Classical Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Renovating Its Hall, New York Philharmonic Plans a Roving Season

      by

      With David Geffen Hall under construction, the orchestra will spend most of 2021-22 at two other Lincoln Center venues.For any major music ensemble, planning a season of concerts as a pandemic stretches on is daunting. For the New York Philharmonic, there is an added challenge: The orchestra’s home, David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, is in the midst of a $550 million renovation.That will leave the orchestra roving for the next year as it tries to recover from the pandemic, which resulted in the cancellation of its 2020-21 season and the loss of more than $21 million in ticket revenue, forcing painful budget cuts.But the Philharmonic won’t travel too far. On Tuesday, it announced its 2021-22 season: a slate of about 80 concerts, compared to 120 in a normal year, spent mostly at two other Lincoln Center venues, Alice Tully Hall and the Rose Theater, with four forays to Carnegie Hall and a holiday run of “Messiah” at Riverside Church.“People are starved for live entertainment,” Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said in an interview. “There may be some slight hesitancy at the beginning, but I think people are going to come flocking back.”The season opens Sept. 17 with the pianist Daniil Trifonov playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 at Tully. Other prominent artists on the schedule include the pianists Yuja Wang and Leif Ove Andsnes; the violinists Hilary Hahn and Joshua Bell; the saxophonist Branford Marsalis, who will play a concerto by John Adams; and the conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who will lead Schumann’s four symphonies and two world premieres over two weeks in March. The Philharmonic’s principal clarinetist, Anthony McGill, will be featured in Anthony Davis’s “You Have the Right to Remain Silent.”Soloists appearing for the first time with the orchestra include the cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, who will play Dvorak’s concerto and also participate in a Young People’s Concert; the soprano Golda Schultz; the pianist Beatrice Rana; and the conductors Jeannette Sorrell and Dalia Stasevska.In its fourth year with the conductor Jaap van Zweden as its music director, the Philharmonic will also premiere a variety of works, including by the American composers Joan Tower and Sarah Kirkland Snider. Those two premieres are part of Project 19, a multiyear initiative to commission works from 19 female composers to honor the centenary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which barred the states from denying women the right to vote.A few of the concerts will be at an unusual time: The orchestra will present three Sunday matinees, the first time it has done that since the 1960s, in an effort to broaden its audience.The Philharmonic has been at the center of the recent revival of the arts in New York. The orchestra appeared at the Shed in April, its first indoor concert in 13 months. And it performed at Bryant Park last week, the first time its musicians had played together without masks since the start of the pandemic.The orchestra is taking precautions in its planning to ease fears about the virus. There will be no intermissions at least through December, to prevent crowds from gathering. Borda said the orchestra would follow guidance from the state and federal authorities in deciding other public health measures, like requiring masks or proof of vaccination.“What it will be like in September is anybody’s guess,” Borda said. “We have to remain flexible.”The Philharmonic had to make a series of painful cuts as more than 100 of its concerts were canceled. The orchestra reduced its administrative staff by about 40 percent, largely through layoffs. In December, its musicians agreed to a four-year contract that included a 25 percent cut to the players’ base pay through August 2023, with compensation gradually increasing after that, though remaining below prepandemic levels.There were some bright spots amid the turmoil. Donations increased 11 percent last year, totaling $31.5 million. The orchestra also worked to deepen its connections with city residents through two series of Bandwagon concerts, bringing first a pickup truck and then a 20-foot shipping container with a foldout stage to neighborhoods across the city, and giving local artists an opportunity to perform.Several of the organizations that took part in Bandwagon concerts, including National Black Theater, a nonprofit arts group in Harlem, and El Puente, a social justice organization in Brooklyn, will be featured in the 2021-22 season. Those collaborations will be organized by Anthony Roth Costanzo, a countertenor who produced the Bandwagon series and is also the orchestra’s artist-in-residence next season; he has also helped prepare a two-week festival focusing on identity, “Authentic Selves: The Beauty Within.”The coming season will be the first time in recent decades that the orchestra has not had access to its own hall. Its administration and Lincoln Center decided to use the shutdown to accelerate the renovation of Geffen Hall, which is set to reopen in the fall of 2022, a year and a half earlier than planned. The hall will feature state-of-the-art acoustics and a more intimate feel, with seats that wrap around the stage.Borda said much of the coming season would be devoted to preparing for the orchestra’s return to Geffen.“This hall provides an opportunity to transform ourselves,” she said, “but also to paint on an even larger palette.” More

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Tania León Wins Music Pulitzer for ‘Stride’

      by

      The New York Philharmonic premiered the work, both solemn and celebratory, in February 2020.In the 1990s, the composer Tania León was named a new-music adviser to the New York Philharmonic. But the orchestra did not play any of her work back then.It made up for lost time in February 2020, when the Philharmonic premiered Ms. León’s “Stride,” a work both solemn and celebratory, as part of its Project 19 initiative, for which it commissioned 19 female composers to honor the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which barred the states from denying women the right to vote.On Friday “Stride” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music. It is a culminating honor in the career of a composer, now 78, who grew up in Cuba; found a footing writing percussive dance works in New York; created a series of memorable orchestral pieces shot through with intricate Latin rhythmic grooves; and became an outspoken advocate for cultural diversity in music. She has also been a pathbreaking conductor, and currently directs the wide-ranging festival Composers Now.Ms. León, who found out about the prize as she left her dentist’s office on Friday, said she started crying at the news. “My mother and my grandmother were maids when they were 8-year-olds,” she said in a phone interview. “My family had so much hope for me and the new generation, to give us an education, and when something major has happened in my life, that’s the first thing that comes to mind.”Inspired by the courage of the women in her family, and by the suffragist Susan B. Anthony, the 15-minute “Stride” isn’t purely optimistic. Forthright brass fanfares recur throughout the piece, a kind of periodic annunciation, and jazzy wind solos squiggle out of the orchestral textures, but a dark, unsettled energy always lurks.The composer Ellen Reid, who won the Pulitzer in 2019 and was part of the committee that awarded this year’s prize, said she had heard the Philharmonic perform “Stride” at Lincoln Center last year.“It was one of the last performances before the pandemic,” she said by phone. “Tania has a way of weaving together so many musical traditions with such joy. She’s just such a wonderful ambassador for music, and her love is infectious.”Explosive bells sound at the end of the piece: “Every time I think about it,” Ms. León said, “I want to hear even more — all the bells in the nation.” But a West African beat shuffles underneath — a reminder that Black women were initially excluded from the right that was granted by the 19th Amendment.“Under all these bells of celebration,” Ms. León said, “there is still a kind of struggle.”Struggle, and movement.“It’s very nice to be recognized,” she added. “But the biggest prize of my life is that I’ve been able to manifest a dream that started in a very small place, far from here, with people who are not here any more. That, for me, is what ‘Stride’ is about: moving forward.”Joshua Barone contributed reporting. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      How a Family Transformed the Look of European Theater

      by

      The Bibienas, the focus of an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, dominated Baroque theatrical design.Many of us have not seen the inside of a theater in well over a year. But as performance spaces around the country are on the verge of reopening, the Morgan Library & Museum is offering a quietly astonishing reminder of what we’ve been missing.Open through Sept. 12 at the Morgan, “Architecture, Theater and Fantasy” is a small but exquisite show of drawings by the Bibiena family, which transformed theatrical design in the 17th and 18th centuries. Organized around a promised gift to the museum of 25 Bibiena works by Jules Fisher, the Tony Award-winning Broadway lighting designer, the exhibit is the first in the United States of the family’s drawings in over 30 years.The small but exquisite exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum is the first of the Bibienas’ drawings in the United States in over 30 years.Janny ChiuFrom Lisbon to St. Petersburg, Russia, the Bibienas dominated every major court theater in Baroque Europe. Their innovations in perspective opened new dramatic possibilities, and their lavish projects cost vast sums, with single spectacles running budgets of up to $10 million in today’s dollars. Writing to Alexander Pope of an opera performed outdoors in Vienna to consecrate the Austrian crown prince’s birth in 1716, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu described a massive stage constructed over a canal. Gilded flotillas sailed beneath it — a spectacle, she wrote, “so large that it is hard to carry the eye to the end of it.”That production’s designer, Ferdinando Galli Bibiena (1657-1743), had arrived in Vienna in 1711 as the official scenographer for the Hapsburg court of Charles VII. His father, the Tuscan painter Giovanni Maria Galli (1618-65), came from a village in Arezzo called Bibbiena, and adapted its name as his own. Young Ferdinando started out in Bologna as a master of quadratura, or illusionistic ceiling painting. But his theatrical talents took his career in other directions in the 1680s.Until that time, European scenery primarily utilized single-point perspective. This optical technique, perfected in 15th-century Italian visual art, arranged scenic images around a central vanishing point, creating the semblance of an infinitely receding space. (A Bibiena drawing already in the Morgan’s collection makes the regress dizzyingly, almost terrifyingly, steep.)Single-point perspective, which gained popularity in the 16th and 17th centuries, produced images of endless depth, like a single central street running away from the viewer. Morgan Library & MuseumThe technique gained popularity over the 16th and 17th centuries, gradually taking over Europe’s indoor theaters during the Age of Reason. It gave designers a way to make a shallow stage space appear substantially larger, using only painted flats set in grooves that ran parallel to the proscenium.The one-point “perspectiva artificialis” produced images of endless depth, like a single central street running away from the viewer. But in practice, the illusion only worked for one privileged spectator — typically an emperor or prince seated centrally in the auditorium. Everyone else’s view was distorted. What’s more, sustaining the trick kept actors largely downstage; if they moved toward the back of the stage, they seemed to become giants.Sometime around 1687, Ferdinando began modernizing this convention. For a royal entertainment staged that April in honor of the Duke of Piacenza’s birthday, he rotated the vanishing point away from center stage, and added a second one on the other side of the playing space. Suddenly two vistas opened up.Ferdinando’s two-point perspective allowed onstage scenery to be viewed as if at an angle, so the device came to be known as “scene vedute per angolo,” or simply “scena per angolo.” It opened the stage to a wider array of perspectives, and eventually became ubiquitous.The Bibienas’ innovation (as in this design from the early 18th century) was to add a second vanishing point, making the scene appear to be angled.Morgan Library & MuseumThe oblique view worked better than one-point at depicting massive, magnificent interiors that tantalizingly suggested spaces beyond what was visible onstage. Ferdinando’s skill in quadratura helped him convincingly mimic the underside of ceilings. Suddenly, flat panels conveyed the startlingly powerful and monumental illusion of three-dimensional, vaulted chambers.These images seem to draw their spectators into the picture plane by an almost gravitational force, pulling them across the proscenium threshold. They triumph in the virtual reality of theater. Actors could now more plausibly move around, and a wider range of viewers in the auditorium could get the scenic illusion without the risk of unintended anamorphosis, or visual warping.The designs tantalizingly suggested spaces beyond what was visible onstage.Morgan Library & MuseumOne can only imagine how the sets looked in performance. Although the Bibienas commanded European stages for a century, their work survives today almost entirely in the form of sketches and renderings. Most of the more than a dozen theater buildings they designed eventually burned; the most notable exception is the sumptuous, recently renovated Margravial Opera House in Bayreuth, Germany, built in the 1740s by Giuseppe Galli Bibiena (1695-1757) and his son Carlo (1721-87). (Richard Wagner briefly considered it as the venue for his epic “Ring” cycle.)Still, the drawings exude an irresistible sensuousness. Primarily in black and brown ink, busy hand markings trace rough motifs and ornaments everywhere, touching nearly every surface. Using wash or watercolor to create painterly effects, the drawings emphasize the allure of dreamy distances. (Or forbidding ones: One scenic sketch in the Morgan exhibit, a prison interior by Antonio Galli Bibiena, one of Ferdinando’s sons, seems to anticipate the labyrinthine “imaginary prisons” of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who knew the Bibiena style well and may have even studied with the family.)“A Colonnaded Stage,” from the mid-1700s, includes some severed feet from a statue once collaged into the image, then removed partially — evoking, perhaps, experimentation with which set pieces to use. Morgan Library & MuseumIn several drawings, you get hints of the design process. “A Colonnaded Stage,” inked mostly in black, sports garlands that were drawn, later on, in brown. Some severed feet remain from a statue once collaged into the image, then removed partially — evoking, perhaps, experimentation with which set pieces to use. In “Left Portion of a Palatial Hall,” the viewer sees how three flat panels, labeled F, G and H, converge into depicting a three-dimensional portal.While other architects and designers, like Andrea Pozzo and Filippo Juvarra, had been dabbling in multipoint perspective when Ferdinando made his innovations, the technique quickly became his brand, and international demand for his new style soon arose. Together with his brother Francesco (1659-1739) and his son Giuseppe, Ferdinando founded a sprawling family business, comprising a handful of major talents and a bunch of lesser-known ones.In “Left Portion of a Palatial Hall,” the viewer sees how three of the flat panels used for scenery in this era, labeled F, G and H, converge into depicting a three-dimensional portal.Morgan Library & MuseumThe Bibienas enjoyed fame for a hundred years. Their heyday ended when tastes changed in favor of humbler settings in the middle of the 18th century. The designs linger like lovingly preserved ruins, fragments of a lost world. As the art historian A.H. Mayor once wrote, the family was “heir to all the Baroque, all that Bernini and Borromini had dreamed but had had to leave undone.” Those earlier artists had practically invented Baroque theatricality in their sculptural and architectural works, but the Bibienas translated it into stage décor. What’s more, they made it go viral.“At their drawing boards,” Mayor wrote, “unhampered by the need for permanence, the cost of marble, the delays of masons, the whims or death of patrons, the Bibienas, in designs as arbitrary as the mandates of the autocrats they served, summed up the great emotional architecture of the Baroque.”Joseph Cermatori, an assistant professor of English at Skidmore College, is the author of “Baroque Modernity: An Aesthetics of Theater,” which will be published in November by Johns Hopkins University Press. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Fermenting Philip Glass: René Redzepi on Music and Cooking

      by

      The chef and owner of Noma, the acclaimed Copenhagen restaurant, wants to engage all the senses.René Redzepi is the chef and owner of the acclaimed restaurant Noma in Copenhagen. His menus are heavy on local, seasonal, foraged ingredients, as well as the use of fermentation to make things like pine cones edible.For a conversation with him based around an exchange of pieces of music, I chose the “Water Cadenza” from Tan Dun’s “Water Passion” as an amuse-bouche, followed by the first movement of “Cantus Arcticus” by Einojuhani Rautavaara. Redzepi chose Philip Glass’s “Floe,” from “Glassworks.” Here are edited excerpts from the discussion.I wanted to pick pieces that speak to your sense of adventure when it comes to using ingredients that people haven’t considered edible before.There is something so spontaneous and simple about the “Water Cadenza” that I truly enjoyed. I felt it was something we could actually listen to in the test kitchen. I came to work and had it on my headphones, and it was really upbeat — a positive, energetic song.What made me think of you in these sounds of water being slapped and poured and decanted is also the quality of synesthesia, of engaging multiple senses. When I ate at Noma, the first course was a broth contained inside a pot of living herbs, with a hidden straw. In order to drink it, I had to bury my face in the living plant and there was the enveloping sense of smell and the leaves tickling my face.It’s a way of shaking people and saying: Stop everything else, be here. This is the natural world right now as we see it; please take it in. Some come here and are already attuned to being curious. But other people? It’s the same with music. People eat and listen to the same seven or eight things all of their lives.The second piece I picked for you is the beginning of the “Cantus Arcticus” by Rautavaara, a Finnish composer who died in 2016. It includes field recordings from a bog near the Arctic Circle so that the birdsong mixes with the orchestra. I thought there was an analogy to your cooking in the wild and the cultivated sounds, the foraged “found” sounds from the field and the composed ones.First of all, I loved the piece. I thought it was incredibly dramatic, like I was waking up in a jungle somewhere.Many things that I enjoy in art and design and crafts is when those two fuse: something raw and wild with something ultrarefined and very polished. When those two can meet I generally think that’s the future of our society. Becoming a little more wild and listening a little more to the wilderness so that we can be more attuned to it.The other thing is that it’s very local. The birdsong ties it to a specific place and a specific season. And that made me want to ask you about seasons. Music is the art of change over time, and I think you are making an argument for returning food to that context.It could also connect, as you said, to variety. We need to be better at using it. Eating variety. Listening to variety. And not having everything be the same all the time. It’s incredibly boring and it makes us lazy people.My childhood was spent partly in Denmark and partly in Yugoslavia. When we decided that Denmark would be our permanent home, I was very rootless for many years. As soon as I entered cooking I found myself with something I loved. I fell in love with flavor immediately. But I was still not 100 percent sure if I actually belonged here. I didn’t have a sense of belonging anywhere.When Noma opened in 2003 nobody foraged. I mean, they had done so out of desperation, but not for flavor or any exquisite texture. And we found ourselves on the shorelines and in the forest. And that’s when I found my sense of belonging, with my feet in some rotten seaweed or my hands deep in a bed of ramps. And I’d like to pass that along to anyone who is rootless: Go out and learn the seasons. See what’s edible. See what changes week by week. See how an ingredient is not that one thing you think it is. It can be five different ingredients as it grows from a little shoot to a berry.I guess another part of that is fermentation, which is another way of making time work on ingredients. It has its own logic and span that you can’t hurry.It’s an antidote to the world where everything is so fast; on-demand; lightning speed. To actually have things that you have to wait for and then something magic happens, I love that. The happiest people I know are people who are in nature all the time: foragers, bakers, fermentation experts. Sometimes I envy that focus. My job is to be at the center of everything that is going on.Speaking of a lot of things going on, let’s talk about the Philip Glass piece you picked, “Floe.”The first time I heard it I thought maybe it was techno, and then I thought: No, it’s something completely different. I got pulled into the rhythm and the way it just keeps building and building. A lot of our staff listen to it. There’s something about the energy in that beehive of sounds that resonates with us when we’re just about to get very busy.Listening, I was actually picturing a busy kitchen as well. It’s a demonstration of how much richness you can get out of changing just one variable, because the harmonic progression is the same over and over. So there are no surprises there. But there are constant surprises in how he changes the texture. He plays with these simple ingredients, but they’re quite weird put together: flutes, French horns, and synthesizers and saxophones. So you have airy, mellow and brash and — I don’t know what I would call a synthesizer. Sharp?People get focused by listening to this song. If you play it loud enough, no matter what’s going on you’ll think: I need to focus. A lot of cooks have Glass on their playlist now. There’s something about his music that really works in the kitchen.It doesn’t impose a story on you the way maybe the Rautavaara does. The Glass is very abstract. And to me, it’s fermentation: I picture things fizzing and bubbling.Maybe we should play it in our fermentation room. Do you know Mort Garson’s “Plantasia”? It’s an electronic album that was meant for plants. And we play that in our greenhouse for our plants. I know there are quirky farmers who play music to their animals.When you said “Plantasia” I thought it might be the amplified sounds of plants growing. John Cage wrote a piece for amplified cactus. And you can laugh or roll your eyes at that, but ultimately it comes down to the same thing you are doing — expanding people’s awareness of what’s audible and what’s edible.I think our senses are the biggest gift we have, and we use them poorly. We don’t eat well, we don’t listen well, we don’t see well. And our senses could be like ninjas. More

    • 113 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      Bruised by the Pandemic, Carnegie Hall Plans a Comeback

      by

      New York’s premier concert hall hopes a star-studded season will draw virus-wary fans. But there’s still uncertainty.For 15 months, Carnegie Hall’s doors have been closed to the public by the coronavirus pandemic. Hundreds of performances have been canceled at the hall — one of the world’s most renowned concert spaces — and millions of dollars in ticket sales lost. Facing a financial crisis, Carnegie reduced its staff by nearly half and dipped into its endowment to survive.Now, as New York’s arts scene stirs tentatively to life, the city’s premier concert hall is planning a comeback. On Tuesday, Carnegie announced its 2021-22 season, a mix of familiar works and experimental music that its leaders hope will persuade virus-wary fans to return.“People are desperate to get back to experiencing live culture again,” Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said in an interview. “That is going to be something very powerful.”The new season, which begins in October, features artists as varied as the jazz musician Jon Batiste, who, like the violinist Leonidas Kavakos, will curate a series of Perspectives concerts; the opera stars Renée Fleming and Jonas Kaufmann; and the conductor Valery Gergiev, who will appear with both the Vienna Philharmonic and the Mariinsky Orchestra.The New York Philharmonic, whose Lincoln Center home is being renovated next season, will appear four times. The conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin will also play Carnegie four times — twice with the Philadelphia Orchestra and twice with the Met Orchestra — and Andris Nelsons will lead the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a concert performance of Berg’s opera “Wozzeck.”In addition to a host of New York and world premieres, Carnegie will turn the focus to performers historically underrepresented on its stages — devoting a festival, for example, to Afrofuturism, the genre that blends science fiction and fantasy with elements of Black history and culture.With vaccines now widely available in the United States and Europe, and infections rapidly falling, many cities have announced plans to reopen cultural venues. New York has been among the most ambitious, with a mega-concert in Central Park planned for this summer and Broadway shows set to resume in September.It remains to be seen whether audiences will flock to Carnegie and other venues as they did before the pandemic. Mr. Gillinson, citing a total anticipated budget deficit of up to $14 million for the 2019-20 and 2020-21 seasons, said Carnegie is bracing for uncertainty.“The risk financially is so huge because nobody knows how audiences will come back here,” he said. “The fact is, you don’t know the balance between the desire to attend concerts and culture and re-engage, and the worries.”The upcoming season will be more modest than usual: about 90 concerts, compared with a typical slate of 150, though more may be added depending on the state of the pandemic. With the virus still raging in many parts of the world and variants circulating, Carnegie said it planned to require concertgoers to show proof of vaccination. It has not yet decided whether to mandate masks inside its three spaces.The hall’s troubles began in March 2020, when the coronavirus forced the closure of New York’s major cultural institutions. Carnegie canceled the remainder of its season and the entire following one as well; it has been the longest closure in the hall’s 130-year history.With live performances suspended, Carnegie, a nonprofit, offered streaming performances and online classes to stay connected to its audiences. But neither provided a steady source of revenue.Mr. Gillinson began slashing the budget, imposing pay cuts of up to 10 percent for many employees and furloughing many workers. In total, 160 positions were cut, leaving 190 people on staff. (The hall plans to rehire some staff to work at concerts this fall, though the total will be less than before the pandemic.)Carnegie weathered other storms during the past year, including its board chairman, the billionaire philanthropist Robert F. Smith, admitting to taking part in a 15-year scheme to hide more than $200 million in income and evade taxes. The hall and its board stood by Mr. Smith, who remains its chairman.To help ease its financial woes, Carnegie’s board approved a plan to increase the amount the hall takes each year from its endowment, which totaled $313.1 million last year, to 6 percent, up from 5 percent. But it still likely faces years of economic pressures. The operating budget for the coming season hovers around $90 million, about 13 percent below its prepandemic level. The hall is still waiting to hear whether it will receive a $10 million Shuttered Venue Operators Grant, part of an aid program created by Congress last year to help struggling live-event businesses.Despite the headwinds, Mr. Gillinson said he was confident Carnegie and other beloved cultural institutions in New York would bounce back.“The big organizations have had a terrible hit, but on the other hand, they’re not going to cease to exist,” he said. “I don’t have any doubts whatsoever that New York will remain one of the greatest magnets for talent in the world.” More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Want More Diverse Conductors? Orchestras Should Look to Assistants.

      by

      At top American ensembles, young assistant conductors are a far more varied group than the reigning music directors. How can the next generation come to power?It is one of the indelible star-is-born moments in music history: Leonard Bernstein, the 25-year-old assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, fills in at short notice for an ailing maestro and leads the orchestra in a concert broadcast live over the radio, causing a sensation.“It’s a good American success story,” The New York Times wrote in an editorial, following a front-page review of the 1943 coup. “The warm, friendly triumph of it filled Carnegie Hall and spread over the airwaves.”Fifteen years later, Bernstein was the Philharmonic’s music director. And the dream of ascending from the assistantship of a major American orchestra to its leadership — like rising up a corporate ladder — was cemented in the popular imagination.There are still assistant conductors, bright, talented 20- and 30-somethings hired by orchestras for stints of a few years. Indeed, there are more of them than ever, and they go by a variety of titles: assistant, associate, fellow, resident. Almost every major orchestra has at least one, and they still fill the traditional duties of Bernstein’s time: sitting in the concert hall during rehearsals to check balances and mark up scores; conducting offstage groups of musicians for certain pieces; and, of course, being ready to take the podium in case of emergency. But it is rare to see them ascend to the top jobs.And that may be a missed opportunity. When Marin Alsop steps down from the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra this summer, it will leave the top tier of American ensembles as it was before she took the post in 2007: without a single female music director. This group has had only one Black music director, and just a handful of leaders have been Latino or of Asian descent.Yue Bao, the conducting fellow at the Houston Symphony, will make her debut with the Chicago Symphony at the Ravinia Festival this summer.Michael Starghill Jr. for The New York Times“It’s been a paternalistic industry to some degree for a long time,” Kim Noltemy, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s chief executive, said in an interview. “In the last 20 years it’s changed quite a bit, but there’s lag time for the top-level leadership, whether it’s management or conductors.”But it is a very different story when you look at the country’s assistants, a far more diverse group in which women and musicians of color have found success in recent years.Now there is a chance for those assistant conductors to become more than just another set of ears in a darkened auditorium. They provide an opportunity to fast-track greater diversity at historically slow-evolving institutions. The question now is how soon they will enter the topmost ranks — and whether, as major orchestras search for music directors in the coming years, they will look toward the crowd right under their noses.“It’s great to have a BIPOC assistant conductor,” said Jonathan Rush, the assistant conductor in Baltimore, who is Black, referring to the acronym for Black, Indigenous and people of color. “To have that in place is awesome. But there are still not many opportunities for you to be that person that a younger musician can look up to. Yes, I get education concerts, they’re awesome, but we would have greater impact if we were music directors.”As community engagement and outreach efforts have broadened nationwide, and become more central for leading orchestras, many assistants have added those activities to their portfolios, too. And during the coronavirus pandemic, when many artists abroad were grounded, some assistants took on new prominence. Vinay Parameswaran, the Cleveland Orchestra’s associate conductor, who had spent a few years mainly doing family concerts and leading the ensemble’s youth orchestra, unexpectedly found himself conducting multiple major programs on Cleveland’s subscription streaming platform.Vinay Parameswaran, the Cleveland Orchestra’s associate conductor, got higher-profile assignments during the pandemic. Gabriela Hasbun for The New York TimesThe differences between the assistant ranks of the top 25 American orchestras and those orchestras’ music directors can hardly be overstated. The Dallas Symphony, for example, has had three assistants since 2013, all women; one of them, Karina Canellakis, is now the chief conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic. Both of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s conducting apprentices since 2015 have been women. In that period, the Minnesota Orchestra’s assistants have been Roderick Cox, one of the few Black conductors appearing with leading orchestras and major opera houses, and Akiko Fujimoto, who became the music director of the small Mid-Texas Symphony in 2019.Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, who was a conducting fellow and then an assistant conductor with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has become a star, leading the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in England and making recordings for Deutsche Grammophon. Gemma New, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s resident conductor until last year, is now principal guest conductor in Dallas and led the New York Philharmonic’s Memorial Day concert at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.But there are still pervasive, sometimes pernicious assumptions about what a music director must look and act like — who can hobnob with donors, who can help sell tickets. And, Bernstein’s model aside, there is no clear pipeline from assistantships to directorships at top American orchestras, the way there are at many corporations.Of the current music directors in the top tier, only a handful started as assistants at the kind of orchestra they now lead. (And, in a sign of how insular this world is, two of that handful, Michael Stern, now in Kansas City, and Ken-David Masur, in Milwaukee, are the sons of musical royalty, the violinist Isaac Stern and the conductor Kurt Masur.)Andrés Orozco-Estrada, now the Houston Symphony’s music director, is the rare conductor to live the Bernstein dream, but he didn’t do it in the United States: He was an assistant at the Tonkünstler Orchestra in Vienna in the early 2000s, then rose a few years later to become its principal conductor. (European orchestras have trailed American ones in codifying assistant programs; the traditional conductor career path in Europe, especially German-speaking countries, goes through opera houses, not symphonies.)Stephanie Childress, the St. Louis Symphony’s assistant conductor, made her debut leading the orchestra in April.Dilip VishwanatThe experience paradox is part of the problem. Top orchestras demand their conductors be seasoned, particularly if they’re going to appear on prestigious subscription series. But if you don’t already have that experience, it’s hard to get it.“There are some people who are professional assistants, basically, or just they go from assistantship to assistantship,” Stephanie Childress, the St. Louis Symphony’s current assistant, said, pointing to the sense that some talented artists just cycle within those ranks without rising further.But orchestra officials insist that things are changing, accelerated by the jolt of the pandemic and the calls over the past year for greater racial and ethnic diversity.“The way it’s always been is all being rethought now,” Noltemy said, adding that resistance has been wearing down among players and listeners. “‘The orchestra won’t accept it; the audience won’t accept it’ — that has been completely deconstructed.”There are ways of increasing the chances of today’s assistants becoming tomorrow’s music directors. Orchestras could deepen their investments in their assistant programs, adding positions to broaden the pool of talent getting experience and exposure. There should be a greater commitment to giving assistants slots on subscription programs as part of their contracts; this is one Covid necessity that could fruitfully outlive the pandemic.Ensembles should make a point of looking to other organizations’ assistants when hiring for gigs. That does happen sometimes: Yue Bao, currently the conducting fellow at the Houston Symphony and a major presence in that orchestra’s streaming over the past year, will make her debut with the Chicago Symphony at the Ravinia Festival this summer.Matías Tarnopolsky, the chief executive of the Philadelphia Orchestra, said he would like to see a kind of consortium program that could rotate assistants among several top institutions, giving them broader experience. “Could a conducting fellowship be multiensemble,” Tarnopolsky said, “either within the U.S. or around the world, bridging symphony and new-music ensemble? Then you really expand the learning.”The pandemic has transformed Jonathan Rush’s time as an assistant conductor. “It’s definitely been different,” he said. “But I wouldn’t have gotten as much podium time. I’ve gotten to conduct the orchestra every single week.”Nate Palmer for The New York TimesAnd if a young conductor has a success, let it snowball. In Baltimore, Rush appeared just before the pandemic as part of the orchestra’s Symphony in the City series, and was then asked to join its next assistant conductor audition, planned for June 2020.That audition was canceled as the virus spread, but in July, Rush got another call. “Hey, listen,” he recalled the orchestra saying, “the musicians keep raving about your work in February, and we would like to invite you to be assistant conductor for the 2020-21 season.”“It’s definitely been different,” Rush added of assisting during the pandemic, which has included regular work with the orchestra’s streaming programs. “But I wouldn’t have gotten as much podium time. I’ve gotten to conduct the orchestra every single week. ”Ensembles should have a plan for continuing relationships with their assistants as those young conductors move on. Marie-Hélène Bernard, the chief executive of the St. Louis Symphony, said the organization had made a commitment to invite Gemma New every season as a guest conductor now that her resident contract is over.“For her, we have a trusted relationship,” Bernard said. “She can step outside of her comfort level and take musical risks she might not take with other orchestras she hasn’t yet visited. Nurturing is not just for the time she’s here with us.”Ruth Reinhardt, an assistant conductor in Dallas, drew raves when she jumped in for an ailing maestro. “Hopefully as we get older,” she said, “we’ll move up the ranks.”Sylvia ElzafonThis is the work that can help turn the encouragingly diverse landscape of assistant conductors into the future of the country’s top music directorships. “Getting a replacement for Marin isn’t even a tipping point,” Noltemy said, referring to Alsop’s departure from Baltimore. “The tipping point would be a significant number of women in positions in the top orchestras in the U.S.”But the field will not get there without taking risks. Ruth Reinhardt had just started as an assistant in Dallas in 2016 when she was tapped to jump in for a subscription program, replacing a veteran conductor who’d suffered a stroke. Scott Cantrell, the Dallas Morning News critic, raved: “Few artistic experiences are as exciting as witnessing a brilliant debut by a young musician.”It worked for Bernstein; we’ll see if it works for this new generation. “When I started conducting 15 years ago or so,” Reinhardt said, “people would openly tell you that you couldn’t do this as a woman. And things are changing. The jobs are more available. Hopefully as we get older, we’ll move up the ranks.” More

    • 88 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      A Pianist Comes Around on Period Instruments

      by

      Early in his career, Andras Schiff disdained historical authenticity. Now he embraces it, including on a revelatory new Brahms recording.For much of his career, the eminent pianist Andras Schiff, 67, disdained the use of historical instruments. He proudly played Bach on modern pianos; referred to fortepianists with an interest in Schubert as mere “specialists”; and told a New York Times interviewer in 1983, “I’ve heard some ghastly things done in the name of authenticity.”Time and experience, though, have brought about a wholesale change in his attitude, and Schiff has transformed into an eager evangelist for the use of historical keyboards. Several years ago he acquired an 1820 fortepiano, which he has used to make compelling recordings of Beethoven and Schubert. In recent interviews, he has criticized the increasing homogeneity of piano performance, with modern Steinways used for repertoire of every era.Schiff’s latest venture in this arena is his most convincing yet: a vibrant new recording of Brahms’s two piano concertos with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Aiming to recover the sound of this music when it was written, Schiff plays a piano made by Julius Blüthner in Leipzig, Germany, in 1859 — the year of the First Concerto’s premiere. He also — a rarity in these works — serves as both soloist and conductor, leading an ensemble of around 50 players.Schiff appearing with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, which plays on period instruments, in London in 2019.Tristram KentonWiping away the historical grime, Schiff and the orchestra breathe air and vitality into pieces that, even in successful performances, can sound heavy and clotted; the drier instrumental palette instead conveys improbable elegance. Words like monumental have a way of attaching themselves to these concertos, but Mr. Schiff and the outstanding players make them sound intimate and human-scale.Schiff spoke about these works and his interpretations in a recent phone call from London. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What changed your skepticism about historical instruments?What converted me was when I first played Mozart’s piano in Salzburg, in the room where he was born. This must have been the second half of the 1980s. It was the first time I met an instrument — an original instrument, not a copy — that was in wonderful condition. Subsequently, there were many occasions to find wonderful instruments. I’m now getting to a place where I will find it very difficult to play music on modern pianos.But even as late as the 1990s, you were still saying in interviews that, for example, you wouldn’t think of playing Schubert on a fortepiano.I did say that, yes. I have to take it back, or I have to say that I was not well-informed, or plain stupid. One has to be flexible and one has to say, sometimes, I made a mistake; I was wrong.Why was Brahms the next composer you decided to record in a historically informed way?It was a logical step from Schubert. And also, I met this wonderful orchestra, the Age of Enlightenment, and we did the Robert Schumann concerto together at the Royal Festival Hall in London, which has something like two and a half thousand seats.It’s a very problematic hall. There are always seats where the piano is covered by the orchestra. And for the first time in my life, in the Schumann with this orchestra it was absolutely without any problems: the balance, the way the piano came across, the way the orchestral parts came across. So after the Schumann I thought, Let’s try the Brahms.Playing the Brahms concertos on a modern piano with modern orchestras, there were always balance problems. And I found, especially in the B-flat Concerto, that it was just physically and psychologically very hard to play. Somehow, with this Blüthner piano, the physical difficulties disappear. The keys are a tiny bit narrower, so the stretches are not so tiring, and the action is much lighter. So there is not this colossal physical work involved.What were the challenges of doing the concertos in this way?The challenge is, of course, to play and conduct and hold it together. And there are many, many places where your hands are busy, so you cannot conduct. Therefore, you need a real partner, because this is not accompaniment, but give and take. And so the orchestra has to anticipate and listen very carefully. It needs an orchestra where we know each other intimately, which has a chamber-music-like approach.You achieve a remarkable level of audible detail in these performances.That was our intention: transparency and clarity, and also just to get rid of the fat already associated with this music from, I would say, the 1930s. And in orchestral terms, for example, the gut strings make a huge difference.I think that in any music you play, this heaviness also comes from — if you see, let’s say, a dotted half note or a long note, people just sit on it forever. The composer will not write a diminuendo on that long note, because Brahms, let’s say, expected a musical person to do that automatically.You’re saying that he didn’t write the diminuendo just because it would have been obvious to the performer.Yes. This already happens all over in Mozart and Beethoven. With every orchestra, when I play and conduct, I have to tell them, endless times, “You wind players, please, attack the note, and then get softer,” because with those sustained chords, you are covering all the detail that you spoke about.Can you think of a particular passage in either of the Brahms concertos in which the use of these instruments allows the music to come across with unusual freshness?For example, in the first movement of the Second Concerto, the development section can sound, in modern performance, very muddy and not clear, because there is so much counterpoint there. I’m very pleased to hear all those details.But also, take the opening of the third movement, with the cello solo. If it’s played with these instruments, next to the cello solo you hear all the other lower strings: the cellos and violas, and then later the oboe and bassoon. I just hear these layers of sound, instead of a general sauce.You also write in the liner notes that “Brahms on the piano is definitely not for children.” What do you mean?I have a very strong view on this, what young people should play and what they should not play. They should not play the early Brahms, because of the enormous physical challenges, and they shouldn’t, certainly, play the late Brahms, where they could manage the notes, but those pieces are the summary of a lifetime.But they do it anyway. I mean, today, any kid comes to you with the “Goldberg” Variations or the last three Beethoven sonatas. Anything goes. And who am I to say? I’m not a policeman. It’s a friendly piece of advice that when you are young, choose the right pieces. And wait with these until you are older.In my ripe old age, I’m beginning now to reduce my repertoire. But I’m very happy to play now the late Brahms, and the last three sonatas of Beethoven. And then there is music, Bach and Mozart, that you start playing when you are very young, and they stay with you until the day you die. More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Percussion

      by

      Listen to the varied, explosive, resonant sounds of instruments struck, shaken, pounded, scratched.In the past, we’ve chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, piano, opera, cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, violin, Baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, flute, string quartets, tenors, Brahms and choral music.Now we want to convince those curious friends to love percussion — the resonant sound of instruments struck, shaken, pounded. We hope you find lots here to discover and enjoy; leave your favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Andy Akiho, composer and steel pan virtuosoIt’s an exciting era for percussion innovation and inspiration. Particularly new works with flexible instrumentation, because they really showcase an ensemble’s choices and personality. Sandbox Percussion’s multiple versions of Jason Treuting’s “extremes” are an awesome example of how a great composition can renew itself with each interpretation. It’s interesting to learn how the piece works and what inspired the material — rhythms drawn from the letters of six American cities — but most important, I just love listening to and watching it be performed, and I want to share that experience with you.Jason Treuting’s “extremes”Sandbox Percussion (Jonny Allen, Victor Caccese, Ian Rosenbaum, Terry Sweeney)◆ ◆ ◆Valerie Naranjo, musician and ‘Saturday Night Live’ band member“Gmeng Se Naah Eee” (“What Shall We Do?”) is a concerto movement for gyil (pronounced “jeel”) and orchestra. The gyil is a pentatonic African marimba that utilizes only four notes per octave in any particular work. Its composer poses the question — When trouble strikes, what shall we do? — then answers it: We will press forward with wisdom and determination, until we move from dismay to delight. I find it amazing that the 12 notes the gyil uses in this work can tell the story of wisdom conquering all with such exuberance — lifting my mood and making me dance.Ba-ere Yotere’s “Gmeng Se Naah Eee”Orchestrated by Andrew Beall; performed by Valerie Naranjo◆ ◆ ◆Evelyn Glennie, musicianPercussion is primal, sophisticated, raw, refined, playful, complex; it evokes a web of emotions and ignites vibrations that transform the body into a huge ear. “Thunder Caves” is relentless drumming that unleashes the human hand and technology together. The voice is primal, too, and what I drum I think about through the guttural grunts of my voice. Pronged sticks, drum sticks, flix sticks, skin on skin — all contribute to the sound colors on these conventional instruments. The incessant pounding of the kick bass drum gives this piece unrelenting momentum.“Thunder Caves”Improvised and performed by Evelyn Glennie (RCA)◆ ◆ ◆Antonio Sánchez, drummer and ‘Birdman’ composerThe drums are the engine of pretty much any band, but some engines work in a unique way. The first time I heard this live recording of Duke Ellington’s “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be” with the Keith Jarrett Trio — Jarrett on piano, Jack DeJohnette on drums and Gary Peacock on bass — back in college, I was astounded by how fluid the drums made the music sound. DeJohnette is one of the most original voices to ever play the instrument. Even though the swing factor is undeniably strong in his performance, the unconventional fills and accents keep a very well-known tune, with a very simple form, exciting and unpredictable. You can hear the crowd going crazy behind some of those trademark DeJohnette fills. Pure bliss.“Things Ain’t What They Used to Be”(ECM)◆ ◆ ◆Stewart Copeland, composer and former Police drummerMost concert works for percussion are as much fun as a concussion. But sometimes folks like Steve Reich and John Adams find real beauty in hitting things. In this piece Tan Dun takes it further, bravely writing for waterphones and other wildly rebellious instruments. He builds a rich orchestral envelope to suggest pitches and rhythms for the unpitched, wafting water sounds. Listening on your slick system, or over your headphones in a darkened room, it is guaranteed to inspire a wild adventure movie of your own design. For background while doing stuff, it will inspire lateral thinking and novel solutions. Probably not great for group bonding, marching or sex — and definitely don’t drive on this stuff!Tan Dun’s Concerto for Water PercussionNew York Philharmonic; Kurt Masur, conductor◆ ◆ ◆Sarah Hennies, composer and percussionistThe composer and performer Michael Ranta, born in 1942, is a crucial figure in percussion music, though he is almost totally unknown today, even to musicians. He was extremely prolific in the 1970s as an interpreter of avant-garde composition, as an improviser and as a composer of highly individualistic solo works, which he still produces today. He has spent significant time in Asia, especially China and Japan, and “Yuen Shan,” for live percussion and prerecorded sounds, is based on ancient spiritual principles and was composed over a period of almost 40 years. Ranta’s stalwart commitment to being a percussionist who is also a creative artist has been a source of great inspiration for my own work.Michael Ranta’s “Yin-Chu”From “Yuen Shan”◆ ◆ ◆David Allen, Times writerCarl Nielsen’s irrepressible Fourth Symphony was written in 1916, in the middle of World War I, and it’s a dogfight between light and dark. Where does the percussion fit in? As the orchestra tries to soar into glory in the finale, two timpanists duke it out, stationed at opposite sides of the stage — and, as Nielsen wrote, “maintaining a certain threatening character,” their dueling dissonances and the brutality of their attack almost pulling the music back into martial disaster. But not quite; life triumphs. It’s one of the most remarkable uses of the percussion in the symphonic repertoire, and stunning to witness live.Nielsen’s Fourth SymphonyBerlin Philharmonic; Herbert von Karajan, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)◆ ◆ ◆Cynthia Yeh, Chicago Symphony principal percussionistThe most obvious traits of percussion in the orchestral realm are sheer power, intensity and terror — both overt, in-your-face terror and a subtler undercurrent of fear. Percussion is often used to create a color, a shimmer, a sparkle or crashing waves. The sounds we can make are limitless because our instruments actually are limitless; percussion is defined as anything one shakes, scrapes or strikes, and this is why I chose Christopher Cerrone’s “Memory Palace.” Almost all the instruments in this piece are D.I.Y.: planks of wood, pieces of pipe, bowls and bottles. It showcases the versatility of percussion — the range of instruments, the creation of rhythm, melody, harmony, character and mood.Christopher Cerrone’s “Memory Palace”Ian David Rosenbaum, percussion (National Sawdust Tracks)◆ ◆ ◆Glenn Kotche, composer and Wilco drummerDynamic and energetic, “Drums of Winter” is at the heart of John Luther Adams’s fascinating early multimedia work “Earth and the Great Weather: A Sonic Geography of the Arctic.” Even without pitched percussion, it contains all of the most exciting elements of percussion music. The tumultuous power and subtle peace of the natural world are expertly encompassed. The piece moves quickly and covers a lot of ground, with the sonic peaks and valleys of rhythmic consonance and dissonance showcasing the tonal potential of the drum quartet. The last 30 seconds are an exhilarating finale bound to open doors and ears to more.John Luther Adams’s “Drums of Winter”Amy Knoles, Robert Black, Robin Lorentz and John Luther Adams, percussion (New World Records)◆ ◆ ◆Anthony Tommasini, Times chief classical music criticThough the piano is a percussion instrument, we agreed we’d look beyond its traditional repertoire for this feature. But John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano are works that truly create a percussion ensemble of exhilarating variety. In these 20 pieces, Cage continued his experiments with prepared pianos — regular pianos with screws, bolts, slabs of rubber, pieces of plastic and other items inserted, according to Cage’s precise specifications, between its strings. By striking the keys, a player produces an array of thuds, chime-like tones, near-pitchless plunks, delicate harplike sounds and more. In the paired Sonatas XIV and XV, “Gemini,” the music sounds like a vaguely Asian dance, with rippling riffs in the bass register, melodic bits in peeling high tones, alluring thumps and intricate rhythmic figures.John Cage’s “Gemini”David Greilsammer, piano (Sony Classical)◆ ◆ ◆Seth Colter Walls, Times classical writerWhen it comes to Duke Ellington’s music from the early 1940s, discussion tends to center on the contributions made by the bassist Jimmy Blanton and the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster — and the skill of the percussionist Sonny Greer is often overlooked. Yet Ellington himself described Greer, his longtime drummer, as the “world’s best percussionist reactor.” “When he heard a ping,” Ellington added in his memoir, “he responded with the most apropos pong.” You can hear that responsiveness throughout the classic “Cotton Tail,” as Greer drives the ensemble sections, adds excitement to an already stirring Webster solo and pongs nimbly underneath Ellington’s piano.Duke Ellington’s “Cotton Tail”(Sony)◆ ◆ ◆Tyshawn Sorey, composer and instrumentalistComposed in 1978 for an eight-member percussion ensemble, Roscoe Mitchell’s “The Maze” is a seminal example of his dialogic/Afrologic relationship to composition. Its unusually notated score favors an egalitarian aesthetic, in which each of the performers has opportunities not only to interpret complex, traditionally notated passages, but also to explore different sonic areas in their individualized assemblages, which feature traditional Western percussion instruments, self-invented equipment and a multitude of found objects. “The Maze” encourages the performers to collaboratively interact with all the traditionally and graphically notated materials in a manner that problematizes separatist notions of “improvisation” and “composition,” cultivating a sonic universe in which such a binary never existed in the first place.Roscoe Mitchell’s “The Maze”(Nessa)◆ ◆ ◆Steven Schick, musicianDuring my first visit to New York City on a crystalline autumn day in 1977, I walked the length of Manhattan to stand outside of the building where Edgard Varèse had lived in SoHo. Along the way, I heard the metal-on-metal cacophony of construction, wailing sirens and snippets of the city’s joyous mix of world music. I realized then that “Ionisation,” composed of those very sounds, was not barren modernism but Varèse’s love letter to his adopted home. Listening 44 years later, the noises of “Ionisation” are still bracing, the rhythms still joyous, and I am buoyed again by this fierce anthem to the present.Varèse’s “Ionisation”Ensemble Intercontemporain; Susanna Malkki, conductor◆ ◆ ◆Jason Treuting, composer and So Percussion memberI first listened to “Genderan” in 1997. It is in the gamelan gong kebyar style and showcases so many of the transfixing qualities of Balinese music — qualities that led me to study with I Nyoman Suadin at the Eastman School of Music, and then to travel to Bali to learn more with him and other musicians. “Genderan” begins with a unison introduction, then hits with intricate hocketing over the gong cycle, showing off bright melodies that wind over the beat in endlessly compelling ways. This music utterly changed my life and my understanding of percussion and its capacities. I hope you love it, too.“Genderan”From “Music for the Gods”; recorded in Ubud, Bali, 1941◆ ◆ ◆Joshua Barone, Times editorIn its rhythms and lyrical gestures, this piece seems to contain elements of Steve Reich and John Adams — maybe even Leonard Bernstein. Yet it predates them all: Colin McPhee wrote “Tabuh-Tabuhan” in 1936, influenced by his years spent studying gamelan music in Bali. He transplanted his research onto the Western classical orchestra, featuring Balinese gongs but also creating what he called a “nuclear gamelan” of two pianos and percussion instruments, and approximating the sounds of hand-beaten drums in the strings. The resulting works helped to pave a new path, later trod by Benjamin Britten and broadened by Lou Harrison, for Western percussion in the 20th century.Colin McPhee’s “Tabuh-Tabuhan”BBC Symphony Orchestra; Leonard Slatkin, conductor (Chandos)◆ ◆ ◆Zachary Woolfe, Times classical music editorIn the prelude to Janacek’s opera “Kat’a Kabanova,” the percussion is as articulate as any singer could be in previewing the drama to come: the timpani, first shadowy, then brutal, beating like a heartbeat, like fate; and the insistent sleigh bells that will later carry away a husband, leaving his wife to temptation, adultery and suicide. Percussion functions under, over and through the orchestra — adding punctuation, italics, boldface.Janacek’s “Kat’a Kabanova”Vienna Philharmonic; Charles Mackerras, conductor (Decca)◆ ◆ ◆Kate Gentile, drummer and composerThe brilliant, multitudinous improvisation in this excerpt typifies the “ancient to the future” ethos of this revolutionary group. The Art Ensemble of Chicago’s extensive percussion setup is played freely and fully by all four band members on this 1969 recording, made before Famoudou Don Moye joined. Lester Bowie is listed as playing bass drum; Roscoe Mitchell, cymbals, gongs, conga drums, logs, bells, siren, whistles, steel drum, etc.; Joseph Jarman, marimba, vibes, conga drums, bells, whistles, gongs, siren, guitar, etc.; and Malachi Favors, log drum, cythar, percussions, etc. — all that in addition to their primary instruments.“Reese and the Smooth Ones”Art Ensemble of Chicago — A.A.C.M.◆ ◆ ◆Elayne Jones, former San Francisco Opera timpanistThe timpani can be such a loud instrument, and people tend to watch you when you’re playing it. But it really captures the audience when it’s so soft; it kind of gets you. Just before the end of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto, it’s only the solo piano and the quiet timpani. Something so big and so heavy, but it comes out so delicate. You capture everyone’s imagination.Beethoven’s Fifth Piano ConcertoAndras Schiff, piano; Staatskapelle Dresden; Bernard Haitink, conductor (Teldec)◆ ◆ ◆ More