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      Three New Books Make the Case for Music as Medicine

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      Three new books make the case for music as medicine. In “The Schubert Treatment,” the most lyrical of the trio, a cellist takes us bedside with the sick and the dying.My colleague Dwight Garner is a great connoisseur of the quotation. I find myself stumbling around this week in the dark corners of the misquotation. Music may indeed have charms to “soothe the savage beast,” as is oft-declared, but the line actually ends “a savage breast,” and is attributable not to William Shakespeare, but to William Congreve, from his 1697 play “The Mourning Bride.”Now you know.Music’s soothing and stimulating effect — its use as a kind of medicine — is the subject of at least three books published this year. This is not a new therapy, but a blooming hot spot of research.I’ve been poking around there for a while, curious to figure out why my mother, a retired professional violist and pianist with advancing dementia, retains so much of her memory (including the ability to sight-read) in this particular realm. She still plays weekly string quartets and piano duos and sings in perfect harmony with Alexa’s somewhat middlebrow choices, though an old game of name-the-composer has faded.THE SCHUBERT TREATMENT: A Story of Music and Healing (Greystone, $24.95), by the cellist and art therapist Claire Oppert, is a slim but shimmery account of performing on her “forever instrument” for a series of patients with varied afflictions, including the inevitable final one.Oppert’s father was a beloved company doctor for several theaters in Paris, who himself played the piano, and she has worked with Howard Buten, a professional clown, novelist and psychologist specializing in autism. (This field teems with polymaths.) Though she tangles dutifully with charts, data and analytics, her philosophy is holistic: “trust and gratitude before the splendor of all things: This is life’s foundation, its bedrock.”Or, more bluntly: “Ten minutes of Schubert is the equivalent of five milligrams of oxy,” the chief of the palliative care unit at a Paris hospital tells her. (Maybe this is why Donald J. Trump played “Ave Maria” at that recent rally-turned-swayfest.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: A Standard Rushes Back to the Philharmonic

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      The New York Philharmonic has played Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony twice in two years. Rafael Payare led its latest outing.Earlier this month, the New York Philharmonic brought back two standards by Beethoven and Brahms after just a couple of years. And this week, under the conductor Rafael Payare, the orchestra did it again, playing Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony at David Geffen Hall not even two years after its last outing.Programming like this may be driven by fear. With two seasons to fill before Gustavo Dudamel arrives as music director, the Philharmonic could be nervous about losing audiences and is juicing the programs with classics. It’s unfortunate: Even though these works are beloved for a reason, there is just too much great music that goes unheard to justify endless repetitions of a tiny core repertoire.But there was also something new this week: the Philharmonic’s first performances of “Fairytale Poem” by Sofia Gubaidulina — just five months after the ensemble played this 93-year-old Soviet-born composer’s Viola Concerto. (That is the kind of repetition I can get behind.)Gubaidulina’s music manages to be both uncompromising and accessible. Its strange colors are so alluring and changeable, its sense of drama and timing so sure, its desire to communicate — even if enigmatically — so evident, that it’s irresistible.“Fairytale Poem” (1971) shows that this was true from her earliest works. The 14-minute piece was inspired by a Czech children’s story; the main character is a piece of chalk that wants to draw gardens and castles but is stuck doing dry work at the classroom blackboard until a boy takes it home and finally gives it free imaginative rein.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Philip Glass Quartet to Be Performed at AIDS Memorial as Tribute to Brian Buczak

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      Glass’s Fourth String Quartet, written after the death of the artist Brian Buczak, will be performed at the New York City AIDS Memorial.The night Brian Buczak died, fireworks lit up the sky.It was July 4, 1987, and his bed at New York University’s hospital on the East River overlooked the holiday celebrations. Buczak’s partner, the Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks, a prolific painter of clouds, was struck by the beauty of what he saw outside the window: bursts of color, brightening a dark expanse.Buczak was just 32, but he had already made more than 400 paintings, founded a small printing press for artists and settled down with Hendricks, the love of his life, with whom he had restored a Federal-style house on Greenwich Street. But all that was cut off when Buczak, like many thousands of New Yorkers before and since, died of complications from AIDS.As Hendricks grieved, he turned to a friend, the composer Philip Glass, to write a tribute to Buczak. The result was Glass’s Fourth String Quartet, nicknamed Buczak, which he has described as “a musical impression.” It premiered on the second anniversary of Buczak’s death at the Hauser Gallery; now it is returning with a free performance by the Mivos Quartet on Sunday at the New York City AIDS Memorial in Greenwich Village.This weekend’s concert is the latest event in a resurgence of Buczak’s story and work. Last winter, there was a solo exhibition of his art, “Man Looks at the World,” at the Gordon Robichaux and Ortuzar Projects galleries, his first since 1989, the year Glass’s quartet premiered. Hendricks, who died in 2018, has a show opening on Friday at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery.“It’s such a relief,” Bracken Hendricks, Hendricks’s son and something like a stepson to Buczak, said of the fresh attention on Buczak. “It feels really earned by Brian’s just really deep and thoughtful work. His creative output was well conceived and conceptualized, and beautifully realized, but it was also forged by the grief of knowing he was dying.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Circe and Muse No Longer: A New Opera Reconsiders Alma Mahler

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      “Alma,” premiering this week at the Vienna Volksoper, views its often-vilified protagonist through a feminist lens: as a thwarted composer and mother.At the end of 1901, the budding composer Alma Schindler received a 20-page letter from Gustav Mahler laying out the expected terms of their future life together.She was 22 years old; he was nearly two decades older, an established composer and the director of the Vienna Court Opera. She had to stop writing music, he wrote, because “if we are to be happy together, you will have to be my wife, not my colleague.” Later he added: “You must surrender yourself to me unconditionally, make every detail of your future life dependent on my needs.”Soon after, the couple wed. Looking back years later, she wrote of the incident: “The iron had entered my soul and the wound was never healed.”Ella Milch-Sheriff’s opera “Alma,” which premieres on Saturday at the Vienna Volksoper, positions this decision as a turning point in the life of Alma Mahler-Werfel. She outlived Mahler by more than 50 years and came to be associated — as a lover, a supporter, an object of obsession or an inspiration — with some of the best-known artists of the 20th century, including Walter Gropius, Franz Werfel, Arnold Schoenberg and Oskar Kokoschka.“When she gave up her composing, she, in a way, killed her own soul,” Milch-Sheriff said in an interview at the Volksoper. “After that, she didn’t feel she deserved to have children because she’d already killed her own children, which were her future creations that were never born.”“Alma” unfurls in reverse chronology, with acts focusing on Mahler-Werfel’s lost children.Lisa Edi for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In the Art Biennale’s Shadow, Venice Celebrates Music, Too

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      The glistening domes of St. Mark’s Basilica seem to billow over Venice’s largest plaza. In the 19th century, when the church was already almost a thousand years old, a mosaic was added above the main entrance, with two angels hovering near Jesus and blowing the trumpets that signal the Last Judgment.The striking placement of the image — you can’t miss it — symbolizes music’s historical centrality in the city that has been home to giants extending from the days of Vivaldi, Gabrieli, Monteverdi and Cavalli to 20th-century masters like Luigi Nono. On a recent Thursday evening at the basilica, under the auspices of the Venice Music Biennale, two choirs in lofts high above the ground faced each other across the glittering gold interior and filled the vast expanse with a “Stabat Mater” by Giovanni Croce, a piece that was written to be performed in this very space some 425 years ago.These days, though, Venice is more of an art town. Every other year, crowds swell this floating labyrinth of twisting alleys and lapping canals for the enormous, seven-month-long Venice Art Biennale, one of the defining events of the global visual arts scene. In 2022, over 800,000 tickets were sold; this year’s iteration continues through Nov. 24.Lisa Streich’s “Stabat” was performed inside St. Mark’s Basilica, alongside Giovanni Croce’s 16th-century “Stabat Mater.”While the Venice Film Festival (organized, like the art event, by La Biennale di Venezia) is world-famous, you could be forgiven for not knowing that under the Biennale’s umbrella are also festivals devoted to architecture, dance and theater — and to music. As fall begins, the temperature cools and the city becomes ever so slightly emptier, the music biennial opens for a two-week stretch of roughly hourlong performances; I attended nine of them over five days earlier this month.Like the art festival, the Music Biennale ventures beyond established exhibition spaces to Venice’s palazzos and churches. It has a base at the Arsenale, a complex of old shipyards and factories, but it sprawls across the city for site-specific concerts: multichoral pieces at St. Mark’s Basilica, delicate viola da gamba duets in the ornate 16th-century Marciana Library, grand ensembles at the gilded Fenice opera house.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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

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

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      Review: A Choir Stands Out in a Multimedia Performance

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

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

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