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      A Pianist Who’s Not Afraid to Improvise on Mozart

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      Robert Levin has long argued that Mozart would have made up new material while performing, and he follows the master in a series of dazzling recordings.Robert Levin playing an excerpt of Mozart, whose complete works for keyboard and orchestra he has recently finished releasing on disc.Cadenzas are a concerto soloist’s time to shine: the moments when the rest of the orchestra dramatically drops out and a single musician gets the chance to command the stage.For about half of Mozart’s piano concertos, cadenzas he wrote have been preserved, and those are what you usually hear in concerts and on recordings. Other composers later filled in the gaps with cadenzas that have also become traditional. Some performers write their own.But 250 years ago, when Mozart was a star pianist, he wouldn’t have performed prewritten cadenzas — even ones he had composed.“When Mozart wrote his concertos, they were a vehicle for his skills,” the pianist and scholar Robert Levin said by telephone from Salzburg, Austria — Mozart’s hometown — where he teaches at the Mozarteum University. “He was respected as a composer and lionized as a performer, but it was as an improviser that he was on top of the heap.”Levin, 76, has long argued that Mozart, as a player, made up new cadenzas and ornaments in the moment. And he has sought to revive that spirit of improvisation in a landmark cycle of the concertos on period instruments, a 13-album project begun more than 30 years ago with the Academy of Ancient Music, led by Christopher Hogwood.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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      Coming Soon to Jersey City: A Gleaming Home for the Symphony

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      The New Jersey Symphony, which long lacked a permanent space, will move into a 550-seat theater that it hopes to make a hub for concerts and classes.The New Jersey Symphony has long lacked a permanent home, performing in a variety of spaces across the state. But come 2026, that will change: The orchestra is getting a gleaming 550-seat theater in downtown Jersey City, the ensemble and the city announced on Wednesday.The new theater, to be called Symphony Center, is expected to become a hub for concerts, classes and other activities. While the New Jersey Symphony will continue to perform across the state, the theater will serve as its flagship location.“We’ve always been in someone else’s house,” said Gabriel van Aalst, the orchestra’s president and chief executive. “This not only gives us an emotional home, but the opportunity to reinvent, re-explore and re-examine our business model, and to look at ways to set the orchestra up for the future.”The project is a coup for the New Jersey Symphony, which, like many arts organizations, is still grappling with the financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic. Last year, the orchestra announced it was trimming its season and cutting its administrative staff by about 15 percent. To keep up with rising costs, the orchestra has dipped into its endowment: The fund is now valued at about $3 million, down from about $9 million in 2019.Symphony Center was recently constructed for about $40 million, as part of a luxury housing development by the home builder Toll Brothers. The space is owned by Jersey City, which will allow the symphony to use it under an initial 30-year lease agreement. The symphony plans to raise an additional $12 million to furnish the space and fine-tune its acoustics.Steven Fulop, the mayor of Jersey City, said the theater was part of the city’s efforts to become a cultural destination. He said it would help elevate the symphony’s profile and bring tens of thousands of people downtown each year.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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      5 Breakout Artists at the Salzburg Festival

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      The Salzburg Festival is synonymous with excellence and fame. But it’s also a place where artists on the cusp of stardom can shine.The Salzburg Festival has, since its founding more than 100 years ago, been known as a gathering place for the world’s finest musicians.That’s still true: During a visit there earlier this month, I heard Grigory Sokolov play Bach with unfussy authority; Jordi Savall lead his period orchestra in magisterial accounts of Beethoven’s final two symphonies; Igor Levit muscle through another Beethoven symphony, the bacchic Seventh, with just a piano.But Salzburg is also a proving ground for artists on the cusp on stardom. The soprano Asmik Grigorian, for example, was busy but hardly world famous until she gave a career-making performance as Salome there in 2018.This year, there were breakthroughs to be found throughout Salzburg’s theaters. If you looked past the top billing, past the Cecilia Bartolis and Teodor Currentzises, they were even at some of the most high-profile events this summer. Here are five of them.Lukas SternathThe pianist Lukas Sternath performing with the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, under the conductor Adam Fischer.Marco Borrelli/Salzburg FestivalIn a bit of scheduling serendipity, Levit’s recital took place during the same weekend that the Austrian pianist Lukas Sternath, his former student, was debuting with the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg. It was touching to see Levit in the balcony of the Mozarteum’s ornate Grosser Saal, looking down as Sternath eloquently performed Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D minor (K. 466) under the baton of Adam Fischer.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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      This Is My Voice One Year on T

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      A transgender music critic explores the change in their singing voice after taking testosterone.When I started taking testosterone last year, I was eager for the effects it would have on my speaking voice. I imagined talking in a voice that was low, smooth, soothing. But my high singing voice felt somehow sacrosanct. I didn’t really want it to change.Maybe that’s because growing up listening to opera I was always drawn to the sound of countertenors — the highest of male voice types — like Anthony Roth Costanzo and Klaus Nomi. In that ethereal, almost genderless sound, I recognized myself.What is it about the voice that carries such emotional weight? Such potential for self-recognition? The word “voice” is so tied up with identity as to be nearly synonymous with it. My writing has a voice. The cello, my primary instrument, is sometimes described as closest to the human voice.All voices evolve over the course of a lifetime. Boys’ voices drop during puberty. Opera singers have noticed how their voices change during and after pregnancy. And menopause brings hormonal changes that can lower voices. Our voices can even fluctuate in pitch over the course of a day, depending on whom we’re speaking to, whether that’s a child or a friend.When I started taking testosterone as part of my transition, I wondered not just how my voice would change, but also what that shift would mean. Would I be the same person with a different voice?I’m a cellist-turned-critic but I’ve always sung for pleasure. It wasn’t until two years ago, though, at 26, that I started voice lessons with a countertenor. I was already thinking about taking testosterone, but before that I wanted to experience my voice, as it was, at its full potential.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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      Harold Meltzer, Composer of Impossible-to-Pigeonhole Works, Dies at 58

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      His music, which was performed by many prominent ensembles, mixed melodic themes and rich textures with the sharp-edged angularity of modernism.Harold Meltzer, a composer who set aside a career as a lawyer to create a highly regarded body of energetic, colorful chamber, vocal and orchestral scores that mixed accessibly melodic themes and rich ensemble textures with the sharp-edged angularity of modernism, died on Aug. 12 in Manhattan. He was 58.Hilary Meltzer, his wife, said that his death, in a hospital, was caused by respiratory failure, a complication of a variety of medical problems he had withstood since having a stroke in 2019.Mr. Meltzer, who was also a director (first with David Amato, later with Sara Laimon) of Sequitur, a new-music ensemble, cut an imposing figure at contemporary music concerts in the 1990s and 2000s.Bespectacled, with wavy hair, he invariably entertained friends during intermissions with wry observations about the music world in general, or the events of the day. Even after his stroke, when he began using a wheelchair, he was determined to maintain something approximating his earlier level of activity, and after only two months of therapy, he appeared as the narrator for his theater work “Sindbad,” a humorous 2005 setting of a Donald Barthelme story that was one of his most frequently performed works.His music was impossible to pigeonhole, mainly because each work was his response to a different set of challenges. In “Virginal” (2002), for harpsichord and 15 other instruments, he wanted to pay tribute to William Byrd, John Bull and other Elizabethan composers whose works were included in the “Fitzwilliam Virginal Book,” a collection of English Renaissance keyboard pieces. To avoid creating a pastiche, he did not quote from any of their music, focusing instead on the structures and processes (repeating figuration., for example) that made their music distinct.If there was one element that connected many of Mr. Meltzer’s works, it was an imaginative use of tone color. Metalli Studio, via the Civitella Ranieri FoundationWe 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 Virtuoso Cellist’s Painstaking Path From Long Covid Back to the Stage

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      For over three years, long Covid has presented Joshua Roman with health challenges — and has indelibly shaped the music he makes.Since he began playing cello at 3, Joshua Roman’s talent has taken him from his hometown of Mustang, Okla., to concert halls all over the world.He was the youngest principal cellist of the Seattle Symphony, at 22, and has been a soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and many other orchestras. His daily routine often included 10 hours of playing, along with a six-mile run.Then, on Jan. 9, 2021, in Jacksonville, Fla., the morning after performing Prokofiev’s Symphony-Concerto, a piece he loves for its “giant sections of flashy, virtuosic excitement,” everything changed. He woke up and found he couldn’t smell his toothpaste. Later that day, he tested positive for Covid.He was only 37 years old, but he felt extreme fatigue, as if “wearing a coat of weighted down metal inside my body.” It would be a month before he had enough energy to fly home to Manhattan. He was so weak that he got stuck on a staircase landing, crying until he managed to crawl up the rest of the steps.Eventually, most excruciating of all, he lost the stamina to play his cello for nearly three months.“I just let it sit literally collecting dust.”Mr. Roman described his fatigue as like “wearing a coat of weighted down metal inside my body.”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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      One of Classical Music’s Great Builders Prepares for the Next Step

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      Over 25 years, through crises and a changing world, Michael Haefliger has made the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland as we know it.Michael Haefliger has made a life out of building music festivals.A Juilliard-trained violinist, he came up with the idea not long after finishing school to create the Davos Festival in Switzerland for young artists. Then, a quarter century ago, he took over the established, expansive Lucerne Festival, which opens on Friday with a performance by the orchestra he founded.Now 63, Haefliger has enjoyed rare success in classical music: His long tenure at Lucerne has been defined not only by sustainability and survival through crises like the coronavirus pandemic, but also by enormous growth.He started the Lucerne Festival Orchestra with the eminent conductor Claudio Abbado; with the iconoclast Pierre Boulez, he created the festival’s academy; when Japan was hit by a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in 2011, he spearheaded Ark Nova, an inflatable, portable concert hall that brought the festival to Matsushima.Over time, Haeflinger has lost major collaborators. Abbado died in 2014; Boulez, two years later. Wolfgang Rihm, Boulez’s successor, died last month. (Riccardo Chailly, who took over the Festival Orchestra after Abbado, will lead Rihm’s “Ernster Gesang” at the opening concert.)“He was quite a strong figure,” Haefliger said of Rihm in a recent phone interview. “The way he saw things and programming was very open. He didn’t remain in his own school and tradition, which is important today in contemporary music.”Rihm’s contributions to the 2025 festival were already settled before his death. That year will also be Haefliger’s farewell; he steps down as artistic and executive director next summer. What comes after that for the academy, and Lucerne in general, will be up to the next leader, Sebastian Nordmann, from the Konzerthaus in Berlin.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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      Esa-Pekka Salonen: A Conductor at the Top, and at a Crossroads

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      Salonen, who will soon be a free agent for the first time in decades, could do pretty much anything at this stage. What will it be?On a late afternoon in May, pop and classical music luminaries gathered in the neo-Gothic sanctuary of a 19th-century church-turned-Soho House in Stockholm. With drinks in hand, they listened as the media personality Cilla Benkö asked Esa-Pekka Salonen, “So what’s going on in your head at the moment?”“Well, I’m at a crossroads,” said Salonen, the composer and conductor, who is a year away from becoming a free agent for the first time in decades. “I’m kind of figuring out what to do, if anything.”Salonen is in a good position to choose what comes next. He is a conductor at the top of his field, and the kind of composer who can bring on not just one high-profile commissioner but several for each new piece he writes. The day after his interview with Benkö, he received the Polar Music Prize, an honor that has been called the Nobel Prize of music, directly from the hands of the Swedish king.Salonen, center, rehearsing with the San Francisco Symphony in 2022. The announcement that he would leave when his contract is up in 2025 came as a surprise.Ulysses Ortega for The New York TimesThe award is given to a classical and a pop artist annually; Salonen’s counterpart was Nile Rodgers, the mind behind songs like “We Are Family” and “Le Freak” and albums by Madonna, David Bowie and Beyoncé. Guests at the ceremony included the royal family, the megaproducer Max Martin and a member of ABBA, all gathered for a televised evening of tributes and black-tie diners dancing in the aisles to music related to the prize winners.With royalty grooving to Daft Punk but also listening attentively to Salonen’s “Concert Étude for Solo Horn,” it was a fitting celebration for Salonen, one of the most open-minded, open-eared and fundamentally cool artists in classical music, who at 66 is beloved and respected across the field.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