Classical Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      At 100, Luigi Nono Remains a Radical, Urgent Composer

      by

      In 1954, Arnold Schoenberg’s widow, Gertrud, and their daughter, Nuria, traveled from the United States to Europe for the first time since fleeing Nazism two decades earlier. They went to Hamburg, Germany, for the concert premiere of Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron,” where Nuria met the young Italian composer Luigi Nono.They married each other the following year in Venice, uniting two families storied in art and invention. Nuria Schoenberg’s father was a revolutionary who broke with tonality and developed a new method of composition that would change the course of musical history; Nono’s father was an engineer and keen amateur musician, while his grandfather was a Venetian painter known for scenes of the poor — a background that foretold his own art of revolutionary politics, avant-gardism and technology.Nono, who was born 100 years ago and died in 1990, invited listeners to musical extremes, especially that of the dynamic pianississimo, or very, very soft. The score of “Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima” (1979-80), his sole work for string quartet, quotes words from the elusive German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, to be “sung” inwardly by the players: a political act of hope, of forging a whole from fragments, as much from silence as from notes.Nono’s enthusiasm for Schoenberg’s music burned stronger, and was less equivocal, than that of his Darmstadt School contemporaries, such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. For them, Anton Webern, Schoenberg’s most radical pupil, was the truer prophet of new music.The Darmstadt School avant-gardists, especially Boulez and Stockhausen, continue to play key roles in music history. Yet since their deaths, their legacies have grown increasingly precarious, with repertory status remaining elusive, the passionate advocacy of a committed few notwithstanding. We ignore Nono at our peril, however: We miss out not only on a rich and varied body of work, but also on the opportunity to transform the ways in which we listen to music old and new, and to the world around us.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott Wrap Up a Partnership With Thanks

      by

      After 40 years of musical collaborations, this cellist and pianist have recorded their final album together, “Merci.”Of all the cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s many, many collaborations, the one with the pianist Kathryn Stott has been among his most enduring.Ma and Stott have been giving recitals and making records for 40 years. But time passes on, and as Stott, 65, prepares to retire from public performances at the end of this year, they have marked the passing of their partnership with a tour and a last album, “Merci” — a beautiful and poignant adieu through music by Gabriel Fauré, Camille Saint-Saëns, Pauline Viardot, and Lili and Nadia Boulanger.Friends before they started playing together, Ma and Stott met in 1978 in rather unusual circumstances. Ma and his wife, Jill, were staying in London, where they sublet an apartment in Hampstead. “One especially hot day I was practicing — with almost no clothes on — when two people unexpectedly walked into the flat,” Ma, 69, has said. “It turned out that our landlord had failed to mention that he had a flatmate or to tell her that he had sublet his room! The flatmate was Kathy Stott. And that’s how a beautiful friendship began.”Yo-Yo Ma, right, and Kathryn Stott, left, wait backstage before their Nov. 9 concert in Paris. They have been performing together since the 1980s.Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesSpeaking from Berlin recently, Ma and Stott discussed their new recording, the notion of lineage in music and their time together. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Kathy, this album seems to have several different layers to it.KATHRYN STOTT It really does. One of my all-time favorite composers is Fauré. It’s 100 years since he died. I don’t like celebrating people’s deaths, but you know, what can you do? So that was one little idea. And then Yo-Yo and I both have connections to Nadia Boulanger, so we were thinking also about our heritage, our teachers and all the links of the composers on the album. Every single composer on there is linked through a story, or being a teacher, or being introduced to another. And then our kind of “merci” to each other for these remarkable 40 years that we’ve had, being musical explorers and otherwise.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Review: The Philharmonic Gives a Master Class in Programming

      by

      The composer John Adams led the New York Philharmonic in a program of contemporary works that didn’t make a big deal of contemporary music.For a master class in orchestral programming, look to this week’s concerts at the New York Philharmonic.Blink, though, and you might miss them. The program, while the best-crafted of the season so far, opened on Thursday night at David Geffen Hall and repeats only once, on Saturday. Led by John Adams, our greatest living American composer, in his occasional capacity as a conductor, it is a rarity for this orchestra: an evening billed as ordinary yet featuring mostly contemporary work, with the sole “classic” just eight decades old.You could see the concert as parallel halves, each with a brief, spare 20th-century work (Arvo Pärt’s “Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten” and Aaron Copland’s “Quiet City”) followed by a hefty modern portrait of California (Gabriella Smith’s new cello concerto, “Lost Coast,” and Adams’s “City Noir”).On a superficial level, you could also call it an evening of contemporary music. Of the four composers, three are alive: Adams, Pärt and the young, brilliant Smith. But even that doesn’t seem fitting for works that nod to centuries-old chant music and film noir.Regardless, these pieces have been assembled, as well as conducted, with thoughtfulness and care. And as an audience member, all you need to do is sit back and enjoy. This is contemporary sound to dispel clichéd fears of abrasive modernism while never cheaply pandering to mass appeal. It’s just fundamentally good music.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Review: Lise Davidsen Meets Puccini in ‘Tosca’ at the Met

      by

      The powerhouse soprano, already a company stalwart at 37, still seems to be figuring out a character whose moods change on a dime.Aficionados have sometimes criticized the Metropolitan Opera for waiting too long to engage singers with starry careers in Europe, like a sports team that acquires only veterans. Even the loudest complainers, though, would have to praise the Met’s early, deep investment in the powerhouse soprano Lise Davidsen, a generational talent from Norway.Davidsen, 37, made her house debut five years ago in Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades.” The title role in Puccini’s “Tosca,” which she sang on Tuesday in a gala honoring the centenary of the composer’s death, is already her seventh part with the company.With a huge, marble-cool voice that she can pull back to a veiled shadow or unleash in a floodlight cry, Davidsen has been most memorable in works by Wagner and Strauss that have broad vocal lines for her to sail through.She has embodied the mythic longing of Ariadne in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” and brought opulent purity to Eva in Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.” Last season, venturing into Verdi with “La Forza del Destino,” she captured Leonora’s eternal woundedness.For saintly, long-suffering figures like Wagner’s Sieglinde and Elisabeth, she’s perfect. Davidsen is tall and statuesque — noble, yet modest. She’s not slow-moving onstage, but there’s something glacial about her. She seems most comfortable when she can settle into a character’s steady state for a few hours and just sing.Tosca is a different beast, and Davidsen still seems to be figuring her out. Puccini’s operas are nothing but endless, changeable business: pocketing letters, discovering keys, spying a knife. Every tiny response is illustrated in the music, and moods shift on a dime. His works require hair-trigger agility, even febrility.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      The Curious Case of Nora Holt, a Pioneer of Black Classical Music and Jazz

      by

      “Fabulous is the word for Mrs. Nora Douglas Holt,” read the 1974 obituary in The Amsterdam News.And fabulous she was: A pioneer of the Black classical music scene in Chicago, Holt also became an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age in Paris. Born into the middle-class, she moved back and forth between worlds: concert artist and blues singer, newspaper columnist and club hostess, erudite scholar and scandalous socialite.This fluidity led to friendships with two women who represented distinct versions of fame for Black women in the early 20th century: Josephine Baker, the working-class dancer from St. Louis, who became the toast of Paris; and the composer Florence Price, who transformed Chicago’s classical music scene, rising to national fame with her symphonies.Holt’s life didn’t follow familiar narratives. Hers was not a rags-to-riches story, like Baker’s; nor was it, like Price’s, a cathartic breakthrough for Black musicians in the white world of classical music. Instead, she had a kind of mutability, frequently changing her name and her place in culture, collapsing ideas about respectability and sexual liberation.Music was the through line in Holt’s life. She first made her name in classical music. For young, middle-class Black women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, classical music could open doors to salon culture, church leadership, jobs teaching music and civic engagement.In 1918, Holt, a pianist, became the first Black person in the United States, female or male, to earn a master’s degree in music, from Chicago Musical College. She also worked in the male-dominated fields of music criticism, scholarship and composition. Her music journalism, public lectures, recitals and community organizing became a blueprint for other Black women seeking to become leaders in Chicago’s classical musical scene.“Of course, men are supposed to have better business minds than women,” she wrote to a male colleague after founding a magazine, Music and Poetry, in 1921. “But I have made this thing go and the opportunities are yet unlimited.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Grammy Nominations 2025: See the Full List of Nominees

      by

      Artists, albums and songs competing for trophies at the 67th annual ceremony were announced on Friday. The show will take place on Feb. 2 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.Beyoncé is the top nominee for the 67th annual Grammy Awards with 11 nods for her genre-crossing “Cowboy Carter.” The LP and its songs will vie for record, song and album of the year, as well as competitions in pop, rap, country and Americana categories.The superstar — who has already won more Grammys than any other artist — leads a pack of contenders that includes Charli XCX, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar and Post Malone (all with seven nods apiece), followed by Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan and Taylor Swift, who have six each.The ceremony, which is scheduled for Feb. 2, 2025 at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, will recognize recordings released from Sept. 16, 2023 to Aug. 30, 2024.Here is a complete list of the nominations, which were announced on Friday by the Recording Academy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Susanna Mälkki and Santtu-Matias Rouvali Take Over the Philharmonic

      by

      Susanna Mälkki and Santtu-Matias Rouvali made back-to-back appearances with the orchestra, leading similar programs with distinct style.Finland’s top exports may be machinery and fuel, but in classical music it is also one of the world’s leading producer of conductors.Over the past century, Finland has nurtured a culture of musical education that has brought about generations of brilliance at the podium. It has given us some of the finest conductors working today, like Esa-Pekka Salonen, as well as some of our buzziest, like Klaus Mäkelä, who picked up storied jobs in Amsterdam and Chicago before the age of 30.As if in a testament to the saturation of Finnish conductors, the New York Philharmonic booked two back-to-back: Santtu-Matias Rouvali, for a program that continues through Tuesday at David Geffen Hall, and Susanna Mälkki last week.The similarities between the two conductors’ programs don’t end with their nationality. Both opened with a contemporary work making its Philharmonic premiere; both featured late pieces by Richard Strauss; and both ended with music written during, and in the shadow of, World War I.Yet these two weeks at the Philharmonic felt satisfyingly distinct. There may be many Finnish conductors, but there is not a Finnish style of conducting. Mälkki and Rouvali both have an intelligent, even wise sense of shape, but are excellent in their own ways; she is a master of color, he of surprise. And the music they programmed, while superficially similar, differed in sound and scale.The biggest difference was between the two contemporary works. Rouvali’s concert, on Thursday, opened with Julia Wolfe’s “Fountain of Youth” (2019), a nine-minute exclamation that starts percussively, with scratch tones in the strings and scraped washboards. Then the score gradually expands to include the whole orchestra: fluttering, sustained notes in the winds and wailing, animalistic cries in the trombones, as well as stylistic interjections like blues, folk fiddle and rock.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Johnny Gandelsman’s ‘This Is America’ at the Met Museum

      by

      Johnny Gandelsman has commissioned 28 pieces for his project “This Is America,” which explores themes of love, hope, inequality and injustice.In a quiet corner of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the violinist Johnny Gandelsman took a few deep breaths and began to play.“Sky above us,” he sang, with the cellist and songwriter Marika Hughes. “Ground below us; 360 support around us. Cut discursive thought.”It was Wednesday morning, the day after the presidential election, and Gandelsman, 46, a recent recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant, was rehearsing “This Is America.” He will bring this project, a collection of 28 pieces he has commissioned and begun to record since 2020, to the Met’s American Wing for a marathon performance spread over Friday and Saturday, with the aim to capture the modern American spirit: its love and hope, but also its inequality and injustice.

      This Is America – An Anthology 2020-2021 (ICR023) by Johnny Gandelsman“This Is America” began four years ago, but, Gandelsman said: “The rhetoric is still the same; the injustices are still the same. I am doing everything I can to represent these voices and support them and uplift them.”For the project, Gandelsman, who was born in Moscow and grew up in Israel before coming to the United States at 17, provided composers with $5,000 and simple instructions: to write a piece for solo violin that responds to the times we are living in. They responded with a variety of styles, including contemporary classical music, jazz, world music and electronics.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More