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      Review: The Philharmonic Feasts on ‘The Planets’

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

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

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

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      Lise Davidsen Is an Opera Star Worth Traveling For

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

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

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

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

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

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      Philip Glass’s Piano Etudes: A Diary of an Influential Life

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      Begun to improve his own technique, piano exercises that Glass wrote over decades are the subject this month of a new book, a concert and dances.Philip Glass wanted to become a better pianist.He didn’t study the instrument in earnest until he was 15. And by the time he was 30 and founding an ensemble — to perform his pathbreaking music of repetitive structures — he needed to be good enough to keep up with his colleagues.So Glass turned to Charles-Louis Hanon’s classic “The Virtuoso Pianist in Sixty Exercises.” Eventually, he took a crack at writing some études himself. “They were totally about my own limitations, in pursuit of technique,” he told the public radio personality Ira Glass, his cousin, in an interview for a new collection, “Studies in Time: Essays on the Music of Philip Glass.”“I was not trying to compose like Scriabin or Rachmaninoff, who were demonstrating the techniques they already had,” Glass added, characteristically underselling himself. Those études, from the early 1990s, may be aspirational in technique, but they are assured in craft: portals into Glass’s world of whirling arpeggios, shocking rhythmic and harmonic turns, and meditative discipline.Once the conductor and pianist Dennis Russell Davies, the reigning interpreter of Glass’s symphonic music, heard about the études, he commissioned a set of six for his 50th birthday in 1994. Those turned into 10, each focused on a specific technical challenge. And then 10 turned into 20, completed in 2012 for another birthday: Glass’s 75th.Now a generation of artists has come of age with Glass’s études. Choreographers have used them for brief, charged dances. And pianists have interpreted them with a wide range of approaches, like the straightforward, crisp treatment by Maki Namekawa, Davies’s wife, who gave the first performance of the whole set a decade ago; or the soft-spoken, sensitive account that Vikingur Olafsson released in 2017.This month, audiences and artists alike have new ways to take in Glass’s études. At David Geffen Hall on Nov. 19, a group of 10 pianists will gather to perform the entire études for a densely kaleidoscopic program that will run about two and a half hours. Then, starting Nov. 28, the Joyce Theater will present “Dancing With Glass: The Piano Etudes,” a program of works from five choreographers, including Lucinda Childs and Justin Peck. And a handsome, informative new folio collection of the études — edited by the composer-performer Timo Andres and Cory Davis from Glass’s publisher, Dunvagen Music — has just been packaged with “Studies in Time” and published by Pomegranate Arts, producers long associated with Glass.A new folio edition of Glass’s études, based on his manuscripts, has been released by Pomegranate Arts.Stephen DoyleStephen DoyleIt’s an unexpected landing for a project that started as personal exercises. But today, the études are spoken of in the same breath as those by Chopin and Debussy. And their influence extends beyond the world of keyboard playing. “Studies in Time,” edited by Linda Brumbach and Alisa E. Regas of Pomegranate Arts, includes surprising contributions from, among others, the filmmaker Martin Scorsese, the artist Maira Kalman and the chef Alice Waters.“What strikes me — aside from their extraordinary range of mood and feeling — is how they represent a life of practice,” Waters wrote. And practice not just for Glass. The first 10 études, more focused and less difficult than the comparatively rhapsodic and occasionally cosmic later set, can be played by the average amateur. And unlike the technical pieces in Hanon’s exercise book, they are rewarding from a purely musical perspective.The artist and musician Laurie Anderson wrote in “Studies in Time” that the études can sound to her like voices: “There’s the stumbling and the trembling of voices. There’s chatting, joking, brisk analysis, rambling, explaining, crooning, grumbling, shouting; there’s the confident attorney rolling out the arguments; there are rules and regulations being spelled out, prayers, announcements, shouts of joy.”That quality of Glass’s music — patterns and repetitive phrases infused with so much character — is in part what has made it a perennial draw for choreographers. (Movement of all kinds, really: Last year, Anderson D.J.’ed a party for his 85th birthday at the Rockefeller Center ice skating rink, and wrote that she can now “say with confidence that Philip Glass didn’t write anything you can’t skate to.”) It has become so common for dances to be set to his music, Peck said in an interview, that he had long found himself resisting it.“But,” he added, “I’ve always loved the music.” As a teenager, he saw Jerome Robbins’s “Glass Pieces” at New York City Ballet. It felt “like I’d experienced vanilla, chocolate and strawberry ice creams,” he said, “and then someone discovered you can make ice cream with pistachios.” He ended up choreographing to Glass for “In Creases” at City Ballet in 2012, and created a new solo, set to the Sixth Etude, for the program coming to the Joyce.Lucinda Childs, the postmodern dance-maker who has had a relationship with Glass and movement going back to “Einstein on the Beach” in the mid-1970s, said his music has always felt like a “sounding board.” They later collaborated on “Dance” (1979), which she described as controversial at its premiere, with its repetitions prompting exasperated audience members to walk out. (That work was recently revived by Lyon Opera Ballet at New York City Center; when she and Glass saw how it was received there, she said, it was “kind of a joke for us because it’s become a classic.”)Then and now, Childs said, she has felt “a tremendous freedom” within his carefully structured scores. For example, the Joyce’s program features a duet of hers set to the 18th Etude. “My first reaction is just to listen,” she said — to the Rachmaninoff-esque shading, the mellowness and alluring romanticism. “There’s passion in this music. I like the idea of that.” From there, she took her work into the studio, eventually bringing in dancers, for a process that she described as fundamentally intuitive.Peck similarly described his étude, the Sixth, in poetic rather than structural terms. “There’s this layer of anxiousness in it,” he said. “It made me feel something emotional, almost like being in a waiting room and not knowing what test results you’re going to get. And the amount of time the étude takes, it feels like an eternity.”Not everyone has such strong emotional reactions to the études. Some have found them downright unmusical. “There’s always been a cadre of people, specifically in the more entrenched classical music world, for whom Philip’s music does nothing,” said Andres, the composer and editor of the new folio set, who is performing in the Geffen Hall concert. “What Philip would say is, there’s plenty of other music in the world.”If there is any agreement on the études, it may be about their specific difficulties. Like works by Mozart, they sound easier than they are, and punish anything short of precision in players. They demand metronome-specific steadiness and crystalline articulation, without sacrificing expression or shape, sculpted over several bars or several slow lines of score.They teach pianists, Davies said, to “be relaxed when dealing with a technical problem, while also building up endurance.” Otherwise, playing the music becomes physically painful. He recalled the story of a musician running out of the orchestra pit during the premiere of Glass’s opera “Satyagraha” because his arm was hurting so much; the études, he added, also “expose weaknesses in anyone’s technique” that can lead to discomfort.Maki Namekawa was the first pianist to perform Glass’s études on a single program. She will play in performances of the pieces this month.Richard Termine for The New York TimesNamekawa, who is performing at both Geffen Hall and the Joyce, warms up for them by playing Bach. Before she brings the Fifth Etude onstage, she will try out a Bach invention in her dressing room, with an ear focused on “the really tiny changes” because in both cases, “the beauty is in tiny changes.”Glass has performed from only the first set of 10 études; he didn’t care as much about whether he could play the second half, which, Davies said, goes beyond “thinking about what’s possible.” By the 20th, Glass achieves a tone poem more like “a benediction,” Davies added. (But these are still exercises. Andres called the 20th “a really good technical étude for legato playing.”)Through all of them, Glass repeats not only short phrases but entire sections, like Schubert, with whom he shares a Jan. 31 birthday. Both composers, Namekawa said, are “always right, very correct” in their use of repetition. And unlike Baroque composers, they don’t use recursive gestures to welcome ornamentation: When something repeats, it returns in identical form.Yet it feels different, Andres said. “When I get to the end of No. 6, for example, when that melody comes back, it has a completely different meaning than it did at the beginning of the piece,” he added. “There’s a settling, a resignation.”In Andres and Davis’s new folio edition of the études, assembled from Glass’s manuscripts, it’s easier to track changes in the music, particularly in the rhythm. Glass wrote with a shorthand that flags shifts more clearly than the comparatively spelled-out version published in 2014. “It’s like reading a sentence,” Andres said. “You’re not reading one word at a time, or one letter at a time. When you’re reading music, the more you can break it down into chunks and the more it makes sense grammatically, the smoother and more pleasurable the reading experience.”With more than one edition now available to players, Glass’s études are starting to look more like classics. They also double as a kind of musical autobiography. “He composed the whole thing in 20 years,” Namekawa said. “It’s a diary. You can see his thoughts and his compositional technique.”In that sense, the études are also something of a guide to Glass. “The thing all the great étude sets have in common is that they’re not just technical études,” Andres said. “They’re études, in a way, for understanding the composer’s language. If you were to learn Philip’s études, you would have a very good overview of his music over his career. You could say the same of Chopin and Debussy and Ligeti études. They’re compendiums: The whole is greater than the parts.” More

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      Park Avenue Armory Will Host ‘Illinoise’ and ‘Indra’s Net’ in 2024

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      The Armory’s upcoming season also includes the North American premiere of ‘Inside Light.’The Park Avenue Armory announced its 2024 season on Thursday, including the New York City arrival of “Illinoise,” a dance-theater work based on a Sufjan Stevens album and staged by Justin Peck, and the North American premiere of “Indra’s Net,” an immersive installation performance inspired by a Buddhist story and created by the interdisciplinary artist Meredith Monk.Rebecca Robertson, the founding president and executive producer of Park Avenue Armory, said the season of performances would provide audiences with opportunities to explore themes of interdependence and spirituality.“It’s a special journey about joy, contemplation and spiritual exploration,” Robertson said.“Illinoise,” which will run for several weeks starting March 2, is an adaptation of Stevens’s 2005 concept album “Illinois,” leading the audience through the American heartland from campfire storytelling to the edge of the cosmos. This music-theater production, adapted by Peck and the Pulitzer-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury, will feature new arrangements by the composer and pianist Timo Andres.Performances of “Indra’s Net,” featuring Monk’s vocal ensemble, as well as a 16-piece chamber orchestra and an eight-member chorus, will start on Sept. 23. The work draws on music, movement and architecture to tell a tale of interconnectedness and interdependence inspired by an ancient Buddhist and Hindu legend in which an enlightened king stretches a net across the universe, placing a jewel at each intersection.The Armory’s season will also include the North American premiere of “Inside Light,” in which Kathinka Pasveer, director of the Stockhausen Foundation for Music, performs five electronic compositions from Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 29-hour opera cycle “Licht.” The performance, which opens on June 5, was conceived specifically for the Armory and will include lasers and a high-definition video projection.In addition to those performances, the Armory’s upcoming season includes:The world premiere of “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful,” from the choreographer Kyle Abraham, with digital design by Cao Yuxi and a score composed and performed live by yMusic.The North American premiere of “R.O.S.E,” a homage to club culture by the choreographer Sharon Eyal that is directed by Gai Behar and Caius Pawson.“Shall We Gather at the River,” a musical call to climate action that weaves together Bach cantatas and Black American spirituals. It will be staged by the director Peter Sellars and performed by the Oxford Bach Soloists and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street. More

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      Jennifer Walshe’s Irreverent, Hectic and Deeply Serious Productions

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      The Irish composer blends everyday items with Dada-like theatricals. But there’s a serious purpose to her explorations.A few weeks ago, Jennifer Walshe was backstage at a concert hall in Essen, Germany, searching for the exit when she paused near the green room. A double bass bow was laid out, ready for the evening’s performance; attached to it, wobbling in the air, were several black-and-white balloons. Walshe grinned and pulled out her phone to snap a picture.This esoteric musical apparatus had been prepared for a new piece, composed by Walshe, that would be premiering in a few hours’ time. Called “Some Notes on Martian Sonic Aesthetics, 2034-51,” it invites a chamber ensemble to impersonate a musically trained crew who have set up a colony on Mars and are beaming performances back to Earth.While researching the piece, Walshe, 49, said that she had asked NASA how sound waves travel in carbon-dioxide rich atmospheres (“you don’t hear high-end frequencies”). She had also requested that packets of freeze-dried food be placed on the percussionists’ tables, so that the audience could hear the sound of astronauts chowing down, along with cans of compressed air to imitate the hiss of airlocks opening and closing.And the helium-filled balloons? Here to make the double bassist’s bow feel 60 percent lighter, as though he were playing in Martian gravity. “I’m a hardcore science fiction fan,” Walshe said as she strode onto the street. “I want things to be as accurate as possible.”Walshe during a performance of “Some Notes on Martian Sonic Aesthetics 2034-51” at a festival in Essen, Germany. She reached out to NASA when researching the piece.Tobias RasokatOtherworldly though the Mars piece may be, by the standards of Walshe’s oeuvre, it isn’t that outlandish. In 2003, she produced a 35-minute opera, “XXX Live Nude Girls,” whose protagonists were Barbie dolls manipulated by puppeteers, their voices supplied by female vocalists. In 2017 came “My Dog & I,” a piece for cello, dancer, film, electronics — and the cellist’s pet, who curled up onstage.A few years later, Walshe began work on a knowing tribute to her homeland called “Ireland: A Dataset,” in part created by feeding gobbets of “Riverdance,” Enya, James Joyce and Irish sean nos folk song into an artificial-intelligence-generated composition engine. In the piece, which Walshe described as “a slightly bizarre radio play,” the results play out alongside video mash-ups and an instrumentalist and vocalists performing skits, one of which pokes fun at Irish American tourists visiting the country in search of their roots.It would be wrong to think of these pieces as jokes, but not entirely wrong: a vein of anarchic humor does run through much of what Walshe does, as well as a taste for hectic, Dada-like theatricals. She often appears as a vocalist in her own pieces, makes accompanying films and writes scripts and essays, in addition to her day job as a professor of composition at the University of Oxford.“It’s hard to keep up with her,” said Kate Molleson, a critic and broadcaster. “Her mind is so restless and inquisitive. I can’t think of a composer more interested in the way the contemporary world functions.”Walshe performing at a festival in Brooklyn in 2017. She often appears as a vocalist in her own pieces.Jacob Blickenstaff for The New York TimesWalshe said she sees what she does as a way of paying attention: “I want to be present, and curious and engaged,” she said over dinner one night. “The work is how I do that.”Born in Dublin to a working-class, artistically inclined family (her father worked for IBM, her mother was a writer), Walshe began as a trumpeter — initially in local youth orchestras, before studying the instrument at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow.At college, she said, she felt like the odd one out: She would practice and attend concerts, and work on her own compositions, but she was also fascinated by visual art, literature, film and a million other things. These obsessions were “regarded as my weird hobby,” she said with a laugh.She felt more at home when she did graduate work at Northwestern in Chicago, discovering not just avant-garde composer-performers like La Monte Young and Laurie Anderson, but also the city’s rambunctious comedy and free jazz scenes. Despite never having taken vocal training, she began to sing and improvise, and the boundaries of her creativity exploded.It is Walshe’s creed that practically everything can be material: text messages, memes, irritating conversations overheard on the train, old TV shows and movies unearthed from YouTube, online message boards, Samuel Beckett and the band One Direction have all appeared in her work.The other week, she said, she had been asked to record her dentist as he performed a procedure: “The second you say, ‘Let’s pay attention to this and see what’s going on,’ maybe that’s something interesting.” Walshe at the Darmstadt Summer Course in Germany. She will soon travel to Huddersfield, England, where she will be the resident composer at the town’s contemporary music festival.Kristof LempBut it would be wrong to interpret her work, extraordinary as it often is, as irreverent for the sake of it, Molleson said. “There’s a real compassion and tenderness there. And she’s fascinated by big issues. Take A.I., which she was exploring a decade ago: She was way ahead of most of us.” For all of its high jinks, in performance “Some Notes on Martian Sonic Aesthetics” was a disconcertingly moving meditation on the loneliness of space exploration.Later this month, Walshe will travel to the northern English town of Huddersfield, where she will be the resident composer at its annual contemporary music festival. “Ireland: A Dataset,” premiered online during the coronavirus pandemic, will have its first in-person performance on Nov. 24. And a gallery will host an exhibition of Walshe’s work, titled “13 Ways of Looking at A.I.: Art and Music,” which will develop the composer’s recent thinking on a subject that has preoccupied and fascinated her for the last decade, and which increasingly seems to infiltrate her output.The festival will open on Friday with another recent work, “Personhood,” created with the accordionist Andreas Borregaard. It explores what selfhood looks like in an era of unremitting technological surveillance — with many of our movements tracked, and much of our data scraped and mined.Andreas Borregaard playing the accordion in the Netherlands during a performance of “Personhood” this month. The work explores what selfhood looks like in an era of unremitting technological surveillance.Paul JanssenAccording to Walshe, Borregaard and the ensemble are instructed to perform choreography as if being controlled by a “mind cult.” The conductor will be equipped with the kind of clicker used by dog trainers, and there will be references to characters resembling Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.A rumination on how it feels to cling to individuality when tech corporations seem intent on trying to turn people into biological fodder for algorithms, “Personhood” is both funny and deeply serious, like so much of Walshe’s work.“Perhaps it sounds earnest, but the way I think of my role as an artist is to try and look at the world around me, and process that,” Walshe said. “It’s how I understand what’s going on.”Huddersfield Contemporary Music FestivalThrough Nov. 26; hcmf.co.uk More