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      Courtney Bryan’s Music Brings It All Together

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      A recent recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant, this pianist and composer fuses different styles for a sound that is entirely her own.The name Courtney Bryan is not one that you’ll currently find on many recordings. Aside from two independently released, jazz-tilting albums from 2007 and 2010, precious little of this pianist and composer’s finely woven, adventurous music is available to hear widely.But you can expect that to change, beyond live performances including the premiere of Bryan’s chamber work “DREAMING (Freedom Sounds),” presented by the International Contemporary Ensemble at Merkin Hall on Wednesday. She also recently signed with the influential music publisher Boosey & Hawkes, whose biography of her online includes the promise of a third recording: “Sounds of Freedom.”Bryan, 41, who was born in New Orleans and received a MacArthur “genius” grant earlier this month, has been making her mark since earning her doctorate in composition from Columbia University in 2014. Symphony orchestras, chamber musicians, vocal groups and jazz performers have all been drawn to her sound. Last spring, the New York Philharmonic premiere of “Gathering Song,” with text by the stage director Tazewell Thompson and hints of post-bop jazz harmony, displayed her place among the most exciting voices in contemporary American music.In a phone interview, Bryan said that before she started her Ph.D. program, “I had the separate thing of doing ‘classical’ here, ‘jazz’ here,” while also working as an organist at the Bethany Baptist Church in Newark.From left, Leslie B. Dunner, Tazewell Thompson, Ryan Speedo Green and Bryan at the New York Philharmonic premiere of “Gathering Song” last spring.Chris LeeBut at Columbia, her composition teacher — the eminent composer, trombonist and computer-music pioneer George E. Lewis — encouraged her to put everything together. “He helped me dream bigger,” Bryan said.And Lewis also helped introduce her to other like-minded students, including the musicologist Matthew D. Morrison, who said that his forthcoming book “Blacksound” is “heavily informed by our conversations, our conspiring — trying to figure out how to get certain ideas of what Black music is out into the world.”Lewis recalled Bryan’s “unassuming brilliance,” a quality evident even at the admissions stage, in which “bombast” and “blowing your own horn” are the norm. Once she started, she altered the culture of the program, Lewis said. The school’s composition seminars had a reputation for treating people poorly: “you know, the idea that somehow sharpening one’s critique was confused with being mean to people.”One day, Lewis added, “Courtney stood up and said, ‘We just can’t continue to treat people this way.’ And everyone just looked at her; she hadn’t said very much, to this point. She’s a person who has that deep spiritual reservoir. And she changed a lot of people.”Their relationship continues today: Lewis leads the International Contemporary Ensemble, and he programmed Bryan at Merkin as part of “Composing While Black: Volume One” — which has ties to his latest book, a volume of critical essays that he edited with Harald Kisiedu.The inclusion of Bryan on this bill reflects Lewis’s appreciation for her direct approach to political commentary. “Courtney was one of the people who, early on, put Black Lives Matter on the classical music table,” he said. Yet, he added, in her works “there’s no one dogma. It’s not conventionally tonal; it’s not conventionally atonal. The orchestration is lush — but spare in some ways.”She brings eclectic references to bear in “DREAMING,” which incorporates text from a dissent by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and other legal opinions. To hear the gospel and jazz elements, Lewis said, “you have to go through the looking glass with her,” and the results are what he called “strange resonances.”“Courtney is able to make you feel reassured,” Lewis said, “but also to realize that you should be feeling unsettled about the state of the world.”In an archived La Jolla Symphony performance of “Yet Unheard,” a 2016 piece that incorporates poetry by Sharan Strange and commemorates the life of Sandra Bland (a Black woman who was found hanged in a Texas jail cell in 2015 after she was arrested during a traffic stop), you can hear Bryan’s talent for transfiguring trends in experimental orchestration, as well as gospel tradition. Similarly, a recently filmed performance of “Sanctum” (2015) by the London Sinfonietta illustrates the score’s braiding of influences including the sermons of Pastor Shirley Caesar, marching band percussion and the rhythmic exultations of street protests.Bryan’s religious side is likewise front and center in her Requiem, in which she sets Greek and Latin text from the Mass as well as selections, in English, from Ecclesiastes and Psalm 23. That work was performed on video during the lockdown portion of the pandemic by members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the treble-voice quartet Quince Ensemble.The mezzo-soprano Kayleigh Butcher, a member of Quince, said that Bryan’s use of extended technique — including whispering and chanting — was not “super intense or aggressive” compared with other contemporary music. But, she added, it was Bryan’s way of fusing those elements with more traditional chamber writing that was responsible for its distinctiveness: “Usually someone will only do an only-extended techniques piece. Or only a tonal, written-notes-on-a-page piece, and not combine them in interesting ways.”“Courtney is able to make you feel reassured,” George E. Lewis said, “but also to realize that you should be feeling unsettled about the state of the world.”Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesBryan’s recent piano concerto, “House of Pianos,” bustles with references to jazz-piano history, including boogie-woogie and Harlem stride. It also contains approaches to harmony that she learned in lessons from the towering New Orleans pedagogue Ellis Marsalis, and traces of music that she examined in a master’s degree program at Rutgers, where she studied with the jazz pianist Stanley Cowell. “New Orleans Concerto,” by her former teacher Roger Dickerson, also informs the work.“It’s my way to pay tribute to a lot of pianists who’ve inspired me — but also a challenge for me as a pianist and composer,” Bryan said of the concerto. For its premiere at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra last May, she performed the solo part.More of her pianistic prowess can be found on those early recordings. For Morrison, the musicologist, one exemplary moment comes during a rendition of “City Called Heaven,” from Bryan’s first album, “Quest for Freedom.”

      Quest for Freedom by Courtney Bryan“She takes this spiritual and she really transforms it,” he said, professing himself “obsessed” with its experimental rhythmic touches and its “Chopinesque” figurations. The first time he heard it, Morrison thought: “Oh my goodness, who does this so seamlessly? And it was Courtney.” More

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      Back-to-Back Premieres Defy a Season of Leaner Offerings

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      Institutions are cutting back, but in corners of the city there is still new music to be found, like song cycles by Ted Hearne and Paul Pinto.New York classical music institutions are in a period of economic challenges. This season, the Metropolitan Opera is dark more nights than in the past. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the historic Next Wave Festival is a shadow of its former self.Yet if you know where to look — at venues large and small — the city still has plenty to fill a calendar. Just on Thursday and Friday, for example, there were back-to-back premieres of ambitious song cycles by living composers.On Thursday, Paul Pinto’s “The Approach” — a multimedia, dramatic work written for the treble-voice quartet Quince Ensemble — was unveiled at Merkin Hall. And the next night, at Zankel Hall, Ted Hearne brought his “Dorothea,” built around poems by Dorothea Lasky, to New York for the first time.To my ear, Pinto’s music for Quince was the stunner of this pair. But after a slow start on Friday, Hearne’s cycle also flashed some of the refinement of his earlier works. He has been adept at using chamber music, rock and electronic instrumentation, and in the oratorio “The Source,” found poetry even in material from WikiLeaks. But the first half of “Dorothea” felt strangely static for a composer-performer of such successful eclecticism.This was due, in part, to an overreliance on the composer’s own singing voice, his tenor electronically altered. Past projects, like “Place” and “Outlanders,” have seen Hearne writing for multiple singers, not to mention multiple facets of himself. But the early portion of “Dorothea” was dominated by steady Auto-Tune style.The effect could be appropriately lovelorn, or weary, as guided by Lasky’s texts. But this digital sheen also eclipsed the contributions of the other artists onstage. Outside of a few choice moments, his fellow performers — like the electric guitarist Taylor Levine or the vocalist Eliza Bagg — could seem sidelined by the digital tweaking of Hearne’s voice.There was a breakthrough, however, with “Complainers,” the eighth of about a baker’s dozen songs, sung by Bagg. Hearne’s comparatively spare, effective setting showed off this vocalist’s luminous sound in Lasky’s sardonic poetry, beginning with the line “Some people don’t want to die/Because you can’t complain when you’re dead.”When Hearne returned as lead singer, in “Another World,” his vocals were less futzed-with, and for the better. He and the band channeled some of Depeche Mode’s booming goth glamour. From there, the balance of the evening did not merely suggest R&B grooves or rock energy from one moment to the next; instead, the songs claimed those textures more sturdily.Thursday’s performance, of the first three “episodes” of Pinto’s “The Approach,” was, at just over 40 minutes, about half as long as “Dorothea.” But it still felt like a full meal, and an inspired one.Conceived as an “episodic, magical-realist song cycle” that is also a “love story for and about the women of Quince,” Pinto’s narrative has a winking, fourth-wall-breaking quality. In his libretto, the Quince singers experience a meet-cute with a female sailor on the subway after a rehearsal. (The flirting commences with a stretch of mysterious, brazen blinking.)When not making use of Quince’s polyphonic skills, Pinto also gives each member of the quartet subjective space for solitary meditations similar to arias. His conceit carries traces of the comic-philosophic operas of Robert Ashley. The aesthetic tends toward the chatty, and is strewn with drone-style phrases. And Pinto comes by this influence honestly: As a vocalist, he has been a key part of recent revivals of Ashley’s stage works.But “The Approach” also displays Pinto’s own innovations. For one thing, his texts tend to move with blitzing speed. (The score specifies 220 words per minute at select frenetic junctures.) And although Ashley’s operas include stray pop-song interludes, Pinto pushes for more songfulness; in excerpts that Pinto has posted online, you can hear him reveling in the gleaming harmonic interplay made possible by Quince.

      The Approach Episode 2 lyric video from Paul Pinto on Vimeo.At Merkin Hall, “The Approach” was staged — modestly, yet stylishly. The Quince singers wore gowns that seemed to line up with the moody sobriquets of their respective characters. Kayleigh Butcher, a mezzo-soprano and Quince’s executive director, wore a dress of green and brown bordering on burnished-gold, a color pattern that seemed to fit her character’s designation as “The Sad One.” Lyric-quoting videos of Pinto’s design also helped the audience to keep track of the swift moving text.Quince’s sound, though, was appropriately the true star. And the group offered more in Thursday’s program: “her lover’s hand,” a satisfying, folk-inflected three-song suite from composer Annika Socolofsky. Pinto sang as well, preceding “The Approach” with “On Shaller Brown,” his arrangement of the much-adapted work song.

      He accompanied himself on piano, while singing with rich textural depth. At one point, video art on the screen behind him instructed audience members to imagine a big chorus joining him, before noting that such a large cohort was beyond this project’s budget.There was knowing laughter in the audience. Nothing, though, felt cheap about this ecstatic, richly rewarding show. Pinto’s music proved that tough times of leaner budgets don’t require reduced ambitions. More

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      Review: An Opera About Drones Brings a Pilot’s War Home

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      Jeanine Tesori and George Brant’s “Grounded,” which Washington National Opera premiered on Saturday, is headed to the Metropolitan Opera next year.The young mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo has a wide grin, haunted eyes and a mellow, confident voice that flashes with lean anxiety. In tone and presence, she’s driven, intense, wry. Onstage she’s unsentimental — and unsettled.She is, in other words, perfectly cast as a swaggering fighter pilot turned dissociating drone operator in “Grounded,” which Washington National Opera premiered on Saturday at the Kennedy Center.“Grounded,” which will open the Metropolitan Opera’s season next fall, originated as a one-woman play a decade ago, when the ethics of drone warfare were at the center of national attention. Written by George Brant, the play traveled widely, and had an Off Broadway run featuring Anne Hathaway, who at one point was planning to star in a film adaptation.But opera swept in first. The Tony Award-winning composer Jeanine Tesori, known for intelligently audience-pleasing musicals like “Fun Home” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” took on the project through the Met’s commissioning program.Tesori and Brant expanded the piece, giving the anonymous pilot a name (Jess) and giving voice to other characters, including Jess’s beleaguered husband and the cacophonous “kill chain” of commanders she hears over her headset. Washington National Opera was eventually brought on as a kind of out-of-town tryout for Michael Mayer’s production.This led to some unwelcome news coverage earlier this year, when Washington announced its season — sponsored by the military contractor General Dynamics, a longtime company donor. The headlines wrote themselves: A drone maker was paying for a “killer drone opera.”The production, directed by Michael Mayer, with set design by Mimi Lien, is dominated by LED screens.Scott SuchmanThe company put out a statement insisting that benefactors had no role in the work’s creation. But it was still a little surprising to hear Timothy O’Leary, the general director in Washington, thank General Dynamics, alongside other major givers, from the stage at the Kennedy Center before the performance on Saturday.The opera begins in Iraq, where Jess is doing her best “Top Gun” impression as a hotshot F-16 pilot. (The F-16 was developed by General Dynamics.) The quietly ominous rumble at the start of Tesori’s score gives way to a chorus of fliers whose stentorian march morphs into a neo-Baroque fugue.The Middle East is suggested by rustling rainsticks, part of a big, varied percussion section, and some modal harmonies; Jess’s voice soars as she sings of “the solitude, the freedom, the peace” she finds in the sky. Tesori’s lyrical ease and eclecticism, the fluidity with which she blends, blurs and moves between styles, are impressively on display, guided with a sure hand by the conductor Daniela Candillari.On leave with her squadron in Wyoming — the pretext for some whispers of swaying cowboy hoedown music — Jess falls in love with a rancher, Eric, and gets pregnant. (The brief duet when she returns to let him know, her profane apologies melting into shared happiness, is perhaps the most charmingly natural moment in the piece.)Her pregnancy, and the birth of their daughter, takes her out of her beloved cockpit. When she wants to return to the skies, she is instead assigned to drone duty — appropriately enough in Las Vegas, the capital of American not-quite-reality.However demeaning for a onetime star pilot, the job will let Jess go home at night, and she is promised by her commander that “the threat of death has been removed” — a mantra taken up by Washington National Opera’s excellent chorus with grim fervor. The Trainer (Frederick Ballentine, his tenor frighteningly shining) describes the Reaper drone’s capabilities and exorbitant cost in a worshipful call-and-response, religious-style chant.Tesori smartly conjures the uncertainty with which Jess begins to learn her new task, with an orchestral landscape of eerie, jittery spareness. Missile explosions happen with uncanny, anesthetized sweetness, a soft choral “boom.”The assurances that this will be “war with all the benefits of home” go awry, of course, as Jess’s professional and domestic lives begin to collapse together. On a trip to the mall with her daughter, she grows paranoid that they’re being surveilled by cameras, just as her Reaper spies on its targets. A double, Also Jess (the forbiddingly pure-voiced soprano Teresa Perrotta), emerges for duets of slippery dissonance as the tension ratchets up.Ratchets up, but not enough. The impact of “Grounded” is surprisingly unexplosive. This may be because Tesori is at heart a composer of normality — even (or especially) when abnormal things are happening, like the accelerated-aging disease at the center of “Kimberly Akimbo.”D’Angelo as Jess, the fighter pilot turned drone operator.Scott SuchmanHer 2003 masterpiece, “Caroline, or Change,” was a perfect marriage of her music with a text, by Tony Kushner, that steadily maintained its reserve amid heartbreak. Her previous opera, “Blue” (2019), about police violence, emanated a sad, wounded dignity. Tesori is at her best mining emotion from this dignified reserve — from the everyday.But “Grounded” is more surreal — and eventually psychotic — material, and Tesori and Brant don’t pursue Jess’s dissolving mental state with the relentlessness, economy or extremity of, say, Berg’s “Wozzeck.” While it’s understandable that the Met would want a single-actor play expanded into something more traditionally grand, the bagginess is palpable in the transition from an 80-minute monologue to a two-and-a-half-hour opera.Eric, for one thing, remains a cipher. His arias feel more like the result of post-workshop notes — “flesh out Jess’s husband” — than emotional imperative or importance to the plot. While the tenor Joseph Dennis is affable in the role, his chemistry with D’Angelo is nil. Besides the messianic Trainer, the stylized characters of the drone operation — the Commander; Jess’s teenage partner, the Sensor; and the “kill chain,” amplified over loudspeakers from offstage — are insufficiently vivid.And while Jess’s ambivalence and troubles are clearly depicted, the storytelling, especially in the second act, is too busy to build the necessary claustrophobia, despite D’Angelo’s talent and earnest commitment. “Grounded” should come as a sobering shock, with the laser-guided horror of a Tomahawk, but for all the touches of churning darkness in the music, it’s oddly gentle.In Mayer’s swiftly shifting if not quite elegant staging, much of Mimi Lien’s set is dominated by LED screens. The projections have been designed by Kaitlyn Pietras and Jason H. Thompson, who did similar work on the triptych “Proximity,” which premiered earlier this year at Lyric Opera of Chicago.On the screens, in impressive high definition, we see blue skies rushing past, nighttime mountains, a sonogram, the grayish desert landscape observed from above by the Reaper drone’s pitiless eye. And we see the Reaper stretched across the stage, as rivetingly chilly as an empire vessel in “Star Wars.” On our first encounter with it, there’s even a shiver of sinister John Williams in Tesori’s score.Yet it is a little pat to describe “Grounded” — as Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, did in an interview in May with The New York Times — as an “antiwar opera.” It is not exactly that, even if it culminates (spoiler alert) in Jess intentionally crashing the $17 million Reaper because she hallucinates that her target’s daughter is her own.The opera implies that old-fashioned fighter piloting is nobler, and better for soldiers’ mental health, than the video-game-style drone deployment that has expanded the battlefield to encompass, potentially, all of us. Darkly, given the state of global affairs lately, the piece seems to say that war is OK; there are just better and worse — more and less authentic — ways of waging it.GroundedThrough Nov. 13 at the Kennedy Center; kennedy-center.org. More

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      How California Became America’s Contemporary Music Capital

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      On the eve of a sprawling new festival, John Adams, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Gustavo Dudamel and others recount how the state reinvigorated classical music.Nobody will be able to take in the entire California Festival, a statewide series of classical music events spanning 650 miles with such density that some nights will have 10 or more performances happening at once.The festival, Nov. 3 -19, was conceived by the music directors of the state’s three largest orchestras: Esa-Pekka Salonen of the San Francisco Symphony, Gustavo Dudamel of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Rafael Payare of the San Diego Symphony. But it grew to contain nearly 100 partnering organizations, who are presenting a host of world premieres and programs of contemporary music under the festival’s banner.It’s an overdue pat on the back for a state that has long encouraged new music, providing freedom and a sense of possibility that has made it the center of gravity for composers who work with a spirit of innovation, a long list that includes Harry Partch, Lou Harrison and Pauline Oliveros in the past, and Terry Riley and John Adams today.Much has centered around distinct communities in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas. “Those of us who make music in San Francisco,” wrote Michael Tilson Thomas, who led the city’s orchestra’s for 25 years, “are blessed with an audience that comes to the concert hall more to discover the world than to escape it.” That was one reason he championed what he called American mavericks.Further south, Los Angeles became a microcosm of the California spirit, with sky-high ambition and musical curiosity that was cultivated by power players like the commission-happy philanthropist Betty Freeman and the strong-willed Philharmonic leader Ernest Fleischmann. And Dudamel brought pop-star power to the orchestra before, in a jolt to the city, he announced this year that he would leave for the New York Philharmonic in 2026.Ara Guzelimian, who grew up in Los Angeles and now leads the Ojai Music Festival nearby, described California’s classical music culture as “the lingering positive presence of the pioneers heading West and looking to escape a kind of conformity” before adding: “That’s sort of romanticized, but I think the reality is that a lot of good work has been done by individuals and institutions to develop that.”Here are edited interviews with some of those people, who shared their ideas about the diffuse histories and beliefs that brought about the California Festival.Far From EuropeMATTHEW SPIVEY (chief executive of the San Francisco Symphony) This goes back to the émigré composers, what Stravinsky and Schoenberg were doing in Los Angeles. You have this European tradition that felt like it was being evolved into a new, American version.ARA GUZELIMIAN The East Coast has historically been weighed down by facing the Atlantic and Europe. But here, there hasn’t been the same glare of the spotlight of everything having this kind of weight of being on the record. So, there’s just been a lot more freedom to experiment and move away from any sense of orthodoxy.JOHN ADAMS (composer who lives in Berkeley) When I arrived, there was a far out community mostly centered around Mills College [in Oakland]. Robert Ashley was the guru. There was a lingering scene of academia composers, sort of the last echoes of the Schoenberg-Sessions influence. But at the same time, there was this very romantic myth about San Francisco, and when I got there, I felt it was very open and gave me the freedom to experiment, which I just didn’t feel in the East.From left, Rafael Payare, Gustavo Dudamel and Michael Tilson Thomas.A Hungry AudienceMARTHA GILMER (chief executive of the San Diego Symphony) People are always looking for the next and the new, so it is a canvas in which to create.JEREMY GEFFEN (executive and artistic director of Cal Performances) This is an enormous state. There’s a whole part of life outside the metropolitan areas, which is what attracted Lou Harrison and others. And there are smaller orchestras that are just as adventurous, because that is the standard.GUZELIMIAN As a teenager, I saw Julius Eastman not in some isolated, alternative venue, but with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta. I saw Stravinsky at a concert of “Les Noces.” I saw Lawrence Morton’s Monday Evening Concerts. And I saw Xenakis because that was a completely normal thing to do. Here’s the great secret of arts management: Organizations create their own audience expectations. You can’t blame a so-called conservative audience.Why CaliforniaGUZELIMIAN I’ve rarely experienced the arts here as having a critical mass as they do in New York City, in which randomly on a subway or walking down the sidewalk you overhear people talking about an opera they’ve seen, or a play, or whatever show at MoMA that’s “unmissable.” That has incredible virtues, but in a funny way it can create a constraint. Whereas on the West Coast, it’s not as pervasive, not as self-conscious. So, there’s room for an imaginative venture to kind of make a go of it. Now, L.A. is bursting with new music groups and series, and to me the height of that spirit in New York is more historical. It doesn’t feel that its bursting at the seams.ADAMS I was really struggling, because back East [he grew up and was educated in New England] there was enormous prestige granted to the sort of Elliott Carter brand of composition back in the ’70s, and I had absolutely no interest in it. But the composers I knew of in California gave me more of a sense of freedom and permission to experiment.ESA-PEKKA SALONEN Many composers came here to find themselves, to find their language. And, as opposed to the East Coast and Europe, there has never been a sense of mainstream modernism, of what new music should be.The Bay AreaDEBORAH BORDA (longtime chief executive of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who worked earlier with the San Francisco Symphony) I got to the San Francisco Symphony when I was 27 [in the mid-1970s], and there was almost no contemporary music. But then came Edo de Waart, and he was really a devotee of new music. We brought John Adams, who was doing New and Unusual Music concerts, we brought in Diamanda Galás, you name it. We did a lot of Louis Andriessen music, like “De Staat.” Sometimes the audiences would boo and hiss his music, but he would come out and laugh in his ripped jeans.ADAMS There was a lot of talk about a West Coast aesthetic, and I suppose that included composers like Daniel Lentz and Terry Riley, and for sure Lou Harrison. I made my own synthesizer, which was a really West Coast thing at the time, and I think the person that did most creatively was Ingram Marshall. He made this amazing amalgam of Balinese influences and these wonderful rich drones and himself singing at what we called performance sites, which were usually just someone’s garage; we didn’t have the term “pop-up.”PAMELA Z (composer and performer) I moved to San Francisco in 1984, and I distinctly remember being excited by the broad range of new music and performance scenes. There were all these different factions: the improvisers, the instrument-builders, the avant-garde contemporary music, people who were doing performance art and people who were doing live performance with electronics, like Diamanda Galás. I was interested in all those different scenes, and I wanted them to be in the same room with each other. I started doing these events called Z Programs, that were almost like an avant-garde variety show. And when Michael Tilson Thomas was at the San Francisco Symphony, he was always interested in opening up things more. So there were connective tissues across the city.From left, Claire Chase, the Rady Shell in San Diego and the composer John Adams.San DiegoCLAIRE CHASE (flutist) I grew up in north San Diego County, and went to public schools where there was no music program. A lot of my musical education happened instead at the San Diego Youth Symphony, which is, I think, a really important cultural organization. It has this storied and really progressive history. California is this maze of contradictions. It has this D.I.Y. fervor — and I don’t mean in the corporate, Silicon Valley co-opting of that word — that gave birth to and sustains every artistic organization: Asian Improv Arts, the Tape Music Center and Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley’s “In C” being a totally D.I.Y. concert.I have these beautiful memories of Pauline barefoot with her accordion embodying this you-can-be-whatever-you-want-to-be feeling that’s so typically Californian and beautiful and true. She was this queer iconoclast doing her thing but also community building.GILMER When I was going to move out here, someone told me, “Whatever you can dream, it’s possible.” I really think that’s true. I don’t know where else I could have opened the Rady Shell [an open-air stage on the San Diego Bay] and started a hall renovation within five years.RAFAEL PAYARE And anyone can see us at the Shell because it’s outside in the park. We are rehearsing, and there’s someone walking their dog.Building in Los AngelesSALONEN When I did my debut with the L.A. Philharmonic [in 1984], I’d never been to this country. They put me up in the Biltmore, which in those days had a suite with a grand piano. I tried to go for a walk, and the doorman said, “Shall I call you cab?” I said I’d just stroll around a bit, and he said, “I don’t recommend that.” Anyway, there was an older cellist who came up to me after the second rehearsal and said, “Welcome to your new home.” I started coming back every season, and when André Previn stepped down, there was this letter from the board that modestly said they would like to develop the L.A. Phil into the world’s best orchestra, would I like to be a part of that process?One morning much later, when I was living in Santa Monica, I got up really early, and my kids were still asleep. I sat in the kitchen, made myself a coffee and thought, What is this weird feeling? And I realized: I’m happy. I feel free, not straight-jacketed by some kind of European, dusty modernist discourse.BORDA There was a real community around music in Los Angeles. In the audience you’d see composers. You’d see Annie Philbin, who runs the Hammer Museum. You’d see politicians.SALONEN Somebody who has to be mentioned in all this is Betty Freeman [who died in 2009 and was an influential donor behind the Los Angeles music scene]. She was quite spiky. She would call me and say: “I heard your new chamber piece. Utter rubbish. Would you like to come over for dinner?” But she did commission quite a lot of stuff, and was behind the scenes supporting composers when they fell on hard times.THOMAS ADÈS (composer) Betty picked me up from LAX my first time in L.A. She sped out to wow me with Los Angeles in those first hours. We were on our way to visit David Hockney, and we were driving past the Hollywood Bowl when I saw a sign that said, “Thomas Adès, Piano.” Then I stayed with her, and not only did she have these [Joseph] Cornell boxes that she got directly from Cornell, but I also knew that this was the house where she had salons with Nancarrow, or Stockhausen and Boulez. So, in a way, I had this impression of Los Angeles as avant-gardist more than any of the reasons other people go to live there.She had very strong taste. She used to put Post-it notes on everything; one on a CD said “BORING” and another said “I DON’T LIKE THIS.” She was bracing, but could get away with it because she was also so sweet. I came back, year after year, and bought a house there, and I would trace it all back to her.FRANK GEHRY (architect) Betty didn’t want me to do Walt Disney Concert Hall, but she did invite me to her house for dinner. The person who got me involved with that project was Ernest Fleischmann [who ran the Philharmonic from 1969-1998]. He asked me to do the competition, and of course I was excited to do it. There was a lot of anti-Frank sentiment, because I worked with plywood, chain link and corrugated metal. But we proved them all wrong.SALONEN (who inaugurated Disney Hall in 2003) The timing was a bit problematic, because the L.A. riots happened in ’92, and in the aftermath the idea of building a sensational concert hall in Downtown L.A. didn’t feel like a huge priority. But the hall changed everything. Now, if you ask people about any kind of visual idea of L.A., it’s the hall. Any action scene in L.A. in a movie, at least one car chase goes by the hall.And for me, I started to understand how much nonverbal messaging there is in a building. It was open from the street level, so it was warm and inviting, and it was complex but not incomprehensible. And there’s this kind of amazing feeling of unity; the geometry is such that everybody inside the hall sees a bunch of other people at all times. It also sounds pretty good. For me, it’s still the reference for balance and sound, and it will be so until the end of my days.From left, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Pamela Z and Walt Disney Concert Hall on its opening night.Los Angeles TodayBORDA We started the Green Umbrella [free-form contemporary music concerts], and had Steven Stucky and John Adams as partners for contemporary music. Steve and Esa-Pekka were extraordinarily close; they spent hours eating together, and drinking together, and talking about music and life. It was very difficult for Esa-Pekka when Steve passed on [in 2016]. Now you have Wild Up and other small groups. And you have what Yuval Sharon has done with opera. The Green Umbrella concerts are still going. There’s an appetite for all this.YUVAL SHARON (founder of the Industry opera company in Los Angeles) What drew me to L.A. was the possibility of smaller, more nimble, freer, more entrepreneurial endeavors to move with some fluidity in and among the community. When I think of L.A., I think of this John Cage book, “Silence,” in which he talks about having an interaction with a European composer who was deriding him: “How could you write so much serious music away from the center?” And Cage [who came of age in Southern California] says, “How can you write such serious music so close to the center?” That was in the 1950s, but I think there’s an element of that ethos that’s still there today.GUSTAVO DUDAMEL (who succeeded Salonen at the Philharmonic in 2009) I was a huge admirer of this orchestra and of Esa-Pekka. Los Angeles is about new things. It’s a place that every day is getting built. It’s very open all the time to new things, and I’ve loved having a relationship with John Adams, who brings these very young composers to be part of the programming of this orchestra.ADAMS Well, I think Los Angeles is teeming with composers. I wish there was that level of creativity and activity in the Bay Area.And in San FranciscoSPIVEY Knowing that Michael Tilson Thomas was going to be stepping down after 25 years at the helm, and all that he had accomplished, there was a sense that those were going to be some difficult shoes to fill. We wanted someone who was not only a great conductor, but also a great orchestra builder. And Esa-Pekka is one of those people.SALONEN Honestly, the optics of a major U.S. orchestra hiring a 60-year-old Finnish guy who’s been around the block a few times, I thought: That in itself is not sensational news. But we talked about bringing in collaborative partners [eight artists who include Chase, the composer Nico Muhly, the computer scientist Carol Reiley and more], who would energize the thinking of the orchestra.ADAMS There are still some wonderful composers from the Bay Area. So when Esa-Pekka came, and the symphony appointed their collaborative artists, and they were pretty much from New York or Europe — flying in and flying out — that was really an insult to California culture.SPIVEY Whether it’s successful or not, we’ll learn from what happens.A New FestivalPAYARE California has, all the time, been nurturing the music of the future. But everyone has been doing it on their own, which is why it was good to do the California Festival.SALONEN We are collectively proud of what has happened in California and what has kept happening, and the California Festival is a manifestation of that. And of how much there is. It’s interesting that there’s no real school. You could say that this is the birthplace of minimalism. I was talking with Terry Riley on Zoom, and I asked him if “In C” was a reaction against East Coast, European modernism. He said: “No, not really. It was more about psychedelic drugs.” I thought, Oh, he kind of nailed it, that lack of pretension here.Always ChangingGEFFEN Something that I worry about is that this state has become so expensive. We’ve already seen this in the Bay Area, that the freelance scene is not full because we’ve lost so many people to the cost of living.BORDA I think the most powerful force for good and innovation is Esa-Pekka. That gives me hope for the north. And for the south, I think what’s embedded there already won’t go away; the history of Los Angeles is reflected in that integration of different art forms and excitement at the new.ADÈS More than in London or New York, I still have a feeling that in California I’m just left to get on with things. A lot of that world of Ernest and Betty have moved on, but it’s evolved into something else. I don’t know if I’m a part of it or not, but whatever attracted me in the first place is still there, that expansion of my molecules that I instantly felt.SHARON This is a moment of real — if we want to put it euphemistically — transition. It’s not just California. Listening to my colleagues on a national level, I think that we have to redefine classical music’s role for contemporary society, and there are a lot of growing pains associated with that. Everyone has seen attendance down, and donations down, across the board. I do think that the ethos of Los Angeles will make things easier to adapt than elsewhere. The L.A. Phil is going through tremendous change in leadership. This is the moment for that attitude and perspective, the time for that push forward to show the way. It’s an opportunity for California to lead, but it’s not going to be easy. More

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      Review: An Unexpectedly Relevant Oratorio at the Philharmonic

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      Planned over a year ago, Handel’s “Israel in Egypt” was presented while the Israel-Hamas war unfolds in the Middle East.Handel is not a composer typically associated with controversy, but the New York Philharmonic found itself entering a difficult public discourse with its performances of the oratorio “Israel in Egypt” this week at David Geffen Hall.As thousands have died in the Israel-Hamas war, and as the conflict has inflamed tensions around the world, Cambridge University’s opera society has canceled a performance of Handel’s “Saul,” which depicts the Israelite David’s victory over the Philistine Goliath. That is the oratorio Handel wrote before “Israel in Egypt,” about a powerless people fleeing the subjugation of an oppressive state.“Israel in Egypt” is less dramatic than “Saul,” and for its concerts, the Philharmonic opted for a program note. In it, the organization’s leadership clarified that this week’s performances were planned more than a year ago and added, “What we could not have anticipated is recent world events, making the timing of this program particularly relevant.”The oratorio’s tale could have been a source of empathy and catharsis for audiences, but that’s not exactly the piece Handel wrote. For those familiar with “Messiah,” Handel’s other English-language oratorio that lifts its text from Scripture, “Israel in Egypt” is an oddity. Written almost entirely for choral forces, with few showpieces for the soloists, it narrates the Jewish exodus that Moses led from Egypt. To modern ears, the text painting of the 10 plagues is so lightweight that it verges on silliness: The orchestra leaps to depict frogs, buzzes for flies and thumps for hailstones.Still, the melancholy-saturated lamentation that opens the piece, and the triumphant choruses that close it, adds substance. And on Wednesday, the conductor and Baroque specialist Jeannette Sorrell led a sonorous performance, drawing captivating singing from the choristers of Apollo’s Fire and intermittently inspiring the Philharmonic’s players to embrace fleeter, Handelian style on their modern instruments.The Apollo’s Fire chorus, a gem of an ensemble, anchored the evening with a beguiling sound. In the big, unified moments, the voice parts stacked atop one another in pellucid columns. Tricky double choruses and fugues had a lucent, weightless, nimble quality.Sorrell’s brisk adaptation trims the score to roughly 80 minutes, which offset the orchestra’s occasionally slackened energy. She wisely reinstated the intensely emotional, sometimes cut lamentation (a decision she also made on a recently released recording with Apollo’s Fire). With a theatrical flourish, she cut short the Exodus section so that it concluded with a thrilling depiction of Pharaoh’s army drowning in the Red Sea.Among the vocal soloists, Amanda Forsythe demonstrated a limpid soprano in “Thou didst blow,” and Edward Vogel showed a rather appealing, midweight baritone in his insertion aria, “To God our strength” (aided by Christopher Martin’s dignified trumpet solo). The tenor Jacob Perry and the soprano Sonya Headlam filled their music with character, and the countertenor Cody Bowers sang with a beautifully shaped tone and enthusiasm to spare.Handel devoted much of the final section, “Moses’ Song,” to a triumphant account of the Red Sea’s parting. In “The depths have covered them,” the strings were as broad and far-reaching as the water’s surface. In the score and the story it recounts, the moment is a deus ex machina. Today, though, we do not live in a time of miracles.New York PhilharmonicPerformed on Wednesday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: Years Late, a Young Pianist Finally Gets to Carnegie

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      Alexandre Kantorow made his Carnegie Hall recital debut after winning both the International Tchaikovsky Competition and the Gilmore Artist Award.The French pianist Alexandre Kantorow was supposed to make his Carnegie Hall recital debut on March 25, 2020, as a late replacement for the ailing Murray Perahia. We know what happened with that.When Kantorow, 26, finally made it to Carnegie on Sunday afternoon, it was again as a substitute for an eminent colleague, this time Maurizio Pollini. The symbolism of the rise of a new generation of performers was hard for me to miss, especially since after Kantorow’s recital, I walked to Alice Tully Hall to witness the Emerson String Quartet’s exquisite retirement concert.This wasn’t Kantorow’s first time playing at Carnegie; he performed two pieces at Zankel Hall in 2019, as one of the winners of that year’s International Tchaikovsky Competition. But Sunday’s very fine recital, on the hall’s main stage, was a wholly different kind of platform.And he arrived with expectations ratcheted up even higher than if he had merely (ha) won the Tchaikovsky. Last month, he received the elusive, prestigious $300,000 Gilmore Artist Award, given to a pianist every four years after a secretive selection process akin to the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grants; Kantorow didn’t know he’d been under consideration until he found out he had won.The stereotype is that competitions mint quick-fingered but mindless virtuosos, while the Gilmore rewards more mature, idiosyncratic artists. To win both the Tchaikovsky and the Gilmore suggests Kantorow has technical security as well as something to say.That felt true on Sunday. A quick glance at the lineup made this seem a potentially tired program: Brahms, Bach, Liszt, Schubert. But Kantorow chose Brahms’s Sonata No. 1, an unwieldy thicket of notes that is hardly a recital chestnut.And the Bach was Brahms’s austerely grand transcription for left hand of the great Violin Chaconne in D Minor, rather than the more popular, gaudier Busoni transcription for both hands. The Liszt was a set of his renderings of Schubert songs, none omnipresent and one never before played at Carnegie. Only Schubert’s “Wanderer Fantasy” could be called a true standard.As in his recordings of the other two Brahms piano sonatas, Kantorow approached this one with a poetically heavy use of rubato, the expressive stretching and pressing of tempo from moment to moment.It was often beautiful; in the first movement, the section before the recapitulation of the theme gave the sense of emerging from fire into quiet, snowy night. And — or, depending on your preferences, but — it conveyed atmosphere better than structure.Kantorow brought a peppery spirit to the Scherzo that turned it into something of a danse macabre. Both this and the fourth movement were exceptionally, even a little drainingly fast — more Presto than Allegro — but never muddied.His account of Brahms’s Bach was rigorous yet rich, with well-judged ebbs and flows of intensity and amplitude. Of the five Liszt-Schubert transcriptions, most interesting was the one new to Carnegie: “Die Stadt,” a collision of the song’s moodiness with Lisztian extroversion, sprays of notes drizzling out of the gloom.It attests to Kantorow’s subtlety and focus that there was no applause between these pieces and the “Wanderer Fantasy,” which felt as if it had emerged from Schubert’s songs — the opening more modest and lyrical than the usual bombast. This was assured, eloquent playing, the lines clear and balanced in each hand even in the chaos near the end of the piece.There is intriguing tension between Kantorow’s lucid, pearly touch and the Romantic wildness of his music-making. The two sides were in memorable balance in his encores: transcriptions of “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix,” from Saint-Saëns’s “Samson et Dalila,” and the finale of Stravinsky’s “Firebird.” They brought together suavity and showmanship.Alexandre KantorowPerformed on Sunday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: The Great Emerson String Quartet Takes Its Final Bow

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      A pillar of chamber music for nearly a half-century, the Emerson players bid farewell with Beethoven’s Opus 130 and Schubert’s String Quintet.Farewell to the Emerson String Quartet, a group that has beaten at the heart of chamber music in the United States, and far beyond, for almost half a century.More than two years after the essential string quartet of its era announced that it had decided to retire, its players took their final bows on Sunday before an Alice Tully Hall audience that paid them the best tribute any musician can hope to receive: listening, and listening well.The time was right, and the place was, too. It was on a Sunday in 1981 that the Emerson made its breakthrough on that very stage, playing all six Bartok quartets in a single, three-and-a-half-hour-plus sitting. The host of Sunday’s concert, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, is the institution for which the Emerson served as quartet in residence from 1982 to 1989, and for which its cellist David Finckel left the ensemble in 2013 to co-direct.Finckel’s departure permitted his successor, Paul Watkins, to spend a decade with the violinists Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer to his right, and Lawrence Dutton, the violist, to his left. Even at the end, as Finckel rejoined the group for one last performance of the Schubert String Quintet, Watkins looked as if he could barely believe his luck.Who would feel any differently? For if Sunday’s concert was a reminder of anything, it was that the Emerson String Quartet was never just a string quartet. It was an establishment, a touchstone, a catalyst. Entire generations of listeners grew up with its recordings, or made one of the hundred and more concerts it undertook each year, with famous collegiality, a habitual date in their diaries. As early as 1984, George Tsontakis had composed it a piece called “Emerson,” as if it already owned the genre; Sarah Kirkland Snider, the last living composer whose music it played, has written that, to her, the Emerson catalog had appeared to be “the definitive interpretation of all the great string quartets in history.”From left, Drucker, Setzer, Watkins and Dutton in the concert’s first half.Da Ping LuoWas the Emerson the Emerson to the end? Close enough. “We were afraid of going on too long,” Setzer said recently, and Sunday suggested that he, Drucker and Dutton have stopped at the timeliest of moments, without cause for regret. Watkins, a soloist and a conductor before he took his chance, still has half his career ahead of him. There were speeches on Sunday, quiet notes of pathos, even a joke or two, but nothing really to get in the way of the music, which is as it should be. The Schubert received a heartfelt performance of inimitable focus, and before it came Beethoven’s Opus 130, with the “Grosse Fuge” duly included as its finale. It was exactly the valediction that one would have hoped for.It was also touching. Nobody could pretend that Sunday saw the Emerson reclaim the heights from which it conquered chamber music, though it was hardly far-off. If its most celebrated predecessors, the Juilliard after World War II and the Guarneri later on, were responsible for a boom in American quartet playing, then it was the Emerson’s part to demonstrate how accomplished a quartet could become. Surely it was not a coincidence that Setzer, who once told The New York Times that “when things aren’t together in the quartet, it sets off a real alarm,” was the son of two violinists in George Szell’s Cleveland Orchestra, and taught by two of its concertmasters.It did not take the Emerson long to set the formidable technical standards that we take for granted among chamber musicians today. “After five minutes of playing,” the critic Bernard Holland wrote of that Bartok concert in 1981, “one began to assume perfection. There were no disappointments.” There are none to be heard, either, in the Emerson’s recorded legacy, which, with all its vitality and its security, Deutsche Grammophon ensured defined the sound of a quartet in the digital age. Hearing them now is to be confronted with persistent excellence, an enduring commitment to quality that any musician would be proud of.If there was ever a justified criticism of the Emerson, it was that its playing was too responsible, too objective, too bland. That was not the case at its passing. Rarely can this ensemble have shaped Schubert’s melodies with such humanity and poignancy, or given such a raw, intense account of the Beethoven fugue. The Cavatina, the delicate emotional core of the Opus 130, will resound in the memory as little short of heartbreaking, and for all the right reasons: As its song faltered on the first violin, it seemed to be embraced, as if the other instruments were helping it through.Farewell, then, to the Emerson. But not to what made it great.Emerson String QuartetPerformed on Sunday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Philadelphia Orchestra and Musicians Reach Contract Deal

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      The agreement, which includes salary increases of nearly 16 percent over three years, ends months of tense negotiations.After months of wrangling at the negotiating table, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the union representing its musicians have reached a deal for a new contract.The three-year contract, which the members of the American Federation of Musicians, Local 77, ratified on Saturday, includes salary raises of nearly 16 percent over three years, a central demand of the musicians, who had argued that they were underpaid compared with other leading ensembles.The musicians’ union praised the agreement, which it said also included pay raises for substitutes as well as a requirement that the orchestra increase the number of musicians it hires each year to fill vacancies. The base salary for musicians in the orchestra in the 2022-23 season was $152,256, including compensation for recordings.“We are an ensemble, and we stuck together and refused to accept substandard deal after substandard deal,” David Fay, a double bass player since 1984 and a union leader, said in a statement. “This contract is a victory for the present and future for the Philadelphia Orchestra and its world-class musicians.”The contract was the first that the orchestra has negotiated since the coronavirus pandemic, which put financial strains on the ensemble, forcing the cancellation of more than 200 concerts and resulting in the loss of about $26 million in ticket sales and performance fees.“Our joint challenge was to find a new and financially responsible path forward that recognizes and furthers the placement of the Philadelphia Orchestra as one of the world’s greatest musical ensembles,” said Ralph W. Muller and Michael D. Zisman, who lead the board of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Kimmel Center Inc., a joint entity that oversees the orchestra.The dispute grew heated over the past several months as orchestra members rejected several proposals from management. A vote in August to authorize a strike, if needed, won the support of 95 percent of those participating. Concerts proceeded as usual and talks continued through the expiration of the old contract in early September.The orchestra has gone through other painful periods in recent decades. It declared bankruptcy in 2011 after the financial crisis but has since balanced its budget and worked to rebuild. Despite expense cuts and bankruptcy, that has not been easy: In 2016, the musicians held a brief strike that began on the night of the orchestra’s season-opening gala. More