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      Norman Carol, Violinist in Historic Concert in China, Is Dead at 95

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      The concertmaster and first-chair violinist with the Philadelphia Orchestra for decades, he took part in a diplomatic breakthrough in 1973 with concerts in Mao Zedong’s Beijing.Norman Carol, a former violin prodigy who was first chair and concertmaster for the acclaimed Philadelphia Orchestra for nearly three decades, accompanying it on a history-making trip to China under Mao Zedong in 1973, died on April 28. He was 95.His death, at an assisted living center in Bala Cynwyd, a community on Philadelphia’s Main Line, was announced in a statement posted on social media by the orchestra. It was not widely reported outside the classical music world at the time.As concertmaster, tuning the orchestra and overseeing the string section, Mr. Carol served under the celebrated conductors Eugene Ormandy, Riccardo Muti and Wolfgang Sawallisch.“He was dashing, comfortable, even swashbuckling as a leader,” Paul Arnold, a violinist with the orchestra, said in the statement. “His playing was bold, expressive and hall-filling.” Mr. Carol “went on to personally embody the ‘Philadelphia Sound,’” he added.That fabled sound, which emerged under Leopold Stokowski and took shape under Ormandy, the orchestra’s longtime music director starting in the 1930s, is built on “distinctive honeyed timbre” emanating from its strings, as the journal Classical Voice North America noted in 2015, along with softer attacks from the brass section and a more blended percussion approach.The orchestra’s sound became known around the world in tours of Europe and Asia during Mr. Carol’s tenure.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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      Mitsuko Uchida Keeps the Focus on Young Artists at Ojai

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      Mitsuko Uchida sat at the piano with her back to the audience.It was an unusual look for a reigning pianist who can fill a concert hall, or sell a new album of 200-year-old sonatas, on the strength of just of her name and face. But over four evenings of performances at the Ojai Music Festival in California, that’s how Uchida played.It was especially strange, given that she was the festival’s music director, an annual post given to an artist to organize programming and the roster of performers. Throughout the festival’s outdoor campus, her name was on T-shirts and signs, not to mention Vogue-thick program books handed out at each concert.Then again, we’re talking about Ojai, where open-minded audiences take in music accompanied by nature and snack on freshly picked pixie tangerines. Uchida might have seemed like a headliner, but this festival is about sharing the wealth.She invited friends and colleagues whom she has known for years, like the endlessly genial Brentano String Quartet. Most heavily featured, during the festival’s run from June 6 through 9, was the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, with whom Uchida often tours in concerto programs that she leads from the piano.The Mahler Chamber Orchestra played traditional concerts at Ojai and also showed up at a local bar as a Johnny Cash cover band,Adali Schell for The New York TimesThose tours, though, rarely showcase the shape-shifting resourcefulness the ensemble brought to Ojai. Its members played pop-up miniatures in Libbey Park, the festival’s center, and even at a local bar as a Johnny Cash cover band. Onstage, they took on traditional fare, like heavenly Mozart concertos with Uchida, but also more contemporary works by Missy Mazzoli and John Adams.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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      When Vienna’s Opera Tradition Got Too Traditional, They Stepped In

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      Bogdan Roscic and Lotte de Beer are shaking the dust off Vienna’s two biggest repertory companies.In a rehearsal studio built on the grounds of old military barracks outside Vienna’s city center one recent morning, the director Barrie Kosky was asking for a touch of vaudeville.He was working on his new production of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte,” which opens at the Vienna State Opera on June 16, and was running through a scene with Kate Lindsey and Christopher Maltman, the singers playing the scheming Despina and Don Alfonso.While Kosky demonstrated a bit of physical comedy, Bogdan Roscic, the general director of the State Opera, walked into the room, and read Mozart’s score over the shoulder of the rehearsal pianist. Once they were finished, he walked over to Kosky.“Your fabulousness,” Roscic said, addressing him. “Are the taxpayers getting their money’s worth?”Roscic was joking, of course; his job is to hire directors for their value as artists, not as public utilities. But his question wasn’t crazy. In Vienna, as in much of Europe, opera receives substantial government support, and the leaders of houses are chosen by politicians. If, in the United States, arts administrators like to talk about their work as a civic duty, in Vienna, it absolutely is.And Vienna is one of the busiest opera destinations in the world. Tourists plan entire trips around the storied, immense State Opera. Not far away, the Volksoper has long offered more varied fare, including musicals and operettas.Such a rich history, though, can be double-edged. In recent decades, the State Opera and the Volksoper, both repertory houses that present a head-spinning number of titles per season, developed reputations as stagnating under the weight of their traditions. At the State Opera this century, the average age of viewers began to increase by one year each year, suggesting that the audience wasn’t changing. It was just getting terminally older.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: ‘Inside Light’ Gives a Taste of Stockhausen’s Opera Epic

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      At the Park Avenue Armory, a five-hour selection of pieces from the 29-hour “Licht” cycle is best appreciated as a marathon performance.How often can you describe five hours of excerpts from an opera as a drop in the bucket of the whole?But Karlheinz Stockhausen’s epic “Licht” — 29 hours of enormous forces, fanciful notions (a camel as candidate for galactic president) and loopy cosmogony — is no ordinary opera. It calls for multiple spaces, and at one point multiple helicopters, dwarfing even Wagner’s mighty “Ring,” a mere dozen or so hours that can fit in a single theater.Presenting bits of “Licht,” as the Park Avenue Armory is doing with the vivid yet meditative, ultimately stirring “Inside Light,” still means presenting quite a lot. For viewers, it’s a six-and-a-half-hour commitment, counting a pair of intermissions and dinner break. But it’s worth it: Written over about 25 years starting in the late 1970s, and never produced — because it’s almost unproduceable — all at once, “Licht” is one of the sui generis works of art from the turn of the 21st century.In Amsterdam in 2019, the stage director and impresario Pierre Audi put on a three-day festival of chunks from the cycle, which is divided into seven operas, each named for a day of the week. As the Armory’s artistic director, Audi has now brought to New York a yet smaller, but still valuable, selection.You can see the program in two parts, half on Wednesday, half on Thursday. But I recommend going on Friday to see it as I did: a back-to-back marathon. With Stockhausen (1928-2007), the experience blossoms, and becomes more oddly moving, the more of his music you take in, ending up greater than the sum of its parts.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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      Gone in a Six-Year Flash: Farewell to the New York Phil’s Maestro

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      The pandemic-derailed tenure of Jaap van Zweden, the orchestra’s music director, was too short to give us a full sense of him, as man or maestro.Jaap, we hardly knew ye.On Thursday at David Geffen Hall, Jaap van Zweden, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, conducted a lean, driven rendition of Mahler’s sprawling Second Symphony. After two more performances through Saturday, he will leave his Lincoln Center podium, a mere six years after stepping onto it.No Philharmonic artistic leader has been less present in front of its players and audience since Mahler himself, who died two years into his tenure, in 1911. There was barely enough time to meet van Zweden, let alone get a full sense of him, as man or maestro.He had no signature initiatives, and his choice of works revealed little personal stamp. His interpretations of the classics only occasionally relaxed from a tense punchiness. And though I wasn’t always displeased after hearing him lead a program, I was never inspired to return and hear it again.The period of van Zweden’s tenure has been hugely consequential for the Philharmonic. There was the orchestra’s survival through the extended pandemic lockdown, the renovation of its home at Geffen Hall and a flood of music by composers beyond the usual roster of white men of the distant past.But van Zweden, 63, has seemed more a participant in all this than a leader. When he was preparing to start in New York, he expressed enthusiasm about bringing back Deborah Borda, an industry legend, as chief executive. Having such a strong, visionary administrative partner, though, ended up making this feel more like Borda’s era than van Zweden’s.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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      Wiener Festwochen Says ‘No Excuses Anymore’ for Inequality

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      In Vienna, a series of concerts and summits will highlight women and nonbinary composers, as well as the dominance of the dead, white, male canon.In the world of classical music, progress toward gender parity can seem incredibly slow.Recent big wins have included women of the New York Philharmonic being allowed to perform in pants, and the appointment of the second woman — ever — to a music director role at one of the 25 largest orchestras in the United States. The Berlin Philharmonic, one of the world’s great ensembles, hired its first female concertmaster last year.Frustrated by the stubborn gender imbalances in classical music, the directors of the Wiener Festwochen, a prestigious arts festival in Vienna, have this year formed the “Academy Second Modernism,” an initiative that will showcase works by 50 female and nonbinary composers over five years.This season, less than 8 percent of approximately 16,000 works staged by 111 orchestras worldwide were composed by women, according to a report from Donne, Women in Music, an organization working for equity in the classical music industry. Of those works, the vast majority were composed by white women.According to the report, three of the 10 orchestras that performed the highest proportion of works composed by women were in the United States: the American Composers Orchestra in New York, the Chicago Sinfonietta and National Philharmonic in North Bethesda, Md. But at the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, two of America’s top orchestras, only about 10 percent of the music programmed was composed by women.“There are so many of us,” said Bushra El-Turk, a British-Lebanese composer who often merges Western and Eastern musical traditions in her work. “Whether we’re given opportunities is the problem.”Rehearsing El-Turk’s opera “Woman at Point Zero,” in Vienna last month.David Payr 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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      The Opera Singer Aigul Akhmetshina on Her Career, ‘Carmen’ and More

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      During a break at the Royal Opera House, Aigul Akhmetshina discussed her action-packed career, “Carmen” and her mission to spread her love of opera.The Russian mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina only just turned 28. Yet she already has a couple of operatic records under her belt: She’s the youngest artist ever to have sung “Carmen” at the Metropolitan Opera and at the Royal Opera House in London.Her trajectory began about 2,700 miles east of London.Akhmetshina was born in the village of Kirgiz-Miyaki in the Republic of Bashkortostan region of western Russia, closer to Kazakhstan than Moscow. She is one of three children of a single mother who worked in the passport office at the police station, whose own mother was a police officer in Soviet times.She was 3 years old when she first sang onstage, and 14 when she decamped to the nearest city, Ufa, to study music. Scouted in her teens at a voice competition in Moscow, she was invited to try out for the Royal Opera’s Jette Parker program for young artists in London — and got the gig. By 22, she was stepping in as an understudy to sing “Carmen” on the main stage, and delivering a career-shifting performance in the title role.Akhmetshina was in London after singing in “Carmen,” one of eight productions of the Bizet opera that she is performing in this season at major opera houses. In an interview during a break from rehearsals for a gala at the Royal Opera House, she discussed her action-packed career and her mission to spread her love of opera.The following conversation has been edited and condensed.What were you like as a little girl?Everyone knew me as Aigul, the singer in the village. I was free-spirited, and an old soul. I would give advice to anyone who came to me with a question. I was into psychology and philosophy from an early age.For me, the village was too small. I was always saying: “Why can’t I just be free to go everywhere? I want to see the world, I want to explore, I want to learn.”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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      At the Curtis Institute, Students Live Entirely for Music

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      James Estrin/The New York TimesStudents, some barely adolescent and some well into adulthood, come from all over the world to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.They study with nearly monastic focus, with the numbers and skill to operate as a world-class orchestra and opera company.But they’re still young people growing up, experiencing triumphs and struggles for the first time, just in an extraordinary environment.At This School, the Students Live Entirely for MusicDelfin Demiray had packed too much. She was leaving her home in Ankara, Turkey, for the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. An 18-year-old who had never been to the United States, she didn’t know what to expect.As she prepared for her flight in August, loading her suitcases with clothes and books, she was still surprised at the turn her life had taken. Demiray had played piano since she was 8, and had a gift for reproducing music she heard on TV at the keyboard; she also liked to improvise with friends and write melodies of her own. But she didn’t think of herself as a composer until a year ago, when she applied to Curtis and, to her shock, was accepted.Her move to the United States would make her parents empty-nesters, but she tried not to think too much about the sadness of saying goodbye. “It’s just how life is,” said Demiray, now 19. “I feel like they are living their dreams through me.”Her story is not so rare at Curtis, an extremely selective school whose roughly 150 students come from around the world to study with almost monastic focus. Even among conservatories, it is exceptional, with a wide age range — from preadolescence to post-baccalaureate adulthood — and a personalized approach, of schedules and repertoire, for musicians who live almost entirely for their art.“We know what it feels like to have to go to bed early on a Saturday night because you have to wake up Sunday morning for a lesson,” said Dillon Scott, a viola student, “and we all know what it feels like to have a performance that was objectively good, but still could’ve been better.”Some of the students are already professionals who perform outside school, as well as on the campus of Curtis, which maintains a full orchestra, an opera program and chamber music groups. Many of the musicians form friendships that lead to collaborations that endure throughout their careers. The list of alumni reads like a musical hall of fame, with titans like Leonard Bernstein and current stars like Lang Lang and Hilary Hahn.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