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      Tzadik’s Experimental Music Is Streaming. Start Here.

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      Listen to 15 streaming highlights from the vast catalog of Tzadik, the imprint founded by John Zorn.John Zorn started the Tzadik label with Kazunori Sugiyama in 1995. Since then, this imprint has amassed a vast catalog of experimental music from the worlds of classical, jazz, rock and beyond.It has also resisted the streaming economy — that is, until last week. As Zorn was celebrating his 70th birthday with concerts, most of Tzadik’s offerings began popping up on Spotify and other platforms.The range of offerings — from over 800 releases — is astonishing. To get an idea, start with these 15 albums.Electric Masada: ‘At the Mountains of Madness’The large-group setting here offers extraordinary, maximalist power in the Jewish folk themes that Zorn wrote for his first Masada Quartet. (Later, he presented them in new arrangements that reflected his interest in chamber music and metal.)Lee Hyla: ‘My Life on the Plains’Tzadik’s Composer Series line has spotlighted artists whose works deliver a synthesis of concert music and jazz or rock energies. In “Polish Folk Songs,” Hyla combines gorgeous string writing with percussive explosions and clarinet riffs.Shelley Hirsch: ‘The Far In, Far Out Worlds of Shelley Hirsch’Excerpts from radio dramas and live shows populate this multifaceted vocalist’s album. Even during a miniature like “So Tender,” Hirsch can create drama by deploying tensile torch-song vibrato, lip smooches and born-in-Brooklyn Jewish accents.John Zorn: ‘Myth And Mythopoeia’In one of Zorn’s most ravishing classical collections, boisterous items like “Hexentarot” elicit hot playing from select members of the JACK Quartet. “Missa Sine Voces” makes dreamy then abstract use of harp and vibes, and the soprano-and-strings “Pandora’s Box” packs plenty of drama into 14 minutes.Keiji Haino & Tatsuya Yoshida: “New Rap”In the late 1990s, Tzadik was the best-distributed source for Japanese experimental rock in America. This 2006 set from its “New Japan” series is among the most unhinged, and most sublime. Credit the relentless energy of Yoshida, the Ruins drummer, as well as Haino’s textured yelping and guitar playing.Julius Hemphill: ‘One Atmosphere’This saxophonist and bandleader was also active as a chamber music composer — one to whom the classical mainstream paid scant attention, but for whom Tzadik rolled out the red carpet. On the title track, spare material alternates with jolting motivic activity, with Hemphill’s partner, Ursula Oppens, at the piano.Annie Gosfield: ‘Almost Truths and Open Deceptions’This composer’s 2012 set reflects her vast talent: Percussion, piano and cello take their at-bats during “Wild Pitch”; a sampling keyboard and Roger Kleier’s electric guitar power an excerpt from “Daughters of the Industrial Revolution”; “Phantom Shakedown” offers Cagean meditation; and the title work is a thrilling cello concerto.John Zorn: ‘Godard/Spillane’Zorn’s famed “file card” pieces advertised a quick-cutting, cinematic experience for the ears. “Godard,” a mid-1980s entry, was reissued by Tzadik in 1999. And it does evoke the French New Wave works of Jean-Luc Godard, particularly “Alphaville.” It also offers a look at a distinguished Zorn collaborator, the turntablist Christian Marclay.George E. Lewis: ‘Endless Shout’This release presents a wide-angle Lewis portrait. “North Star Boogaloo” is a kinetic work for samples and the solo percussionist Steven Schick. “Smashing Clusters” reinterprets the legacy of Harlem stride piano legends. And in “Voyager” Lewis plays trombone against orchestral backing realized by his improvising software program of the same name.Craig Taborn and Ikue Mori: ‘Highsmith’Mori’s solo-electronics sets have been important to Tzadik, but her skill as a collaborator is just as crucial. Here, she teams up with Craig Taborn, a jazz-world star, for a set of improvisations that cavort and splinter with indefatigable invention.Naked City: ‘Naked City Live Vol. 1: Knitting Factory 1989’This concert date doesn’t benefit from the wild contributions of the ensemble’s regular vocalist Yamataka Eye. Even so, Zorn’s early rock group — capable of delivering grindcore in one minute and the “Batman” TV theme the next — puts on quite the show.Wadada Leo Smith: ‘Golden Quartet’Tzadik championed Smith, reissuing his early albums and putting out new sets. There’s a great band on this one, with the composer on trumpet, Jack DeJohnette on drums and Malachi Favors Magoustous on bass, as well as Anthony Davis on piano.Derek Bailey: ‘Ballads’Bailey, a giant of the free-improvisation scene, enjoyed a fine late-career run on Tzadik, including this at-first-glance quizzical approach to jazz’s core songbook. But the precise use of extended techniques lends an idiosyncratic grace to the chords that you can barely glimpse when Bailey plays “Stella by Starlight.”Alvin Singleton: ‘Somehow We Can’This American artist was recently celebrated at the Darmstadt Summer Course in Germany. Yet he rarely receives the kind of attention he deserves at home. On Tzadik, he does: Here, there is variety, including a duo for Wadada Leo Smith and Anthony Davis, as well as the chamber orchestral highlight “Again.”John Zorn: ‘Spinoza’Simulacrum is one of Zorn’s best groups: a fine-tuned metal band and a smoking jazz-organ trio. Typically, he doesn’t play with the ensemble, but on this 2022 set, he pulls out his sax for the second suite. Both of the album’s long tracks are protean in style, yet unmistakably driven. Very Tzadik. More

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      James Jorden, Parterre Box Opera Blog Creator, Dies at 69

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      With Parterre Box, he brought together high culture, punk aesthetics and gleeful camp in an irreverent source for news, criticism and gossip.James Jorden, a feisty, influential writer and editor who brought together high culture, punk aesthetics and gleeful camp in his opera zine-turned-website Parterre Box, was found dead on Monday at his home in Sunnyside, Queens. He was 69.The police, asked by a friend in a 911 call to check on Mr. Jorden, discovered his body, but it was unclear when he died, according to the New York Police Department. The medical examiner was to determine the cause of death.In the early 1990s, Mr. Jorden was struggling to find work as a stage director in New York when he got the advice to try writing about opera rather than producing it.The East Village at the time was “a little past the peak of punk music zines, fan zines,” he recalled in a 2009 interview. “And I really liked the aesthetic, even though I had no idea what it was they were talking about.”Issues of Parterre Box in its zine form, based on the punk zines Mr. Jorden saw around the East Village.Mimicking those DIY projects, Mr. Jorden played around at home with some text, photographs cut from magazines and a glue stick. Parterre Box — which would go on to become an irreverent, essential source of news, criticism, rabid discussion and archival recordings — was born.With a four-page inaugural issue published in December 1993, it was likely the world’s first “queer opera zine,” as it described itself. Parterre Box embraced both the sublime and ridiculous aspects of the art form with a breathless, over-the-top tone familiar to the gay fans who kibitzed during intermissions at the Metropolitan Opera.Maria Callas was on the cover of that first issue (and, as Medea, graced the back of Mr. Jorden’s left shoulder in tattoo form). The contents included intense poetry; parodied the columns in more strait-laced publications like Opera News; imagined Cecilia Bartoli starring as the Long Island temptress Amy Fisher in “Cavalleria Suburbiana,” a takeoff on “Cavalleria Rusticana”; and made cutting observations about less-favored divas.“Parterre Box,” Mr. Jorden wrote on the second page, “is about remembering when opera was queer and dangerous and exciting and making it that way again.”At first, Mr. Jorden distributed copies of the zine at the Tower Records store near Lincoln Center and at the Met — tucking them into brochures in racks in the lobby and leaving them in bathroom stalls. On one occasion, caught stuffing the racks before a performance of “Salome,” he was ejected from the theater by security guards.That pugnacious, underground spirit fit the era. “It was a very activist time in the gay community, in terms of fighting back against AIDS,” Richard Lynn, a longtime contributor, told The New York Times in 2018. “And I view Parterre Box as part of that bigger cultural trend. It wasn’t afraid to be in your face or confrontational or angry. I felt it was therapeutic.”James Glen Jorden was born on Aug. 6, 1954, in Opelousas, La. His father, Billy Wayne Jorden, worked for the Louisiana State Highway Department, and his mother, Glenora (Jory) Jorden, was a high school teacher as well as a local theater director and actress. (He is survived by two brothers, John and Justin Jorden.)Mr. Jorden got his start in opera modestly, costuming a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “H.M.S. Pinafore” when he was in a gifted-and-talented program in his teens; his co-designer was a young Tony Kushner. After Mr. Jorden’s mother grew tired of his constantly playing his recording of “Pinafore,” she bought him “Carmen,” and his obsession turned to opera in general.In 1976, while attending Louisiana State University, he hitchhiked to Dallas to hear the Met on tour and saw the soprano Renata Scotto in the three leading roles of Puccini’s triptych “Il Trittico.”“That turned me around,” Mr. Jorden said in the 2009 interview. “I saw what the possibility was. And I actually choose that date as the birthday of La Cieca” — his draggy Parterre Box alter ego, named after the blind mother in Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda.”After finishing college and remaining for a time in Louisiana, he moved to New York — all the while teaching, coaching, directing, acting and working day jobs, all of which continued even after Parterre Box was founded.The zine’s length, sophistication and readership gradually grew; professionals in the field began to feed Mr. Jorden valuable bits of inside information and casting news. In the voice of La Cieca — and informed by a capacious knowledge of classic theater, music and film — he skewered Met productions, aired rumors about its administration and star singers, and took other writers to task for their vocabulary quirks and for doing boosterism instead of real criticism.“I know that his blog was often very critical of the Met and me,” Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, said in an interview. “But ultimately, he was on the side of opera, and I always respected him for that.”With a deep love of the art form lying just under the barbs, the obsessively informed, fiercely opinionated, often hilarious tone of the zine translated well to the budding blogosphere when Mr. Jorden added a web version in 1996. Parterre.com’s blind items, fervent cast of regular contributors and often irascible commentariat of readers anticipated the influential internet style that would emerge in the early 2000s.Parterre Box, both as a zine and a website, became an irreverent, essential source of news, criticism, rabid discussion and archival recordings.Mr. Jorden always tried to stay ahead of the technological curve: His podcast, started on a whim in 2005, long before the medium took off, became one of the great online resources for live opera recordings. La Cieca, the host, would announce Parterre Box’s motto in an over-enunciated blue-blood accent: “Where opera is king, and you, the readers, are queens.”Parterre Box’s print version ended in 2001, but Mr. Jorden continued to run the website, in addition to writing criticism and features for other publications, including Gay City News, The New York Post, The New York Observer and The Times.As its founder and editor gained more mainstream affiliations and respectability, Parterre Box mellowed a bit. Its reviews — from a lineup of critics around the country and world — grew more measured. (The comment sections, though, could still be bracing.)At the Met, from which Mr. Jorden was once thrown out for distributing the zine, Parterre Box now has press seats. When one of its critics was granted a ticket for opening night of the company’s 2015-16 season, the moment was “a total game changer,” Mr. Jorden said. “It felt like being an adult.” More

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      Jaap van Zweden’s Final Season

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      The final season of Jaap van Zweden’s brief tenure as music director in New York began with a new suite for the star violinist Joshua Bell.The elements came out for “The Elements.”A clever friend made that observation at the New York Philharmonic’s concert on Friday evening, as the city emerged from a deluge that broke records and inundated subways. The weather was probably a large part of the reason that David Geffen Hall was pocked with an unusual number of empty seats for a performance featuring the star violinist Joshua Bell.Bell was the soloist in — and instigator of — “The Elements,” a new suite of short concerto-esque pieces inspired by the natural world, with five composers as contributors. He was the focus on Friday, just as Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s admired, just-departed chief executive, was on Wednesday at the orchestra’s season-opening gala.On neither occasion was full attention turned to the man on the podium, the season’s ostensible honoree: Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s music director, who is leaving in the spring after a brief, pandemic-interrupted tenure, before Gustavo Dudamel arrives in 2026.“Celebrate Jaap!” the orchestra’s marketing orders us (with an implied whisper of “…or else”). But the feeling is one of saying goodbye before we’ve really gotten to know van Zweden — and of a man who’s been a participant in the Philharmonic’s recent history rather than its leader.The period since he started, in 2018, will almost certainly be remembered for the ensemble’s survival through the long pandemic shutdown, for the fast-tracked renovation of Geffen Hall and for an influx of contemporary music, especially by women and composers of color. In these achievements, it was more Borda’s Philharmonic than van Zweden’s.His personality hasn’t come through in his choice of works. Even in the kind of pieces for which he was primarily hired — his predecessor, Alan Gilbert, was perceived as less of a polished taskmaster in the likes of Beethoven and Brahms — van Zweden has largely stuck to the most standard of the standards. When the little-done 12th Symphony of Shostakovich, a composer he conducts effectively, was played by the Philharmonic for the first time last season, it was under the baton of Rafael Payare.So van Zweden’s time in New York feels a little faceless, and so short that Steve Reich, whose “Jacob’s Ladder” premieres this week, was mentioned in Friday’s program as a composer van Zweden has “championed” — apparently by leading a single Reich piece, four years ago. There’s the sense of the orchestra’s trying to manufacture an identity for a conductor who hasn’t been around long enough to develop one organically.This final season brings some firsts for him at the Philharmonic in core repertory: his first Schubert symphony, first Mendelssohn symphony, first Mozart Requiem. There’s more Shostakovich and Brahms; yet another Beethoven’s Fifth; Sofia Gubaidulina’s brooding, ferocious Viola Concerto, from 1996; and a handful of newer pieces.His finale, in June, will be Mahler’s grand, choral Second Symphony, an all-purpose Philharmonic favorite for occasions both reflective (the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks) and triumphant (Leonard Bernstein’s 1,000th concert with the orchestra). In all this, there’s not much personal taste to be gleaned.Yo-Yo Ma was the soloist at the opening gala on Wednesday as van Zweden started his final season with the Philharmonic. Chris LeeIf van Zweden hasn’t had an idiosyncratic vision in his choices of music, though, he has shown a consistent, characteristic style in the works he’s conducted. The typical Jaap-led symphony is tense, tight, punchy. He makes the Philharmonic’s sound glint and glare, especially in the live-wire acoustics of the new Geffen Hall, which can tip into harshness rather than encouraging rounded, blended warmth.You get the impression that he’s been attempting an evocation of the flashy, blazing, sometimes blaring reign of Georg Solti at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the 1970s and ’80s, captured in influential recordings. But while the Philharmonic is a very high-quality ensemble, it is not quite at the same level of flawlessly brilliant precision as Solti’s Chicagoans.So you get the overbearing control and aggressive forcefulness without the climactic grandeur or dumbfounding shine. I had never heard Copland’s Third Symphony, which the Philharmonic played on Friday after “The Elements,” sound so un-pastoral. This can sometimes be a baggy work, but van Zweden made it taut — and arid.A sharp edge in the first movement kept the music moving, and avoided sentimentality. Van Zweden brought out the second movement’s machinelike motion, and the eerie transparency of the slow third, before a finale — showcasing the classic “Fanfare for the Common Man” — of lean focus. This was a Third without much sweetness or sumptuousness.It was almost interesting, such a tough, grimly logical progress through the work — as if a reflection on a different United States than the one Copland was commemorating at the victorious close of World War II. And after years of the old hall’s undervaluing bass frequencies, it remains wonderful to feel them so viscerally now; the clarity of solos, particularly in the winds, is impressive.Perhaps surprisingly, given van Zweden’s base in older repertory and firm hand in symphonies, he’s been a game and sensitive leader of a broad swath of contemporary music, and a considerate, never domineering concerto accompanist. On Wednesday, he was polite even as Yo-Yo Ma was too light-textured to make a strong impact in Dvorak’s evergreen Cello Concerto.And on Friday, van Zweden guided the orchestra eloquently and smoothly around Bell in “The Elements.” But this 40-minute suite, an attempt to recast Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” for our time, is basically syrupy schlock.Kevin Puts’s “Earth,” which begins and ends the work, has a sleepily saccharine section plainly borrowed from Copland, and some madcap, off-kilter propulsion plainly borrowed from John Adams. Jake Heggie’s “Fire” sets off bursts of orchestral “sparks” and racing whimsy, trimmed with celesta. Jennifer Higdon’s “Air” is blooming, not particularly airy; Jessie Montgomery’s “Space,” yet another romance-then-romp structure.All of this was practically begging for film to accompany it and fill out its vagueness — with a uniformity of style, texture and color that made the pieces practically interchangeable manifestations of Bell’s warm, genially bland playing.And Edgar Meyer’s tame “Water,” with its undulating winds and trickles of violin, was certainly no match for what had been going on outside. More

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      Nancy Van de Vate, Composer and Advocate for Women in Music, Dies at 92

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      An American who settled in Vienna, she had a prolific career in contemporary classical music and broke gender barriers in her field.Early in her career, Nancy Van de Vate, a celebrated modernist composer, would tell people about her work and sometimes be met with dismissive questions like “Do you write songs for children?” And though she often won competitions that she had entered anonymously, her daughter Katherine Van de Vate said, she rarely won when she entered them under her own name, a dynamic she attributed to gender discrimination.Ms. Van de Vate refused to let such barriers slow her down. In 1968, she became only the second woman to receive a doctorate in music composition in the United States, according to “Journeys Through the Life and Music of Nancy Van de Vate” (2005), by Laurdella Foulkes-Levy and Burt J. Levy.Ms. Van de Vate would go on to compose more than a hundred compositions in a seven-decade career, including seven operas, many orchestral works and a large body of chamber music.She died on July 29 at 92 at her home in Vienna, where she spent the final 38 years of her life, her daughter said. Her death was not widely reported at the time.Ms. Van de Vate created a distinct musical voice, tinged with dissonance, that drew from a variety of genres and global influences, including traditional Indonesian music, and from a wide array of composers, including Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Penderecki and Varèse.“When you’re at a smorgasbord,” Ms. Van de Vate said in an interview with the music writer Bruce Duffie in the 1990s, “do you head for the dishes you like, or do you make a conscious choice that you should sample everything there? I go to enjoy the variety.”Even working at the conceptual frontiers, Ms. Van de Vate composed music to be listened to, not to be dissected by theorists.Ms. Van de Vate in 2020. Her work drew on many musical styles and influences, among them traditional Indonesian music, as well as a variety of composers.via Van de Vate family“While no stranger to modernism, she had a deep desire to connect with her audience,” the composer David Victor Feldman, a friend, said in an email. “She didn’t see the tropes of modernism as a deal breaker, so they’re definitely in her mix. But so is infectious rhythm, color and the sounds of music coming from beyond the West.”Among her best-known pieces was her orchestral work “Chernobyl,” a haunting rumination on the 1986 Soviet nuclear disaster, which had its world premiere in Vienna in 1995 and its U.S. premiere in Portland, Maine, in 1997.She also earned critical acclaim for “All Quiet on the Western Front,” a searing antiwar opera based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque about trench warfare during World War I, which premiered in Osnabrück, Germany, in 2003.A prominent feminist in a male-dominated field, Ms. Van de Vate led by example. In 1975, she founded an advocacy organization called the League of Women Composers, later renamed the International League of Women Composers and now part of the International Alliance for Women in Music.In 1990, she and her husband, Clyde Smith, founded Vienna Modern Masters, a small label dedicated largely to recording new orchestral music, including many works by female composers.Though progress was made, she believed far more was needed. “There have always been one or two women in the American musical establishment,” she told Mr. Duffie. “I don’t see that as progress,” she added. “It’s like saying we have Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court now, so therefore all women have equal rights.”Nancy Jean Hayes was born on Dec. 30, 1930, in Plainfield, N.J., the second of three children of John Hayes, who ran an insurance company, and Anna (Tschudi) Hayes, a secretary.A gifted pianist since childhood, she studied piano at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., for a year after graduating from North Plainfield High School in 1948. She transferred to Wellesley College, where she majored in music and received a bachelor’s degree in 1952. She earned her pioneering doctorate from Florida State University in 1968.In addition to her daughter Katherine, Ms. Van de Vate’s survivors include another daughter, Barbara Levy; a son, Dwight; and six grandchildren. Her marriage to Dwight Van de Vate Jr., a philosophy professor, ended in divorce in 1976. She married Mr. Smith, a career naval officer, in 1979. He died in 1999.Ms. Van de Vate was also a committed music educator; she taught at Memphis State University, the University of Tennessee and other institutions through the 1960s and ’70s. While teaching in Hawaii in the mid-’70s, she organized music appreciation courses for sailors stationed at the Pearl Harbor naval base.“My mission as a teacher was to do as much as I possibly could to bring people to an understanding and, if possible, a liking for contemporary music,” she said in a 1986 interview with Ev Grimes, a radio producer. “And I found that if they understood it, they almost always liked it.”“I want my music to communicate,” she added. “I don’t care to write for the shelf.” More

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      Conducting Lessons: How Bradley Cooper Became Leonard Bernstein

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      On a late-spring day in 2018, when the New York Philharmonic was deep in rehearsals of a Strauss symphony, an unexpected visitor showed up at the stage door of David Geffen Hall, the Philharmonic’s home.Listen to This ArticleListen to this story in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.The visitor, Bradley Cooper, the actor and director, had come on a mission. He was preparing to direct and star in a film about Leonard Bernstein, the eminent conductor and composer who led the Philharmonic from 1958 to 1969. He was asking the orchestra’s leaders for help with the movie, “Maestro,” which has its North American premiere on Monday at the New York Film Festival.The Philharmonic is accustomed to having luminaries at its concerts. But it was unusual for someone like Cooper to express such deep interest in classical music, a field often neglected in popular culture.“How many top Hollywood stars can be genuine or interested in that way?” said Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s then-president and chief executive. “We were really impressed.”Soon, Cooper was a regular at the Philharmonic’s concerts and rehearsals, sitting in the conductor’s box in the second tier and peppering musicians with questions. He visited the orchestra’s archives to examine Bernstein’s scores and batons. And he joined Philharmonic staff members on a trip to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, placing a stone on Bernstein’s grave, a Jewish rite.Cooper as Bernstein.Jason McDonald/NetflixBernstein as Bernstein, in 1962.Eddie Hausner/The New York Times“You could see that he was watching with a very special eye,” said Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s music director. “He wanted to get into Bernstein’s soul.”Cooper’s time with the Philharmonic was the beginning of an intense five-year period in which he immersed himself in classical music to portray Bernstein, the most influential American maestro of the 20th century and a composer of renown, whose works include not just “West Side Story” but music for the concert hall.He attended dozens of rehearsals and performances in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Berlin and at Tanglewood in Massachusetts. And he befriended top maestros, including van Zweden; Michael Tilson Thomas, a protégé of Bernstein who led the San Francisco Symphony; Gustavo Dudamel, who leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic; and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra, who served as the film’s conducting consultant.Cooper has portrayed musicians before: He took piano, guitar and voice lessons for his role as Jackson Maine, a folksy rock star, in the 2018 film “A Star Is Born,” which he also directed.But “Maestro,” in theaters on Nov. 22 and on Netflix on Dec. 20, posed a new challenge. Bernstein was a larger-than-life figure with an exuberant style at the podium. Cooper needed to learn not only to conduct, but also to captivate and seduce like a great maestro.Cooper watched archival footage of Bernstein conducting, and Nézet-Séguin recorded dozens of videos on his phone in which he conducted in Bernstein’s manner. He also sent play-by-play voice-overs of Bernstein’s performances and assisted Cooper on set, sometimes guiding his conducting through an earpiece.Nézet-Séguin said the biggest challenge for Cooper, as for many maestros, was “feeling unprotected” and “naked emotionally” on the podium. “He wouldn’t settle for anything less than what he had in mind.”Cooper with Yannick Nézet-Séguin at Ely Cathedral, in England, where Nézet-Séguin coached Cooper for the film’s re-creation of a performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra.NetflixCooper, who wrote “Maestro” with Josh Singer, declined to comment for this article because he belongs to the union representing striking actors, which has forbidden its members from promoting studio films. But in a discussion last year with Cate Blanchett, who played the fictional maestro Lydia Tár in “Tár” (2022), he described conducting as “the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced.”He said that people often ask: “What does a conductor even do? Aren’t you just up there doing this?” He waved his arms.“My answer is it’s the absolute hardest thing you could possibly ever want to do,” he said. “It is impossible.”Cooper grew up near Philadelphia surrounded by music. He played the double bass and showed an interest in conducting, inspired by portrayals of mischievous maestros in “Looney Tunes” and “Tom and Jerry” cartoons. When he was 8, he asked Santa for a baton.“I was obsessed with conducting classical music,” he told Stephen Colbert on the “Late Show” last year. “You know you put your 10,000 hours in for something you never do? I did it for conducting.”Steven Spielberg, who had been planning to direct “Maestro,” was aware of Cooper’s obsession. He recalled Cooper telling him that “he’d conduct whatever came out of their hi-fi system at home.”After a screening of “A Star Is Born,” Spielberg was so impressed that he decided to hand “Maestro” over to Cooper, with whom he shares a love of classical music.“It only took me 15 minutes to realize this brilliant actor is equaled only by his skills as a filmmaker,” said Spielberg, who produced the film, along with Cooper and Martin Scorsese.Cooper worked to win the trust of the Bernstein family, including his children, Jamie, Alexander and Nina, who gave the film permission to use their father’s music. (“Maestro” beat out a rival Bernstein project by the actor Jake Gyllenhaal.)Jamie Bernstein said that Cooper seemed “keen to seek an essential authenticity about the story.” He asked questions about her relationship with her father, and he was adept at imitating his gestures, like placing his hand on his hip as he conducted.Cooper visited the family home in Fairfield, Conn., admiring a Steinway piano that Bernstein used to play and examining his belongings: a bathrobe, a blue-striped djellaba, a bottle of German cough syrup that he brought back from a foreign tour.“Channeling a supernova”: Cooper with Gustavo Dudamel at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.Kazu Hiro/Netflix“He was just like a sponge soaking up every detail about our family’s existence that he possibly could,” she said.Cooper sent photos of himself in makeup and costumes, holding replicas of Bernstein’s batons, to his children. (They defended him recently when he drew criticism for wearing a large prosthetic nose in his portrayal of Bernstein, who was Jewish.)At the gym, Cooper sometimes wore a shirt emblazoned with the words “Hunky Brute,” a nickname that Bernstein used for the New York Philharmonic’s brass players. (Bernstein also wore a version of the shirt.)Bernstein’s musical career unfolds in the background in “Maestro”; much of the film focuses on his conflicted identity, including his marriage to the actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) and his dalliances with men.Cooper was eager to approach “Maestro” less as a biography and more as the story of a marriage, Spielberg recalled.While Cooper understood Bernstein’s genius, Spielberg said, he also had “an understanding of the complexities of Felicia’s love for this man, whom she would certainly have to share not only with the world but also with his hungry heart.”The film, shot largely on location, recreates several moments from Bernstein’s career, including his celebrated 1943 debut with the New York Philharmonic, when he filled in at the last minute for the ailing conductor Bruno Walter at Carnegie Hall.At Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home in the Berkshires, Cooper’s Bernstein is shown leading master classes and driving a sports car with the license plate MAESTRO1 across a pristine lawn as the real Bernstein had done. He visits his mentor, the Russian conductor and composer Serge Koussevitzky, who suggests he change his surname to Burns to avoid discrimination.Cooper in the pit at the Metropolitan Opera where he observed Nézet-Séguin during a performance of Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande.”Jonathan Tichler/Metropolitan OperaIn his conducting studies, Cooper spent the most time with Dudamel and Nézet-Séguin. He visited Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, dressed and made up as Bernstein, for sessions with Dudamel. And he traveled to Germany, score in hand, to observe Dudamel as he rehearsed Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic. (Dudamel declined to comment because he is also a member of the actors’ union.)Cooper stealthily watched Nézet-Séguin from the orchestra pit at the Met, including at a 2019 performance of Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande.” Later that year, for Bernstein’s 100th birthday, Nézet-Séguin invited Cooper and Mulligan to narrate a staging of Bernstein’s operetta “Candide” with the Philadelphia Orchestra.Nézet-Séguin said he didn’t set out to give Cooper conducting lessons but to refine his portrayals. “I had to take what he already did as an actor,” he said, “and make it into a frame that was believable.”Nézet-Séguin, who also conducts the film’s soundtrack, helped him find the downbeat for Schumann’s “Manfred” overture, which opened the Carnegie program in 1943. And he assisted Cooper with dialogue for a rehearsal scene of “Candide,” during which he conducts with a cigarette in his mouth.Last fall, Cooper and Nézet-Séguin traveled to Ely Cathedral in England to recreate a 1973 performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony by Bernstein and the London Symphony Orchestra, a climactic moment in the film.Cooper, who chose the music in “Maestro,” had studied the piece intensely, watching Bernstein’s performance as well as videos in which Nézet-Séguin dissected Bernstein’s gestures and explained how to count beats.“He would watch the videos,” Nézet-Séguin said, “and then text me and say, ‘Hey, can we talk about this or that moment?”Inside an empty Ely Cathedral, Nézet-Séguin, wearing a sweater that had belonged to Bernstein, coached Cooper as he rehearsed an eight-minute section of the piece with a recording.When the London Symphony Orchestra arrived, Cooper watched as Nézet-Séguin rehearsed in the style of Bernstein, who often broke the rules of conducting with his animated gestures. Sometimes, Cooper offered suggestions, such as adding tremolo in the strings.When Cooper took the podium, Nézet-Séguin provided occasional direction through an earpiece, advising him to hold onto a moment or let go.The musicians of the London Symphony Orchestra were startled by Cooper’s transformation. “It was uncanny,” said Sarah Quinn, a violinist in the orchestra. “It was just kind of a double take.”Throughout his work on “Maestro,” Cooper maintained a connection to the New York Philharmonic, soliciting stories about Bernstein. Van Zweden, who worked with Bernstein in Amsterdam in the 1980s, told him how Bernstein had broken protocol and hugged Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, calling her “darling” and taking a sip of his drink at the same time.Cooper visited Geffen Hall last fall after its $550 million renovation, attending a rehearsal of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and flipping through a Mahler score that had belonged to Bernstein. He returned in February when Dudamel was introduced as the Philharmonic’s next music director, embracing him and admiring a photo of Bernstein.Over the summer, Cooper invited a few Philharmonic staff members and musicians to his Greenwich Village townhouse for screenings of “Maestro.” The orchestra presented him with a gift: a replica of Bernstein’s Carnegie debut program.“From the beginning, he was intent on avoiding a broad burlesque of a personality, especially one as big as Bernstein’s,” said Carter Brey, the orchestra’s principal cellist, who attended a screening.Cooper has compared playing Bernstein to “channeling a supernova.” He said in a recorded Zoom conversation with Jamie Bernstein last year that her father transmitted his soul through conducting.“The pilot light never went out with him, which is incredible given everything that he saw, experienced, understood, comprehended, bore witness to, even within his own self,” he said in the video. “What a person. What a spirit.”Audio produced by More

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      Christian Thielemann to Succeed Daniel Barenboim at Berlin State Opera

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      The conductor, an acclaimed Wagnerian, was named to replace Barenboim, who stepped down in January after three decades because of health problems.For months, the Berlin State Opera, one of the world’s premier opera houses, has been in a state of uncertainty. Its revered leader, the conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim, resigned in January after three decades in charge because of health problems. Musicians and cultural leaders questioned whether anyone would be able to match his impact and influence.But on Wednesday, German officials said they had found their maestro: the acclaimed Wagnerian Christian Thielemann, the principal conductor of the Staatskapelle orchestra in Dresden, who will take over as general music director of the Berlin State Opera in September 2024.“It was a perfect match,” Joe Chialo, Berlin’s senator for culture, said in an interview. “This is a new beginning.” Thielemann, 64, the heir to storied maestros like Wilhelm Furtwängler and Herbert von Karajan, for whom he once served as an assistant, praised the opera house’s “long and illustrious tradition” and thanked Barenboim for his “wonderful work and constant support.” As a child, he said he traveled from West Berlin to East Berlin to catch performances at the opera house.“I’m proud I can be part of this tradition,” Thielemann said in an interview. “Daniel is such a wonderful musician and he has inspired me always.”Barenboim, who has known Thielemann since he was 19, said that “his musical talent was already obvious back then and he has since developed into one of the outstanding conductors of our time.” He said he was pleased to see him take the helm of the opera and its renowned orchestra, the Staatskapelle Berlin.“I have been at the helm of these very special musical institutions for over 30 years, and I am sure that, under the leadership of Christian Thielemann, they will continue to maintain and expand their exceptional position in Berlin and international musical life,” he said in a statement.Thielemann, who is from Berlin and led the Deutsche Oper there from 1997 to 2004, will face significant challenges at the State Opera, including restoring a sense of stability after a tumultuous period.The institution has been in flux over the past couple years as Barenboim, 80, a towering figure in classical music who has built an artistic empire in Berlin and helped define German culture after reunification, grappled with health issues. He was diagnosed last year with a serious neurological condition, and he said in January that the illness made it impossible for him to carry out his duties.The uncertainty of his condition placed strains on the opera house. It was left scrambling to find substitutes for Barenboim, including for a highly anticipated new production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle last year, for which Barenboim tapped Thielemann at the last minute.Thielemann and Barenboim have a complicated history. When Thielemann was at the Deutsche Oper, he complained publicly about its low level of government support compared with Barenboim’s State Opera. At the same time, accusations spread that Thielemann had made antisemitic comments about Barenboim, who is Jewish. Thielemann denied making the comments at the time. The two men never broke and have spoken and met regularly over the years.Thielemann said on Wednesday that the two men had a strong relationship and that Barenboim was a critical influence in his career. “I owe him,” he said. Daniel Barenboim at the State Opera in Berlin in 2017.Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen he stepped in for Barenboim last year, Thielemann deepened his bond with the Staatskapelle Berlin and became a favorite of the orchestra’s players, who were influential in his selection.When Chialo started his term as Berlin’s top culture official in April, he made arrangements to meet Thielemann. “The orchestra was jumping up and down and preferring him,” Chialo said. Elisabeth Sobotka, the Berlin State Opera’s incoming artistic director, said she felt Thielemann’s vision and musical approach were close to Barenboim’s.“There was a very, very special atmosphere between him and members of the orchestra,” she said. “It all comes very naturally to him, and the musicians trust him.”Thielemann rose to prominence in his 20s, winning posts at German opera houses, including in Düsseldorf and Nuremberg. He led the Munich Philharmonic from 2004 to 2011, leaving amid disagreements with the orchestra’s managers. He served as music director of the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, a showcase for Wagner’s work, from 2015 until 2020. He was the artistic director of the Salzburg Easter Festival in Austria, founded by von Karajan, from 2013 until last year. While he was once a regular in the United States, he has reduced his commitments there significantly over the past couple decades. But last year, he made a triumphant return, taking the podium of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for the first time since 1995 in performances of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony.Succeeding Barenboim will not be easy. During his tenure, he brought the Staatskapelle to new heights, leading international tours and securing hundreds of millions in government grants to finance his ambitions. He persuaded officials to build the Pierre Boulez Saal, a Frank Gehry-designed hall housed in the same building as a music academy. And he pushed a costly renovation of the opera house’s main theater that was finished in 2017. The State Opera last year had 587 employees and a budget of roughly 81.4 million euros, or about $85.9 million.Barenboim maintained his grip on power, despite occasional troubles. In 2019, members of the Staatskapelle accused him of bullying; later that year, though, the opera house, saying that it could not verify the accusations, extended his contract.As his health worsened last year, Barenboim initially resisted resigning his post and told friends and family that he planned to return to the podium. But even as he kept up some appearances, attending rehearsals and teaching classes in Berlin, it became increasingly apparent that he could no longer lead the opera house full time.Thielemann said he hoped to bring more operas by Richard Strauss to Berlin, including the rarely staged “Die Schweigsame Frau,” and that he was eager to find ways to connect with younger audiences.“If people think, ‘I don’t go to an opera house because I think it’s so stiff and I don’t feel comfortable,’ then one has to take away the fear from them,” he said.Thielemann’s career has had its share of drama; he has left some positions under tumultuous circumstances. He said he had learned from his years in the music industry. “When you are young, you are more temperamental and you make more mistakes,” he said. “I’m trying to be a little bit wiser, especially coming into a so well-organized institution.” More

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      ‘Doppelganger’ Review: A Soldier Confronts His Mortality

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      At the Park Avenue Armory, an imaginative and viscerally shocking staging of Schubert songs from the director Claus Guth and the tenor Jonas Kaufmann.In the classical tradition, a song often evokes intimacy and solitude: a poet baring vulnerability, a composer painting a miniature. That sense of seclusion extends to the performance as well: a singer and pianist alone onstage, a listener absorbing the work in an intimate recital hall or immersed, alone, with headphones.These conventions surround the final group of songs written by Schubert, known as “Schwanengesang” (Swan Song) and published after the composer’s death in 1828 at age 31. But those expectations were upended in “Doppelganger,” which had its world premiere Friday at the cavernous Park Avenue Armory Drill Hall. The director Claus Guth, the star tenor Jonas Kaufmann, the pianist Helmut Deutsch and a raft of collaborators transformed “Schwanengesang” at the Saturday night performance into an entire wartime narrative.Kaufmann is a soldier who lies dying in a military hospital. Far from being alone with Deutsch onstage, he is one of nearly two dozen injured and sick soldiers being tended by a fleet of six nurses, the rest of the cast is made up of dancers. Deutsch and the piano are dead center among more than 60 hospital beds that stretch across the hall’s immense floor. Kaufmann’s soldier spends the last hour of his life revisiting his memories in a cascade of Schubert’s songs, stitched together with ominous new music by the German composer Mathis Nitschke.Guth’s imaginative and powerful staging for his New York debut recalls history. This drill hall has served as a hospital and shelter; “Doppelganger,” which had originally been intended for a fall 2020 premiere, also invokes the field hospitals hastily erected at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.The inventive and minimalistic set design by Michael Levine is dominated by hospital whites, and the clever lighting is by Urs Schönebaum.Monika Rittershaus/Courtesy of Park Avenue ArmoryMichael Levine’s inventive and minimalistic set design is dominated by the blanched shades of hospital whites and khaki uniforms. Growls of Nitschke’s sound and clever lighting by Urs Schönebaum suggest thunderstorms and bombings.Does the theatrical conceit serve Schubert’s songs? In the hands of Kaufmann and Deutsch, who have long worked together, yes — and it reignites the master’s music in a fresh, intelligent setting without sacrificing the duo’s artistry as classical performers.At one point, the piano becomes a main character in the drama, as Kaufmann and the dancers gather to listen in respite to Deutsch perform the second movement of Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, D. 960. It was a rare treat to hear Deutsch, who usually performs an accompanist, take literal center stage.In a concession to the Armory’s sheer expanse, Kaufmann’s voice was lightly amplified. This was occasionally distracting when he turned his head away from his microphone, and his normally crisp articulation was slightly muddied. But Kaufmann’s sweet tone transcended the limits of the technology, particularly in Schubert’s yearning song of desire “Ständchen.”In the evening’s climactic song, “Der Doppelgänger,” Kaufmann’s soldier encounters his ghostly twin at the moment of death. Although the audience knows this was coming, having already seen the soldier being mortally wounded, the theatrical ingenuity and visceral force of “Doppelganger” was so strong that the audience let out an audible gasp of shock. When was the last time you heard something like that in a classical concert hall?DoppelgängerThrough Thursday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. More

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      John Cage Shock: When Japan Fell for Cage and Vice Versa

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      After a 1962 visit, a mutual love affair began between the composer and the country’s musicians. A new series at the Japan Society explores this relationship.About 30 miles south of Tokyo is the city of Kamakura, where the American composer John Cage was taken soon after arriving on his first visit to Japan, in 1962.There, D.T. Suzuki, the Zen authority from whom Cage had learned about Buddhism a decade earlier, greeted him and his close collaborator David Tudor at Tokei-ji, an ancient temple. Cage was given special permission to ring the temple bell; a photograph captures him inside the bell, slightly bent over and smiling a little as he listens to the reverberations.As Serena Yang writes in a recent dissertation on Cage and Japan, the discussion at Tokei-ji turned to the music of a Zen ceremony at another temple, near Kyoto. Cage exclaimed “this ceremony must be dominated by silence” — in other words, it must be similar to the works that had, by then, made him one of the world’s most important experimental composers.The similarity was, indeed, profound. The overlap between Cage and Japan went deep; for us today, suspicious of appropriation, it is a precious example of a truly mutual cultural exchange. And it has inspired a four-part series at the Japan Society in New York that begins on Sept. 28 and continues into December.Cage’s vision of life and music — his embrace of indeterminacy and chance; his use of and trust in silence — was shaped by Japanese philosophy, religion and aesthetics. And the influence of his 1962 visit on Japanese composers was such that it came to be referred to as “Jon Keji shokku”: John Cage Shock.His liberating example helped those composers — who had largely been in thrall to European modernism in the years after World War II — broaden their style, including to use traditional music as source material.John Cage conducting Toshi Ichiyanagi’s “Sapporo” at Hokkaido Broadcasting Company in 1962. From left: Yoko Ono, Yuji Takahashi (behind her), Kenji Kobayashi, Ryu Noguchi, Toshinari Ohashi, Toru Konishi, John Cage (with his back to camera), David Tudor and Ichiyanagi at the piano.Yasuhiro Yoshioka, via Sogetsu Foundation“I think that what we played for them gave them the chance to discover a music that was their own, rather than a 12-tone music,” Cage said, referring to the radical path away from traditional tonality that Arnold Schoenberg had charted a few decades earlier. “Before our arrival, they had no alternative other than dodecaphony.”Toru Takemitsu, the eminent composer who became close with Cage, later recalled: “In my own life, in my own development, for a long period I struggled to avoid being ‘Japanese,’ to avoid ‘Japanese’ qualities. It was largely through my contact with John Cage that I came to recognize the value of my own tradition.”As Yang emphasizes, the meeting of Cage and Japan did not begin with his arrival in 1962. Avant-garde Japanese musicians had been aware of Cage, who was born in 1912, from the late ’40s, through journalistic accounts of his work and, eventually, scores.“I felt an ‘Eastern’ sense from Cage’s music,” the composer Kejiro Sato wrote in the mid-’50s.In a 1952 letter to the critic Kuniharu Akiyama, Cage wrote, “I have always had the desire to come one day to Japan.” He later wrote to Akiyama that Japan “is the country of the whole world whose art and thought has most vitality for me.”After his early studies with Schoenberg, the prophet of 12-tone technique, Cage had undergone a transformation: a “great leap of the heart,” as the critic Kay Larson put it in “Where the Heart Beats,” her 2012 book on Cage and Zen. Starting in the mid-1940s, he delved into Indian music and philosophy; attended some of Suzuki’s American university lectures on Zen Buddhism; and discovered the “I Ching,” the Chinese text which he began to use as a stimulus for chance techniques in his music. His new course diverged from both tonality and dodecaphony.In 1952, this great leap culminated in a piece that asked a pianist merely to sit at his or her instrument for four minutes and 33 seconds. The music would be all the sound in the performance space that was not music; “4’33,” Cage’s most famous artistic statement, was more a philosophical inquiry into the passage of time, the nature of silence and the distinction between individual and collective experience than a standard concert event.As the ’50s went on, some of the fruits of his innovations began to filter into Japanese publications, which wrote about Cage’s embrace of Eastern art and ideas. Avant-garde critics observed that Cage’s musical choices (like his use of percussion rather than the traditional Western orchestra), his rhythms and his adoption of randomness as a compositional tool were influenced by Eastern examples, including the Japanese concept of “ma,” the notion of empty space or silence.Cage at Nanzenji Temple in Kyoto in 1962. He would return to Japan many times after ’62, including with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.Yasuhiro Yoshioka, via Sogetsu FoundationFor Cage, Zen was not only an aesthetic inspiration; it also spoke to his more general desire to re-energize a Western world he perceived as in serious crisis. At the 1954 Donaueschingen Festival in Germany, he told the critic Hidekazu Yoshida that “America is a mixed nation and has no unified spiritual basis. We rely on material culture and therefore have less and less spirituality. Yet I think the East is totally the opposite. My interest in Zen is based on my hope to recover Americans’ lost spirit.”Inspired by Cage and by European musicians making similar investigations, such as Stockhausen, composers like Takemitsu, Toshiro Mayuzumi and Yuji Takahashi had begun to work with chance; graphic scores, rather than traditional Western notation; and Cagean instruments like the “prepared” piano, adjusted with objects that affected the sounding of its strings. A contemporary music festival in Osaka in 1961, which included works by Cage, brought his brand of indeterminate, malleable music to Japanese audiences for the first time. (The response was decidedly mixed.)This all laid the groundwork for Takemitsu, Mayuzumi and Toshi Ichiyanagi, a composer who had studied with Cage in New York, to invite Cage to visit Japan, under the auspices of the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo, a nexus of experimental performance in the 1960s. He and Tudor spent six weeks there: In addition to their trip to Tokei-ji, they toured widely, including Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka and Sapporo; had the rare honor of viewing a geisha banquet; spent the night at a monastery; and even used a chance procedure to choose the color of a necktie to buy.In Kyoto, they were shown the Zen temple Ryoanji, renowned for a rock garden with 15 stones arranged in a geometric pattern. Cage’s drawings based on the stones, made 20 years after the trip, inspired his highly mutable ensemble piece “Ryoanji,” which will be performed at the Japan Society on Oct. 21 — with some of the performers streaming live from Japan.Cage and Tudor’s concerts during their visit had a galvanizing effect. Performing Cage’s “Music Walk” in Tokyo, Tudor lay under the piano; Yoko Ono, already an important artist and musician who was married to Ichiyanagi at the time, put her body on top on the piano strings. In “Theater Piece,” Tudor cooked rice and stir-fried, with contact microphones attached to objects around the stage: the cookware, a piano, toys.For the premiere of “0’00,” a follow-up silence exercise to “4’33,” Cage sat at a desk and wrote a sentence: “In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action.” Contact microphones had been attached to his pen and glasses, so, as the Cage scholar James Pritchett writes, his action “was both the creation of the score and its first performance.”“0’00,” dedicated to Ichiyanagi and Ono, will be among the works performed at the Japan Society on Dec. 7 in “Cage Shock,” a program meant to convey a sense of the 1962 visit. It was not until 1969 that Hidekazu Yoshida, the critic, used that phrase, and some have suggested it overstates the suddenness of what was actually a more gradual influence.But it is clear that experimental work in a Cagean spirit grew more common in Japan after the visit. Even a composer like Makoto Moroi, who was skeptical about the 1962 performances, took to working with indeterminacy and graphic notation — as well as traditional Japanese instruments — in the wake of Cage Shock.For Cage’s part, Yang writes that visiting the country “corrected his image of Japan. Where he had pictured a Zen-like, ancient Eastern country, he found a vibrant, modern society.” Both sides of the exchange had their ideas of the other refined and deepened.Cage and Tudor returned to Japan two years later on tour with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and again with Cunningham in 1976 — and then five times in the 1980s. His last visit, in 1989, was to receive the prestigious Kyoto Prize. The citation called him “a prophet who has foretold the spirit of the coming era” through “a new style of contemporary music by his new concept of chance music and non-western musical thought.”By then, Cage was mulling what he called a “Noh-opera,” possibly to be based on works by Marcel Duchamp. But Cage died, in 1992, before he could realize the project. On Nov. 16 at the Japan Society, a team led by the composer and performer Tomomi Adachi will offer a kind of completion of the idea — which, like so much of Cage’s work, transcends traditional boundaries of genre and culture.“It was Cage,” Takemitsu said, “who could ignore all restraints and do whatever he liked, who helped me make up my mind to get out of my own restraints.” More