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      New York City Ballet and Its Orchestra Reach Contract Deal

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      The agreement, which includes an increase in compensation of about 22 percent over three years, ends months of tense negotiations.After months of wrangling, New York City Ballet and the union representing its musicians announced on Tuesday they had reached a deal for a new contract.The three-year contract, which is expected to be ratified by members of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, includes an increase in compensation of about 22 percent over three years, a central demand of the musicians, who had argued that they were underpaid because of salary cuts made during the pandemic.City Ballet and the musicians’ union praised the agreement, which came just after the company began its holiday run of “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker,” typically the most lucrative production of the season.“The marriage of music and dance is a hallmark of N.Y.C.B.,” the company and the orchestra said in a joint statement. “We are thrilled that this agreement has been finalized and we look forward to a successful season featuring our wonderful musicians and dancers who are among the greatest performers in the world.”The contract was the first that City Ballet and the orchestra have negotiated since the coronavirus pandemic, which forced the cancellation of hundreds of performances and the loss of about $55 million in ticket sales. City Ballet, like other cultural institutions, reduced the salaries of dancers and musicians as it worked to weather the crisis.Under the deal, the company will restore a salary cut of about 9 percent made during the pandemic, as well as offer a raise of 13 percent over three years.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      An Oratorio About Shanghai’s Jews Opens in China at a Difficult Time

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      “Émigré,” about Jews who fled Nazi Germany, debuts amid U.S.-China tensions and cultural rifts over the Israel-Hamas war. It comes to New York in February.“Émigré,” a new oratorio about Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany for Shanghai in the late 1930s, begins with a song by two brothers, Josef and Otto, as their steamship approaches a Chinese harbor.“Shanghai, beacon of light on a silent shore,” they sing. “Shanghai, answer these desperate cries.”The emigration of thousands of Central European and Eastern European Jews to China in the late 1930s and early 1940s — and their survival of the Holocaust — is one of World War II’s most dramatic but little-known chapters.In “Émigré,” a 90-minute oratorio that premiered this month in Shanghai and will come to the New York Philharmonic in February 2024, the stories of these refugees and their attempts to build new lives in war-torn China are front and center.Musicians of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra warming up before a dress rehearsal of “Émigré.” The oratorio will be performed by the New York Philharmonic in February.Qilai Shen for The New York TimesThe piece, composed by Aaron Zigman, with lyrics by Mark Campbell and Brock Walsh, has been in the works for several years, a commission of the Philharmonic, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and its music director, Long Yu. But it is opening at a delicate time, with tensions high between China and the United States and with the Israel-Hamas war spurring heated debates in the cultural sphere.The war in the Middle East is a sensitive subject in China, which has sought to pitch itself as a neutral broker in the conflict, though state-controlled media has emphasized the harm suffered by civilians in Gaza while giving scant coverage to Hamas’s initial attack. Israel has expressed “deep disappointment” at China’s muted response to the Hamas attack. Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, on Tuesday called for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza and for “the restoration of the legitimate national rights of Palestine.”In recent weeks, promotional materials in China for “Émigré” have rarely mentioned its plot, and listed its Chinese title, “Shanghai! Shanghai!” The major state-owned Chinese news outlets did not cover the premiere this month, although an English-language television channel for foreign audiences did.The creators of “Émigré,” which takes place during the Second Sino-Japanese War, said they hoped the piece would help underscore a shared sense of humanity in a time of renewed strife. “I don’t think music and politics really belong in the same sentence,” Zigman said. “I just want people to be human and kind, and there are certain parts of this piece that help that vision.”Brock Walsh, who wrote the lyrics to “Emigré,” with Mark Campbell.Qilai Shen for The New York TimesThe composer Aaron Zigman said, “Our project is really about bridging cultures and humanity and love, hope, loss and tragedy.”Qilai Shen for The New York TimesIn 2019, Yu, worried that the stories of Jewish refugees in his hometown were being forgotten, came up with the idea for the piece. He approached the New York Philharmonic, which has had a partnership with the Shanghai Symphony since 2014, about commissioning the work together.Yu said he never expected the oratorio to premiere in wartime but hoped that its message would still resonate.“We always make the same mistakes in our lives, and we have to learn from history,” he said. “We can be inspired by the kindness and support that Shanghai showed in this moment.”To shape the music and the plot, Yu turned to Zigman, a classically trained film and television composer who has returned to classical music in recent years, including with “Tango Manos” (2019), a piano concerto he wrote for the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet. Yu has long known Zigman, who has composed more than 60 Hollywood scores, including “The Notebook,” and he and Thibaudet suggested the idea for a tango concerto.For “Émigré,” Zigman said he was eager to create a “multicultural love story” that drew attention to the violent struggles unfolding in Asia and Europe at the time. Those include the 1937 massacre in Nanjing, an eastern Chinese city, in which tens of thousands of Chinese civilians were killed by occupying Japanese forces; and Kristallnacht, the wave of antisemitic violence carried out by Nazis in 1938.“Our project is really about bridging cultures and humanity and love, hope, loss and tragedy,” Zigman said.Rehearsing in Shanghai. Yu, the orchestra’s music director, worried that the stories of Jewish refugees in his hometown were being forgotten.Qilai Shen for The New York Times“Émigré” tells the story of Otto, a rabbinical student, and Josef, a doctor, who leave Berlin for the port city of Trieste, Italy, and board a boat headed for Shanghai.The brothers are anguished about leaving their parents and homeland but try to settle into life in China. Josef is interested in traditional Chinese medicine and visits an herbal medicine shop, where he meets Lina, the daughter of the owner, who is grappling with the death of her mother in Nanjing. They fall in love, but their cross-cultural union draws scorn from their families.Shanghai’s role as a haven for Jews was a historical fluke. Britain, France and the United States insisted that Beijing let them set up settlements there in the 1840s. By the 1930s, the settlements had grown into a sprawling city. But the Chinese government controlled who was issued visas to enter mainland China, including for arrival at Shanghai’s docks.When Japan seized east-central China in 1937, including the area around Shanghai, the Nationalist Chinese government could no longer inspect visas at the city’s riverfront docks. But the Japanese military did not start controlling visa access to the area until shortly before the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941.The result? Nobody was controlling who entered China at Shanghai. It became an open port for those four years: Foreign travelers were welcomed and could stay in the Western settlements.Mark Campbell, who wrote the libretto with Brock Walsh.Qilai Shen for The New York TimesCampbell, who has written librettos for more than 40 operas, said he hoped that the stories of refugees in “Émigré” could be a modern-day lesson.“It’s very important for the audience to go away and remember there was a time in this world when one country embraced the refugees of another country,” he said.In Shanghai, the stories of Jewish residents are preserved at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum. The core block of China’s legally designated Jewish ghetto, where the Japanese required Jews in Shanghai to live during the last three years of the war, has been preserved. Its Central European-style townhouses and house-size synagogue still stand.But much of the surrounding area has been bulldozed amid rapid growth in recent decades, causing concern among preservationists. Two gargantuan office buildings, each 50 stories tall, cast huge shadows toward the little synagogue at midday.At least 14,000 Jews lived in the ghetto during the war, and possibly several thousand more. Another 1,000 to 10,000 secretly lived elsewhere in the city. (Almost all of Shanghai’s Jews left after the war, many resettling in the United States.)A building in what was the Jewish ghetto in Shanghai. The core block has been preserved amid encroaching urban growth.Jackson Lowen for The New York TimesShanghai was a deeply troubled place in the years that “Émigré” takes place: packed with Chinese refugees as well as Jewish ones, frequently short on food and potable water, and racked by epidemics of disease. Opium was smoked openly and prostitutes gathered on street corners.Among the ghetto’s residents was Michael Blumenthal, who fled from Nazi Germany in 1939 at 13 and who much later became treasury secretary under President Jimmy Carter. Blumenthal said in an interview with The New York Times in 2017 that when he was a teenager, a Japanese police station was just down the block from the synagogue. He and others had to apply at the station for permission to leave the ghetto during the war, and by the final year, it was almost impossible to obtain permission.Trucks patrolled Shanghai, not just in the ghetto, to collect those who succumbed to illness. “I used to see them driving around the city, picking up dead bodies,” Blumenthal said. “The city was vastly overcrowded, it was dangerous, there was constant fighting among factions, and shootings.”“Émigré” received wide attention in China when it was announced in the summer. With a Chinese and American cast, the work was hailed as a sign of the power of cultural exchange between China and the United States in a time of increasing tensions. Yu joined Zigman, Campbell, Walsh and Gary Ginstling, the president and chief executive of the New York Philharmonic, for a news conference at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum celebrating the commission.When the joint Shanghai-New York project was announced, “Émigré” was hailed as a sign of the power of cultural exchange between China and the United States in a time of increasing tensions. Qilai Shen for The New York Times“Émigré” will have its American premiere in February with the same cast, and Ginstling said in a recent interview that he did not expect the Israel-Hamas war would lead to alterations in the work, which Deutsche Grammophon recorded in Shanghai for release next year.“Things change quickly in the world,” he said. “We are committed to our role as cultural ambassadors.”The Philharmonic’s version, directed by Mary Birnbaum, will be semi-staged and incorporate some visual elements, including images of devastation from World War II and the Second Sino-Japanese War.Several New York Philharmonic musicians took part in the premiere in Shanghai, and a group of Chinese musicians will play at the premiere in New York.At a recent rehearsal for “Émigré” at Jaguar Shanghai Symphony Hall, choir members sang Jewish, Christian and Buddhist prayers, which open the work. “Grant peace in high places,” they sang in Hebrew.“Sacred presence blossoming,” they sang in Chinese.The cast includes the tenor Arnold Livingston Geis as Josef; the tenor Matthew White as Otto; the soprano Zhang Meigui as Lina; the mezzo-soprano Zhu Huiling as her sister, Li; and the bass-baritone Shenyang as their father, Wei Song.Between rehearsals, Zhang said that she was trying to stay focused on the music, and that she hoped “Émigré” could provide some relief from the war.“We’re going through a very difficult time in this world,” she said, “but I think music has to be separate from this.”Zhang added that she had found some comfort in a song at the end of the first act called “In a Perfect World.” In that piece, Josef sings:If I ruled the world,Mine to redesign,I’d stop every gunshot, every war.Now, forevermore.Li You More

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      JACK Quartet Commits to Finding the Music

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      Its stylistic range, precision and passion have made the group one of contemporary music’s indispensable ensembles.“Can your hiccups be even bigger?” the composer Natacha Diels asked the JACK Quartet on a recent morning.“I was thinking there were differences in how you were leaning back on the flamingos,” she added, and, addressing the cellist, said: “Jay, your owls are a little unconvincing. Maybe a little more jowl in your owl?”Somehow, this bizarre code would translate into meticulously uproarious art. Diels and the JACK had come together in an airy room at the Mannes School of Music in Manhattan to rehearse her “Beautiful Trouble,” a five-part piece premiering in February that brings together surreal short films and just-as-absurdist live performance.Diels calls for the four musicians to hiccup, as well as make clicks, dings, odd little movements, head rolls and maniacal grins, among much else. Flamingos and owls are drawn in the score as notation for a full-body unfurling motion and shudder. At that morning rehearsal, the JACK’s usual instruments — violins, viola and cello — were still in their cases at the edge of the room.A few days before, I had spent time with the venerable Emerson String Quartet as it prepared to give its final concerts, with music of Beethoven and Schubert. Compared to that, this JACK rehearsal didn’t feel like a different group or a different piece; it felt like a different world.“The performance practice can be kind of far away from the Classical-Romantic continuum,” Jay Campbell, the quartet’s cellist, said with winking understatement in an interview alongside his colleagues a week later. “And we gravitate to that.”“That” can mean a lot of different things. The group — Campbell, the violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, and the violist John Pickford Richards, all in their mid-30s to mid-40s — can do, with equal aplomb, austerely earthy arrangements of Renaissance and medieval pieces, the eclectic folk jam of Gabriella Smith’s “Carrot Revolution” and Diels’s fanciful choreography.John Zorn’s ferociously fast thickets of notes and Catherine Lamb’s glacially shifting microtonal drones are both JACK specialties; on Friday, the group will perform Lamb’s 90-minute magnum opus “divisio spiralis” at Yale.With that sprawling stylistic range and its technical mastery, its enthusiastic curiosity about eminent and student composers alike, its precision and passion, the JACK has, since its founding in 2005, become one of contemporary music’s indispensable ensembles.“There’s almost nothing they can’t do,” said the composer Amy Williams, who is at work on a new JACK commission. “So in a way, it’s like writing for electronics, with no human limitations. That can be exciting, and also terrifying.”The soprano Barbara Hannigan, who has toured with the group, said: “It’s a very disciplined yet manic virtuosity. And somehow they’re also very calm at the center of all that virtuosity. They are super, super centered. I’ve worked with quartets with a specialty in modern repertoire, but there’s nobody like JACK.”The group formed in the heady atmosphere for new music at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., in the early 2000s. The players in the original lineup — Richards, Otto, the violinist Ari Streisfeld and the cellist Kevin McFarland — were united by decisive encounters with the work of the German composer Helmut Lachenmann, a master of sonic extremes. Lachenmann traveled to Toronto to coach three of the JACK members in his first quartet, “Gran Torso,” and the group flew to a festival in Mexico with other Eastman musicians to continue working with him.“I am their father, or something — their grandfather,” Lachenmann, who turns 88 this month, said with a laugh recently. “They were totally precise, and very musical. And there is for me one word that is very important: They are serene. When I met them, immediately it was clear, the honesty and the concentration. I don’t find better groups for my music than them.”Otto recalled, of their early work on Lachenmann’s third quartet, “Grido”: “We could sense that it was just the tip of the iceberg. Just the depth of this music — I’d never encountered something like that before, the thought that we could just continue practicing this piece for a really long time.”JACK performing at the Tribeca New Music Festival 2010 with its original lineup: from left, Ari Streisfeld, Otto, Kevin McFarland and Richards.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesThey chose to call the group “JACK,” an acronym of their first names — at first a jokey nod to Lachenmann, whose “Grido” is named after the members of the Arditti Quartet. But the players also liked its slightly ironic all-American quality and its modesty.In the first years, the group played only sporadic concerts, and they weren’t usually glamorous. The JACK often performed at the Tank, then on Church Street in Lower Manhattan, where cockroaches would sometimes scamper over the musicians’ feet while they played.Lachenmann put in a good word with WDR, the influential radio network in Cologne, Germany, which invited the JACK to play and record all four of Iannis Xenakis’s quartets, a feat not yet attempted. Released in 2009 as part of Mode Records’s complete Xenakis project, it made the group’s reputation.“We got paid to record it, which is crazy,” Richards said. “And that album introduced JACK to a lot of people.”It established the quartet as youthful masters of daunting modernism, as did a live recording of a 2011 performance of works by Xenakis (“Tetras,” an intense calling card), Ligeti, Cage and Matthias Pintscher at Wigmore Hall in London. But the flood of repertory and touring soon grew trying.“It’s hard to do more than 70 or 80 concerts a year with all new pieces,” Richards said. McFarland wanted to move to Colorado, where his partner lived, and Streisfeld wanted to stop traveling so much and take a steadier teaching position.They left the group in 2016, and while Otto and Richards were committed to keeping JACK going, it was, Richards recalled, “surprisingly hard to discover people who wanted to throw their whole lives into it.” But Campbell and Wulliman, both well regarded in the cozy contemporary-music community, fit the bill.“I had been playing in professional new-music ensembles in Chicago,” Wulliman recalled. “But to sit down with these guys to read through ‘Tetras’ — whoa, I have never, ever, ever experienced anything like that. Being able to just get through something that easily. The ease of the music moving forward.”The JACK is not one of those businesslike quartets that travels separately and meets up just for soundchecks and performances. “I still like spending time with them,” Wulliman said. They go on hikes and search out new restaurants together on tour — and, when road trips are involved, always sit in the same configuration in the car, with Richards at the wheel.The four have mock fights about things like whether they should play Ralph Shapey’s astringent music. (“I’m dying to do Shapey,” Otto said; “I’d rather die,” said Wulliman.) But when they’re rehearsing, they speak in genial fragments, completing one another’s sentences and doing much more playing than debating.Going through an arrangement of a piece by the 16th-century composer Nicola Vicentino, Otto, who was doing a harsh, very contemporary-sounding bow stroke, asked, “Does it feel over the top with the sweeping stuff?”JACK rehearsing in San Francisco recently. Otto said: “We’ve always gotten along, but there’s been an evolution in how we communicate — with our playing as well as our words.”Ulysses Ortega for The New York TimesWulliman thought a second, and answered, “I’m not ready to pass judgment yet.” And they moved on.In the interview, Otto said: “We’ve always gotten along, but there’s been an evolution in how we communicate — with our playing as well as our words. Sometimes, early on, we would get overly conceptual or just talkative at rehearsals, and it wasn’t really that productive.”Since those beginning years, using the Kronos Quartet as a model, JACK has been organized as a nonprofit — Lachenmann co-signed the articles of incorporation — to allow it to raise money, commission pieces and start initiatives on its own, rather than waiting for partner institutions.“It feels like institutions are just a little behind,” Campbell said. “I want to be more in front of it.”In 2018, the group became the quartet in residence at Mannes, a milestone for its artistic and financial stability. Its budget in 2010 was $120,000; it’s now $700,000, separate from the members’ Mannes salaries — and large enough for JACK to have hired a full-time executive director, Julia Bumke, in 2020.As its 20th anniversary approaches, the group is focusing on expanding its fund-raising to include more individual givers amid the grants and foundation support, as well as fortifying its already robust commissioning activities, including the JACK Studio program, which offers funding for new scores as well as a range of mentorship and performance opportunities.When the quartet believes in a composer, it truly commits. “As we worked together,” Catherine Lamb said, “something clicked: ‘I can really write what I want to write for these people. I don’t have to hold back. I can explore what I want to explore.’ So I let myself go.”The result was “divisio spiralis,” an epic, 13-part experiment in delicate yet rending, mesmerizing harmonic changes that demands hyper-exact intonation to make its impact.“The last time I heard them play it live,” Lamb said, “I was overwhelmed by how much it had grown since the premiere in 2019. They had more clarity in reaching the sound colors together, finding the right kinds of balances. It’s more and more seamless, more and more musical.”That commitment to finding the music — the sheer beauty — in what could be merely exercises in complexity, to treating every composer like a distinct style that can be ever more fully inhabited, is what sets JACK apart.The group said it was a little intimidated by the difficulty of Amy Williams’s music. But Williams, whose new JACK piece relies heavily on hocketing, the medieval technique of alternating rhythms so lines interlock like a zipper, said that was unlikely.“They have absorbed so much music — working with students, premiering pieces, large-scale composer projects,” she said. “It’s quite extraordinary how much they’re processing. Challenging them is no longer on the table.” More

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      Review: The Philharmonic Feasts on ‘The Planets’

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      Under Dima Slobodeniouk, the orchestra played works by Holst and Ligeti and, for the first time, Julia Perry’s somber “Stabat Mater.”Holst’s “The Planets” is one of the Thanksgiving feasts of classical music. It seduces with variety of color and texture — just as tangy cranberry compote refreshes after buttery mashed potatoes — but tends to leave you overstuffed.I’ve never heard it when it wasn’t at least a little too much. But, played with vigor by the New York Philharmonic under Dima Slobodeniouk on Wednesday evening at David Geffen Hall, it didn’t have me moaning with overindulgence, as some “Planets” performances do. It felt like an ideal way to ring in a holiday that’s all about bounty.There was punchiness in “Mars” and genuine playfulness in “Mercury,” and Slobodeniouk was agile in guiding the orchestra through the hairpin transitions of “Jupiter.” That section’s noble hymn theme was less strings-heavy than usual, flowing with ease.That Ligeti’s “Atmosphères” is, like “The Planets,” indelibly associated with the extraterrestrial is due less to its title than to its inclusion (without its composer’s permission) in the soundtrack of “2001: A Space Odyssey.”Written in 1961, not quite half a century after Holst’s tone poem, the sumptuously eerie “Atmosphères” on Wednesday felt a bit like the son or grandson of “The Planets.” Ligeti’s queasily unsettled sound world seemed a direct descendant of the stunned stillness at the start of “Saturn,” the uneasy simmering after the march drops out in “Uranus” and the gaseous, hovering mystery of “Neptune.” Neither of these works was played with super-polish at Geffen, but under Slobodeniouk both had vibrant drama.Those tried and true “Planets” aside, this wasn’t a concert of chestnuts. The orchestra revived “Atmosphères” to cap its commemorations this fall of Ligeti’s centennial; it hasn’t presented the piece (except as it’s excerpted in the “2001” score) since 1978. And it is performing Julia Perry’s 1951 “Stabat Mater” this week for the first time ever.Perry’s brief “Study for Orchestra” was, in 1965, the first music by a Black woman to be played on a Philharmonic subscription program. It was brought back last year, but the “Stabat Mater,” scored for strings and a vocalist, is a far more powerful work. Heated yet subtle and restrained, the piece’s 10 sections on a Latin text, lasting about 20 minutes in all, chart an intimate drama whose moments of grandeur are all the more effective given the overall modesty.In the short prelude, light yet pungent pizzicato plucks — amid brooding low strings and an elegiac solo violin — movingly evoke Jesus’s mother’s tears without feeling too obvious. Throughout, Perry gives both voice and orchestra an appealing combination of Neo-Baroque angularity and post-Romantic warmth. The quivering, high-pitched flames of “the fire of love” near the end are reminders that this piece and “Atmosphères” date from the same era.The mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges sang with oracular authority in the somber vocal lines, rising to flashes of intensity. There were passages in which a more encompassing, contralto-style richness in the low register would have filled out this music. But Bridges’s focused tone was just right for Perry’s poignant austerity.The violinist Sheryl Staples, in the concertmaster chair, played with sweetness and eloquence in both the “Stabat Mater” and Holst’s “Venus.” That section of “The Planets” also featured a beautifully mellow flute solo by Alison Fierst, leading into rhapsodic lines from the orchestra’s longtime principal cello, Carter Brey.Oh, and for at least one night, the “fireflies” — the lights over the Geffen stage that do a flickering up-and-down dance before concerts, in corny imitation of the chandeliers that rise before curtain at the Metropolitan Opera next door — were stilled.Might they stay that way forevermore? That would be something to be thankful for.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      ‘Maestro’ Review: Leonard Bernstein’s Life of Ecstasy and Agony

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      As director and star, Bradley Cooper delivers an intimate portrait of the composer and his many private and public selves.“Maestro,” Bradley Cooper’s intimate portrait of Leonard Bernstein, takes flight with a terrific whoosh of exuberance. The young Bernstein (played by Cooper) has just gotten the phone call that will change his life. He’s been asked to step in for an ailing guest conductor and lead the New York Philharmonic; it will be his conducting debut. Overjoyed, Lenny, as he’s often called, jumps up, throws open a curtain and then sprints out of his apartment to race, bathrobe flapping, into his dazzling, very public future as an American genius.The real Bernstein was 25 and an assistant conductor with the Philharmonic when he took the Carnegie Hall stage on Nov. 14, 1943, to polite applause. The program opened with Schumann, ended with Wagner, and by the time it was over, the house, as Bernstein’s brother, Burton, put it, “roared like one giant animal in a zoo.” The next day, The New York Times ran a story about the concert on the front page. A few days later, The Times followed up on the concert with a small item that likened Bernstein’s debut to a young corporal taking charge of a platoon when the officers are down: “It’s a good American success story.”In “Maestro,” Cooper explores the definition — and brutal toll — of that kind of success with deep sympathy, lushly beautiful wall-to-wall music and great narrative velocity. In outline, it’s a familiar story of a classic American striver. Bernstein was the son of Jewish-Russian immigrants who escaped a dire fate in the family business (the Samuel J. Bernstein Hair Company) to become a 20th-century cultural force. He conducted and composed, wrote for the ballet, the opera and Broadway, and was a fixture on TV. He had gold and platinum albums, was on the cover of Time and Newsweek, and won slews of Grammys and Emmys.It was a big juicy life, one that Cooper — who wrote the script with Josh Singer — has condensed into two eventful, visually expressive hours. “Maestro” is as ambitious as Cooper’s fine directorial debut, “A Star Is Born,” but the new movie is more self-consciously cinematic. Some of the choices — different aspect ratios as well as the use of both black-and-white and color film — nod at the look of movies from earlier eras. The visuals also convey interiority, swells of mood and feeling, as does Lenny’s explosive, at times ecstatic physicality, the full-bodied intensity of his conducting style and the orgasmic rivers of sweat that pour off him.“Maestro” is a fast-paced chronicle of towering highs, crushing lows and artistic milestones, most delivered in a personal key. Cooper packs a lot in without overexplaining the era or its titans (Brian Klugman plays the composer Aaron Copland, one of Bernstein’s closest friends); years pass in an eyeblink, events slip by obliquely or go unmentioned. Cooper is more interested in feelings than happenings, though part of what makes the movie pop and gives it currency is how he complicates the familiar Great Man of History template. Bernstein is rightly the main event in “Maestro,” but crucial to the film’s meaning is his relationship with his family, especially his wife, Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein (a brittle Carey Mulligan).Theirs was a fraught, decades-long relationship that begins in the 1940s when they meet at one of those fabulously glamorous New York parties that mostly exist in old Hollywood films or in biographies of very important dead people. There, amid a boisterous crowd of revelers wreathed in cigarette smoke and bobbing together on an ocean of booze, Lenny and his pals Betty Comden and Adolph Green (Mallory Portnoy and Nick Blaemire) are lighting up the room. Lenny and Felicia make their introductions, tuck into a quiet corner to flirt and laugh, their heads and bodies soon listing toward each other. By the time the night is over, they’re walking side by side, seemingly destined for a happily ever after.Cooper, who stars and directs, used different aspect ratios as well as both black-and-white and color film.Jason McDonald/NetflixIt didn’t turn out exactly that way for assorted reasons, including Bernstein’s overshadowing brilliance. He was also gay, though maybe bisexual; the movie nimbly avoids labeling him. (In her memoir “Famous Father Girl,” his daughter Jamie refers to him as both.) Instead, with roundelays of teasing and desiring looks as well as in asides and conversations (including a faithful restaging of an Edward R. Murrow interview), “Maestro” expresses the complexities of Lenny’s private and public selves. After Lenny receives that call to conduct the Philharmonic, for one, he playfully taps drumlike on the discreetly covered rear of his lover, David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer). And then Lenny rushes out the door alone.The opener introduces the idea of Lenny’s life as a performance, which becomes the film’s controlling metaphor. Cooper underscores this idea repeatedly, including when Felicia takes Lenny to the empty theater where she’s an understudy and where they playfully act out a love scene they seal with a Hollywood kiss. Sometime later, in an energetic swerve into surrealism, Felicia grabs his hand, and they sprint from an outdoor meal with friends and into another theater where three dancers in white sailor uniforms are waiting onstage. As with Lenny’s dash out of his bedroom and into Carnegie Hall, Cooper stages this sprint with the camera pointing down at the characters, as if it were running on an overhead catwalk.As Felicia and Lenny race into the theater, they look like performers hitting their marks and a bit like dollhouse runaways. The dancers start performing “Fancy Free” — Bernstein and Jerome Robbins’s ballet about sailors on shore leave in New York — then move into its musical adaptation, “On the Town.” With Felicia and Lenny watching, the sailors begin moving to the infectiously alive, jazzy music, their snaky hips and tight uniforms emphasizing the choreography’s muscular eroticism; and then a sailor beckons Lenny to join in the fun.Here and elsewhere, Cooper makes a point of showing Felicia watching Lenny first with what seems to be admiration, then love and later something darker, sadder and despairing. He’s already a name when they meet and already taking up a lot of room; soon, he is the star around which everything and everyone orbits, including Felicia and the three children they have together. He’s a bigger-than-big personality (flamboyance is a favorite adjective of Bernstein biographers), with a buzzing, heady vitality that feels like a life force or a painfully addictive high. It’s easy to see why she’s pulled in, but the exhilaration that initially lifts the film is a harder sell once Felicia and Lenny begin to fall in love.The movie makes the case that their love was genuine, even if Cooper and Mulligan never convincingly sync up. This disconnect doesn’t seem intentional, but it also serves the story and characters, including early on when Lenny’s and Felicia’s heightened emotions and smiles can feel forced, like an act of mutual will. Even so, you believe they love each other, however differently; and because Cooper spends a lot of time on Felicia, you grow to understand that she knows she’ll never be enough for Lenny. Yet in focusing so much on Felicia, whose light dims the brighter his blazes, stressing what it costs her to play a role in this performance of happy heterosexuality, Cooper also inadvertently shortchanges Lenny.Although Cooper makes Felicia the linchpin of his Great Man revisionism, the film’s most deeply felt scenes involve Lenny with his children and his close male friends. One centers on an anguished encounter he has with David. The other unfolds at Lenny and Felicia’s country home after the birth of one of their children and finds him walking across the lawn, the newborn in his arms. Lenny drifts over to Aaron Copland, who’s sitting under a tree on a swing with a smile. Lenny joins him and gently holds the baby so that Aaron can see the baby’s face. Lenny nuzzles the infant, and the two men just sit quietly as the tenderness of the moment — and the overwhelming cruelty of this world and all its terrible lies — knocks you flat.MaestroRated R for some discreet nudity and a whole lot of cigarettes and booze. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Lise Davidsen Is an Opera Star Worth Traveling For

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      Her high notes emerging like shafts of sunlight, Davidsen is playing the title role in Janacek’s “Jenufa” at the struggling Lyric Opera of Chicago.A new pop song is the same streamed anywhere. And if you wanted to see Beyoncé this year, she likely came to a town not far from you, giving pretty much the same show in Barcelona as she did in Detroit.But an opera star doing a role in Berlin or London doesn’t mean she’ll bring it to New York. When it comes to the art form’s greatest singers, there are things you simply can’t hear by staying put. And Lise Davidsen is worth traveling for.Davidsen, the statuesque 36-year-old soprano with a flooding voice of old-school amplitude, has been singing the title character in Janacek’s crushing “Jenufa” at Lyric Opera of Chicago this month. Though she has been a regular presence at the Metropolitan Opera — where she will star in a new production of Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” in winter — there’s no promise she’ll ever perform Jenufa there.So for those of us who hear in Davidsen’s rich, free tone the kind of golden-age instrument we otherwise know mostly through glimpses on old recordings, it was a privilege to be in Chicago.The added incentive was that the redoubtable soprano Nina Stemme would be onstage with her. At 60, Stemme is stepping away from the kind of dramatic touchstones, like Isolde and Brünnhilde, that Davidsen is gradually stepping into.Pavel Cernoch and Nina Stemme in “Jenufa,” directed by Claus Guth.Michael BrosilowDavidsen and Stemme in “Jenufa,” conducted by Jakub Hrusa, the young conductor recently appointed music director of the Royal Opera in London, in a grimly spare staging by Claus Guth: This was a coup for Lyric, especially since the Janacek has been running alongside a winning cast in Donizetti’s “La Fille du Régiment,” as fizzily charming as “Jenufa” is desperately sad.Seen over the course of 24 hours this weekend, the pairing shows off the best of a venerable company that has been struggling in the pandemic’s aftermath, along with much of the American performing arts scene. Its chief executive, Anthony Freud, announced in September that he would step down this coming summer, two years before the end of his contract.Freud, 66, is retiring as the gap between opera’s costs and the demand for tickets grows ever wider. Financial pressures have prompted the company to pare back its performances; Lyric’s current season features just six mainstage productions, compared to eight in the last full season before the pandemic.But this was a weekend Freud could be proud of. The title character of “Jenufa,” set amid tangled romantic and familial relationships in a Moravian village in the 19th century, is secretly pregnant by a man who refuses to marry her. Her stepmother, a civic figurehead known as the Kostelnicka, desperate to keep the family from disgrace, kills the baby, a crime whose discovery leads to a stunned, sublime gesture of forgiveness.For this raw, agonized story, Janacek wrote tangy, lush yet sharply angled music, with unsettled rhythms and roiling depths; obsessively repeated motifs, as anxious as the characters; passages of folk-like sweetness; vocal lines modeled on spoken Czech for uncanny naturalness even in lyrical flight and emotional extremity; and radiant climaxes.Davidsen’s upper voice is her glory: steely in impact but never hard or forced, emanating like focused shafts of sunlight. (In Janacek’s fast, talky music, the middle of her voice didn’t project as clearly, but this is a quibble.)For a singer of such commanding capacity, she is remarkably beautiful in floating quiet. She played the character with prayerful dignity, reminiscent of Desdemona in Verdi’s “Otello”; at the beginning of the third act, when Jenufa starts to think her suffering might finally be behind her, Davidsen registered on her face and in her freshening tone a cautious but real happiness. This is a singer who acts with her voice.I’ve always thought of Jenufa and the Kostelnicka as antagonists — a spirited youngster facing a repressive older generation — but this performance movingly suggested they are more alike than different: two independent-minded women, both isolated from the village mainstream. And Stemme’s voice remains strong and even; this is not your standard acid-tone Kostelnicka; in soft duet at the start of Act II, she and Davidsen made a combination that evoked “Norma”-like bel canto.Hrusa supported that sensitivity on the podium. His vision of the score emphasizes its sheer beauty, encouraging smooth lyricism and a kind of musical patience, letting the drama unfold rather than spurring it on. Sometimes this feels like mildness, at the expense of spiky intensity. But that this “Jenufa” is played something like a sustained hymn often heightens the aching tragedy.Guth’s production emphasizes the uniformity and repetition that define this small town’s small-mindedness. A prisonlike atmosphere prevails in Michael Levine’s airy yet forbidding set, Gesine Völlm’s constricting costumes and James Farncombe’s lighting, all leached of color.Metal bed frames that line the walls in the first act are arranged, in the second, to form an eerie enclosure, reminiscent of a refugee camp, in which Jenufa has been hidden to give birth. An ominous crowd of women in “Handmaid’s Tale”-style bonnets lurks on the sidelines; a dancer is dressed as a slow-stalking raven. The folk-wedding dresses that finally add brightness in Act III convey genuine joy after so much ashy heartbreak.Fizzy joy: Lisette Oropesa in Laurent Pelly’s production of “La Fille du Régiment” at Lyric Opera.Michael BrosilowThat kind of joy permeates “La Fille du Régiment,” one of the repertory’s most delightful comedies, presented in Chicago in the winkingly stylized Laurent Pelly production that has been at the Met since 2008. (The mountain range made of old maps is still superbly silly.)Lisette Oropesa and Lawrence Brownlee are both sprightly in Donizetti’s stratosphere-touching coloratura; this opera is famous for a tenor aria with nine high Cs, and after an ovation Brownlee repeated it with flair. But the pair are even better in the score’s slower-burning, longer-arching passages of tenderness.Lyric Opera of Chicago may be in serious trouble; its chief may be taking an early exit. But, having attracted Oropesa and, especially, Davidsen to the company for these memorable debuts, Freud is leaving on a high note. More

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      David Del Tredici, Who Set ‘Alice’ to Music, Dies at 86

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      David Del Tredici, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer who began as an experimentalist but became best known for a midcareer shift toward a style that came to be called the New Romanticism, which yielded a series of rich-hued, tuneful pieces based on Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” stories, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.The pianist Marc Peloquin, a longtime friend and collaborator and the executor of Mr. Del Tredici’s estate, said the cause was Parkinson’s disease.Flamboyant and gregarious, Mr. Del Tredici cultivated a reputation as a beloved scamp who did what he wanted. But he also had a gift for explaining his musical goals and how he had settled upon them. And he was frank about his personal life and his demons — alcoholism, for one. If the composer George Antheil had not already laid claim to the phrase “Bad Boy of Music,” Mr. Del Tredici could easily have adopted it himself.Mr. Del Tredici in 1973. He established himself as a young star of the experimental music world with a series of settings of the work of James Joyce.Jack Mitchell/Getty ImagesStarting as a teenager, when he decided to set aside a promising career as a pianist in favor of composition because of the way a piano teacher had spoken harshly to him, Mr. Del Tredici regularly redefined himself. He often abandoned approaches that had brought him success and went against the grain of the classical music world. Typically, he would face opposition at first, only to see his innovations win over listeners and other composers.He established himself as a young star of the experimental world with a series of settings of the work of James Joyce — most notably “Night-Conjure Verse” (1965) and “Syzygy” (1966), both of which showed how vividly angular, athletic vocal lines and pointillistic instrumental writing could magnify a work’s emotional depths.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      At the Philharmonic, Violin Concertos as Alike as They Are Different

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      In back-to-back programs, the orchestra presented concertos by Beethoven and Benjamin Britten.The violin concertos by Beethoven and Benjamin Britten are as alike as they are different, and over the past week, the New York Philharmonic presented them in back-to-back programs that gestured at their beauties without digging into them.Both concertos begin with a rumbling in the timpani, barely the outline of a rhythm, but enough of a motif to inspire developments in the orchestral and violin parts that build to strenuous emotional heights. Both tax the soloist’s endurance with a series of technical hurdles, and challenge the orchestra to step up its musical partnership.The Philharmonic nestled each concerto into the middle of programs that began with a brief curtain-raiser and ended with expansive, idiosyncratic symphonies. Last week, Stéphane Denève conducted the Beethoven in between Carlos Simon’s “Fate Now Conquers” and Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony. Then, on Thursday, Paavo Järvi led a more strongly conceived program that framed the Britten with Veljo Tormis’s Overture No. 2 and Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony.If the concerts had similar setups, they had similar problems too. The Philharmonic, perhaps a bit on autopilot, began the concertos tentatively, smoothed out the drama of the symphonies and locked into isolated moments of dynamism. The openers, particularly the Tormis, emerged as effectively crafted short stories: internally coherent, absorbing, satisfying.The unabashed emotionality of Britten’s concerto, which the pacifist composer completed after the outbreak of World War II, shows up in the solo writing in two ways: urgent, long-lined melodies of sweet despair; and raw plucking and feverishly cascading stops. Alena Baeva, making her Philharmonic debut, played the piece with assertive beauty and vibrato so quick, at times, that it seemed to disappear. With her understated legato and handsomely voiced harmonies, she made things sound easy. In guttural passages, she indicated Britten’s intentions without compromising her ability to return to lyricism.Baeva, so facile in surmounting technical obstacles, had trouble turning up the temperature. The exquisite, full-throated lament at the center of the second movement gets volleyed between soloist and orchestra, and Järvi didn’t build a compelling progression out of the straightforward yet potent musical scenario. Baeva’s final re-entry was anticlimactic. In the cadenza, she dispatched technical challenges — the duetting of held notes and plucked ones was finely handled — without tapping into the writing’s existential anguish. She sounded more aligned with the tranquillity of the third movement.Stéphane Denève, left, leading the Philharmonic and the violinist Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto last week.Chris LeeIn 1801, a few years before completing his Violin Concerto, Beethoven wrote in a letter of his encroaching deafness, “From a distance I do not hear the high notes of the instruments and the singers’ voices.” And yet he ended up producing a sprawling concerto that keeps the violin in the tippy top of its range as it leaps continually through intervals.The violinist Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider’s solo playing, decisive in bold passages and tender in soft ones, sometimes turned brittle. Quiet moments emerged like beautiful whispers that evaporated as they tapered off, and he sounded more at ease in stepwise passages than leaping ones.Saint-Saëns’s Third, nicknamed the “Organ Symphony” for its prominent use of that instrument, is full of theatrical string writing that Denève shortchanged. The work came alive in its final stretch when he made the Maestoso section, which derives its power from majestically broad time signatures, sound like a king’s procession marching down the aisles of David Geffen Hall. The four-hand piano playing was simple yet magical, and the organist Kent Tritle seemed to be having a ball with his forte passages after teasing out the subtler beauties of earlier sections and their woozy prism of colors.Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony, like Britten’s Violin Concerto, can be considered a response to the horrors of World War II; at times you can almost hear the sound of an individual’s spirit writhing out of the grasp of a conflict that would snuff it out. And, as with the Saint-Saëns, the Philharmonic snapped into focus in the work’s final minutes.Up until that finale, when he drove the Vivace at a thrilling clip into a climax of overwhelming impact, Järvi walked the middle of the road. The conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky, chosen by Prokofiev for the symphony’s world premiere, left behind a gripping recording full of specific choices: a stiff, percussive celesta; ear-clearing winds screeching on high, blowzy brasses with something sinister to say. By contrast, Järvi’s adherence to conventional beauties sounded strange.But he found Prokofiev’s individuality in the Vivace, where the violins sounded clean yet somehow breathless, and the clarinet, warm yet sharply etched. A threat bubbled up from the percussion section. The final moments of cataclysm arrived suddenly and all at once. It was almost worth the wait. More