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      New Recordings Revive James P. Johnson and Mary Lou Williams Rarities

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      A pair of new recordings bring holy grail artifacts by the composer-pianists James P. Johnson and Mary Lou Williams into the light.This September, audiences will at last possess a more dynamic, more elegant — and just plain improved — sense of how New York City’s jazz and classical scenes converged in the 1940s.Was eight decades a galling length of time to have waited? Naturally. But better late than never.The belated occasion is because of a pair of new recordings. Each one has located and dusted off a holy grail artifact, dating from an era when Black composers with sway in jazz circles dared to pursue hybrid musical styles, all while meeting various forms of resistance or disrespect. Their classical works were discussed as they premiered, yet were rarely programmed twice. Nor were they properly documented on recordings.That last bit of the story is what’s changing, starting this week. One CD, out Friday from the Naxos label, brings the world premiere recording of “De Organizer”: a one-act opera on labor politics jointly conceived by the composer-pianist James P. Johnson and the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes.James P. Johnson, shown, jointly conceived the one-act opera “De Organizer” with Langston Hughes.Gilles Petard/Redferns, via Getty ImagesMary Lou Williams’s “Zodiac Suite” has long been popular in its jazz-trio form, but its chamber orchestra version had never been properly documented on a studio recording.Graphic House/Archive Photos, via Getty ImagesOne week after that, the chamber orchestra version of Mary Lou Williams’s “Zodiac Suite” will enjoy its first-ever studio recording on the Mack Avenue label.When news releases for both albums hit my inbox nearly simultaneously, toward the end of the summer, my mouth hung open. Both Johnson and Williams were era-defining composers and improvising pianists: Johnson was an exemplar of Harlem stride and the author of the “Charleston”; Williams matured as a composer and player in the crucible of Kansas City’s boogie-woogie style, before arranging for Ellington and tutoring lions of bebop in New York. Why shouldn’t we have access to their ambitious classical works?Johnson and Hughes’s “De Organizer” had its lone stretch onstage in 1940, at a convention hosted by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. And then Johnson’s score promptly disappeared from public view until it was (mostly) recovered, and a restoration by the scholar-pianist James Dapogny premiered in 2002.After discovering a copy of every sung note in the opera, Dapogny was also given details on the original orchestration by Johnson’s foundation. The new Naxos CD documents the scholar’s edition, recorded by the conductor Kenneth Kiesler and the University of Michigan Opera Theater and Symphony Orchestra in a 2006 performance. (It also offers excerpts from another Johnson opera, “The Dreamy Kid,” based on the Eugene O’Neill play.)In “Organizer,” the result is a chameleonic work that melds the vibrato of operatic singing with select stylistic attributes of Black spirituals and the blues; its orchestral heft also has a place for touches of the Harlem stride style that Johnson pioneered. (Dapogny is the pianist in this performance.)The libretto — previously published in Susan Duffy’s book “The Political Plays of Langston Hughes” — can seem sleek to a point of slightness, on the page. But Hughes’s narrative and rhetorical designs hit in a new way when heard in tandem with Johnson’s ebullient, inventive music; his plot feeds Johnson’s capaciousness as a composer, making space for choral meditations and grand solo entrances, even as it presses forward with clear narrative drive and a sense of high spirits.When a local overseer crashes a meeting of Black sharecroppers to discourage their unionizing, Hughes’s text indicates that the rhythm involved should evoke the song “Mamma Don’t ’Low No Piano Playin’ Here” (a folk tune that has enjoyed a great number of variations over the decades) — signaling that one authority’s wishes will not present a major obstacle for the community that can sing out together.The new “Zodiac Suite,” on LP. Diehl credited the Knights’ artistic director and conductor for his ability to “translate” the piece’s jazz-ensemble aspects to the full chamber orchestra.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesWith an all-Black creative team pushing for a progressive vision of labor solidarity, perhaps it’s no great mystery as to why the classical industry of the time did not promote the opera (or invest in its preservation). However the erasure of “Organizer” came about, Dapogny’s devotion to his restoration of the score, right up until his death in 2019, amounts to its own kind of artistic activism.A similar interventionist spirit was required when producing a new take of Williams’s “Zodiac Suite.” With its 12 movements — one for each astrological sign — the composer created affectionate portraits of admired artists and friends. While that composition has long been popular in its jazz-trio form, Williams was eager to adapt it for both chamber orchestra and a full orchestra. A document exists of the chamber version, capturing a live 1945 performance at Town Hall in New York, though that take’s lack of proper rehearsal time is audible in the final, muddled result.So her chamber version was also in need of a contemporary champion. It has found one in Aaron Diehl — a pianist widely admired in both jazz and classical circles.During the lockdown portion of the pandemic, he was joined by the New York Philharmonic as he played excerpts from the chamber “Zodiac” for the orchestra’s streaming channel. Yet on the new Mack Avenue recording, he’s joined not by the Philharmonic, but by the adventurous chamber orchestra the Knights, which is staffed by some of the brightest younger players on the classical scene. And they’ve clearly invested time in all 12 parts of Williams’s suite.The Knights as a whole balance lightness of touch with a forward sense of swing in the opening “Aries,” and in the regal flourishes that Williams deployed in movements like “Taurus” and “Leo.” Strings in particular seem to revel in the bluesy sliding tones of “Cancer,” which also includes the guest tenor saxophonist Nicole Glover’s elegant soloing (in a spot originally conceived by Williams for Ben Webster).The Knights flutist Alex Sopp emerges as a key figure as the suite progresses — including when she soars dreamily atop the rhythmic patterns of “Scorpio” for significant, exposed stretches. Diehl, the bassist David Wong and the drummer Aaron Kimmel are a consistent delight — as when providing authoritative piano-trio swing during “Virgo.”In an interview, Diehl lavished praise on the chamber orchestra. “It’s hard enough — even in a small jazz ensemble, five or six people — to agree on the eighth-note triplet,” he said. “When you have multiples of that — 25 or 30 people — that always makes it more difficult. It’s always about negotiating how you’re going to play, how you’re going to phrase.”Diehl credited the Knights’ artistic director and conductor, Eric Jacobsen, for his ability to “translate” the jazz-ensemble aspects of the “Zodiac Suite” to his full chamber orchestra.In a separate interview, Kiesler, the conductor of “De Organizer,” described how the Michigan performance of Johnson’s operatic music required a similar sense of open investigation regarding orchestral swing. He said he learned from Dapogny that, when it comes to swing, “the style is not always about the rhythm, but the weight — it’s about emphasis in places that we might not have it in so-called ‘classical’ music.”The interpretive insights on both new recordings are so strong, they stand alongside other recent triumphs in the American repertoire. The just-right balance of orchestral weight and lithe swing is also in evidence in a recent recording of Wynton Marsalis’s Symphony No. 4. And the engaged political elements of Johnson and Hughes’s one-act opera have a connection with the contemporary operas of the saxophonist and composer Anthony Braxton, whose “Trillium X” premiered in Prague this summer.So: More evidence of the true breadth and nature of the American repertoire is steadily coming into view. What major orchestras and opera companies do with that information may be up to their donor bases. But in the meantime, both of these new recordings are capable of dishing out American art music ambrosia — and to a broad community of listeners. More

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      Jorma Panula: The Teacher Behind the Greatest Conductors

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      “He doesn’t like talking about himself,” Marja Kantola-Panula said, gesturing to her husband, Jorma Panula, across their dining table while he sat silently. He had been asked a question about his sprawling presence in classical music as arguably the world’s most influential conducting teacher. But instead of answering, he took a bite from a pastry.When Panula, 93, does speak, it’s brief and authoritative, at times abrasive and absolutely clear. At his home, a modest yet paradisiacal retreat tucked among trees in the countryside northwest of Helsinki, he explained, “I was in the orchestra, and most musicians, they hate talking.”He is not so different in the classroom, where he is famous for quietly listening, happy to offer advice if students ask for it but otherwise saying little, gruffly, and certainly never lecturing. His approach hasn’t really changed in the half-century he has spent shaping young conductors — at the storied Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, and now through master classes and his own school.Think of major Finnish conductors working around the world today — there are a disproportionate number of them — and chances are they studied with Panula. If this country is the world’s top exporter of conducting talents, then he is something like a farmer, cultivating generations of artists: those leading the field, like Susanna Mälkki and Esa-Pekka Salonen, and those emerging in a blaze, like Klaus Mäkelä.“None of us would exist without him,” said Tarmo Peltokoski, the 23-year-old Finn who leads the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra. “All the foundation of my conducting comes from him.”Susanna Mälkki, who studied with Panula, conducting the New York Philharmonic.Chris Lee/New York Philharmonic, via Associated PressPeltokoski in particular has a close relationship with Panula because of their shared background: Both grew up in Vaasa, in western Finland, and speak its dialect. It’s there that Panula hosts a conducting competition every three years. But it’s not where he first picked up a baton; he had prepared for a different life, one that led to his graduating, in 1950, from the Sibelius Academy as a student of organ and church music.That school is the namesake of Jean Sibelius, Finland’s most treasured composer, who was still alive, and in his 80s, when Panula moved to Helsinki. One day, a friend told him where the national hero liked to take a walk after lunch. “The next morning, it was rainy, but I took my bicycle to the little bay and waited,” Panula recalled. “It was freezing, and I waited, and waited. He didn’t come, so I went back home.”Later, that afternoon, he ran into a neighbor, who said that Sibelius had arrived right after he left. “Mamma mia!” Panula exclaimed, throwing up his hands in exasperation from a rocking chair in his living room seven decades later. “I was so close.” The two never met.Panula remained at the Sibelius Academy to study conducting, which he decided to focus on as a career, with success: By 1965, he was the music director of the Helsinki Philharmonic. His tenure was thoroughly Finnish, with repertoire heavy on homegrown composers, but also pioneering in his commitment to works by, for example, Shostakovich. He composed music as well, for both the concert hall and the opera house.His career as a conductor, however, pales compared with his teaching.Most of Panula’s students begin at a young age, though not always. Dalia Stasevska, 38, the chief conductor of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, didn’t start until her early 20s. She played violin in a Sibelius Academy ensemble that he used in his classes. After seeing Eva Ollikainen (now of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra) at the podium one session, Stasevska told Panula that she was interested in conducting, so he took a receipt out of his pocket, wrote a phone number on it and said, “Call here.” She was so inspired by her first experiences with him, she said, “I couldn’t let go of the baton from my hands.”Express everything with your hands: Klaus Mäkelä, 27, said Panula first taught him to conduct with small movements, just “a postage-stamp-sized beat.”Miguel Angel Molina/EPA, via ShutterstockMäkelä, 27, and Peltokoski were both adolescents with no conducting experience when they enrolled in Panula’s classes, and they studied with him until adulthood. They got a crash course in his quintessentially Finnish school of thought, which Sakari Oramo, 57, a former student of Panula’s who now teaches at the Sibelius Academy, summarized by saying: “You have to be able to express everything with just your hands. We are a nation of few words.”And so, at least at first, Panula’s students are not allowed to speak while they conduct. They do communicate physically, though. Mäkelä recalled that he was never taught the basic patterns of gesturing time — something easy enough, an actor can pick it up for a role — but that he was immediately made to lead musicians with small movements, just “a postage-stamp-sized beat.” Once that was accomplished, he added, “we could do whatever we wanted.”“Clarity,” Panula said, “is No. 1, fundamental.”Very quickly, the reasoning behind his lessons becomes clear. To Peltokoski, Panula’s approach to communication set up how to interact with players efficiently, and honestly, to “not suck up to anyone.” And Mäkelä has since noticed how easily conductors develop mannerisms that his education resisted.Panula values close readings of scores, which to him entail more than simply following the notes on the page. “I can see in their faces if they know the music or not,” he said, which means also knowing a composer’s particular style, as well as background. “What kind of literature were they reading?” he added as an example. “What opera did they see? What ballet?”Dalia Stasevska, another Panula student, said, “He doesn’t hold your hand, and it teaches every student to become his or her own teacher.”Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Times, via Getty ImagesHe often proposes questions without offering answers, Mäkelä said, which makes it “so much more powerful when you find the answer yourself.” If students want more detailed explanations from him, however, he won’t deny them. “They can always ask,” Kantola-Panula said. “The best students will do that.”This method also avoids a pitfall in conducting pedagogy: creating clones. Rather, Oramo said, he “let me make music the way I wanted to do it.” Panula’s students have described him as a close listener, and never a pontificator. (Still, he does get vocal about one bête noire: a conductor who serves audiences instead of orchestra. “Remember who all these gestures are for,” he said. “That is a cardinal fault.”)“He doesn’t hold your hand, and it teaches every student to become his or her own teacher,” Stasevska said. “What is so brilliant about his teaching is that it leads to giving space to grow and find your personal style in conducting.”No two Panula alumni look the same onstage. Their similarities emerge during rehearsals: To this day, many of them speak to orchestra players succinctly and purposefully. Like, well, Finns.They do not, however, tend to pick up his personality traits, which are singular and notorious. There is his Finnish directness, and then there is his language — “this old man,” Mäkelä said of the first time he saw him, “swearing like crazy.”Part of his barbed persona was honed in his home region, Ostrobothnia. Oramo’s mother came from there, too, and was, he said, “very much of the same culture as Jorma.” Hearing Panula, he said, “was for me very familiar, almost homelike.”His sense of humor is quite dark, in a way that can be misread; Peltokoski once saw Panula walk out of a master class, then come back after rounding the block, a move that he described as “purely for theatrical effect.”“It’s not the sort of humor all people might like, but it’s very specific to him,” Peltokoski added. “And it’s also essential in understanding him — the sarcasm, the deliberate misleading of people, the wordplay, these sort of ridiculous overexaggerations.”Occasionally, though, Panula’s way of expressing himself has slid into the territory of offensive generalizations. In 2014, he gave an interview in which he glibly said that women were more suited to “feminine” music and were poor interpreters of repertoire like Bruckner symphonies. He was quickly criticized, including by former students.Panula, whose personality quirks are famous, is also known for maintaining relationships with students beyond graduation.Vesa Laitinen for The New York Times“People, of course, when they get old, become a little bit like characters,” Stasevska said. “There’s some kind of grumpiness. It’s in his personality. But I was surprised by that comment, because I don’t recognize my teacher in that. It was a sad thing for him to say, and I have no idea why he said it.”The Panula that endures in her memory, she said, is the one who nurtured her through artistic and personal struggles. Who took her and others out, almost daily, to lunches that he paid for. Who led “marvelous” discussions about culture and was devoted to his students “beyond anything I ever experienced.”He is known for maintaining relationships with students beyond graduation, checking in with terse but warmhearted phone calls. Peltokoski’s parents receive a visit when Panula is back in Vaasa. And alumni of his classes make up a far-reaching, still-growing family tree.“I’ve met people in various parts of the world who have been Jorma’s students: architects and pedagogues, people from different walks of life,” Oramo said. “The work he’s done has just been a huge piece of Finnish orchestral life and culture. And the fact that the profession of the conductor is so highly appreciated in Finland is largely the result of his work. He’s irreplaceable.”And Panula doesn’t plan to be replaced any time soon. The morning after the interview at his home, he and his wife were off to Hungary for a master class. In his latest call with Stasevska, she said, she could still hear the “sparkle” with which he discusses new students — who will keep coming as long as he’s alive.Because, asked whether he would ever truly retire, he responded with his trademark concision: “No. Why?” More

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      Gloria Coates, Composer Who Defied Conventions, Dies at 89

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      A Wisconsin native, she was among the most prolific female composers of symphonies, 17 in all, finding particular prominence in Europe, where she lived.Gloria Coates, an adventurous composer who wrote symphonies — she was one of the few women to do so — as well as other works, pieces that were seldom performed in her home country, the United States, but found audiences in Europe, where she lived much of her professional life, died on Aug. 19 in Munich. She was 89.Her daughter, Alexandra Coates, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.Ms. Coates composed 17 symphonies, along with numerous works for small ensembles and voice. In 1999, when she was working on her 11th symphony, the composer and critic Kyle Gann wrote in The New York Times that “Ms. Coates’s symphonies are dark and sensuous, and distinguished by an imaginative use of orchestral glissandos (gradual rather than stepwise changes of pitch, like slow sirens), which culminate powerfully in drawn-out crescendos.”The glissando continued to be her calling card, Mr. Gann said this week by email.“Gloria owned the orchestral glissando the way van Gogh said he owed the sunflower,” he said. “The slow pitch slides that run across the surfaces of her symphonies and string quartets can be difficult for the performers to coordinate, which has probably made musicians less willing to present her music. But they make it absolutely distinctive and recognizable. And underneath those glissandos there is often a clear discipline of canons, palindromes and other simple musical structures.”“The effect,” he added, “is often like a painting of a beautiful edifice on which rain has impressionistically smeared the surface.”Ms. Coates first came to wide attention when her “Music on Open Strings” was performed by the Polish Chamber Orchestra at the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music in 1978. Her work has since received only occasional bursts of attention in the United States — as in 1989, when her “Music on Abstract Lines” was given its world premiere at the New Music America festival in Brooklyn; and in 2002, when New World Records released the first recording of her works on an American label; and in 2019, when “Music on Open Strings” was performed at Zankel Hall in Manhattan by the American Composers Orchestra.In 2021, Edition Peters announced that it would begin publishing her works.Ms. Coates said her music “sometimes is melodic, but often derived from structures of microtones melted together.”“It is a way of thinking of music not as separate tones on a scale, as we have for centuries,” she told The Wausau Daily Herald of Wisconsin, her hometown newspaper, in 2021, “but as sounds gliding through time and space which have their own laws and still have roots in the historical musical tradition.”In 2005, the Crash Ensemble performed her Sixth String Quartet (1999) in Dublin.“Bleak and ascetic, strange and disturbing as her music may be, it’s also got a purity that makes it peculiarly compelling,” The Irish Times wrote then. “It’s not music that’s ever likely to leave even a single listener indifferent.”Ms. Coates and the conductor George Manahan in 2019 at Zankel Hall in New York City, where the American Composers Orchestra performed her “Music on Open Strings.”Jennifer TaylorGloria Ann Kannenberg was born on Oct. 10, 1933, in Wausau. Her father, Roland, was a state senator, and her mother, Natalina (Corso) Kannenberg, worked in weapons manufacturing during World War II and was later a nurse’s assistant.Gloria showed musical inclinations early.“The children in the 5-year-old kindergarten have a rhythm band,” The Wausau Daily Herald reported in early 1939. “Thomas Evenson, Jack Luedtke and Gloria Kannenberg brought drums from home.”By then she was also proficient on the toy piano. By 12 she was creating her own often unconventional music. In 1951, a composition of hers won an “excellent” rating in a national junior composers’ competition. But teachers and contest judges sometimes discouraged her more audacious departures from tradition.She told The Irish Times in 2005 that a key moment in her development came when, as a teenager, she attended a question-and-answer with the Russian composer Alexander Tcherepnin, who would become a mentor. He told her that it was more important to follow her instincts than to follow predetermined rules.After graduating from high school in Wausau, she studied music and drama for a time at Monticello College in Illinois. She later studied at other institutions, including the Cooper Union in New York and Louisiana State University, which she attended after marrying Francis Mitchell Coates Jr. in 1959 and settling for a time in Baton Rouge. She earned a master’s degree in composition there.She continued her studies in New York, but after her marriage ended in divorce in 1969, she, her daughter and their dachshund boarded a ship for Europe. Ms. Coates, who had studied voice as well as composition, settled in Munich and for a time pursued a career singing opera. But fate intervened.“When I was 7,” Alexandra Coates said by email, “she was hit by another skiing student and was paralyzed in the upper back.”Ms. Coates gave up singing and focused on painting, another interest, along with music. She told The Irish Times that in the early 1970s, amid the terrorist attacks at the Olympics in Munich and the violence of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Munich building where she was living was thought to be a possible terrorist target. She moved her music manuscripts out of the building but continued to live there. (Her daughter was living with her father in the United States.) She was, she said, sending a sort of subliminal message to herself.“It was not until several months later that I realized that that music was so important, it was more important than my life,” she said.From then on, music became her primary focus. For years Ms. Coates curated a series in Germany devoted to American contemporary music. Her own compositional output covered a wide range. Her daughter said that for a time Ms. Coates held a job giving tours of the Dachau concentration camp to members of the U.S. Army. Among the works those tours inspired was her “Voices of Women in Wartime,” a setting of writings by women under various circumstances during World War II.In addition to her daughter, Ms. Coates is survived by a brother, Philip Kannenberg; a sister, Natalie Tackett; and a grandson.If her work wasn’t often heard in the United States, critics and other writers admired her originality. Simon Cummings, who writes the contemporary music blog 5:4, said by email that Ms. Coates had set herself apart from other out-of-the-mainstream composers as “one who doesn’t merely surprise or amuse you when you encounter their music for the first time, but who completely knocks you off your feet, and moves you very deeply and powerfully, even if, at the time, you’re not really sure why you’re experiencing such a strong reaction.”In 2014, the Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed called Ms. Coates simply “our last maverick.” More

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      For 50 Years, Emanuel Ax Has Made Music Sound Simply Right

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      Understated and unarrogant, Ax can be taken for granted. But he has long been, and continues to be, one of the finest American pianists.“A young pianist with the hard-to-forget name of Emanuel Ax has one thing going for him before he plays a note,” the New York Times critic Donal Henahan wrote in 1973. “But brand identification, as advertising men term it, helps in the long run only if the product delivers, and Mr. Ax’s recital at Alice Tully Hall on Monday night fortunately carried the stamp of quality.”The occasion was Ax’s New York debut, and it was the opening flourish of a banner few years. At the Marlboro Festival in Vermont that summer, Ax gave his first concert with Yo-Yo Ma, the cellist he has spent his career playing and quipping with, the friend who calls him “the big brother I never had.” Soon, there was a date on the Young Concert Artists series, a Carnegie Hall appearance, a victory in the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition and, in February 1975, an eloquent first recording.That stamp of quality had become indelible, and it has since endured. Of course, Ax, 74, protests that the half-century career he has enjoyed following that inaugural hometown bow has been largely the product of good fortune. Never mind his Avery Fisher Prize or his 19 Grammy nominations (and eight wins), his long list of premieres or his generosity and ease as a chamber music partner to Ma and other eager collaborators. Even now, Ax will only reluctantly allow that he has much talent at all.“I just started, and I stuck to it; I liked it,” Ax said of playing the piano during a recent interview at Tanglewood, where he was joining the Boston Symphony Orchestra for a Brahms concerto as he has many, many times before. “I think the sheer enjoyment of it is a talent in itself.”From left, Leonidas Kavakos, Ax and Yo-Yo Ma, who as a trio have been working their way through arrangements of the Beethoven symphonies.Hilary ScottThat’s Manny, as everyone calls him. He has said things like this forever, sought to share the spotlight or point it wholly elsewhere. And his modesty, which he wraps in a jesting smile and a famous bonhomie, is at the heart of his pianism and personality alike.“Whatever his musical decisions are, they are never ones that would draw attention to himself,” said the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, who has known Ax for four decades and will premiere a piano concerto by Anders Hillborg with him and the San Francisco Symphony in October. “So in the very, very best sense of the word, he kind of eradicates himself out of the picture.”Might that mean, though, that Ax is taken for granted? After all, how many artists have performed at his level for so long? How many have treated us so reliably to such taste and good sense as he? How many have had his ability, not unlike that of his late associate Bernard Haitink, to make music sound so simply right?Ax ranks among the very finest of American pianists. Yet he would never admit it. As Ma put it, “He doesn’t go around saying, ‘And I did this.’” In fact, Ma recalled, when Ax told him that this article was happening, he said, “I don’t know why they’re doing this.”“I told him it’s because he’s old,” Ma said, bursting into laughter.Ma, left, and Ax in 1989.PhotofestMa — who, aside from the pianist Yoko Nozaki, Ax’s wife since 1974, has probably heard him play more than anyone — has a theory about why Ax is the way he is. “One thing that I can safely say, over the 50 years I’ve known him, is that he operates by a very strict code of conduct,” he said.The code, Ma went on, means that Ax never speaks ill of other pianists, and does what he can to bolster them instead. He insists on being kind, on looking at the brighter side of things. He goes to unusual lengths to build trust with fellow performers because the music, in the end, depends on it.“Somewhere along the line, he saw some things that he didn’t like, and he decided that he was not going to be that,” Ma explained. “He’s seen the consequences, and that’s why the code of conduct exists. It’s not some arbitrary thing.”AX WAS BORN in the Soviet Union in 1949, in what is now Lviv, Ukraine — though he still calls it Lwów, the Polish name it held in the interwar years. During the Holocaust, his parents, Joachim and Hellen, survived the concentration camps but lost, he said, “everybody.” They wed after the war and left for Warsaw when Ax was 7. He didn’t return to Lviv until six years ago, when he visited at the invitation of Philippe Sands, whose book “East West Street” movingly recounts the history of that contested city.Ax as a boy.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesAx with his parents, who left the Soviet Union and eventually settled in the United States.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesAx said that he only really remembered the opera house where he had first heard music, but Ma has heard him talk about a darker recollection, too: “I think he remembers a big parade in the town, and he knew the exact spot where it was. He backtracked and realized that that must have been when Stalin had died.”Warsaw led to Winnipeg, and Winnipeg to Manhattan, where the family settled into an apartment on the roof of a building across the street from Carnegie Hall. Ax was 12, and the hall, where he will play works by Beethoven and Schoenberg in April, became his playground. “I haunted the place,” he said.Great pianists crossed his path, older ones like Artur Rubinstein and younger artists such as Vladimir Ashkenazy, and he speaks of them with the excitement of a fan and the insight of a colleague. For Emil Gilels, he reserves telling enthusiasm.“I think he’s in a way the most sane pianist,” Ax said. “It’s so direct, absolutely self-confident, unarrogant, logical, beautiful, and just done just right. You walk out and you say, ‘That’s the way it should be.’ Of course, then you hear Richter, and you say, ‘No, that’s the way it should be.’ And then you hear Horowitz.”Ax studied at Juilliard with Mieczyslaw Munz, and endured several competitions before he triumphed in the Rubinstein. Even then, his virtues were not those typical of winners. For all his “dream technique,” as a critic described it in 1975, he immediately seemed a deeper musician than most. “His interpretations are warm, solid and straightforward,” Tim Page wrote in The Times in 1985, styling him as “a deeply satisfying pianist” — traits you can hear on his recording of the Chopin “Ballades” from the same year, or his later Haydn and Brahms.Ax performing with the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2011; the two will be reunited when they premiere a new concerto with the San Francisco Symphony in October.Barbara Davidson/Los Angeles Times, via Getty ImagesIf consistency has been Ax’s hallmark, he has never been entirely reducible to type. He dabbled with period instruments for a while, joining Charles Mackerras and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment to record the Chopin concertos with brilliance and verve; his dedication to new music, which has seen him premiere scores by composers including John Adams and Missy Mazzoli, has been striking for a pianist of his stature.“I don’t think he sees it as a duty,” Salonen said of Ax’s commitment to contemporary works. “I think he thinks it’s normal. He thinks this is something that musicians do.”Chamber music, though, was with Ax from the start. He studied with the legendary tutor Felix Galimir as a teenager, then went on to form, among other groups, his duo with Ma, a piano trio with Ma and Isaac Stern, a piano quartet with the addition of Jaime Laredo, and, most recently, another trio with Ma and Leonidas Kavakos, with whom he is working his way through arrangements of the Beethoven symphonies.Ax’s fundamental approach to chamber music reflects his “devotion to where he landed, and to the aspirations of the system,” Ma said, to “the idea of republicanism, that you can be not hierarchical.” Their relationship was forged on jokes told in the Juilliard cafeteria, where they met when Ma was 15 and Ax was 21, but also on an ideal of equality in shared music, Ma said; this, at a time when pianists were still billed as accompanists to stars, or spoken of in the possessive sense.And it is chamber music, or more precisely playing with friends, that keeps Ax from retiring. He thinks about it more than he used to, he said; he missed giving concerts during the pandemic, but he also felt liberated from the deep anxiety that has always come with them.Ax in 1973.Christian Steiner/YCA“I get very nervous when I play, and I really wish I could get over it,” Ax said, confiding that the feeling can be worse now than before. “It’s not even a musical worry, it’s more about getting things right, you know — wrong notes and things like that.”Ax is modest even about these strains; Ma compared the pressure that Ax has always felt to that suffered by Martha Argerich, whose stage fright and perfectionism have led her largely to abandon solo recitals. But he suspects that Ax is not there yet.“Something in me tells me that he’s not going to stop, because performing also does something for him that is a pillar in his life,” Ma said. “It’s solidifying. I wouldn’t say that it’s like he needs it, but there’s a mutuality that’s good.”Ask Ma what makes Ax special as a pianist, and he will say that it is how he gives music the sense that everything has been thought through. He will note how revealing it is that Ax so adores Brahms, whose works are all about restraint, about reaching for things that are kept out of reach. He will marvel, with more than a hint of exasperation, that Ax still practices for four hours a day, that he is still so prone to doubt; he will grant, though, that doubt serves a purpose in Ax’s life.“He experiences that — he lets himself experience that — because he doesn’t want to say, ‘I know everything,’” Ma said.But Ma will say all this only when asked to elaborate. Otherwise, when he answers the question of what defines Ax as a pianist, he responds with just one word.“Musicianship.”Ax, left, with students from Kids 4 Harmony at Tanglewood.Hilary Scott More

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      John Eliot Gardiner Withdraws From Performances After Accusations He Struck Singer

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      John Eliot Gardiner said he would take time off until next year to “get the specialist help I recognize that I have needed for some time.”The renowned conductor John Eliot Gardiner, who drew criticism this month when he was accused of hitting a singer in the face after a performance in France, said on Thursday that he would withdraw from performances for the rest of the year as he sought counseling.“I am taking a step back in order to get the specialist help I recognize that I have needed for some time,” Gardiner said in a statement. “I want to apologize to colleagues who have felt badly treated and anyone who may feel let down by my decision to take time out to address my issues. I am heartbroken to have caused so much distress and I am determined to learn from my mistakes.”Intermusica, the agency that represents Gardiner, said he would withdraw from all concerts until next year to focus “on his mental health while engaging in a course of counseling.” He had at least 10 more planned engagements this year, including a planned six-concert tour in the United States and Canada in October with two of his ensembles, the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists.“Over the next few months he will be undergoing an extensive, tailored course of treatment and he asks for space and privacy while the program is ongoing,” a spokesman for Intermusica, Nicholas Boyd-Vaughan, said in a statement.Gardiner, 80, apologized last week after he was accused of striking the singer, William Thomas, 28, after a performance of the first two acts of Berlioz’s opera “Les Troyens” with two of his ensembles, the Monteverdi Choir and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, at the Festival Berlioz in La Côte-Saint-André. Gardiner abruptly returned to London to see his doctor and withdrew from the rest of a planned European tour with the ensembles.Gardiner was upset that Thomas had headed the wrong way off the podium at the concert, according to a person who was granted anonymity to describe the incident because the person was not authorized to discuss it publicly.Gardiner expressed regret last week, saying that he had lost his temper and that he had apologized to Thomas, a rising bass from England.“I know that physical violence is never acceptable and that musicians should always feel safe,” he said at the time. “I ask for your patience and understanding as I take time to reflect on my actions.”Thomas was not seriously injured and has continued to perform on the tour. He has not commented on the encounter.Gardiner, who conducted at the coronation of King Charles III of Britain in May, is a crucial figure in the period-instrument movement and the founder of some of its most treasured ensembles. He has made numerous recordings, many of which are considered classics, and wrote 2013’s “Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven,” about the life and music of Johann Sebastian Bach.In October, he was to appear with the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists in the United States, including at Carnegie Hall, where he was to lead Bach’s Mass in B Minor and a rare performance of Handel’s “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato.”The Monteverdi Choir & Orchestras, a nonprofit that oversees Gardiner’s ensembles, said in a statement on Thursday that the tour would proceed without Gardiner, and that a replacement would be announced at a later date.“The well-being of all our performers and employees is important to us and we respect his decision,” the statement said. More

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      36 Hours in Amsterdam: Things to Do and See

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      12 p.m.
      Find your perfect street food
      Between the Lindengracht Markt and the neighboring Noordermarkt, a pricier, organic market that also has antiques, handmade jewelry, artisanal pickles, soaps and honey to browse, there are plenty of street-food stalls to choose from. (Walking while eating is frowned upon in Dutch culture, so grab a picnic table). On the Lindengracht side, try a sabich (€7.50), a stuffed vegetarian pita at Abu Salie, or for a classic Dutch lunch, go for the speciaal beenham and braadworst (a sandwich piled high with sausage, ham and sauerkraut, €6) at Fluks & Sons. Stalls throughout the markets also sell raw herring, sometimes covered in onions. Join locals at the Noordermarkt for fresh oysters (from €3.50 each; find them beside the entrance, next to the church tower). Dutch sweets also abound, including the ever-popular poffertjes (mini pancakes in powdered sugar or syrup) or warm and gooey stroopwafels. More

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      Henry Timms Wants to Tear Down Walls at Lincoln Center

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      For evidence that all is not business as usual at Lincoln Center these days, look no further than its stately travertine campus, which, for much of the summer, was dominated by a giant glittering disco ball, pink and purple flowers painted on the sidewalk and a flock of 200 flamingo lawn ornaments.“There are some who will reasonably eye-roll at this,” said Henry Timms, the center’s president and chief executive, standing on the plaza recently. “I get it. But it sends a message that we are here to have some fun.”“We can afford,” he said, “to loosen up a little.”Since taking the helm in 2019, Timms has been on a mission to remake Lincoln Center. Having helped finally push through the long-delayed $550 million renovation of David Geffen Hall, he is working to forge closer ties with the city and to bring more diversity to the center’s staff, board and audiences.Now he wants to tear down the barriers that literally wall the campus off from Amsterdam Avenue, with its neighboring housing projects, schools and new developments. But as Lincoln Center rethinks its programming — this summer’s festival included hip-hop, K-pop and an LGBTQ mariachi group — it has drawn some criticism for presenting less classical music and international theater.For the summer, Lincoln Center hung up a disco ball on the plaza.Evelyn Freja for The New York TimesThis summer’s festival — which included more popular programming than in the past and choose-what-you-pay tickets for some events — attracted more than 380,000 people, officials said, many of whom were new to the campus. Among them was Sandy Mendez, a saleswoman who lives in Washington Heights, and saw her first Lincoln Center performance, a comedy show, after coming across an advertisement at a community center. She took photos in front of the disco ball with her husband and two children.“It feels like a dance club here,” said Mendez, 42, “not a performing arts center.”It is the kind of observation that both Timms’s admirers and his detractors might make.Running Lincoln Center is not easy. The center acts as landlord to the independent arts organizations on its campus, including the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet and the New York Philharmonic, but has little power over them, since each has its own leadership, board and budget.Linc. Inc., as it’s known, also presents its own work, which has sometimes led to tensions with constituents. Reynold Levy, its president for more than a decade, called his memoir “They Told Me Not to Take That Job.” After he left, in 2013, Lincoln Center cycled through four leadership teams in five years before appointing Timms in 2019.The British-born Timms, 46, who previously led the 92nd Street Y, helped create #GivingTuesday and co-wrote “New Power,” a book exploring bottom-up leadership, including movements like #MeToo and social networks like Facebook. Now he is trying to apply some of those participatory principles at Lincoln Center. He said his efforts were not “some new trendy idea” but a response to the fact that the center has for too long been disconnected from the community.“We very much came with an agenda, which was we were going to tell a different kind of story about Lincoln Center,” Timms said, “to fundamentally shift the institution in terms of who leads it, who represents it, who’s on our staff, who’s on our stages, who’s in our audiences.”Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi, the new restaurant at Geffen Hall, has been a hit with critics and is drawing crowds.Nico Schinco for The New York Times“We have a long way to go as an organization — nobody at Lincoln Center is taking a bow,” he added in an interview at Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi, the new restaurant at Geffen Hall that critics have named one of the best in the city. “But relative to where we were, I feel like we’ve made good progress.”Nevertheless, the reduction in programming, and the shift away from classical music and theater to other genres, has raised questions. Joseph W. Polisi, a former president of the Juilliard School who has written a history of Lincoln Center, said that Timms’s vision was a “sea change” for the center that could come at a cost.“It leaves a gap in music programming in New York City that is not being filled — it can’t be filled,” he said. “All the artistic leaders I know are fully in support of more program diversity at Lincoln Center. Now the question is, how far does the pendulum swing?”The critic Alex Ross recently wrote in The New Yorker that the new approach seemed “fundamentally out of step with Lincoln Center and its public, both extant and potential.”The conductor Jonathon Heyward will lead a reimagined version of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.Lawrence Sumulong/Lincoln CenterBut Timms pushes back on such criticism, partly by pointing out that “we have just spent four years through a pandemic, and half a billion dollars, creating a concert hall to house the New York Philharmonic” and noting that the center had hired Jonathon Heyward, who recently became the first Black music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, to lead a reimagined version of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.“Lincoln Center was founded as Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; it was not founded as Lincoln Center for the Classical Arts,” Timms said. “You go back to the beginning and there’s a reason Mahalia Jackson was playing here. And it’s not because we’re only supposed to be about the opera and the ballet.”Summers at Lincoln Center look different now. The old Lincoln Center Festival was scrapped a few years before Timms arrived, and with it the large-scale, ambitious productions it brought each summer from around the world, including Noh theater and Kabuki theater from Japan, Indonesian dance and Chinese opera. Lincoln Center’s programming is now overseen by Shanta Thake, its chief artistic officer, who was formerly an associate artistic director at the Public Theater. She and Timms have replaced the Mostly Mozart Festival, which had focused on classical music and recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, with the more eclectic Summer for the City festival.Portia and the American Composers Orchestra at “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle,” which Lincoln Center staged in Damrosch Park as part of its Summer for the City festival.Lawrence Sumulong/Lincoln Center“How do we build on this promise of being a performing arts center for all New Yorkers?” Thake asked. “How do we not rest on our laurels but push for what a performing arts center needs to be right now? Everybody’s willing to have hard conversations.”The coming fall and winter season will feature an array of classical offerings, including a new production of Henry Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen” and a performance of Philip Glass’s piano études. There will also be more experimental fare in line with the center’s new vision, including a reimagining of “The Sound of Music” through a “utopian, Afrofuturistic lens,” featuring gospel, funk, soul and Afrobeat music.Timms has also prioritized diversity backstage: of the 109 current members of the executive and senior management teams, about 60 percent are women and nearly 40 percent are people of color. In addition, the center recently started a two-year fellowship program to develop a diverse pipeline of potential board members for the resident organizations; three have been placed as trustees and three more have elections pending.Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, who serves on Lincoln Center’s board, praised Timms as a “once-in-a-generation leader” who “genuinely understands that diversity correlates with excellence.”A summer dance party on the Lincoln Center plaza.Mohamed Sadek for The New York TimesThe ballet dancer Misty Copeland, who joined Lincoln Center’s board under Timms, commended his spearheading of the Amsterdam Avenue project, a long-neglected plan to make right Lincoln Center’s initial razing of the low-income San Juan Hill neighborhood where the performing arts complex was built.“He does not shy away from a history that may not look clean and sparkly,” Copeland said. “I don’t think I could imagine 10 years ago that this is where Lincoln Center would be.”Timms, whose mother was an illustrator from the United States and whose father was a British archaeologist, grew up in Exeter, England, where his family often attended regional theaters.“Our childhood was full of ideas and the arts,” he said. “We had access and experience and ownership. You felt like you were a part of something.”He graduated from Durham University in England and landed a job overseeing programming at the 92nd Street Y in 2008, where he helped start #GivingTuesday, a day of philanthropy after Black Friday and Cyber Monday that became a global success. In 2014, he was named the Y’s executive director.Steven R. Swartz, the new chairman of Lincoln Center, said Timms had won over the center’s board with his energy and ideas, quickly recognizing the organization’s main problems, including tensions with the constituents. “He just so quickly diagnosed what needed to be done,” Swartz said.And after years of false starts and bitter feuds, Timms built a good working relationship with the leaders of the Philharmonic — he and Deborah Borda, who was the orchestra’s president and chief executive, sometimes resolved disputes over coffee or martinis — and finally renovated Geffen Hall. By accelerating construction during the pandemic shutdown, they were able to open the reimagined hall ahead of schedule.“He was intent on moving past the history of animosity that existed between Lincoln Center and the New York Philharmonic,” said Borda, who stepped down at the end of June. “He put a premium on working together. He was essentially the right man at the right time at the right place.”Katherine G. Farley, who stepped down as Lincoln Center’s chairwoman in June, said Timms “has led the transformation of a traditional institution” and that he is “quick and eager to experiment.””Not everything works out,” she added. “When it doesn’t work, he’s quick to shut it down and try something else.”Like other arts institutions, Lincoln Center is still trying to recover from the pandemic shutdown, when the performing arts came to a halt for more than 18 months. The organization is spending less on programming than it did when Timms began his tenure: about $14 million in the fiscal year that ended in June 2022, down from $23 million in 2019, a decrease of about 40 percent that officials attributed in part to the fact that Geffen Hall remained closed for construction through the fiscal year of 2022.But fund-raising remains relatively strong, and the endowment has risen to about $268 million, compared to $258 million in 2019. Moody’s recently affirmed its A3 rating on the center’s $356 million of debt but revised its outlook to stable from negative, noting the completion of Geffen Hall and the center’s efforts to cut expenses and attract new audiences.And relations have eased with the constituent organizations — who historically competed with Lincoln Center for audiences, donors and attention.David Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, reopened last year after a long-delayed renovation.Hilary Swift for The New York Times“He’s been very clear that it’s the job of Lincoln Center to honor and pay attention to and try to help all the constituents that make up Lincoln Center,” said Andre Bishop, the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater. Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, said Timms had signaled to the constituents early in his tenure that the days of infighting were over. “Here was somebody who understood and really seemed to be listening,” he said. And Damian Woetzel, the president of Juilliard, said Timms had proven “tradition is not at war with innovation.”On a recent day, a team of Lincoln Center staff members inside Geffen Hall was conducting research to prepare for the Amsterdam Avenue project, asking visitors where they spent time on campus and what they would like to do more of: attend cultural events? meet friends? play games? exercise? A poster explained the history of the San Juan Hill neighborhood and said: “Help us make our campus more welcoming!”In a few hours, Timms would join a salsa band on the outdoor dance floor in a pair of coral-colored Nike Air Max sneakers.“Changing with the world isn’t just the right thing to do morally,” he said. “It’s the right thing to do strategically. And if leaders in a position like ours don’t lead this change, what on earth are you doing?” More

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      An Orchestra’s ‘Ode to Joy’ Calls for Ukrainian Freedom

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      Not long after the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, Leonard Bernstein traveled to the once-divided German city and led a performance of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” replacing the word “Freude,” or joy, with “Freiheit” — freedom.In an echo of that historic concert, the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, a touring ensemble formed in the early months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, presented Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the suburbs of Berlin on Thursday. And, for the famous “Ode to Joy” choral finale, the text was translated to Ukrainian, with the key word being “slava,” or glory, as in “Slava Ukrainii”: Glory to Ukraine.“I’m driven by my passion for Ukraine,” the orchestra’s conductor, Keri-Lynn Wilson, said on Thursday afternoon before the concert, at the garden of Schönhausen Palace. “And my desire to get rid of Putin and his regime through culture.”Around her was a bustle of activity: ushers laying pillows on chairs, sound technicians consulting in a booth, pink umbrellas being placed to shield an orchestra from the sun. The orchestra, made up of 74 Ukrainian musicians — some of whom live in that country still, some of whom have fled — was about to perform as part of its second summer tour of Europe.“Russia says there’s no Ukrainian culture, or music, or language,” said Anna Bura, a violinist in the orchestra. “They want to erase Ukrainian culture. We want to show people we are here.”The program included the second violin concerto by the contemporary Ukrainian composer Yevhen Stankovych, and ended with the Beethoven. While on vacation three weeks ago, Wilson arrived at the idea that the “Ode to Joy” should be sung in Ukrainian, and worked with Mykola Lukas and the vocal coach Ivgeniia Iermachkova to create a new singing translation of the Friedrich Schiller text.Keri-Lynn Wilson, right, conducted the orchestra, whose performances featured Valeriy Sokolov as the soloist in Yevhen Stankovych’s Second Violin Concerto.Andreas Meichsner for The New York TimesThe orchestra’s stop in Berlin coincided with Ukrainian Independence Day. Kyrylo Markiv, a violinist in the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, helped rehearse the choir, the Ukrainian Freedom Chorus, which was assembled for the occasion from the Diplomatic Choir of Berlin and other singers. He serves as a first-desk violinist in the Odesa Philharmonic and is choirmaster at the Transfiguration Cathedral in Odesa, which was built in the early 19th century, reconstructed between 1999 and 2003 and then damaged last month by Russian airstrikes.The night the cathedral was bombed, Markiv had left his violin there in preparation for a concert the next day. “My colleagues wrote in a work chat that the building was on fire,” he said. “I got dressed and went with my brother, who is a deacon there, and saw destroyed cars, fire. In the building, I looked for my violin. Everything was destroyed, but my violin was about 80 percent OK.”Now, his violin is being repaired by a luthier in Lviv. The attack, he said, strengthened his resolve for the tour. “I’m proud that we came to show our art,” he said. “These times are hard for us. We’re strong, and the European people make us stronger.”Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York and Wilson’s husband, helped to arrange and raise money for this tour and the one last summer. “The intensity of the war has raised the stakes this year,” he said. “These musicians all live there or have families there. The war makes everything more intense: their playing, their relationships with each other. Everything is magnified.”The violinist Anna Bura.Andreas Meichsner for The New York TimesKyrylo Markiv, the choirmaster of the Odesa Transfiguration Cathedral.Andreas Meichsner for The New York TimesAt a rehearsal on Thursday, as Wilson led the orchestra into a breakneck run-through of the Beethoven’s second movement, the two first-desk bass players, Nazarii Stets and Ivan Zavgorodniy, bounced along to the rhythm with broad smiles on their faces. Stets, who lives in Kyiv, said in an interview that this summer’s tour was less celebratory than he had hoped: “I expected it would be the victory tour, and it’s still a tour with continuous fighting.”A member of the Kyiv Camerata, a chamber orchestra that plays contemporary Ukrainian music, he had a solo recital scheduled on the day after the invasion began.“My bass was already at the concert hall,” Stets said. “I spent the night in my house, and then the war started.” After two months with his family in the west of the country, he returned to Kyiv. Since then, he has played in “a lot of charity and benefit concerts,” he said — mostly for the Music Unites charity fund, which donates medicine and food to children, and cars and communications equipment to soldiers.Many musicians have used their art to raise money. The cellist Denys Karachevtsev now lives in Berlin but spent the first year of the war in his hometown, Kharkiv, the site of vicious fighting at the beginning of the conflict. More than 600,000 residents fled that city as Russian shells and rockets destroyed homes and public buildings. A video he recorded of Bach’s fifth cello suite among the ruins garnered attention and donations.From left, the vocal soloists Vladyslav Buialskyi, Vassily Solodkyy, Nicole Chirka and Olga Kulchynska.Andreas Meichsner for The New York TimesBut music, Karachevtsev said, was just one part of his efforts. “I had my car,” he added, “so I was evacuating people and taking them to the trains, bringing back medicine and food. We didn’t know how the situation would go on.”The videos brought him to the attention of the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, which invited him to participate this year. “I think it’s a good way to continue helping our country,” he said. Now, Karachevtsev is studying in Berlin while continuing to teach students in Kharkiv online. It is still considered too dangerous to have in-person lessons. “The nearest Russian city is about 50 kilometers away,” he said. “It takes 30 seconds for the bombs to come.”As the sun began to set in Berlin, the orchestra ate dinner. Dignitaries, including Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Oleksiy Makeev, and the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, arrived as audience members began to file in for the free concert. Some sat in the chairs, and others spread out picnic blankets. Children ate ice cream; the atmosphere was warm and friendly.Audience members at the concert included Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Oleksiy Makeev, and the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier.Andreas Meichsner for The New York TimesSome people wore Ukrainian flags and some a vyshyvanka, a traditional embroidered blouse. Viktoria Neroda, who arrived in Berlin as a refugee from Rivne in western Ukraine last year, said she was there primarily to celebrate Ukrainian Independence Day. “I love Ukrainian music,” she said in a German-language interview, “but I’m hearing this orchestra for the first time tonight.”This tour’s performances are taking place at an uneasy moment for Ukrainians. The war has dragged on far longer than many expected, and hopes for a quick victory, heightened by the success of Ukrainian self-defense early on, have faded. Life is lived between air raid sirens. Every week brings more bad news: friends killed fighting on the front, family members’ homes destroyed by drone strikes or rocket attacks.European solidarity, too, is shifting. Berlin is 10 hours by train from Przemysl, the Polish city near the Ukrainian border where, in the war’s first weeks, refugees poured in.Berlin citizens swung into action: operating welcome centers, bringing supplies to train stations, offering rooms in their apartments. Governments announced special visa rules for Ukrainian refugees. German lawmakers spoke of a “Zeitenwende,” an epochal change in German defense policy, and sent, if sometimes reluctantly, weapons and tanks to the Ukrainian army.At the Berlin State Opera, the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko withdrew under pressure from a new production of Puccini’s “Turandot” because she had not, the house stated, adequately distanced herself from the invasion. She had said that she opposed the war, but didn’t go as far as criticizing the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, whom she had supported in the past.Denys Karachevtsev, a cellist in the orchestra.Andreas Meichsner for The New York TimesNazarii Stets, a bass player.Andreas Meichsner for The New York TimesSolidarity is still visible, but it is also beginning to splinter. Many Germans, struggling with inflation, fuel bills and the country’s economic stagnation, are questioning the price of support. The far-right Alternative for Germany party, which has been sympathetic to Putin, has surged in the polls. And classical music stages, where Russia was long a moneymaking destination, have also wavered. As the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra rehearsed last week, Netrebko was set to start rehearsals for a revival of Verdi’s “Macbeth” at the State Opera in September. (The company’s leader, Matthias Schulz, told Berlin public radio this year that Netrebko had spoken out, in his opinion, as far as she was able.)Thursday’s concert, then, was both a celebration of Ukraine’s independence and Germany’s solidarity, and part of an effort to preserve those two things. After speeches from the dignitaries, the orchestra launched into energetic, insistent Verdi, followed by a searing account of the Stankovych concerto. That piece ends with a sustained, harmonious major third in the strings, which clashes with the solo violin’s plucked minor third. The dissonance holds, softly, then fades out.The orchestra’s concert on Thursday was met with standing ovations.Andreas Meichsner for The New York Times More