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      Review: With Premieres, an Orchestra Keeps Facing Forward

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      The American Composers Orchestra, which occupies an essential place in the New York scene, presented an evening of several new works at Zankel Hall.Pity the American composer interested in writing orchestral music. Unless your last name is Glass, Reich or Adams, opportunities are destined to come few and far between.But one institution bucks this regrettable trend. The focus of the American Composers Orchestra is right there in its name: Its website specifies an intention to spotlight “the infinite variety of American orchestral music, reflecting gender, racial, ethnic, geographic, stylistic and age diversity.”On Thursday night at Zankel Hall in Manhattan, the orchestra did its mission proud. There was a significant amount of music from veterans of the American experimental scene: Augusta Read Thomas’s “Sun Dance — In memoriam Oliver Knussen” and George E. Lewis’s “Weathering.” Pieces by the younger composers Nina C. Young and Jack Hughes offered distinct ways of engaging the tradition of tonal writing, and Guillermo Klein’s “The Kingdom” offered some of the poised polystylism familiar from his work as a pianist and bandleader.With the exception of Thomas’s work, a local premiere, every piece on Thursday was being given its world premiere. All told, the program’s 70 minutes of playing were equal to the amount of new American orchestral music that you might catch in an especially ambitious month of, say, the New York Philharmonic’s season.Led by Vimbayi Kaziboni, the American Composers Orchestra gave an impressive account of the varied works, even if there were occasional hints that this program had tested the limited rehearsal time available for it — as in some blurred brass articulation in Thomas’s hard-riffing, six-minute tribute to Knussen. But overall, the ensemble’s sound was a pleasure to hear, across pieces that were all worth hearing.“Weathering,” a bustling, impassioned 15-minute work, continued Lewis’s sterling recent run of music for large forces. (How long until the Philharmonic, his local symphony, recognizes the merit of his orchestral catalog?) Speaking from the stage before the performance, he compared the title with the endurance required in the face of racist microaggressions. He advertised a noisy “weathering” chord that he said depicted this ritual annoyance. It was indeed noisy, and did indeed recur. But it was also not narrowly didactic: His packed yet considered orchestrations connote a generous spirit — even, or particularly, in moments of carefully chiseled chromatic density.Lewis’s “weathering” chord, then, cut a wry, playful figure whenever it appeared. And the balance of his writing was riveting, with different elements catching the ear in near simultaneity. One such moment of supple rhythmic patterning came from a pair of percussionists playing gongs that led to a wisp of luminous harp writing and droning in the woodwinds. Kaziboni shaped this hyperactive swirl with crucial attention to dynamics. At one juncture, he let the orchestra rip with a loud chord, then pared things back to cradle a crying articulation in the trumpets.Discussions of tonal contemporary music sometime fall into the cliché of calling any such works “lushly” melodic. So give Hughes credit: His motivic sense in “Three Ways of Getting There” on Thursday was robust and convincing. And yet his accompanying orchestration didn’t operate with any boring received wisdom. In the first movement, as an undulating-then-rising melodic figure was passed among the strings, there was also tartness that offered a clever way of scrambling expected codes for conventional melody. (Tuneful and finely textured, “Three Ways” makes you wonder what Hughes would do with an opera commission.)

      Los Guachos Cristal by Guillermo KleinAfter intermission, “The Kingdom” offered some of the characteristic complexity of Klein, a pianist-composer known for writing harmonically stacked material for his jazz ensemble, Los Guachos. Where his recordings spoil listeners with fine-drilled detail, some moments of Thursday’s performance had me wondering about intonation: Passages of polyphonic sourness could seem slightly overdone, even though I left wanting to hear the piece again.I had a similar reaction to Young’s “Out of whose womb came the ice,” a 28-minute monodrama for orchestra and baritone (Sidney Outlaw, sounding richly impassioned). Inspired by Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic exploration, it was full of spacious expanses and some stark, well judged dramatic pivots. Not all those were obviously loud in nature: At multiple junctures, Young skillfully depicted hope breaking down through a subtly unspooling, solo instrumental line, amid keening hazes of arid orchestration.But the text, by Young and David Tinervia, overindulged in nautical coordinates and other technical language. It also stinted on some of the concepts Young described more expansively in a program note — specifically, her interest in the crew’s “perception of the Endurance in relationship to their surroundings.” Her electronic elements, while well produced, tended to distract attention from the orchestral momentum. And R. Luke Dubois’s accompanying video design was likewise too often literal, depicting blocks of ice in various stages of melting.It’s unfortunate that Thursday’s program was a one-off performance. Still, Kaziboni and the players were skilled champions of the music. And the focused attention of a robust crowd of listeners was an indication that this group’s necessary interventions have a ready, supportive local audience.American Composers OrchestraPerformed on Thursday at Zankel Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Yuri Temirkanov, Conductor Who Celebrated Russia’s Music, Dies at 84

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      Immersed in his native land’s repertoire — Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev — he drew bold, rich sounds from the world’s major orchestras. In Russia, he was adored.Yuri Temirkanov, a well-traveled Russian conductor steeped in his country’s bygone musical culture, died on Nov. 2 in St. Petersburg, the city where he held sway for over 30 years. He was 84.His death was announced by both the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, where he was music director from 1988 to 2022 — his tenure began when it was still the Leningrad Philharmonic — and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, where he was music director from 2000 to 2006. A close associate in Baltimore said Mr. Temirkanov had had heart trouble and had died in a care facility.When he was a boy, Prokofiev had held his hand; in his prime, he was artistic director of one of the world’s great opera companies, the Kirov, in what was then Leningrad, taking that post before he was 40; and in his later years, he consulted with Shostakovich, conducted some of the world’s major orchestras, and was the object of almost cultlike adoration in his native land.At a glittering memorial service for him on Sunday in the columned hall of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, his coffin lay open as the orchestra played Tchaikovsky.In the Russian repertoire with which he was most closely associated — Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev — Mr. Temirkanov drew bold, rich sounds from his orchestras, each phrase laden with meaning. But he also found subtleties in the understated works of Haydn.Critics praised his ability to shape extended lines with minimal hand gestures — he eschewed the baton — but were puzzled by what some called his unpredictability and inconsistency. And he created an uproar in 2012 when he declared to a Russian interviewer that women shouldn’t be conductors because it was “counter to nature.” A woman, he explained, “should be beautiful, likable, attractive. Musicians will look at her and be distracted from the music!”His handpicked associate conductor in Baltimore, Lara Webber, said in a phone interview that those words were “completely incoherent with the experience I had.”Mr. Temirkanov, she said, was a “really supportive boss” and a “tremendously empathetic humanist.”Mr. Temirkanov largely tried to steer clear of politics; he once insisted to the British critic Norman Lebrecht that while living in the Soviet Union he never joined the Communist Party. But he told the critic Time Smith of The Baltimore Sun in 2004 that President Vladimir V. Putin was a “very good friend, very good.” Mr. Smith noted that Mr. Temirkanov had successfully lobbied Mr. Putin for funding and that he was the first recipient of a new medal created by the president.Mr. Temirkanov after his farewell concert with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra at Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in Baltimore in 2006.Brendan Smialowski for The New York TimesGregory Tucker, who had become close to Mr. Temirkanov as publicity director for the Baltimore orchestra, said that as Russian orchestras faced financial crisis in the post-Soviet era, Mr. Temirkanov “had a very frank discussion with Putin, that if the state doesn’t step up, these institutions won’t survive.”To his American associates, Mr. Temirkanov was a mysterious but compelling presence, a visitor from the lost world of the Soviet Union’s last years and a disciple of old modes of music instruction that now barely exist. The Baltimore Sun critic Stephen Wigler noted in 1999 that Mr. Temirkanov “doesn’t own a TV set and doesn’t even know how to drive a car.”He spoke English but hardly used it, and he did not go out of his way to cultivate audiences, though those who knew him in Baltimore said that this was less a sign of aloofness than of shyness.“My back must be to the audience, not to the orchestra,” he told The Sun. “When I conduct, I am like an actor, I am talking to the audience, but the words belong to the composer, and I am just the vessel through which they pass.”In 2005, the critic Anne Midgette wrote in The New York Times: “‘Unpredictable’ is a word that has consistently cropped up in assessments of Mr. Temirkanov’s work. And it seems to apply not only to his conducting — which he does without a baton, using circular hand motions that can seem enigmatic to outsiders — but also to his musical tastes and, indeed, to the man in general.”He was known to audiences around the world. Over his career he variously conducted the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, the Staatskapelle Dresden, the London Philharmonic, the London Symphony, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, among other ensembles.His arrival in Baltimore was greeted with some astonishment: A world-class conductor was coming to an orchestra that, although considered good, was not in the country’s top five. The city had “landed a big one,” a Sun editorial said in 1997. The tone was set for an awed and respectful relationship.For the musicians who played under Mr. Temirkanov in Baltimore, the experience was unlike any they had had with any other conductor.“He was very much into expressiveness, through hands and body movements,” Jonathan Carney, the Baltimore Symphony’s concertmaster, said in a phone interview. “It was like a ballet, watching him. He was not into controlling an orchestra. He was trying to entice us to go into a certain direction. For me, it was like watching a poet on the podium.”That Mr. Temirkanov used few words only added to his aura and helped create a “certain almost fear that you would have,” Michael Lisicky, the orchestra’s second oboist, recalled. Yet, he said by phone, “he would sing the phrase back to you. Everything, when he sang it back to you, it made sense.”“You never knew what he was thinking,” Mr. Lisicky said. “He kind of gives you these hand gestures, as if he was blessing you.”In an interview from his home in Prague, the pianist Evgeny Kissin, who played with Mr. Temirkanov many times over the years, said simply, “He was an extraordinary man.”Mr. Temirkanov conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra during a rehearsal in London in 1979. He was named the orchestra’s principal guest conductor in 1980 and later became its principal conductor.Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesYuri Khatuyevich Temirkanov was born on Dec. 10, 1938, in Nalchik, the capital of the southern Russian republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, in the Caucasus. He was the son of Khatu Sagidovich Temirkanov, the republic’s culture minister, and Polia Petrovna Temirkanova. His father was shot and killed by the Nazis when Germany invaded Russia in 1941; shortly before that, Sergei Prokofiev and his wife, who were evacuees, had stayed with the family.Mr. Temirkanov studied violin at the Leningrad Conservatory, graduating in 1965. He won a prestigious Soviet competition in 1968 and was named music director of the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra the next year.After becoming director of the Kirov Opera in 1977, he was named principal guest conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London in 1980. (He would later become the orchestra’s principal conductor.) In 1988, he was named principal conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic (later the St. Petersburg Philharmonic).Mr. Temirkanov remained active as a conductor roughly until the onset of Covid in 2020, Mr. Tucker said.Mr. Temirkanov’s son, Vladimir, a violinist in the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, and his wife, Irina Guseva, died before him. No immediate family members survive. More

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      Zdenek Macal, Conductor With an International Reach, Dies at 87

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      Shuttling between Europe and the United States, he conducted the world’s great orchestras. He was music director of the New Jersey Symphony for 11 years.Zdenek Macal in 2010. His sound, rounded and warm, was ideally suited to the 19th-century repertoire with which he was most closely associated.Michal Krumphanzl/Associated PressZdenek Macal, a Czech-born conductor who drew a distinctively rich and full sound from orchestras in several countries, including the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, where his tenure is regarded by musicians and administrators as something of a golden age, died on Oct. 25 in Prague. He was 87.The orchestra announced his death.With the New Jersey Symphony, where he was music director from 1992 to 2003, Mr. Macal (pronounced ma-KAL) was especially known for his robust performances of works by his compatriots Antonin Dvorak and Josef Suk, and by late-Romantic composers like Gustav Mahler and Sergei Rachmaninoff.But his career was international: He shuttled between Europe and the United States and conducted the world’s great orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Czech Philharmonic, where he was principal conductor from 2003 to 2007.After he left the Czech Philharmonic, he continued as guest conductor there and freelanced with other orchestras, a spokesperson for the Philharmonic said in an interview.Mr. Macal conducting the French National Orchestra. Among the many other European orchestras he conducted was the Czech Philharmonic, where he was principal conductor from 2003 to 2007.INA, via Getty Images“He was an old-world figure in music, and he really brought an old-school sound,” the New Jersey Symphony’s concertmaster, Eric Wyrick, said in a phone interview. “He would always ask, ‘Where is my sound?’ And he was relentless in pursuit of this sound world he was famous for.”That sound, rounded and warm, was ideally suited to the 19th-century repertoire with which Mr. Macal was most closely associated.“You must feel something, and you should try to show it or say it, and that’s the point for any kind of art,” he told the radio interviewer Bruce Duffie in 1990.Mr. Wyrick recalled: “There is a real aerobic feeling to the way he wanted us to play. He would tell the winds, ‘Don’t step out of the texture.’ He was marvelous.” He added that the slow tempos Mr. Macal sometimes favored were ideally suited to Dvorak, though perhaps less so to Beethoven.“He would say, ‘I don’t know how I do it. I take off with my elbows,’” and then he would gesture with his elbows, Mr. Wyrick said.In a review of a 1990 performance of Czech music by the Pacific Symphony led by Mr. Macal, the critic Chris Pasles noted in The Los Angeles Times that Mr. Macal “obviously had a sense of the correct style — the folk elements transmuted by the composer — and he emphasized the vigorous rhythms while maintaining uncluttered balance.”Reviewing a 1994 performance of the New York Philharmonic conducted by Mr. Macal, Bernard Holland of The New York Times called him “a good manager of excitement” who “manipulated the accumulating dramas” in Mussorgsky’s “A Night on Bald Mountain” with “admirable control.”The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians called Mr. Macal “a conductor of strong personality, clarity of purpose and firm structural logic in performance.”That personality could manifest itself in a certain impetuousness. When the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, Mr. Macal fled his homeland in a taxi, telling the driver to take him to the German border.“His wife and he and his young daughter, they left with whatever they had, and he had to start all over again,” said Larry Tamburri, the former executive director of the New Jersey orchestra.Looking back in 1990, Mr. Macal told Mr. Duffie: “In the whole of my life I started a few times from the beginning. I started my career in Czechoslovakia, and then after the Russian invasion we left in ’68. So I started again and had my base in Western Europe. We came every year a little to the United States, but my base was in Europe.”He moved to the United States in 1982 and, after becoming a citizen, assumed the directorship of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra in 1986. He held that position until 1995; for the last three years he was the music director of both the Milwaukee and New Jersey orchestras.The New Jersey Symphony’s recording of Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, which he conducted, won a Grammy Award for best engineered classical album in 2001.Mr. Macal conducting in Olomouc, Czechoslovakia, in 1966. Two years later, when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, Mr. Macal fled his homeland with his wife and daughter in a taxi.Frantisek Nesvadba/CTK, via Associated PressZdenek Macal was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, on Jan. 8, 1936, and studied violin with his father from the age of 4. He enrolled at the conservatory in Brno, won an international conducting competition in Besançon, France, in 1965 and conducted the Czech Philharmonic for the first time shortly after winning the Dimitri Mitropoulos conducting competition in New York in 1966. He made his American debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1972.Mr. Macal’s wife, Georgina, a singer, died in 2015. A daughter, Monika, died last year. More

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      The Kronos Quartet Celebrates Its 50th Anniversary

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      The group, which celebrated its birthday on Friday at Carnegie Hall, changed music with its open-eared and open-minded approach.Late one night in 1973, a young violinist named David Harrington was listening to the radio. He heard some music that was just a few years old: George Crumb’s “Black Angels,” a harsh and eerie, prayerful and screaming piece for amplified string quartet, full of grief and anger about the quagmire in Vietnam.“A lot of people my age,” Harrington recalled in a recent interview, “were desperately trying to find work that felt like it somehow related to what we were experiencing, what our country had been going through.”For him, “Black Angels” was it. “I thought, I don’t have any choice,” he said. “I have to play that piece.”Harrington got three friends together and, with the help of a Greco-Roman mythological dictionary to brainstorm a name, the Kronos Quartet was born with a vision, then rare, of focusing on new and recent compositions.Fifty years, and over 1,000 fresh works and arrangements later — an anniversary and achievement celebrated on Friday with a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall — the group has changed the music world.When Kronos formed, contemporary music was widely viewed as mathematically rigid and atonal: unlistenable audience poison. Buoyed by dramatic stage lighting, trendy clothes and passionate, eclectic performances and recordings, the quartet showed that a new approach to the new could fill halls and draw young crowds.Kronos proved that composers working in different idioms than standard-issue modernism — like Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams and Osvaldo Golijov — could become core string quartet material, as could world traditions and collaborators on nonwestern instruments. A quartet could adapt the music of far-afield artists like Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, Astor Piazzolla and Sigur Rós, and could define the hard-edge soundtracks of films like “Requiem for a Dream.”Kronos and dozens of collaborators ended the quartet’s anniversary concert at Carnegie with a performance of Terry Riley’s “Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector.”Stephanie BergerThe group didn’t necessarily shy from modernism and its tough descendants — the likes of Schnittke and Zorn — but it did play that music in welcoming company on its programs, and with populist theatricality. At one 1987 show, a New York Times review noted, the modernist composer Elliott Carter sat next to Sting, which says it all.For all its variety, Kronos had a point of view, an aesthetic, a brand. Few if any ensembles of any size before it had been so flexible, open-eared and open-minded.“I can’t think of a more significant player in terms of contemporary music becoming seen as fun and enjoyable,” said Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director. “It’s not a risk. It’s music you’ve never heard before, but you’re going to enjoy it.”Not everyone was convinced. Some sniffed that the group too often tipped into wan crossover. Some found the energy good-natured but the playing a little ragged. Some thought the showy lighting and sound were overwrought. Some rolled their eyes at an arrangement of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” that was once a standby for Kronos encores.But playing Hendrix was a sincere gesture, the symbolic move of a quartet seizing the whole of music for its own and boldly crossing traditional genre — as well as racial, national, ethnic and gender — divides. This was, after all, the era of “Graceland,” Paul Simon’s blockbuster 1986 album, and some of Kronos’s defining recordings were in that globe-trotting spirit: “Pieces of Africa” (1992), the omnivorous “Caravan” (2000) and “Nuevo” (2002), which explored Mexican classical, folk and pop.Like the more traditionally minded Emerson String Quartet, also formed in the mid-1970s, Kronos was lucky to come of age during the CD boom — Emerson on the august label Deutsche Grammophon, Kronos on hip Nonesuch.The 1997 album “Early Music” was a surprising dip into medieval repertoire — but typical of Kronos in that it combined arrangements of Machaut, Pérotin and Hildegard with Cage, Schnittke, Pärt, Scandinavian fiddling and Tuvan chant, closing with a minute and a half of bells tolling at a monastery in France.This was a narrative approach to recording, rather than one of just stacking pieces, at a time when projects like that were hardly mainstream in the classical world.“What were thought of as these wacky ideas are very much normal now,” said Andrew Yee, the cellist of the Attacca Quartet. “Everyone — all the young quartets — has at least a small part of Kronos built into their DNA.”The Canadian Inuk vocalist and composer Tanya Tagaq, center, joined the quartet at the concert.Stephanie BergerFriday’s concert embodied the Kronos spirit, with a parade of collaborators from around the world, multimedia elements and sound effects, in works that often had an earnest, liberal political message. In one piece, the writer Ariel Aberg-Riger recited a plain-spoken account of the life of the conservationist Rachel Carson as the quartet underscored her. During another, the Canadian Inuk vocalist and composer Tanya Tagaq roared “You colonizer!” over and over.Laurie Anderson was her usual gnomically witty, poignant presence for part of “Landfall,” her 2012 work with the quartet about climate and loss. Roots Americana was on the program, as was one of Kronos’s Mexican arrangements, Indonesian sinden (a style of gamelan singing) and Bollywood. A longtime collaborator, the pipa virtuoso Wu Man, was featured in an excerpt from her “Two Chinese Paintings.”Dozens of musicians joined for the finale, Terry Riley’s “Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector” (1980). An initially minor-key, slightly melancholy, ultimately propulsive jam, it is a wistful counterpart to the composer’s “In C.” Most moving was the spectacle: Many of those onstage hadn’t yet been born when Kronos formed.Laurie Anderson joined Friday’s performance with part of her 2012 work “Landfall.”Stephanie BergerThe evening passed in something of a blur of activity, which is not unusual for the quartet. The group has done — and still does — so much that it can be easy to take it and its impact for granted.“One of our jobs,” Harrington said, “is to make it seem like music just falls out of the sky.”There is so much music, of so many kinds, that if one piece or album doesn’t appeal, the next very well might. “The Kronos does not guarantee profundity,” Bernard Holland wrote in The Times in 2006. “It just likes to keep the conversation going.”Early on, Kronos created a nonprofit arm that let the quartet raise money, sponsor ambitious initiatives and commission music on its own, rather than depending on composers and presenters. The group’s recently completed “50 for the Future” project commissioned dozens of new pieces designed for young players and made them available online for free.This is the work of a quartet with its legacy in mind, but there are no plans for Kronos to disband. An ensemble constantly chasing newness may be less beholden to a given set of players than a more traditional quartet. Harrington, of course, has been with the group from the beginning, and the violinist John Sherba and the violist Hank Dutt since the late ’70s. The cello chair, long held by Joan Jeanrenaud, has had some more turnover; Paul Wiancko, a generation younger than the others, joined earlier this year.At 74, Harrington demurs when retirement — “the R word,” as he called it in a short documentary screened at Carnegie — comes up. “There’s nothing else I’ve seen in life that would be half as interesting as this,” he said in the interview. “The idea of stepping away from it is impossible.”That said, he added: “I can imagine this group continuing on and on. I want it to be the most activist, energetic, energizing ensemble in the universe. If we can make it that way, I don’t think it should be restricted by my own lifetime.” More

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      Review: Ligeti’s Fascinating Polyrhythm at the New York Phil

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      The conductor Susanna Mälkki led a program centered on Ligeti’s Piano Concerto, propelled by the soloist Pierre-Laurent Aimard.On Thursday, the conductor Susanna Mälkki led the New York Philharmonic at David Geffen Hall in an unusually cohesive program built around the bizarro sound world of Ligeti’s Piano Concerto. It was part of the orchestra’s centennial celebrations of the composer.Written in the 1980s, the piece draws its lifeblood from Ligeti’s remarkable rhythmic sense. The piano soloist works out asymmetrical accents from interlocking metrical units while also maintaining composure in scales and running 16th notes. On the surface, there’s a high degree of independence among the wailing strings, fluorescent woodwinds and intricate percussion, but as Pierre-Laurent Aimard, the Philharmonic’s soloist, recently told The New York Times: “It’s a work that renews polyphony through fascinating polyrhythm.” The chaos has a way of coming together if a listener stops resisting it.The concerto seems frozen between states, its harmonic center melting away without ever evaporating, but in Mälkki’s expert hands, it could sound almost traditional in structure. In the first movement, she lined up emphatic pizzicati with the accents that Aimard plucked out of the solo part. In the second, a siren crescendoed into a blaring signal whistle to herald the piano’s violent re-entry — a satisfying climax built from unusual means. The music seemed to levitate with the centrifugal force of rampaging bongos. The strange postludes that close out the second movement (scored for Chromonica) and the fifth (a duet for xylophone and piano) were gripping afterthoughts.The crisp acoustic of the recently renovated hall enhanced Ligeti’s rhythmic vivacity. The orchestra sounded warm and precise, with a tone that was full but not fatty. In the Lento e deserto, the work’s only slow movement, the lonely yowlings of piccolo, bassoon and slide whistle formed a tender yet humorous trio.Mälkki folded the piano into the texture like a firing engine, enabling Aimard, a longtime friend and champion of the composer, to propel the piece. Aimard, something of an elegant mathematician, handled polyrhythms with a through line and sense of ease. Pianistic effects, like scales, crunchy chord clusters and running 16th notes with multiple voicings, had unfussy finesse. The “leggiero, non legato” (“light, but not connected”) passage in the Presto luminoso had a discrete, glockenspiel-like tone that didn’t turn percussive. Aimard and Mälkki were unable to reach the finish line in the Presto in three minutes or less, as Ligeti requests in the score, but it was nonetheless a bravura performance.The Ligeti crowned the first half of the program, which was themed around Hungarian composers. The Budapest-born musician Jeno Lisztes opened the concert with a dazzling solo arrangement of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 for cimbalom, a traditional Hungarian instrument in the dulcimer family that utilizes a pedal mechanism and mallets that resemble cotton-padded bar spoons. His performance had melancholy grace and a rollicking climax that left me wondering where this symphony of notes was coming from. In Bartók’s brief Romanian Folk Dances, the orchestra sounded sturdy and grounded.After intermission, Mälkki and the orchestra leaned heavily into the grotesquerie that characterizes half of the images that Mussorgsky depicts in “Pictures at an Exhibition.” “Gnomus” had a dangerous agility, both aggressive and surprising, and “Bydlo” was moody and theatrical. The brasses, summoning deep, forbidding power, made a meal of “Catacombae.” The penultimate movement, “The Hut on Hen’s Legs” — and not Mälkki’s muscular take on the magnificent “The Great Gate of Kiev” — provided the piece’s true finale. The hut, which houses a witch of Russian folklore, lurched in gleeful, monstrous ways as its inhabitant sniffed out young children to devour.Mälkki and the players dug into the fantastical elements of “Pictures” as if possessed, almost as though they couldn’t shake off the Ligeti — and after such a tremendous performance, neither could I.New York Philharmonic, conducted by Susanna MälkkiThrough Saturday at David Geffen Hall; nyphil.org More

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      Celebrating the Music of Ligeti: ‘The Incarnation of a Free Spirit’

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      The pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, a friend and collaborator of Ligeti, is helping the New York Philharmonic observe the centennial of his birth.If you are going to salute the composer Gyorgy Ligeti, you might as well ask one of his most dedicated and perceptive collaborators to lend a hand.Ligeti, who died in 2006, and the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard were more than artistic partners, more than a composer and a sympathetic interpreter; they were friends. So the New York Philharmonic can surely have found no more suitable a soloist than Aimard to help observe the centennial of Ligeti’s birth.“Ligeti was certainly one of the most seminal composers of the latter half of the 20th century,” said Gary Ginstling, the president and chief executive of the Philharmonic. “It’s important, and an honor, for the Philharmonic to celebrate his contributions in collaboration with one of his greatest champions, Pierre-Laurent Aimard.”And the Philharmonic, which began its Ligeti tribute a couple of weeks ago with a program featuring the “Concert Romanesc” and “Mifiso la Sodo” under the conductor David Robertson, is going to keep Aimard busy.On Thursday, Friday and Saturday, Aimard, 66, will join Susanna Mälkki at David Geffen Hall for performances of Ligeti’s Piano Concerto. He has recorded that work three times, if you count a fascinating documentary he made with Pierre Boulez and Ensemble Intercontemporain.But if anything, Aimard’s relationship with Ligeti’s formidable, witty Études is closer still; many of them were written with him in mind. For a Saturday Nightcap concert, Aimard and a fellow pianist, Joachim Kühn, will draw links from selected Études to jazz. And on Tuesday, back at Geffen, Aimard will connect the Études and other works to Beethoven, Chopin and Debussy. The Philharmonic, in addition, is mounting an archival exhibition that includes manuscripts lent to it for the occasion.Aimard talked in a recent interview about his relationship with Ligeti, who lost most of his family during the Holocaust and fled Hungary during the uprising of 1956, and offered some reflections on the composer’s place in music today. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Take me back to when you and Ligeti met, in the 1980s. What struck you about him?I met him at a rehearsal of “Aventures” and “Nouvelles Aventures,” one of his most eccentric compositions, and I was struck by both his freedom and imagination, and his wish to realize every sound product in the most achieved way. This mix of inner freedom and care in craftsmanship was extraordinary. He was always inspiring in the way he spoke about his musical visions, with astonishing metaphors, ideas, suggestions, and at the same time he was very demanding, always fighting for quality.Gyorgy Ligeti, left, with Aimard. The two met in the 1980s and remained close until the composer’s death in 2006.Louise DuchesneauLigeti came to maturity at a particularly turbulent time in Hungarian history. Did his music have a particular message, to you?Which music doesn’t carry a message? First of all, all the discoveries, an extraordinary era of discoveries in science, all possible fields of knowledge. Then, it was also a period of great discovery for artists. He was in contact with everything that was new in any artistic territory and would absorb that as well. But also, he was a part of the history of his century, and was part of it quite dramatically, quite tragically. This part, this dark dimension, was always in him.Some of his music has that sense of tragedy to it, but also a sense of humor.Definitely. It was music that never fell into pathos, because he was too attracted by life. So, all the antidotes against pathos were there, including humor, and sometimes dark humor.It’s hard to speak generally about influence, but in what ways does Ligeti’s music have an influence on composers today?He belonged to a generation of avant-gardists who opened hundreds of doors, and consequently, yes, he influenced generations of very different creators. His music is not avant-garde anymore; pages have been turned in between. Even if our era is not an avant-garde era artistically at all, on the contrary, he is an extraordinary, living part of the past. But the past can still face us with very appropriate questions, I think.What kinds of questions does Ligeti ask?Well, all the destabilizing ones that he does in his creations.During your time with the New York Philharmonic, you are putting Ligeti in the context of folk music, jazz and the classical tradition. Where did that extraordinary range in his music come from?He was an open-minded man who loved and shared independence, paid for that at a very high price in his life, but lived like that on a daily basis. For me, he was the incarnation of a free spirit, really. One could never manipulate him. He would never follow models; he would create all the time.All the Études are so different in their own way, yet so characteristically him.Well, they are different because he had a lot of fantasy, and was interested in many layers of our past and our present, and consequently incorporated a lot in his music. I don’t think there is a dramaturgy that doesn’t work among them. If so, he would have left it in the wastepaper basket.Do you have a favorite among the Études? Is there one that you think is particularly characteristic of your work with him, or just of him?Of course, these possible favorites change; the more I work on them the more I discover the richness, the way how he could balance and compose, extremely carefully, each identity: identity of textures, identity of movements, of polyrhythms. I’m not a preacher of this music, I’m an interpreter, so I try to have the closest and best possible contact with each of the pieces I try to make present onstage.How would you describe the Piano Concerto for somebody who does not know it?I would avoid describing it too briefly, the work is so rich. It’s a work that renews polyphony through fascinating polyrhythm, and a piece in which his own fantasy reinvents the relationship between the soloist and the group of players in five different ways. There are five movements in the piece.Do you think of it as a kind of chamber concerto?It’s a chamber concerto with highly virtuosic soloists, a bunch of them, because the part for each instrumentalist is challenging. So, this is, let’s say, for a group of kamikaze.It hasn’t been played by the New York Philharmonic for seven years, and only twice in the history of the orchestra. Do you think that is because of that difficulty?It is true that it is challenging, and I’m not the only one who has played this piece who thinks that, in terms of challenging concertos, this one is really at the top. I don’t think that the difficulty is a problem; the difficulty is a challenge. The question mark is more, I think, understanding the language. When a new language appears, it takes time to be absorbed. For instance, a great majority of my young colleagues play some, if not several, of the Ligeti Études. So, it has taken a bit of time — but not so much. More

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      Courtney Bryan’s Music Brings It All Together

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      A recent recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant, this pianist and composer fuses different styles for a sound that is entirely her own.The name Courtney Bryan is not one that you’ll currently find on many recordings. Aside from two independently released, jazz-tilting albums from 2007 and 2010, precious little of this pianist and composer’s finely woven, adventurous music is available to hear widely.But you can expect that to change, beyond live performances including the premiere of Bryan’s chamber work “DREAMING (Freedom Sounds),” presented by the International Contemporary Ensemble at Merkin Hall on Wednesday. She also recently signed with the influential music publisher Boosey & Hawkes, whose biography of her online includes the promise of a third recording: “Sounds of Freedom.”Bryan, 41, who was born in New Orleans and received a MacArthur “genius” grant earlier this month, has been making her mark since earning her doctorate in composition from Columbia University in 2014. Symphony orchestras, chamber musicians, vocal groups and jazz performers have all been drawn to her sound. Last spring, the New York Philharmonic premiere of “Gathering Song,” with text by the stage director Tazewell Thompson and hints of post-bop jazz harmony, displayed her place among the most exciting voices in contemporary American music.In a phone interview, Bryan said that before she started her Ph.D. program, “I had the separate thing of doing ‘classical’ here, ‘jazz’ here,” while also working as an organist at the Bethany Baptist Church in Newark.From left, Leslie B. Dunner, Tazewell Thompson, Ryan Speedo Green and Bryan at the New York Philharmonic premiere of “Gathering Song” last spring.Chris LeeBut at Columbia, her composition teacher — the eminent composer, trombonist and computer-music pioneer George E. Lewis — encouraged her to put everything together. “He helped me dream bigger,” Bryan said.And Lewis also helped introduce her to other like-minded students, including the musicologist Matthew D. Morrison, who said that his forthcoming book “Blacksound” is “heavily informed by our conversations, our conspiring — trying to figure out how to get certain ideas of what Black music is out into the world.”Lewis recalled Bryan’s “unassuming brilliance,” a quality evident even at the admissions stage, in which “bombast” and “blowing your own horn” are the norm. Once she started, she altered the culture of the program, Lewis said. The school’s composition seminars had a reputation for treating people poorly: “you know, the idea that somehow sharpening one’s critique was confused with being mean to people.”One day, Lewis added, “Courtney stood up and said, ‘We just can’t continue to treat people this way.’ And everyone just looked at her; she hadn’t said very much, to this point. She’s a person who has that deep spiritual reservoir. And she changed a lot of people.”Their relationship continues today: Lewis leads the International Contemporary Ensemble, and he programmed Bryan at Merkin as part of “Composing While Black: Volume One” — which has ties to his latest book, a volume of critical essays that he edited with Harald Kisiedu.The inclusion of Bryan on this bill reflects Lewis’s appreciation for her direct approach to political commentary. “Courtney was one of the people who, early on, put Black Lives Matter on the classical music table,” he said. Yet, he added, in her works “there’s no one dogma. It’s not conventionally tonal; it’s not conventionally atonal. The orchestration is lush — but spare in some ways.”She brings eclectic references to bear in “DREAMING,” which incorporates text from a dissent by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and other legal opinions. To hear the gospel and jazz elements, Lewis said, “you have to go through the looking glass with her,” and the results are what he called “strange resonances.”“Courtney is able to make you feel reassured,” Lewis said, “but also to realize that you should be feeling unsettled about the state of the world.”In an archived La Jolla Symphony performance of “Yet Unheard,” a 2016 piece that incorporates poetry by Sharan Strange and commemorates the life of Sandra Bland (a Black woman who was found hanged in a Texas jail cell in 2015 after she was arrested during a traffic stop), you can hear Bryan’s talent for transfiguring trends in experimental orchestration, as well as gospel tradition. Similarly, a recently filmed performance of “Sanctum” (2015) by the London Sinfonietta illustrates the score’s braiding of influences including the sermons of Pastor Shirley Caesar, marching band percussion and the rhythmic exultations of street protests.Bryan’s religious side is likewise front and center in her Requiem, in which she sets Greek and Latin text from the Mass as well as selections, in English, from Ecclesiastes and Psalm 23. That work was performed on video during the lockdown portion of the pandemic by members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the treble-voice quartet Quince Ensemble.The mezzo-soprano Kayleigh Butcher, a member of Quince, said that Bryan’s use of extended technique — including whispering and chanting — was not “super intense or aggressive” compared with other contemporary music. But, she added, it was Bryan’s way of fusing those elements with more traditional chamber writing that was responsible for its distinctiveness: “Usually someone will only do an only-extended techniques piece. Or only a tonal, written-notes-on-a-page piece, and not combine them in interesting ways.”“Courtney is able to make you feel reassured,” George E. Lewis said, “but also to realize that you should be feeling unsettled about the state of the world.”Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesBryan’s recent piano concerto, “House of Pianos,” bustles with references to jazz-piano history, including boogie-woogie and Harlem stride. It also contains approaches to harmony that she learned in lessons from the towering New Orleans pedagogue Ellis Marsalis, and traces of music that she examined in a master’s degree program at Rutgers, where she studied with the jazz pianist Stanley Cowell. “New Orleans Concerto,” by her former teacher Roger Dickerson, also informs the work.“It’s my way to pay tribute to a lot of pianists who’ve inspired me — but also a challenge for me as a pianist and composer,” Bryan said of the concerto. For its premiere at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra last May, she performed the solo part.More of her pianistic prowess can be found on those early recordings. For Morrison, the musicologist, one exemplary moment comes during a rendition of “City Called Heaven,” from Bryan’s first album, “Quest for Freedom.”

      Quest for Freedom by Courtney Bryan“She takes this spiritual and she really transforms it,” he said, professing himself “obsessed” with its experimental rhythmic touches and its “Chopinesque” figurations. The first time he heard it, Morrison thought: “Oh my goodness, who does this so seamlessly? And it was Courtney.” More

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      Back-to-Back Premieres Defy a Season of Leaner Offerings

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      Institutions are cutting back, but in corners of the city there is still new music to be found, like song cycles by Ted Hearne and Paul Pinto.New York classical music institutions are in a period of economic challenges. This season, the Metropolitan Opera is dark more nights than in the past. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the historic Next Wave Festival is a shadow of its former self.Yet if you know where to look — at venues large and small — the city still has plenty to fill a calendar. Just on Thursday and Friday, for example, there were back-to-back premieres of ambitious song cycles by living composers.On Thursday, Paul Pinto’s “The Approach” — a multimedia, dramatic work written for the treble-voice quartet Quince Ensemble — was unveiled at Merkin Hall. And the next night, at Zankel Hall, Ted Hearne brought his “Dorothea,” built around poems by Dorothea Lasky, to New York for the first time.To my ear, Pinto’s music for Quince was the stunner of this pair. But after a slow start on Friday, Hearne’s cycle also flashed some of the refinement of his earlier works. He has been adept at using chamber music, rock and electronic instrumentation, and in the oratorio “The Source,” found poetry even in material from WikiLeaks. But the first half of “Dorothea” felt strangely static for a composer-performer of such successful eclecticism.This was due, in part, to an overreliance on the composer’s own singing voice, his tenor electronically altered. Past projects, like “Place” and “Outlanders,” have seen Hearne writing for multiple singers, not to mention multiple facets of himself. But the early portion of “Dorothea” was dominated by steady Auto-Tune style.The effect could be appropriately lovelorn, or weary, as guided by Lasky’s texts. But this digital sheen also eclipsed the contributions of the other artists onstage. Outside of a few choice moments, his fellow performers — like the electric guitarist Taylor Levine or the vocalist Eliza Bagg — could seem sidelined by the digital tweaking of Hearne’s voice.There was a breakthrough, however, with “Complainers,” the eighth of about a baker’s dozen songs, sung by Bagg. Hearne’s comparatively spare, effective setting showed off this vocalist’s luminous sound in Lasky’s sardonic poetry, beginning with the line “Some people don’t want to die/Because you can’t complain when you’re dead.”When Hearne returned as lead singer, in “Another World,” his vocals were less futzed-with, and for the better. He and the band channeled some of Depeche Mode’s booming goth glamour. From there, the balance of the evening did not merely suggest R&B grooves or rock energy from one moment to the next; instead, the songs claimed those textures more sturdily.Thursday’s performance, of the first three “episodes” of Pinto’s “The Approach,” was, at just over 40 minutes, about half as long as “Dorothea.” But it still felt like a full meal, and an inspired one.Conceived as an “episodic, magical-realist song cycle” that is also a “love story for and about the women of Quince,” Pinto’s narrative has a winking, fourth-wall-breaking quality. In his libretto, the Quince singers experience a meet-cute with a female sailor on the subway after a rehearsal. (The flirting commences with a stretch of mysterious, brazen blinking.)When not making use of Quince’s polyphonic skills, Pinto also gives each member of the quartet subjective space for solitary meditations similar to arias. His conceit carries traces of the comic-philosophic operas of Robert Ashley. The aesthetic tends toward the chatty, and is strewn with drone-style phrases. And Pinto comes by this influence honestly: As a vocalist, he has been a key part of recent revivals of Ashley’s stage works.But “The Approach” also displays Pinto’s own innovations. For one thing, his texts tend to move with blitzing speed. (The score specifies 220 words per minute at select frenetic junctures.) And although Ashley’s operas include stray pop-song interludes, Pinto pushes for more songfulness; in excerpts that Pinto has posted online, you can hear him reveling in the gleaming harmonic interplay made possible by Quince.

      The Approach Episode 2 lyric video from Paul Pinto on Vimeo.At Merkin Hall, “The Approach” was staged — modestly, yet stylishly. The Quince singers wore gowns that seemed to line up with the moody sobriquets of their respective characters. Kayleigh Butcher, a mezzo-soprano and Quince’s executive director, wore a dress of green and brown bordering on burnished-gold, a color pattern that seemed to fit her character’s designation as “The Sad One.” Lyric-quoting videos of Pinto’s design also helped the audience to keep track of the swift moving text.Quince’s sound, though, was appropriately the true star. And the group offered more in Thursday’s program: “her lover’s hand,” a satisfying, folk-inflected three-song suite from composer Annika Socolofsky. Pinto sang as well, preceding “The Approach” with “On Shaller Brown,” his arrangement of the much-adapted work song.

      He accompanied himself on piano, while singing with rich textural depth. At one point, video art on the screen behind him instructed audience members to imagine a big chorus joining him, before noting that such a large cohort was beyond this project’s budget.There was knowing laughter in the audience. Nothing, though, felt cheap about this ecstatic, richly rewarding show. Pinto’s music proved that tough times of leaner budgets don’t require reduced ambitions. More