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      A Mental Tightrope: When Instrumental Musicians Have to Sing, Too

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      Artists who take up contemporary music sometimes have to sing and play at the same time. The results can be extraordinarily powerful.There are many difficult moments in Peteris Vasks’s Cello Concerto No. 2, “Klatbutne” (“Presence”). The opening cadenza is exposed and virtuosic; the second movement has intricately rhythmic, Shostakovich-inspired counterpoint. But for the renowned cellist Sol Gabetta, a simple chorale in D minor at the end is the really tricky part, because in that passage she has to not just play, but also sing.At this point in the concerto, Gabetta, to whom the piece is dedicated, has been playing for over half an hour. Her voice is dry, and she has been leaning over her cello. “And suddenly,” Gabetta, 43, said in a video interview, “you need to be open and sing.”The effect of Gabetta’s clear voice joining her own cello, as well as two string soloists from the orchestra, is both startling and organic. By design, the conclusion retroactively changes your whole impression of the piece. Vasks conceived the Cello Concerto No. 2 to represent the cycle of life, with the voice’s entrance evoking metaphysical renewal.“It’s like a birth of a baby which becomes adult, and you can feel that in the music,” Gabetta said. “And then, in the moment when the singing voice is coming up, the person already died, and this is like the spirit living.”Vasks’s concerto is one of many compositions in recent decades that require musicians trained as instrumentalists to sing while they play, working explicitly with the contrast between their instrumental mastery and their typically untrained yet often expressive voices. This is difficult. It requires excellent aural and physical coordination, a more careful and holistic approach to the posture of playing an instrument, and a certain fearlessness: Instrumentalists must be willing to make a sound they haven’t spent their lifetimes honing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: A Choir Stands Out in a Multimedia Performance

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      The Crossing is one of many elements in “Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness,” which links pieces by Gabriela Ortiz in a five-movement meditation.“Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness,” which had its New York premiere on Friday evening at Zankel Hall, jams a lot into its 75 minutes.The piece includes, in shifting combinations, the Crossing, a superb contemporary-music choir; a flutist who wanders the stage; a quartet of percussionists; two actors; dancers from a pair of troupes; projections of drawings and photographs; poetry in English and Spanish; and, throughout, the suggestion of themes of profound societal import, like war, migration and environmental destruction.What pulls together all these elements — or is supposed to — is one composer, Gabriela Ortiz. Ortiz, in residence at Carnegie Hall this season, makes music of bright, energetic colors, and “Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness” offers a selection of her pieces, loosely linked in a five-movement multimedia meditation and directed by Stephen Jiménez.Solemn dialogues for the two actors — not naturalistic scenes, exactly, but elegiac nods toward pained emotions — form interludes between the musical sections. Ortiz’s shining 2022 choral work “Tierra,” with an artfully enigmatic text by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, provides music for the first and final movements.The flutist Alejandro Escuer “plays in a breathily stark style that evokes Latin American wooden folk instruments,” our critic writes.Stephanie BergerWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At 150, Charles Ives Still Reflects the Darkness and Hope of America

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      This pioneering composer is not the easiest to love. But while he explores the poison of American nationalism, his music also offers an antidote.Sunday is the 150th anniversary of the composer Charles Ives’s birth, and the most fitting way to celebrate would be to bang your fists on the table and rail against the damned closed-mindedness of classical music, with its lazy dependence on a predictable canon. But honestly, that’s old news; a lot of the classical community is already doing that. Would Ives be satisfied by the current state of things? Hard to say. Improvements have been made but not, I suspect, enough.Ives, a Connecticut Yankee, straddled tumultuous and defining eras of American life; he was born in the shadow of the Civil War and lived almost a decade after World War II. He had no shortage of grand visions, whether for music or for his quite successful insurance business. He conceived influential strategies of estate planning and formulas for coverage. He dreamed that music would evolve into “a language, so transcendent, that its heights and depths will be common to all mankind.” (This didn’t pan out, unless you count Taylor Swift.) And, in the first two decades of the 20th century, he dreamed up a radically original American musical voice — an enviable triumph that came bundled with failure. It was a voice many people didn’t want to hear, and still don’t.It is easy to understand the doubts of audiences, befuddled by under-rehearsed and under-enthused orchestral performances of Ives’s work. It is harder to forgive this neglect in professional musicians. Not long ago, I was in a car with a distinguished British cellist who admitted he knew just one Ives piece: the cheeky satire “Variations on America.” When I mentioned the anniversary, he said that Ives was “cute,” but that was it. This condescending opinion, offered in near-perfect ignorance, made me want to dump every last ounce of British tea into the nearest harbor.Concert presenters don’t seem super keen this anniversary, either. Thankfully, the writer Joseph Horowitz took initiative and obtained grants for events at Indiana University, Carnegie Hall and elsewhere. The flutist Claire Chase cleverly curated a program at the Juilliard School that traces Ives to other experimental artists. But that seems to be the extent of Juilliard’s commitment.The BBC Proms in Britain were more festive than most. (Cancel that tea party!) As a pianist, I’m trying to do my bit by performing the “Concord” Sonata, including at the 92nd Street Y New York in December, and releasing a recording of the violin sonatas with Stefan Jackiw on Nonesuch. But there doesn’t seem to be a groundswell of demand. It’s more like a bunch of passionate Ives nuts are standing at a street corner, begging the world to care.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Adam Abeshouse, Prolific Producer of Classical Music, Dies at 63

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      A trained violinist, he found his calling in the studio control room. He also started a foundation to help fund recordings that lack major-label support.Adam Abeshouse, a Grammy Award-winning producer of classical music for more than 30 years who also ran a foundation that helps fund the recording of works not supported by major labels, died on Oct. 10 at his home in South Salem, N.Y., in Westchester County. He was 63.His wife, Maria Abeshouse, said the cause was bile duct cancer.Mr. Abeshouse, who was also a concert violinist, was prolific: Starting in the early 1990s, he produced (and often engineered and edited) hundreds of albums. Among the musicians he worked with were the violinists Joshua Bell and Itzhak Perlman, the pianists Simone Dinnerstein, Garrick Ohlsson, Leon Fleisher and Lara Downes, and the Kronos Quartet. In 2000, he won the Grammy for classical music producer of the year.Musicians described Mr. Abeshouse as a technically brilliant and joyful producer.“He had so many different qualities necessary for recording, but you don’t expect them all to be contained in one person,” said Ms. Dinnerstein, who recorded 14 albums with Mr. Abeshouse, including her newest, “The Eye Is the First Circle,” which documents a 2021 performance of Charles Ives’s “Concord” Sonata.“He had a fantastic, acute ear,” she added. “He knew how to do a recording session; he knew when you needed a break or needed to move on or to be pushed. He was an amazing engineer; he knew all about sound, microphones, acoustics, and had a huge array of vintage microphones.“And he was astonishingly good at editing. From all the takes in a session, putting them together was almost like being a sculptor.”Mr. Bell said that Mr. Abeshouse’s background as a violinist helped their collaborations.“He was a wonderful violinist; he didn’t just hack away at it,” Mr. Bell recalled, adding that Mr. Abeshouse helped him get past his perfectionism in the studio.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Exquisite Fragility of Mark Andre’s Music

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      Andre’s family history is one of precarity and mutability. His works, vulnerable and intricate, aren’t so different.In 2007, Pierre Boulez was conducting a performance of Mark Andre’s “…auf…II” in Amsterdam when a phone rang. The interruption broke the spell of the score’s opening, in which stabbing harmonies activate a mysterious echo. Boulez stopped the orchestra, went backstage for a few minutes, then started the music again.Boulez’s response speaks to the exquisite fragility of the music by Andre, 60, who has earned a reputation as one of Europe’s most original composers. His pieces are like spider webs: Close attention reveals their intricate beauty, while a careless gesture can destroy their effect.His newest composition, a work for piano and electronics titled “…selig ist…,” will be premiered by Pierre-Laurent Aimard at the Donaueschingen Festival in Germany on Oct. 19. (The concert will also be livestreamed.) The piece lasts about 50 minutes and is ferociously difficult. It’s also full of sounds that can easily be obscured by a ringtone.Five or six years ago, Aimard, a contemporary music virtuoso, began pursuing a collaboration with Andre; this new work is their first world premiere together.“After having listened a lot to his music I thought, ‘This is the person I would like to dedicate some of my forces and time to,’” Aimard said in a phone interview. “Because it seemed to me that the profoundness of his creation, his deep spirituality, the extremely subtle acoustical world which he works with, and the high discipline in his handwork were what I was looking for at this moment.”The fragility of Andre’s music can be traced to his family’s background in Alsace, a region that changed hands between France and Germany many times.Robert Rieger for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Leif Segerstam, Provocative Finnish Conductor and Composer, Dies at 80

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      He led his country’s principal orchestras and major orchestras elsewhere in Europe. He also mystified his countrymen with an unstoppable flow of symphonies.Leif Segerstam, a Finnish conductor and composer whose hundreds of symphonies were as mysterious as his pronouncements about them, died on Oct. 9 in Helsinki. He was 80.His son Jan said he died in a hospital after a brief bout of pneumonia.In a small country with a unique musical culture, Mr. Segerstam occupied a singular place: He was the “king of our country’s cultural industry,” the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat wrote after his death. He himself said he was “the Jesus of music,” explaining, “In the world of music I have truths that are just as valuable as the teachings of Jesus.”He led Finland’s principal orchestras as well as other major orchestras in Europe; he shaped his country’s world-leading crop of conductors; and he was an unequaled interpreter of its greatest musician, Jean Sibelius, bringing a composer’s creativity to his uncompromising, barren scores.“The conductor was at the summit of the art of rubato” — the practice of expanding and contracting rhythm — “which made absolutely exquisite the slightest melodic curve,” Pierre Gervasoni of Le Monde wrote in a review of Mr. Segerstam’s 1998 Paris performance of Sibelius works with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. That was typical of the way critics reacted to Mr. Segerstam’s instinctive accounts of Sibelius.“Music is in time, but you shouldn’t stop and find out, because then you lose the time, because time doesn’t exist,” Mr. Segerstam said, mysteriously, to the music journalist Bruce Duffie in 1997.Mr. Segerstam “is an alarming person to interview,” James Jolly, the editor in chief of Gramophone magazine, wrote in 2002. “He doesn’t speak in sentences or even paragraphs: instead his ‘thoughts’ come streaming out in torrential pages.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Philharmonic’s Afromodernism Festival Gathers Black Artists

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      An Afromodernism festival at the New York Philharmonic shines a light on Black artists, who are vastly underrepresented in classical music.At the New York Philharmonic’s festival Afromodernism: Music of the African Diaspora, the composer Nathalie Joachim plans to showcase the richness of Black musical expression, like Haitian funeral brass bands, swing and New York Minimalism.“We are not a monolith,” she said.Black artists have long struggled to be seen or heard in classical music. And despite some recent progress, they remain vastly underrepresented among orchestra players, soloists, composers and conductors.But this week, Black musicians will be front and center at the Philharmonic, which is devoting a series of concerts and events to the music of the African diaspora. On Thursday and Friday, the orchestra will play works by living composers like Joachim and Carlos Simon and revered figures like William Grant Still, whose Symphony No. 4 celebrates the fusion of musical cultures in the United States.On Saturday, the orchestra will host a Young People’s concert focused on diasporic experiences. And later this month, the Philharmonic will also present a concert by the International Contemporary Ensemble, the contemporary music group, featuring a variety of Black composers.The composer Carlos Simon wants to shatter stereotypes about Black American culture, with a piece highlighting dance forms including tap, holy dance, ring shout and waltz.“There will be people in the audience who had no idea that Black people were doing a waltz,” he said about wealthy Black Americans in the 1930s who had debutante balls for their children. “It’s going to be a learning experience.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Violinist María Dueñas Makes a Carnegie Hall Debut

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      The stage of the Felsenreitschule, a theater carved from the side of a mountain in Salzburg, Austria, is about 130 feet wide. During concerts, artists come out from catacombs at the side, beginning a walk to the center that, depending on nerves, can feel punishingly long.The 21-year-old violinist María Dueñas made that journey under the spotlights for her debut at the prestigious Salzburg Festival one night this summer. But, instead of nerves, she felt comfort the moment she saw the seated orchestra.“I could tell, that I was in a safe space,” she said the next morning over coffee.She looked beyond the lights to the full house, taking in the audience’s energy. Once she found her place, nestled in the semicircle of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, she raised her bow and let out a steady, then soulful open G at the start of Bruch’s First Violin Concerto. During the slow second movement, she listened to the hall as she played and noticed that she couldn’t hear people breathing.Dueñas with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra at the Salzburg Festival.Marco Borrelli/Salzburg Festival“That, for me,” she said, “is a very good concert.” Stunned silence is common at performances by Dueñas, who, in an industry always eager for the next prodigy, has emerged as something particularly special: a strong-willed young artist with something to say, and the skill to say it brilliantly.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More