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      ‘The Chevalier’ Review: A Music-Theater Portrait of Joseph Boulogne

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      “The Chevalier,” an intriguing music-theater hybrid, unwraps the still little-known life and work of this 18th-century composer.Now, the composer Joseph Boulogne would be hailed as a Renaissance man: artist, athlete, intellectual, soldier. Born in Guadeloupe in 1745, the son of a white French plantation owner and an enslaved mother of Senegalese origin, Boulogne became a virtuoso violinist, prodigious composer, champion fencer, the general of Europe’s first Black regiment and an avid abolitionist.But Boulogne, a.k.a. the Chevalier de Saint-Georges (and whose last name is sometimes spelled “Bologne”), was a biracial man in a time and place that held little space for him, which means his remarkable life has largely been erased from the historical narrative, though that is beginning to change.“The Chevalier,” a trim hybrid of theater and music, seeks to revive his reputation. The show was written and directed by Bill Barclay, the artistic director of Music Before 1800. (Barclay also plays Choderlos de Laclos, a Boulogne collaborator and author of the novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.”) A single performance at the eye-poppingly opulent United Palace theater in Washington Heights on Sunday served as its New York City premiere; it will be available to stream next month.“The Chevalier” starts rather unpromisingly. Barclay takes as his point of imaginative departure the few weeks that Boulogne and Mozart were housemates in Paris. Mozart, 11 years younger, grills Boulogne about his life story, and he responds with long, expository answers that hit on major biographical points — more school lecture than beguiling drama.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      6 Highlights of Maria Callas’s Opera Career at La Scala

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      The soprano appeared in more than two dozen productions at the house in Milan as she rose to become opera’s leading lady. Here are six highlights.No opera house has been more instrumental to the enduring myth of Maria Callas than the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.Her more than two dozen productions at La Scala mirrored the peaks and troughs of her life and marked her finest years as an opera singer.It was near the start of her La Scala years that Callas underwent a physical transformation, losing some 80 pounds and becoming a global celebrity; and it was toward the end of that period that she left her husband Giovanni Battista Meneghini for the wealthy magnate Aristotle Onassis, who then married someone else (Jacqueline Kennedy).Callas’s many performances at La Scala “have passed into legend,” said Neil Fisher, executive culture and books editor, The Times and Sunday Times in London. “If La Scala is a temple to opera, then Maria Callas is one of the goddesses.”Callas during a rehearsal for Cherubini’s “Medea” with the Canadian tenor Jon Vickers at La Scala in 1961. “Medea” was her final show at La Scala.Associated PressLa Scala’s reputation, in turn, is “almost inseparable” from her, Mr. Fisher added: “Postwar, the glamour of opera, and also its mystique, swirls around this character of Maria Callas.”Why does a soprano who died in 1977 remain the single most celebrated opera singer of all time?Because she made opera “about the story and the drama and the narrative,” said the American soprano Lisette Oropesa. “It wasn’t just about the beauty of the voice: She used her voice to tell a story.”Crucially, Ms. Oropesa noted, Callas became the story herself — a “hot-topic, controversial figure” — after her life became mixed up with those of Onassis and Kennedy. As a result, “people to this day cannot stop talking about her,” Ms. Oropesa added. She’s “a legend.”Callas appearing as Violetta in “La Traviata” by Giuseppe Verdi, in a 1955 production at La Scala. The character is widely considered one of her three finest roles.DeAgostini/Getty ImagesFollowing is an overview of some of Callas’s career highlights at La Scala.“Aida” (Verdi): April 12, 1950Callas’s very first performance onstage at La Scala was as a substitute for the much-adored Renata Tebaldi, who was unwell. It was, by all accounts, a tepid debut. A skin condition had given the 26-year-old soprano facial blemishes that she awkwardly covered with veils. In “Maria Callas: An Intimate Biography,” by Anne Edwards, the director Franco Zeffirelli (who would go on to work with Callas) recalled “this overweight Greek lady, peeping out from behind her trailing chiffon,” with an “unevenness” in her voice. Her two remaining performances of “Aida” went much better, but this inaugural “Aida” was a blow to the young prodigy’s self-confidence.“I Vespri Siciliani” (Verdi):Dec. 7, 1951This was the first time that Callas was headlining a La Scala production — kicking off the opera house’s season, in fact — and it was a triumph. She was understandably nervous at the start. “The miraculous throat of Maria Meneghini Callas did not have to fear the demand of the opera,” the music reviewer Franco Abbiati wrote in the newspaper Corriere della Sera (according to the biography “Maria Callas: The Tigress and the Lamb,” by David Bret). Mr. Abbiati lauded the “phosphorescent beauty” of her tones, and “her technical agility, which is more than rare — it is unique.”“Lucia di Lammermoor” (Donizetti): Jan. 18, 1954This was Callas’s first time with the renowned conductor Herbert von Karajan at the baton, and she didn’t disappoint. In the famous “mad scene” — where Lucia stabs her new husband on her wedding night — Callas appeared barehanded, in a nightgown and messy hair, on a dimly lit staircase; she had turned down the dagger and fake blood that are usually used to portray the murder. Yet her performance was so realistic that mesmerized audience members jumped up mid-performance, clapping and cheering, and tossed red carnations onstage that Callas touched as if they were gobs of blood. In Opera News, the critic Cynthia Jolly hailed “Callas’s supremacy amongst present-day sopranos,” and “a heart-rending poignancy of timbre which is quite unforgettable,” according to the Bret biography.“La Traviata” (Verdi): May 28, 1955The character of Violetta in “La Traviata” is widely considered one of Callas’s three finest roles — along with Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” and Bellini’s “Norma.” And the May 1955 staging by the director Luchino Visconti is, in turn, considered her finest “Traviata.” It was “a revolutionary production” that was “renowned for its realism, the intimacy and the gorgeousness of the setting, the painterly qualities,” said Mr. Fisher of The Times. It also “encapsulated so much” of the Maria Callas that audiences have come to know and revere. Set in La Belle Epoque, with ornate décor and costumes, the show triggered another audience frenzy on opening night. People cried out Callas’s name, sobbed uncontrollably and showered the stage with red roses, which a tearful Callas picked up as she took a solo bow. The conductor Carlo Maria Giulini later confessed that he, too, had wept in the pit. Yet Callas’s monopolizing of attention in her solo bow was too much for the tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano, who quit the show that night.“Anna Bolena” (Donizetti):April 14, 1957This was another Visconti spectacular, and another triumph. Callas played Anne Boleyn, a doomed wife of Henry VIII, in a somewhat lesser-known Donizetti opera. Queenlike, she appeared in a dark blue gown and enormous jewels at the top of a grand staircase, surrounded by royal portraits. Musically, she gave it her all, triggering 24 minutes of applause (according to the Edwards biography), a La Scala record.Yet offstage, in Milan, her star was starting to fade, after she had refused to perform a fifth time with the La Scala opera company on a tour in Edinburgh (she was only contractually obligated to four performances, and was feeling unwell). Protesters awaited her as she headed to the “Anna Bolena” premiere, the Edwards biography reported, and she was accompanied inside by armed police officers. When she got home on the last night of the show, there were obscenities scribbled with animal excrement on her front door and windows.“Medea” (Cherubini): May 29, 1962By the time of her final performances at La Scala, Callas was divorced and in a relationship with Onassis. Her voice was still dazzling audiences worldwide. Just 10 days before this performance of “Medea,” she had sung two arias from the opera “Carmen” at a celebration of President John F. Kennedy’s 45th birthday (where Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday”).Yet as she was performing “Medea” that night, a sinus infection led Callas’s voice to waver in parts, though she sang all the way to the end, and still managed to draw some press acclaim.Long after her passing, Lord Harewood, a Callas supporter and onetime director of the Royal Opera House, recalled in an Evening Standard article that was excerpted in the Bret biography that it was “evident that her voice had deteriorated markedly,” and attributed it to her “being at sea with Onassis in his boat” and attending “too many parties.”“You felt that this wonderful career was coming to an end,” he was quoted as saying in the Bret biography. “But I thought that she still had great power, a tremendous grandeur about everything she did. In spite of everything, she never lost that.” More

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      Peter Schickele, Composer and Gleeful Sire of P.D.Q. Bach, Dies at 88

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      Peter Schickele, an American composer whose career as a writer of serious concert music was often eclipsed by that of his antic alter ego, the thoroughly debauched, terrifyingly prolific and mercifully fictional P.D.Q. Bach, died on Tuesday at his home in Bearsville, a hamlet outside Woodstock, N.Y. He was 88.His death was confirmed by his daughter, Karla Schickele. His health had declined after a series of infections last fall, she said.Under his own name, Mr. Schickele (pronounced SHICK-uh-lee) composed more than 100 symphonic, choral, solo instrumental and chamber works, first heard on concert stages in the 1950s and later commissioned by some of the world’s leading orchestras, soloists and chamber ensembles. He also wrote film scores and musical numbers for Broadway.His music was performed by the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Lark Quartet, the Minnesota Opera and other notable ensembles, as well as by the folk singers Joan Baez and Buffy Sainte-Marie, for whom he wrote arrangements.But to his resigned chagrin, it was as a musical parodist in the tradition of Victor Borge, Anna Russell and Spike Jones — Mr. Schickele’s particular idol — that he remained best known.For more than a half century, through live performances seemingly born of the marriage of Mozart, the Marx Brothers and Rube Goldberg; prizewinning recordings; and even a book-length biography, P.D.Q. Bach (“the only dead composer from whom one can commission,” Mr. Schickele liked to say) remained enduringly, fiendishly alive.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      At 70, the Composer Georg Friedrich Haas Encourages Self-Discovery

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      One of Haas’s former students reflects on his time with a teacher who had lessons to offer in music, doubt and influence.One evening in 2013, during my graduate recital in composition at the City of Basel Music Academy in Switzerland, an instrument I had built went flying into the audience. It was a small loudspeaker duct-taped to a string — I called it a sound pendulum — and when the musician twirled it, the tape didn’t hold.Almost everything that could have gone wrong, did. A pianist lost her place in the music. A saxophonist mixed up the performance time and rushed in wearing flip-flops after a frantic phone call from me. In the composition I was most excited about, I badly misjudged an important combination of instruments: A passage meant to sound sleekly metallic was merely tinny.I had a panic attack. I went outside to get some air. My composition professor, Georg Friedrich Haas, and a fellow student, the Israeli composer Yair Klartag, followed, aiming to calm me down.As my breath returned to its regular rate, Haas told me that he valued my music, but that I would need to start believing in myself.Easy for him to say, I thought. This Austrian composer, who turned 70 last August, was close to the height of his fame. In 2010, the music critic Alex Ross of The New Yorker referred to Haas as “one of the major European composers of his generation,” and in early 2013 the eminent conductor Simon Rattle described Haas’s “In Vain” as “one of the only already acknowledged masterpieces of the 21st century.”Haas had forged an original voice using microtonal materials, or intervals smaller than the minor second, the smallest distance between two notes in standard Western intonation. He mined the unfamiliar density of these sounds to create a primal interplay of tension and release in which shattering tension lived beside wary beauty.I was a 25-year-old with indifferent grades whose homemade instrument had almost clocked someone.But Haas and I had more in common than was immediately obvious. He moved to Switzerland from Graz, Austria, in 2005; I arrived from Salzburg, in the same country, in 2011. We both had high hopes for our lives in Basel but felt ill at ease once we arrived. The city seemed skeptical of outsiders, and the atmosphere at the conservatory could be tense. I only ever seemed to meet gay men my age when I took the seven-hour train ride to Berlin; Haas’s third marriage was in crisis. In Basel, “I lost the ground beneath my feet,” Haas recalled in a recent interview. “I always felt on the defensive.”Haas knew what it felt like to question yourself. Self-belief, he said, “is one of the most fundamental things for me.”I looked forward to Haas’s courses. His private lessons included long silences punctuated by insightful remarks about the music and an occasional sly joke. In seminars, my classmates and I listened to old and new compositions, followed by sometimes raucous discussions about their merits. Haas never discouraged his students from trying an outlandish idea. He would only mention it if he had attempted something similar in a piece and had been disappointed by the result.Georg Friedrich Haas in his New York apartment in 2016.Brian Harkin for The New York TimesHaas didn’t talk to me about self-belief before my disastrous recital, but he modeled the trait by treating each of his students with respect, no matter how much their aesthetic preferences differed from his own. While studying with Haas, I became friends with my fellow composing students — Ryan Beppel, Arash Yazdani and William Dougherty, as well as Klartag — at least partially because Haas discouraged students from jockeying for position. “There was a kind of utopia in that classroom,” Beppel recalled. “We were really supportive of each other, which I now know isn’t always the case in creative circles.”For his part, Haas said that he sees “it as a certain logic in my work as a teacher that I try to accept every person who composes music as he or she is, and pass that on to the others.”He was enthusiastic about the wildest, least practical idea of my composing days: a piece for six ambulances driving around an audience. Their speeds would be carefully calibrated to create different layers of the Doppler effect, or the bending in a note that we perceive when sound passes us by. For obvious reasons, the piece was never performed.By the day of my recital, Haas and I both had our escapes from Basel planned. He was going to New York to become a music professor at Columbia University. I was going to Berlin to become a waiter at an American-style diner.Haas was so focused on moving that he now has no memory of our conversation at my concert. “I was at a complete dead end, and I had to get out,” he said. “I was unbelievably lucky that I was offered a way out.”His opera “Thomas,” which premiered in May 2013, encapsulates that feeling of suffocation. Based on a libretto by Händl Klaus, the work focuses on the title character, whose boyfriend, Matthias, has just died in a hospital. Thomas grieves but must interact with the businesslike functionaries of death. The instrumental music is often skeletal, with an ensemble consisting almost entirely of plucked instruments, their quick decays a reminder of transience. The opera expresses an existential loneliness eased only by the gentle shimmer of its microtonal harmonies.Once Haas began teaching at Columbia, his life changed rapidly. He met Mollena Williams, a writer, performer and alternative lifestyle activist, on OkCupid. Haas had long wanted a partner who shared his interest in B.D.S.M. and dominant-submissive dynamics. After decades of suppressing that desire, he found someone in New York who shared it. They married in 2015, and she now goes by Mollena Williams-Haas. The couple has collaborated on works such as “Hyena,” for which Williams-Haas wrote and performed a text about alcohol withdrawal, accompanied by Haas’s music.Since his move to New York, Haas, whom I remembered as a shy teacher, has been blunt about his past. Shortly after their wedding, he and Williams-Haas spoke with The New York Times about their relationship, describing how their shared kink encouraged their creativity. Later that year, Haas told Die Zeit that he was raised by a family that remained ideologically close to Nazis after the end of World War II.“The monsters,” Haas told the newspaper, “they were my parents and grandparents.”“The Artist and the Pervert,” an intimate documentary about Haas and Williams-Haas, premiered in 2018. When the composer moved to the United States, “There was the thought, ‘I’m in New York now and New York is big, New York is anonymous, I could do what I want and no one will notice,’” he said. “That concept didn’t quite work.”Klartag, my classmate, followed Haas to Columbia from Basel to pursue his doctorate in composition, and found his teacher transformed. “He was very shy and introverted, at least with the students, in Basel,” Klartag said. “In New York, he really opened up, was very outgoing, outspoken.”In 2022, Haas published a German-language memoir that goes into greater detail about his past, “Durch vergiftete Zeiten: Memoiren eines Nazibuben” (“Through Poisoned Times: Memoirs of a Nazi Boy”). His grandfather, the architect Fritz Haas, joined the Nazi Party in 1934, when the organization was still illegal in Austria. Haas’s father attempted to raise young Georg in the same ideology. While he was studying in Graz, from 1972 to 1979, Haas realized that Nazi sympathies remained among some Austrian composers. He described physical abuse at the hands of his family and sexual abuse at the hands of his schoolmates.Maybe most painfully, the book explores the roots and manifestations of the composer’s own Fascist views, which he held until his early 20s.I studied in Austria almost 30 years later than Haas, at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg. I had excellent teachers and an absurdly generous number of private lessons. But I can imagine the environment in which Haas learned. Once, I borrowed an obscure Mozart score from the university library. The cover page was emblazoned with a Third Reich seal.For Haas, his memoir was an act of exorcism that freed him to devote all his energies to music. “I’ve made peace with myself,” he wrote in the book. “The past is behind me. I still have much to do.”My youth, in Jewish, progressive Brookline, Mass., was much easier and happier than Haas’s. But conservatories have a way of instilling doubt in all but their most exceptional students, and although I don’t compose anymore, I’m still absorbing his broader lesson about self-belief. Recently, Haas brought up my old idea of the piece for ambulances. “It’s really a shame that we weren’t able to continue it,” he said.I couldn’t keep a miniature loudspeaker attached to a whirling string, but he trusted me to compose for real ambulances, he said, “like a 5-year-old child in the clouds somewhere playing with his cars.”In 2020, Haas wrote a piece of similarly fantastical ambition. Titled “11.000 Saiten” (“11,000 Strings”), the work, which premiered last August in Bolzano, Italy, is composed for chamber orchestra and 50 upright pianos, each tuned at the microscopic interval of two cents from the next. (Cents measure the difference between musical intervals; a minor second, the smallest distance between two notes in standard Western intonation, is a hundred cents.)Swarming “microclusters” created by this tuning morph in and out of radiant, complex overtone harmonies. Though the title refers to the number of strings in the ensemble, it also recalls Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1907 pornographic, sadomasochistic novel “The Eleven Thousand Rods.”“11.000 Saiten” is a culmination of the past decade in Haas’s life. Now, he wants to encourage self-discovery, no matter how oblique, in others. As he did for me.“My dream as a teacher,” Haas said, “is when something keeps growing underground, like a rhizome, and then at a different place grows into a different plant.” More

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      Jay Clayton, Vocal Innovator in Jazz and Beyond, Dies at 82

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      She sparred with avant-garde instrumentalists and used electronics to alter and extend her vocal palette. She was also at home in more conventional settings.Jay Clayton, a singer whose six-decade career encompassed freewheeling improvisation, lyrical songs and poetry, and the prescient use of electronics, died on Dec. 31 at her home in New Paltz, N.Y. She was 82.Her daughter, Dejha Colantuono, said the cause was small-cell lung cancer.Ms. Clayton established herself as an innovator in the 1970s and ’80s, sparring with instrumentalists in avant-garde settings and using electronics to alter and extend her vocal palette well before the practice became common. She worked frequently with other singers — she formed an especially close bond with Sheila Jordan, an early mentor — and she sang in playfully aerobatic vocal groups with peers like Jeanne Lee, Ursula Dudziak, Norma Winstone and Bobby McFerrin.“She works in the familiar avant-garde terrain of wordless, spontaneous improvisations in duo and group settings,” the critic Jon Garelick wrote of her work in The Boston Phoenix in 1990. “But Clayton is also a warm, gracious interpreter of lyric standards, and this lyricism pervades all her work.”Ms. Clayton in 1969. She fell in with the downtown jazz scene after moving to New York in 1963.via Clayton familyShe performed for a decade with the composer Steve Reich, participating in the development and recording of breakthrough pieces like “Drumming,” “Music for 18 Musicians” and “Tehillim.” She also worked closely with dancers and choreographers early in her career, and she maintained an enduring collaboration with the tap dancer Brenda Bufalino.A prominent and influential teacher, Ms. Clayton held positions at the City College of New York, the Peabody Institute and Princeton University. She developed a vocal program for the Banff Center in Alberta, Canada, where she taught with Ms. Jordan. The two further collaborated in training programs in Massachusetts and Vermont and ran a celebrated retreat for singers at Willow Lane Farm in Berne, N.Y., near Albany.Prominent among Ms. Clayton’s students are the composer Karen Goldfeder and the protean vocal improviser Theo Bleckmann. But through her widespread pedagogy — including a book, “Sing Your Story: A Practical Guide for Learning and Teaching the Art of Jazz Singing,” published in 2001 — her progeny are legion.She was born Judith Theresa Colantone on Oct. 28, 1941, in Youngstown, Ohio. Her father, William Colantone, was a carpenter and construction worker; her mother, Josephine (Armeni) Colantone, had sung professionally during the big-band era.Ms. Clayton took up the accordion and later had several years of piano lessons. After high school, she attended a summer program at the St. Louis Institute of Music and then enrolled at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she received a bachelor’s degree in music education in 1963. Since jazz courses were not available, she studied classical repertoire while quietly polishing her improvisational skills on weekend dates with a local trombonist.A prominent and influential teacher, Ms. Clayton was the author of what she called “a practical guide” to the study of jazz singing/No creditAfter moving to New York City in 1963, Ms. Clayton fell in with the downtown jazz scene and formed an early association with the soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy. Through him, she met the drummer Frank Clayton, with whom she began a relationship in 1965. In 1967, the couple started a concert series, “Jazz at the Loft,” in their home on Lispenard Street, in the neighborhood later called TriBeCa, presenting performances by the saxophonist Sam Rivers, the pianist Joanne Brackeen and others. They married in 1968.Not long afterward, Ms. Clayton was introduced to Mr. Reich by the singer Joan La Barbara, who was her student. What he sought, he said in a phone interview, was a “modern-day equivalent” of Ella Fitzgerald: someone who could perform his music with spontaneity as well as precision.Ms. Clayton fit the bill. “Her pitch was dead-on, and her rhythm was a lift to the spirit,” Mr. Reich said. “She grasped what had to be done, and she did it to perfection.”Flourishing among her fellow innovators and iconoclasts, Ms. Clayton led educational workshops with Jeanne Lee and performed with the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams at the Public Theater in 1979. That same year, she consulted on the first Women in Jazz festival, produced by Cobi Narita (who died in November).In 1981, Ms. Clayton released her first album, “All-Out,” a wide-ranging statement with an ensemble that included Mr. Clayton, the pianist Larry Karush, the saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom, the vocalist Shelley Hirsch and others. On several tracks Ms. Clayton sang swooping, soaring lines in tandem with Ms. Bloom, a recent arrival from New Haven, Conn., whom Ms. Clayton had taken under her wing.“From the minute she and I met, we had this linear synchronicity,” Ms. Bloom said in an interview. “There’s something about the combination of her sound and my sound: We played lines together, and it was like this other instrument.” They collaborated for decades.In 1982, Ms. Clayton, her husband and their two children moved to Seattle, where she taught at the Cornish School, now Cornish College of the Arts. When she and Mr. Clayton divorced in 1984, she remained in Seattle, developing a new circle of collaborators that included the drummer Jerry Granelli, the trombonist Julian Priester, the bassist and the saxophonist Briggan Krauss.Ms. Clayton, center, in the 1980s with, from left, the pianist Larry Karush, the bassist Harvie Swartz, the drummer Frank Clayton and the saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom.via Clayton familyShe recorded works by the experimental composer John Cage in the late 1980s and returned to Mr. Reich’s music on occasion. Her jazz recordings from those years include “Beautiful Love,” a 1995 album devoted to vintage popular standards with the pianist Fred Hersch.“I always think that doing standard material lets you know where somebody’s coming from,” Mr. Hersch said in an interview, likening the practice to a painter rendering a still life or a nude. “In Jay’s case, a lot of it is very hauntingly beautiful, and pretty fierce in terms of improvising.”Ms. Clayton moved back to New York in 2002, re-establishing a local presence both alone and in collaboration with Ms. Jordan. She made a stream of recordings for the Sunnyside label, ranging from a lyrical tribute to the songwriter Harry Warren to an adventurous electronic fantasia involving poetry by Emily Dickinson, made with the composer and pianist Kirk Nurock.She was diagnosed with aggressive lung cancer in December 2022. Her final recording, “Voices in Flight,” a collaboration with the singer Judy Niemack, was released in June.In addition to her daughter, Ms. Clayton is survived by her brother, William Colantone Jr.; her son, Dov Clayton; and two grandchildren.To the end, Ms. Clayton remained devoted to her students. “She was always just exactly herself, personally and musically,” Ms. Goldfeder wrote in a Facebook post; “it’s one of the many ways she was a great teacher.” More

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      Hilary Hahn Announced as Avery Fisher Prize Winner at Philharmonic Concert

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      The star violinist’s appearance as artist in residence included an announcement that she had received the $100,000 Avery Fisher Prize.After the concerto, after the encore, there was still more business to take care of when Hilary Hahn appeared with the New York Philharmonic on Thursday.She returned to the stage of David Geffen Hall, joined by Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s former leader, and Gary Ginstling, its current one. They had an announcement to make: Hahn — at 44 a star violinist for four decades — had been awarded the Avery Fisher Prize, a $100,000 honor that rewards the good citizens of classical music who have complemented artistic excellence with lasting contributions to the field.Those contributions are varied but often affirm the vitality of the art form. The violinist Midori, who won in 2001, tours like a roving artist in residence, working with young musicians in small towns far from music capitals like Boston and New York; the flutist Claire Chase, the 2017 winner, is a passionate educator at work on a decades-long project to modernize her instrument’s repertoire; and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma (1978) — well, what isn’t he doing?Even as a teenager, Hahn was much more than a prodigy. She has always made herself accessible to fans, whether entertaining the longest of autograph lines or letting the public in on her practice sessions on social media. (If you come across #100daysofpractice on Instagram or TikTok, she started that.) She has been a prolific commissioner who insists on recording the works she premieres. And her community engagement, like her “Bring Your Own Baby” concerts for parents and their infants, is as endearing as it is genuinely valuable.If only there were more than just a taste of all this at the Philharmonic, where Hahn is the artist in residence this season. Thursday’s performance was the first in a series that will include one more subscription program, an evening of Bach solo works and a Nightcap show with the New York City Ballet principal dancer Tiler Peck.Hahn has done much more in the same post at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where she has been in residence since the 2021-22 season. There, she has collaborated with local youth initiatives, and revived her “Bring Your Own Baby” concerts. Her encore from Thursday, Steven Banks’s “Through My Mother’s Eyes,” was written for her time in Chicago.At the Philharmonic, we just get Hahn the performer. Which, to be fair, is quite something. Her account of Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto exemplified the golden-age richness and astonishing technique that have long made her a standout in a crowded field. She handles her instrument like a great soprano handles her voice, with muscular lyricism and a luminously penetrating sound capable of reaching the farthest seats at a whisper.There was a sense of that deceptive softness in a whistling trill near the end of the piece, and as she generously partnered with members of the orchestra: her strumming paired with the wandering melody of Anthony McGill’s clarinet; her muted twinkle adding new color to the opening theme as it flowed from Robert Langevin’s flute.Elsewhere in the concerto, the orchestra plays a largely supportive role. And it was sensitively balanced yet sufficiently distinct under the baton of Jakub Hrusa, a guest conductor who tends to tame and enliven the Philharmonic’s forceful sound, with a feeling for dramatic shape that befits his recent appointment to the podium of the Royal Opera House in London.The ensemble was both larger and more showcased in the evening’s opening work, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Ballade,” from 1898, which had its Philharmonic debut on Thursday. Some in the audience might have been unfamiliar with this chronically underprogrammed composer, but his alluringly chromatic score had much to please them: the lush orchestration of Brahms and Romantic gestures of Tchaikovsky, tightly packaged with the breathlessness of a Dvorak concert overture.Naturally more of a showcase for the players, though, was Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, a beloved reimagining of the Baroque concerto grosso for the 20th century. In a work obsessively precise in its construction — a love letter to sonata and arch forms that unfurls as a roll call of virtuosity — the Philharmonic and Hrusa were freely organic and sounded revelrous, with smiles accompanying the parodic passages of the fourth-movement Intermezzo interrotto.It was touching for the Bartok to follow the announcement of Hahn’s award. Because while workaday musicians might not have the glamour of a star soloist, they are no less essential to the ecosystem. Not for nothing does McGill, the Philharmonic’s principal clarinet, have an Avery Fisher Prize, too.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Franz Welser-Möst to Leave the Cleveland Orchestra

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      One night last fall, Franz Welser-Möst, the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, walked onto the stage of Severance Hall, crossed over to the podium and faced the audience. He was neither solemn nor particularly expressive; he just flashed a Mona Lisa smile before turning to the players and gesturing the downbeat of a Mozart symphony.For the regulars in the audience, this was a familiar sight. Welser-Möst, 63, is known more for his authoritative, even demanding, conducting than for his showmanship. And what followed that night was also familiar, as the orchestra turned out a program of the Mozart, a new percussion concerto and a Tchaikovsky rarity at the exhilaratingly high level that has led many to call this ensemble the finest in America.Unflashy yet unmatched. Such is the culture of the Cleveland Orchestra, an oasis of excellence, maintained and nurtured since Welser-Möst became its music director in 2002. And while there is more to come — the orchestra opens Welser-Möst’s Perspectives series with a pair of concerts at Carnegie Hall on Jan. 20 and 21 — the end of his tenure is in sight: He announced on Thursday that he would not renew his contract when it expires in 2027, which is relatively soon given the far-ahead planning cycles of classical music. More

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      An Opera Superfan’s Surprise Gift: $1.7 Million for the Arts

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      Lois Kirschenbaum, who died in 2021, made the donations to cultural groups from unexpectedly large life savings.When Lois Kirschenbaum, a cultural aficionado who was a fixture at the Metropolitan Opera for more than half a century, died in 2021 at 88, star singers gave tributes and fellow fans offered remembrances.But that was not the end of Kirschenbaum’s relationship with the arts.Though even her closest friends didn’t know, Kirschenbaum, a former switchboard operator who lived in a rent-controlled apartment in the East Village, had made plans to give away a large share of her life savings — some $1.7 million — to cultural groups upon her death. After years of legal proceedings, donations of $215,000 apiece have started to arrive, surprising groups like New York City Opera, American Ballet Theater, Carnegie Hall and the Public Theater.“I was just astonished,” said John Hauser, the president of the George and Nora London Foundation for Singers, one of the recipients. “I had no idea that she had that kind of money.”Kirschenbaum had no spouse, siblings or children, and lived a no-frills lifestyle, working as a switchboard operator for the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian aid organization, until her retirement in 2004. On most nights, she traveled by bus and subway to Lincoln Center, where she secured free or cheap tickets just before performances began.Kirschenbaum was known to rush to collect autographs after performances at the Metropolitan Opera.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesElena Villafane, a lawyer for the executor of the estate, said that Kirschenbaum had “an incredibly frugal, Depression-era lifestyle.” Her father was an optometrist who died in 1990, Villafane said; his first and second wives died before him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More