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      Channeling the Pain of Chinese Immigrants, in Music and Verse

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      “Angel Island,” an oratorio by Huang Ruo, brings to life the stark poetry of Chinese detained on the California island in the first part of the 20th century.In “Angel Island,” a staged oratorio about the anguish and isolation of Chinese detainees at Angel Island Immigration Station in California, a choir recites a poem about tyranny and misfortune.“Like a stray dog forced into confinement, like a pig trapped in a bamboo cage, our spirits are lost in this wintry prison,” they sing in Chinese. “We are worse than horses and cattle. Our tears shed on an icy day.”The poem is one of more than 200 inscribed on barrack walls at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, where hundreds of thousands of people, mostly from China and Japan, were questioned and held — sometimes for months or even years — as they sought entry to the United States in the first part of the 20th century. Their harrowing accounts form the emotional core of “Angel Island,” by the Chinese-born composer Huang Ruo, which has its New York premiere this month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in a staging that is part of the opera and theater festival Prototype.The production, directed by Matthew Ozawa and featuring the Del Sol Quartet and members of the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, shines light on life at Angel Island, the port of entry for many Asian immigrants from 1910 to 1940, whose punishing atmosphere stood in contrast to the more welcoming spirit of Ellis Island.Angel Island, in San Francisco Bay, in 1949.San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers, via Getty ImagesOfficials examine Japanese immigrants on a ship at Angel Island in 1931.Corbis HistoricalThe oratorio also tackles the legacy of injustice and discrimination against people of Asian descent in America, weaving in historical events, including the 1871 massacre of Chinese residents in Los Angeles and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned the immigration of laborers from China.Huang described “Angel Island” as activist art, saying he wanted to “give people history that they didn’t learn in school.”“This is not just a Chinese American story,” he said. “This is an American story.”The oratorio, which premiered on Angel Island in 2021, comes to the stage at a time of heightened concern about the treatment of Asians and Asian Americans in the United States, following the wave of violence against people of Asian descent during the early years of the coronavirus pandemic.“Angel Island” hints at parallels between past and present — highlighting, for example, racist portrayals of Asians as carriers of disease in the late 1800s, a precursor to the pandemic’s xenophobia and the use of the “Chinese virus” label to describe Covid-19.In Ozawa’s staging, the dancer Jie-Hung Connie Shiau plays a modern-day woman who uncovers artifacts explaining her great-grandmother’s immigration to the United States. Through film and movement, she immerses herself in the world of her ancestors.The composer Huang Ruo at a recent rehearsal of “Angel Island.” “This is not just a Chinese American story,” he said. “This is an American story.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOzawa, who is Japanese American, said that taking part in “Angel Island,” which features a largely Asian American cast and creative team, was difficult because of the rawness of the history. But the work could also be uplifting.“It’s painful to be reminded of racism and prejudice and exclusion, but simultaneously it is very cathartic to be open with it and to allow ourselves to feel what our ancestors have felt and know that we’re not alone,” he said. “We are actually part of a much larger story that is filled with hope, redemption and the power to change things.”Huang and the Del Sol Quartet, which is based in San Francisco, began working on “Angel Island” in 2017, when they received a $150,000 grant from the Hewlett Foundation to create an oratorio about the detainees. The immigrants, who came from China, Japan, India, Russia and elsewhere, faced overcrowded and unsanitary conditions at Angel Island. They were typically held for weeks or months, though some were detained for as long as two years. Ultimately, many were deported.Charlton Lee, a Chinese American violist in the quartet, had pitched the idea of an Angel Island project to Huang, who had previously collaborated with Del Sol, including on chamber performances of Huang’s music ahead of the American premiere of his first opera, “Dr. Sun Yat-sen,” in 2014. Lee, who had been impressed by Huang’s ability to set Chinese text to music, said he thought the history of Angel Island had been neglected.“We’re staring at Angel Island all the time — it’s in the middle of the bay — but people don’t know about the detention center,” he said. “They don’t know about the plight of these immigrants who were trying to come here, start a new life and were just stuck.”Members of the Choir of Trinity Wall Street rehearsing in Brooklyn.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn 2018, Huang and the quartet visited the island, now a state park. They examined the poems, written in classical Chinese, in which detainees described feelings of anger, fear and homesickness. They began to improvise inside the barracks, with members of the quartet accompanying Huang as he sang a melody in Chinese.“Being in that spot — it was haunting,” he said, “but it was also heartwarming to bring something alive back to a place that was so dead.”Huang selected a few poems to set to music: “The Seascape,” “When We Bade Farewell” and “Buried Beneath Clay and Earth.” He added in historical writings to be read aloud with accompaniment by the quartet. These included a discussion of the Los Angeles massacre in 1871, when a mob shot or hanged at least 18 Chinese residents; a list of questions used by American immigration officials in the late 1800s to assess whether Asian women were prostitutes; and an essay by Henry Josiah West from 1873 warning of a “Chinese invasion.”“The question” West wrote, “is shall we submit to the growth of this heathen Chinese Republic?”In 2021, after a yearlong delay caused by the pandemic, Huang and the Del Sol Quartet returned to Angel Island for the premiere.Lee said it was jarring to hear the music in the barracks, which he had seen as dark and foreboding.“It felt like the spirits were just coming out of the walls,” he said. “It’s almost like we performed some kind of ritual and all of a sudden these people who had suffered — they were able to smile.”Immigrants arriving at Angel Island’s quarantine station around 1911.Fotosearch/Getty ImagesSince then, “Angel Island” has been performed several more times, including in Berkeley, Calif., Washington and Singapore.Huang has recently expanded the piece, adding another poem, “The Ocean Encircles a Lone Peak,” and a movement about Fang Lang, a Chinese survivor of the Titanic shipwreck who was barred from entering the United States because of the Exclusion Act.The New York production is the first full staging of “Angel Island.” Dancers are featured throughout, and film plays an important role, with historical footage and videos of Angel Island, shot by Bill Morrison, projected on screens. Choir members mimic carving Chinese characters and poems.“This is really the manifestation of a community,” Ozawa said. “You want the audience fully immersed and to experience a sense of hypnotic ritualism.”And, he added, he would like the story to resonate with a broad audience.“Angel Island is still living and breathing within the bodies of so many Asian Americans,” he said. “My true hope is that we all recall, connect and learn from our personal heritage, our past, our ancestor’s experience coming to America, but also feel empowered by the material to ignite discourse, empathy and understanding toward those newly coming into the country.”The director Matthew Ozawa, center, said: “This is really the manifestation of a community. You want the audience fully immersed and to experience a sense of hypnotic ritualism.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe detainees’ poems remain at the center of “Angel Island” and give the work its spiritual grounding.Huang, who came to the United States as a student in the 1990s, stopping first in San Francisco, said he could relate to many of the poems.“There is that same feeling of what it means to leave your family behind,” he said, “and of coming to a place in hopes of a new life and not knowing what is ahead of you.”At the end of “Angel Island,” members of the choir leave the stage and encircle the audience, a gesture meant to help them feel part of the community of detainees.The final poem in the oratorio describes leaving Angel Island and preparing to return home. It speaks of jingwei, a mythological bird that tries to fill the sea with twigs and stones:Obstacles have been put in my way for half a year,Melancholy and hate gather on my face.Now that I must return to my country,I have toiled like the jingwei bird in vain. More

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      Review: The Philharmonic’s Maestro Revels in the Classics

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      Jaap van Zweden returned to the orchestra for the first time since October with a conservative lineup of works by Wagner, Beethoven and Brahms.With the new year, it’s the homestretch for Jaap van Zweden’s six-year tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic, which ends this spring.But even on their way out, chief conductors don’t lead their orchestras that much. Before this week, van Zweden hadn’t been on the Philharmonic’s podium since early October, and after Sunday he won’t return until mid-March.So Thursday’s concert at David Geffen Hall was an island in a sea of guest batons. And it was about as van Zweden-esque as a program could be, consisting of nothing but standards: the kind of music that this maestro most relishes, and what he was brought to New York to enforce discipline in.These days, if a major orchestra is going to play classic repertoire like Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto and Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, as the Philharmonic did on Thursday, it tends to precede it with a short contemporary piece in the opening slot. Window dressing, maybe, but it’s become the norm.So it was almost radical to instead give that position to the Act I Prelude from Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” probably the most-played chestnut of the evening. (For what it’s worth, audiences don’t seem to mind: The weekend’s run of four performances — rather than the usual three — is all but sold out.)The Wagner turned out to be the weakest point in an otherwise very fine concert. This was a flowing, not stodgy, take on the “Meistersinger” prelude, bringing the winds and brasses to the fore, their lines audible even in passages that usually spotlight the rich strings. While the sound wasn’t heavy, especially at loud dynamics it still emphasized the unpleasant way that, in densely massed music, the stark lucidity of Geffen Hall’s acoustics can tip into brittle blare rather than warm blend.This was less of a problem for the pared-down ensemble in the Beethoven concerto, though both here and in the Brahms, there was sleekness in the high strings without meaty heft; I kept wanting more depth to the violin sound. But there was considerable spirit and some evocative hushed playing. Again and again in the concerto, van Zweden cast a dreamlike glow without losing rhythmic tightness or momentum.And the performance boasted an immaculate soloist in Rudolf Buchbinder, nearing 80 and playing with patrician reserve and clarity, neither indulgent nor detached. At the start of the second movement, his tone was poignantly wounded in the face of orchestral aggression; in the finale, he was the ensemble’s graceful partner.The Brahms symphony was also clean and straightforward: precisely done, its tempos reasonable. The second movement developed eloquently from muted and funereal to noble and grand before a hearty third, and a fourth that was more sober and reflective than raging. This wasn’t a thrilling performance, but it was a considered and satisfying one.And it was part of a trend. When van Zweden last led the Philharmonic, in October, on the program was Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto and Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony. In those pieces and on Thursday, I didn’t feel the rigidly tense, mannered, punchy quality that has marred some of his performances. This Beethoven and Brahms were strong without being overbearing, shaped but with room to breathe.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Sunday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Willa Cather and Yehudi Menuhin: An Unlikely, Unwavering Friendship

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      These two titans of 20th-century literature and music formed a profound, yearslong relationship across generations and backgrounds.Early in 1935, a blizzard blew through New York City. The storm was so fierce, it virtually emptied Central Park. But Willa Cather spent her morning there, sledding with the violin prodigy Yehudi Menuhin and his sisters.Afterward, they all went to the Ansonia Hotel on the Upper West Side, where the Menuhins were living, for an intimate lunch — just the family, the violinist Sam Franko and Cather, along with her companion, Edith Lewis. “It was a lovely party, with the whole world outside lost in snow,” Cather, the author of American classics like “My Ántonia” and “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” wrote to her friend Carrie Miner Sherwood. “Inside, perfect harmony!”This idyll gets a passing mention in Benjamin Taylor’s brisk new biography, “Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather,” though it was one of many in the yearslong friendship of Menuhin and Cather, two titans of 20th-century culture — he a musician and she a writer whose works exude a passion for music.Their relationship was an unlikely one. Menuhin was a famous child with a busy performance schedule; Cather, several decades older, was in retreat from the modern world and skeptical of celebrity (even her own). Yet across generations and backgrounds, they formed a deep bond. She gave him a literary education, while he fed her love of music. With both of their lives in motion, they were a mutual source of stability and support, whether he was storing his sled in her Park Avenue apartment building or they were leaning on each other through loss, heartbreak and infirmity.They met when Menuhin was a young teenager, in 1930; both were in Paris and she was introduced to his family by shared friends. Cather was also struck by his younger sisters, writing to her nieces that the girls, Hephzibah and Yaltah, musicians too, were “almost as gifted and quite as handsome as he.”The next year, back in the United States, Menuhin was on a West Coast tour that coincided with Cather’s visit to her mother in Pasadena, Calif., and the two picked up where they had left off. Cather was so taken with Menuhin that she wanted to dedicate her next novel, “Shadows on the Rock,” to him and his siblings.A profile of her published that August in The New Yorker — one that described her prose “as surely counterpointed as music” — said that she “picked her intimates with care,” and that “she admires big careers and ambitious, strong characters, especially if they are the careers and characters of women. The most fortunate and most exciting of human beings, to her mind, is a singer with a pure, big voice and unerring musical taste.”The Menuhin children, instrumentalists born in America to Lithuanian Jews, didn’t fit that bill exactly, but enough for a quickly flourishing relationship. They called Cather Aunt Willa, and she loved them as if they were family. She kept what her friend Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant remembered as “a melting, angelic photograph of young Yehudi Menuhin” prominently displayed in her apartment, and frequently crossed Central Park to spend time with him and his sisters at the Ansonia.In his memoir, “Unfinished Journey,” Menuhin wrote that Cather was “a rock of strength and sweetness,” but also that “her strength had a patience and evenness which did not preclude a certain severity.”“Her mannish figure and country tweediness, her let’s-lay-it-on-the-table manners and unconcealed blue eyes, her rosy skin and energetic demeanor,” Menuhin wrote, “bespoke a phenomenon as strangely comforting to us all as it was foreign, something in the grain like Christian Temperance or the Girl Scout movement.” (The New Yorker said that she, “in spite of her Irish-Alsatian ancestry, her American upbringing, has a strain of Tartar in her temperament.”)Cather, right, traveling to Europe in 1902 with others including, at left, Isabelle McClung, who would later introduce Cather to Menuhin.University of Nebraska-LincolnCather gave Menuhin books of Heinrich Heine’s poetry and Goethe’s “Faust” in German, and would pick up used copies of Shakespeare plays for him and his sisters. “In our apartment,” Menuhin wrote, “there was a little room, nobody’s property in particular, small enough to be cozy, and furnished with a table around which Aunt Willa, Hephzibah, Yaltah, myself and often Aunt Willa’s companion, Edith Lewis, gathered for Shakespearean readings, each taking several parts, and Aunt Willa commenting on the language and situations in such a way as to draw us into her own pleasure and excitement.”She was, Menuhin thought, “the embodiment of America — but an America which has long ago disappeared.” Still, with a Henry James-like sensibility, treasuring new-world determination and hope alongside old-world refinement and tradition, she also impressed upon them European values. Through their peripatetic lives they occupied both cultures; and for them, she was a bridge.Even as Menuhin became an adult and Cather’s writing fixated increasingly on the past, their relationship remained strong. He would send her flowers and orange trees in winter. She would notify friends of his New York concerts and radio broadcasts. They went to “Parsifal” at the Metropolitan Opera, and saw Paul Robeson and Uta Hagen in “Othello” on Broadway. No matter the weather, they enjoyed walks in Central Park; her favorite path took them around the reservoir.Cather was protective of his reputation. In letters, she reminded people that “anything about my doings with the Menuhins is confidential,” and once wrote, “I scarcely dare whisper any fact or opinion about them for fear of seeing myself quoted in The New York Times.” (She was, beyond this, so private that she didn’t want any of her correspondence, as well as the draft of her unfinished final novel, to survive her death.)When Menuhin was navigating young love, Cather was a font of advice — “I always have your future very much at heart,” she told him in one letter — and gushed over his marriage to Nola Nicholas. “No artist ever made such a fortunate marriage,” Cather wrote to her friend Zoë Akins. “Yehudi loves goodness more than anything, (I mean beautiful goodness) and she has it.”When Cather was homebound for four weeks with bronchitis, Yehudi and Nola Menuhin visited her nearly every day; he tended to the fire, and she made tea. He was even more of a solace as Cather experienced loss: the deaths of her brothers and of her old friend Isabelle McClung Hambourg, who had introduced Cather and Menuhin.Little, however, could lift her from the depressive isolation that followed her surgery for breast cancer in early 1946. She wasn’t seeing any friends, “not even Yehudi,” and wasn’t even listening to music, she wrote to her sister-in-law Meta Cather. “I have simply had, for the present, to cut out all the things I loved most.”Cather would make it out again; her last night on the town was to see Menuhin play at Carnegie Hall. Then, in March 1947, he visited her at home with his two children. Hephzibah was there, too, with her husband and two boys. “Here we all were (the children only were new), the rest of us were sitting in these rooms just as we used to meet here every week 10 and 12 years ago,” Cather recounted in a letter the next day.The Menuhins were stopping by on their way to board the Queen Elizabeth. About an hour an a half before it was to set sail, they “quietly rose,” Cather recalled, then “without any flurry, dropped in the elevator to the street floor.” Seemingly understood but unspoken was that this would be the last time they saw one another. Cather died in April.In the letter about that final visit, Cather said that this friendship had been “one of the chief interests and joys of my life.” She went as far as to say that she would rather have almost any other chapter of her life left out than that of her time with Menuhin and his sisters. Even then, as adults, they felt like dear children to her, Aunt Willa.“Today,” she said at the end of the letter, “these rooms seem actually full of their presence and their faithful, loving friendship.” More

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      The Metropolitan Opera Moves Bizet’s ‘Carmen’ to America

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      Starring a magnetic Aigul Akhmetshina, Carrie Cracknell’s lethargic staging updates Bizet’s opera to present-day America.The Metropolitan Opera says its new production of “Carmen” aims at “reinvigorating the classic story.”To that end, the director Carrie Cracknell has updated Bizet’s tale of a heedless, headstrong woman and her tragic fate from early-19th-century Spain to present-day America. It seems that the action has been placed somewhere along the border with Mexico, where guns are smuggled in long-haul trucks and rodeo riders (rather than the libretto’s toreadors) are local celebrities.But this change — intended “to find the relevance to contemporary concerns” in the piece, as Cracknell says in an interview in the program — ends up being little change at all. The bland, lethargic staging, which opened on New Year’s Eve, falls into the pattern of so many of the Met’s updatings: It is, almost gesture for gesture, the same as any extra-stale traditional “Carmen,” just dressed up in cutoff jeans and trucker hats instead of flamenco skirts and castanets.Don’t be fooled. The only truly impressive aspect of this “Carmen” is its Carmen: the 27-year-old mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina, in turquoise cowboy boots. Though this icon of the repertory is her first leading role at the Met, she seems unfazed by the pressure, singing with easily penetrating evenness and clarity, never needing to push. Her molten yet agile tone can be confiding one moment and extroverted the next, and she moves with magnetic naturalness onstage.But she suffers from a staging that lacks passion, wit, depth and variety. Cracknell, who is making her Met debut, describes her directorial approach as “looking through a feminist lens.” Perhaps because harshness or darkness in the title character could be perceived as antifeminist — as Carmen somehow provoking her ex-lover to kill her rather than lose her — Akhmetshina’s take on the part is fundamentally sweet and sincere, well-meaning and fun-loving. Even her seductiveness is gently nonthreatening, with the same old hand-on-hip mannerisms as the Carmens of a century ago.The other leading artists are still more at sea. As the opera’s ingénue, the soprano Angel Blue swings up to excitingly free high notes, but her voice pales a bit and wavers with vibrato lower down — and the production can’t decide whether it wants the standard meek Micaëla or a more assertive woman. As Escamillo, here a selfie-taking rodeo star rather than a bullfighter, the bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen swaggers just enough to remain sympathetic, his sound compactly resonant.Akhmetshina and the tenor Rafael Davila, who played Don José in the production’s New Year’s Eve opening.Ken Howard/Metropolitan OperaOn Sunday, the tenor Rafael Davila had the tough assignment of replacing Piotr Beczala, who was announced as ill just a few hours before curtain, as Don José, the soldier whose mania for Carmen drives him from decent country boy to murderous outlaw. Davila’s sturdy voice grew unreliable as it rose, and in a staging seeking to shift as much moral responsibility as possible onto José, he was, oddly, no more violent or volatile than the norm.The conductor Daniele Rustioni kept to moderate, well-judged tempos, and the train always stayed firmly on the tracks, including precise work by the chorus — although that came at the expense of ferocity and sensuality. In the preludes to the third and fourth acts were glimpses of a wilder, more expansive and more beautiful vision of Bizet’s score.Michael Levine’s sets are grandly spare and unevocative. With a high chain-link fence awkwardly shoving much of the action to a thin strip downstage, the first act takes place outside a factory making weapons, rather than the libretto’s cigarettes. Carmen and her merry band make off with a truck that then dominates the second and — crashed and burning on its side — third act. Skeletal, cagelike black bleachers rotate ominously in the fourth.Modern-day touches abound. Ann Yee’s choreography for a little second-act dance party echoes the finger-pumping-in-the-air style of the crowd at a pop show; the rodeo audience does the wave. Tom Scutt’s costumes are plausible Carhartt-ish evocations of today’s border country denizens; Guy Hoare’s lighting veers wildly, naturalistic to stark to frantic.Yet the 21st-century-ness is all on the surface, even if Cracknell’s goal is nothing less than a revolution in the opera’s sexual dynamics. “Ending violence against women and reimagining the depiction of violence against women,” she says, “live at the center of the feminist movement.”But this “Carmen” reimagines nothing. It seems from her interviews that Cracknell wants to emphasize the broader structures of gender and class that make Carmen’s death a societal tragedy instead of an individual crime of passion. But the director struggles to render that distinction legible to the audience.The bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen, as the rodeo star Escamillo, takes a selfie with Akhmetshina and a crowd.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSure, a security guard walks by during Carmen and José’s final confrontation and doesn’t intervene. And at the end, the women in the bleachers at the rodeo rise in solidarity while the men remain seated. But it’s all too little, too late for anything approaching a structural critique — or even just interesting, vibrant theater.Some of Cracknell’s choices, in fact, make the work less provocative. The children’s chorus mimics the changing of the guard in the opera’s opening act; if you’d like, society is training them for militarism. But rather than doubling down, Cracknell has the kids sing directly to the audience, choosing charm over menace.And it’s wrongheaded to imply, as Cracknell does, that the male chauvinism has been suppressed and the violence romanticized in previous “Carmen” productions. At the Met alone, I remember a performance of an old-fashioned Franco Zeffirelli staging around 2000, a few years after it premiered, in which the deadly final scene really did provide the queasy sensation of spying through a window on a murder, with all the attendant feelings of horror, excitement and shame.Richard Eyre’s production, which replaced the Zeffirelli in 2009 and set the work at the time of the Spanish Civil War, introduced a pervading sense of grimness, of the characters being thrown together by forces beyond their control. That was a show in which you certainly felt Carmen’s brooding fate more than her stereotypical insouciance or sex appeal. It made the stakes of the opera clearer and darker than they were on Sunday.And in removing the opera’s exoticizing of Spain as the playground of bandits and Gypsies, Cracknell, who is British, introduces a more insidious exoticizing. As in the Australian director Simon Stone’s 2022 Met staging of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” the frisson of this “Carmen” is its glib depiction of so-called flyover states — the part of the country that fascinates the operagoing elite as much as Seville fascinated 19th-century Paris.There’s something depressing, even corrosive, in taking such a superficial glance at our fellow Americans, when — especially as an election year dawns — our cultural institutions should be trying to help us understand one another.CarmenThrough Jan. 27, and returning in the spring with a new cast, at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Willie Ruff, Jazz Missionary and Professor, Dies at 92

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      A master of the French horn, a rarity in jazz, he toured the world with the pianist Dwike Mitchell and taught music at Yale.Willie Ruff, who fashioned an unlikely career in jazz as a French horn player and toured the world as a musical missionary in the acclaimed Mitchell-Ruff Duo while maintaining a parallel career at the Yale School of Music, died on Sunday at his home in Killen, Ala. He was 92.His death was confirmed by his niece Jennifer Green.Mr. Ruff, who was also a bassist, played both bass and French horn in the duo he formed with the pianist Dwike Mitchell in 1955, which lasted until Mr. Mitchell’s death in 2013. They opened for many jazz luminaries, including Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Sarah Vaughan; played countless concerts in schools and colleges; and toured foreign countries where jazz was little known or even taboo.In 1959, they flouted edicts against music that the Soviet Union deemed bourgeois, performing an impromptu set in Moscow while on tour with the Yale Russian Chorus. Their concerts in China in 1981 were considered the first jazz performances there since the Cultural Revolution.A globe-trotting musical career, however, seemed a remote possibility when Mr. Ruff was growing up in a small Southern town during the Great Depression.Mr. Ruff, left, and Dwike Mitchell, right, in November 1959 with the classical pianists Lev Vlassenko, second from left, and Van Cliburn. Mr. Ruff and Mr. Mitchell met in the Army and in 1955 formed the Mitchell-Ruff Duo, which stayed together until Mr. Mitchell’s death in 2013.Associated PressHe was born on Sept. 1, 1931, in Sheffield, Ala., the sixth of eight children of Willie and Manie Ruff. “We lived in a house — my mother and eight children — that had no electricity, so there was no radio or music,” he said in a 2017 interview with Yale. “But there was always dancing, to silence. The dances made their own rhythm.”He eventually learned to pound out his own rhythms on piano and drums. At 14, he fudged his way into the Army, on the advice of an older cousin who had enlisted at 17 with his parents’ permission and dismissed Mr. Ruff’s concern that he was too young: “For a musician, you sure are dumb,” Mr. Ruff recalled the cousin saying. “Don’t you know how to write your daddy’s name?”He hoped to leverage his skill with the sticks into a spot in a highly regarded all-Black military band, but, seeing a glut of drummers, he took up the French horn instead. It was in that band that he met Mr. Mitchell, who taught him to play the stand-up bass.After leaving the Army, Mr. Ruff applied to the Yale School of Music, hoping to use his financial windfall from the G.I. Bill of Rights to study with the famed composer Paul Hindemith. “I brought my French horn and played an audition, and by some miracle they let me in,” he said in an interview with the quarterly newspaper The Soul of the American Actor. “So, Uncle Sam put me through my schooling!”He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1953 and his master’s degree a year later. In 1955, he was weighing an opportunity to join the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra when he turned on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and saw his old friend Mr. Mitchell at the piano, as a member of Lionel Hampton’s band. He called him at the television studio, and Mr. Mitchell soon recruited Mr. Ruff to play in the band.Playing an instrument associated with classical music in a jazz band was unconventional, but it opened doors for Mr. Ruff, as did the broad musical training he had received at Yale.“Lionel Hampton’s band was the worst-paying, hardest-working band in the world,” he recalled in an interview for Yale’s Oral History of American Music project. “So if a saxophone player quit, I played his part. If a trombone player quit, I played his part, and that would make me valuable because I could transpose all these parts.” With no parts written for the French horn itself, he said, Mr. Hampton “didn’t know what to expect”:“As long as it worked, I was left to invent. It was wonderful training.”From left, Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington and Mr. Ruff in 1972, the year Mr. Ruff founded the Ellington Fellowship program at Yale.Reggie Jackson/Yale University Art GalleryMr. Ruff joined the Yale faculty in 1971 and stayed until he retired in 2017. In 1972 he founded the Ellington Fellowship, which is dedicated to expanding the study of African American music and has honored a long list of jazz notables, some of whom performed concerts in New Haven, Conn., and shared their musical knowledge with hundreds of thousands of local public school students.His immediate survivors include a brother, Nathaniel. His wife, Emma, and daughter, Michelle, died before him.Late in his life, Mr. Ruff recalled that his turn to education seemed almost predestined. When he was in second grade, W.C. Handy, the composer and musician known as “the father of the blues,” who was from nearby Florence, Ala., visited his class. He played trumpet for the students and talked to them about “how important it was to continue our education and hold up our heritage and our culture,” Mr. Ruff told Yale in 2017. “He said that it’s not from royalty or from the highborn that music comes, but it is often from those who are the farthest down in society.”“After he finished,” Mr. Ruff added, “all the children who were musically inclined were permitted to shake the hand of the man who wrote ‘The Saint Louis Blues.’”“I was never the same boy again,” he recalled. “I had to be a teacher.” More

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      How Cancer Has Influenced Andreas Steier’s Music-Making

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      “The music stays as beautiful as it is,” said Andreas Staier, an eminent interpreter of early keyboard music who has a rare blood disease.The harpsichordist and pianist Andreas Staier has never been a morning person. And since August 2019, when he was diagnosed with primary myelofibrosis, a rare bone marrow cancer, he has felt what he called a fundamental fear most vividly in the mornings.Playing music helps. After getting out of bed, Staier goes to one of his keyboard instruments and sight-reads a piece or practices a tricky spot. “The music stays as beautiful as it is,” he said in an interview at his home in Cologne, Germany. “It doesn’t change. And that is very, very consoling.”Staier, 68, has shaped the European early music movement for 40 years. Born in Göttingen, Germany, he joined the period instrument ensemble Musica Antiqua Köln as a harpsichordist in 1983. In 1986, he left the group to concentrate on solo and chamber music, with an emphasis on the harpsichord and the fortepiano, a softer-sounding predecessor of the modern grand piano.His discography, of about 60 recordings, has remarkable range. He has uncovered forgotten gems from the Portuguese Baroque and lent startling intimacy and timbral variety to works as familiar as Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier” and Schubert’s Four Impromptus (D. 935). His 2006 album of Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas No. 4 and 7 with Daniel Pelec highlights the ferocity barely held at bay by the pieces’ Classical forms.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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      Zita Carno, Concert Pianist, Coltrane Scholar and More, Dies at 88

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      A veteran of 25 years with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, she was known as much for her eccentricities as for her exceptional musicianship.Zita Carno in 1960 with the composer Wallingford Riegger. The critic Harold C. Schonberg called her the “perfect interpreter” of Mr. Riegger’s technically difficult “Variations for Piano and Orchestra.”Whitestone PhotoWhen the Bronx-bred pianist Zita Carno auditioned for the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1975, she played short excerpts from the orchestra’s repertoire for the music director, Zubin Mehta.“Then Mehta said, ‘Come back tomorrow. I want to hear you play the Boulez,’” she recalled years later, referring to the French conductor and composer Pierre Boulez.“Well, I said, ‘I eat that stuff for breakfast,’ which made him laugh.”Ms. Carno was hired and spent the next 25 years as the orchestra’s pianist, capping a career as a widely praised classical keyboardist (she also played the harpsichord and organ) who was also an expert on the music of the innovative jazz saxophonist John Coltrane.Ms. Carno died on Dec. 7 in an assisted living facility in Tampa, Fla. She was 88.Her cousin Susanna Briselli said the cause was heart failure. Ms. Carno had moved to Tampa with her mother after her retirement from the Philharmonic to be near the spring training facility of the Yankees, her favorite baseball team.Ms. Carno was known as much for her eccentricities as for her musicianship.Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s music director from 1992 to 2009, said in a phone interview that Ms. Carno “had an extraordinary capacity as a musician,” adding, “She could read basically everything — not only Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms but pieces by Hindemith and Richard Strauss, with all sorts of complex transpositions, and play them in real time and in tempo.”Mr. Salonen said that Ms. Carno’s talents transcended sight-reading piano pieces and extended to calculating a full orchestral score in her head. “She had a particular kind of C.P.U. that could process a lot of information in real time,” he said. “She had that kind of unusual brain.”She also frequently used the phrase “Yoohoo, bubeleh!” — “bubeleh” is Yiddish for “sweetheart” — as a greeting in her booming voice.“Those words came out of her with startling regularity,” David Howard, a former clarinetist with the Philharmonic, said by phone. The two collaborated on an album, “Capriccio: Mid-Century Music for Clarinet,” released in 1994.During a rehearsal when Mr. Boulez was conducting the orchestra, Mr. Howard recalled, “He asked Zita to play something a little bit softer and she said, ‘Sure, bubeleh!’“Boulez was as serious and solemn a music figure as ever lived,” he added. “We had to grit our teeth to keep from laughing.”She also used the words “yoohoo” and “bubeleh” in musical scores, To Ms. Carno, “yoohoo” denoted a duplet (a group of two notes), and “bubeleh” was her word for a triplet (a group of three).Joanne Pearce Martin, Ms. Carno’s successor at the Philharmonic, wrote on Facebook after Ms. Carno’s death that she “never erased a single mark of Zita’s in any of the LA Phil keyboard parts. Seeing those ‘Bubulas’ and ‘Yoohoos’ peppered throughout the parts brings a special smile to my face — how could it not?”Ms. Carno, right, performed in an elimination round of the Leventritt Competition, a prestigious international contest for pianists and violinists, in 1959. To her left was Harriet Wingreen. Sam Falk/The New York TimesZita Carnovsky was born on April 15, 1935, in Manhattan and grew up in the Bronx. Her father, Daniel, who immigrated from Poland, was a pharmacist. Her mother, Lucia (Briselli) Carno, who was born in Odessa, Russia, was a homemaker whose piano playing Zita began to imitate when she was quite young — anywhere from 2½ to 4 years old, depending on the account.From ages 4 to 6, Zita traveled with her parents to Philadelphia, where she played duets with her uncle, Iso Briselli, a violin virtuoso, who also coached her, Ms. Briselli, his daughter, said in a phone interview. At 10, she finished writing her first fugue.She graduated from the High School of Music and Art (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts) in New York and, in 1952, received honorable mention for a piece she wrote for violin and piano in a composition contest conducted by the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts.She attended the Manhattan School of Music, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in 1956 and her master’s the next year.When she made her debut at Town Hall in Manhattan in 1959, the New York Times critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote that she was “without a doubt one of the major young American talents, with splendid technical equipment, brains and finesse.”In October 1960, she was the soloist in a program of Romantic music during four concerts with the New York Philharmonic, with Leonard Bernstein conducting. Mr. Schoenberg called her the “perfect interpreter” of Wallingford Riegger’s technically difficult “Variations for Piano and Orchestra.”In the 1960s, she was a member of the Pro Arte Symphony Orchestra of Hofstra University and the Orchestra da Camera, both on Long Island. She was also in demand for recitals and concerts around the United States. She joined the New Jersey Symphony in the early 1970s and stayed until she left for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.She was also intrigued by jazz. (“She was always interested in cutting-edge music,” Ms. Briselli said.) In 1959, she wrote a two-part article about John Coltrane in The Jazz Review. Explaining his technique, she wrote, “Tempos don’t faze him in the least; his control enables him to handle a very slow ballad without having to resort to the double-timing so common among hard blowers, and for him, there is no such thing as too fast a tempo.”Ms. Carno, who was introduced to Coltrane by the bassist Art Davis, was able to transcribe his solos while listening to him perform.“I used to go equipped with music paper and a few well-sharpened pencils and I would take them down during the performances, which amused Trane no end,” she told Lewis Porter, the author of “John Coltrane: His Life and Legend” (1998).She wrote the liner notes to “Coltrane Jazz,” Coltrane’s second album for the Atlantic label, which was released in 1961.No immediate family members survive.In addition to her musical pursuits, Ms. Carno was an amateur baseball scholar. She wrote articles for the Society for American Baseball Research (about the pitcher Eddie Lopat) and the Baseball Research Journal (about pitchers who were notoriously tough on certain teams).She was also a science fiction fan and frequently commented online about the “Star Trek” television series and films.In a post on the science fiction author Christopher L. Bennett’s website in 2018, she said that she had been researching the Vulcan mind-meld and the half-Vulcan Mr. Spock’s advanced telepathic abilities. “As a result,” she wrote, “I have gained a whole new appreciation of the power of the mind — ‘wuh tepul t’wuh kashek’ in Vulcan — and how Spock was able to use it, especially when it came to getting himself, Captain (later Admiral) Kirk and the great starship Enterprise out of one jam after another.” More

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      Best Arts Photos of 2023

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      Peter Fisher for The New York Times2023 in Retrospect: 59 Photographs That Defined the Year in ArtsDeadheads, ballerinas and Mick Jagger: As 2023 winds down, revisit a memorable handful of the thousands of images commissioned by our photo editors that capture the year in culture.Marysa Greenawalt More