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      What to Know About ‘Maestro’: A Guide to Bradley Cooper’s Bernstein Biopic

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      Now on Netflix, the movie tracks the life of the American conductor and composer and his wife, the actress Felicia Montealegre, played by Carey Mulligan.Pop quiz: Who wrote the score for Bradley Cooper’s new Leonard Bernstein biopic, “Maestro”?Trick question: Bernstein. But you might not realize it, or learn of some of his more lasting accomplishments (“West Side Story” erasure!), even after watching the entire film, which focuses on the personal life of the prodigiously talented musician.Which is to say, the film — which Cooper directed and starred in, and which is now streaming on Netflix — does not hand-hold. It assumes some basic familiarity with one of America’s most storied conductors and composers. Here’s a guide to help you get up to speed.His careerWhat is Bernstein best known for?One of the rare virtuosos to compose for musical theater, write classical music and conduct august bodies like the New York Philharmonic, Bernstein is probably best remembered as the composer of the 1957 musical “West Side Story.”The Manhattan-set tale of urban gang warfare in New York City, based on “Romeo & Juliet,” includes standards like “Tonight,” “I Feel Pretty” and the aching, wistful “Maria.” The classic show, a collaboration with Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book, and Stephen Sondheim, who penned the lyrics, won two Tony Awards in its original incarnation.In his day, Bernstein was known first and foremost as an animated, passionate conductor. After his spectacular fill-in debut at the Philharmonic at age 25 in 1943 — on just a few hours’ notice, because the scheduled guest conductor fell ill — Bernstein would be affiliated with the orchestra for four decades and conduct symphonies around the world.He also wrote classical music, including three symphonies, “Jeremiah,” “The Age of Anxiety” and “Kaddish,” and made the classical realm accessible to ordinary Americans through his Young People’s Concerts. Those televised lectures, which ran on CBS for 14 years, covered a broad range of subjects including humor in music, and the composers Gustav Mahler and Igor Stravinsky.What is Tanglewood?Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its training academy in the Berkshire Hills in Massachusetts, is where Bernstein studied with Serge Koussevitzky, then the director of the ensemble. The two met in 1940, when Koussevitzky selected a 22-year-old Bernstein as one of three inaugural conducting fellows for the Berkshire Music Center, now known as the Tanglewood Music Center.Bernstein went on to teach and perform there nearly every summer for 50 years, becoming the head of orchestral conducting at Tanglewood after Koussevitzky died in 1951. In 1990, Bernstein led the final performance of his life there — a gripping account of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.How much of the film’s score is Bernstein’s music?That cue you hear when Bernstein finds out he’ll be making his conducting debut at the New York Philharmonic? That’s from “On the Waterfront,” the 1954 Marlon Brando drama for which Bernstein wrote the music. That spiky, horn-filled composition that signals tension when Bernstein and a male lover arrive at the family’s Connecticut home? That’s the prologue from “West Side Story.”In fact, most of the music you hear was written by Bernstein. (Also see if you can spot classical excerpts from his ballets “Facsimile” and “Fancy Free,” his opera “A Quiet Place,” and parts of his second and third symphonies.)His personal lifeWas Bernstein gay or bisexual?Though he was married to his wife, the actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), for 26 years, he had numerous relationships — with both men and women — before and during their marriage, and after her death in 1978.The film focuses on two of them — his dalliance with the clarinetist David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer), whose bottom Bernstein slaps at the beginning of the film, and the musician Tom Cothran (Gideon Glick), whom he steals kisses with at a party and brings to his Connecticut home.What was society’s attitude toward gay people at the time?Anti-gay prejudice was rampant in America in the 1940s and 1950s, and the Lavender Scare — a fear that homosexual people had infiltrated the federal government and were a threat to national security — led to the dismissal of gay and lesbian employees, and those assumed to be, en masse. Gay, lesbian and transgender people — particularly public figures — faced intense pressure to conceal their identities, and Bernstein worried that the public revelation of his sexual orientation would hurt his conducting prospects.Did Montealegre know Bernstein was gay or bisexual when she married him?Yes, according to a letter she wrote to him the year after they were married, which the couple’s children discovered after her death. “You are a homosexual and may never change,” she wrote, adding later, “I am willing to accept you as you are, without being a martyr.” She went on to tell him, “Let’s try and see what happens if you are free to do as you like, but without guilt and confession.”Was Bernstein open about his affairs with men?At first, he was discreet, heeding Montealegre’s request to not embarrass her publicly. But, as “Maestro” shows, he became “sloppy” later or, rather, decided that he no longer wanted to hide what he viewed as a fundamental part of himself amid society’s changing attitudes.In 1976, he briefly left Montealegre to live openly with his boyfriend, Cothran, though he returned to her a year later when she learned she had lung cancer and cared for her until she died at age 56.What did Bernstein say about his sexuality?Nothing, at least, publicly. But privately, he suffered through years of therapy, apparently in the hope that he could be “cured” of his attraction to men. That desire lasted a lifetime: “I have been engaged in an imaginary life with Felicia,” he wrote in a letter to his sister, Shirley, from Israel in 1950, “having her by my side on the beach as a shockingly beautiful Yemenite boy passes.”Did Bernstein love his wife?Bernstein was “a gay man who got married,” his “West Side Story” collaborator Arthur Laurents once said in response to the assumption that Bernstein, who had three children with Montealegre, was bisexual. “He wasn’t conflicted about his sexual orientation at all. He was just gay.”But what is clear, from their children’s memories and from Bernstein’s own letters, is that he and Montealegre had an abiding affection for one another, and that their relationship was built on tenderness and mutual respect.“Bernstein absolutely loved her — there was no question about that,” Paul R. Laird, the author of “Leonard Bernstein,” a 2018 biography, recently told Time magazine. “It was as sincere a marriage as you’re going to get between a male homosexual and a woman at a time when a lot of male homosexuals married women.”Bernstein’s oldest daughter, Jamie, has spoken about her parents’ friendship. “They were really great friends, and probably that counts for the most in the long run, that they could still make each other laugh,” she said in a 1997 PBS interview.How did Bernstein die?He had received an emphysema diagnosis in his mid-20s — he would struggle with addiction to cigarettes and alcohol for most of his life — and died on Oct. 14, 1990, at 72, of a heart attack caused by lung failure.He was often depressed in his later years, intimidated that he would be best remembered as a conductor, resigned to the fact that he could never live up to the success of “West Side Story,” and guilty about his wife’s death from cancer, which he held himself responsible for. More

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      Best Classical Music Albums of 2023

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      Our favorites include premiere recordings of works by Thomas Adès and Anna Thorvaldsdottir, as well as portraits of Missy Mazzoli and Kaija Saariaho.Thomas Adès: ‘Dante’Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra; Gustavo Dudamel, conductor (Nonesuch)“Inferno”: “The Gluttons — in slime”NonesuchThis recording has so much to applaud: the achievement of Thomas Adès in writing such a clever, vivid, effective work; the ambition of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in performing its hour and a half of music in a single evening and taping it live; the wisdom of Nonesuch in releasing the audio. Essential listening. DAVID ALLENBach: ‘Goldberg’ VariationsVikingur Olafsson, piano (Deutsche Grammophon)Variation 15Deutsche GrammophonThe finest interpreters of the “Goldberg” Variations balance the individuality of each section with a sense of shape over the work’s 75 minutes. Vikingur Olafsson does that — achieving unity while avoiding flatness — and more, from a beautifully simple Aria to a life-affirming Quodlibet and back, with nostalgic sweetness, to the Aria again. JOSHUA BARONE‘Broken Branches’Karim Sulayman, tenor; Sean Shibe, guitar (Pentatone)Fairuz: “Li Beirut” (arr. Sean Shibe and Karim Sulayman)PentatoneThis year, there wasn’t anything in classical music quite like this thoughtful program of songs, arranged for Karim Sulayman’s alluring voice and Sean Shibe’s expressive guitar, that create dialogues across cultures and centuries — raising complicated questions about identity, exoticization and exchange along the way — while providing an absolutely beautiful listening experience. JOSHUA BARONEByrd: ‘The Golden Renaissance’Stile Antico (Decca)Mass for Four Voices: “Agnus Dei”DeccaWilliam Byrd died 400 years ago this July, and the anniversary celebrations offered no finer tribute than this typically imaginative, immaculate record from Stile Antico. At its heart is the Mass for Four Voices; I could listen to the exquisitely tender “Agnus Dei” all day, and for a week or two last winter, I think I actually did. DAVID ALLENChristopher Cerrone: ‘In a Grove’Metropolis Ensemble; Andrew Cyr, conductor (In a Circle)“Scene 5: The Outlaw”In a CircleChristopher Cerrone and Stephanie Fleischmann’s “In a Grove,” an operatic retelling of the short story that also inspired the film “Rashomon,” is a vividly immersive thriller about the nature of truth and memory. Not a word or note is without dramaturgical purpose, and both are captured, if not enhanced, in this richly produced recording. JOSHUA BARONE‘Contra-Tenor’Michael Spyres, tenor; Il Pomo d’Oro; Francesco Corti, conductor (Erato)Latilla: “Se il mio paterno amore”(Erato)With a juicy, chesnut-colored timbre, a stupefying three-octave range and a keen instinct for showmanship, Michael Spyres flies through virtuoso arias from the Baroque and early Classical eras. It’s 70 minutes of gobsmacking singing. The effervescent playing of Il Pomo d’Oro contributes to the album’s heady effect. OUSSAMA ZAHR‘Julius Eastman, Vol. 3: If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?’Wild Up; Devonté Hynes and Adam Tendler, pianos (New Amsterdam)“Evil Nigger”New AmsterdamThis latest in Wild Up’s series of recordings of works by Julius Eastman takes on three stormy, swiftly shifting, open-ended scores, rendered in new arrangements for a large and varied ensemble with passion, richness and complexity — a forest of details — and a controlled chaos inspired by free jazz. ZACHARY WOOLFE‘Fantasia’Igor Levit, piano (Sony Classical)Liszt: Piano Sonata in B minor, first movementSonyRefulgent Bach, poetically precise Liszt, twilit Berg, artfully brooding Busoni — the pianist Igor Levit is aware of style but more beholden to affect. He works methodically, his mind on not just the next bar but the next page, as he proves the coherence and the imagination of this album’s expansive, fantasy-like pieces. OUSSAMA ZAHRFauré: ‘Nocturnes & Barcarolles’Marc-André Hamelin (Hyperion)Nocturne No. 12 in E minorHyperionFauré’s 13 nocturnes and 13 barcarolles — two and a half hours in all — are not the kind of dizzyingly virtuosic works that are the fire-fingered Marc-André Hamelin’s stock in trade. But his clarity and sensitivity confirm that this is music of tender poignancy and subtle experimentation. ZACHARY WOOLFE‘Gradus ad Parnassum’Jean Rondeau, harpsichord (Erato)Fux: Ciaccona in DEratoTaking on works for piano by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Debussy on this quietly audacious album — a reflection on influence, transcription and re-creation — the harpsichordist Jean Rondeau also shows his gift for in-the-moment artfulness in pieces originally for his instrument by Palestrina, Clementi and Johann Joseph Fux. ZACHARY WOOLFEJohnson: ‘De Organizer’ and ‘The Dreamy Kid’University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra; Kenneth Kiesler, conductor (Naxos)“De Organizer”NaxosHere, James P. Johnson, the composer of “The Charleston,” sets texts by Langston Hughes and Eugene O’Neill in two short stage works. Aside from scholars, who knew? Well, now everyone can experience this Harlem Stride pianist’s talent for orchestration, shaping narrative — and, on occasion, weaving the feel of spirituals into the fabric of American opera. SETH COLTER WALLSLiszt: ‘Transcendental Études’Yunchan Lim, piano (Steinway & Sons)“Harmonies du Soir”Steinway & SonsYunchan Lim was just 18 when he played this formidable Liszt collection during the semifinals of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition last year. He is already so mind-bogglingly accomplished technically, and so refined musically, that these formidable works sound easy. “I’d like to be a musician with infinite possibilities,” he has said. And so he would appear to be. DAVID ALLENWynton Marsalis: Symphony No. 4, ‘The Jungle’Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra; Nicholas Buc, conductor (Blue Engine Records)Movement VI: “Struggle in the Digital Market”Blue Engine RecordsWynton Marsalis’s best symphony draws from his familiar lodestars. Duke Ellington looms large, as ever and as he ought. But other affinities also bloom: post-Minimalist orchestral riffing, pastoral melody and noir ambience all have their say. Plus, Marsalis’s climactic trumpet exclamations summon Cootie Williams from the grave. SETH COLTER WALLSMissy Mazzoli: ‘Dark With Excessive Bright’Peter Herresthal, violin; Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra; Arctic Philharmonic; Tim Weiss, James Gaffigan, conductors (Bis)“Dark With Excessive Bright”BisMissy Mazzoli is a master of chiaroscuro. Her first full-length album of orchestral music opens with a bold statement of blinding light and warmly inviting darkness. Her compositions have a signature sound and a sense of movement, as in the enlarging circles of “Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres)” and the plunging explorations of “These Worlds in Us.” OUSSAMA ZAHRMendelssohn: ‘Quartets Vol. 2’Quatuor Van Kuijk (Alpha)String Quartet No. 6 in F minor, Finale: Allegro moltoAlphaIt can be difficult, throughout this survey of Mendelssohn’s string quartets, to tell whether one or four instruments are being played, so unified are the Quatuor Van Kuijk players in their interpretation and delivery. At their most impressive, as in their excellent Schubert album, they are capable of shattering expressivity without a hint of sentimentality. JOSHUA BARONEMonteverdi: ‘Vespro della Beata Vergine’Pygmalion; Raphaël Pichon, conductor (Harmonia Mundi)“Ave maris stella”Harmonia MundiThere was good reason to think a little more deeply about the future of the period-instrument movement this year, but in Raphaël Pichon and his Pygmalion ensemble, the future may already be here. They already have a strong list of recordings to their name, but this is one of their most daring, fervent and joyous and free. DAVID ALLENRavel: ‘L’Oeuvre Pour Piano’Philippe Bianconi, piano (La Dolce Volta)“Une Barque sur l’Océan”La Dolce VoltaThe French pianist Philippe Bianconi traces his pedagogical lineage back to Ravel’s circle, and the result is an album that is magical and transporting, lean and precise. There is no wallowing, no schmaltz. The melancholy he finds in “Sonatine” is as sharply observed as the jerky flight of moths in “Noctuelles.” OUSSAMA ZAHRSaariaho: ‘Reconnaissance’Helsinki Chamber Choir; Nils Schweckendiek, conductor (Bis)“Nuits, Adieux”: VIII. Adieu III — IX. Adieu IV — X. Adieu VBisThe painful loss of Kaija Saariaho this year makes this album particularly precious. Saariaho’s choral music — including the title work, from 2020, to a text about encounters with Mars — looks back to medieval chant and Renaissance madrigals, and forward to a future of eerie cyborg combinations of the acoustic and electronic. ZACHARY WOOLFE‘Rising’Lawrence Brownlee, tenor; Kevin J. Miller, piano (Warner Classics)Robert Owens: “In time of silver rain”Warner ClassicsThis beautifully curated album has the sound of an artist who went into the recording studio with something urgent and personal to say. Lawrence Brownlee, Rossini tenor extraordinaire, stretches his vibrato-dense instrument to register subtle feelings aroused in him by songs of the African American experience. Captivating in his commitment, he doesn’t waste a note. OUSSAMA ZAHRHenry Threadgill: ‘The Other One’Henry Threadgill Ensemble (Pi Recordings)“Of Valence”: Movement I, Sections 6A-7APi RecordingsThis is where the Second Viennese School meets American second line parade music. Recorded live at Roulette in Brooklyn, and conducted by Henry Threadgill, the blend of strings, woodwinds, tuba, piano and percussion on this recording of “Of Valence” conjures jazz combo and chamber music ecstasies alike. SETH COLTER WALLS‘Weather Systems II: Soundlines’Steven Schick, percussion (Islandia Music Records)Vivian Fung: “The Ice Is Talking”Islandia Music RecordsEver ambitious, the percussionist Steven Schick fills this set with three hours of self-challenges, including Xenakis’s benchmark “Psappha”; Vivian Fung’s “The Ice Is Talking,” played on a block of the frozen stuff; Roger Reynolds’s “Here and There,” incorporating a Beckett text; and the hourlong sparseness of Sarah Hennies’s “Thought Sectors.” ZACHARY WOOLFETchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra; Manfred Honeck, conductor (Reference Recordings)II. Andante cantabile, con alcuna licenzaReference RecordingsManfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra have a habit of recording benchmark accounts of classic works, and this Tchaikovsky is no exception. It’s not just their ability to make the most of even the tiniest details that makes this account special, but also how each of those details speaks in service of Honeck’s hair-raising conception of the work. DAVID ALLENAnna Thorvaldsdottir: ‘Archora/Aion’Iceland Symphony Orchestra; Eva Ollikainen, conductor (Sono Luminus)“Aion”: “Entropia”Sono LuminusThe Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir has long been associated with evocations of the earth and tectonic forces. Here, especially in the symphony-length “Aion,” her preoccupation is still ecological, but in an abstract, grander sense that surveys immense textures and forms from ever-shifting scales of time and space. Feel small yet? JOSHUA BARONEMary Lou Williams: ‘Zodiac Suite’Aaron Diehl Trio and the Knights; Eric Jacobsen, conductor (Mack Avenue Records)“Pisces”Mack Avenue RecordsThe chamber orchestra edition of Mary Lou Williams’s “Zodiac Suite” receives marvelous new life here. The Knights revel in textures flowing from her appreciation of Hindemith; a rhythm section locks into swing grooves. The pianist Aaron Diehl moves deftly between those worlds, and supports an art-song finale that features the soprano Mikaela Bennett. SETH COLTER WALLSEric Wubbels: “If and Only If”Josh Modney, violin; Mariel Roberts, cello; Eric Wubbels, piano (Carrier Records)“Haven”Carrier RecordsThe composer-performer Eric Wubbels brings meticulous poise to his experimentalism. Each new movement of this hourlong piano trio may sound alarming at first. But it’s not shock for shock’s sake: Wubbels maintains immersion in alternate tunings and microtonality in order to set up gradual, ravishing changes. You just might bliss out. SETH COLTER WALLS More

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      Can One of Opera’s Greatest Singers Get Her Voice Back?

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      Anita Rachvelishvili was pregnant when she began to lose her voice.It was the middle of 2021. She and her husband had tried for years to conceive, and it seemed like a child would be the storybook ending to being forced to slow down during the pandemic. Rachvelishvili, the Georgian mezzo-soprano, had spent the previous decade crisscrossing the world, blazing through some of the most difficult parts in opera.She made her name with a potent combination of capacious sound and interpretive subtlety. In 2018, Riccardo Muti, the pre-eminent Verdi conductor, called her “without doubt the best Verdi mezzo-soprano today on the planet.” Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager, recently said: “She was the greatest dramatic mezzo-soprano singing. It seemed there was no big, meaty role she couldn’t tackle.”Rachvelishvili sang Carmen, the role of her 2009 breakthrough, hundreds of times, and was scheduled to ring in 2024 as Bizet’s classic antiheroine in the splashy premiere of a new production at the Met.Instead, the show will go on without her. Rachvelishvili, 39, will spend New Year’s Eve at home in Tbilisi, where she was born, as she tries to reconstruct the fundamentals of the voice that brought her stardom and then abandoned her.“It is a nightmare, a total nightmare,” she said over dinner in September at a rustic restaurant nestled in the woods outside the city. “I’ve had two years of nightmare at this point.”Transforming the body and causing sweeping hormonal changes, pregnancy is rarely easy for opera singers, who rely on a carefully calibrated physical apparatus to dependably produce huge waves of unamplified sound. Rachvelishvili had not quite felt herself in the handful of performances she did while she was carrying the baby — her voice, she said, came out “scratchy and strange” — but she assumed things would return to normal after the birth.Lioness: Rachvelishvili at the Tbilisi State Conservatory, where she studied after auditioning with a Whitney Houston song.Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesShe delivered her daughter, Lileana, in late November 2021, and something still felt different, though the lower part of her voice was, if anything, bigger than before. She figured she could handle the low-lying role of Marfa in Mussorgsky’s “Khovanshchina,” which she was to rehearse in Paris just a month later — months sooner than many singers return after giving birth.“It was the worst decision of my life,” she said, sitting alongside Otari Maisuradze, her husband — who became her vocal coach, too, after a rift with her teacher early in her crisis.Over a week of conversations, meals, walks and drives in and around Tbilisi, Rachvelishvili described how rushing back to the stage had helped set off an agonizing dance of one step forward, two steps back. Seeming improvement would be countered by dispiriting nights, and the increased size of her low notes was offset by the sudden disappearance of her high ones. Her once-steady confidence and smooth column of sound were both fractured.“You start having big panic attacks, then you lose control completely,” she said. “Of breath, of body. Everything.”Her husband spoke softly. “She was my lioness,” he said. “I am very proud I have very strong women in my family. But these two years, with this trouble, she became like a little cat.”A VOICE IS A MYSTERIOUS, largely invisible amalgam of body and psyche — of tiny, vibrating vocal cords; muscles that provide support for the breath; cavities through which sound resonates; and the self-belief to fearlessly deploy it all. Problems are inevitable, though the path to overcoming them is uncertain, since medical interventions can be chancy. And talking about them is still stigmatized within the industry, perhaps in part because responses to artists are already so subjective that illness or injury can cloud later evaluation even if the difficulty has been “fixed.”“Every singer, at some point, will have some kind of vocal issue,” said the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, who made an arduous recovery from surgery on her cords earlier in her career. “It’s like football players: Every quarterback has some shoulder issue at some point.”Rachvelishvili warming up with her husband, who has become her vocal coach.Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesMaria Callas couldn’t undo her instrument’s unraveling. In an essay about her, the conductor and critic Will Crutchfield once wrote, “There is no example of an important operatic singer encountering serious vocal problems and returning to form.”That is true, to a point. The tenor Jonas Kaufmann has been open about vocal issues, yet has managed to keep singing challenging parts at a high level. But Rolando Villazón, another 21st-century star tenor, never recovered from his troubles.“Every singer goes through that fear of the high notes, or feeling not really comfortable with your voice,” Rachvelishvili said. “I just need to have this battle with myself, by myself. Nobody else can help me. I need to remember how I was, and how Anita did it.”THOUGH SHE CAME TO OPERA LATE — she sang a Whitney Houston song when she auditioned for conservatory — Rachvelishvili was not merely an intuitive natural talent but also a smart, dedicated musician. She slowly built on a firm technique and stuck to her relatively low signature role as she waited and worked.“I sang Carmen for so many years because I didn’t have easy high notes,” she said. “I took time to learn how to do those notes so that the body knew what it was doing.”Those notes grew stronger without her pushing, and she practiced diligently to incorporate the nuances, colors and seductive soft singing that set her apart from many who shared her repertoire. She sang the wild Azucena in Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” with startling refinement in 2018 at the Met, where her triumphs culminated in a scorching run as the Princesse de Bouillon in Cilea’s “Adriana Lecouvreur” early in 2019.Rachvelishvili and Otari Maisuradze with their daughter, Lileana, who was born in November 2021. Rachvelishvili’s vocal problems began when she was pregnant.Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesHer future seemed limitless. In addition to Azucena and Verdi’s Eboli and Amneris, major roles in “Les Troyens,” “Werther,” “La Favorite” and “La Gioconda” were on the horizon. With her powerful high notes, sumptuous tone and onstage intensity, it seemed that Wagner’s Ortrud, Fricka, Kundry and even Isolde — the province of big-voiced sopranos — might be possible.Then came the pandemic. Rachvelishvili had struggled to get pregnant in the past, but she said that the drastic reduction in travel and stress in 2020, as well as the hormones prescribed by her doctor, helped it happen.Fearful of losing the baby, she was cautious in the early days of the pregnancy, but she sang some performances in mid-2021. Muti said of their concert “Aida” in Italy that summer, “She was able in the past to hold long phrases without any problem, and now going in the high register she had some difficulty.”Still, he added, “you could feel, here and there, the great singer.”When she sang “Khovanshchina” in Paris so soon after giving birth, it was possible, because of the role’s low center of vocal gravity, to believe she was back in her old shape — even if a short excerpt posted by the opera company suggests that her tone had grown more fragile, her vibrato wider, even beyond her high notes.“It was like a completely different body,” Rachvelishvili said, “with a completely different voice.”“It was like a completely different body,” Rachvelishvili said of performing after giving birth, “with a completely different voice.”Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesIn the past, her muscular support had originated down by her pelvis, but that was disrupted by the pregnancy and birth. While she searched for a new approach, her next engagement, “Adriana Lecouvreur” at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in early 2022, was disastrous. The Princesse’s high notes, once easy for her, refused to come. At the premiere, Rachvelishvili fled the theater in despair before her curtain call, something she had never done.“It was the most horrible experience of my life, not being able to sing the way I wanted,” she said. “I couldn’t go out after a performance like that. It’s not the old Anita they’re used to, or I’m used to. I’m not going out; it’s insulting to them, to La Scala.”She canceled the rest of the run, then moved on to Munich, where she had a long rehearsal period before she was supposed to sing her first Didon in Berlioz’s “Les Troyens.” A doctor saw inflammation on her vocal cords; it could have been allergies, acid reflux, a hormonal imbalance or laryngitis, or some combination of those factors.Unable to produce high notes or offer the elegant control of volume and texture for which she was admired, she left before the premiere. She began to lose faith in herself, which set off a vicious cycle with her physical problems.“I said to my therapist that I’d kill myself if it wasn’t for the baby,” she recalled. “I have a baby to take care of.”She was also her family’s breadwinner. Maisuradze had long ago devoted himself to supporting her career, and even star singers are freelancers.“The responsibility is huge, because everybody depends on me working,” she said. “I have my parents to take care of, and my family, and the baby. People said that if I couldn’t sing, I should just stop. And I said, ‘Will you feed my family if I stop?’ I have to at least try and try and try. I need to bring some money to the table.”But in summer 2022, she had to drop “Cavalleria Rusticana” in London and “Aida” in Salzburg before they opened. Leaving the “Aida,” Rachvelishvili released a statement citing back pain after the birth of her daughter and asking “all haters and even some colleagues” to “please stop inventing stories about me losing my voice or nonsense like this.”She retreated to Tbilisi to work. And early in fall 2022, she was able to creditably sing the generally low Dalila in Saint-Saëns’s “Samson et Dalila” in Naples, though her high notes were still problematic.“I said to my therapist that I’d kill myself if it wasn’t for the baby,” Rachvelishvili recalled. “I have a baby to take care of.”Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesThe tenor Brian Jagde, her co-star in that “Samson” and several other productions during this period, sometimes went so far as to anchor her during scenes with a hand at her waist, to lend the lower muscular support that she no longer felt internally.“There’s nothing harder to watch than a person onstage with you that you believe in so much, and she’s struggling,” he said. “There were clear signs the top wasn’t working like she wanted it to, and she was working desperately to make it work. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t.”She canceled a fall run of Verdi’s “Don Carlo” at the Met, but arrived there to sing “Aida” in December. Rachvelishvili thought the first performance went passably, but the company’s administration disagreed.“It was obvious that she was not the same singer — at least temporarily not the same singer — who had conquered our stage so brilliantly up to that point,” Gelb said, and he decided to remove her from the coming “Carmen” and a solo recital that was to have taken place earlier this month.“I had a painful discussion with her in my office, because I wanted her to hear it from me,” he said. “I said that we needed to wait until she was back singing well again, and then we’d be happy to have her return. She had a hard time accepting that.”EARLY THIS YEAR, RACHVELISHVILI was able to get through another “Samson,” in Berlin, and a new role, Charlotte in Massenet’s “Werther,” in Athens, with her body feeling more dependable. But when she returned to Munich in the spring for “Aida,” she began having terrifying panic attacks onstage, paralyzed by fear of the high notes, and left after four of eight performances.“She’s such a tough character, but she’s human,” Jagde said. “That was what I saw progress for her in a negative way: less belief in herself because of what was happening. The physical affected the mental for her.”“On 50 seconds, we are working two or three days,” Maisuradze said of Rachvelishvili’s practice routine. “They must be beautiful, the voice and colors, and stylistically true.”Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesDropping out of all her engagements after early June, she had minor surgeries for stomach problems and to lessen the effects of acid reflux, and another procedure to remove what she said was a small polyp on her vocal cords. Since then, she has been at home in Tbilisi with her husband and daughter. Lileana, she said, is “worth everything. She’s even worth never singing again.”But she still hopes she can have both. Rachvelishvili and Maisuradze have been painstakingly reviewing her instrument and technique, going through scores phrase by phrase and restitching together her different registers, returning to the basics.“On 50 seconds, we are working two or three days,” Maisuradze said. “They must be beautiful, the voice and colors, and stylistically true.”Of her high register, Rachvelishvili said this month: “It’s not as perfect as I want, or as I had it a few years ago, honestly. But it’s much easier; it’s there; it’s not difficult anymore to take them.”The clock is ticking: A new role, Laura in Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda,” is scheduled for April in Naples, before a revival of “Aida” in Munich. Noting her voice’s solid technical foundation, Muti was optimistic.“She is young,” he said, “so she will come back. We are waiting with great enthusiasm.”Rachvelishvili has fought her panic with therapy, antidepressants and meditation, but it still lurks. “All the physical problems, the vocal problems, are gone,” she said. “Right now, I’m just battling with myself and my head to make sure that when I go onstage soon, I will feel calm inside. The joy of being back is so big that it overtakes me sometimes.”She described a recent video call with her manager. “I was doing a high note in Dalila’s second aria,” she said, “and he stopped me: ‘I see the fear in your eyes. Don’t be afraid, just go for it. You can do it without fear in you.’ And I did it, and it was perfect.” More

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      How ‘The Nutcracker’ Has Been Reimagined, for Better and Worse

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      A tour through five cases in which Tchaikovsky’s classical score has been taken up by jazz legends and misguided filmmakers.“The Nutcracker” is a cherished Holiday staple — one that, for every traditional treatment, inspires a left-field twist toward the contemporary.There’s a grain of truth in Lisa Simpson’s comment that everybody does “The Nutcracker” “because you don’t have to pay for the music rights.” As the critic Roslyn Sulcas once wrote in The New York Times, “Even less-than-great versions of the ballet exercise a kind of magic through Tchaikovsky’s score, which offers the same infinite potential for choreography as the texts of great plays do for staging.”That potential, however, can be double-edged. Here are five instances in which light tweaks and heavy rewrites have reframed — and occasionally ruined — Tchaikovsky’s famous music.Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn: ‘The Nutcracker Suite’Perhaps the most classic update of Tchaikovsky’s score, the Ellington-Strayhorn “Nutcracker” has inspired productions as different as Donald Byrd’s “The Harlem Nutcracker” and David Bintley’s “The Nutcracker Sweeties.” Its release, in 1960, also suggested an interesting switch in power dynamics between arranger and arranged: The original cover art gave Ellington, Strayhorn and Tchaikovsky the same billing.“Overture” sets the tone, with a wandering double bass that leads softly into classic Ellington orchestrations. But that softness is quickly dispelled by the high woodwind chirps of “Toot Toot Tootie Toot (Dance of the Reed-Pipes),” and there are flashes of Stravinsky harshness in the “March,” renamed the “Peanut Brittle Brigade,” which begins with dissonant stacks of harmony that could be straight from “A Soldier’s Tale.” Most powerful is the amount of textural space Ellington and Strayhorn afford; in the sparse, boozy “Sugar Rum Cherry” and the light yet expressive “Arabesque Cookie Arabian Dance),” less is definitely more.‘The Hip Hop Nutcracker’Some “Nutcracker” scores are reimagined; others are remixed. But “The Hip Hop Nutcracker,” a 2014 production by Jennifer Weber that has become a touring staple in the United States, is a remix in the fullest sense. Clara — here, Maria-Clara — goes on a quest to bring her parents back together, accompanied by a troupe of break dancers. The score is remixed onstage by a D.J. and an electric violinist. As in all revisions of “The Nutcracker,” the key is for the score to act like a double mirror: The act of shining fresh light on the original score should rebound to energize the new. The brittle electronic beats create solid new foundations for improvised flourishes and ensemble numbers alike.Brian Setzer Orchestra: ‘The Nutcracker Suite’Brian Setzer’s career has been defined by a revivalist energy. First, his rockabilly group Stray Cats looked back to the rock ’n’ roll of the 1950s through the eyes of the 1980s. After the group split, he founded the Brian Setzer Orchestra, a boogie-woogie, jump blues band straddling originals and jazzed-up covers.“The Nutcracker Suite,” originally arranged for Les Brown and his Band of Renown by Frank Comstock, wasn’t the only time that the Brian Setzer Orchestra dabbled in classical rearrangements. In the 2007 album “Wolfgang’s Big Night Out,” Beethoven’s “Für Elise” became the Django Reinhardt pastiche “For Lisa,” and Johann Strauss II’s “The Blue Danube” became the bluesy swing chart “Some River in Europe.”An unlikely source brought the group’s take on Tchaikovsky into holiday tradition: Buddy, in the movie “Elf.” As the lights dim in Gimbels, the store that Buddy (Will Ferrell), has tasked himself with redecorating overnight, the Brian Setzer Orchestra trumpets strike up, playing the fanfare call from “March of the Toy Soldiers.” But what follows is not the impish, pizzicato response that usually accompanies the toys’ jolting movements: A drum kit crashes in, and snarling, swinging saxophones accompany Buddy’s commando rolls across the aisle behind a security guard. The whole arrangement pits clipped precision against swirling chaos.Drew McOnie and Cassie Kinoshi: ‘Nutcracker’Cassie Kinoshi, a composer and saxophonist associated with London’s jazz scene, has already had a fruitful foray into dance, collaborating with the group BalletBoyz alongside her work for theater, film and orchestra. Now she has reimagined Tchaikovsky’s score for Drew McOnie’s “Nutcracker” at the Tuff Nut Jazz Club, a pop-up speakeasy hidden underneath the Southbank Center in London.Like Strayhorn and Comstock’s arrangements before, Kinoshi’s score is based in jazz. But where the others have the golden dazzle of that full big-band sound, her music is much more contained, for a versatile four-piece group nestled in the corner of the performance space. Led by the bass player Rio Kai, the quartet lovingly dismantles Tchaikovsky’s music and brings in modern energy, switching effortlessly between chilled vamps and off-kilter meters. Moments of sugary sweetness — in a nice touch, the players are dressed in pajamas — add yet more sparkle to the heavily sequined production, for which the phrase “camp as Christmas” was surely coined.‘The Nutcracker in 3D’Here is a warning that new takes on “The Nutcracker” can go too far.Set in 1920s Vienna, Andrei Konchalovsky’s deeply strange film, from 2010, presents the classic story as a Nazi allegory few, if anyone, saw coming. The combination of a tedious plot, poor acting, some howling digital effects and not infrequent references to the Holocaust made this largely nondancing “Nutcracker” an expensive Christmas turkey, costing $90 million to make but bringing in only $20 million at the box office.Among the worst elements of “The Nutcracker in 3D” is the music, which inexplicably gains lyrics by Tim Rice. And so “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” becomes “It’s All Relative,” a song for the Einstein-like Uncle Albert (Nathan Lane) packed full of banal sentiments like “Who’s to say what/Is or is not/Who writes your plot?/You do!” Later, “Dance of the Reed Flutes” becomes a sleazy, vaudevillian show tune sung by an anthropomorphic Rat King to his loyal subjects, a group of baying rodents dressed like SS officers. And, as if ruining “The Nutcracker” weren’t enough, the movie then plunders from the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, mapping kitschy lyrics for the chronically misunderstood child Mary (Elle Fanning) onto one of the composer’s most popular tunes. It’s grotesque. More

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      Anthony Parnther Conducts ‘Black Panther’ in New York

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      Anthony Parnther has a flourishing career as a classical conductor who also works in the fast-paced world of commercial entertainment.Anthony Parnther has a job that routinely takes him to fantastic places. Parnther, 42, makes his New York Philharmonic conducting debut this week. His destination? Wakanda: With a wave of his hand, he’ll evoke lush jungles and shimmering citadels as the film “Black Panther” screens overhead.Back home in Los Angeles in January, Parnther will pass through idealistic college classrooms and anxious laboratories, headed to a date with destiny in Los Alamos, when he conducts the sweeping score to “Oppenheimer.”But in a recent video interview, Parnther was finding his way to someplace quite different: Whoville.“I’ll be very honest with you,” he said in a video interview. “I’m sitting here trying to rapidly memorize the words to ‘You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.’”He was cramming for a Christmas concert with the San Bernardino Symphony Orchestra, where he has served as music director since 2019.“I could tell you that I’m sitting here studying the Prokofiev Second Piano Concerto, which we’re doing on this concert,” he said. “But I’m actually more worried about the Grinch, because I’m the soloist.”Posts at San Bernardino and the Southeast Symphony Orchestra — a Los Angeles ensemble that is one of the nation’s oldest primarily Black orchestras — allow Parnther to explore and expand the repertoire. An enthusiastic communicator, he talks his audiences through his programs regularly, so singing isn’t that big of a stretch.Parnther conducting the Gateways Music Festival Orchestra in its 2022 Carnegie Hall Debut.J. Adam Fenster/University of RochesterBut his “Black Panther” and “Oppenheimer” engagements shed light on a less visible aspect of his growing career, which has included appearances with major ensembles, including the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Even if you don’t know Parnther by name, you’ve likely heard his conducting — on film soundtracks like “Avatar: The Way of Water” and “Turning Red”; television series like “Fargo” and “Only Murders in the Building”; or video games, including “League of Legends” and “Guild Wars.” If you’ve streamed “Encanto at the Hollywood Bowl,” a concert performance of the animated Disney film featuring the original voice cast, you’ve seen him in action.Ludwig Göransson, who composed the scores for “Black Panther” and “Oppenheimer,” views Parnther as an invaluable collaborator. In a video interview from Los Angeles, he said: “If something doesn’t sound right, I’ll hit him up on the podium and we’ll talk about things — how to adjust a couple of notes or change a voicing — and he can immediately relate that information to the musicians.”One reason he works so effectively with studio musicians, Göransson says, is because he emerged from their ranks. For Parnther, working with Göransson on the “Star Wars” TV spinoffs “The Mandalorian” and “The Book of Boba Fett” was especially meaningful. As an eighth grader in Norfolk, Virginia, he learned his middle-school band would play music from “Star Wars” on a coveted trip to the theme park Kings Dominion. Thumbing through a musical reference book, he flipped past “A” and the accordion — it brought up unfortunate associations with “The Lawrence Welk Show” — before landing on “B” and the bassoon. He took up the instrument as his way to tag along.Parnther, the son of Jamaican and Samoan academics, was exposed to gospel in the Baptist church, but it was soundtracks by John Williams that sparked his interest in music. The timing wasn’t ideal: In high school, when he decided to pursue music professionally, his family was living in public housing after losing their home in a fire; his mother was fighting cancer.She bought her son the best bassoon she could afford, a Schreiber S91 Prestige: not state of the art, but a durable instrument.“She had to literally make the choice between paying the electric bill and making the payments on my instrument,” Parnther said. “She decided to make the payments on my instrument, so there was a fire lit in me: I wanted to repay my mother for the sacrifices that she made.”Parnther went on to earn music degrees from Northwestern and Yale. He then took a position at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tenn., gaining confidence as a conductor while earning a music education degree.His tenacity and ambition paid off. The kid who had been inspired by “Star Wars” to pick up the bassoon would go on to play his hardy Schreiber for Williams in the soundtracks for the last three feature films in the series. He also played bassoon on sessions with high-profile pop artists, including Beyoncé, Rihanna and Snoop Dogg. (When his instrument was stolen from his car in 2020, its theft and recovery made headlines.)“The conductor of the future, in order for the orchestra to remain relevant,” Parnther says, “will have to find a way to center the orchestra and not the genre.”Philip Cheung for The New York TimesHis work as a versatile, open-minded conductor brought him attention beyond the studios. In addition to his San Bernardino and Southeast Symphony posts, in 2020 Parnther was named conductor of the Gateways Music Festival Orchestra, an elite annual aggregation of classical musicians of African descent, whose Chicago debut he will lead in April.Conducting also brought unanticipated collaborations — with the singer John Legend, the hip-hop producer Metro Boomin and the metal band Avenged Sevenfold, among others. Parnther hasn’t lured those artists into his concert-music realm yet, but it’s not out of the question.“The conductor of the future, in order for the orchestra to remain relevant, will have to find a way to center the orchestra and not the genre,” he said. “Sometimes that means you mix genres on the same concert, if there’s a story line or a relevant through line.”And the skills he’s picked up in the fast-paced world of commercial entertainment have proved transferable. Engaged last year to record “The Central Park Five,” Anthony Davis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning opera, with the Long Beach Opera in just two days, Parnther took the company into a Glendale film studio. He used a metronomic click track and other tools of the trade to maximize efficiency.“The click track lends a certain precision,” Davis said in a video interview, “but there are times when I want a little more flexibility to let the music breathe” — crucial in sections involving improvisation. “It was a great experience, having the tightness of the music, yet also allowing space for the creative expression of individual musicians.”Parnther has used his platforms and rising profile to champion Black composers like Davis and Adolphus Hailstork, while nurturing artists who straddle worlds as he does, including Kris Bowers, Chanda Dancy and Tamar-kali. But his Hollywood affiliations have their own perks.“I’m not a famous conductor,” Parnther said, “but I have been picked out in so many public spaces as the conductor from ‘Encanto at the Hollywood Bowl.’” He’s seen a video of his symphonic concert with Metro Boomin rack up over six million views on YouTube. “And a comment that I ran across is like, Oh my God, this is awesome — but wait a minute, is that the same conductor from ‘Encanto at the Hollywood Bowl’?” More

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      Trinity Church’s ‘Messiah’ Is Still the Gold Standard

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      The church’s urgent and eloquent version of Handel’s classic oratorio remains an inspired communal rite.The holidays are a time for traditions — and for doubting them. Is Grandma’s ham drier than you thought when you were young? Is the movie the whole family watches every year maybe a little offensive?For me, the question on Wednesday was whether Trinity Wall Street’s version of Handel’s “Messiah” would be as good — as bracing, as riveting, as disturbing and consoling — as I remembered.Seeing Trinity’s “Messiah” for the first time, in 2011, showed me the galvanic possibilities of this classic work more than any recording or live outing I’d ever heard. This wasn’t the usual, quaintly sleepy Christmas routine, but a seething, electrically direct and dramatic enactment of an oratorio that both describes and calls for transformation: “And we shall be changed,” its crucial line promises.It had been a good few years since I’d heard the church’s Handel. But when people would ask me for a “Messiah” recommendation among the many options that pop up in New York each December, I always replied with a single word: Trinity.This “Messiah” long achieved its exhilarating quality because of an exceptional in-house choir and period-instrument orchestra — and because of Julian Wachner, Trinity’s director of music and the arts, who led the church’s medieval-to-modern music program with energy and ambition.Early last year, Wachner was fired by Trinity before the church completed an investigation into an allegation of sexual misconduct against him, but after it found he had “otherwise conducted himself in a manner that is inconsistent with our expectations of anyone who occupies a leadership position.” (He has denied the allegations.)His departure left one of the jewels of the city’s artistic and spiritual scenes leaderless until early this month, when the church announced that Melissa Attebury would be its next director of music. For almost two years, Trinity has depended on staff and guest conductors, including, for this year’s Handel, Ryan James Brandau.And what a relief to find that Trinity’s “Messiah” is still burning and gladdening, vivid in both darkness and light. If Brandau’s account lacked some of Wachner’s charged, even savage intensity, that wasn’t entirely a bad thing. The performance on Wednesday added some elegance to the urgent, heartfelt directness, the emphasis on communication, that has been Trinity’s standard in this piece.The soaringly resonant acoustics of Trinity Church smoothed some of the choir’s bite into airy creaminess, but the passion was still palpable. And while the orchestral sound was sleeker than I recalled, it had the same stirring commitment and bristling responsiveness to the vocalists, as well as a glistening, pastoral dawn quality to the shepherds.These forces are truly an ensemble, aided by my favorite aspect of the church’s version. Most “Messiah” presentations bring in a quartet of opera singers for the solos. Trinity’s soloists — almost 20 of them — come forward from the choir, giving the oratorio the feeling of an intimate, alternately sober and joyous communal rite, modest yet monumental.This practice also allows the ensemble to show off the strengths of its roster — no soprano is ideally suited to all the work’s soprano arias — and to experiment. In 2017, Wachner switched the traditional genders of all the solos, a change thrillingly recalled this year by having Jonathan Woody, a bass-baritone, blaze through “He was despised,” instead of the standard female alto.There was more sense than there usually is of the range of emotion within numbers, not just between them. The tenor Stephen Sands was calm, then pressing in the beginning of the work, and the soprano Madeline Apple Healey was sprightly, then tender in “Rejoice greatly.”Brandau guided the score so that “Hallelujah” seemed to emerge from the preceding numbers, which gradually rose in fieriness. And he, choir and orchestra built patiently to the work’s true climax — “The trumpet shall sound,” sung with annunciatory power by the bass-baritone Edmund Milly and accompanied with eloquence, on a difficult-to-control, valveless natural trumpet, by Caleb Hudson — before the shining waves of the final “Amen.”Though pleasant enough, a pared-down New York Philharmonic’s “Messiah,” heard on Tuesday, paled in comparison. Conducted by Fabio Biondi, the founder of the distinguished period-instrument group Europa Galante, in his debut with the orchestra, this Handel was a little stolid in the first part, though with more crispness and color in the second and third.Fabio Biondi made his debut with the New York Philharmonic conducting Handel’s “Messiah.”Chris LeeThe quartet of young vocal soloists made little impact in tone or interpretive zest; the star here was the venerable Handel and Haydn Society Chorus, from Boston. A few dozen strong, it sounded rich yet lucid, with metronomic clarity in the burbling 16th notes of “And He shall purify” and with evocative gauziness in “His yoke is easy.” Biondi led a lithe, brisk “Hallelujah,” seemingly designed to make this omnipresent number a bit more unassuming than the norm.Beyond the start of “Messiah” season, this was a banner week for early music in New York. On Saturday, the Miller Theater hosted the Tallis Scholars at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Manhattan, part of the ensemble’s 50th-anniversary tour. And yet more Handel: On Sunday, Harry Bicket and the English Concert continued their annual series of concert performances of his operas and oratorios at Carnegie Hall with “Rodelinda.”“Messiah” is Christmas music, but not entirely, since Jesus’ birth occupies only a few minutes of this long meditation on his life and example. The Tallis Scholars, though, offered a real Christmas program of largely Renaissance works focused on the shepherds who receive the news of the Nativity.Under their founder and director, Peter Phillips, these 10 singers displayed the floating silkiness, light without seeming insubstantial, that has been Tallis’s trademark over its remarkable career.With the parts of Clemens’s “Missa Pastores quidnam vidistis” interwoven with other pieces, the concert was notable for its exploration of different composers’ treatments of the same texts. Pedro de Cristo’s straightforwardly lyrical, almost folk-inflected “Quaeramus cum pastoribus” preceded Giovanni Croce’s grander version. And Jacob Obrecht’s plainchant-and-elaboration “Salve regina” came before Peter Philip’s later, more declamatory one.At Carnegie, the English Concert brought its characteristic spirited polish — moderate yet exciting — to “Rodelinda,” a work that Bicket has helped make a sterling recent addition to the Metropolitan Opera’s standard repertory. The cast of six was individually impressive and, even better, well matched. The soprano Lucy Crowe’s voice warmed in the title role as the afternoon went on, and her portrayal was gripping from the start. The countertenor Iestyn Davies, as her believed-to-be-dead husband, Bertarido, had, as usual, special time-stopping persuasiveness in slow music.It was refined work. But the performance over the past week that has lingered with me most is clear. If someone asks for a recommendation — for the holidays, or for music in New York in general — my answer is the same as it’s been for years: Trinity’s “Messiah.” More

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      in Theater

      Stephen Sondheim Belongs in the Pantheon of American Composers

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      “You know, I had the idealistic notion, when I was 20, that I was going into the theater,” Stephen Sondheim once said. “I wasn’t; I was going into show business, and I was a fool to think otherwise.”It was a remark characteristic of Sondheim, the titan of musical theater whose decades’ worth of credits as a composer and lyricist included “West Side Story,” “Company” and “Into the Woods.” Here he was as many had seen him in interviews over the years: unsentimental and a bit flip, self-effacing to the point of selling himself short.Because among musical theater artists of his generation, Sondheim, who died in 2021 at 91, was arguably the most artistic — challenging, unusual, incapable of superficiality in a medium often dismissed as superficial. He was, perhaps to his disappointment, not the best businessman, with shows that rarely lasted long on Broadway. And his work was better for it.Sondheim has always had a dedicated fan base, but right now his musicals are true hot tickets with substantial real estate on New York stages. Recently, it was possible to take in four Sondheim shows in a single weekend: “Merrily We Roll Along” and “Sweeney Todd” on Broadway, “The Frogs” in a starry concert presentation by MasterVoices, and “Here We Are,” his unfinished final work, completed and in its premiere run at the Shed.From left, Lindsay Mendez, Jonathan Groff and Daniel Radcliffe in “Merrily We Roll Along” on Broadway.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTogether, they form a portrait that helps in considering Sondheim’s place among American composers. I say American because Broadway, alongside jazz, is the most homegrown of this country’s music, and his work constantly pushed the art form further. Where so many of his colleagues have operated within standard structures, he, even in writing a 32-bar song, seemed to always ask, “What else is possible?”It’s also important to consider Sondheim as a distinctly American composer because his writing reflects a creative mind repeatedly fixated on the idea of his homeland, with an ambivalence by turns affectionate and acerbic. It’s there in his lyric contribution to “Gypsy,” arguably the Great American Musical, which the musicologist Raymond Knapp has described as “a version of the American dream that leads, as if inevitably, to striptease.” And it continues, with an unconventional patriotism in “Assassins” and a revealing journey across state lines and years in “Road Show.”In that sense, Sondheim is not only one of the finest American composers, but also one of the most essential.“He and Lenny are at the top of that list,” Paul Gemignani, Sondheim’s longtime music director, said, referring also to Leonard Bernstein. “Most Broadway composers are writing pop tunes. Steve never wrote a pop tune. ‘Send in the Clowns’ got lucky.”Sondheim seemed fated to create musical theater at a higher level than his colleagues. Like Bernstein, he was pedigreed: His mentor, for lyric writing, was Oscar Hammerstein II, of Rodgers and Hammerstein; for composition, the modernist Milton Babbitt. Yet he emulated neither.In an interview with the Sondheim Review, Sondheim said that he was trained by Hammerstein “to think of songs as one-act plays, to move a song from point A to point B dramatically.” But he thought of them in more classical terms: “sonata form — statement, development and recapitulation.”And while Sondheim composed with the spirit of an avant-gardist, he was more of a postmodernist than Babbitt, though he described Babbitt as a closet songwriter who admired Kern and Arlen as much as Mozart and Schoenberg.“The first hour of each of our weekly sessions would be devoted to analyzing a song like ‘All the Things That You Are,’” Sondheim recalled, “the next three to the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, always concentrating on the tautness of the structures, the leanness and frugality of the musical ideas.” Genre didn’t matter; craft did, which is why one of their most influential lessons entailed how a Bach fugue built, as Babbitt put it, an entire cathedral from a four-note theme. Sondheim would later do the same in the score of “Anyone Can Whistle.”As a university student, Sondheim wrote some juvenilia as a lyricist-composer — most intriguingly, fragments of a “Mary Poppins” musical that predates the Disney movie by over a decade. But, after a false start, his first professional credit was as the lyricist on “West Side Story.” “Gypsy” followed, with music by Jule Styne, but it wasn’t until “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” that Broadway saw its first show with both music and lyrics by Sondheim.He was often asked which came first, the music or the lyrics. The most accurate answer is probably sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both, but with a deference to clarity of text. Like Wagner, who wrote the librettos of his operas, Sondheim wanted his lyrics to be heard and understood; his vocal lines resemble those of Janacek and Debussy, whose dramas unfurl with the rhythm of speech.Hal Prince, left, and Sondheim in 1988.Kyle Ericksen/Getty ImagesSondheim’s most prolific, and ambitious, period began with the concept musical “Company” (1970) and his collaborations with the eminent producer and director Hal Prince. Gemignani said that, together, they “never compromised on bringing their ideas to life.” It was during this period that Sondheim emerged as a postmodernist in the vein of John Adams, with a deep well of references presented with a wink or sincerity, but above all with dramaturgical purpose.That might be why “Follies,” from 1971, has been called a “post-musical musical.” Its score abounds in pastiche — what is “Losing My Mind” if not a Gershwin tune from an alternate universe? — and artful irony, such as dissonances that betray the darker truth of “The Road You Didn’t Take.”For “Pacific Overtures” (1976), Sondheim took a similar approach to Puccini in “Turandot,” by putting authentic sounds — in this case, Kabuki music — through his own idiomatic prism. But, like Puccini, he suggests rather than represents, unable to escape a Western perspective while purportedly telling a story from a Japanese point of view. It’s a contradiction that doesn’t serve the musical as well as the more globalist style of “Someone in a Tree,” a song that brought a simplistic American Minimalism to Broadway.Inspired by the spareness of Japanese visual art, Sondheim composed an analogue in a song that does little more than develop a single chord, over and over. As Philip Glass and Steve Reich were applying a world-music sensibility to the classical sphere, Sondheim wrote his own kind of repetitive phase music. “It’s not insignificant that when I met Steve Reich,” Sondheim later wrote, “he told me how much he loved this show.”He was on culturally surer ground with “A Little Night Music” (1973), in which the idea of variation is applied to waltz-like melodies in three. He wrote that his favorite form was the theme and variations, and that he respected Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” This musical came closer to that piece than anything else Sondheim wrote, with a hint of Sibelius.“The Frogs,” presented by MasterVoices, at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center in November.Erin Baiano for The New York TimesSondheim’s sound, like that of any good postmodernist, was both consistent and chameleonic, never more so than in “Sweeney,” which displays his genius and misguided musical beliefs in equal measure.Aside from “Passion” (1994), it is Sondheim’s most operatic work in sensibility and craft, yet he bristled at the idea of “Sweeney” being called an opera or an operetta and once wrote that “when ‘Porgy and Bess’ was performed on Broadway, it was a musical; when it was performed at Glyndebourne and Covent Garden, it was an opera.” (That’s not true. It was always an opera, and played on Broadway at a time when many operas did.)All told, “Sweeney” is a hybrid of music theater, one that brings in yet another medium: cinema. Sondheim believed that, with all due respect, “John Williams is responsible for “Jaws,” not Steven Spielberg.” His score for “Sweeney” is similarly rich with edge-of-your-seat underscoring, while the lyrics are both ingenious and inherently melodic. Sondheim was proud of the opening line of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” and rightfully so: “Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd” sets a mood of theatrical artifice and anachronism, with a piercing consonance in the T’s as unsettling as Nabokov’s “tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth” in “Lolita.”Josh Groban, left, and Annaleigh Ashford in “Sweeney Todd” on Broadway.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHere, it must be said, that the sound of Sondheim would not be such without a crucial collaborator: Jonathan Tunick, his orchestrator to this day. (The scores of all four shows I recently attended were arranged by him.) Sondheim composed at his piano, then sang through while accompanying himself; from there, Tunick teased out the textures of his playing into entire instrumental ensembles.In an interview, Tunick said that you can’t overthink the process. “I was able to tell a great deal, not only from the actual notes but from the way he played them,” he added, “the way he phrased, the way he attacked a chord.” He described the transformation as, more than anything, “Dionysian.” At its fullest, the arrangement on Broadway now, the “Sweeney” score abounds in colorful flourishes and bone-rattling horror, the fluttering in the winds in one song as delicate as the low brasses are chilling at the start of “Epiphany.”If “Sweeney” reflects a worldview, a pretty dismal one, that speaks to America only allegorically, a more direct view of the country emerges in later works. “Merrily” comments obliquely on the period of history it covers, with the space-age promise of Sputnik giving way to cynical neoliberalism. And American themes are even more overt in the shows that brought Sondheim back together with John Weidman, the book writer of “Pacific Overtures”: “Assassins” (1990) and “Road Show,” a troubled musical that went through multiple revisions and titles before premiering in its final form in 2008. Both shows are flawed — “Road Show” structurally, and “Assassins” for its disturbing pageant of mental illness — but reflect the promise and tragedy of the American dream.“Assassins” goes so far as to propose “Another National Anthem,” which reads as a litany of disenfranchisement from a cast of characters who all feel let down by a system that was supposed to work for them; it’s not far from the complaints that fueled distrust of government today and the rise of Donald J. Trump.Micaela Diamond, left, and fellow cast members in the premiere run of “Here We Are” at the Shed.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMore barbed yet is “Here We Are,” in its sendup of elitism and the privilege of both apathy and revolt. For better and worse, the score has a valedictory spirit, recalling earlier work without quoting it exactly, and the lyrics contain satirical observations that wouldn’t be out of place in “Company.”My generation of theater fans came of age loving “Into the Woods,” which, because of its enduring popularity as theater for children, will remain onstage far into the future. But the Sondheim works most likely to last, from a purely musical perspective, are those that least readily show their age, and happen to be classical-leaning and postmodern: “Follies” is timelessly Broadway; “A Little Night Music,” universally elegant; “Sweeney,” perennially effective.Gemignani called “Sweeney” Sondheim’s “Porgy and Bess.” Like that show, it has played in Broadway theaters and opera houses alike. And like that show, it’s the masterpiece of a great American composer. More

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      Review: This ‘Magic Flute’ at the Met Lacks Some Luster

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      Mozart’s opera, tailored to families in this staging, is big on spectacle and let’s-put-on-a-show verve. What shines? Kathryn Lewek as Queen of the Night.The evolution of Julie Taymor’s production of “Die Zauberflöte” from long-running hit to children’s-theater show at the Metropolitan Opera is now complete.Since the premiere of Taymor’s staging in 2004, her diaphanous puppets and George Tsypin’s translucent set pieces have brought a welcome weightlessness to Mozart’s hard-to-stage singspiel, which wraps fairy-tale monsters, young love and a Masonic quest in melodies of direct and abundant charm. This abridged version, in English, followed a few years later as a holiday show for families (though, at nearly two hours without intermission, it doesn’t exactly fly by).When the Met introduced a new production of the work by Simon McBurney last May that sees the world with a brand of childlike wonder that’s really meant for adults, it decided to keep Taymor’s puppets-and-plexiglass version as a separate, family-friendly entertainment that can be trotted out this time of year.This season’s run of the Taymor version, dubbed “The Magic Flute — Holiday Presentation,” opened on Friday with a rough let’s-put-on-a-show energy. The cast played broadly to its young audience. The orchestra, conducted by Patrick Furrer, sounded thin and tinny, lacking the mellow-gold shine that conveys nobility and transcendence in this score.On paper, it made sense to cast the tenor Rolando Villazón in the comic baritone role of Papageno. Now a stage director as well as a singer, he has largely given up the lyric tenor roles that catapulted him to the top of the opera world two decades ago. Still, he has charisma to burn, and Papageno is more or less the main character of this adaptation. Unfortunately, Villazón struggled with the low-for-him tessitura; his voice, tired and frayed, often floated around the center of the pitch when he wasn’t tweaking melodies to suit his range.It was sad to see an artist who was once capable of rare musical insight funnel his considerable creative energy into a frenetic, always-on physicality. Mimicking Woody Woodpecker’s laugh and Road Runner’s “meep meep!” he practically morphed into a cartoon. His improvisations and sprinklings of Spanish into the dialogue won over the audience, and his genuine rapport with the priest portrayed by Scott Scully, perhaps the Met’s funniest comprimario, was a joy.Kathryn Lewek, a scintillating Queen of the Night in McBurney’s production last season, returned to the role for this holiday run.Evan ZimmermanJanai Brugger (Pamina) and Brindley Sherratt (Sarastro) sounded a bit colorless in the first half, but their voices ripened as the show progressed. As the opera’s hero Tamino, the tenor Piotr Buszewski could be sensitive, but too often his singing came across as overcooked.Kathryn Lewek, a scintillating Queen of the Night in McBurney’s production last season, returned to the role for this holiday run. Regardless of what was going on around her, she sang like she was on the stage of one of the world’s foremost lyric theaters. “O zittre nicht,” in particular, was captivating with its soft tone, graceful lyricism and sharply etched coloratura. Putting aside a dry note here and there, “Der Hölle Rache” had impressive point, and the triplets tumbled seamlessly.Chuckles and puppets make for a fun night with the kids, but singing like Lewek’s is what the magic of opera is all about.The Magic FluteThrough Dec. 30 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More