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      Boston Symphony Orchestra Names First Woman Chief Executive

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBoston Symphony Orchestra Names First Woman Chief ExecutiveGail Samuel spent nearly three decades at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, part of a management team that helped make it the envy of the orchestra world.“There is no other orchestra in the world that I would have left to be part of,” Gail Samuel said of leaving the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the Boston Symphony Orchestra.Credit…Emily Berl for The New York TimesFeb. 18, 2021, 9:30 a.m. ETThe Boston Symphony Orchestra announced Thursday that Gail Samuel, the chief operating officer of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, would become its next chief executive, making her the first woman to lead the institution in its 140-year history.In picking her, the orchestra looked west, to one of the most successful American orchestras of recent years, for its choice to succeed Mark Volpe, who led the Boston Symphony for 23 years. Samuel will be responsible for steering the organization out of one of its most dire crises: The pandemic has left the Boston Symphony, one of the nation’s wealthiest orchestras, struggling after months of lost revenues and deep uncertainty around when live audiences will return.Samuel will become Boston’s president and chief executive in June. By the time she leaves Los Angeles, she will have worked at the Philharmonic for nearly three decades. She said in an interview she had not imagined leaving Los Angeles until she started having conversations with the Boston Symphony.“There is no other orchestra in the world that I would have left to be part of,” Samuel said in an interview. The company is exceptional for its breadth of activities, she said, which include the core symphony orchestra; the Boston Pops, its lighter alter ego; and Tanglewood, its thriving summer music festival in the Berkshires.Samuel was part of the management team that helped make the Los Angeles Philharmonic the envy of the classical music world. She was named the orchestra’s acting president and chief executive when Deborah Borda, its longtime leader, took a brief sabbatical in 2015 to teach at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and she was given the acting position again after Borda left to take over the New York Philharmonic. Samuel had hoped to succeed Borda, but the Philharmonic’s board went outside the organization, choosing Simon Woods, who had led the Seattle Symphony. (When he stepped down in 2019 after less than two years in the post, the Philharmonic elevated Chad Smith, who had been its chief operating officer.)She is also president of the Hollywood Bowl, the band shell that serves as the Philharmonic’s lucrative summer home, supplying much of its revenue.Samuel grew up in Los Angeles in a musical family; her parents were public school music teachers, and the violin became her instrument of choice. She studied music and psychology at the University of Southern California, where she later got an M.B.A.Although she spent the vast majority of her career on the West Coast, Samuel has a strong connection to Tanglewood. She remembers stopping there on a family road trip in 1986 and seeing a concert conducted by Leonard Bernstein. That concert became famous when the violinist Midori, then 14 years old, had to swap instruments twice after the E string broke on her violin, then again on the borrowed violin.“I fell in love with that place,” Samuel said. She soon sought a way to return, and found her way back there one summer as a student, and two summers as a staff member.In Boston, Volpe leaves behind a legacy of financial stability, despite the struggles of the classical music industry, and artistic evolution. During his tenure the orchestra’s endowment — the largest in the classical music field — more than tripled, to $509 million. Its music director, Andris Nelsons, is among the most sought-after in the world.But when the orchestra returns to performing live in the concert hall, it will be in a different world: The musicians there have already agreed to steep pay cuts that will only revert to normal if the orchestra meets financial benchmarks.“This is a difficult time for everyone and I think every organization is going to be thinking about how to come out of this,” Samuel said. “It’s a long path, but there’s also an opportunity to think about things differently.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The Thrill of a Contemporary Classical Concert, Captured on Disc

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookThe Thrill of a Contemporary Classical Concert, Captured on DiscWith live performances still largely shut down, the group Klangforum Wien has released a five-album set of solos and premieres.Members of Klangforum Wien at the Vienna University of Economics and Business in 2019.Credit…Tina HerzlFeb. 17, 2021, 12:33 p.m. ETIt’s easy to focus on large institutions when bemoaning the loss of classical music in New York during the pandemic; their concerts were big-ticket items, planned (and planned for) far in advance. Yet the charm of cultural life in this city has often been found in evenings that came together on a shorter timeline, and at smaller venues.I remembered this while listening to five new albums recently released on the Kairos label — all featuring members of Klangforum Wien, an Austrian chamber orchestra with a strong reputation in contemporary classical music.They’re the kind of group you could find, before the pandemic, playing a free concert in the small recital hall at the Austrian Cultural Forum in Midtown. You might R.S.V.P. a couple of hours before the performance, where sterling renditions of rarely heard repertoire would lend a vivid, unexpected charge to the evening. Existing somewhere between the informality of the pop-up concert and the pomp of the major symphonic or operatic showcase, these are sorely missed, too.In some ways, though, a similar experience is possible with these new recordings, which are centered on individual composers — Olga Neuwirth, Toshio Hosokawa, Rebecca Saunders, Salvatore Sciarrino and Georges Aperghis — and their works for soloists. The albums, recorded last summer and each featuring a premiere commissioned by the ensemble, feel like experimental-business-as-usual, executed at a typically high level; the players sequence vistas of extremity and alarm next to furtive glimpses of more traditional instrumental beauty. Few listeners will thrill to every single piece. But that’s normal, even useful. (Remember risk-taking? The cultural kind, not the taking-your-life-in-your-hands-to-buy-groceries kind?)A chancy overall approach helps the programming of the five albums resonate. Each comes with the subtitle “Solo,” Klangforum’s only reminder of the limitations put on pandemic recording practices. Otherwise, they all offer a welcome release from recent productions that promise good-enough amiability for the moment. Even if you’re unfamiliar with these composers, you can get started with the tracks below.Olga Neuwirth: ‘Magic Flu-idity’It’s a little bit of a cheat to call “Magic Flu-idity” a solo. This work for flute — heard in New York, when Claire Chase played it as part of her “Density 2036” project in 2019 — requires a percussionist to join in, on an Olivetti typewriter. (On Klangforum’s release, that percussionist is Lukas Schiske, joining the flutist Vera Fischer).Still, Neuwirth earns the extra instrumental voice. The typewriter’s punchy carriage return — and its associated pinging sound — has a way of punctuating the end of barreling motifs in the flute writing. There’s a wit in these moments that leavens some of the aggression found elsewhere. It’s a balance Neuwirth has also struck in her “Lost Highway Suite.”If you find yourself won over by “Magic Flu-idity,” make time for the first track on the album: “CoronAtion I: io son ferito ahimè” (2020), a work for percussion and sampled audio commissioned by the group.Toshio Hosokawa: ‘Falling Cherry Blossoms’Hosokawa emphasizes his interest in Western experimentalism, traditional Japanese musical forms, as well as in calligraphy — which he has used as a metaphor for his own compositional approach. The first of his “2 Japanese Folk Songs” for harp, written in 2003, contains peculiar timbres and percussive fillips. But it also features a transporting melodic gracefulness, particularly in Virginie Tarrête’s recording.His diverse reference points are also identifiable in other works on the album. A piano solo, “‘Haiku’ for Pierre Boulez” contains the sort of heady modernism that its dedicatee specialized in; yet it also has a Zen-inflected calm — what the ensemble’s liner notes describe as “an almost ego-less ‘Path of Awareness’” — that is rare in Boulez’s body of work.Rebecca Saunders: ‘Dust’A mysterious play with texture and spare melodic materials form the core of Saunders’s aesthetic; just listen to the recent release of her orchestral works in the Musica Viva series (one of my favorite albums of 2020). Klangforum’s tour of her writing for solo instruments is not as consistently thrilling. Though played well by the pianist Florian Müller, Saunders’s “Shadow,” from 2013, seems less distinctive than the composer’s best pieces — its rapid changes in dynamics familiar from vintage experimental trends.But other entries in this solo set deliver. One is “Dust,” a percussion piece performed here by Björn Wilker. Saunders’s imagination is well represented within the work’s wealth of sonic effects. The movement between uneasy, wobbling tones and steadier, more mournful harmonies for pitched percussion elements is both persuasive and ravishing. And the album’s closing work — another piano solo, commissioned by Klangforum and performed by Joonas Ahonen — shows a composer fully in command of her voice. (That solo, titled “to an utterance — study,” may whet appetites for her larger piano concerto of the same name, set to premiere later this year.)Salvatore Sciarrino: ‘Due notturni: I’Sciarrino is perhaps the best-known composer represented in this Klangforum set, but the album devoted to his solos still contains surprises. The leadoff pair of nocturnes, composed in 1998, have a relaxed air, particularly when compared with the more harried “Notturni crudeli” piano solos. Another highlight is “Canzona di ringraziamento,” a quivering and arresting “mutation” for alto saxophone.Georges Aperghis: ‘Lopsided Sob’Save the most dramatic, intense album in the “Solo” series for the end. Aperghis’s experimental sound world is famously theatrical; and “Lopsided Sob,” a 2015 piece for accordion, shows that he was losing none of his febrile flair as he approached age 70.There’s a gamboling quality in the dense first figures. The drama increases, paradoxically, as the music transitions into quieter dynamics. Will the opening aggression return? While you wait to find out, the coexistence of Aperghis’s dissonant harmonies and the effervescence embedded in Krassimir Sterev’s performance produces a pleasingly dizzying effect.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      A Young Pianist Learns Liszt From Listening

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA Young Pianist Learns Liszt From ListeningFor his new album, Benjamin Grosvenor delved into historical recordings of the daunting Sonata in B minor.“This is music that’s probably not supposed to be played cleanly,” Benjamin Grosvenor said of Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor, the centerpiece of his new album.Credit…Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesFeb. 15, 2021How do the great musicians prepare to play the great works? Each has his or her own methods, and tends to keep the strategy quiet, a secret key to success.One thing that distinguishes the subtle Benjamin Grosvenor, 28, from the rest of the pack of young star pianists is his extensive knowledge of historical recordings. This listening has paid off in a spellbinding Liszt recording out on Decca on Friday, crowned with a typically thoughtful account of the treacherous Sonata in B minor.“I almost feel like you should know the notable recordings of a work like this,” Grosvenor said of the sonata in a recent interview. “More than anything, it helps you understand what works and what doesn’t work. You react to some things positively and you react to some things negatively, and that fuels your imagination.”Close listening brought out the enormous range of possibilities in a work that presents an intellectual challenge of interpretation as much as a punishing test of technique. The piece is a Faustian struggle between the diabolical and the divine; the question is how to make it cohere over more than 30 minutes.“You react to some things positively and you react to some things negatively,” Grosvenor said, “and that fuels your imagination.”Credit…Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesThere is no single answer. The example of Radu Lupu points in one direction. “It has this great inevitability about it,” Grosvenor said of Lupu’s interpretation. “In terms of the way he controls the pulse it’s quite symphonic, and also in the kinds of sounds he produces.”Shura Cherkassky, a figure beloved of pianophiles whose impulsive, visionary performances were so idiosyncratic that Grosvenor said he would never dare imitate them, offers something else in a live recording from 1965. “Sometimes it feels kind of improvisatory and sometimes he doesn’t quite do what’s written in the score,” Grosvenor said. “But he somehow makes this miracle of his own unique narrative from it.”Perils lurk whichever way a pianist turns. “The danger in pursuing this symphonic, quite rigid, controlled outlook is that it could quite easily become something more of an academic exercise than the fantastical piece that it is,” Grosvenor said. “And obviously if you go along the Cherkassky route, you could make it sound like something that doesn’t make much sense.”If Grosvenor successfully traces a course between those extremes, he also takes inspiration from how his forebears have resolved the many difficulties in a work of this scale. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What do you think about the opening bars of the sonata, which are so spare compared to what follows?It’s foreboding, and mysterious, and a little bit threatening. It would be quite interesting to just line up eight recordings of the first bar. For someone who is a music lover but who is not that acquainted with putting a piece together, it might just be interesting to hear how two notes can essentially be interpreted in so many different ways.Vladimir Horowitz’s opening(Sony Classical)Shura Cherkassky’s opening(Live, 1965)Alfred Brendel’s opening(Philips)Benjamin Grosvenor’s opening(Decca)There are many valid approaches. What Vladimir Horowitz does in a large hall in his Carnegie recording, this kind of demonic thing, works very well. Cherkassky’s is interesting; it sounds like he’s improvising, like it’s something that’s just come to him in the moment, but it’s obviously conscious because he executes it in the same way at the end of the slow movement as well.I was aiming for something mysterious, almost — so the notes are not too present. They’re quite soft, very much like plucked strings, the bass more in it than the treble, like what Alfred Brendel does.So comparisons with orchestral sounds help you define what you are trying to achieve, even in a work as pianistic as this?As a pianist you’ve been playing the piano all of your life; you have a natural association with piano sound. So it’s only when you’re forced to put it into words that you try to make those associations. But it is an appropriate way to think, because, for most composers, the piano is always trying to imitate other instruments, because of its nature as a percussion instrument. Again, it’s a line of thought that adds fire to the imagination, and the colors that you then draw out.One of the challenges in the piece is how to create tension over the whole, or even just over shorter periods of double octaves, or continuous fortissimo dynamics. You picked out a section near the start as an example.In this double-octave passage there is a lot of fortissimo playing, and you vary that in terms of dynamics, but the meter is the same for a while, with these continuous quavers.Horowitz’s octaves(Sony Classical)Radu Lupu’s octaves(Live, 1990)Grosvenor’s octaves(Decca)Horowitz, in the final rise and descent, just pushes through. There’s lots of wrong notes, but it’s raw. It’s exceptionally difficult because of the octaves, but if you can push through it in that way I think it’s very effective, all the way to the lowest note on the piano.So when you are playing the piece live, does atmosphere matter more than precision in passages like this?Yes, this is music that’s probably not supposed to be played cleanly. Part of the struggle is, it is technically difficult, but that’s what makes it exciting. Someone said of Horowitz that his playing is not exciting because he plays fast, but because he plays faster than he can. In this music there’s an element of that. Lupu generates the tension in a different way; it’s tension by holding back, by creating a limit that you’re working against.Then the slow movement poses quite different challenges.Claudio Arrau’s slow movement(Philips)Grosvenor’s slow movement(Decca)It’s magical music. The most incredible bit for me is this ascending line in the right hand, the scales after the climax. It’s the most static point of the piece, and a groove needs to be found between static to the point of no motion, and finding the magic that’s in it. Not to play it too casually. Claudio Arrau there is very special; it’s such a wonderful moment with these triple pianissimos — finding that beautiful color, and where to take the time.Then comes the fugue, a moment when I’m always wondering how fast a pianist is going to try to play. Is this another place where aura matters more than accuracy?The counterpoint needs to be clear. So it’s the point at which you can still characterize it, and that point is different for each pianist, as long as it builds and builds gradually to the right point.Cherkassky’s fugue(Live, 1965)Grosvenor’s fugue(Decca)Intellectually speaking it’s not necessarily correct, but I quite like the idea of treating the first five bars as a kind of fanfare. They don’t carry enough to push forward out of the slow movement, so to me they inevitably sit somewhere in between if you are going to take it at that tempo. I like the change of pace there.The magic, and the music, of the slow movement return on the very last page.Grosvenor’s ending(Decca)It’s this final transition from darkness to light: the rumbling in the left hand, then the way that it ascends to the top of the piano. Those diminished chords are little shards of light, then it comes away to the very low notes, then these transcendent last chords. That’s what the last page is about: transcendence. You can’t help but think that the last note is an awakening from a dream.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      3 New Albums Retell the History of Black Composers

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story3 New Albums Retell the History of Black ComposersRecordings by the pianist Lara Downes, the Catalyst Quartet and the baritone Will Liverman aim to correct the canon.Among the artists using recordings to advocate for racial equity in classical music are, from left, Lara Downes; the Catalyst Quartet: Karlos Rodriguez, Karla Donehew Perez, Abi Fayette and Paul Laraia; and Will Liverman.Credit…Max Barrett; Ricardo Quiñones; Jaclyn SimpsonFeb. 12, 2021Music can’t survive on its own. Composers not entrenched in the canon need support: from publishers, from foundations, from performers. Without these champions, it’s all too easy to slide into obscurity.Three projects — by the Catalyst Quartet; the baritone Will Liverman; and the pianist Lara Downes — consider another avenue for maintaining a legacy: recordings. Gone are the days when classical albums could be relied on as moneymakers. But in the age of streaming, they are endlessly accessible, easy to disseminate and, in the case of these new releases, ideal for spreading the word about overlooked composers of color, whose music often exists in varying states of disrepair.Recordings have helped propel the recent revivals of Julius Eastman and Florence Price, whose works are held up by scholars and critics today but languished for decades — neglected for a variety of reasons, including race.When a friend of mine, the musicologist Jacques Dupuis, programmed Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Endymion’s Dream” a few years ago for the Boston ensemble Calliope, the only full score of it he could find was a rare holograph at the Library of Congress. So he traveled to Washington and spent dozens of hours transcribing it and creating a performing edition. A video of the resulting concert is the only available recording of the piece.“I’m not sure that would be sustainable as a regular practice without robust institutional support,” he said, “which speaks to some of the hurdles in bringing equity and diversity to music programming.”Similar labor went into the creation of these albums, made with the goal of highlighting music by Black composers and offering new possibilities for the classical canon.‘Uncovered, Vol. 1: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’[embedded content]The Catalyst Quartet’s Uncovered project began in 2018, growing from an initial idea of performing and recording a program of works by a few underrepresented composers. That quickly blossomed into something more ambitious: a series of focused surveys, beginning with music by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.Coleridge-Taylor, born to a white mother and Black father in Britain in 1875, wrote the pieces on “Uncovered, Vol. 1” while he was a student at the Royal College of Music in London. Although they reflect the influence of Brahms and Dvorak, as the violinist and scholar Matthew Leslie Santana observes in the album’s liner notes, they have the feel of “a new music project,” said Karlos Rodriguez, the quartet’s cellist.“Except it of course isn’t new, and now it’s redefining the canon,” Rodriguez added. He pointed to the Clarinet Quintet in F-sharp minor: “You think of Brahms and Mozart clarinet quintets, but this is up there. It holds its own.”“Uncovered, Vol. 1,” released earlier this month on the Azica label, features Catalyst — the violinists Karla Donehew Perez and Jessie Montgomery, the violist Paul Laraia and Rodriguez — in three early Coleridge-Taylor works, including quintets performed with the pianist Stewart Goodyear and Anthony McGill, the New York Philharmonic’s principal clarinet. (Montgomery, increasingly in demand as a composer, left the quartet last month and was succeeded by Abi Fayette.)Preparation for the Coleridge-Taylor album — and future installments of Uncovered, which continues with a Florence Price recording — didn’t come as easily as, say, a recording of Beethoven quartets. The scores were not always readily available, and there wasn’t an established interpretation history.“These pieces are not in your blood,” Donehew Perez said.Some of the music had never been recorded, or there was only a single record, and, as Laraia said, “None of these pieces should exist in one recording.” The members of the quartet are hoping that “Uncovered, Vol. 1” prompts more Coleridge-Taylor performances.“I think this is an interesting way for presenters to move in an interesting direction, but there doesn’t have to be shock,” Fayette said. “You can hear the Classical era and Romantic era; it’s not like you’re throwing audiences into the deep end. And I think this year has proven to us that classical music is ready for a shift.”‘Dreams of a New Day: Songs by Black Composers’[embedded content]Will Liverman’s “Dreams of a New Day,” a program of American art songs by Black composers out Friday on Cedille Records, has been in the works for two years. But, Liverman said, the album “is coming at a good time.” Because of pandemic delays, he found himself recording it with the pianist Paul Sánchez last summer, a time of widespread Black Lives Matter demonstrations and renewed urgency for racial equity in classical music.At the heart of the album — its roster includes both living composers and older ones like Margaret Bonds and Harry Burleigh, known for his influence on Dvorak and the threading of spirituals with classical idioms — is the premiere recording of Shawn Okpebholo’s “Two Black Churches.” It is an affecting setting of poems about the bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., church in 1963 and the 2015 shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.Liverman, who is scheduled to sing this fall in the Metropolitan Opera’s season-opening production of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” — the company’s first opera by a Black composer — said that he has been performing these works in recitals, but that the recording is a way to “normalize” them.“When I was starting off as a student, I kept seeing people like Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau because they had made so many recordings,” he said. “There’s something very important about having music that’s out there and accessible.”Rising Sun Music[embedded content]About two years ago, Lara Downes wanted to record an album of unearthed piano works by Florence Price. She took the project to three labels; none were interested.“But it needed to happen,” she recalled. “So I just did it.”A similar spirit led to the creation of Rising Sun Music, a digital label that debuted this month with the EP “Remember Me to Harlem” and will continue to release recordings of works by Black composers. “If you’re independent,” Downes said, “you can move a lot faster.”Downes has been working to develop a community of scholars and musicians to help with the project, which seeks to highlight the work of composers of color going back more than 200 years. Two of those collaborators appear on “Remember Me to Harlem”: the oboist Titus Underwood, in William Grant Still’s “Song for the Lonely”; and the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, achingly gentle in Margaret Bonds’s “When the Dove Enters In.”As part of the initiative, Downes also intends to release new — in some cases, the first — editions of scores, to make them more accessible to performers and students. The shaky state of these works, she said, reflects the history of American music, and of the country more broadly.“Every story you uncover, there’s a question of, ‘Why was this covered?’” Downes said. “You’re talking about Black life and an imbalance. Part of this is bigger than the music. We can look at our art and culture as a microscope of us.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Notes Toward Reinventing the American Orchestra

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeMake: BirriaExplore: ‘Bridgerton’ StyleParent: With ImprovRead: Joyce Carol OatesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyNotes Toward Reinventing the American OrchestraFlexible programming, broader racial representation and welcoming spaces would go a long way in recovering from pandemic closures.Credit…Gizem VuralFeb. 12, 2021, 10:00 a.m. ETJust think how overwhelming it will be to see the New York Philharmonic onstage at Lincoln Center this fall — when, we hope, it returns after an 18-month absence. The coronavirus pandemic has taught us never again to take live music for granted.Yet simply a return to normalcy in the music world will not do. The closures of concert halls and opera houses have revealed how fragile the economic support system for classical music actually is. Freelance artists have lost most of their work. Major institutions have been grappling not just with survival, but also with questions of mission, relevance and inclusion, issues that became even more acute when nationwide demonstrations for racial justice broke out last year.These questions are driving talks and planning at all American performing arts institutions. But I’ve been thinking especially of our orchestras, which, for all their many admirable yet scattered efforts at innovation and outreach, remain reluctant to make fundamental changes to how their seasons are presented. It’s 2021, and we are still debating how to reinvent the orchestra for the 21st century.“For next season, we must question ourselves,” Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s chief executive, said in an interview. “How have we changed, in light of the internal and external journey our nation has been on?”Now is the moment for orchestras to think big and take chances — yes, even as many players have agreed to salary reductions and administrators are coping with crushing deficits. Conceptually it’s not so hard. Approaching programming with exciting new ideas; fostering music by living composers; finding looser ways to organize a season; educating audiences both in the halls and in communities — all have been kicked around for decades.The composer Tania León, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic as part of its Project 19, takes a bow in February 2020.Credit…Chris LeeIt starts with creative programming, which isn’t just important; it’s everything. I’ve long argued that American orchestras think too much about how they play, and not enough about what they play and why they’re playing it. Programming an orchestra season is usually presented as a balancing act between maintaining the standard repertory while fostering contemporary music. But this makes it seem like old and new music exist in separate realms. Music is music; old and new music should be part of an integrated approach.The most dynamic American orchestras have understood this for years. The San Francisco Symphony, under the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, brought renegade “American mavericks” like Ives, Cage, Ruggles and Harrison into the orchestra’s bloodstream. The Los Angeles Philharmonic is more or less alone in giving contemporary work an equal platform. I was heartened by the pluck the New York Philharmonic showed in taking a pass on a massive celebration of Beethoven’s 250th anniversary last year. Instead, the orchestra chose to focus on another milestone, the centennial of the 19th Amendment, by inaugurating Project 19, a multiyear venture to commission works from 19 female composers.And after last year’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations and protests against police brutality, American arts institutions felt compelled to look within, including — especially — the white-dominated field of classical music. There were calls for the art form to immediately grapple with a legacy of neglect. Orchestras have a responsibility to commission composers of color, to program works by such composers from earlier times, and to hire Black and Latino conductors and soloists — and empower them to leave their mark on programming.But perhaps the biggest impediment to creative programming and fresh thinking — including broader racial representation — remains the subscription-series schedule that prevails at all major American orchestras and locks them into standard-issue, week-after-week programs loaded with the classics and sprinkled, at best, with unusual or new choices. This structure has continued even as subscriber numbers have fallen. Most people, and not just younger ones, have become accustomed to more flexibility in planning their entertainment. The idea of committing yourself to a regularly scheduled night at your local concert hall feels odd and constraining.Alan Gilbert, who chafed at the Philharmonic’s strict programming structures, conducting the orchestra in 2017.Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York TimesIn 2014, Alan Gilbert, then the Philharmonic’s music director, tried to put a hopeful spin on this shift. “It’s forcing our planning to be inspired and compelling,” he said. “We have to sell individual events. It’s hard, but there’s a great part of that.” He lamented the rigidity orchestras must contend with when subscription programs are scheduled years in advance.He added, “I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve torn our hair out during meetings, saying, ‘If only we could be nimble on our feet, change a program on a dime.’”Why can’t orchestras be nimble and respond to sudden inspiration, or current events? If the Pittsburgh Symphony has a hit with a premiere, why must audiences in other cities wait years to hear it? When a major composer dies, imagine if an orchestra were able to organize, on short notice, a mini festival of his or her scores. If halls had been open during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, I’d like to believe that some scheduled programs could have been altered to present recent and long-overlooked pieces by Black composers.The subscription model need not be discarded completely. Portions of a season could be planned in advance and sold as a series. Imagine a survey of the six Tchaikovsky symphonies on six consecutive programs, each paired with a mid-20th-century Russian score, or a new piece composed in response to Tchaikovsky. But this series, in my mind, would be offered not over six weeks, but over a week or two, festival style.Most subscription programs are repeated three, sometimes four times. But certain programs could actually run longer, if not for the tyranny of subscription scheduling. I bet Riccardo Muti conducting the Chicago Symphony in a concert performance of a Verdi opera could sell 10 performances. On the other hand, the Boston Symphony could offer a concentrated celebration of Boston composers, with 10 programs over two weeks, each performed just once, pairing composers who once loomed large in the city — Leon Kirchner, Gunther Schuller, Donald Martino — with diverse emerging composers from the region.When imaging how orchestras could thrive in the future, the spaces they perform in are pivotal. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, the “most important orchestra in America — period,” as my colleague Zachary Woolfe argued convincingly in 2017, would doubtless have been less successful at tying its mission to education and social justice without having Walt Disney Concert Hall, a Frank Gehry-designed masterpiece, as its home. In addition to its gleaming, glorious auditorium, Disney Hall has all sorts of smaller spaces, even nooks and crannies in the winding lobbies, where visitors can be engaged by talks and intimate performances.An artist rendering shows the Philharmonic’s plans for the renovation of David Geffen Hall, its home at Lincoln Center.Credit…New York Philharmonic, via Associated PressBorda, who oversaw the creation of Disney Hall, is now working on a major renovation of the New York Philharmonic’s David Geffen Hall. When the pandemic put an end to concerts, it seemed possible that the Geffen project might be put on hold. But implicitly acknowledging the challenges of seeing the renovation through, Borda doubled down, ceding some day-to-day operations to colleagues so she could focus on leading the Geffen effort.The larger goals of the project are more important than ever, she insists. “How can we amplify, employ and design a space so it truly is a gateway, a welcoming port for the community?” she said in the recent interview. The new Geffen Hall will have, she added, a “new flexibility to allow us to produce events we haven’t dreamed of yet.”There will be a welcome center and expanded lobbies; a Sidewalk Studio where passers-by will be able to see performances and activities taking place. Best of all, the expanded front lobby will have a wall devoted to screening performances. And it will be possible to open three sides of the lobby to the plaza to allow people to wander in and out.I’d go further. Why not broadcast the orchestra’s rehearsals during the day to show the public what musicians’ work entails? The lobby could also be a space where players from the orchestra, composers and conductors present short performances and talks during the day.Borda emphasized that any increased programming flexibility won’t matter if the Philharmonic doesn’t transform its hall into an acoustically vibrant, intimate-feeling and appealing space. Giving concerts, after all, is what orchestras do.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Mastery and Transgression’ in Music That Bridges Genres

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Notebook‘Mastery and Transgression’ in Music That Bridges GenresA new box set showcases Julius Hemphill’s work as a composer, saxophonist and flutist on the boundary between jazz and classical styles.“The Boyé Multi-National Crusade for Harmony,” issued by New World Records and named after one of Julius Hemphill’s touring projects, shows how thoroughly he adapted and reinvigorated his early influences.Credit…George Rose/Getty ImagesFeb. 5, 2021Julius Hemphill was a vigorous force in American music from his first public performances and recordings in the late 1960s until his death, at 57, in 1995. Whether playing saxophone or flute — or even, as on his overdubbed solo “Blue Boyé,” both at once — he blended folk traditions with a joyous avant-garde edge.Growing up in Fort Worth, he heard R&B-infused jazz and country twang. The booklet included with a new seven-disc set of Hemphill’s compositions, many previously unreleased and drawn from his archive at New York University, quotes from an interview about those early years: “It was musically rich,” he said. “I could hear Hank Williams coming out of the jukebox at Bunker’s, the white bar. And Louis Jordan, Son House and Earl Bostic from the box at Ethel’s, the Black bar across the street.”[embedded content]Hemphill may have started with those related, if segregated, reference points. But the widely varied recordings on the new set — “The Boyé Multi-National Crusade for Harmony,” issued by New World Records and named after one of Hemphill’s touring projects — show how thoroughly he adapted and reinvigorated those early sources.The first two discs contain some formative late-’70s small-group recordings, as well as an astonishing duo set (date and location unknown) by Hemphill and the cellist Abdul Wadud, one of his crucial collaborators. On the track “Rhapsody,” you can hear Hemphill’s alertness on soprano saxophone, as Wadud switches between thick, strummed playing and lyrical bowing. Hemphill’s melodic sensibility, supple even when spare, is present throughout, even when his sound production turns piping or frenzied.Before Hemphill’s emergence as a bandleader, he came into contact with other inquisitive, improvising players like the trumpeter Lester Bowie. Hemphill began experimenting with theatrical works, too. He started his own label, and in St. Louis helped launch the Black Artists Group (known as BAG) alongside poets, dancers and other saxophonist-composers, like Oliver Lake. After a 1971 BAG performance was interrupted by a bomb threat, it was a Hemphill score that was heard after the all-clear had been given. (That episode is recounted in Benjamin Looker’s book “Point From Which Creation Begins,” a crucial history of BAG and resource about Hemphill’s work.)Hemphill later joined forces again with Lake in the World Saxophone Quartet, which played open-minded, poly-genre spaces like the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Devoted to jazz but not exclusively defined by it, Hemphill wrote solo and chamber works for the virtuoso pianist Ursula Oppens, his partner toward the end of his life. (Search out the Tzadik release “One Atmosphere” to hear the vivacious piano quintet that gives that album its title.)The New World box set also contains a disc of Hemphill chamber music. In addition to a work written for Oppens, it includes the premiere release of a 2007 Daedalus Quartet performance of “Mingus Gold,” a 1988 composition in which Hemphill arranged tunes by Charles Mingus.These are not straight transcriptions, as the take on “Better Get Hit in Your Soul” proves. During its opening, the cello part occasionally comes close to Mingus’s own bass motifs, though it also diverts from the source material, with the other strings pausing to meditate before the quartet digs into Mingus’s theme with gusto.Hemphill’s experimental yet songful approach connected him to adventurous pop artists; he joined Lake on tour with Björk in support of her album “Debut” in 1993-94. And like Lake, Hemphill was apt to say that his varied pursuits were not evidence of a scattershot sensibility, but rather of a complex, integrated purpose. The liner notes for the new box set include one of his better known statements: “Well, you often hear people nowadays talking about the tradition, tradition, tradition. But they have tunnel vision in this tradition. Because tradition in African-American music is wide as all outdoors.”Since his death, Hemphill’s influence has continued to make that vista ever wider. His most famous composition, “Dogon A.D.,” with its addictive, loping 11/16 percussion groove, was memorably covered by the pianist Vijay Iyer on his breakout 2009 trio album, “Historicity.” Player-composers like Tim Berne and Marty Ehrlich, who wrote the liner notes for the new release, also swear by Hemphill.The World Saxophone Quartet in 1978.Credit…Deborah Feingold/Getty ImagesSo why aren’t his contributions better known? One reason is that his most celebrated album, also called “Dogon A.D.” (1972), has spent long stretches out of print. (It was available on CD for a brief period, in the 2010s, but now that version and the original LP command high prices on the secondhand market.) Another reason likely has to do with the policing of the border between jazz and classical traditions (a subset of the larger issues of racial exclusion in classical music). Most classical programmers are likely unaware of the breadth of Hemphill’s legacy. His music has occasionally been played on predominately classical series like the Composer Portraits at the Miller Theater at Columbia University, but he is usually perceived as a jazz artist, full stop.But while his music can swing hard, he also explored airier, less propulsive realms. One lengthy track on New World’s disc of chamber music, “Unknown Title No. 1,” documents a 1981 performance by a wind and brass quintet Hemphill conducted.The unhurried, pungent material heard at the outset is far away from “Dogon A.D.,” “Rhapsody” or the glosses on Mingus. After detours into riotous improvisation, the performance eventually hurtles into a bumptious, tuba-driven conclusion. But its route there is distinctive in the available Hemphill catalog.Back when Vijay Iyer’s cover of “Dogon A.D.” was earning him plaudits, he described in a profile how seeing Hemphill in concert in 1991 had been a transformative experience. Hemphill’s 1988 album “Big Band” “dazzles me as much today as it did then,” Iyer said in an email, also noting Hemphill and BAG’s important contributions during the “period of Black artists’ self-determination initiatives,” which also included the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in Chicago.Hemphill, devoted to jazz but not exclusively defined by it, in 1990.Credit…Michael WildermanRelating the experience of watching a 1992 duo performance by Hemphill and Wadud, later released as the album “Oakland Duets,” Iyer wrote, “I was astonished by the sense of simultaneous mastery and transgression. I think that describes his music in a nutshell.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Eva Coutaz, a Record Label Force for Quality, Dies at 77

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyEva Coutaz, a Record Label Force for Quality, Dies at 77An executive with the respected label Harmonia Mundi, she shaped classical music careers and public tastes in turning out incomparable recordings from a French farmhouse.Eva Coutaz, the driving force behind the record label Harmonia Mundi, rehabilitated forgotten composers and nurtured some of the leading figures in early music.Credit…Josep MolinaFeb. 4, 2021, 3:13 p.m. ETEva Coutaz, who in more than four decades at the highly respected record label Harmonia Mundi shaped musicians’ careers, rehabilitated forgotten composers and expanded the tastes of record collectors, died on Jan. 26 in Arles, France. She was 77.Jean-Marc Berns, the label’s head of marketing, said the cause was complications of renal failure.Ms. Coutaz joined Harmonia Mundi in 1972 at the invitation of its founder, Bernard Coutaz, whom she would go on to marry. Her first job was to oversee publicity and to organize concerts to promote the label’s artists, but she quickly proved her business acumen and artistic sensibility.Ms. Coutaz nurtured long-term relationships with a stable of musicians that included some of the leading figures in early music, among them the countertenor Alfred Deller and the performer-conductors René Jacobs, William Christie and Philippe Herreweghe. Later she brought in another generation of recording stars, including the violinist Isabelle Faust, the pianist Alexandre Tharaud and the baritone Matthias Goerne.She built a catalog of more than 800 recordings as head of production starting in 1975. On the death of her husband in 2010 she became chief executive of the company and remained in that post until 2015, when she sold the label.At its most prolific, Harmonia Mundi released more than 50 new recordings a year. Industry publications frequently crowned it label of the year, and collectors came to trust it as a guide to hidden gems and illuminating interpretations of the classics. With their beautifully designed covers and thoughtful liner notes, Harmonia Mundi albums stood for a listening culture that was both meticulous and meditative.Ms. Coutaz was “the great guiding force” behind the label, Mr. Christie said in a phone interview. As a businesswoman, he said, she could be “tough as old boots.”“She had a strong will and an extraordinary sense of rightness about repertory,” he added. “And she was going to take risks.”In the 1970s and ’80s, those risks paid handsome dividends in a market buoyed by fresh interest in early music and historically informed interpretations. Ms. Coutaz recognized, for example, the market potential of the French baroque composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier at a time when his ilk lagged far behind the popular appeal of their German and Italian counterparts, Mr. Christie said.Costly productions of unknown oratorios and operas remained a gamble, and Ms. Coutaz greenlighted some projects against her own better financial judgment. In a 2018 radio interview with the Belgian station RTBF, she spoke about a recording, led by Mr. Jacobs, of the opera “Croesus” by the northern German baroque composer Reinhard Keiser — a footnote in music history books.“I thought it would be a loss for us,” she said. But she was so taken by the music that she told herself, “I want to record it — it would be a shame if people don’t hear it.” “Croesus” sold more than 25,000 copies, a triumph for classical music.Mr. Jacobs said that Ms. Coutaz had encouraged his conducting career when he was still known mainly as a countertenor. After he had gained fame as a champion of Baroque music, she urged him to record Mozart operas. His Harmonia Mundi recording of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” won a Grammy Award in 2004 and became a best seller.“She pushed me to go further,” he said.Eva Schannath was born in Wuppertal, Germany, on Feb. 26, 1943. Her father was a cabinetmaker. After attending a Roman Catholic school in Düsseldorf, she took on an apprenticeship as a bookseller. Eager to experience France, she went to Marseille in 1964 as an au pair, then stayed on, working first at a book shop in Montpellier and then for a cultural center in Aix-en-Provence.It was there, in 1972, that she met Mr. Coutaz, who was then running Harmonia Mundi from Saint-Michel-l’Observatoire, a remote village in Provence. Mr. Coutaz founded the company in 1958.Jean-Guihen Queyras, a boy studying the cello, was living in a nearby hamlet, and his parents befriended the couple. When he was 10 he received his first taste of a Harmonia Mundi recording session when Ms. Coutaz invited him to work the organ bellows for Mr. Christie in a tiny Romanesque mountain chapel.Years later Mr. Queyras joined the label as a soloist. “What was different to other labels was her vision and her very human and organic way to bring together musicians in a way that really feels like a family,” he said.He recalled her strong emotional reactions to music. “Sometimes she would talk to you after a concert, and you could see there had been tears,” he said. “She really made all this out of pure, intense love for music.”Eva and Bernard Coutaz worked closely together even as they married, divorced and remarried. They had no children. Information on her survivors was not immediately available.The couple moved the label to an old farmhouse in Arles in 1986. It became the creative and logistical hub for a company that at its height employed more than 350 people. Its influence spread through subsidiaries in Spain and the United States, a publishing arm and a network of record boutiques.In the early 2000s, the rise of streaming started to put the recording industry in crisis and forced painful cuts at Harmonia Mundi. In the radio interview, Ms. Coutaz spoke of a 70 percent drop in CD sales over a span of 10 years. She warned that as earnings plummeted, high-quality studio recordings would become a thing of the past. “If digital sales are not monetized, the moment will come when you can no longer produce,” she said.In 2015, she approved the sale of Harmonia Mundi’s catalog to PIAS, a Belgian group of independent labels. She remained involved as a consultant for another year, to help maintain quality. In 2018, Gramophone, a leading classical music publication, named Harmonia Mundi label of the year.Reflecting on Ms. Coutaz, Mr. Christie said his generation had known a recording industry led by “strong-minded and intensely committed individuals who had an extraordinary sense of the rightness of what they were doing and how to create markets.”“And she stood out among them.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      A Critic and a Pianist, Close but Not Quite Friends

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookA Critic and a Pianist, Close but Not Quite FriendsA 35-disc set of Peter Serkin’s remarkable recordings rekindles our critic’s memories of their intersecting careers.The pianist Peter Serkin in the late 1980s. A new collection of his recordings features music by Beethoven, Berio, Chopin, Mozart, Takemitsu, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and more.Credit…Donald DietzFeb. 4, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETThe pianist Peter Serkin made his New York debut when he was just 12. But his real introduction to the public — as an artist of his own special merits, not just as the renowned pianist Rudolf Serkin’s son — came six years later, in 1965, with his recording of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations.Critics praised the vibrant, elegant and clear playing. Many singled out the exceptional maturity of this teenager’s interpretation.That recording made a powerful impression on me. Just a year younger than Serkin, I was then a serious pianist planning to pursue music in college. But our backgrounds couldn’t have been more different. There were no musicians in my family; my talent and passion had seemed to come out of nowhere. Serkin had inherited the mantle of classical music as a birthright going back generations, and received the best training imaginable.Still, I felt he and I were kindred spirits, though at the time I couldn’t explain why. Listening today to that remarkable Bach recording, I understand better what affected me so deeply.Serkin, in the foreground, playing with his father, the eminent pianist Rudolf Serkin.Credit…Gjon Mili/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty ImagesFrom his serenely lyrical shaping of the opening theme, and then his lilting yet subtly restrained playing of the bouncy first variation, he approached this formidable masterpiece with unspoiled directness and sincerity. His performance combined an almost spiritual equilibrium with soft-spoken joy. He dispatched the brilliant variations crisply and cleanly, without a trace of showiness.That breakthrough has been reissued as part of a 35-disc box set of his complete recordings on the RCA label (and some on Columbia), made in the first three decades of his career. It was released last year, just four months after he died, that February, of pancreatic cancer. The collection offers a rich variety of solo pieces, chamber works and concertos by Beethoven, Berio, Chopin, Mozart, Takemitsu, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and more — in probing, lucid, often exhilarating performances. Some of these recordings I didn’t know; others I’d not listened to in years. The set has rekindled strong memories of Peter — as I came to know him — and his great artistry, and the intersection of our lives and professions.As his recordings kept coming out after that “Goldberg” Variations, I bought them eagerly and followed Peter’s journey. There was his spacious, searching yet beguilingly playful account of Schubert’s late, lengthy Sonata No. 18 in G, recorded during the same sessions as the Bach but released in 1966. There were exciting collaborations with Seiji Ozawa and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Bartok’s First and Third Piano Concertos and Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto, a piece that clobbered me at the time. That 1968 Schoenberg album included the Five Piano Pieces (Op. 23). Peter’s compelling performance inspired me to learn that work, which I eventually did, with enormous effort, for my senior recital in college.Peter Serkin was sensitive about his complicated relationship with his famous father.Credit…Bettmann/Getty ImagesRudolf Serkin was a childhood hero to me, and I will always cherish his formidable artistry. But in my early 20s a generational shift was coaxing me toward solidarity with his son. Peter seemed like the unintimidated pianist-leader of our emerging generation, claiming classical music on his own terms. I wanted to meet him, to hang out. I had a hunch we could become friends.We didn’t meet, though, until the summer of 1987, just weeks before he turned 40. By then I was a freelance critic for The Boston Globe and he was teaching young artists at the Tanglewood Music Center. He was known to be interview-shy, burned by the snide reactions of critics during the 1970s, when he sported a ponytail and stringy goatee; often performed wearing Nehru shirts and love beads; and disdained the touring virtuoso circuit, which he compared to a “monkey doing his trained act with the same pieces over and over.”In 1973, he and three like-minded young musicians had founded Tashi, an ensemble that focused on contemporary music. These adventurous players gave dozens of mesmerizing performances and made a top-selling recording of their signature piece, Messiaen’s mystical “Quartet for the End of Time.”Peter wanted to shake up classical music, which he felt was far too beholden to old repertory and traditional protocols. Still, it was hard for him to shrug off being seen as “the counterculture’s reluctant envoy to the straight concert world,” as the critic Donal Henahan put it in a 1973 profile in The New York Times. And he was sick of being asked about his complicated relationship with his father.I knew all this going into our interview and was a little wary. But from the moment we met, I felt at ease. We sat on the grass under the sun on the grounds of Tanglewood and talked for a couple of hours about everything: his memories of how intensely he experienced music as a child; his travels to India, Thailand and Mexico in his early 20s, when, for a while, he stopped performing and even practicing to “find out who I am without it”; the satisfaction he was deriving that summer from coaching a fresh generation of musicians who seemed to share his innate curiosity about new music; and his excitement over an ambitious project he was planning, to take on tour a program of 11 works newly written for him. Learning to deal with difficult fathers came up, too. Over the following week at Tanglewood, we did hang out — which was, as we would have said back then, really cool.Serkin was thought of as “the counterculture’s reluctant envoy to the straight concert world,” as the critic Donal Henahan put it in a 1973 profile for The New York Times. Credit…Gjon Mili/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty ImagesBy that point, though, our relationship was defined and, to some extent, constrained by our respective roles as performer and critic. (Actually, I was still actively performing then, and Peter wanted to know all about my work and hear some concert recordings, which I shared with him.) Had I not been a critic, we might have developed a true friendship; yet had I not been a critic, I might never have met him at all. In a way, I already sensed that I could do more for music, and for Peter, by being an informed observer of his remarkable work.For years after that first meeting, he and I spoke on the phone now and then, exchanged emails, and sometimes found occasions to meet. He enjoyed teaching in the summers at Tanglewood so much that he bought a house in the Berkshires and lived there with his wife and children. He invited me to come visit. Right now I wish I’d accepted. But even he understood, I think, that it was better to keep some measure of professional distance.People may assume that as a critic, I can’t possibly be objective about an artist I feel warmly toward. Yet just as a novelist can tell a writer friend the truth about problematic aspects of a manuscript, perhaps I, who admired Peter’s playing so much, was able to see when his take on a piece didn’t quite click.For example, the new collection includes three albums of Chopin works recorded between 1978 and 1981, when Peter was looking afresh at a composer he was not known for performing. He brought out the ruminative, poetic elements of the music, even in mazurkas and waltzes that might seem lithe on the surface. His recording of the 14-minute Polonaise-Fantasie, one of Chopin’s most elusive and original scores, is overwhelming. Peter makes the piece seem like a dark, restless, fantastical musing on the deeper heritage of the polonaise, a defining dance of Chopin’s war-torn homeland.But he also applied this pensive approach to the Andante Spianato et Grande Polonaise Brillante, with less success. This may have been the closest Chopin came to writing an unabashed virtuoso showpiece. I get what Peter was going for, and it’s fascinating. But the performance is so probing it feels a little grounded. You want the effortless dazzle of a Vladimir Horowitz.Serkin’s extraordinary 1973 recording of Messiaen’s “Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésu” remains, for our critic, definitive.Credit…Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times, via Getty ImagesPeter’s extraordinary 1973 recording of Messiaen’s “Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésu” remains, for me, definitive. This two-hour work, structured as a set of 20 pieces, poses astounding technical challenges as the music shifts between meditative timelessness and exuberant, near-frenzied spirituality, run through with bird calls. Peter took it on tour, playing it complete and from memory, sometimes accompanied with mood-setting lighting. When we spoke that first time he recalled Messiaen hearing him perform the piece. Afterward, the composer was “really too kind,” Peter said: “He told me that I respected the score, but that when I didn’t it was even better.”The album that may have meant the most to Peter was “… in real time,” featuring works written for him, including several of the 11 scores he played on that program of commissions by Henze, Berio, Takemitsu, Kirchner, Alexander Goehr, Oliver Knussen and Peter’s childhood friend Peter Lieberson. He makes the swirling busyness and tart sonorities of Berio’s “Feuerklavier” sound like a crackling blaze; he delves below the undulant grace and tenderness of Lieberson’s “Breeze of Delight” to reveal the music’s eerie undertow.Peter started teaching at the Bard College Conservatory of Music in 2005 and loved working with the inquisitive students the program attracted. Even while enduring debilitating cancer treatments, he tried to keep teaching and playing. In an email to me from April 2019, he wrote of feeling “terrible pain and exhaustion, much worse than last time.” Yet he had forced himself to participate in a performance of Brahms’s C minor Piano Quartet because the cellist, Robert Martin, a close colleague, was playing his final concert as director of the conservatory. “It went well enough,” he wrote. Actually, it’s a profoundly affecting performance, as a video makes clear.I had arranged to visit him at his home near Bard that August, on my way back to New York after several days covering Tanglewood’s contemporary music festival. But the morning of our planned get-together Peter texted to say he felt wretched. He texted again the next day to tell me how sad he was to have canceled.“I got a little four-hand music out in case you wanted to play but I guess I’ll bring it back downstairs now for possibly some other time,” he wrote.There was no other time. We tried to reschedule, but his health was too shaky. The last email he sent me, some three months before he died, was a short reply to a note I’d sent. “Yes, we are good friends,” he said, “and I look forward to seeing you.”Friends, indeed, in our own way.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More