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      Colette Maze, Pianist Who Started Recording in Her 80s, Dies at 109

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      Born before the outbreak of World War I, she began making albums in the 1990s. She released her latest, “109 Ans de Piano,” this year.When the French composer Claude Debussy died at his home in Paris in 1918, he probably had no idea that one of his youngest fans lived just a few blocks away. Colette Saulnier, not yet 4, was already learning the rudiments of music, and even at that age she was drawn to the work of her famous neighbor.“I love these climates where you have to create an atmosphere, a daydream,” Colette Maze, as she later became known, said in a 2021 interview with the website Pianote. “I’m connected with Debussy because he corresponds to my deepest sensibility.”Mrs. Maze would go on to become an accomplished pianist and teacher. But it was only in the late 1990s, when she was over 80, that her son persuaded her to begin recording commercially.What followed was one of the most surprising second acts in classical music history: seven albums, largely but not exclusively the music of Debussy, and a fan base drawn as much to Mrs. Maze’s exquisite finger work as to her sheer, irrepressible joy, which shone through in interviews with French television and in videos posted to her Facebook page.“As soon as I get up, I start playing the piano to connect with the forces of life,” she told Pianote. “It’s a habit. It’s always been that way. I don’t need to motivate myself, it’s natural. It’s like an automatic function.”Mrs. Maze, who was widely considered the world’s oldest recording pianist, died on Nov. 19 in the same Paris apartment where she had lived since she was 18, with views of the Eiffel Tower and the Seine River. She was 109. Her son, Fabrice Maze, confirmed the death.Mrs. Maze at age 18. She studied under Alfred Cortot and Nadia Boulanger.via Maze familyColette Claire Saulnier was born in Paris on June 16, 1914, a month before the beginning of World War I. Her father, Léon Saulnier, managed a fertilizer factory, and her mother, Denise (Piollet) Saulnier, was a homemaker.She grew up surrounded by music. Her mother, who played violin, and her maternal grandmother, who played piano, gave concerts in the Saulnier home, and chords wafted in from a piano-playing neighbor. By 4 she was learning to play.She aspired to be a concert pianist, but her parents — who were strict and, according to her, miserly with their love — disapproved. When she applied to the performance track at the École Normale de Musique, a new conservatory founded by Alfred Cortot, her parents refused to let her stay home alone to practice for her audition.Her score wasn’t quite high enough, but she still qualified for the teaching track. She studied under Mr. Cortot and Nadia Boulanger, who tutored some of the 20th century’s greatest musicians, including Daniel Barenboim, Virgil Thomson and Philip Glass.Mrs. Maze later credited the Cortot method of playing, with its emphasis on relaxation, for her ability to continue at the piano without suffering the sort of joint stiffening that can strike older pianists.“If I still play at my age, it is because the teaching of Alfred Cortot and Nadia Boulanger was very flexible and based on improvisation,” she said in a 2018 interview with the newspaper Le Parisien. “He told us that our hand was a diamond at the end of a silk stocking.”After graduating in 1934, she stayed at the conservatory to teach. When the Germans invaded in 1940, she and a friend fled on bicycles to the deep south of France, where they remained until the end of World War II.Back in Paris, she had a relationship with a married man, Hubert Dumas, with whom she had a son, Fabrice. But Mr. Dumas left her in 1952.She married Emile Maze, another musician, in 1958. He died in 1974. Along with her son, she is survived by two grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.Even after she retired from teaching in 1984, Mrs. Maze continued to play four hours or more a day. Her son later began encouraging her to record an album, to capture both her talents and the influence of Mr. Cortot’s unique methods.Her first album, a recording of Debussy’s preludes, was released in 2004, the year she turned 90. Three more albums of Debussy followed, as well as three others featuring music from different composers: “104 Years of Piano” (2018), “105 Years of Piano” (2019) and “109 Years of Piano” (2023).As her discography grew, so did public curiosity, which turned into acclaim as critics praised her technique and her supple interpretations of not just Debussy but also Robert Schumann and Erik Satie, as well as more modern composers like Astor Piazzolla and Ryuichi Sakamoto.She found even more fame in 2020, when she took to Facebook to share daily comments of good cheer during the darkest days of the pandemic. As restrictions eased, fans streamed to her home, coming from as far as Japan to ask for a brief lesson.“I always preferred composers who gave me tenderness,” she told NPR in 2021. “Music is an affective language, a poetic language. In music there is everything — nature, emotion, love, revolt, dreams; it’s like a spiritual food.” More

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      Review: Philharmonic Debuts Back Flashiness With Substance

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      In an evening built to entertain, there was also depth in Andrés Orozco-Estrada’s conducting and the cellist Edgar Moreau’s playing.There’s often a bias against the idea of flashiness, especially in classical music circles, as if it must always be preceded by the word “empty.”But not on Wednesday at David Geffen Hall, where the conductor Andrés Orozco-Estrada and the cellist Edgar Moreau were making their New York Philharmonic debuts. If anything, the word that accompanied their kind of flashiness was “fun.”By offering plenty of buoyancy — and largely skirting grave weight — the programming communicated this conductor’s zealous pursuit of entertainment. It ran from a rousing take on Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” Overture-Fantasy to a graceful (and yes, occasionally flashy) Haydn Cello Concerto No. 1, then, after intermission, a truly aggressive reading of Bartok’s “Miraculous Mandarin” Suite and a boisterous finale in Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody No. 1.That’s an evening built to dazzle and entertain. But there was substance as well. From the outset of Tchaikovsky’s crowd-pleaser, Orozco-Estrada had the Philharmonic players in fine balance: Plucked strings had presence; entrances of flute or harp came across clearly; a roll of percussion heightened tension without calling too much early attention to itself.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?  More

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      Jay Schwartz’s Music Reflects a Past of Oceans and Deserts

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      The composer’s latest work, “Theta,” born of the pandemic, loss and long swims in open water, is premiering in Germany.In early March 2020, the composer Jay Schwartz traveled to San Diego from his home in Cologne, Germany, to attend the funeral for Don Bukovich — his stepfather and the only person in his extended family with an affinity for classical music.Bukovich was especially fond of music by Bach. And, when the pandemic hit and Schwartz got stuck in San Diego and stayed with his brother, he found himself playing Bach’s “Komm, süßer Tod” (“Come, Sweet Death”) over and over at the piano. He also went for long swims in the Pacific Ocean, far from the shoreline.“You reach a kind of euphoric state,” Schwartz said in an interview. “You’re in the ocean and you’re euphoric because of the natural beauty, but also because you’re on the cusp of extreme danger.”As Schwartz swam, he thought about musical ideas: an unusual chord progression in the Bach piece; glissandos, the sliding from one note to another; and an aural illusion known as the Shepard tone, the sonic equivalent of a barber’s pole.“I started to superimpose those things in an intuitive way, not thinking it was a concept,” Schwartz said. “It just happened while in the ocean.”By June 2020, Schwartz had finished a new piece for orchestra based on those ideas. He called it “Theta,” after the Greek letter once used as a symbol for death.No one had commissioned the work. But a week after it was completed, Schwartz received a call from the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra. Its music director, Teodor Currentzis, was planning a program built around Gustav Mahler’s final, incomplete Symphony No. 10, and wanted Schwartz to compose a piece.Schwartz considered writing something new. But, as he researched the end of Mahler’s life, Schwartz realized that the symphony and “Theta” had both been inspired by Bach works related to death. The pieces also shared an interest in mortality’s release: As he composed, Mahler wrote in a poem to his wife, Alma, that he hoped for “the bliss of death in the most painful hours.”On Thursday, Currentzis and the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra will premiere “Theta” and other responses to Mahler’s Symphony No. 10 in Stuttgart, followed by performances in Hamburg, Freiburg and Berlin. The concerts are a milestone for Schwartz, 58, an artist with no formal composition training who has forged a career largely parallel to the structures of contemporary classical music in Germany.Schwartz, behind at right, at a recent rehearsal led by the conductor Teodor Currentzis, at the podium.Felix Broede for The New York TimesDespite — or, as Schwartz sees it, because of — his lack of academic education, his music is unmistakable. All his pieces include glissandos, which he uses to create arresting parabolas of texture. “There is no glissando without dissonance,” Currentzis said in an interview. “Always he puts a note that keeps, and then the glissando creates the nirvana of the dissonance, of falling apart.” At key moments, these tendrils of sound alight on major and minor chords: familiar harmonies rendered new.Schwartz’s pieces have clearly audible forms and stark climaxes, taking obvious pleasure in sound. “Musical events happen that achieve a kind of breathing or wave-shaped forms,” Bernd Feuchtner, a writer and the artistic director of the Handel Festival in Halle, Germany, said in a phone interview. He added that when he hears a new Schwartz piece, “I’m always sitting on the edge of my seat.”The conductor Matthias Pintscher has said of Schwartz, “For me, he’s a Schubert of our time.”SCHWARTZ’S FATHER was a boxer turned pool maintenance worker; his mother, a homemaker who later worked as a schoolteacher. Schwartz, who was born in San Diego, showed musical talent early: At 4, he would pick out snatches of the easy listening music his parents liked on his plastic toy piano. At 7, he began formal lessons.His parents divorced in 1979, and his mother moved Schwartz and his two brothers to Deming, N.M., whose desert landscape he loved. He began practicing to become a classical pianist. Schwartz studied music at Arizona State University, where he won his first and only piano competition.“The best art, at least that I’ve done, I don’t feel like I’m inventing it,” Schwartz said. “I find it, in the sense of excavating, going into something, and digging something up.”Felix Broede for The New York Times “I was taught that that was the thing I should be doing: playing Rachmaninoff concerti, and not making them up myself,” Schwartz said. “I actually did play a Rachmaninoff concerto with the college orchestra. And at the end it was like, ‘Did that, got the T-shirt. I’m out of here.’”In 1989, Schwartz traveled to the university town of Tübingen, Germany, for what was supposed to be a one-year exchange program as part of his graduate school studies in Arizona. He has lived in Germany ever since.Schwartz considered studying musicology, but a professor, citing his then-rudimentary German, discouraged him. Instead, Schwartz practiced the language and worked on the assembly line of a Mercedes-Benz factory. “I was either listening to German grammar or to music, because the job was super boring,” he said. “You could sit there for hours and not have a single part come by.” (He now speaks German so fluently he sometimes needs a moment to find an English word.)In 1990, Schwartz became an assistant in the musical archives of the Stuttgart State Theater, where he did what he described as “menial tasks.” Later, the theater noticed his composition skill, and hired him to write small pieces of incidental music. The job wasn’t for him. “I don’t like being subordinate to some director saying, ‘I need four bars of minor’ and those kinds of ridiculous demands,” Schwartz said.But he did take advantage of free tickets to everything at the theater. He saw opera, ballet or theater nearly every night, and listened to contemporary music on public radio. He made some of his closest friends in those years. Still, it was a time of soul-searching. “An identity crisis comes with entering a foreign country,” Schwartz said. “And that whole identity crisis is super important for forming an artist. I had years when I couldn’t compose. When it did happen, it was a flood.”His catalog includes 16 pieces of chamber music, five vocal works, an opera, a recent recomposition of Schubert’s “Winterreise” for voice and saxophone ensemble, a piece for voices and orchestra, and eight pieces in the series “Music for Orchestra,” of which “Theta” is the most recent.Schwartz began the “Music for Orchestra” series in 2002, when a cellist friend asked him to write a piece for 12 of his students and a semiprofessional string quintet, “Music for 17 String Instruments.” A year later, the artistic director of the German National Theater in Weimar commissioned him to compose incidental music for a stage adaptation of Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” with a full orchestra at Schwartz’s disposal.“He wanted me to copy Tchaikovsky, which I did,” Schwartz said. “At the same time, I looked at the recording plan, and I had a ridiculous amount of time in the recording studio.” He took the opportunity to orchestrate “Music for 17 String Instruments” and record it.“I put it on their stands, and they did it, like, ‘This is part of the play,’” Schwartz said. “It never entered the play.”That work became the first “Music for Orchestra.” In a phone interview, Eric Marinitsch, the former head of promotion for Universal Edition, Schwartz’s publisher, described hearing the music as a “big bang.”“The piece was so clear in its dramaturgy,” Marinitsch said, “and yet composed with such complex means.”Composed over the past two decades, the pieces of “Music for Orchestra” evoke the austere, ominous beauty and subtle gradations of the environments where Schwartz was raised: the ocean and the desert. “The best art, at least that I’ve done, I don’t feel like I’m inventing it,” he said. “I find it, in the sense of excavating, going into something, and digging something up.”In late November, Schwartz traveled from Cologne, where he lives with his husband, to rehearsals for “Theta.” In an early rehearsal, Schwartz and Currentzis worked to make the individual parts coalesce into a unified texture. “I hear fragments,” Currentzis told the timpanist as he tried to smooth out a long, slow glissando.Working together with visible joy, the conductor and the composer added Mahlerian touches — winds playing with their bells up, a dramatic hammer stroke — to the piece. They sang bits of “Komm, süßer Tod” to demonstrate musical shapes.In a section of frothy trills, Schwartz addressed the woodwinds. “Realize,” he told them, “that you’re part of the wave.” More

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      Review: A New York Philharmonic Staple Outshines a Flashy Premiere

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      Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances was the highlight of a program that also included the New York debut of Bryce Dessner’s evocative Concerto for Two Pianos.On Thursday, the New York Philharmonic gave the New York premiere of a double piano concerto by a pop artist with classical and indie rock credentials. With the composer in attendance, the piece, lovingly crafted to show off the evening’s soloists, Katia and Marielle Labèque, had a strong claim as the evening’s centerpiece.Instead, Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, a repertory staple that the Philharmonic recently performed in 2022, walked off with the night.The fault hardly lies with the piece written by Bryce Dessner, a founding member of the rock band the National, who has a master’s from the Yale School of Music and is a Grammy winner in rock and classical categories. The Labèque sisters’ recording of his Concerto for Two Pianos reveals an evocative, neatly conceived work that uses contrast to build momentum across three movements.Dessner, who closely studied the Labèques’ repertoire, throws all manner of writing at the pianists, who play cascading figures in canon, stuttering syncopations, gently articulated polyrhythms, jabbing chords and twinkling starbursts of notes. The orchestra, mesmerized, follows their lead. The winds copy the arching shape of the piano’s dreamy chord progressions, and the low strings and brasses double the piano’s bass stabs. What the concerto lacks in mystery it makes up for in showmanship and communal impact.On Thursday, the Labèque sisters played with typical precision, carving out figures from the orchestral fabric with a scalpel. They found flair in clarity; long-breathed lines flowed evenly, and the interplay between the piano parts — whether layered atop or responding to one another — had athletic grace. In the second movement, Katia played notes on high like a smooth, confiding whisper, and Marielle lashed out percussively. They make collaboration sound like an instinctive mind meld.The evening’s conductor, Semyon Bychkov, opted for a reduced version of the orchestration that sounded skeletal in live performance. A sequence of whole notes across the orchestral parts in the third movement desperately needed heft. The hairpin dynamics for the brasses, which are meant to flash by like a car’s headlights on a pitch-black night, were barely indicated. Without shape, vignettes blurred together: Prettily fragile passages sounded awfully similar to dissonant ones.The concerto, which never really reached out to grab its audience, deserved a fairer outing, especially as it was sandwiched between two works, Strauss’s “Don Juan” and the Symphonic Dances, that received the high Romantic treatment.The orchestra came out swinging in the Strauss, overshooting the brashness and bravado of the opening phrase and stiffly dispatching moments of mischief. But there was genuine sweep in the romantic climaxes as the orchestra summoned the intoxicating magic of Strauss’s dense score. The Don’s demise at the end was unsentimental and, in its own way, honorable.After intermission the orchestra, sounding reborn, struck a perfect balance between its overheated excitement in the Strauss and its detachment in the Dessner. From the first notes of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, the players, attuned to matters of balance and color, showed a striking confidence and natural expansiveness. The first movement’s extended woodwind chorale, anchored by the rose-gold color of Lino Gomez’s alto saxophone, was luxurious to behold. The strings, piano and harp answered with melancholic optimism.The second movement dispelled any lingering question about the Philharmonic’s dexterity with contrasts. It opened with the wheezing of stopped horns and muted trumpets, which quickly gave way to the liquefaction of legato winds and the oom-pah-pah of plush strings. A waltz of peculiar color, it seemed to waft off the stage and into the hall. It didn’t overwhelm the audience members or recede from them; instead, it invited them into the dance.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Review: Daniel Barenboim Misses His American Swan Song

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      The ailing conductor was to have led the Staatskapelle Berlin in Brahms’s symphonies at Carnegie Hall. Yannick Nézet-Séguin jumped in.On Jan. 20, 1957, a 14-year-old pianist named Daniel Barenboim made his Carnegie Hall debut, playing a Prokofiev concerto. In 1968, just 25, he appeared at the hall for the first time as a conductor.Some 150 Carnegie performances later, Barenboim, now 81 and one of the great musical figures of our time, was to have returned this week to conduct the Staatskapelle Berlin in Brahms’s four symphonies over two evenings, Thursday and Friday.But earlier this year, health issues forced him from the Staatskapelle’s podium, where he had reigned since the early 1990s. And while he had still hoped to travel to Carnegie with the orchestra as part of a four-city North American tour, those health problems ended up making the trip impossible. It would have been a poignant American swan song for Barenboim, bringing him not just to Carnegie but also to Chicago, where he led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1991 to 2006.In September, Christian Thielemann, 64, a master of Austro-German classics like Brahms’s symphonies, was named Barenboim’s replacement at the Staatskapelle, which is also the pit orchestra of the Berlin State Opera. But Thielemann couldn’t take on the tour.Instead, the ensemble looked to younger conductors: Giedre Slekyte for a performance in Toronto; Jakub Hrusa in Chicago; and, in New York and Philadelphia, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Metropolitan Opera (where he’s currently leading “Florencia en el Amazonas”) and the Philadelphia Orchestra.Nézet-Séguin has been Carnegie’s omnipresent man of late, appearing at the hall two dozen times since fall 2021 alone. And he’s been a dependable luxury substitute there, having jumped in for three dates with the Vienna Philharmonic at the dawn of the Russian war in Ukraine last year, when Valery Gergiev was forced off the programs under pressure.This was a shotgun wedding — “spontaneous,” as Nézet-Séguin put it in remarks from the podium at the end of the first Staatskapelle concert on Thursday, thanking the orchestra and sending good wishes to Barenboim. Nézet-Séguin hadn’t led the ensemble in 10 years, and it felt that way: sometimes excitingly volatile, sometimes unsettled.Brahms’s first and second symphonies were featured on the program, with the third and fourth to follow on Friday and in Philadelphia on Sunday. This orchestra is experienced in balancing Brahms’s winding, saturnine lines with his restless energy; the violins irradiate these scores, with a sound under pressure that’s slicing and white hot but never harsh.In the First Symphony, Nézet-Séguin nudged the ensemble toward slower slows and faster fasts, with high-wire, occasionally vague or nervous transitions between sections in the first movement. In the second movement, the strings glowed as they surrounded the wind solos. And while the soft initial statement of the brass chorale in the finale was seductively transparent, with each instrument’s layer audible in the sedimentary whole, that chorale’s restatement at the end was breathlessly sped through.The brighter-spirited Second Symphony felt more comfortably lived in, with a glistening, lightly frosted, even dreamlike sound in the first movement. The opening of the second was lovingly conducted, with a modest dignity to the theme and vigor in the rest.It would have been meaningful to be able to show our gratitude to Barenboim this week: for all the performances, for all the recordings, for all the sense he has conveyed that classical musicians can and should be vital parts of civic life.His albums, of course, will remain with us. Hopefully, so will the institutions he founded, like the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, a project he conceived with Edward Said and dedicated to breaking down barriers in the Middle East.We in New York are left thinking back to what will likely end up being his final Carnegie appearances: a triumphant Bruckner cycle with the Staatskapelle in 2017, nine concerts in which he paired those sprawling symphonies with Mozart piano concertos, conducted from the keyboard. This was the king in full, thrilling command, the way he would want to be remembered.Staatskapelle BerlinThe orchestra will play Brahms at Carnegie Hall in Manhattan on Friday and at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia on Sunday; philorch.org. More

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      Putin Ally Valery Gergiev to Lead Bolshoi Theater

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      The Russian maestro, who heads the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, will also control the Bolshoi in Moscow, replacing Vladimir Urin, who spoke out against the Ukraine war.Valery Gergiev, the star Russian maestro and prominent supporter of President Vladimir V. Putin, was tapped on Friday to lead the storied Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, the Russian government announced .The move will expand Mr. Gergiev’s dominance at the pinnacle of Russia culture. He already serves as the artistic and general director of the nation’s other premier performing arts institution, the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. In Moscow, he will replace Vladimir Urin, the Bolshoi’s general director since 2013, who signed a petition last year expressing opposition to the war in Ukraine.Russia’s government said in a post on Telegram that Mr. Gergiev would serve a five-year term under an order signed by Prime Minister Mikhail V. Mishustin. The post said that Mr. Urin had been “relieved of this position at his own request.”In selecting Mr. Gergiev, 70, to lead the Bolshoi, Mr. Putin has rewarded a renowned musician and staunch ally who once endorsed his re-election and has appeared at concerts in Russia and abroad to promote his policies. The men have known each other since the early 1990s, when Mr. Putin was an official in St. Petersburg and Mr. Gergiev was beginning his tenure as the leader of the Mariinsky, then called the Kirov.Mr. Urin’s fate at the Bolshoi, which houses renowned ballet and opera companies, had been uncertain since his name appeared on the petition opposing the war. Mr. Putin at times seemed to hint that Mr. Urin’s days were numbered; in March 2022 he publicly asked Mr. Gergiev if he was interested in “recreating a common directorate” that would unite the Bolshoi with the Mariinsky.But Mr. Urin, 76, defied expectations for a time, maintaining his post even as other artists who denounced the war faced reprisals or left the country. He said in an interview with a Russian news outlet earlier this year that it was “not an easy time” for the Bolshoi.Mr. Urin announced his resignation to colleagues on Thursday after a performance of César Cui’s “The Mandarin’s Son” and Stravinsky’s “The Nightingale” at the Bolshoi, Russian news outlets reported.“Today I say goodbye to you, because today is my last working day at the Bolshoi Theater,” Mr. Urin said in a speech to his colleagues, according to a video that circulated online.After Russia invaded Ukraine, Mr. Gergiev, whose extensive international career once made him one of the busiest maestros in the world, has been persona non grata in the United States and Europe. His touring schedule dried up in the West, and he was fired by the Munich Philharmonic, where he had been chief conductor, because of his long record of support for Mr. Putin.After the invasion, many cultural institutions in the United States and Europe rushed to cut ties with Russian artists and institutions closely aligned with Mr. Putin, upending decades of cultural exchange that had endured even during the depths of the Cold War.The Bolshoi and Mariinsky theaters faced cancellations of performances set for London, Madrid, New York and elsewhere, and a popular program to broadcast Bolshoi performances into more than 1,700 movie theaters in 70 countries and territories was suspended. Licenses to perform foreign works at Russian theaters expired, and some Russian choreographers and directors asked that their names be removed from works performed in Russia. Several Russian stars with ties to Mr. Putin lost work in the West, including the soprano Anna Netrebko and the pianist Denis Matsuev.Mr. Urin, who played a key role in steering the Bolshoi after the shock of the 2013 acid attack on the ballet director Sergei Filin, tried to maintain a sense of normalcy, pushing forward with performances of classics like the ballet “Giselle” and the opera “Eugene Onegin.” But the war created new complications. He said at one point that he could not stage works by artists who spoke out against the invasion because it might create a “serious negative reaction,” according to Russian news reports.Demand for performances at the Bolshoi and Mariinsky has appeared to remain strong. A stampede broke out outside the Bolshoi last month as several hundred people lined up to buy tickets for a popular holiday run of Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker,” according to Russian news outlets.With the West off limits, the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky have turned to other overseas markets, including China, where Russian artists and cultural groups have been warmly received. Mr. Gergiev and the Mariinsky have led three tours in China this year; the Bolshoi appeared in Beijing over the summer.Alex Marshall More

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      Extinction Rebellion Climate Protesters Interrupt Met Performance

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      Met officials were forced to bring down the curtain halfway through the opera as protesters unfurled banners that read “No Opera On A Dead Planet.” The performance later resumed.The opening night of a revival of Richard Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” at the Metropolitan Opera in New York was interrupted Thursday night by climate protesters shouting “No Opera” from the balconies on both sides of the opera house.Protesters with the group Extinction Rebellion NYC unfurled banners that read “No Opera On A Dead Planet,” according to Peter Gelb, the general manager at the Met. Met officials were then forced to bring down the curtain at around 9:30 p.m., halfway through the second act.About eight minutes passed before security officials ushered out the protesters perched on the balconies, Mr. Gelb said.The crowd jeered the demonstrators and burst into applause when the curtains again opened, but the elation was short-lived.A woman sitting in the orchestra section of the audience then stood up and began to shout.The curtains closed again. While security removed the woman, Mr. Gelb consulted with other officials on how to proceed.Many audience members shouted back at the protesters, with people screaming “Go away!” “Go home!” and “Shut up!” Some attendees walked out, with one person questioning “is there no security here?”The show was delayed for 22 minutes, Mr. Gelb said.Mr. Gelb appeared onstage to inform the audience that the house lights would remain on so security could quickly identify and remove any additional protesters who might pop up during the rest of the four-and-half-hour performance.The production was scheduled to end shortly after 11 p.m. but will instead end closer to midnight because of the interruptions.Mr. Gelb said the protesters were removed from the premises and referred to the police.A New York Police Department spokesman said no arrests were reported.The return of Otto Schenk’s classic production was eagerly anticipated among opera goers because it marked the Met debut of the highly-sought-after baritone Christian Gerhaher, who sang the role of Wolfram. The Austrian tenor Andreas Schager sang the title role, Elza van den Heever was Elisabeth and the opera was conducted by Donald Runnicles.In a statement, Extinction Rebellion said the demonstration was timed to “coincide with the main character’s declaration that ‘love is a spring to be drunk from.’”It added: “contrary to those words spoken on stage, springs are not pure now, because we are in a climate crisis, and our water is contaminated.”“Everyone was just so startled,” said George Chauncey, a history professor at Columbia University, who was seated in the orchestra section. “We didn’t know what was going to happen.”Mr. Chauncey said some audience members were concerned about their safety, while others were annoyed that opening night was interrupted.“I agree there’s a climate emergency and I understand the frustration that leads people to do something like this,” he said. “But I’m not sure it’s very effective.”Before the show, several demonstrators were at the house protesting the Israel-Hamas war, including Nan Goldin, the photographer and activist.Thursday’s interruption was just the latest example of climate activists disrupting a classical music concert.In September, climate activists interrupted a performance in Switzerland. And last year during a performance of Verdi’s Requiem in Amsterdam, according to Opera Wire, climate activists shouted: “We are in the middle of a climate crisis and we are like the orchestra on the Titanic that keeps playing quietly while the ship is already sinking.” They were escorted out minutes later.Climate activists have also targeted museums, sometimes harming paintings, and interrupted sporting events. In September, Extinction Rebellion NYC also interrupted the U.S. Open semifinal match between Coco Gauff and Karolina Muchova. Four protesters in the upper levels of Arthur Ashe Stadium called for an end to fossil fuels, and one activist glued his feet to the ground. Their protests delayed the match for 49 minutes.Javier C. Hernández More

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      ‘American Symphony’ Review: Intimate Harmony

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      This portrait of the musician Jon Batiste and the author Suleika Jaouad follows an artistic couple through ambition and adversity.Partway through “American Symphony,” the musician Jon Batiste pokes gentle fun at the coverage he received in advance of the 2022 Grammys. The breadth of his 11 nominations, which bridged pop, jazz and classical categories, made him tough to label. He ultimately fended off Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish to win album of the year.This documentary, directed by Matthew Heineman, is likewise deceptively tricky to peg. In the broad strokes, it is a process film, following Batiste, who grew up in the New Orleans area and trained at Juilliard, as he prepares a wildly original symphony that shares a title with the movie. “My ambition for composing this symphony is massive,” he says. “I’m trying to expand the canon of symphonic music, break through long-gatekept spaces.”(Ben Sisario, writing in The New York Times, described the piece, which premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2022, as a “Whitmanesque canvas of funk, Dixieland jazz, operatic vocals and Native American drums.”)But this is also a movie about two artists, their love, their creative attitudes and how, as a couple, they approach living a “life of contrasts.” That description comes from the writer Suleika Jaouad, Batiste’s partner (they marry during the film), whose best-selling memoir, “Between Two Kingdoms,” was published in 2021 and who, before college, studied at Juilliard herself, with a specialization in double bass.As Batiste gets ready for his Grammy and Carnegie Hall coups, Jaouad undergoes a bone marrow transplant after a recurrence of cancer. (She received her first leukemia diagnosis at 22, and from 2012 to 2015 wrote in The Times about her experiences.)While some of the backstage material has an official feel (Batiste and Jaouad are listed among the many executive producers, along with Barack and Michelle Obama), the documentary does not shy from showing private moments. It captures Batiste hiding his head under a pillow as he talks on the phone with his therapist and sits in with the couple as a doctor discusses the open-ended course of chemotherapy he is recommending. When it comes to the music, too, the film is unafraid to dwell on a drawn-out silence or phrase.American SymphonyRated PG-13 Potentially upsetting medical scenes. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More