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      Byron Janis, Pianist of Romantic Passion, Dies at 95

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      He had a brilliant career before arthritis in his hands forced him from the stage, but he overcame the condition and returned to performing.Byron Janis, an American pianist renowned for his commanding performances of the Romantic repertory and for his discovery of manuscript copies of two Chopin waltzes, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 95. His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his wife, Maria Cooper Janis. He remained active, writing about his career and managing recordings of his music, until recent days, she said. On the concert stage, Mr. Janis could seem like a tightly wound spring, full of tension that, when combined with the sheer physical energy he brought to his performances, yielded interpretations that could be overpowering and seductive, by turns. At the height of his career, in the 1950s and 1960s, he was known for the tremendous sound and colorful sonorities he drew from the piano, and for a freewheeling interpretive approach that sometimes led him to bypass composers’ expressive markings when they were at odds with his conception.“Mr. Janis has a quirky physical style compounded of nervous hovering, sudden jabs, bounces, brittle taps and tentative caresses,” the critic Will Crutchfield wrote in The New York Times, reviewing a recital at the 92nd Street Y in 1985. “The music emerges a little like that too; occasionally it’s disconcerting, but at least he has a style, and more often it is engaging.”What audiences did not know was that by the early 1970s, Mr. Janis was experiencing pain and stiffness during his performances, the result of psoriatic arthritis in both hands and wrists. After he was diagnosed, in 1973, he maintained his concert schedule, and his five-hour daily practice regimen.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Winterreise’ Review: Hiding a Roiling Grief

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      On Friday, the pianist Mitsuko Uchida and the tenor Mark Padmore illuminated the bleakness of Schubert’s genre-defining song cycle at Zankel Hall.It was a performance of hard-won wisdom. When the eminent pianist Mitsuko Uchida and the tenor Mark Padmore teamed up for Schubert’s “Winterreise” on Friday at Zankel Hall, they brought the maturity of hindsight to a genre-defining work of young, unrequited love. The concert was part of Uchida’s Perspectives series with Carnegie Hall.Schubert’s cycle comprises 24 songs, most of them in minor keys, and derives from the natural world endless metaphors for heartache. The winter’s journey of the title begins with a breakup, and the narrator spends the rest of the time ruminating upon the fallout. The narrator’s beloved, he says, proved to be as fickle as a weather vane batted by the wind. His tears freeze and scald, and his numbness hides a roiling grief, like a river seething below a surface of ice.The piano part has the capacity to amplify or comment on the narrator’s mental state, and Uchida used it to console him like a wise, empathetic friend. She eased into key changes with subtle decelerations. The octaves of “Der Lindenbaum” (“The Linden Tree”) were transparent, rather than towering, and the rustling of branches had a dusky quality as though seen through the mollifying haze of a dream. In “Wasserflut” (“Flood”), she handled chromatic semitones with utmost delicacy to minimize the impact of their dissonant pangs. Her performance came to a peak in “Das Wirtshaus” (“The Inn”), where a slow, firm sequence of full-fingered chords provided ineffable comfort.The narrator’s beloved dominates the first half, but in a curious twist, she largely vanishes in the second, as his despair consumes him and convinces him that he’s destined for life as a social pariah.Uchida achieved arresting coherence across the entire cycle, but Padmore dug more specifically into that point of divergence. His acidulous tone, an awkward fit for the cycle’s early expressions of young heartbreak, illuminated the existential anguish of a soul who has decided he’s better off lost. Rather than struggle with that anguish, Padmore’s narrator embraced it with a sense of finality beyond his years.Padmore muscled his way through the cycle’s first 12 songs, summoning a pointed resonance but no real sense of line in Schubert’s gracious melodies. The milky softness of his tone in early recordings has curdled, and his technique, which used to cultivate mellifluousness with frequent use of a precise and floaty mixed voice, now produces a hard and unwieldy sound that veers out of tune.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Overlooked No More: Miriam Solovieff, Lauded Violinist Who Suffered Tragedy

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      She led a successful career despite coping with a horrific event that she witnessed at 18: the killing of her mother and sister at the hands of her father.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.On Feb. 23, 1940, Miriam Solovieff gave a recital at Town Hall in Manhattan. She was 18 and widely known as a violin prodigy, having toured much of the United States, Canada and Europe. It was no surprise, then, that the recital, presenting work by Mozart, Vivaldi and Alexander Glazunov, would receive positive reviews.What was surprising was the concert’s timing. Just six weeks earlier, Solovieff’s mother and younger sister — her entire family — were murdered by their estranged father.Solovieff had kept vigil by her mother as she lay dying from gunshot wounds in a hospital bed. And she ultimately heeded her mother’s urging that she not cancel the recital (it would be postponed a mere two weeks).The shootings became a tragedy so unspeakable that after the initial news reports, it was discussed only in hushed circles. For Solovieff, it opened a chasm between childhood promise, spent in the company of her cherished mother and sister, and an extraordinary adulthood, albeit one that bore tremendous emotional repercussions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Thomas Adès Takes a Step Toward the Classical Music Canon

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      As Adès premieres an orchestral work, “The Exterminating Angel” is receiving something rare in contemporary opera: a new production.Pity living composers, toiling away in a field that has long favored dead ones. If they get a precious commission, the cycle tends to go something like this: The work premieres, and then travels to any other ensemble or company that helped to pay for it. After that, who knows. The fate of contemporary music typically comes down to marketability — hits still exist! — and to that strange, slippery thing called legacy.One recent work that is worthy of the canon yet seemed doomed to obscurity is Thomas Adès’s opera “The Exterminating Angel.” It had a prestigious start, premiering at the Salzburg Festival in 2016, then playing at the Metropolitan Opera the next year. But it was immense: written on a grand scale, with more than a dozen principal roles, a chorus and an orchestra equipped with idiosyncratic sounds like that of the spooky, electronic ondes Martenot.In his book, “The Impossible Art,” the composer Matthew Aucoin recalled hearing an opera administrator say that putting on “The Exterminating Angel” was “like watching money burn.” Regardless of its merits, there didn’t seem to be much hope for this work’s future.How extraordinary, then, that “The Exterminating Angel” has not only been revived, but has also received something even rarer in opera: a new production, by Calixto Bieito, at the Paris Opera. (It continues through March 23 and is streaming on the company’s platform until Saturday.) And, revised by Adès, with the composer in the pit, it sounds better than ever.“The Exterminating Angel,” with a libretto by Adès and Tom Cairns adapted from Luis Buñuel’s surrealist film, is one of the finest operas of the century so far, alongside works by George Benjamin and Kaija Saariaho. It represents opera at its most fundamental, an elevated expression of humanity on the edge. There is sex, violence and desperation. While the meaning can’t easily be explained, crucially for opera, the plot can be described in a single sentence: People enter a room, then lose the will to leave it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Esa-Pekka Salonen to Leave San Francisco Symphony

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      Esa-Pekka Salonen, the ensemble’s music director, said that he no longer shared the same goals as the administration, which has been cutting costs.Esa-Pekka Salonen, the music director of the San Francisco Symphony since 2020, announced on Thursday that he would step down when his contract expires next year, citing differences with the orchestra’s board.Salonen, 65, a groundbreaking conductor who has promoted new music and experimented with virtual reality and artificial intelligence, said he no longer saw a path forward.“I have decided not to continue as music director of the San Francisco Symphony because I do not share the same goals for the future of the institution as the Board of Governors does,” he said in a statement. “I am sincerely looking forward to the many exciting programs we have planned for my final season as music director, and am proud to continue working with the world-class musicians of the San Francisco Symphony.”Disputes between maestros and management rarely break into public view, and this split is notable because of Salonen’s stature: A revered conductor and composer, he has been a leading force in efforts to redefine the modern symphony orchestra. In San Francisco, he appointed a team of what he called “collaborative partners” from a variety of genres, and he oversaw a steady stream of premieres.The rift between Salonen and the board appeared to be over efforts to cut costs, which include reducing the number of concerts and commissions, as well as putting tours on hold. The orchestra is also seeking to make unspecified shifts in programming to drive revenues. That approach raised broader questions about whether Salonen could achieve his expansive vision for the orchestra. (Salonen declined to comment for this article.)Matthew Spivey, the San Francisco Symphony’s chief executive, said in an interview that the orchestra had different challenges and priorities than when Salonen was named the orchestra’s music director in 2018. The pandemic exacerbated longstanding budget woes, he said, and there were “significant financial pressures on the organization that have become impossible to ignore.” He said the orchestra would need to “evolve in various ways to respond to those pressures.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Yvonne Loriod Was So Much More Than a Composer’s Muse

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      Loriod, the vessel for Olivier Messiaen’s piano works, had a rich musical life beyond him, which is captured in a new set of recordings.The composer Olivier Messiaen’s earliest students at the Paris Conservatory liked to call themselves the Arrows. They didn’t see themselves as mere pupils; with the help of their teacher, one of the most important voices in 20th-century French music, they imagined themselves shooting arrows into the future.They weren’t just dreaming. Messiaen’s first batch of students, in the 1940s, included Pierre Boulez, who would become the de facto face of French serialism and modernist thought. Their teacher, though, was partial to another musician in the class: a young pianist named Yvonne Loriod.Born 100 years ago and a prodigious keyboard talent from an early age, Loriod so impressed Messiaen that he quickly began to write for her, immense masterpieces like “Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus” and “Catalogue d’Oiseaux.” She challenged him to push the piano to new limits; he in turn gave her more to chew on than the standard repertoire with which she had built her reputation. They elevated each other, creating what The New York Times would eventually describe as a composer-performer partnership likely without parallel in music history.“It’s obvious that while writing ‘Vingt Regards’ or ‘Catalogue d’Oiseaux’ I knew they would be played by Yvonne Loriod,” Messiaen said in a book of interviews with Claude Samuel. “I was therefore able to allow myself the greatest eccentricities because to her, anything is possible. I knew I could invent very difficult, very extraordinary, and very new things: They would be played, and played well.”Their relationship was formalized by marriage in 1961, and it was so fruitful that it’s hard to imagine 20th-century piano music without those solo works or the extravagant, orchestral “Turangalîla-Symphonie.” But their collaborations also tend to overshadow Loriod’s life before and beyond Messiaen. Her devotion to him required renunciation: She let go of her composing ambitions and gave over the majority of her schedule to performing his scores. Yet she remained a brilliant artist with a broad-minded, generous view of her instrument and its long history.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: Two Electric Debuts at the New York Philharmonic

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      An exciting program featured the conductor Elim Chan and the cellist Sol Gabetta in a pairing of music by Martinu and Rimsky-Korsakov.At a time when many orchestras are relying on entrenched repertoire and beloved artists to shore up their dwindling audiences, the New York Philharmonic on Thursday night offered three thrilling new perspectives — two from younger, female performers making their Philharmonic debuts, the third a world premiere.One of the debuting artists was the dynamic conductor Elim Chan. Born in Hong Kong, trained in the United States and already a sensation in Europe, Chan walked to the podium with confidence. Her physical ease was justified: She showed up to her first gig with the Philharmonic fully ready to harness its forces.She opened the program with the string orchestra version of “Pisachi,” commissioned by the Philharmonic from the Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate. Originally written for the string quartet Ethel, “Pisachi” (pronounced “pih-SAH-chee”) pays homage to the desert landscape of the Southwest and the music of the Hopi and Pueblo peoples.“Pisachi” alternates between hushed, singing harmonics and piquant rhythms painted in impassioned tremolos and spiky pizzicatos. Tate’s gifts for texture and color are intensely rendered in Ethel’s feisty 2015 recording; the Philharmonic’s version was plusher. Still, Chan drew out all of Tate’s biting phrases; conducting with just her hands, her fingers fluttered in the air.The Argentine cellist Sol Gabetta made her Philharmonic debut, in Bohuslav Martinu’s First Cello Concerto.Chris LeeChan was then joined by the Argentine cellist Sol Gabetta, also making her Philharmonic debut, in Bohuslav Martinu’s First Cello Concerto — enough of a rarity that it might as well be another piece of new music. (The Philharmonic last performed it in 1976.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: Igor Levit Wields Orchestral Power With Just a Piano

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      For his latest Carnegie Hall appearance, Levit played solo piano transcriptions of symphonic works by Mahler and Beethoven.Igor Levit, a pianist of awe-inspiring insight and redoubtable technique, decided to conduct himself during his solo recital at Carnegie Hall on Thursday.He was playing the Nocturne from Hindemith’s “Suite 1922,” a collection of five genre pieces like marches and rags, and there are a few moments in which the pianist only needs to use one hand. Gesturing with his left one in a downward pressing motion, he seemed to tell himself, “Gentle, gentle,” as he plucked starlight off the page and dispersed it through the air.When Levit is onstage, he seems to be in his own world. He scratches his nose, nods approvingly as a piece closes and shakes out the strain in his hands from a particularly grueling program. He doesn’t make a show of inviting the audience along; rather, he leaves the door cracked open for anyone who wants to join.Such physical quirks are of a piece with the prodigious concentration and individuality of Levit’s performances. He makes music his own and illuminates it for others. His confidence and decisiveness allow a listener to hear a piece’s architecture, the way individual figures become phrases and then entire sections.At Carnegie, Levit tested his focus and stamina with piano transcriptions of well-known symphonic works. The program opened with the relatively brief Hindemith suite before diving headlong into Ronald Stevenson’s adaptation of the Adagio from Mahler’s 10th Symphony and a nearly hourlong rendition of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, in a solo version by Liszt.It was a display of earth-rattling strength. Octaves in contrary motion smoked with ferocity in the Hindemith, and sforzandos in the Beethoven reintroduced audiences to the elemental wildness of a composer of repertory standards. Levit’s New York appearances last season, in music by Shostakovich and Morton Feldman, deployed his concentration in service of witty élan and meditative stillness. But Thursday’s recital was pure might.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More