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      Fou Ts’ong, Famed Chinese Pianist, Dies of Covid-19 at 86

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFou Ts’ong, Pianist Whose Family Letters Inspired a Generation, Dies at 86Driven from China during Mao’s rule, Mr. Fou kept up a correspondence with his father that became a beloved book in the wake of the Cultural Revolution.Fou Ts’ong in 1960. He was one of the first pianists from China to win international renown.Credit…Erich Auerbach/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesDec. 31, 2020, 4:59 a.m. ETFou Ts’ong, a Chinese pianist known for his sensitive interpretations of Chopin, Debussy and Mozart, and whose letters from his father, a noted translator and writer, influenced a generation of Chinese readers, died on Monday at a hospital in London, where he had lived for many years. He was 86.The cause was the coronavirus, said Patsy Toh, a pianist, who had been married to Mr. Fou since 1975.In 1955, Mr. Fou became one of the first Chinese pianists to achieve global prominence when he took third place in the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, also winning a special prize for his performance of Chopin’s mazurkas.Almost overnight, he became a national hero at home. To China’s nascent Communist-led government, Mr. Fou’s recognition in a well-known international competition was proof that the country could stand on its own artistically in the West. Chinese reporters flocked to interview Mr. Fou, while many others sought out his father, Fu Lei, a prominent translator of French literature, for advice on child-rearing.But the authorities’ good will did not last long.Two years later, Mao Zedong initiated the Anti-Rightist Campaign, during which hundreds of thousands of Chinese intellectuals, including Mr. Fu, were persecuted. Many were tortured and banished to labor camps. Mr. Fou, then studying at the Warsaw Conservatory in Poland, was made to return to China to undergo “rectification” for several months.Not long after going back to Warsaw, Mr. Fou found himself in a quandary. Having witnessed the increasingly tumultuous political climate back home, he knew that if he returned to China upon graduation — as the government expected him to do — he would be expected to denounce his father, an unimaginable situation.So in December 1958, Mr. Fou fled then-Communist Poland for London, where he claimed political asylum.“About my leaving, I always felt full of regret and anguish,” he later recalled in an interview. So many intellectuals in China had suffered, he said, but he had escaped. “I felt uneasy, as if I owed something to all my friends,” he added.After his defection to London, Mr. Fou maintained a written correspondence with his father in Shanghai — a special privilege that was said to have been personally approved by Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier.Then, in 1966, Mao unleashed the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long period of chaos that upended Chinese society. Militant Red Guards accused Mr. Fu, a prolific translator of writers like Balzac and Voltaire, of having “capitalistic” artistic taste, among other crimes. They humiliated and tortured the scholar and his wife for days until the couple, like many other Chinese, were driven to suicide. Mr. Fou, still in London, did not learn of his parents’ deaths until several months later.In 1981, after China’s post-Mao government posthumously restored the reputations of Mr. Fou’s parents, a volume of letters written by his father, primarily to Mr. Fou, was published in China. Full of advice, encouragement, life teachings and stern paternal love, the book, “Fu Lei’s Family Letters,” became an instant best seller in China.For many, the long disquisitions on music, art and life offered a welcome contrast to the Cultural Revolution years, which saw sons turn against fathers, students against teachers and neighbors against neighbors — all in the name of politics.“If you imagine the environment we grew up with, it was very rigid,” said Xibai Xu, a political analyst who first read the letters in middle school in Beijing. He added, “So when you read ‘Fu Lei’s Family Letters,’ you realized how a decent human life could be — a life that is very delicate and artistic, with real human emotions and not just ideology.”Besides influencing a generation of Chinese, Mr. Fu’s words resonated long after his death with the person for whom they were originally intended.“My father had a saying that ‘First you must be a person, then an artist, and then a musician, and only then can you be a pianist,’” Mr. Fou once recalled in an interview. “Even now, I believe in this order — that it should be this way and that I am this way.”Mr. Fou performing in New York City in 2006.Credit…Nan Melville for The New York TimesFou Ts’ong was born on March 10, 1934, in Shanghai. His father, in addition to being a translator, was an art critic and a curator. His mother, Zhu Meifu, was a secretary to her husband.Under the strict supervision of their father, Mr. Fou and his brother, Fu Min, were educated in the classical Chinese tradition, and they grew up surrounded by both Western and Chinese cultural influences. As a child, Mr. Fou studied art, philosophy and music, frequently making use of his father’s phonograph and extensive record collection.A lover of classical music from a young age, Mr. Fou began taking piano lessons when he was 7. He later studied under a number of teachers, including Mario Paci, the Italian conductor of the Shanghai Philharmonic.But the chaos of wartime China prevented the young pianist from receiving a systematic musical education. In 1948, Mr. Fou, then in his teens, moved with his family to the southwestern province of Yunnan, where he went through what he described as a rebellious period. It was only after returning to Shanghai several years later that he began to dedicate himself in earnest to the piano.In 1952, Mr. Fou made his first stage appearance, playing Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. The concert caught the attention of officials in Beijing, who selected the young pianist to compete and tour in Eastern Europe, Mr. Fou’s first trip abroad.Soon, Mr. Fou moved to Poland, where he studied at the Warsaw Conservatory on a scholarship. To prepare for the fifth Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 1955, he practiced so diligently that he hurt his fingers and was nearly cut from the first round of competition.After the deaths of his parents in 1966, Mr. Fou stayed abroad, rising to become a renowned concert pianist on the international circuit. Though he was best known for his interpretations of Chopin, he also received acclaim for his performances of works by Haydn, Mozart, Schubert and Debussy. In a review of a 1987 recital in New York, the critic Bernard Holland wrote in The New York Times of Mr. Fou’s “sensitive ear for color” and “elusive gift of melody.”“We should hear Mr. Fou more often,” Mr. Holland wrote. “He is an artist who uses his considerable pianistic gifts in pursuit of musical goals and not for show.”In 1979, after Mao’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, Mr. Fou was granted permission to return to China for the first time in more than two decades, reuniting with his brother to hold a memorial service for their parents.On subsequent visits, Mr. Fou gave performances and lectures; he became known to many Chinese as the “Piano Poet” for his lyrical musical interpretations. Later versions of “Fu Lei’s Family Letters” were updated to include some of Mr. Fou’s letters to his father.Mr. Fou’s death came at a time of resurgent nationalism in China. On Chinese social media, some ultranationalist commentators called him a traitor to the country for having defected decades ago, echoing similar accusations that Mr. Fou faced in the 1950s not long after settling in London.“What would I tell them? There was nothing to say,” Mr. Fou once said of such critics in an interview. “It’s not that I was longing for the West.”“I was choosing freedom,” he added. “It was not an easy situation. There was no other choice.”Many other Chinese honored his memory, including well-known pianists like Li Yundi as well as Lang Lang, who called Mr. Fou “a clear stream in the world of classical music and a beacon of light in our spirit.”Mr. Fou in Chengdu, China, in 2007. The pianist Lang Lang called him “a clear stream in the world of classical music.”Credit…VCG/VCG, via Getty Images“Fou Ts’ong’s legacy was to show people and musicians the importance of integrity, character and music beyond technique,” said Jindong Cai, a conductor and the director of the U.S.-China Music Institute at Bard College Conservatory of Music.Mr. Fou’s first marriage, to Zamira Menuhin, daughter of the prominent violinist Yehudi Menuhin, ended in divorce, as did a brief marriage to Hijong Hyun. In addition to Ms. Toh, Mr. Fou is survived by a son from his first marriage, Lin Xiao; a son from his marriage to Ms. Toh, Lin Yun; and his brother, Mr. Fu.Mr. Fou remained passionately devoted to music in his later years, playing piano for hours every day even as his fingers grew frail. It was a love that he invoked often in interviews, alongside nuggets of wisdom from his father.“When I was very young, I wrote to my father from Poland that I was sad and lonely,” he once recalled. “He wrote back: ‘You could never be lonely. Don’t you think you are living with the greatest souls of the history of mankind all the time?’”“Now that’s how I feel, always,” Mr. Fou said.Amy Chang Chien contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      With No Tickets to Sell, Arts Groups Appeal to Donors to Survive

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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 storyWith No Tickets to Sell, Arts Groups Appeal to Donors to SurviveVirtual cocktail parties have replaced black-tie galas as cultural institutions struggle to pay their operating costs.Many nonprofit cultural institutions, whose ticket revenues have fallen sharply during the pandemic, are struggling to collect donations as well. A donation box at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Credit…James Estrin/The New York TimesDec. 28, 2020One of the headliners of the New York Philharmonic’s fall gala last month was Leonard Bernstein, leading his old orchestra in the overture to “Candide.”Yes, Bernstein died three decades ago. But since the gala, like so much else, was forced to go remote, the Philharmonic had some fun with the format, filming its current players performing to historical footage of Bernstein wielding his baton. The virtual gala had some advantages: it cost less to produce, with no catering, linen rentals and flower arrangements for a black-tie audience, and it reached some 90,000 people, while the concert hall holds around 2,700.But when it came to the bottom line, the picture was less rosy. The virtual event raised less than a third of what the gala concert took in last year: $1.1 million, down from $3.6 million, a vivid illustration of the steep challenge of raising money for the arts during a global pandemic.With little or no earned income coming in amid canceled performances and proscribed public gatherings, nonprofit cultural institutions across the nation are scrambling to attract a source of revenue that is often even more important to their bottom lines: philanthropy. Now, as they anxiously await the results of their year-end appeals for donations, they are facing competition from pressing causes including hunger, health care and social justice.“I am pedaling quickly to try to make sure that we can try to figure out how to make it through,” said Deborah F. Rutter, the president of the Kennedy Center in Washington, which ended its fiscal year on Sept. 30 with a $500,000 deficit compared to last year’s balanced budget. “We are heavily dependent on contributed revenues to survive.”The going has, indeed, been rough. Box office revenues for many institutions have fallen off a cliff: ticket sales for performing arts groups in the United States were down 96.3 percent in November compared to that month last year, according to a report released last month by the analytics group TRG Arts. And donations do not appear to be making up the difference.Despite an outpouring of contributions when the virus first struck, individual giving to arts organizations fell by 14 percent in North America during the first nine months of the year, the group found in another report. The average size of gifts from the most active, loyal patrons fell by 38 percent, the survey found.With live performances and large events canceled, arts groups have had to move their fundraisers online. Clockwise from upper left: Zadie Smith at the BAM Virtual Gala, Meryl Streep during Equality Now’s Virtual Make Equality Reality Gala, Cate Blanchett at the BAM gala and Aubrey Plaza at the Equality Now event. Credit…Getty Images for BAM (Smith and Blanchett); Getty Images for Equality Now (Streep and Plaza)A survey of performing arts administrators by the publication Inside Philanthropy found 45 percent reporting “reduced funder interest and resources as a result of the current shifting of funds for Covid and racial justice.”The outbreak has forced institutions to find creative ways to interact with donors: virtual cocktail parties, music quizzes, meet-the-musician online events.“It’s a long way to make up for the gap, and I think we should all be realistic about the fact that this is nowhere near a substitute,” said Henry Timms, the president of Lincoln Center, who helped develop #GivingTuesday in 2012, a day to encourage philanthropy on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. But he added that “when the traditional fund-raising vehicles return, a lot of us will have also learned some new digital tricks.”Among those tricks: New York City Center has invited audiences to “Make Someone Happy” this holiday season by sending as a gift (for $35) digital access to its Evening With Audra McDonald, available on demand through Jan. 3. And earlier this month, Ars Nova, an artists incubator in New York, raised more than $400,000 during its 24-hour livestream telethon, which featured more than 200 artists.Museums are struggling to raise funds in the absence of events, and because they were forced to close during the first few months of the pandemic. “We count on the front door for about 30 percent of the budget, so to lose that in one fell swoop is perilous,” said Richard Armstrong, the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which is projecting a $13 million deficit and had to cancel a potentially high-traffic Joan Mitchell touring retrospective because the timing no longer worked.Rather than pivot to a virtual gala, the Guggenheim decided to scrap that event altogether — instead inviting donations to a “Gala Fund” — in part because of Zoom fatigue and because online programming had not been a strong point.“We were a little far behind on virtual previously, so we had to catch up and we’re still figuring that out,” Mr. Armstrong said. “We certainly put out a lot of content in the seven months. We’ve learned, I think better, how to make the online museum more comparable to the physical space.”New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet typically hold a benefit each year after a Saturday matinee of “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker,” followed by a backstage tour and party on the promenade of the David H. Koch Theater. This year they went online.The principal dancer Tiler Peck gave a backstage tour, told the story of the ballet and performed an excerpt. People who purchased benefit tickets received treats delivered to their homes, and were able to interact with dancers on Zoom. Dancers, in costume, were streamed live from their theater dressing rooms, where they did makeup demonstrations, talked about their characters and answered questions. And attendees received a free link to watch the company performing the full ballet on marquee.tv through Jan. 3.But many arts institutions must navigate a sensitive fund-raising climate — making the case for culture as a worthy cause, while remaining mindful of the international health crisis, rising hunger and a national reckoning around racial and social justice.“We were careful not to be overreaching, allowing partner organizations to do what they had to do, like United Way or other community service organizations that were literally dealing with life and death situations,” Mark A. Davidoff, the chairman of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, said. “How much is enough, and how much might be too much?”This month’s annual summit of the Arts Funders Forum, which aims to increase private funding for arts and culture in the United States, emphasized how arts institutions need to demonstrate to donors what they are doing to drive social change.“Of the causes that Americans of all generations do support,” said Melissa Cowley Wolf, director of the forum, during her opening remarks, “arts and culture do not make the top seven.”With no performances of “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” this season, New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet had to move their family benefit fundraiser online.Credit…Rachel Papo for The New York TimesMany nonprofit institutions are hoping to apply for aid available in the stimulus bill that President Trump signed Sunday night.Amid the crisis, some foundations are stepping in to try to help keep institutions afloat, and large organizations are seeking emergency support from their boards.Virtual fund-raising has benefited a bit from the fact that people are stuck at home, making them eager for engagement as well as less heavily scheduled.“People have the bandwidth for those kinds of conversations,” Ms. Rutter, of the Kennedy Center, said. “In the past, it would be like, ‘Let’s get together for lunch,’ and it would take six months to get it on the calendar. Now it’s like, ‘I’m free tomorrow.’”Still, fund-raising challenges remain formidable. What is typically a subtle dance — we’ll give you this perk, if you give us your dollars — has now become a more brazen cry for help.This month, the Metropolitan Museum of Art placed donation boxes in the lobby of its Fifth Avenue entrance: “Please give to The Met to help us connect others to the power of art.” The Detroit Symphony launched what it is calling a Resilience Fund “to ensure that our world-class orchestra keeps the music playing for our community during the Covid-19 crisis and beyond.”The New York Philharmonic has established the “It Takes an Orchestra Challenge,” trying to raise $1.5 million by Dec. 31. David M. Ratzan, a New Yorker who typically takes his son to several concerts a year, contributed $100. “If people don’t pitch in,” he said, “these places won’t exist.”The orchestra was forced to cancel its entire current season, and this month its musicians agreed to substantial salary cuts as its administration was reorganized to allow Deborah Borda, its president and chief executive, to focus on two priorities: renovating David Geffen Hall, its Lincoln Center home, and fund-raising.“It’s an incredibly serious situation,” Ms. Borda said. “Our last concert was March 10 and we can’t play this entire year and then the next question is, looking forward, what will happen in the fall of 2021? What is going to happen with the vaccine? How comfortable will people feel about coming back?”Given this uncertainty, cultural executives still find themselves far outside the bounds of the traditional arts management playbook.“I’m not talking about whether Yo-Yo is available,” said Mark Volpe, the chief executive of the Boston Symphony, referring to the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and noting that the symphony would typically have started selling tickets for its summer Tanglewood season in November. “I’m talking about what the future is going to be.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      I Think Beethoven Encoded His Deafness in His Music

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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 storyI Think Beethoven Encoded His Deafness in His MusicGabriela Lena Frank, a composer born with high-moderate/near-profound hearing loss, describes her creative experience.“Is it an exaggeration to say that composers after Beethoven, the vast majority of them hearing, were forever changed by a deaf aesthetic?”Credit…Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis, via Getty ImagesDec. 27, 2020Gabriela Lena Frank, a composer and pianist and the founder of the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, which aims to foster diverse compositional voices and artist-citizens, was born with a neurosensory high-moderate/near-profound hearing loss. In an interview with Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, she described her creative practice and her exploration of the music of Beethoven, who gradually lost his hearing and by his 40s was almost totally deaf. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.From the time I was a little girl, I have been fascinated with how deafness affected Beethoven. If you look at his piano sonatas, in that first one in F Minor, the hands are very close together and the physical choreographies of the left and right hands are not that dissimilar. As he gets older, the activity of the hands become more dissimilar in his piano work, and farther apart.The progression over the course of the sonatas — a musical document of his hearing loss in transition — is not perfectly linear by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s undeniable. By the time of the “Waldstein” Sonata, not only are the hands far apart, but they are doing very different things: that left hand pounding in thick chords against the right hand’s spare little descending line, for instance.Well, I recall from my therapy classes for hearing-impaired children that I was taught to recognize thick from thin. My therapist had me close my eyes and indicate from which direction a rumbly drum was coming, as opposed to a high-pitched whistle. I couldn’t really hear them, but I could certainly feel them and their contrasting energies.I think it’s fascinating, too, that as Beethoven’s hands stretched for lower and higher notes, he demanded pianos with added notes, elongating the pitch range of the keyboard; he asked for physically heavier instruments that resonated with more vibration. More pitch distance and difference, and more vibration and resonance, create a recipe for happiness for a hearing-impaired person, trust me. A more dissonant and thick language, with clashing frequencies, also causes more vibration, so the language does get more physically visceral that way, too.That said, if I don’t wear my hearing aids for a couple of days, my composing ideas start to become more introverted. This can produce music that is more intellectual, more contrapuntal, more internal, more profound, more spiritual, more trippy. And I think these are also hallmarks of Beethoven’s later music, and not just for piano.Yet more from my own experience: When I’m really under a deadline, and need to get new ideas quickly, I don’t usually listen to music, as some composers do. In fact, I do the opposite: I take off my hearing aids and stay in silence for a few days. In the absence of sound, my imagination goes to different places. It’s a bit like being in a dream when unusual and often impossible events come together, the perfect place from which to compose. And when I put in my hearing aids again, I can feel all these wonderful ideas and connections fly away, just as a dream disappears when awakening.The composer Gabriela Lena Frank in Boonville, Calif. “When I’m really under a deadline, and need to get new ideas quickly, I don’t usually listen to music,” she said. “I take off my hearing aids and stay in silence for a few days. In the absence of sound, my imagination goes to different places. It’s a bit like being in a dream.”Credit…Carlos Chavarria for The New York TimesI wonder: Is it an exaggeration to say that composers after Beethoven, the vast majority of them hearing, were forever changed by a deaf aesthetic? And that the modern-day piano wouldn’t be with us if a deaf person hadn’t demanded its existence? This is beyond my expertise, but I’ve also wondered about sign language. Are there certain spatial gestures in the language that appear in the choreographic execution of certain kinds of music? And if so, does this imply yet more levels in which a deaf sensibility infuses the music-making of a hearing world?I often wonder how Beethoven would react to modern-day hearing aids considering his great frustration with the ear trumpets of his day. Personally, I miss the old analogs of my girlhood, for their simplicity. Nowadays it’s an effort not to roll my eyes as a technician fits me with the ubiquitous digital aids that, in addition to all manner of dazzling bionic-lady bells and whistles, default to the type of correction desired by late-deafened people — namely, high frequencies and spatial reorientation to help with speech recognition. That’s completely understandable as losing the ability to communicate with loved ones is an awful and dispiriting experience.Yet those of us born with hearing loss are often champion lip-readers (as I am) or use sign language. And whether or not we are musical, we join musicians with hearing loss (at any stage) in desiring hearing aids that prioritize beauty of sound, unchanged pitch, unchanged timber and naturalness — restoring proper weight to middle and low frequencies, and spatialization. We don’t want hearing aids that ply our sound world with obvious artifice, like a supposedly “acoustic” album that’s been overworked by a manic sound engineer.In this vein, I don’t think Beethoven would like how so many modern-day digital hearing aids massage all kinds of processes into what the wearer hears. It helps to have an imaginative and sensitive technician, preferably one with experience with performers and composers. A good fitting is an art so the music can just breathe.At the piano, I usually start practicing without my hearing aids, entering a world of profound silence familiar from my earliest years, when I wasn’t yet fitted. At first, I’m still hearing the music in my head, but after a while, I’m more aware of the choreography, how it feels like a dance in my hands. Focusing on a physical experience that feels good and healthy can counteract bad habits which appear when you are only listening to the sound.For instance, if one plays a large chord of, say, eight notes, the tendency will be to bring out the lowest note and the highest note — the bass and the melody — to give them more audibility and importance. Because of the structure of the hands, this means the weakest pinkie fingers are bringing out the most important notes. To help the poor fingers out, the hands may be tempted to angle out, left hand pointing to the bass, right hand to the melody.This is a very unnatural position for your hands to be in, and in fact it mimics the wrist-breaking karate locks taught in dojos, inviting injury. Imagine a series of these chords up and down the keyboard, in such an unnatural position. But because you are chasing a full-bodied sound from this eight-note chord, and not paying attention to its physicality, you start to do dangerous things. With the ability to take the sound out of the equation, I focus on the feel. I solidify a good technique first, and know it. Knowing it, I can hang onto it once I do put my hearing aids back in, and then work on the sound.So, ironically, even though we are talking about a sonic art form, sound can be a distraction. Sound can take your attention away from the many other factors that go into making music. Music, after all, is about so much more than volume. For my own loss, I’m just missing volume. I’m not missing everything else one needs to make or enjoy music. And I even have perfect pitch, so in some ways, I hear better than hearing people.And I think that had to have happened to Beethoven. He learned to create music without sound, however reluctantly. While he increasingly withdrew from society and disliked talking about his disability, he left us a living document of his hearing loss in transition likely starting with music written in his mid to late 20s, when his hearing began to fade. In other words, I think he encoded his deafness in music. And as I say, the progression in his music is not a perfectly linear one, just as his progression through deafness was likely not perfectly linear, but the journey is there. Unmistakably.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Fanny Waterman, Doyenne of the Leeds Piano Competition, Dies at 100

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFanny Waterman, Doyenne of the Leeds Piano Competition, Dies at 100A British pianist and teacher, she helped establish one of the world’s most important piano showcases and then presided over it for decades.Fanny Waterman in 2010. Convinced that Leeds, her native city, was worthy of an international piano competition, she pushed hard to establish one and served as its guiding force for more than half a century.Credit…Andy ManningDec. 26, 2020, 3:31 p.m. ETFanny Waterman, the British pianist and teacher who co-founded the prestigious Leeds International Piano Competition and oversaw it as chairwoman and artistic director for more than five decades, died on Dec. 20 at a care home in Ilkley, Yorkshire. She was 100.Her death was announced by the Leeds competition.The idea of presenting an international music competition in 1960s Leeds, a gritty industrial city in northern England, seemed risky. But Ms. Waterman, a Leeds native who learned perseverance from her poor Russian immigrant father, believed in the vitality of her hometown and was certain she could draw support for the venture.“I dreamt it up one night, and I was so excited that I woke up my husband,” she said in a 2010 interview with The Jewish Chronicle. “He was born in London,” Ms. Waterman added, “and he said: ‘It won’t work in Leeds. It has to be in a capital city.’”But Ms. Waterman talked up the idea and raised funds from patrons, banks, businesses, the Leeds City Council and the University of Leeds. Her husband, Geoffrey de Keyser, a doctor, became a founder of the competition, along with her good friend Marion Harewood, a pianist who was then the Countess of Harewood (and was later married to the Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe). The two friends also wrote “Me and My Piano,” a series of piano lesson books that remain top sellers in Britain.From the start, Ms. Waterman conceived of the Leeds competition, which is held every three years, as a means to foster musical values she had cultivated as a performer and teacher, placing musicianship, artistry and sensitivity over technical bravura.Music is a “wonderful discipline,” she said in the 2010 interview. “You can’t play a note without thinking, how loud, how soft, how soon, how late. It makes you think carefully and it gives you judgment.”Over the years the competition joined the ranks of the world’s elite contests, including the Van Cliburn, Tchaikovsky and Chopin. Such competitions are major springboards for careers in music, often an obligatory stop on a young performer’s progress; they have also come in for criticism for quashing creativity and individuality.As with all competitions, the administrators of the Leeds contest point not just to the list of their outstanding winners — among them Michel Dalberto, Jon Kimura Parker, Ian Hobson and Alessio Bax — as proof of success in identifying young talent, but also to finalists who became major artists. That group of luminaries includes Mitsuko Uchida, Andras Schiff, Lars Vogt and Louis Lortie.The first Leeds competition took place in 1963, with the composer and conductor Arthur Bliss as chairman of an eminent jury. It was an immediate success, with 94 entrants from 23 countries, though with one potentially embarrassing result: The winner was one of Ms. Waterman’s students, Michael Roll, raising the perception of favoritism. Ms. Waterman later said that he had deserved to win, and that the judges had strongly supported him.Ms. Waterman backstage with the cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, left foreground, and the pianist Murray Perahia, right foreground, in 1972, the year Mr. Perahia won the Leeds competition.Credit…Leeds International Piano CompetitionFor the third competition, in 1969, Ms. Waterman asserted herself after the Romanian pianist Radu Lupu placed fourth in the second round, which meant he would not advance to the finals. Deeply impressed by Mr. Lupu’s playing, Ms. Waterman insisted that the number of finalists be increased from three to five and vowed not to organize another competition unless he made the cut. She got her way, and Mr. Lupu wound up winning and went on to a distinguished career.The competition garnered wide attention in 1972 when the American pianist Murray Perahia, then 25, won first prize.In the last round, with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the other two finalists, Craig Sheppard and Eugene Indjic, also Americans, played Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, a work that many young pianists have used to prove their virtuosic mettle.Mr. Perahia, already an audience favorite from performances of works by Schumann, Mozart, Mendelssohn and others, instead chose to play Chopin’s intimate, elegantly brilliant Piano Concerto No. 1 in the finals. He prevailed despite suffering terrible anxiety under the pressure, earning a cash prize of $1,850 and numerous recital and concerto engagements.Ms. Waterman was born on March 22, 1920, in Leeds, the second child of Mary (Behrman) Waterman and Meyer Waterman (the family name was originally Wasserman). Her mother was an English-born daughter of Russian immigrant Jews. Her father, born in Ukraine, was a skilled jeweler.Though the family struggled financially, her parents came up with enough money to provide young Fanny with piano lessons once her talent became clear. She practiced on an old upright piano and studied with a local teacher, while her brother, Harry, took violin lessons.At 18, she became a scholarship student at the Royal College of Music in London, studying with Cyril Smith. She performed Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in 1941 with the Leeds Symphony Orchestra, the same year she met Dr. de Keyser, then a young medical student, whom she would marry in 1944. With the birth of her first child, Robert, in 1950, Ms. Waterman decided to devote herself to teaching.Robert de Keyser survives her, as do another son, Paul, a violin teacher, and six granddaughters. Her husband died in 2001.Once the Leeds Competition got going, Dr. de Keyser became intimately involved, both in recommending lists of repertory and in writing up rules. “He was a doctor, but his knowledge of music was second to nobody,” Ms. Waterman said in 2010.In 1966 Ms. Waterman and her husband bought Woodgarth, a magnificent eight-bedroom Victorian house in Oakwood, a suburb of Leeds. She kept two fine pianos in its spacious drawing room, where she taught, made plans for the competition and presided over lively musical soirees that included guests like the composer Benjamin Britten and the tenor Peter Pears, as well as Prime Minister Edward Heath. Ms. Waterman sold the house this year.She was appointed dame commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2005. In 2015, at 95, she retired from the Leeds Competition. Yet in an interview with the BBC five years later, she revealed that she had stepped aside unwillingly.“I think they were misguided,” she said of the unnamed people who wanted her out, “because I had many, many years more to give of my own passion, my own knowledge and everything.”Still, she expressed pride over her accomplishments. “I do hope and pray,” she said, “that in another 100 years our competition will have the reputation it’s got now.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny, Whose Music Melded Genres, Dies at 75

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny, Whose Music Melded Genres, Dies at 75A creator of modern music as a teenager, he later juggled a breezy pop sensibility with conceptual rigor. He was an important collaborator with the composer Robert Ashley.The pianist and composer “Blue” Gene Tyranny in performance at La MaMa in Manhattan in 2004.Credit…Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesDec. 23, 2020, 5:58 p.m. ETRobert Sheff, a composer and pianist who worked under the name “Blue” Gene Tyranny as a solo performer and a collaborator with artists including Iggy Pop, the composer Robert Ashley and the jazz composer and arranger Carla Bley, died on Dec. 12 in hospice care in Long Island City, Queens. He was 75.The cause was complications of diabetes, Tommy McCutchon, the founder of the record label Unseen Worlds, which released several albums by Mr. Tyranny, said in an email.His memorable pseudonym, coined during his brief stint with Iggy and the Stooges, was derived partly from Jean, his adoptive mother’s middle name. It also referred to what he called “the tyranny of the genes” — a predisposition to being “strongly overcome by emotion,” he said in “Just for the Record: Conversations With and About ‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny,” a documentary film directed by David Bernabo released in September.Music, Mr. Tyranny explained in the film, was a source of solace, but also a means “of deeply informing myself that there’s another world. Music is my way of being in the world.”A master at the keyboard and an eclectic composer who deftly balanced conceptual rigor with breezy pop sounds, Mr. Tyranny was active in modern music as early as his teenage years.From curating contemporary-music concerts in high school, he went on to participate in the groundbreaking and influential Once Festival of New Music in Ann Arbor, Mich., during the 1960s. He taught classes and worked as a recording-studio technician at Mills College, an experimental-music hotbed in Oakland, Calif., from 1971 to 1982. Arriving in New York City in 1983, Mr. Tyranny worked with Mr. Ashley, Laurie Anderson and Peter Gordon’s Love of Life Orchestra, while also composing his own works.Mr. Tyranny, who had been living in Long Island City since 2002, is survived by a brother, Richard Sheff, and three half siblings, William Gantic Jr., Vickie Murray and Justa Calvin.He was born Joseph Gantic to William and Eleanor Gantic on Jan. 1, 1945, in San Antonio. When Mr. Gantic, an Army paratrooper, was reported missing in action in Southeast Asia during World War II, Mr. Tyranny related in “Just for the Record,” his wife gave up their infant child for adoption.He was adopted 11 months later by Meyer and Dorothy Jean Sheff, who ran a clothing shop in downtown San Antonio, and renamed Robert Nathan Sheff. He began piano studies early in his childhood and took his first composition lessons at 11. By high school, he was performing avant-garde works by composers like Charles Ives and John Cage in an experimental-music series he jointly curated with the composer Philip Krumm at the McNay Art Institute in San Antonio.Invited by the Juilliard School to audition as a performance major, he demurred, insisting even then on being viewed as a composer. Instead he went to Ann Arbor, where he lived and worked from 1962 to 1971 and participated in the Once Festival. Mr. Tyranny’s works from this period, like “Ballad” (1960) and “Diotima” (1963), were abstract and fidgety, chiefly concerned with timbral contrast.Mr. Tyranny preparing for a concert at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., in 2006.Credit…Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesIn 1965, Mr. Tyranny helped found the Prime Movers Blues Band, whose drummer, James Osterberg Jr., would achieve fame as the proto-punk singer-songwriter Iggy Pop. Another founder, Michael Erlewine, later created AllMusic, which became a popular reference website to which Mr. Tyranny contributed, occasionally writing about his own work.In the late 1960s, Mr. Osterberg transformed himself into Iggy Pop and formed the Stooges. After releasing the album “Raw Power” in 1973, he invited his former bandmate to join him on tour. Mr. Tyranny accepted, performing with red LED lights woven into his hair.He also played in the bands of jazz composers like Bill Dixon and Ms. Bley, and in 1976 explored the intersections of contemporary classical music and rock with Mr. Gordon in a groundbreaking concert series in Berkeley, Calif., documented on a 2019 Unseen Worlds release, “Trust in Rock.”An association with Mr. Ashley, whom Mr. Tyranny had met in Ann Arbor and then followed to Mills College, flourished into a close, enduring collaboration. Mr. Tyranny’s best-known work likely was the role he created in “Perfect Lives (Private Parts)” (1976-83), Mr. Ashley’s landmark opera, conceived and eventually presented as a television series: Buddy, the World’s Greatest Piano Player. Their relationship was deeply collaborative. Presented by Mr. Ashley with a blueprint indicating keys and metric structures, Mr. Tyranny filled in harmonies and supplied playfully ornate piano writing.“Blue and Bob had this symbiotic relationship from back in Ann Arbor,” Mr. Gordon, who also participated in the creation of “Perfect Lives,” said in a phone interview. “The character Buddy is like the avatar for the music of ‘Blue’ Gene.”“What we commonly recognize as music in ‘Perfect Lives’ was ‘Blue’ Gene’s,” Mr. Gordon explained, “but the overall composition was Bob’s.” Mr. Tyranny would contribute in different ways to later Ashley operas, including “Dust” (1998) and “Celestial Excursions” (2003).In his own music, much of which he recorded for the Lovely Music label, Mr. Tyranny moved from early efforts with graphic notation and magnetic tape to compositions that drew from popular styles. Some selections on his debut solo album, “Out of the Blue” (1978), like “Leading a Double Life,” were essentially pop songs. “A Letter From Home,” which closed that album, mixed found sounds and dreamy keyboards with an epistolary text, spoken and sung, ranging from the mundane to the philosophical.He worked extensively with electronics and labored throughout the 1990s on “The Driver’s Son,” which he termed an “audio storyboard.” A realization of that piece, a questing monodrama set to lush timbres and bubbly rhythms, will be included in “Degrees of Freedom Found,” a six-CD boxed set of unreleased Tyranny recordings due on Unseen Worlds in the spring. Mr. Tyranny, who lost his eyesight in 2009 and gave up performing after 2016, helped to compile the set, hoping to give his disparate canon a coherent shape.Mr. Tyranny’s compositions divided critical response. “To this taste, Mr. Tyranny’s work too often skirts the trivial,” John Rockwell wrote in a 1987 New York Times review. But Ben Ratliff, in a 2012 Times review of the last new recording issued during Mr. Tyranny’s life, “Detours,” offered a different view: “Mr. Sheff represents a lot of different American energies.”He added, “He does not stint on beautiful things — major arpeggios, soul-chord progressions, lines that flow and breathe — and his keyboard touch is rounded and gorgeous, a feeling you remember.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Meet the People Who Can’t Bring You ‘Messiah’ This Year

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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 storyMeet the People Who Can’t Bring You ‘Messiah’ This YearListen as nine performers guide you through the emotional arc of Handel’s classic, from comfort to grief to jubilation.Dec. 23, 2020, 11:46 a.m. ETEvery year, Handel’s “Messiah” is a communal ritual — a glittering parade of recitatives, arias and choruses that binds listeners and performers together in a story of promise, betrayal and redemption.But not this year. In 2020 the oratorio, if you listen to it at all, will be by necessity a private matter. And many artists for whom it is a beloved (and remunerative) staple remain almost entirely out of work.In this context, the emotional arc of “Messiah” — from comfort to grief to eventual relief — can feel more powerful than ever. Here, listen along as seven singers and two conductors offer a behind-the-music guide through the work.Brian Giebler, tenor: ‘Comfort ye’When you step up to the stage at the beginning of “Messiah,” every eye in the room turns to you. For the next three minutes you have complete command over everyone’s emotions.“Comfort ye” is my moment to take everyone’s anxiety, and pause for a second to reflect on why we’re here. You come after the overture, which is this almost chaotic moment, like everybody bustling about trying to get presents, or running to Carnegie Hall after a busy day of work. And then the beginning of “Comfort ye” is so solemn.What I’m after is a sense of calm. It’s all about long lines. Baroque ornamentation is fun, but here, it’s about taking time and not doing anything too flashy.Luthien Brackett, mezzo-soprano: ‘O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion’It’s a bubbling up of excitement, this secret you can’t wait to tell.It starts with exuberant champagne bubbles in the strings, and by the time you’re ready to sing you almost can’t contain your excitement. It’s like you’re addressing a friend who’s been grieving and maybe has been home alone for a while, and you come over and say, OK, get your coat on, we’re going to have a great time: “Get thee up into the high mountains!”There’s healing, as well. Those exuberant string notes with that wonderful contrast between the high and the low feel like a weight is being lifted. You have this energy you didn’t know you possessed. The aria goes straight into a chorus and everybody joins in.Joélle Harvey, soprano: ‘Rejoice greatly’The soprano performs in the Handel and Haydn Society’s 2020 version of “Messiah.”CreditCredit…Handel and Haydn SocietyThe music sounds like skipping through a meadow. I don’t know how you can say the words “rejoice greatly” without smiling. But the challenge is how to make the joy last so it doesn’t feel false or overdone. In the da capo section — on the words “Shout! Shout!” — instead of letting them get louder, I now make it more internal. Something to rev yourself up.Straight from the beginning, the phrases expand with each iteration. And the melismatic passages are exciting, almost like a game. Once you’re past the technical part of it, it’s very easy to find the playfulness in this aria. The da capo is ecstatic, with ornaments on top of ornaments.Reginald Mobley, countertenor: ‘He was despised’With its limited range and simple placement of notes, this is a piece that needs more than a park and bark. This is an aria that needs more than a big-haired Texan soprano spinning some tone for an expanse of quite a bit of an hour. You as the artist are the conduit: You have to be a prism for this incredibly heavy emotion that sets the stage for the Passion portion of “Messiah.”If you speed up the “A” section and slow down the “B” section — which usually sounds like a cavalry charge — then you can hear the flagellation, you hear Christ being tortured. My job is to transmit the personal horror and shame of being responsible.In 2014 I was singing the aria in Kansas City. This was the year of the Ferguson riots following the killing of Michael Brown. As I was singing, I thought of him and all the others who have been murdered by an unjust system. I thought, I get to be a survivor and tell the story of my brothers, my sisters, who were scorned and shamed and spited and spat upon. And I have to carry that shame: of what Americans should feel allowing the system to go on as long as it has.Joe Miller, conductor: ‘All we like sheep’What Handel is good at doing is creating amazing emotional contrast. At the very end of this piece is the crux of humanity: The iniquity of everyone is going to be laid on this one person. Up until then you have this comedy of sheep turning around and running away — I always think of an English sheepdog trying to round everyone up — and all of a sudden it comes down to this very profound moment.In the runs, everyone in the choir gets to weave and turn away. And then people sing “Everyone to his own way” over and over, and it’s all on one note, like everyone running into a fence and not knowing what to do.Jonathan Woody, bass-baritone: ‘Why do the nations so furiously rage together’I performed “Messiah” in Kansas City in December 2016. The recent election was on everyone’s mind. In between the dress rehearsal and the concert I read about a politician who, speaking about the Obamas, said something about Michelle returning to the Serengeti to live as a man. I read it on my phone and it broke my heart. In performance that day, what I was really doing was asking the people in the audience: Why do we hate each other, mistrust each other, dehumanize each other?I look around the world that we live in where we continue to treat people terribly. When Handel sets these rage arias, I get the sense that he understood that also. The world he lived in was not any less tumultuous than the one we live in today. I hear it in the music, in the intensity of the string figures, those 16th notes. I hear that angst.Kent Tritle, conductor: ‘Hallelujah’So much of the magic is the sheer jubilation that Handel conjures. The “Hallelujah” chorus sets out a firm, memorable exposition and then takes us to what is a short but extremely touching section about transformation. Then, through a sequence of sequentially rising pedal points on the words “King of kings,” he creates a sense of uplift, followed by a compaction of “Hallelujahs” as they barrel toward that cliff’s edge before the final absolute affirmation. It’s an incredible structure.When everyone in the hall rises from their seats it’s an amazing moment. You feel the energy shift in the house. And I see the glow on the faces of the choir as though they are a mirror reflecting what the audience is doing. Because of that choreographic moment, you get the sense that we are really on the same level. It’s magical and hair-raising.Jolle Greenleaf, soprano: ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’I see this as an opportunity to share a message of hope and love during a season when it’s getting darker, when people are looking for meaningful connections and ways to manage their emotions through the holidays. I try to look out at the audience and make as many personal connections with the people there so that they can feel that there truly is hope, that I’m a vessel for that hope.The tune feels very expansive. It just glides in a way that you can add ornaments to it. Those ornaments help create the gold filigree that you would see in a tapestry. Of course there is acknowledgment of darkness: “Though worms destroy this body.” I was 35 when I was diagnosed with cancer. It made everything related to death feel more fresh and raw and scary. But there’s power in reclaiming that and singing about hope despite that fear.Dashon Burton, bass-baritone: ‘The trumpet shall sound’This aria is about awe in every possible form. There’s the reverent awe of someone shocked into paying attention, hearing this mystery that says that no matter who you are, you are going to be raised after death, and no matter what trials you’ve gone through, you will have everlasting life.And then it’s the amazing sense of awe you get from hearing a rare trumpet solo. I just love that sense of grandeur: Even though it is a triumphant piece there is such mystery and quietude.The “B” section is a moment for reflection. As if shocked by this awesome presence, you need to take a moment: What have I just experienced? It’s a joy to sing those lines in one breath, to heighten the drama and really cinch these incredibly long phrases together. And to come back to the “A” section, now highly ornamented with all the regalia of your own vocal prowess and the entire emotional experience of having gone through this story. Not only to see, but to share. It’s the greatest moment onstage to be able to say to the audience: This is for you and this is with you.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      A ‘Messiah’ for the Multitudes, Freed From History’s Bonds

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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 storyA ‘Messiah’ for the Multitudes, Freed From History’s BondsA polyglot, nonsectarian, gender-inclusive film from Canada remakes the Handel classic for today’s world.Half of the 12 soloists in “Messiah/Complex” are Indigenous, including Diyet van Lieshout, a mezzo-soprano from Yukon, who is filmed traipsing through the snow in her traditional mukluk boots.Credit…Alistair MaitlandDec. 21, 2020A gay Chinese-Canadian tenor struts through the streets of Vancouver, joyously proclaiming that “ev’ry valley shall be exalted” as the camera focuses in on his six-inch-high stiletto heels.A Tunisian-Canadian mezzo-soprano reimagines Jesus as a Muslim woman in a head scarf.In Yukon, an Indigenous singer praises the remote snow-covered landscape in Southern Tutchone, the language of her ancestors.“This is not your grandparents’ ‘Messiah,’” Spencer Britten, the tenor in heels, said in an interview. He and the other performers are part of “Messiah/Complex,” an iconoclastic new production of Handel’s classic oratorio, which draws on biblical texts to form a stylized narrative of suffering, hope and redemption.Spencer Britten, a gay Chinese-Canadian tenor, struts through the streets of Vancouver in this reimagined “Messiah.”Credit…Georgia Street MediaAn 80-minute film featuring a dozen soloists from all corners of the country, this unabashed celebration of Canadian multiculturalism has recast the work as a series of deeply personal video narratives. (The performance will be streaming through Jan. 7.)The brainchild of Joel Ivany, a Broadway-loving son of pastors, and his Toronto indie opera company, Against the Grain Theater, in collaboration with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, “Messiah/Complex” seeks to revamp a Christmas favorite for a world upended by a pandemic and a renewed consciousness about the rights of Black people and other minorities.It mixes the sacred and profane as it journeys from Canada’s Far North to an urban hockey rink, engaging in a bit of high camp and translating passages into six languages, including Arabic, French, Dene and Inuttitut. The text Mr. Britten sings has been retooled as a coming-out anthem for a young man confronting his conservative Chinese relatives.The production may send some purists running. One comment on YouTube called it “blasphemy.” But the critical reception has been more enthusiastic; The Globe and Mail, a leading national newspaper, lauded a “daring interpretation” that nevertheless “might get a rise out of the ‘Hallelujah’ people.” (The stalwart “Hallelujah” chorus, by the way, is performed by the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, whose members came together to record the vocals in a space divided into makeshift booths with shower curtains to observe pandemic health protocols. The group was later filmed lip-syncing it — socially distanced — in downtown Toronto.)At a time when opera houses and concert halls around the globe have been shuttered by the coronavirus and are battling to remain relevant, Mr. Ivany said he wanted to create a “Messiah” befitting the moment. He added that he hoped the online production, initially conceived for Toronto’s Winter Garden Theater, would attract a younger audience that didn’t usually come to the opera.“As the Black Lives Matter protests were happening across the world, the silence in the classical music world was deafening, and I thought, ‘What if every soloist in this “Messiah” was Indigenous, Black or a person of color?’” said Mr. Ivany, who previously staged “La Bohème” in a pub. Mindful, he added, that he was “a white man interpreting a piece by a dead European male,” he partnered with Reneltta Arluk, an Indigenous theater director based in Alberta.The mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb changed the words of her aria, “He was despised,” to “She is despised,” to evoke herself and her Muslim mother.Credit…Huei LinThis reimagining of Handel, Ms. Arluk said, was also a way to grapple with recent research suggesting that the German-born composer had investments in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. “We can’t control the actions of composers hundreds of years ago,” she said. “But we can claim Handel’s work in our voices.”“Messiah/Complex” is hardly the first adjustment to “Messiah,” which was reworked by Mozart in 1789 and has since been interpreted by rock guitarists and gospel and hip-hop artists. Handel himself was initially accused of sacrilege in some orthodox quarters for transposing the biblical text.“Can it make you angry that we dared to do such a thing, that we provoked you?” said Matthew Loden, the chief executive of the Toronto Symphony. “That is what art is supposed to do.”In Canada, where the global reckoning about systemic racism has spawned debate about the dearth of minority voices represented in popular culture, the production is also being seen as a cultural corrective of sorts. And all the more so since the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has made a priority of reconciling with Indigenous peoples.In 2018 “Slav,” a theater production by the prominent Canadian director Robert Lepage, closed early at the Montreal International Jazz Festival following an outcry because a majority-white cast was portraying Black slaves. Indigenous artists also lashed out after another Lepage production, “Kanata,” which recounts aspects of Indigenous Canadians’ subjugation by white people, did not include any Indigenous Canadians in the cast.Ms. van Lieshout, in red coat, said that translating her aria into Southern Tutchone, her First Nations language, had been a way to “decolonize myself.”Credit…Alistair MaitlandHalf of the 12 soloists in “Messiah/Complex” are Indigenous. Diyet van Lieshout, the mezzo-soprano from Yukon, is filmed traipsing through the snow in her traditional mukluk boots. She said that translating her aria, “O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion,” into Southern Tutchone, her First Nations language, with the help of her 91-year-old grandmother had been nothing less than a way to “decolonize myself.”In the 1960s, she said, her mother, like other Indigenous children, had been taken from her family at the age of 5 and sent to a government-sponsored residential school run by the church, where she was forbidden to speak her language. (In 2015, a government commission said that such schools, which were in operation for over a century, “can best be described as ‘cultural genocide.’”)Ms. van Lieshout said she had struggled to reconcile her love of church music with the suffering her mother had endured. She said that singing “O thou that tellest” in her native tongue had “given me a reason to like Handel again.”Deantha Edmunds, an Inuk soprano who translated her part into her native Inuttitut, said showcasing Indigenous opera divas would also help combat the stereotype that people like her were more likely to be seen hunting than singing arias. In fact, she said, classical music had been brought to Inuit communities in her native Labrador, on Canada’s Atlantic coast, by European missionaries from Moravia about 250 years ago. She recalled how her father used to serenade the family over Christmas by singing “Silent Night” in English, German and Inuttitut.Deantha Edmunds, an Inuk soprano, translated her part into her native Inuttitut.Credit…Justin OakeyPerhaps the most intense intervention is that of Rihab Chaieb, a Tunisian-Canadian mezzo-soprano who has sung often with the Metropolitan Opera. She removed Jesus from her aria altogether, changing “He was despised” to “She is despised,” to evoke herself and her Muslim mother.Quebec recently passed a law banning teachers, and other public sector workers from wearing religious symbols like head scarves while at work. Ms. Chaieb said neighbors in Montreal had called her veiled mother a terrorist, inspiring this singer to use Handel’s music to express her estrangement.In her segment, Ms. Chaieb is portrayed in black and white as a dutiful daughter, drinking tea in her mother’s apartment. But when she is shown, in color, under a graffiti-splattered underpass in Montreal, her barely submerged pain gradually crescendos as she sings in her native French.“My reinterpretation of the ‘Messiah’ is about me feeling despised and rejected as a first-generation immigrant in Montreal,” she said. “Like me, Jesus felt wretched and despised. But by taking Jesus out of the equation and making it more personal, I have reclaimed the ‘Messiah’ as my own.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More