.Not merely a chaperone, Jiji sat in the lessons as well, taking notes. She also took a waitressing job at a Japanese restaurant to help cover the costs of their trips to New York; Goosby’s father, Ralph, was often traveling for his job in marketing. There were nights when the children were at home with no parents, eating a microwave dinner or pizza.“I really understood even then how much of a sacrifice it was for my whole family,” Goosby said. “My family is my core, and it was a time when we could have seen a little more of each other.”A turning point came when Goosby, following his Sphinx triumph, joined the Perlman Music Program and met his mentor.“I had idolized Mr. Perlman, and of course I had my preconceived notion of what he’d be like,” Goosby said. “But he was one of the most down to earth, relatable, comforting presences for me.”For his debut album, Goosby wanted to tell a story “that meant something to me personally,” he said.Elias Williams for The New York TimesIn an interview, Perlman recalled being struck by Goosby’s sound. “The important thing for me, in any musician, is sound,” he said. “And his is beautiful. It immediately hits the listener.”Perlman shares teaching duties with Catherine Cho, who over the past decade has also become a close mentor of Goosby’s; their lessons, veering into life in general, can take on the feel of therapy sessions. When she first heard him play, she said, “the level of his talent was clear.”“You can tell so much by the way someone puts their violin up,” Cho added. “The way he approaches the instrument is very personal. Then when he puts his up and plays a note — you can hear that spark, that he has something to say and he passionately wants to say it. That’s talent.”So Cho and Perlman took on Goosby as a student, with the goal, Cho said, of “nurturing his gift and not messing it up.”Successfully not messing it up is more complicated than regular lessons. Beyond technique, Goosby was figuring out work-life balance. He avoided the label “prodigy,” which had been attached to him after the Sphinx competition, referring to it only as “the P-word.” And from his father, he learned the importance of making time for his friends and hobbies, like basketball.There is still, he thinks, work to do on his sound — an elusive, nearly magical ingredient in music that begins to truly differentiate students when they get to a place like Juilliard, where he is pursuing an Artist Diploma. It was the focus of a recent lesson with Cho, their first together in person after months of Zoom sessions.The two spoke mostly with poetic language. After he played a showy passage from Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s trio of showpieces “Blue/s Forms,” she asked whether he felt fire or coolness, and he responded, “There are so many notes, it comes across as fiery, but on the inside, I think I’m feeling cool.” Then she asked where the energy was coming from, and, after a thoughtful pause, he said, “the lower belly, core area.” The questioning immediately showed in Goosby’s playing, which had audibly greater clarity and focus.IN A WAY, Goosby could not have made his debut with a big concerto; “Roots” was made last year, when gathering with an orchestra was all but impossible. But even without the pandemic restrictions, he said, he was more interested in telling a story — about the way the artists on his program influenced one another “in a trickle-down effect through time.”“For me, the easiest way to tell the story would be through something that meant something to me personally,” he said. “I could have recorded all three Brahms sonatas. That story’s been told countless times, and there are people who want to hear that story told a certain way.”The program is constellatory rather than chronological, beginning in the present with Foley’s foot-tapping earworm “Shelter Island” and continuing with “Blue/s Forms.” Then come the great violinist Jascha Heifetz’s arrangements of songs from Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” — along with Dvorak, suggested by the label to offer listeners something familiar — and William Grant Still’s Suite for Violin and Piano; premiere recordings of three warmly melodic and eclectic pieces by Price; an arrangement of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Deep River”; and Dvorak’s American-inspired Sonatina in G for Violin and Piano. (Zhu Wang is the pianist throughout.)Some of the works, by virtue of being adapted from songs, bring out the alluring lyricism of Goosby’s playing, which has a tinge of golden-age tenderness and expressive portamento. In the coming season, audiences around the world will hear that voice applied to concertos by Brahms, Bruch, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Beethoven and Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges — another long overlooked Black composer.Goosby signed a multi-album deal with Decca, and it’s likely his next recording will be a concerto program. “We’ve talked about ideas of Mozart and Chevalier de Saint-Georges and Coleridge-Taylor and late Romanticism,” he said.“One thing I do know,” he added, “is that it has to have a story.” More

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    A Requiem, Derailed by the Pandemic, Arrives When It’s Needed Most

    Courtney Bryan’s Requiem, premiering Thursday after its original date was canceled last year, now follows a time of loss and upheaval.You’ve probably heard a story like this before. Courtney Bryan’s Requiem was set to premiere with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in late March 2020. In a time of incalculable loss, her music became part of another kind of casualty: the sounds that vanished from stages around the world.Like many premieres originally planned for the past year, Bryan’s Requiem, written for the vocal quartet Quince Ensemble and members of the Chicago Symphony, was stranded in limbo. But through the orchestra’s turn to online programming and a season-ending series organized by Missy Mazzoli, its composer in residence, the piece was given a new date this week, when the latest episode of CSO Sessions lands on the streaming platform CSOtv.Maybe it’s actually more fitting that the Requiem be released now, as the United States emerges from its worst days of the pandemic — over 600,000 deaths later — and the country celebrates its first federally recognized Juneteenth, a year after the emotional, nationwide peak of the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd.“I think about the loss in my own life, but I know that a lot of people have had a lot of losses during this time, due to Covid and other situations,” Bryan said in a recent interview. “So I’m really happy that this is the actual premiere.”Bryan, who is based in and from New Orleans, is a composer and performer who deals in collaboration, with an open ear to traditions like jazz and gospel — and, occasionally, to topics around racial justice like Black Lives Matter. In “Sanctum” (2015), she wove live orchestral playing in with sounds including the voices of demonstrators in Ferguson, Mo. Her oratorio “Yet Unheard” (2016) commemorated the life of Sandra Bland.Edwin Outwater leads the Quince Ensemble and members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the premiere performance of Bryan’s Requiem, now streaming.Todd RosenbergHer Requiem was meant to be more abstract — haunted by contemporary tragedies, perhaps, but not explicitly tied to any one in particular. It draws from a broad range of inspirations, including death rituals from the Anglican Church, “The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” Neoshamanism’s death rite known as the “great death spiral” and New Orleans jazz funerals, as well as text from the Bible and the traditional Catholic Mass.Its five movements — Bryan associates that number with life — begin with a gentle, a cappella harmony built from elemental “mmm” sounds before each of the four voices of the Quince singers begins to follow a unique line, with detours into half-sung Sprechstimme and percussive sibilance. The other instruments don’t enter until about seven and a half minutes in, when the clarinet and brasses offer a chorale-like interlude, mournful and dignified.The Requiem is primarily a showcase for the Quince singers. They follow that instrumental passage with repetitions of the word “listen,” in different ways: The score instructs one to exclaim, and the others to plead, chant on pitch and whisper. A bass drum resounds, signaling the start of a dirge that includes a duet of simultaneous yet lonely melodies from the clarinet and trombone. By the end, after sadly beautiful word painting with the “Kyrie eleison” text and a clarinet solo of upward runs, Bryan arrives at a finale that is less restful and resolved than a traditional Requiem’s, but more cyclical, closing with the “mmm” vocalise that started the piece.Bryan talked more about the work and its inspirations in the interview. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Was this commission specifically for a Requiem, or was that your choice?It actually goes back to when I met Quince. I was really taken not only with their music and their voices, but also how they talked about music and the things that they cared about. We bonded, and then a year after that — about four years ago — we were talking, and I told them I would like to write an a cappella Requiem.I grew up in an Anglican church and was deciding between the Catholic Mass and the Anglican Mass, and thinking of writing a Requiem, but in my own style. As I got into it, I started reading about different dying rituals from traditions around the world, how people approach funerals and the celebration of life. Then I took a pause, because it got really big. There was a lot to learn, and it was changing the way I approached it — and because we didn’t have a specific deadline, I stepped down.Later, I heard from Missy Mazzoli about a commission at the Chicago Symphony, and I knew that Quince was on the program. So I changed it. The first section is still a cappella, but then I added instruments.Even with more musicians, it’s still far from the scale of something like Verdi’s Requiem.It was already going to be chamber size. But yeah, I ended up going kind of minimal with the way I used the instruments. I checked out classic Requiems, definitely Verdi’s and Mozart’s, and the feeling I got — or even just from reading the Catholic Mass — was this feeling of rising up against death. It feels like there’s a battle or a triumph, and I found that I was most interested in thinking about death and the cyclical nature of life and death, and more, kind of, an acceptance. So all my text was Christian, but it’s my perspective on the Requiem.I was about to say, there’s a tension at the end of your piece, between triumphant language like “Death will be no more” and music that’s more unsettled and mysterious.It felt like a natural ending because it’s a life cycle; it wasn’t a triumph or an arrival point. And with the text, “The first things have passed away,” I thought it was something that was not an ending or a beginning.Performed by the Quince Ensemble with members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Edwin Outwater, conductor.When you were exploring traditions of mourning, what did you find yourself attracted to, conceptually and artistically?The one that hit home the most is just thinking about New Orleans — the idea of the celebration of life and the jazz funeral. There’s the walking of the casket from the church to the burial ground, but there’s a whole ceremony in a jazz funeral that starts with the dirge, and then it goes up-tempo to a celebration of life. So that was a major influence on the instruments that I chose: the brass band or the New Orleans ensemble. I wasn’t trying to replicate the style, necessarily, but there are little symbolic things.What do you make of the context of this Requiem’s premiere, as opposed to spring last year?I know some commissions come in response to this historic thing, and you have your own take, but this was something that I just wanted to do. That’s why it’s interesting that it took its own time and that the actual premiere is after this really profound time of loss. I find these kinds of things mysterious, how they happen. So, I hear it differently. It sort of came out of some of the work I was already doing, where I was writing music about police brutality. I wouldn’t say this piece is about that; it was a chance for me to go in deeper into these ideas about life and death.Quince asked, in the middle of the rougher parts of the pandemic, how I would feel if they just recorded the first, a cappella part and put it online for people — just something to share. The folks at the Chicago Symphony were very supportive of that, so we did. It felt good to have something like that to offer, and I feel the same way as it is being offered now. I hope it will be healing to people.RequiemStreaming at cso.org/tv. More

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    Gianna Rolandi, Spirited Soprano With a Radiant Voice, Dies at 68

    Ms. Rolandi, an acclaimed Vixen and Lucia, made her mark at the New York City Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago.Gianna Rolandi, an American soprano who brought effortless coloratura technique, bright sound and a vibrant stage presence to diverse roles over a 20-year international career, died on Sunday in Chicago. She was 68.Her death, in a hospital, was announced by the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Ms. Rolandi had earlier been the director of the company’s Ryan Opera Center, a training program. No cause was specified.Her husband was the renowned British conductor Andrew Davis, who will step down on June 30 after nearly 21 years as music director and principal conductor of the Lyric Opera.Ms. Rolandi’s auspicious 1975 debut at the New York City Opera, as Olympia in Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann,” came when she was 23 and just out of the conservatory. She took over the role on short notice when the scheduled soprano withdrew. (Three days later she made what was to have been her official debut, as Zerbinetta in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos.”)She quickly won attention for the agility and radiance of her singing — and for, when it was called for, a beguiling sassiness. Beverly Sills, City Opera’s greatest star, became a crucial mentor to Ms. Rolandi in the 1980s, when Ms. Sills retired from singing to become the company’s general director.Along with career guidance, Ms. Sills gave Ms. Rolandi insight into roles she herself had performed to acclaim, among them the title role in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” Elvira in Bellini’s “I Puritani” and Cleopatra in Handel’s “Giulio Cesare.”Reviewing her feisty performance as Zerbinetta with the company in 1982, The New York Times’s Donal Henahan wrote that “in Gianna Rolandi the City Opera had a Zerbinetta capable of creating pandemonium in any opera house anywhere.”Her “deft and virtually unflawed handing of her big, florid aria, one of opera’s most feared obstacle courses for coloratura soprano,” he added, “brought the performance to a halt for as extended an ovation as this reviewer has heard at either of our opera houses this season.”Ms. Rolandi starred in two notable “Live From Lincoln Center” telecasts of City Opera productions: “Lucia di Lammermoor” in 1982, and, the next year, the title role in Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen,” an enchanting folk-tale opera centering on a community of forest animals and a few humans.Ms. Rolandi in the title role in the 1981 City Opera production of Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen.” Beth Bergman“The Cunning Little Vixen” was largely unfamiliar to American audiences when City Opera introduced its colorful production in 1981. It was performed in an English translation of the Czech libretto, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas and directed by Frank Corsaro, with sets and costumes realized from designs by Maurice Sendak.Ms. Rolandi was cast as the bushy-tailed, impish Vixen. It was “one of Ms. Rolandi’s finest roles to date,” the critic Thor Eckert Jr. wrote in The Christian Science Monitor, adding that she acted “with feline grace and an occasional touch of crudity just right for the role.”Her Metropolitan Opera debut came as Sophie in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” in 1979. But despite some acclaimed performances at that house, including the title role of the Nightingale in Stravinsky’s “Le Rossignol” in 1984 and Zerbinetta in 1984-85 (with Jessye Norman as Ariadne), she made just 17 appearances with the Met over six years.Even while appearing with major houses in America and Europe, Ms. Rolandi was content to call City Opera her base.“I feel like I’ve grown up here,” she said in a 1982 interview with The Times. The company “is a blessing for me,” she added. “You get exposure and you don’t have to leave home.”Carol Jane Rolandi was born on Aug. 16, 1952, in Manhattan. Her mother, Jane Frazier, from Winston-Salem, N.C., was a successful soprano who met Dr. Enrico Rolandi, an Italian obstetrician and gynecologist, while performing in Italy. They married and settled in New York.In 1955, when Ms. Rolandi was not yet 3, her father died in an automobile accident. Her mother moved with her and her brother, Walter, to the South, began teaching, and had a 30-year career as a professor of voice at Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C., where Ms. Rolandi grew up.Though drawn early to the violin, Ms. Rolandi kept listening to opera recordings and was increasingly captivated by singing. She studied both violin and voice at the Brevard Music Center, a prestigious summer music institute and festival in North Carolina. She continued her studies at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.Her City Opera debut came shortly after her graduation from Curtis. She went on to sing major roles in more than 30 operas with the company, including the American premiere of the Israeli composer Josef Tal’s “Ashmedai” in 1976 and the world premiere of Dominick Argento’s “Miss Havisham’s Fire” in 1979.Overall, though, she was not drawn to contemporary opera, as she acknowledged in a 1993 interview with Bruce Duffie, later broadcast on the Chicago radio station WNIB. It’s crucial for composers to “make the vocal part singable so you can make a line,” she said, and she did not like pieces that were “all over the place.”“The old guys had it right,” she said: “a nice line.”Ms. Rolandi and her husband, the conductor Andrew Davis, in 2005. The couple moved to Chicago when Mr. Davis became music director and principal conductor of the Lyric Opera there.Cheri EisenbergAfter an earlier marriage to Howard Hensel, a tenor (who appeared with City Opera) and actor, Ms. Rolandi met Mr. Davis in 1984 when she sang Zerbinetta at the Met, a production he was conducting. “We didn’t hit it off particularly well then,” she recalled in a 2006 interview with The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.They later met again at the Glyndebourne Festival in England. “This time it was different,” she said in that interview, “and the fireworks started to happen.” They married in 1989 and lived for some years in England.In addition to her husband, Ms. Rolandi is survived by their son, Ed Frazier Davis, a composer, baritone and conductor, and her brother.Ms. Rolandi retired from the stage in 1994 and focused on teaching. She and her husband moved to Chicago after Mr. Davis’s tenure with the Lyric Opera began in 2000. The next year she was appointed director of vocal studies at the company’s opera center; in 2006 she was promoted to director of the program, a position she held until 2013. Among the notable singers who worked with her in the program were Nicole Cabell, Quinn Kelsey, Stacey Tappan, Erin Wall and Roger Honeywell.Ms. Rolandi always cited the mentoring she received from Beverly Sills as her main inspiration for wanting to nurture young singers. Ms. Sills was “my teacher, my coach, my psychiatrist and finally my friend,” she told the critic Heidi Waleson in an interview for “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias,” Ms. Waleson’s 2018 book about City Opera.She was, Ms. Rolandi said, “my biggest cheerleader and fiercest critic.” More

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    Musical Chairs? Why Swapping Seats Could Reduce Orchestra Aerosols.

    Moving super-spreading instruments, like the trumpet, closer to air vents could limit the aerosol buildup on stage, according to a new study.If musical instruments were people, trumpets would be super spreaders. When a trumpeter blows into the mouthpiece, tiny respiratory droplets, known as aerosols, travel out of the musician’s mouth, whiz through the brass tubing and spray into the air.During a deadly pandemic, when a musician might unwittingly be exhaling an infectious virus, that poses a potential problem for orchestras. And the trumpet is not the only musical health hazard.“Wind instruments are like machines to aerosolize respiratory droplets,” said Tony Saad, a chemical engineer and expert in computational fluid dynamics at the University of Utah.A simple but radical change — rearranging the musicians — could significantly reduce the aerosol buildup on stage, Dr. Saad and his colleagues reported in a new study, which was published in Science Advances on Wednesday.The work began last summer, when the Utah Symphony began to wonder whether, and how, they could return to performing safely.“They were looking for people that could provide insight into mitigation strategies that people would have some faith in,” said James Sutherland, a chemical engineer at the University of Utah and a co-author of the study.Comparison of aerosol concentrations, both instantaneous and averaged, for the baseline scenario and for the proposed mitigation strategy.Hedworth et alThe researchers created a detailed computer model of the symphony’s concert hall, noting the location of every air vent and the rate of air flow through the HVAC system.Then they mapped the typical position of each musician. The Utah Symphony, like most modern orchestras, positioned its musicians in a standard pattern, with the string instruments at the front of the stage, followed by several rows of woodwinds and brass instruments — the flutes and oboes, then the bassoons and clarinets, and then the trumpets and French horns. The trombones and the percussion section were positioned at the very back of the stage.To model the spread of aerosols during a concert, they incorporated recent research led by Jiarong Hong, a mechanical engineer at the University of Minnesota. Working with the Minnesota Orchestra, Dr. Hong and his colleagues had measured the concentration and size of aerosol particles emitted by a variety of different wind instruments. (Among their findings: The trumpet, bass trombone and oboe posed the highest risk.)With these parameters in place, Dr. Saad and Dr. Sutherland used what are known as computational fluid dynamics simulations to model how the air, and aerosols, would flow through the Utah concert hall when all the musicians were playing.The simulation revealed complex patterns of airflow. In general, the air flowed down from the air supply vents in the ceiling to the air return vents in the floor at the back of the stage. But two distinct vortices, at the front and the back of the stage, also formed, they found. “You see these large regions that are recirculating like a big tornado,” Dr. Saad said.Aerosols can get caught in these vortices, swirling around and around the stage and building up over time.The trumpets, which emitted large, concentrated aerosol clouds, posed a particular problem. As the instruments’ aerosol plumes traveled toward the air vents at the back of the stage, they passed directly through the percussionists’ breathing zone.“We saw this and said, ‘OK, this is a big problem, we’ve got to solve this,’” Dr. Sutherland said. “And given the insight we had into how the flow was moving, we said, ‘Well, let’s move some of these instruments around.’”They knew the idea might be controversial; orchestras have generally been arranged the same way for decades, for reasons that include both acoustics and tradition. “We asked them when we started the project, ‘What constraints do we have to work with? Can we move people?’” Dr. Sutherland said. “And they said, ‘You do whatever you think you can to mitigate risk.’”A visualization of the proposed seating arrangement for the orchestra. Colors indicate the speed at which the respiratory aerosols are being emitted at (red is high, blue is low) and size indicates the amount of aerosols emitted per second.Hedworth et alThey moved the trumpets to the very back of the stage, right next to the air-return vents. Then they shifted the other wind instruments from the middle of the stage, moving them either closer to the back air vents or to the stage doors, which they suggested opening.These moves, the team hoped, would allow the aerosols to flow directly out of the concert hall, without passing through the breathing zones of other musicians or getting caught in an onstage vortex. “You want the smoker to sit close to the window,” Dr. Saad said. “That’s exactly what we did here.”Finally, they moved the instruments that do not generate aerosols at all — the piano and the percussion section — to the center of the stage. Together, these tweaks reduced the average aerosol concentration in the musicians’ breathing zones a hundredfold, the researchers calculated.Although the precise air flow patterns will be different in every venue, the general principles should hold everywhere, the team said. Orchestras can reduce the risk of aerosol spread by positioning the highest risk instruments near open doors and air return vents. (Orchestras that cannot do their own computer modeling could put a fog machine onstage and track how the fog flows, the researchers suggested.)Dr. Hong, who was not involved in the Utah study, praised the modeling work. “Simulating the flow inside an orchestra hall is not easy,” he said. “They did beautiful work in terms of characterizing flow.”But he questioned whether moving musicians was really a practical solution. “We work with musicians closely, and they don’t like to be rearranged,” he said. (He did note, however, that “for a student band, I think it’s perfectly fine.”)Instead, he proposed a different, albeit equally unconventional, solution: Masks, for the instruments. In a recent study, he found that covering the bell of a trumpet with a single layer of acoustic fabric could reduce particle emissions by about 60 percent without compromising sound quality.The Utah Symphony, for its part, proved open to rethinking the seating. And when it took the stage last fall, it did so with the stage doors open and the wind instruments at the rear.“That was a huge challenge for the musicians,” said Steven Brosvik, the president and chief executive of the Utah Symphony and Utah Opera. “But they all dove into it, and said, ‘Let’s go, let’s give it a try.’”It took a few weeks for the musicians to get comfortable with the new arrangement, and they plan to return to their traditional seating configuration this fall, Mr. Brosvik said. But the simulations gave the musicians peace of mind and allowed them to get back onstage, he said: “For us, it was life changing.”The researchers were pleased with how willing the musicians were to embrace an unusual solution, although their findings may have hit some instrumentalists harder than others. As Dr. Sutherland said, “We had to apologize to the trumpets in advance.” More

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    Hit Hard by Pandemic, Philadelphia Orchestra and Kimmel Center to Merge

    By joining forces, the two institutions hope to bounce back from the severe losses brought by the coronavirus.The pandemic forced many American arts organizations to resort to mass layoffs and deep pay cuts as ticket sales vanished for more than a year.Now one of the nation’s most prominent ensembles, the Philadelphia Orchestra, is trying another tack as it seeks to recover from the crisis: It announced plans Thursday to merge with its landlord, the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts.“We knew we needed a big move,” said Matías Tarnopolsky, the president and chief executive of the orchestra, who is set to lead the new organization, which will be called the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Kimmel Center, Inc. “The only way forward is collaboration.”Facing severe shortfalls, cultural groups across the country are looking for ways to streamline operations and establish new sources of revenue. American orchestras, including Philadelphia’s, are particularly vulnerable after years of rising costs.The Philadelphia Orchestra, one of the nation’s best ensembles, has struggled financially. Its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, led them in 2017 at Carnegie Hall.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesThe orchestra and the Kimmel Center are betting that by pooling resources, they can better navigate the financial and artistic challenges of the post-pandemic era.The orchestra has won accolades for its artistry under the music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who also serves in that role at the Metropolitan Opera, but it has long struggled financially. After a year of mostly streaming concerts, the orchestra will begin a new season in October with a performance by the cellist Yo-Yo Ma.The merger will give the orchestra, which has tried for years to rebuild after declaring bankruptcy a decade ago, a leading spot at one of the country’s largest performing arts centers, and allow it to save on rent. (When the orchestra filed for bankruptcy in 2011, it cited the high cost of rent at the Kimmel Center, which then totaled $2.5 million a year, as contributing to its woes; it subsequently got a rent reduction.)The arrangement will allow the Kimmel Center, which is almost entirely dependent on ticket sales, the added support of the orchestra’s $266 million endowment. That endowment, which was bolstered by a $50 million gift in 2019, is now among the largest for an American orchestra.Both institutions have made painful cuts as they seek to recover from the pandemic. The orchestra lost about $26 million in ticket sales and performance fees after canceling more than 200 concerts. The orchestra’s leaders took pay cuts and its musicians agreed to reduce compensation temporarily by 25 percent.The Kimmel Center, which depends heavily on touring artists, Broadway shows and appearances by authors and public intellectuals, canceled more than 1,100 events and lost more than $42 million in ticket revenue. The center furloughed many of its 126 employees and led an emergency campaign to raise $10 million.The pandemic accelerated conversations about a possible merger, said Anne Ewers, the president and chief executive of the Kimmel Center, who initiated talks with Tarnopolsky last fall.“When the pandemic hit, every single earned revenue line was gone,” Ewers said. “I realized that our philanthropic base was not as deep and as broad as it needed to be.”The orchestra has called Verizon Hall, one of three venues at the Kimmel Center, its home since the center’s opening in 2001, playing more than 100 concerts a year there.But behind the scenes, the orchestra and the Kimmel Center sometimes clashed over schedules and programming choices, Tarnopolsky said.By merging with the Kimmel Center, he said, the orchestra would be able to expand its offerings, hosting classical music festivals, collaborating with Broadway performers and jazz artists, and taking part in outreach events and other live offerings.“It’s about seizing those opportunities rather than watching them go by,” Tarnopolsky said.The orchestra has balanced its budget in recent years as it has worked to recover from a financial crisis that drove it into bankruptcy in 2011. Despite cutting its expenses in bankruptcy, rebuilding has not been easy: In 2016, its musicians held a brief strike that began on the night of the orchestra’s season-opening gala.The pandemic has led many arts organizations to reconsider questions of structure and management, and some have come to see benefits in joining together during a time of uncertainty. The San Francisco Conservatory of Music last fall acquired Opus 3 Artists, a leading agency that was struggling with steep losses as venues around the world shut down.Ewers said she hoped the merger in Philadelphia would serve as a model for other institutions facing economic pressures.“Many people tell us there needs to be more of this kind of collaborative effort,” she said. “I’m hoping that we inspire that.” More

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    For a Composer, the Final Minutes Are Critical

    Flowering into lushly affecting patterns, Christopher Cerrone’s new album is part of a burst of activity over the past year.Christopher Cerrone’s career got a huge boost right at its beginning: His opera “Invisible Cities,” inspired by Italo Calvino’s novel, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2014, when he was barely in his 30s.But despite its lucid grace and a compelling production — it was performed in a bustling train station for a wandering audience listening over headphones — I found myself wanting to love its unhurried nimbuses of melody more than I did. The opera’s drifting quality ended up feeling too shapeless.In a recent interview, Cerrone, 37, agreed that “Invisible Cities” suffered a bit from an overreliance on what he called “this lyrical, sort-of-melancholy thing.”“Honestly,” he added, “little by little I think I figured out how to compose.”It certainly didn’t take him too long to figure out. “Hoyt-Schermerhorn,” for solo piano and electronics, suavely subverted its initially sedate cast of mood as a stirring opening for Vicky Chow’s album “AORTA” in 2016. And in “Goldbeater’s Skin,” performed at Trinity Wall Street in 2018, he alternated luminous melodic development with frizzy rhythmic outbursts. At one point, a merger of muted, slowly strummed acoustic guitar and pitched percussion felt like the announcement of a new level of craft.

    Christopher Cerrone: Liminal Highway by Tim MunroCerrone’s most recent full-length album, “The Arching Path,” was released on In a Circle Records in May. The title piece — a three-movement work, played by the pianist Timo Andres — starts with brittle repetition before flowering into lushly affecting patterns before the end of the first movement. Tender ascending notes in the left hand contribute a sense of earnestness to the right hand’s chordal, Minimalist-inflected mechanics.“That’s the classic Cerrone heart-on-the-sleeve moment,” Andres said in an interview. “That’s where it’s all going.”Andres — also a composer and a close friend of Cerrone’s since they met as graduate students at the Yale School of Music — considers the piece a leap forward.“It’s not music that’s virtuosic for virtuosity’s sake — which is something I’m not really interested in, as a pianist or a composer,” he said. “But the musical form and the musical gesture just sort of requires a degree of virtuosity to play itself out. To me, when these two things fuse with each other, it can be very moving.”The pandemic gave Cerrone time to edit and release recordings of performances that had been captured over the past few years. Along with “The Arching Path,” the additions to his discography include a solo percussion-plus-electronics track, “A Natural History of Vacant Lots,” that sounds like a full-length ambient record compressed into a single, without seeming hurried. The second movement of “Liminal Highway,” performed by the flutist Tim Munro (who doubles on piccolo and beer bottles), begins with expansive, hard-core repetition before spiraling into its melodic material.“More and more over the years,” Cerrone said, “I’ve tried to do the same thing with rhythm and pulse that I’ve done with harmony. And I think it’s helped clarify and refine my overall compositional language.”A recent work for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra — “A Body, Moving,” featuring tuba, trumpet and a percussionist who uses a bike pump — saves its most emotive material for its closing minutes. That is also true of Cerrone’s violin concerto for Jennifer Koh, “Breaks and Breaks,” performed with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in 2018. (The concerto shares material with the string quartet “Can’t and Won’t,” which was also released as a single last year.)Closing minutes — of a movement, or of an entire work — tend to be a big deal for Cerrone. His compositions can seem like vessels that catch sparse rainfall for long stretches, thus setting critical terms of engagement for a listener, until a limit of storage is reached. Then, his writing sends this carefully husbanded material back outward in generous pourings.“I think he’s always really had this sense of going for a dramatic moment in his forms,” Andres said, while adding that this hasn’t always been clear in Cerrone’s music: “There’s some early works that I can think of where he was sort of too beholden to his modernist influences to really let it fly, if you know what I mean. Morton Feldman is not going to really have a such heart-on-the-sleeve moment. And I think Feldman was a big North Star for Chris, early on.”Born in Huntington, on Long Island, in 1984, Cerrone grew up taking piano lessons, but also played guitar in punk bands. He loved the ambient music of Aphex Twin, as well as Radiohead, Björk and the arranger Gil Evans’s collaborations with Miles Davis — all music that was, he said, “so closely influenced by classical music that I started to get excited by the Stravinsky records that were lying around my house.” (Cerrone’s father did advertising work for Tower Records, and was paid partially in classical LPs.)“My relationship to instrumentality — and, like, time — is not particularly drawn from classical music per se,” he said. “It’s a combination of these other genres of music, and the computer.” Growing up in the MTV era also had an impact on his work, and on his hopes for its intelligibility to nonspecialists.“I’ve just come to embrace it more and more,” he said. “I should make my music really accessible to the equivalent person who’s not in classical music.”Cerrone’s pieces can seem like vessels catching stray raindrops for long stretches, before each piece sends its carefully husbanded material back outward in generous outpourings.Lila Barth for The New York TimesWhile college and then graduate school opened his mind to experimental classical styles, he still has an allergy to certain extremes. On Twitter, where Cerrone is an impish presence, he recently asked what listeners could possibly get from the heady, quick-changing complexity of a composer like (the widely beloved) Elliott Carter, who died in 2012 at 103.“I cannot, for the life of me, understand the appeal of Elliott Carter’s music,” Cerrone wrote, “but sometimes I suspect it’s the ability for it to fit into a certain kind of showy athleticism that fits into the canon the way, say, Vivaldi does?” (He later clarified that “Vivaldi is good.”)“I really should never tweet,” he said in the interview, with a laugh. But there was something telling about his critique, which he said came from his desire in his own music “to do things in as few notes as possible,” reflecting his sense of the precious nature of an audience’s time.“Maybe that’s why I had that moment with Carter,” he said. “It wasn’t offering me anything.”But while he doesn’t court virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake, Cerrone doesn’t have his music stay rudimentary for long — as the gradual windup of“The Arching Path” and “A Body, Moving” both demonstrate.“These pieces,” he said, “are all about taking really simple things and simple materials — repeated notes or single notes or things like that — and trying to build these dense, formally crystalline worlds out of them.” More