Classical Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      10 Classical Concerts to Stream in May

      by

      A fast-rising young conductor, a 90th birthday celebration and a starry trio are among the highlights.With in-person performances not yet quite widespread, here are 10 highlights from the flood of online music content coming in May. (Times listed are Eastern.)Diderot String QuartetMay 2 at 4 p.m.; mb1800.org; available through July 15.The invaluable New York concert series Music Before 1800 is back with a series of streams, including this period-instrument group’s program of music written for the court of Catherine the Great. One of the pieces may well be familiar: Haydn’s Quartet in E flat, “the Joke.” The other will be a rarity, by Anton Ferdinand Titz. (The harpsichordist Aya Hamada’s recital follows on May 23.) ZACHARY WOOLFEKarl LarsonMay 6 at 8 p.m.; roulette.org; available indefinitely.Roulette, in Brooklyn, one of the best places to hear music in New York, is allowing limited audiences into its space for performances this spring. But those shows will still be livestreamed, too. No matter how you attend, any gig featuring Karl Larson, known as the pianist of the trio Bearthoven, is worth it. Here, he celebrates “Dark Days,” his new solo recording of music by Scott Wollschleger. Wollschleger’s generally soft dynamics may lull you into thinking he’s primarily meditative, but part of the fun involves staying alert for the alterations of attack and twists of mood that Larson highlights. SETH COLTER WALLSPhiladelphia OrchestraMay 6 at 8 p.m.; philorch.org; available through May 13.This program, led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and featuring the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, opens with a triptych. First is the propulsive “Shake the Heavens,” from John Adams’s “El Niño,” followed by “Vigil,” a subdued and affecting song in memory of Breonna Taylor, by Igee Dieudonné and Tines. (You can stream that now, from Lincoln Center at Home.) Then Tines gives a preview of Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” which he will star in at Michigan Opera Theater next year. The second half of the concert features Mozart’s Symphony No. 25 in G minor, which fans of “Amadeus” will recognize immediately. JOSHUA BARONESusanna Malkki will conduct the Berlin Philharmonic in a streamed concert starting May 22.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times92nd Street YMay 11 at 7:30 p.m.; 92y.org; available through May 18.Schubert’s “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen” (“The Shepherd on the Rock”), thought to be the last of his 600 songs, is an extraordinary piece for soprano, clarinet and piano. Susanna Phillips, a frequent presence at the Metropolitan Opera, will sing it in a recital livestreamed by the 92nd Street Y, joined by the clarinetist Anthony McGill and the pianist Myra Huang. The program also includes a premiere by James Lee III — a setting of a poem by Lou Ella Hickman written for this trio combination — a work by William Grant Still and Schubert’s popular “Arpeggione” Sonata, here adapted for clarinet and piano. ANTHONY TOMMASINIAlvin Lucier at 90May 13 at 8 p.m. through May 14 at midnight; issueprojectroom.org; available indefinitely.For the 90th birthday of this experimental-music icon, over seven dozen colleagues will join him for 28 hours of performances of “I Am Sitting in a Room,” his signature work, from 1969. The piece consists of a few sentences that are recorded as they’re spoken; the recording is then played and rerecorded, and the process continues as the clashing frequencies of the different recordings begin to dominate and the words become unintelligible. After a year of isolation, what could be a more poignant artistic celebration? ZACHARY WOOLFEConcertgebouw OrchestraMay 14 at 2 p.m.; concertgebouworkest.nl; available through May 21.The coronavirus pandemic has upended the orchestral world, including separating ensembles from their music directors, sometimes by thousands of miles. This has provided an opportunity for conductors closer to home to fill in, sometimes even multiple times. It’s a slightly different situation with this superb Amsterdam orchestra, which has been searching for a new podium leader for the past few years — but the opportunity is still there. After making his debut in September, Klaus Makela, a 25-year-old Finn recently appointed music director of the Orchestre de Paris, returned to the Concertgebouw in December and will now be back yet again, an almost unthinkable frequency in normal times. His program includes Messiaen’s “Les Offrandes Oubliées” and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, with its grandly brooding opening. ZACHARY WOOLFEA concert by the cellist Seth Parker Woods, second from right, will stream starting May 25.James Holt/Seattle SymphonyJoshua Bell, Steven Isserlis and Evgeny KissinMay 21 at 8 p.m.; washingtonperformingarts.org; available through May 27.When three star performers come together, it is often the occasion for canonical standards. This violin-cello-piano recital, though, goes a more idiosyncratic route, attempting to evoke Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the world wars. Works by Solomon Rosowsky and Ernest Bloch conjure that scene, as will Kissin’s recitation of Yiddish poetry. Then the cataclysm of the Holocaust will be represented by Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2, written in 1944. ZACHARY WOOLFE‘Albert Herring’May 22 at 1 a.m.; mnopera.org; available through June 5.Britten’s chamber opera “Albert Herring” is like a wistfully comic alternative to his “Peter Grimes”; it’s the story of an awkward, shy, innocent boy who doesn’t fit in with the expectations of the people in his small market town in England, but goes on to be improbably crowned the town’s May King. This Minnesota Opera production, directed by Doug Scholz-Carlson, features the tenor David Portillo as Albert, with the insightful conductor Jane Glover leading Britten’s subtly complex, whimsical score. ANTHONY TOMMASINIBerlin PhilharmonicMay 22 at 1 p.m.; digitalconcerthall.com; available indefinitely.What will come of the premieres that were canceled during the pandemic? Thankfully, two by the composer Kaija Saariaho are happening sooner rather than later. The Aix Festival in France is planning to present her new opera “Innocence” in July, conducted by Susanna Malkki. And the Berlin Philharmonic is livestreaming the belated premiere of Saariaho’s 25-minute “Vista” — also led by Malkki, to whom the piece is dedicated. Filling out the program is “Bluebeard’s Castle,” the chilling Bartok one-act, of which Malkki recently released a wonderfully textured recording with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. JOSHUA BARONESeth Parker WoodsMay 25 at 7 p.m.; kaufmanmusiccenter.org; available through June 1.This cellist burst onto the scene with a 2016 recording that featured his stellar acoustic playing, often in works that also incorporated electronics. He’ll play one of those pieces — Pierre Alexandre Tremblay’s “asinglewordisnotenough3 (invariant)” — in this virtual concert for the Ecstatic Music series. The rest of the program, including a composition by Nathalie Joachim, emerges from Woods’s solo show, “Difficult Grace,” inspired in part by the Great Migration. SETH COLTER WALLS More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      The Renaissance’s Most Influential Composer, 500 Years Later

      by

      Centuries after his death, Josquin des Prez’s achievements as a musical “magician-mathematician” remain stunning.For the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, the classical music field pulled out all the stops last year, even in the midst of pandemic performance cancellations around the world. But while 2021 brings its own significant anniversary — in August it will be 500 years since the death of Josquin des Prez, the most influential composer of his age — few listeners will know it.At the center of his body of work are 18 grand, unaccompanied choral masses — exactly the kind of music that will be largely forbidden for some time yet for fear of aerosol transmission of the virus. Those masses are the major legacy of the man Peter Phillips, the founder and director of the renowned vocal ensemble the Tallis Scholars, called a “magician-mathematician” in a recent interview.Josquin indeed wedded the logic of math to the magic of melody, and his compositions feel like they unfold with both perfect clarity and atmospheric strangeness. Shining and austere, with the gentle radiance of a shaft of sunlight beaming through a window, Josquin’s music weeded out extraneous, extravagant ornamentation; he created textures of polyphonic complexity that are still smooth and free.His works feel unified because they are organized around small melodic fragments that gradually develop as they are passed from voice to voice. This might seem like a description of, well, all music. But the notion of carrying a melodic “cell” through a whole work was unknown before Josquin’s time, and he was one of the most gifted experimenters with the concept.Josquin des Prez, who died 500 years ago, was the first celebrity composer, and the first to be known widely through printed scores.Fine Art Images/Heritage Images, via Getty ImagesHe was also one of the first celebrity composers, and one of the first to be known by the wide dissemination of his scores — possible because of the newly developed technology of printing. The earliest surviving print of music by a single composer is a book of Josquin’s masses made in Venice in 1502.Little is known of his birth, which took place around the middle of the 15th century, somewhere near the modern-day border between France and Belgium. He eventually rose as a singer and composer, and by the late 1480s had made his way to Italy, where he worked for the Sforza family, formed his mature style and was for a period a member of the papal choir. (His only known signature is carved into the wood of the Sistine Chapel’s choir loft.)To discuss Josquin and his significance, Phillips, who has recorded a full cycle of the masses with the Tallis Scholars and will lead them in performing those works this summer at the Boulez Saal in Berlin, joined the composer Nico Muhly, whose work is deeply informed by the choral music of the Renaissance. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Part of Josquin’s “Missa Pange Lingua,” one of the 18 unaccompanied choral masses that are at the center of his achievement.Fine Art Images/Heritage Images, via Getty ImagesNICO MUHLY If someone asked you in the street, “Oh, you’re Peter Phillips, I’ve always wondered who Josquin is,” what’s your answer?PETER PHILLIPS He was the first superstar in the history of music. He was the first composer who was desired financially and artistically in the big places of the world at that time. He charged a lot, but people wanted him because he was the guy who had the reputation.And the reason for that was, he mastered all the techniques of his time, turned them into something better, and then passed them on to the next generation of composers, who were all influenced by him. It’s like Beethoven.MUHLY Was his stardom maintained for the last 500 years? Or did he go into obscurity before being rediscovered? I sang him as a boy chorister, but it was random motets scattered throughout the year, and he felt like more of a niche composer than a meat-and-potatoes figure.PHILLIPS He never completely disappeared. And he was extremely famous for the hundred years after he died. Nineteen years after his death, somebody said that Josquin had written more music since he died than while he was still alive, the point being that everyone claimed his music was theirs.One of the most surprising things I discovered recently is that on the Albert Memorial in London, opposite the Royal Albert Hall, there is a stone gallery of famous composers, the ones that a committee of English gentlemen in 1863 thought worth remembering. There are about 20 of them, and Josquin is there, next to Rossini. Schubert is not.MUHLY What does it mean if a composer, like Josquin, sets the exact same text 30 times over and over again? Because I write a lot of choral music, I’ve done almost a dozen settings of the Magnificat, but in the more traditional parts of contemporary music, you’re kind of encouraged, if not expected, to be in a state of constant innovation.PHILLIPS Well, that’s a very Romantic, 19th-century approach. We have to go back to what it was like in the 15th century. The words of the mass were extremely well known and Josquin set them 18 times; you can’t expect anyone to make much of every single word, every time, that often. And he didn’t; he took the words pretty well for granted.Modern performers find that terribly hard to accept. They think they’re missing out on the one absolutely crucial thing they ought to be concentrating on — the words — when what they really ought to be concentrating on is making a good sound, so the music can come alive as music. They shouldn’t spend hours discussing the meaning of “Kyrie eleison.” In the 15th century, everyone knew what that meant.MUHLY Something that compositionally I find so exciting about Josquin is that he is obsessively repetitive. Compared to other music of that time and in the centuries afterward, he doesn’t take a bit of music and then unspool it into this bigger thing that gets more and more ornate. It actually kind of curves back around itself, the exact same things happening.PHILLIPS There are a lot of passages where he keeps going back to the same note. And as you say, the music doesn’t seem to advance; it just goes around. And it’s sort of a fascinating circle. He keeps hitting that note. The Amen of the Creed of the “Missa Faysant Regretz” is where he goes constantly, so constantly, back to a D, that one gets completely mesmerized by it. I mean, you become sort of crazy.MUHLY I wonder if you could talk about what it means to have an entire body of work that’s based on previous ideas. Josquin was constantly referencing existing tunes — which, again, in the modern sense would register as being not particularly innovative.PHILLIPS There are various levels of taking an old thing and turning it into something new. My guess is that he was keen to show he could master all the techniques that were in currency when he started and take them to a higher level. One typically show-off example of this is in the Hosanna of the “Missa Mater Patris.” He takes a motif of five notes from his model, and proceeds to quote it in every measure of the final composition — 46 of them, at every modal pitch available to him. This sounds incredibly modern, even jazzy, and it’s terrific fun to sing.MUHLY Sometimes the original tune is, like, buried inside. So it’s less about transformation, and more about embedding, and kind of baking things into the cake.PHILLIPS He did take some very good tunes, that’s the first thing. So, in addition to his own good tunes, he was basing his music on very good past material. But then he felt it was his job to disguise the borrowing — embedding the original material in the counterpoint, which can make it quite hard or even impossible to hear. And sometimes he elongates the note lengths so, again, you can’t really follow them. And sometimes he writes wacky canons so that the material gets all jumbled up. I mean, he’s a mathematician at heart. A magician-mathematician.MUHLY We’re used to thinking about music of that time as being kind of austere and impenetrable. But you just peel one layer back and an enormous, enormous wealth of math turns into emotion.PHILLIPS And the mathematics produces atmosphere. I could go on about atmosphere, because I’ve done all these 18 masses, and they all have a different atmosphere. And it’s done not by expressing the text, which remains the same, but by very clever, purely musical means with the voices, how they interact and create mood. Perhaps the most perfect example of this is in the last movement of the “Missa L’Homme Armé Sexti Toni,” where three canons overlap — one involving the “Armed Man” melody. But forget the math, and enjoy the atmosphere all that cleverness creates.MUHLY Oftentimes people ask me, “Why do you write sacred music?” And the answer that I give is that it’s atmosphere, and that sacred music can and should be like sacred architecture, where it’s a space in which you are encouraged to look upward.PHILLIPS If you just close your eyes and let it come to you, without any preconceptions, you stop fussing about the mathematics; they’re in there, but they do their work subliminally. When Josquin is writing a clever canon or whatever, and he’s writing the tune inside out, or upside down; that’s my favorite, when the tune comes upside down — no one can possibly hear it. But somehow you sense it.MUHLY You can’t hear it, but I feel it’s like when you walk into a church, you can tell if someone has really thought about the structure in a very intense way, where the proportions are just so.Something that’s so great about the Tallis Scholars is that your technical commitment to the music of that time really shows both in the foreground and the background. You can tell that everyone singing is aware of what technical stuff is going on, and aware enough to almost forget it and make music confident in that hidden knowledge.PHILLIPS I’ve found it doesn’t need spoofing up. It doesn’t need to be sold. Just do it simply, straightforwardly, without dressing it up. No candles, no funny costumes. And let the composer speak directly. You don’t need anything else. You really don’t.MUHLY I’m not a big fan of gossiping about the dead, but I’m wondering if you could talk about Josquin as a kind of a competitive composer?PHILLIPS I think he was very keen to show off when he wanted to. He was the sort of personality who needed to say, “Look, I’m better than you. I’m the greatest.” The reports say he was a difficult man, but these days I feel we’ve rather come to admire difficult, outrageously talented people.He was compared with Heinrich Isaac, who was also a great composer of that period, but not quite as famous as Josquin. And one story has someone saying that you want to employ Isaac because he will write when you want him to — whereas Josquin will only write when he wants to, and costs twice as much. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Paul Kellogg, New York City Opera Impresario, Dies at 84

      by

      He had no opera experience when he was chosen to run the Glimmerglass Opera in upstate New York; 17 years later, he took on City Opera during a difficult period.Paul Kellogg, an innovative impresario who led the Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, N.Y., and later, during a dynamic and financially precarious period, also led the New York City Opera, died on Wednesday at a hospital in Cooperstown. He was 84.His death was announced by the Glimmerglass Festival, as the company is now called. No cause was given.Mr. Kellogg was living on the outskirts of Cooperstown and trying to write a novel when in 1979 he was the unexpected choice to become the executive manager of the four-year-old Glimmerglass Opera, which presented productions in the cramped, acoustically dry auditorium of Cooperstown High School. Though an opera lover, he had no real training in music and scant managerial experience. Yet he immediately envisioned what this fledgling summer festival could become.“A summer festival is not only what it does artistically, it’s what it provides people in the way of a full experience,” he said in a 1993 interview with The Christian Science Monitor.He courted local patrons and found support to boost the programming from one or two productions every summer to, eventually, four. He took on increasing executive and artistic leadership as his title expanded over the years. From the start, along with staples, he presented unusual fare like Bernstein’s “Trouble in Tahiti” and Mozart’s “The Impresario.” Believing in opera as a form of engrossing contemporary theater, he engaged important directors, including Jonathan Miller, Mark Lamos, Leon Major, Martha Clarke and Simon Callow.Most important, he oversaw the construction of a near-ideal house: the acoustically vibrant 914-seat Alice Busch Opera Theater, which opened in 1987 and boasted a large stage, ample backstage area and a proper orchestra pit. The theater, designed by the architect Hugh Handy, was perched in the middle of 43 acres of former farmland near Otsego Lake, about eight miles north of Cooperstown. And the side walls had screens that let the breeze inside, though sliding wood panels were closed over them when the music started. The bucolic setting and the splendid house became a magnet for audiences.Mr. Kellogg oversaw the construction of an intimate, welcoming opera theater in Cooperstown, N.Y., for Glimmerglass’s summer seasons.via GlimmerglassIn a surprising move, the New York City Opera in 1996 announced that Mr. Kellogg would become its general and artistic director — succeeding Christopher Keene, a beloved conductor, who had died the previous year — while remaining with Glimmerglass.The companies were very different operations. At Glimmerglass, which was essentially a nonunion house that relied heavily on interns, the budget for four productions during the 1995 season was about $3.5 million. City Opera during the 1995-96 season was presenting 114 performances of 15 productions, on a budget of about $24 million.Mr. Kellogg made the companies creative partners. New productions were introduced at Glimmerglass, where rehearsals took place in festival conditions, and then later presented at City Opera with the same or similar casts. Both institutions had demonstrated commitment to innovative contemporary productions, offbeat repertory and overlooked 20th-century works, and both had cultivated emerging singers who, while they might not have been stars, had fresh voices and often looked like the youthful characters they portrayed.From left, Nancy Allen Lundy, Anthony Dean Griffey and Rod Nelman in a scene from Carlisle Floyd’s “Of Mice and Men” at City Opera in 2003.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFor a while City Opera prospered under this arrangement. Mr. Kellogg presented 62 new productions there, about half of which had originated in Cooperstown. Among them were Carlisle Floyd’s “Of Mice and Men,” with the tenor Anthony Dean Griffey in a career-making performance as the slow-witted Lennie, and the director Francesca Zambello’s compellingly updated, emotionally penetrating staging of Gluck’s “Iphigénie en Tauride,” starring Christine Goerke in the title role.Still, City Opera was encumbered by the spotty, dull acoustics of the 2,700-seat New York State Theater (now the David H. Koch Theater), which had been designed to meet the needs of the New York City Ballet. In 1999 Mr. Kellogg, in a controversial move, announced that a subtle sound enhancement system was being installed at the theater to enliven the acoustics.Opera was an art form that had gloried in natural voices for centuries, and many felt the company had started down a slippery slope. Even Beverly Sills, once City Opera’s greatest star and a former general director, went public with her dismay.Mr. Kellogg, like City Opera leaders before him, argued that the house was not a second-tier company in the shadow of the Metropolitan Opera but a vibrant institution with a distinctive mission and repertory. He came to view relocating to either a renovated or new house as the only way to fulfill that mission.Yet, in explaining the deficiencies of the company’s home to lure financial backing for his dream, he inevitably undermined outreach to audiences: Why should people attend performances in an inadequate opera house?Several plans were considered and abandoned as financially impossible. Mr. Kellogg pledged to keep searching. It was not to be, and in the end, partly because of Mr. Kellogg’s heavy spending, City Opera spiraled into deeper trouble after he stepped down.City Opera’s home, the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, now the David H. Koch Theater. The hall, designed for ballet performances, was not ideally suited to opera.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPaul Edward Kellogg was born in Los Angeles on March 11, 1937. His father, Harold, who had studied singing with the great tenor Jean de Reszke, worked at 20th Century Fox teaching voice projection and diction. His mother, Maxine (Valentine) Kellogg, was an accomplished pianist.After his family moved to Texas in the late 1940s, Paul majored in comparative literature at the University of Texas in Austin, then continued his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris and at Columbia University in New York. In 1967 he was hired as a French teacher by the Allen-Stevenson School in Manhattan. He went on to become the school’s assistant headmaster.After Mr. Kellogg moved to Cooperstown in 1975, his partner (and later husband), Raymond Han, a noted sculptor and painter, was recruited to work on sets for a few Glimmerglass productions. Mr. Kellogg volunteered to handle props. Company officials came calling in 1979 with a bigger job.Mr. Han died in 2017. Mr. Kellogg leaves no immediate survivors.Under Mr. Kellogg’s leadership, Glimmerglass took its place among the leading summer opera festivals. He started a young-artists program so emerging singers could receive expert coaching and gain experience onstage. Between Glimmerglass and City Opera he had a solid record of fostering news works, among them operas by William Schuman, Stephen Hartke, Robert Beaser, Deborah Drattell and Charles Wuorinen.He made a crucial contribution to the development of new operas through Vox: Showcasing American Composers, an annual program begun in 1999 that presented free readings with top singers and the City Opera orchestra of excerpts from operas that were in progress or unperformed. These invaluable readings led to dozens of premieres elsewhere.But City Opera’s acclaimed work kept draining the budget and punishing the endowment. After widely reported problems with deficits and declining attendance at City Opera during Mr. Kellogg’s final years, he retired from both companies in 2006. City Opera collapsed in 2013. (A new team under the City Opera name has been presenting productions and attempting to resurrect it.) Glimmerglass continues to thrive under the leadership of Ms. Zambello.Mr. Kellogg addressed the audience, with almost every member of the company behind him, on Sept. 15, 2001, the opening of the City Opera season, which had been delayed after the attack on the World Trade Center.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times The defining moment of Mr. Kellogg’s career came just four days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. City Opera had been scheduled to open its fall season on the evening of Sept. 11 with a grim new production of Wagner’s “Flying Dutchman.” At the behest of city officials, the company opened with a matinee performance of the Wagner on the 15th instead.Nervous audience members wondered whether it was even appropriate to be at the opera. Then the curtain rose to reveal a large American flag hanging above the stage and, standing closely together, almost every member of the company: singers in costumes, administrators in business attire, stagehands in dusty jeans and T-shirts, and Mr. Kellogg, in the middle. The performing arts, he said in a quavering voice, have many functions: “catharsis, consolation, shared experience, reaffirmation of civilized values, distraction.” So, he added, “We’re back.” Everyone in the house joined in singing the national anthem. Then Mr. Kellogg, engulfed in hugs, led the City Opera family offstage and the performance began.Suddenly, thoughts of budget deficits, declining patronage and an inadequate house were pushed aside. That performance that day, under that leader, truly mattered. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Wayne Peterson, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Composer, Dies at 93

      by

      His Pulitzer, in 1992, came amid controversy not of his making: A three-member jury had recommended a different work.Wayne Peterson, a prolific composer whose fraught winning of the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 stirred debate about whether experts or average listeners were the best judges of music, died on April 7 in San Francisco. He was 93.His son Grant confirmed the death, in a hospital, which he said came just seven weeks after that of Mr. Peterson’s companion of decades, Ruth Knier.Mr. Peterson won the Pulitzer for his composition “The Face of the Night, the Heart of the Dark,” but only after the 19-member Pulitzer committee rejected the advice of the three-member music jury, which initially recommended that Ralph Shapey’s “Concerto Fantastique” receive the prize.The jury was made up of composers, who had the ability to study the scores of works under consideration, whereas the committee members, mostly journalists, had no particular expertise in music. The dust-up began when the jury submitted only one piece, Mr. Shapey’s, in its recommendation to the committee, rather than three candidates, as was traditional.The committee sent the recommendation back, demanding at least one more name. When the jury responded with Mr. Shapey’s work and Mr. Peterson’s, while indicating that Mr. Shapey’s work was its first choice, the committee awarded the prize to Mr. Peterson instead. The jurors responded with a sharply worded complaint that said, in part, “Such alterations by a committee without professional musical expertise guarantees, if continued, a lamentable devaluation of this uniquely important award.”The incident produced considerable hand-wringing over whether experts or a more general panel should determine the winner of the music prize, an issue the Pulitzers had faced before in other genres. The dispute was puzzling because, as music critics for The New York Times wrote in the aftermath, it was not necessarily a case of Mr. Peterson’s work being more listener-friendly than Mr. Shapey’s — both men wrote atonal works. Some writers suggested that the matter was simply the Pulitzer committee asserting its dominance over the jury.In any event, the controversy left Mr. Peterson in an awkward position, since he knew the jury members who had faulted the decision, and since he professed admiration for Mr. Shapey’s works.“He would have been thrilled to get second place,” Grant Peterson said.“There was no bad blood,” he added. “It was just kind of a bummer because it wasn’t of his making.”Mr. Peterson himself acknowledged that the dispute left him with mixed feelings.“I had sent the work in as a lark, and I didn’t think I had even a remote chance of winning,” he told The Times in 1992. “I have won other awards, but the prestige of the Pulitzer is greater than that of the others. The controversy has made it a little different. I just hope the pall that it has cast will not jeopardize what the Pulitzer could mean in helping circulate my music.”Grant Peterson said that, in that regard, the episode proved to be a plus — the prize, he said, did boost his father’s name recognition, and it brought him more lucrative commissions.Mr. Peterson became a professional jazz pianist at 15, and his love of jazz found its way into his compositions.via Grant PetersonWayne Turner Peterson was born on Sept. 3, 1927, in Albert Lea, Minn. His father, Leslie, was “a victim of the Depression,” he told The Associated Press in 1992, who “bounced around from one thing to another”; his mother, Irma (Turner) Peterson, died when he was young, and he lived with his grandmother after that, his son said.His musical ability, which he said came from his mother’s side of the family, manifested itself early.“I became very interested in jazz piano and was a professional jazz musician from the age of 15 on,” he said. “I put myself through college by playing jazz, through three degrees at the University of Minnesota” — a bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate, all earned in the 1950s.He became a professor of music at San Francisco State University in 1960, and taught composition there for more than 30 years. He lived in San Francisco at his death.Mr. Peterson’s career as a composer began in 1958 with the performance of his “Free Variations” by the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (now the Minnesota Orchestra). He composed for orchestras, chamber ensembles and other groupings, sometimes unusual ones. “And the Winds Shall Blow,” which had its premiere in Germany in 1994, was described as a fantasy “for saxophone quartet, winds and percussion.” There was also his Duo for Viola and Violoncello.“A nervous, effectively written piece, filled with dark melodies well suited to these lower string instruments, the duo builds to a fast and exciting climax,” Michael Kimmelman wrote in The Times when the work was performed at the 92nd Street Y in 1988.Mr. Peterson thought it important for a composer to listen to others’ works, across a wide range.“I don’t limit myself to any one group of composers,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1991. “I try to listen to everything, and if I hear anything I like, it gets distilled in my psyche and comes out somewhere in my music.”His love of jazz also found its way into his compositions, including “The Face of the Night, the Heart of the Dark.”“There’s a lot of syncopation you can associate with jazz,” he said of that work, “but this isn’t a jazz piece.”It was given its premiere in October 1991 by the San Francisco Symphony. George Perle, the chairman of the Pulitzer jury that recommended the Shapey piece, took pains to praise Mr. Peterson’s composition even amid the controversy.“It is absolutely worthy of a Pulitzer Prize,” he said in 1992. “But the Pulitzer Prize is supposed to be for the single best work of the year, and on this occasion we felt that there was a work that was more impressive.”The controversy over his Pulitzer — which the committee awarded him instead of the composer recommended by the music jury — left Mr. Peterson in an awkward position. He knew the members of the jury and respected the composer they had recommended.Grant PetersonEven Mr. Shapey, who died in 2002 and was known for being outspoken, came to view his missed prize with a touch of humor.“A critic in Chicago started calling me ‘Ralph Shapey, the non-Pulitzer Prize winner,’” he told The Times in 1996. “They’ll have to put that on my tombstone.”Mr. Peterson’s marriage to Harriet Christensen ended in divorce in the 1970s. In addition to his son Grant, he is survived by three other sons, Alan, Craig and Drew, and two grandchildren.Grant Peterson said that since his father’s death he had been going through his papers and had been astonished at his productivity — not just his roughly 80 finished compositions, but the countless fragments.“There’s the stuff that’s bound and finished and published,” he said, “but mixed in with that is the chicken-scratch on yellow tablets. The guy was a music machine.” More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Renée Fleming Was Back Onstage. Here’s What Happened First.

      by

      To pull together a 85-minute indoor concert at the Shed with the opera star and three musicians, everything had to go according to plan.The soprano Renée Fleming sauntered onstage in a shimmering long-sleeve gown, perched on a chair and started to sing.For a renowned performer decades into her career, it might have been an uneventful Wednesday evening at the Shed, the expansive performance space in Hudson Yards. But after 13 months in a pandemic, a sea of faces was a novel sight for the opera star and the trio accompanying her.“Wow, applause!” she remarked after finishing the meditative opening number. “Very exciting.”Exciting, indeed — and no mean feat to pull off.After the Shed and other flexible New York performance spaces lobbied to let audiences in, it got the go-ahead to open its doors for a live event on April 2, after 386 days of shutdown. Fleming’s April 21 show there, before a limited audience, was the fourth performance in a series co-sponsored by NY PopsUp, a public-private program aimed at reviving the arts.While the 85-minute show — a mix of classical, jazz and popular music — went off without a hitch, it demonstrated that mounting indoor events in New York at this stage of the pandemic will still be time-consuming, unpredictable and expensive.To get Fleming and the musicians onstage involved dozens of hours of careful planning; hundreds of dollars in safety equipment like plastic face shields and hand sanitizer; and nearly $2,500 in coronavirus tests. All this for drastically reduced ticket revenue.And while she may have been the headliner, pulling the show off took a large cast of behind-the-scenes figures, some of whom hadn’t worked regularly in the building for months.Monday: Two days to showtimeIn normal times, the staff in a preshow morning production meeting might be discussing last-minute program changes or the status of ticket sales.On April 19, it was where and when Renée Fleming would get her rapid Covid tests.She would arrive to rehearse at 1:30 p.m. the next day, the staff was told, and head to the sixth floor to the smaller Kenneth C. Griffin Theater, where her dressing room was located. There, she would meet a medical technician who would administer a nasal swab.There would be no servers bringing the talent tea, coffee or food, per health department edict.“We do the barest minimum,” said Laura Aswad, the Shed’s producer, noting that Fleming, who had acted in a play during the Shed’s opening season, wouldn’t be left completely untended: Bottled water, tea bags and a kettle would be in her dressing room.Alex Poots, the Shed’s chief executive, had one big announcement to share with the staff. The venue had not received state permission to expand the size of the audience. In the days leading up to the concert, the Shed had asked to double capacity from 150 to 300, which would still only be a fraction of the roughly 1,200 people the McCourt, its largest performance space, can seat.But the state had essentially told them: Not so fast.The concert had sold out in two hours. Audience members who did secure tickets had already received the first of four emails explaining the coronavirus protocols they would need to follow.Gone was the chance to rush to a concert after work and plop down into your seat as the curtain rose. Before they entered the Shed, concertgoers would need to check one of three boxes: show proof of full vaccination; demonstrate a negative PCR test taken within 72 hours of the event; or have taken a rapid antigen test, which is less reliable, within six hours of showtime.This was such a jumble of rules and dates that the front-of-house staff would be provided printed cheat sheets for the day of the show.Shed employees check vaccination certificates from audience members before admitting them to the show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTuesday: One day to showtimeThe guitarist Bill Frisell was surrounded by piles of sheet music — some Handel, some Stephen Foster — laid out on the dining room table and the living room floor of his Brooklyn home. He was writing out his parts in pencil, referencing a list of songs that Fleming had sent to him, the bassist Christian McBride, and the pianist Dan Tepfer.Pandemic restrictions meant only one in-person rehearsal before the day of the show, and Frisell was in study mode. He had played alongside Fleming before — they had recorded an album in 2005 — but never alongside Tepfer or McBride.“It adds a level of stress to the event, no question,” Fleming said. “We still have a lot to figure out in terms of how we’re arranging everything.”As Frisell was reviewing the sheet music to Cole Porter’s “Down in the Depths (on the Ninetieth Floor),” Fleming was up on East 57th Street, visiting her longtime hair stylist, Michael Stinchcomb, at Vartali Salon.Stinchcomb has been an avid fan since the 1990s and first met Fleming backstage at Carnegie Hall. He’s been doing her hair for more than two decades, often traveling around the world when she performs.But last winter Fleming moved from New York to Virginia, and the pandemic had prevented her from visiting Stinchcomb until the day before her Shed performance.“She was so happy to come in,” Stinchcomb said. “She’s a woman who likes to look good.”Later that afternoon, Fleming arrived at the Shed for a three-hour rehearsal, where she and the musicians discussed harmonies, tempos and spots for improvised solos.“A full rehearsal the day before a show?” McBride said. “That’s a lot in the jazz world.”José Rivera, left, and Steven Quinones place clusters of seats more than 6 feet apart.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWednesday: 11 hours to showtimeJosé Rivera pointed at the space between two clusters of seats. “From here to here, it’s 6-foot 4,” he announced, bending to scrutinize his yellow tape measure. “From here to here is 6-foot 1.”That made the grade: According to state rules, the distance between audience members had to be over six feet.He and another facilities employee, Steven Quinones, had been arranging the chairs for some two hours, ensuring that the setup matched a detailed paper diagram.“And see, this is the big aisle that people walk through, so it’s 9 feet, 5 inches,” Rivera continued, raising his voice to be heard over the whirring of a third colleague zooming around the room on an industrial floor scrubber.Five floors up, Josh Phagoo, an operations engineer, checked up on one of the Shed’s most important technologies for Covid safety: the HVAC system. Massive air handlers and chillers in the building’s engine room whirred constantly as Phagoo made sure the machines that keep the air at roughly 70 degrees Fahrenheit and the humidity at 50 percent were functional.On the stage itself, the first piano notes of the day were vibrating through the air, up to the McCourt’s 115-foot ceiling.Stephen Eriksson had arrived at 11 a.m. to tune the gleaming Steinway grand piano. While he said his business had disappeared for the first four months of the pandemic, now he is busier than ever.For nearly 30 minutes, he used a tuning wrench to make sure that the piano was concert ready. Afterward, he played a bit of Debussy and “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”“That’s a bit of pure indulgence,” he said.Stephen Eriksson tuning the grand piano on the day of the performance.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWednesday: Three hours to showtimeWithin 15 minutes after arriving at the Shed, Fleming — who was scheduled for her second vaccine in New York the morning after the show — got the rapid Covid test in her dressing room. Negative.Afterward, she rehearsed onstage with the musicians, their instruments positioned more than six feet apart from one another, while an audio crew member in a mask and a face shield flitted around them, making sure everything was working properly.The six-person crew working the show was slightly smaller than usual, according to Pope Jackson, the Shed’s production manager. Everywhere they went, they brought along what Jackson referred to as a “Covid cart,” which contained a stock of masks, gloves, sanitation supplies and brown paper bags, which the musicians’ union requires so that players have a clean place to put their masks while they perform.Downstairs, a staff of eight security guards had their nostrils swabbed to make sure that they tested negative.Richard Reid, who works security, getting a rapid Covid test before the show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFleming and the musicians had been doing virtual and outdoor concerts throughout the pandemic, but the security staff was filled with people whose careers had been even more upended.Allen Pestana, 21, has been unemployed for more than a year after being let go from working security at Yankee Stadium; Duwanna Alford, 53, saw her hours cut at a church in Morningside Heights; Richard Reid, 33, had worked in April 2020 as a security guard at a field hospital in Manhattan, where he had tried to forget his health fears and focus on the hazard pay he was receiving.This was the moment before a concert where the theater was alive with preparation and nerves — a bustle missing in the city during the first year of the pandemic.“It’s like doing the electric slide, the moonwalk and the bachata all at once,” Jackson said of the minutes before showtime. “But when the lights go up, it all fades away.”The masked audience applauding at the end of the 85-minute concert.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesShowtimeThe front-of-house staff had only 20 minutes to review the audience members’ IDs and Covid-related documents; take their temperatures; and show them to their seats.Icy gusts of wind just outside the doors weren’t making things any easier.But by 8:05 p.m., 150 people had settled into their precisely placed seats, able to snap a photo of the QR code on the arms of the chairs to see the concert program.In between performances of the jazz classic “Donna Lee” and “Touch the Hand of Love,” which Fleming had once recorded with Yo-Yo Ma, the artists chatted onstage about what they’d been doing with their lives for the past 13 months.“Wishing this pandemic would be over,” McBride said.Tepfer said he had been improving a technological tool that made it easier for musicians to play in unison over the internet — a tool that he and Fleming had used to rehearse together virtually.Frisell had not performed for an indoor audience since the beginning of the pandemic. “This is such a blessing,” he said.The show ended with a standing ovation, and then the musicians played an encore: “Hard Times” by Stephen Foster, which Fleming described as a song that tends to resonate in times of crisis.“Hard times,” she sang, “come again no more.” More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Christa Ludwig, Mezzo-Soprano of Velvety Hues, Is Dead at 93

      by

      She was a beloved interpreter of Strauss, Mozart and Wagner roles, but equally admired for her rendition of art songs.Christa Ludwig, who poured a lustrous voice into dramatically taut performances of opera roles — especially those of Mozart, Strauss and Wagner — and intimately rendered art songs as one of the premier mezzo-sopranos of the second half of the 20th century, died on Saturday at her home in Klosterneuburg, Austria. She was 93.Her death was confirmed by her son, Wolfgang Berry.Ms. Ludwig commanded a broad range of the great mezzo-soprano parts, including Dorabella in Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte,” Cherubino in his “Le Nozze di Figaro,” Octavian in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” Bizet’s Carmen and numerous Wagner roles. Often, critics were reduced to calling her the greatest mezzo-soprano of her time.But like many mezzos, Ms. Ludwig strove to lay claim to higher-voiced — and higher-profile — soprano roles. So she took on, most successfully in that category, characters including the Marschallin in “Der Rosenkavalier,” the Dyer’s Wife in “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” and Leonore in Beethoven’s “Fidelio.”She was an equal master of the intimate song — especially the works of Brahms, Mahler and Schubert. Her artistry put her in the pantheon of postwar lieder singers that included Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Elly Ameling and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.Ms. Ludwig made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Cherubino (a trouser role, a type she said was not her favorite) in 1959, took on Octavian and Amneris in Verdi’s “Aida” at the house that year as well and sang regularly at the Met until the end of her career.Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, left, and Ms.  Ludwig in a recording studio in 1962. Both were renowned lieder singers.Erich Auerbach/Hulton Archive/Getty Images,She was associated for decades with the Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival, and worked especially closely with the conductors Karl Böhm, Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan.Ms. Ludwig rose from straitened origins in a shattered wartime Germany to the height of the singing world, aided by a sense of discipline instilled by her strong-willed mother — her only real teacher and a constant presence throughout her career.She also displayed traits of the pampered diva, with a preference for elegant gowns and opulent hotel suites (partly inspired by the hardships of her youth), fanatical attention to any hint of illness and the state of her vocal cords, and reverential fans who followed her from house to house. On performance days, she would communicate with whistles or by writing on a pad.But onstage, Ms. Ludwig brought a striking combination of acting ability, charisma and vocal beauty. Her voice had range and power, a security through all the registers and a broad array of colors.“Her unmistakable, deep-purple timbre envelops the listener in a velvet cloak,” Roger Pines wrote in Opera News in 2018, reviewing her collected recordings. “She excelled equally in intimate, legato-oriented lieder and the largest-scale operatic repertoire, where her sound expanded with glorious brilliance.”Critics often took note of her wit and comic deftness, and a personality that could fill a hall even when she sang softly. “Her presence on the Met stage was a synthesis of the dramatic arts all by itself — her voice, her wonderfully natural diction and her shadings of facial expression and gesture all conspiring to express with great emotional breadth the singular message of this singular music,” The New York Times critic Bernard Holland wrote of a “Winterreise” performance in 1983. Ms. Ludwig sang that searing Schubert song cycle some 72 times, even though it was composed for a male voice.Ms. Ludwig in 1963. She favored elegant gowns and opulent hotel suites and paid fanatical attention to the state of her vocal cords.Harry Croner/ullstein bild via Getty ImagesMs. Ludwig was born on March 16, 1928, in Berlin. Her parents lived in Aachen in western Germany, but her mother, Eugenie Besalla-Ludwig, wanted the child to be born in her family home in the capital.In Aachen, Christa’s Viennese father, Anton Ludwig, a former tenor who had sung with Enrico Caruso at the old Met, was the opera house stage director and manager; her mother sang in the company, and performed several roles under an up-and-coming conductor named Herbert von Karajan. Christa saw those performances and many others. “I practically lived in the theater,” she said in her 1993 memoir, later published in English under the title “In My Own Words.”Her mother gave her singing lessons as a girl and remained her lifelong coach, going to her rehearsals and performances and living most of her life with Ms. Ludwig. “I really owe everything to her,” she said. But Ms. Ludwig also described her mother as an inflexible and sometimes suffocating presence who dominated her life before she felt able to cut ties only at age 60.During the war, a half brother was killed on the Eastern front. Food was rationed and Christa was sent to work on a farm. The family’s home and belongings in Giessen, where Mr. Ludwig had become director of the municipal theater, were destroyed in an Allied bombing raid, leaving them homeless. With the arrival of American troops, Ms. Ludwig recounted in her memoir, she and her parents were assigned an abandoned apartment with a piano that had been used as a toilet.Christa’s mother gave voice lessons. “Studying singing was a wonderful way to forget the wretched way we lived, the ruins, the still-smoldering coal cellars, and the stink of ashes,” Ms. Ludwig wrote.The young singer soon found work singing popular tunes at the American officers club, wearing a dress she had made from a Nazi flag. She was paid in cigarettes and stole whatever food she could. Once her father, who had been a member of the Nazi party, was denazified, he was given back his job and organized variety shows around town in which his daughter was featured.Ms. Ludwig received her first major contract in 1946, at the Frankfurt Opera, and made her stage debut as Prince Orlofsky in “Die Fledermaus.” Her mother, recently divorced from her father, moved in with her in the city in an unheated room, and they began daily lessons.Along with her opera work, she sang many concerts of contemporary music amid a wave of creative freedom unleashed by the fall of the Reich. “I was cheap,” she told The Guardian in 2004. “I learned things easily and I had a good voice.” It was a shrewd move: Critics got to know her before she became famous.Ms. Ludwig as Fidelio (Leonore) in the first act of the Beethoven opera “Fidelio” at the Salzburg Festival in August 1968.Gerhard Rauchwetter/picture alliance via Getty ImagesStints in the opera houses of Darmstadt and Hanover followed, until she was summoned to audition for Mr. Böhm, the director of the Vienna State Opera. He took her on in 1955, and she quickly became a mainstay. Engagements at the world’s major opera houses followed. She met the bass-baritone Walter Berry at the Vienna opera in 1957 when they were cast in “Le Nozze di Figaro.” They married three months later and had a son, Wolfgang, who survives her, along with a grandson and a stepson, Philippe Deiber. The couple frequently appeared together in operas and joint recitals. In interviews, Ms. Ludwig said they felt occasional rivalry and were at odds in preparing for performances (she needed quiet, he less so; he liked small hotel rooms and she liked large suites).The couple divorced in 1970, though they continued to perform together. (Mr. Berry died in 2000.)Soon after her divorce, Ms. Ludwig met the actor and stage director Paul-Emile Deiber while he was preparing a production of Massenet’s “Werther” at the Met, and they married in 1972. He died in 2011.Ms. Ludwig came of age at the dawn of the postwar golden era of recordings, and her LP legacy is vast, from a 1961 “Norma” with Maria Callas to a 1962 “St. Matthew Passion” conducted by Otto Klemperer, to two complete and classic Wagner “Ring” cycles. She appears on five “Rosenkavalier” recordings, including a beloved rendition with Ms. Schwarzkopf, conducted by Mr. von Karajan.In the realm of song, critics took note of her sensitivity, smooth lines, intimacy, control and mastery of the text. “She is perhaps the reigning feminine expert at making us feel good about lonely teardrops and thwarted bliss,” The Times critic Donal Henahan wrote in 1979.Despite the care that she took with her voice, Ms. Ludwig suffered damage to her vocal cords in the early 1970s that forced her to cancel numerous performances, and even parts of whole seasons. She recovered but cut back on opera appearances. She gave a series of farewell performances in the 1993-1994 season before retiring.A few years after her vocal crisis, Ms. Ludwig made clear the pragmatic view she had about a singer’s voice.“It’s like a raw egg,” she once said. “Once it’s kaputt, it’s kaputt.” More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Gustavo Dudamel, Superstar Conductor, Will Lead Paris Opera

      by

      In a coup, the venerable company has hired as its next music director the rare classical artist to have crossed into pop-culture celebrity.When Alexander Neef was named the next director of the mighty Paris Opera in 2019, he did not have a particular candidate in mind to succeed the company’s music director, who was leaving after a decade. “I felt I should consult with the musicians,” Neef said by phone recently, “and see who for them, what for them, how for them the future looked like.”One surprising name kept coming up in those conversations: the superstar conductor Gustavo Dudamel, the musical leader of the Los Angeles Philharmonic since 2009 and the rare classical artist to have crossed into pop-culture celebrity.He had made his Paris debut in 2017, with “La Bohème,” and hit it off. “I felt this connection with the house, the musicians, the choir, with the whole team,” Dudamel recalled in an interview on Thursday at the company’s ornate Palais Garnier theater. “I was here for one month and a half and I was feeling like I was at home.”Yet it still seemed an unlikely marriage, given Dudamel’s packed schedule and the fact that, even if that “Bohème” was a success, it had still been his only engagement with the company. Indeed, while he has dipped his toe into the operatic repertory in Los Angeles, at the Metropolitan Opera and elsewhere, he has been largely known as a symphonic conductor.“But I thought,” Neef recalled, “why not ask?”That ask eventually resulted in a coup for the company, which announced on Friday morning that Dudamel would be its next music director, starting in August for an initial term of six years, overlapping for much of that period with the Los Angeles position, where his current contract runs through the 2025-26 season.The appointment marks a turning point in the heady career of an artist who made his name as a wunderkind with orchestras in North and South America and is now, at 40, taking the reins at one of Europe’s most venerable opera companies, founded in 1669 as the Académie d’Opéra by Louis XIV.Dudamel said he had not required much convincing when Neef offered him the permanent position.“It’s a big and beautiful responsibility,” he said.Dudamel in the Palais Garnier, one of the Paris Opera’s theaters, on April 15. “I have been developing my opera career in the way that I wanted to,” Dudamel said. “I took my time.”Julien MignotDudamel — who was born in Venezuela in 1981 and was trained there by El Sistema, the free government-subsidized program that teaches music to children, including some in its poorest areas — occupies a unique position in music. He is sought by leading orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic and Vienna Philharmonic. But he also appeared in a Super Bowl halftime show; was the classical icon Trollzart in the animated film “Trolls World Tour”; is conductor of the score for Steven Spielberg’s upcoming film version of “West Side Story”; and inspired a messy-haired main character in the Amazon series “Mozart in the Jungle.” In 2019 he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.His renown will surely be a shot in the arm for the Paris Opera, which like other arts organizations is warily eyeing the need to reintroduce itself to its core audience after the long closures of the pandemic, at the same time as it aims to capture new operagoers. Handsomely subsidized by the French government, the company has expanded its audience in recent years, but still faces the pressure of roiling debates about racial representation and the relevance of expensive-to-produce classical art forms.“Our future is not validated by our history,” Neef said. “This Covid crisis has put us in a pressure cooker and reinforced and amplified the need to give people real artistic reasons for why we need to exist, why this has value.”He added that Dudamel was “already a very credible ambassador for that. What he’s done successfully is, he’s broken down barriers.”It is no longer the norm — especially outside German-speaking countries — for opera music directors to start as pianists and singer coaches and work their way up through the ranks, as Philippe Jordan, 46, Dudamel’s predecessor in Paris, did. While Dudamel lacks that upbringing in the nuances and logistical complexities of the art form, and his operatic appearances have been sporadic, he is not unknown at major houses. He made his Teatro alla Scala debut in 2006, when he was in his mid-20s, and had his first appearance with the Berlin State Opera the following year. He first conducted at the Vienna State Opera in 2016, and at the Met in 2018, with Verdi’s “Otello”; on Wednesday he finished a run of “Otello” in Barcelona.“I have been developing my opera career in the way that I wanted to do, and I feel very good about that,” he said. “I took my time.”Neef pointed out that Yannick Nézet-Séguin, 46, the Met’s music director since 2018, did not start there with an enormous repertory, either. “The question is not about quantity,” Neef said. “And these things are a little bit deceptive: When you look at the list of operas Gustavo has conducted, it’s from Mozart to John Adams. He’s been conducting opera as long as he’s been conducting symphonic music.”Asked which works he is most looking forward to tackling, Dudamel replied, “Everything.” In Paris this fall he is scheduled to conduct Puccini’s “Turandot” and Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.” In addition to mainstream repertory, he said he hoped to work with living composers from Europe as well as North and South America, including Adams, Thomas Adès and Gabriela Ortiz.He added that he is keen to conduct the Paris Opera Ballet, the company’s in-house dance company. Dudamel said his mentor, José Antonio Abreu, the founder of El Sistema, often took him to the ballet to learn about conducting.“It was part of my education,” he said. “Even for my way of seeing the music.”His appointment will involve significant travel between Paris and Los Angeles, but his commitment to the Philharmonic is one Dudamel said he has no intention of curtailing. “I will share my time between the two families,” he said.Chad Smith, the chief executive of the Philharmonic, said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, “With Paris as a place where Dudamel can delve more deeply into opera, it creates a perfect balance with his orchestral home in L.A.”What he will cut back on is guest conducting, a process he said he started a few years ago in order to shift his focus to longer-term projects.“The way we’re going to organize it is the way he works in L.A., too,” Neef said. “Long periods that hang together, rather than a lot of travel.”Neef added that Dudamel would be a charismatic and visible link between the company’s main stage productions and its educational endeavors. In Los Angeles, Dudamel has contributed to the Philharmonic’s robust educational outreach, especially the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, a program inspired by El Sistema that was founded in 2007.He also continues to also hold the post of music director of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, but after he criticized the Venezuelan government in 2017, the country canceled his planned international tour with that ensemble. While he has not been able to perform with the Simón Bolívar since then, he still works with it remotely and has sometimes met outside Venezuela with groups of its players; during the pandemic he has had sessions with them over Zoom.His appointment comes two months after the release of a report on discrimination and diversity at the Paris Opera. The report focused on changes to the repertory, school admissions process and racial and ethnic makeup of the ballet company. At the same time, opera companies around the world have been called on to make their staffs, artists and productions more representative.Dudamel said in the interview that he would press for that conversation to continue at the Paris Opera over the long term. “Sometimes we pretend to do changes,” he said, snapping his fingers to indicate overly fast decisions. “In that way, you cannot develop something that is strong for the future.”Neef said that alongside Ching-Lien Wu, the company’s recently appointed (and first female) chorus master, Dudamel’s hiring was part of an effort to change the face of the company’s executive ranks and how it thinks about diversity and equity.“It’s already what he lives and who he has been in L.A. and other places,” Neef said. “I think there’s great opportunity to be gained from that experience for us, to have someone with that experience at the table at the highest level.”The next step is for Dudamel to learn French. “I’m starting!” he said, before adding, “I’m very bad with languages.”One carrot will be the opportunity to finally read one of his favorite books — Rousseau’s “Confessions,” which he discovered as a teenager and brings with him everywhere — in the original. “I will try,” Dudamel said, smiling. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Gustavo Dudamel, superestrella de la música clásica, dirigirá la Ópera de París

      by

      En una jugada maestra, la venerable compañía ha contratado como su próximo director musical al excepcional artista clásico que también ha conquistado la fama en la cultura popular.En un golpe maestro de la venerable Ópera de París, fundada en 1669 por Luis XIV, la compañía anunció el viernes que el conductor superestrella Gustavo Dudamel será su próximo director musical.Dudamel, líder musical de la Filarmónica de Los Ángeles desde 2009 e inusual artista clásico que ha cosechado un estatus de celebridad de la cultura pop, solo ha dirigido una única producción en París: La Bohème en 2017. Y, aunque en Los Ángeles ha jugueteado con el repertorio operístico, tanto en la Ópera Metropolitana como en otros escenarios, es más conocido como conductor sinfónico.Pero para quienes han seguido de cerca el ascenso constante de Dudamel en los últimos 15 años, no será sorpresa otro gran nombramiento. El nuevo puesto es un hito en la magnífica carrera de un artista que se hizo renombre como niño prodigio con las orquestas en Norte y Sudamérica y que ahora, a los 40 años, tomará las riendas de una de las compañías de ópera más antiguas de Europa. Ocupará el cargo a partir de agosto, en principio por seis años, superpuestos en gran parte con su trabajo en Los Ángeles, donde su contrato actual llega hasta la temporada 2025-26.Dudamel —nacido en Venezuela en 1981 y formado ahí por El Sistema, el programa gratuito subsidiado por el gobierno que enseña música a los niños en las zonas más pobres— ocupa una posición única en el mundo de la música. Lo asedian las principales orquestas, entre ellas la Filarmónica de Berlín y la Filarmónica de Viena.Pero también ha actuado en un espectáculo de medio tiempo del Súper Bowl, apareció como Trollzart en el filme animado Trolls Gira Mundial, dirige la música en la próxima versión fílmica de Steven Spielberg de West Side Story e inspiró un personaje desmelenado en la serie de Amazon Mozart en la Jungla. En 2019 recibió una estrella en el Paseo de la Fama de Hollywood.Sin duda, su renombre será una inyección de energía para la Ópera de París que, como otras organizaciones artísticas, contempla cautelosamente volver a presentarse ante su audiencia tradicional tras el largo cierre pandémico al tiempo que busca captar nuevos asistentes. Con un generoso subsidio del gobierno francés, la compañía —cuyo director Alexander Neef, asumió el cargo el otoño pasado— ha expandido su audiencia en los últimos años, pero aún enfrenta la presión de los agitados debates sobre la representación racial y la relevancia de las costosas formas artísticas clásicas.Ya no se acostumbra —especialmente fuera de los países germanohablantes— que los directores musicales de ópera inicien como pianistas y entrenadores de voz y asciendan el escalafón de la compañía, tal como hizo el antecesor de Dudamel en París, Philippe Jordan, de 46 años. Aunque Dudamel no cuenta con esa preparación, no es un desconocido para las principales casas operísticas. Debutó en la Scala en Milán en 2006, cuando tenía veintitantos años y al año siguiente se presentó en la Ópera Estatal de Berlín. Su primera actuación en la Ópera del Estado de Viena fue en 2016 y en la Met en 2018 con Otello de Verdi. El miércoles concluyó una temporada con Otello en Barcelona.Durante su trabajo en Los Ángeles, ha contribuido al sólido programa educativo de compromiso con la comunidad, en especial con la Orquesta Juvenil de Los Ángeles, un programa inspirado en El Sistema que se fundó en 2007. También sigue ocupando el cargo de director musical de la Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar, pero después de criticar al gobierno de Venezuela en 2017, el gobierno canceló la gira internacional que estaba programada. A pesar de que no ha podido actuar con la Simón Bolívar desde entonces, aún trabaja de forma remota con la agrupación y, en ocasiones, se ha reunido fuera de Venezuela con grupos de sus integrantes.El nombramiento de Dudamel sucede dos meses después de que se dio a conocer un reporte sobre la discriminación y la diversidad en la Ópera de París, enfocado en los cambios al repertorio, el proceso de admisión de la escuela y la composición racial y étnica de su compañía interna de ballet.Pero alrededor del mundo, las compañías de ópera también han sido llamadas a diversificar su personal, elenco artístico y repertorios. Junto con Ching-Lien Wu, la recién nombrada maestra del coro de la Ópera de París, la contratación de Dudamel forma parte de un esfuerzo por cambiar el rostro de las filas ejecutivas de la compañía y su enfoque hacia la diversidad y la igualdad.Zachary Woolfe ha sido el editor de música clásica desde 2015. Antes fue crítico de la ópera en The New York Observer. @zwoolfe More