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      How a Family Transformed the Look of European Theater

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      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

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      Fermenting Philip Glass: René Redzepi on Music and Cooking

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      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

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      Bruised by the Pandemic, Carnegie Hall Plans a Comeback

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      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

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      Want More Diverse Conductors? Orchestras Should Look to Assistants.

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      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

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      A Pianist Comes Around on Period Instruments

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      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

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Percussion

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      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

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      Bach’s Cello Suites, Now on Violin, With a Folksy Feel

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      With an ear for dance and a new five-string violin, Johnny Gandelsman set out to transform a towering classic.Bargemusic was rocking last Friday evening as rain fell heavily outside, casting the view of Lower Manhattan in gray.Inside, though, Bargemusic — the tiny concert hall docked in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge in Dumbo — was alight with the liveliness of belowdecks entertainment as a small audience rode out the storm to the fiddling sounds of Johnny Gandelsman’s violin. At times the performance had the improvisatory feel of folk music, but it was in fact a survey of Bach’s towering six cello suites — transformed, with foot-tapping joy, for a smaller string instrument.Gandelsman isn’t the only violinist to have tackled these classic works; Rachel Podger recorded them in 2019, a year before he released his own set. But his approach is singular: feather-light and rooted in dance and folk music. He treats the suites as six enclosed spaces, tracing long arcs through each one, the sections blurring as he plays them through without pausing.Gandelsman’s recording came out in February 2020, and he had a concert planned at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan that March. Like everything else, it was canceled. Bargemusic on Friday was his return; because of ongoing safety measures, it was a modest one, with a distanced crowd in an already small space, and the six suites spread over two evenings instead of his usual one.He’ll be back on the barge, June 24 and 25, with more Bach: the sonatas and partitas for solo violin. After that, he may return to this endlessly explorable composer, but his focus will be shifting to a new project: This Is America, a set of 22 new violin works commissioned from the likes of Angélica Negrón, Tyshawn Sorey and Tomeka Reid, with premieres rolling out starting this summer.But before that, he joined a video call after the Bargemusic concerts to discuss the cello suites, which he said he had been discouraged from recording.Gandelsman said that his interpretation of the suites aimed for the “sense of freedom” found in dance and folk music.Mary Inhea Kang for The New York Times“It was looked at as a novelty gimmick,” he said. “But there are at least three 19th-century editions of transcriptions, and they feel so good on the violin.”The project followed his recording of the sonatas and partitas. While the violin solos are most difficult in their fugues and implied counterpoint, he said, the cello works more or less keep multiple voices within the same line. The suites did, however, require idiosyncrasies like scordatura (alternative tuning) in the Fifth Suite and the use of a five-string violin in the Sixth — both common in folk music.That’s what he worked toward in his interpretation: a folk flavor. He avoided listening to recordings — though he said he had been inspired by Paolo Pandolfo’s viola da gamba rendering, “maybe the most radical in a way” — and tried to internalize the music to get at its dance-y “sense of freedom.”In the video call, he focused on three sections to discuss his approach. Here they are, with side-by-side comparisons of his recording and ones by Yo-Yo Ma, Pablo Casals and Anner Bylsma.Suite No. 1 in G: GigueThe First Suite, Gandelsman said, “has this just incredible sense of lightness, and also discovery” — a tone set immediately in the Prelude, airy and full of naïve wonder in his reading.“I don’t want to suggest that a viola or cello can’t do these things,” he said. “But there’s something about the way the violin resonates that just kind of propels everything forward.”He gives the sections the feel of “a real set of dances,” like something an Irish fiddler would play. Seen from that perspective, he said, the suite’s final movement, the Gigue, is a “party moment” — albeit a brief one. But that fleeting celebration, he added, is “pure joy.”“I think of the way my friend Martin Hayes” — a renowned fiddler — “might approach a gigue and vary inflections and articulations in a natural way,” Gandelsman said. “To bring a sense of joy and abandon and a sense of closing to these beautiful 15 minutes of discovery.”Suite No. 4 in E flat: PreludePlayed on a cello, this Prelude tends to take on what Gandelsman called a “majestic quality.” The phrases leap octaves, beginning at the lowest string and jumping to the highest — which, at an unhurried pace, creates a foundational resonance. “I quickly realized,” he recalled, “that that just does not work for me on the violin.”He couldn’t sustain the low-note resonance at a slow tempo and still articulate a long line. So he arrived, he said, at “an overall shift.” The score is in cut time, so he started by following that, speeding up the eighth notes and taking a wider view of the movement.“Suddenly everything kind of came together,” he said, “and created this incredible feeling where I felt like I was looking through a kaleidoscope.”The music was now perhaps less grand than on a cello, but the architecture had been revealed to Gandelsman in a new way. “The majestic quality can sound quite heavy,” he said, “and sometimes one can get lost in the beauty of each bar or each note and lose the sense of how the harmonies are shifting almost imperceptibly from bar to bar. Once I kind of let go of that majestic quality and went for something else, I saw an overall character of the entire suite that is incredibly light and funny and full of humor.”Suite No. 5 in C minor: SarabandeWhen Gandelsman started working on the Fifth Suite, he found himself “pulled into the world of the way that it sounds on the cello,” he said. “It’s very dramatic and in some ways the darkest of the suites.”The Sarabande, in particular, is despair in miniature — only a few lines in the score, made up of phrases seemingly cut short by low notes, a Sisyphean climb. Those depths, though, are impossible on the violin. And the character of the piece isn’t exactly a natural fit for the instrument’s bright high E string.Gandelsman took steps throughout the project to pre-empt any problems the violin’s upper register might pose: He used a gut E string, for instance, and recorded to tape to further soften its sound. On the violin, there is still a darkness to the Fifth Suite, Gandelsman said. But as he was working on it, “it started revealing a quality of loneliness, more so than gravitas.”“What I feel,” he added, “is the most inward kind of conversation with yourself.”The Fifth’s Sarabande is unique among the suites for not containing chords. “It is the most bare-naked, lonely line,” he said. Without multiple voices, and without a low C string, the violin is left with a fundamentally different, less resonant sound than the cello. But it’s no less affecting.“There’s a single voice, but there’s also incredible dissonance in this movement,” he said. “Not everywhere, but in specific places he chooses these minor-second inflections, which are so painful. I feel an incredible sense of loss when I’m playing it. I just try to embrace that and not try to compete with the fact that I don’t have low strings that can ring forever.” More

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      A Beloved London Concert Hall Grows Bold as It Turns 120

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      Smart choices in the pandemic mean that the Wigmore Hall is reopening in a more confident position than many other British venues.LONDON — “Welcome!” said John Gilhooly, the general director of the Wigmore Hall, standing in front of the auditorium’s small circular stage. The audience applauded wildly — for a crowd of chamber music fans.It was May 23, and the first Sunday morning concert since the pandemic had closed down the hall last March. “I like to choose something special for each performance,” said Gilhooly, 47. “The Elgar Quintet you will hear today was premiered in this hall on the 21st of May, 1919, when the country was coming out of another major crisis.”The Wigmore is emerging from its most recent crisis with aplomb. As an early adopter of livestreamed concerts at the beginning of the pandemic, it won large dividends of good will and public donations. Whereas many small performing venues in Britain are reopening nervously after six months of forced closure, the Wigmore Hall is confidently poised to celebrate its 120th anniversary with an ambitious program, starting Sunday.The hall has occupied a special place in music lovers’ hearts since 1901, when it was opened as a recital hall by the German piano manufacturer Bechstein, which had a showroom next door. The discreet wooden doors under an art nouveau canopy that lead into the 540-seat hall, with its red plush seats, marble, gilt and dark wood panels, are a portal to another era.Probably the most important chamber-music venue in Britain, the Wigmore has an intensely loyal London audience that filled the hall for most of the 500-plus concerts a year it was staging before last March.The German piano manufacturer Bechstein opened the Wigmore Hall as a recital space in 1901.Kaupo Kikkas, via Wigmore HallJohn Gilhooly, the hall’s general director, became its executive director at 27 and took the top job five years later.via Wigmore HallBut even the best-loved British concert halls and theaters have been in peril since the onset of the pandemic, with revenues reduced to zero, costs still to be met and anxieties about the future running high. Live shows for reduced audiences opened briefly in the fall, only to close again in early December. Venues then remained shut until May 17, when they were allowed to open with limited capacity.If all goes according to plan — and given concern about new coronavirus variants circulating in Britain, it might not — full houses will be possible after June 21, according to Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Even then, most halls won’t open at full capacity.“It has been a much longer and more intense struggle than any of us had feared,” said Gillian Moore, the director of music at the Southbank Center, a London performing arts complex. “The economics are really challenging, but we can’t immediately go to full audiences, because we need to see how everything will work logistically.”Gilhooly, who was born in Limerick, Ireland, and trained there as a singer, became the executive director of the Wigmore Hall at 27 and then its general director five years later. And while he might not give the impression of a risk-taker, throughout the pandemic he has been decisive about getting musicians into the hall — many of them famous, but some lesser-known — and daring in his programming.Beginning last June, the Wigmore Hall presented free daily concerts from the empty hall, livestreamed by the BBC. Over the past year, through opening up and locking down, the Wigmore has streamed 250 programs by 400 artists, including major London-based artists like Mitsuko Uchida, Iestyn Davies and Stephen Hough. The concerts were acclaimed by classical music enthusiasts as a beacon of light in a somber time.“People wrote to me from all over the world,” said Hough, whose opening recital on June 1 garnered about 800,000 live views. “The return of live music was a symbol, like Myra Hess giving concerts at the National Gallery during World War II.”The Wigmore was able to get off the starting blocks quicker than most because Gilhooly and his board had invested in sophisticated cameras and recording equipment in 2015, when they began to broadcast a concert every month. It was a quietly progressive step for an organization that exudes an air of staid tradition, and last year’s decision to broadcast free concerts even more so.Mitsuko Uchida perfroming at the Wigmore Hall in March.via Wigmore HallThe Wigmore receives a subsidy of 300,000 pounds from the British state, but raises most of its own £8 million — about $11 million. It gets just over half of its income from the box office (when there isn’t a pandemic), and most of the rest from fund-raising.“The Wigmore have been fantastic leaders in terms of online activity,” said Kevin Appleby, the concert hall manager at the 350-seat Turner Sims in Southhampton, England. “But there is the inevitable question of how you monetize it.”“Do you keep the online model? A hybrid model?” Appleby added. “Will part of the audience, especially older people, not come back if they can watch at home?”Gilhooly said that even though the livestreamed concerts were free to watch, they had brought money and attention to the hall. The recitals have had about seven million views online from around the world, and grateful contributions have poured in: “a million pounds in £20 increments, and quite a few bigger amounts from individuals and foundations,” Gilhooly said. The Wigmore hall’s paying membership has increased from 10,000 to 15,000, and it now has 400,000 people on its mailing list.The soprano Gweneth Ann Rand, one of the Wigmore Hall’s associate artists, performing in the auditorium in October 2020.via Wigmore HallThis growth was wasn’t hampered, Gilhooly said, by more adventurous programming, including the work of the little-known Black American composer Julius Eastman and concerts by contemporary music groups like the Hermes Experiment and Riot Ensemble. “I lost fear about people objecting to more experimental programs, because I wasn’t having that direct contact with audiences,” he said, adding that regular subscribers whom he considered musically conservative often liked those concerts.To mark the hall’s upcoming anniversary, Gilhooly recently announced the appointment of nine new associate artists, including sarod players, viola players, saxophonists and a performer of the sarod, an Indian stringed instrument. He also outlined plans for a series of concerts focusing on music from Africa.“He is introducing the audience to new musical worlds, which takes knowledge, courage and vision,” said Gweneth Ann Rand, a soprano who is one of the new associates.Yet none of these innovations and successes will necessarily shield the Wigmore Hall from the uncertainty around the future of the performing arts in postpandemic Britain. As Angela Dixon, the chief executive of the Saffron Hall, a 740-seat concert space in southern England, put it, “You end up spending money in order to be open.” Social distancing rules mean that the Saffron Hall can only sell a fraction of its seats.“When you are reliant on people buying tickets for half your annual expenditure, you can’t afford to let people forget about you,” she said.A socially distanced audience in the venue in September 2020. At full capacity, it seats 540 people.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGilhooly said that his core audience was mostly vaccinated and returning to in-person concerts. (Because of social distancing, demand now outstrips availability, and tickets are being allocated by ballot). But he concurred that if the June 21 opening up is pushed out much further, classical music in Britain will be in trouble. “There has been so much suffering in the industry already,” he said, “particularly for freelancers who fell between the cracks.”For the start of the Wigmore Hall’s 2021-22 season in September, Gilhooly said he had “A, B, C and D scenarios.”“The best-case going forward,” he said, “is that we open on Sept. 1 with full houses and a really ambitious eclectic season. Our stage is a tiny space, but a place I can dream up huge ideas.” More