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      Long Play Rises to the Top of New York Classical Music Festivals

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      This weekend of concerts, organized by Bang on a Can, has quickly but assertively ascended to the rank of destination event.Long Play has been around only since last year, but it is already the most important classical music festival in New York City.And, based on the 15 concerts I attended during its second edition, which unfolded and overlapped in spaces around Brooklyn from Friday through Sunday, this festival by the Bang on a Can collective could even stand to get a little bigger.Capacity crowds amassed at Pioneer Works to hear Meredith Monk’s ensemble collaborate with the Bang on a Can All-Stars; at Roulette to hear the Philip Glass Ensemble; at the Mark Morris Dance Center to hear a new repertory group investigate music from the early 1990s by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill. These in-demand sets couldn’t fit everyone who wanted to hear them, but with two or three other events always close by, nobody was truly left out in the cold.Before Long Play, Bang on a Can had spent three decades presenting one-day marathon concerts. But the scope of this organization’s ambition has reached a new level, and it is an untrammeled joy to experience.Meredith Monk, center, performing with members of the Bang on a Can All-Stars as part of her set on Friday.Peter Serling @lotsopikturesFor example, on Saturday afternoon at Public Records, the JACK Quartet performed a version of “Prisma Interius VII” by the young composer Catherine Lamb. Previously conceived for violin and synthesizer alone, the piece was recast here for the dreamy, collaborative ability of the JACK players to hold precise microtonal harmonies. Staggered entries of droning pitches steadily created complexly sour motifs that tended to plunge downward. Where Lamb switches up her patterns with melodic ascents, the players savored the opportunity to make this often static music sing out.From there, you could race over to the big crowd forming at Roulette for Glass’s music, or stay put to enjoy Xenakis’s “Tetras” as well as “rag′sma,” by the JACK violinist Chris Otto. Although I’ve enjoyed those pieces on recordings, I felt a need to check in on the Glass Ensemble. The composer was present in the audience but no longer performs with this band, so this was an opportunity to hear the group’s veteran music director, Michael Riesman, lead younger players like the saxophonist Sam Sadigursky.When interpreting the composer’s landmark “Glassworks” album from 1982, the ensemble brought a bass-heavy thump that reflected real love for the “Walkman” mix — created in its time “for your personal cassette player,” a way for Glass to put his music in a useful dialogue with contemporary pop styles (a lesson that the Bang on a Can crew took to heart in their own careers).Conrad Tao, left, and Tyshawn Sorey playing the music of Morton Feldman at Roulette.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesNext, at the BRIC House Ballroom, I heard a performance by the saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, who is known for his fusion of avant-garde jazz and London club music, but here stuck to flutes, as part of a serene South Asian-influenced quartet led by the vocalist (and sometime bassist) Ganavya. Call it another sign of an aesthetically confident festival: Here, artists are not required to stay in expected lanes.Early Saturday evening, Roulette hosted the symphonic, brawling, experimental, tuneful big-band music of David Sanford; slightly overlapping, in the BRIC lobby, was the Momenta Quartet’s presentation of Alvin Singleton’s string quartets. Sanford, one of my favorite living composers, conducted his own music, in which you can hear his taste for artists as wide-ranging as Helmut Lachenmann and Charles Mingus.

      A Prayer For Lester Bowie by David SanfordI stayed for Sanford’s entire set before watching the Momenta players handle the climactic, interlocking figures from Singleton’s third quartet with an acrobatic ease; after that, they brought Romantic feeling to the fourth. This varied sequence of music by two living Black composers, ecstatic on its own terms, also put the lie to claims that you’ll sometimes hear from bigger institutions that say they are retreating from “classical music” in an effort to appeal to new audiences.The composer Henry Threadgill, second from the right, was in the audience for a program of his music.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesWhen programmers at the Brooklyn Academy of Music or Lincoln Center say such things — fewer string quartets, like Momenta, more electric bass, as in Sanford’s band — you can understand the point, and maybe even agree with it in principle. But with the Long Play festival, Bang On a Can replies: “Why not both, and why not back to back?”Also on Saturday night, I caught a performance at Public Records by the trio Thumbscrew, with Mary Halvorson on guitar, Michael Formanek on bass and Tomas Fujiwara on drums. In addition to Thumbscrew’s own vibrant compositions, the trio also let loose a wild take on Mingus’s “Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Blue Silk.”This kind of wide array was on offer all weekend. The next day, I traveled from a set of electronic music by the composer Ash Fure to a quartet performance led by the vibraphonist Patricia Brennan.

      ANIMAL_LONGPLAY from Ash Fure on Vimeo.Though visually arresting, an environment combining art installation and avant-house-music light show, Fure’s new concept — a kind of thumping club from hell — seemed starkly limited as musical matter compared with thrilling past chamber works on the album “Something to Hunt.” Half an hour later, at BAMcafé, Brennan’s quartet interpreted languid-then-convulsive pieces like “Space for Hour,” from her recent album “More Touch”; her electronically outfitted vibraphone playing belongs in a conversation with the Ash Fures of the world.

      More Touch by Patricia BrennanFrom there, I enjoyed the first 75 minutes of a radical yet sensitive take on Morton Feldman’s “Triadic Memories,” with Conrad Tao on piano and Tyshawn Sorey on percussion. This is originally a piano solo, yet Sorey’s skittering cymbal work was closely attuned to the score, his floor toms tuned to highlight the densest chordal moments in Tao’s interpretation of the notated material.I would happily have stayed for the final minutes but needed to rush to hear a band playing the music of Threadgill’s Very Very Circus outfit. The guitarist Brandon Ross, the tuba player Marcus Rojas and the drummer Gene Lake were all veterans of that ensemble; here, they brought works like “Little Pocket Size Demons” to life in the company of younger players, including the guitarist Miles Okazaki.From left, Brandon Ross, Marcus Rojas, Yosvany Terry, Gene Lake, José Dávila, Ron Caswell and Miles Okazaki performing Threadgill’s music at the Mark Morris Dance Center.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesThreadgill isn’t likely to play the Very Very Circus music himself again, but he was in the audience on Sunday to appreciate the birth of a new repertory band in his honor; he soaked up applause from his seat, just as Glass had.The weekend was so rich, it hardly mattered that Sunday night’s planned closing set, by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, had to progress without the participation of the group’s sole remaining founder, the saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, who tested positive for Covid-19 before the gig. Hutchings bravely stepped in on short notice, and the potent, anchoring work of the percussionist Famoudou Don Moye recalled some of his first recorded performances with the group, after he joined in the early 1970s. Hutchings didn’t try to sound like Mitchell, but instead gave listeners a taste of the brawny, insistent tenor sax sound that we hadn’t heard the previous day in his appearance with Ganavya.Such is the strength of Long Play. When a veteran headliner has to drop out, there’s still something else to savor. And when a veteran like Meredith Monk does hit the stage — as she did for Friday night’s opening concert — she is apt to bring a new vigor to vintage works like her “Tokyo Cha Cha,” which she performed, complete with choreography, for nearly 20 grooving, ethereal minutes.Pray that this festival continues, and that it expands. It should become a destination event; and if it does, it’s going to need some bigger rooms — or a bigger schedule — to serve a public that is already showing that it wants to hear all of this music. More

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      Menahem Pressler, Pianist Who Co-Founded the Beaux Arts Trio, Dies at 99

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      Mr. Pressler, who fled Nazi Germany as a youth, was the anchor of a group that, with various lineups, performed all over the world for 53 years.Menahem Pressler, the celebrated pianist who fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and, after establishing himself in postwar America, co-founded the Beaux Arts Trio, which became the world’s reigning piano-violin-cello ensemble and dazzled audiences for a half-century, died on Saturday in London. He was 99. His death was announced by the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, where he had been on the faculty since 1955.At 14, Mr. Pressler hid on Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, as Nazi thugs smashed his father’s shop. When World War II began in Europe, his Jewish family landed in Haifa, in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. Traumatized, he nearly perished at 16, but he found the will to live in a haunting Beethoven sonata. In 1946, he won an international piano competition in San Francisco. A year later, he made his Carnegie Hall debut.After years as soloists, Mr. Pressler, the violinist Daniel Guilet and the cellist Bernard Greenhouse joined forces in 1955 and formed the Beaux Arts. Such groups, called piano trios although two of their members play string instruments, had been around for centuries. But theirs was a daring venture at a time when most listeners preferred string quartets, with their even sonorities and vast repertory, for intimate chamber concerts.There are technique and temperament issues in a piano trio. The elephantine grand piano can easily bully its smaller partners or timidly overcompensate. And the piano’s staccato notes have to blend with a smoother continuity of strings. Some trios are also notorious for two-against-one squabbles. But the Beaux Arts achieved what critics called a wondrous harmonic unity in a resilient three-way musical marriage.The final version of the Beaux Arts Trio in performance in New York in 2008, from left: Daniel Hope, Mr. Pressler and Antonio Meneses.Julien Jourdes for The New York Times“We do everything together, the good things and the bad,” Mr. Pressler told The New York Times in 1981. “We travel and get lost together. We eat meals together. As in every close relationship, the musical traits and qualities that first attracted us to one another can become irritants, so we have to keep renewing the attractions that first brought us together. We try to handle our separate egos and create a single ego for the whole group.”Over decades, the trio’s violinists and cellists came and went — changes that might have doomed the precarious balance of sound, interpretation and chemistry that is the heart of chamber music. But critics said the trio was held together by the diminutive, cherubic, irrepressibly ebullient Mr. Pressler, who as mentor and leader preserved its technical quality and its confluence of musical views.The Beaux Arts eventually won a devoted global following and many awards. It recorded nearly all the piano trio repertory — Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert, Brahms, Dvorak, Saint-Saëns and others — mostly on the Philips label, through the boom years of LPs and into the digital age. The group was praised for redefining the perception of the piano trio and of chamber music itself.“In recent years, we’ve seen a rapid expansion not only of the audience for chamber music, but of that audience’s sophistication and its awareness that the genre also includes sonatas, piano trios, small vocal ensembles, quintets, sextets and indeed all manner of combinations,” John Rockwell of The Times wrote in 1979. “And for that expansion of awareness, we can partly thank the Beaux Arts Trio.”In 2008, when the Beaux Arts Trio disbanded after 53 years, Mr. Pressler was still its anchor, the last surviving original member. He was 84, but he continued performing as a soloist and with ensembles. He also continued teaching at Indiana University, where he held the Charles H. Webb chair in Music.Menahem Pressler was born in Magdeburg, Germany, on Dec. 16, 1923, 153 years after what is generally accepted as Beethoven’s birthday. One of three children of Moshe and Judith (Zavderer) Pressler, he began playing the piano at 6 and was an accomplished performer as a teenager, taught secretly by a church organist after Hitler’s persecution of the Jews rose to a fever pitch.He recalled Kristallnacht, in November 1938, when the Nazis orchestrated a nationwide attack on Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues.“The thugs broke into our family shop in Magdeburg — a gentleman’s outfitters,” Mr. Pressler told The Guardian in 2008. His English still accented with the German of his childhood, he slipped into the present tense as vivid memories returned: “We are hiding in the house, hoping it will go by. In the street, you hear running, yelling, smashing sounds, banging at the door.”Menahem, his parents and his siblings, Leo and Selma, escaped to Italy months later and then reached Haifa. His grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins all perished in the Holocaust.Tormented by loss and dislocation and unable to eat, he grew thin and weak. One day, playing Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 31, he fainted. But it was a turning point.“It has idealism,” he said of the sonata. “It has hedonism, it has regret, it has something that builds like a fugue. And at the very end, something that is very rare in Beethoven’s last sonatas — it is triumphant. It says, ‘Yes, my life is worth living.’”He recovered, and at 16 he performed with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.After winning a Debussy competition in 1946, Mr. Pressler moved to New York. His Carnegie Hall debut, at which he performed Schumann’s Piano Concerto with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, won rave reviews.“This, indeed, was the playing of a free artist, secure in his birthright,” Olin Downes wrote in The Times. “The presence of a huge orchestra, an authoritative conductor, an immense audience, did not and could not inhibit the warmth, the loveliness and certainty of his interpretation.”In 1949, he married Sara Scherchen. She died in 2014. His survivors include their son, Amittai; their daughter, Edna Pressler; and his partner since 2016, Annabelle Weidenfeld. Mr. Pressler had homes in London and Bloomington, Ind.In 1955, the same year Mr. Pressler began teaching at Indiana University, the Beaux Arts Trio made its debut at the Berkshire Music Festival in Lenox, Mass. (now the Tanglewood Music Festival).Touring was often a bizarre experience. Mr. Pressler played pianos that were out of tune, battered or broken. One piano’s pedals once fell off. In a town in Chile, he was presented with an upright. In another hall, the piano had a dead key, and a message: “I tried to fix that note but I couldn’t. Try not to use it too much.” Some page turners could not read music. The trio was stranded in India. Mr. Greenhouse did an entire European tour with his leg in a cast.But to perceptive audiences, the trio was a marvel, not only of sound but also of subtle sights. Its performers were in constant visual and aural communication with one another — heads swiveling and nodding, eyes making contact, bows signaling cues, the pianist’s left-hand upbeat cuing the cello’s entrance or the violin’s stroke: an undercurrent of almost imperceptible signs as the tidal melody swelled and ebbed.While the trio’s artistry was achieved over many years, it was tested periodically by the adaptations required to incorporate new members. After 32 years as the cellist, Mr. Greenhouse was succeeded by Peter Wiley (1987-98) and Antonio Meneses (1998-2008). Mr. Guilet was replaced by Isidore Cohen (1968-92), Ida Kavafian (1992-98) Young Uck Kim (1998-2002) and Daniel Hope (2002-8).The Beaux Arts often performed as many as 130 concerts a year in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the Americas, including annual appearances at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Library of Congress.“Menahem Pressler: Artistry in Piano Teaching,” by William Brown, was published in 2008. That year, Mr. Pressler returned to Germany to observe the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht. And in 2013, at 90, he made his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic, at a New Year’s Eve concert that was televised live throughout the world. More

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      Review: When the Philharmonic Applauds the Soloist

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      Without interplay from the musicians, Leonidas Kavakos found tension in his own playing in Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto.After the musicians of the New York Philharmonic finished Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto on Thursday night, they did something they don’t usually do: They applauded the soloist.With a violinist on the order of Leonidas Kavakos, that reaction felt justified. He is a wonder. The music flowed out of him like a river — big, glistening and unobstructed, but also tasteful in its frictionless subtleties.Shostakovich, under the watch of Soviet authorities and brought to heel at Stalin’s pleasure, completed the concerto in 1948 but, presumably fearing retribution for failing to glorify the nation and its people, shelved it until after Stalin’s death in 1953. The work is constructed as a suite of movements. It opens with a character piece, a murkily colored Nocturne that lives in the Upside Down of Chopin’s genre-defining works for piano, and reaches a climax in a Baroque-derived Passacaglia, at once august and austere, that leads into a fiendish five-minute cadenza for the soloist.Playing from memory, Kavakos cleared one hazard after another in Shostakovich’s stupendously original score. He didn’t just spin legato lines in the searching, conversational Nocturne; he expounded entire legato paragraphs in an eloquent, unbroken stream of consciousness. Shredding his way through the Scherzo, his tone was poised, even lavish. Where some violinists convey a sense of anguish in demanding passages — playing two melodies in duet or an endless seesaw of double stops — he sounded effortless. Even his harmonics had a juicy ping.The orchestra, led by Gianandrea Noseda, faded into the background. The players failed to envelop Kavakos in the Nocturne’s glimmering, unsettling darkness. The Scherzo had no abandon, and the Burlesque’s funhouse-mirror distortions of the concerto’s once-noble themes had no derision. Noseda fitfully ratcheted up the intensity of the Passacaglia with its implacable 17-bar pattern. As energy slacked, shy deference reigned.Without interplay from the orchestra, Kavakos found tension in his own playing. In the cadenza, he could have been a caged animal reacquainting itself with its own majesty. His encore, taken from Bach’s Partita No. 1, was spellbinding.It was hard to imagine how anything could follow Kavakos’s performance, and perhaps someone at the Philharmonic felt the same way. After he left the stage, an announcement was made that the next piece, George Walker’s Sinfonia No. 1, would be pushed to after intermission.During the break, I wondered if the clean, bright acoustics of the Philharmonic’s new hall were partly to blame for the orchestra’s showing in the Shostakovich. Each instrumental section sounded crisp, soloistic and unblended.The Walker, an imaginative exercise in disparate timbres, dispelled those suspicions. The orchestra, from the pointed brasses to the curling woodwinds, found its way to unanimity of utterance.The final piece, Respighi’s “Roman Festivals,” gave the Philharmonic an opportunity to demonstrate how far it has come in calibrating its sound to the enhanced acoustics of its new auditorium. A composer of sunny bombast, Respighi provided the stirring finale for the ensemble’s first subscription program of the season in October with “Pines of Rome,” the second piece in his Roman trilogy. At the time, colors practically bounced off the walls in the lively acoustic; climaxes, perhaps overshot, took on a fuzzy quality.On Thursday, the orchestra showed off the clarity of fortissimo passages, layering percussion, brass and strings in handsome tiers. Corrosive brasses and heated strings enlivened the Respighi’s first movement, and gray-toned woodwinds, transparent violins, and luxuriant cellos and basses colored the second.In something of a redo of Shostakovich’s Burlesque, “Roman Festivals” closes with a portrait of the antic, circuslike crowds of Piazza Navona in Rome. The Philharmonic’s players came alive in the coordinated chaos. It was the sound of revelers falling into a shared rhythm — and of an orchestra relearning how to play with itself.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Charles III’s Coronation: Music That Made Kings and Queens

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      The coronation ceremony of King Charles III and Camilla, the queen consort, on Saturday has been described as a millennium-old tradition of pomp and circumstance, reaching back to Charles’s most distant forebears.But while the service and liturgy of the coronation of English and British monarchs stretches back to the 10th century, the tradition of its sound is far more recent — and less noticed. Many of the accounts of coronations before the 19th century have been lost, and the ones that remain make very little mention of music, if at all.The sound of the British coronation that has become so affixed in the cultural landscape is, in fact, a 20th-century invention, in a concerted effort to present the past as the present.Charles III has commissioned new works for his coronation, adding to the rich tapestry of pieces composed for the occasion. Here is a brief history of that music, exploring the sound of the divine right of kings.A scene from Elizabeth II’s coronation. The sounds of this royal ceremony are largely an invention of the 20th century.Getty ImagesEarly CeremoniesThe first coronation of an English monarch that resembles what we see today was for Edgar in 973. This coronation provided the overall structure that has been filled out since the 10th century: the procession and recognition, the oath, the anointing, as well as the investiture, enthronement and homage. The coronation itself is a religious ceremony, centered around the Eucharist, and so, from 973 to 1603, the coronation ended with a Catholic mass.In 1382, the “Liber Regalis” (“Royal Book”) was written to provide a detailed account of the coronation order of service, likely for Anne of Bohemia. The book provides the coronation text but gives no information on the music itself; coronations would have music composed specifically for them, and some works only became fixed in later centuries. The first coronation music was likely sung chants, which, starting in 1603 with the coronation of James I, were refashioned into coronation anthems now with English text.James II, 1685Music by more familiar composers appears with the coronation of James II. One of Henry Purcell’s settings of “I was glad” is used for the entrance anthem. Also known by its Latin name, “Laetatus sum,” the text is a setting of Psalm 122. The anthem is in two parts, beginning with a bright and lilting section in triple meter marking James’s entrance into Westminster Abbey.As James ascended the stairs toward the Chair of Estate, the King’s Scholars from the Westminster School shouted “Vivat” (also known as the Acclamation); this was the first coronation where that tradition was present. The second section, now in minor and in duple time, acts as a solemn prayer of peace and prosperity for the monarch and the nation. The section ends with the “Gloria Patri” (“Glory be”), and it is this Purcell version that inspired the tripartite structure for C.H.H. Parry’s setting of “I was glad” in use today.George II and Queen Caroline, 1727George II’s coronation is perhaps best known for introducing George Frideric Handel’s coronation anthems, including “Zadok the Priest” (HWV 258), along with several others. It is unknown, however, where in the service each coronation anthem was performed. “Zadok the Priest” sets text from 1 Kings 1:38-40, text that has appeared in some form at every coronation since Edgar.The anthem begins with a lengthy orchestral introduction, building tension up to the entrance of the choir, accompanied by pealing brass and timpani. It is believed that the introduction was written to help provide flow in the order of service, specifically giving time for the monarchs to change robes in preparation for the anointing. The anthem also includes the acclamation “God save the King! Long live the King!” — linking the anointing to the later acclamation from the Homage of the Peers, where those with hereditary titles swear fealty to the monarch.Victoria, 1838The coronation of Queen Victoria is the first time the entire musical service is transcribed, in part because of George Smart, who was in charge of the coronation’s music. The service features the Handel coronation anthems “Zadok the Priest” and “The Queen Shall Rejoice,” as well as the Hallelujah chorus from “Messiah,” which took place after Victoria received communion. The reliance on Handel and the lack of new musical material — except for one new anthem, “This is the day,” by William Knyvett — resulted in widespread criticism of the service, with The Spectator writing that “the musical part of the service was a libel on the present state of art in this country.”Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, 1902It is with Edward VII’s coronation that music becomes a significant part of the service, by royal decree. Frederick Bridge, in charge of the music for the coronation, wrote that “the King was most explicit in declaring his Command that there should be no curtailment of the musical part of the service,” when cuts were being made to shorten the service because of Edward’s health.For the first time, music was incorporated in the published order of service, including compositions performed both before and after the coronation. This featured marches by Wagner, Gounod, Saint-Saëns, Tchaikovsky and Elgar, whose “Imperial March” had been written for Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Within the coronation service, Bridge outlined a program that would connect centuries of English church music together from Tallis to Parry, aiming to highlight Britain’s imperial might by showcasing the long centuries of its artistic power.Bridge commissioned new coronation anthems for the service, notably “I was glad” by C.H.H. Parry and a new setting of the “Confortare” by Walter Parratt, Master of the King’s Musick. Both have since become staples in the coronation service. Parry’s setting of “I was glad” is resoundingly jubilant, opening with brass over a full orchestra in a fanfare, before giving way to the chorus’s unaccompanied entrance. Parry incorporates the vivats into the anthem; here they are sung by the choir, punctuated by brass echoes and snare drums, while excising the “Gloria Patri.” Parratt’s “Confortare” (“Be strong and play the man”) revived a text not used since the 17th century. Parratt’s arrangement takes the antiphon from recited chant to full chorus with fanfare-like brass accompaniment.Elizabeth II and Charles IIIThe accession of Elizabeth II prompted the idea of a new Elizabethan age, one that would rival the artistic, cultural and military achievements of the 16th century, connecting postwar Britons with the glory of their ancestors. The coronation showcased that idea by featuring music by the premiere contemporary British composers: Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax, Herbert Howells, Arthur Bliss, George Butterworth, Gordon Jacob, Charles Villiers Stanford, Gustav Holst, John Ireland and William Walton.And at the most recent coronation, comparisons between Elizabeth II and Charles III are unsurprisingly being made. Composers writing music for this coronation include both expected and unexpected names, including Judith Weir, Master of the King’s Music; Tarik O’Regan; Paul Mealor; and Shirley Thompson; there will be a new coronation anthem from Andrew Lloyd Webber.Charles III’s coronation is set to usher in the new Carolean era, in the hopes that it will reflect its namesake Charles II and his contributions to art and music. Only the coronation and time will show if this new era lives up to that promise. More

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      A Drone Opera, Brought to You by General Dynamics? A Company Clarifies.

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      “Grounded,” a new work about the psychological toll of drone warfare, drew scrutiny after its presenter, Washington National Opera, advertised the support of a major military contractor.When the Washington National Opera announced that it would open its coming season with the premiere of “Grounded,” a new opera exploring the psychological toll of drone warfare, its star composer, Jeanine Tesori, got less attention than its listed sponsor: General Dynamics, the military contractor.Anger erupted online, with critics accusing Washington National Opera of serving as a mouthpiece for the defense industry. A think tank that advocates military restraint labeled it a “killer drone opera.” New York magazine gave the opera a “despicable” rating on its Approval Matrix, describing it as “the drone-bombing opera ‘Grounded,’ sponsored by General Dynamics.” RT, a state-owned Russian news outlet, said the work showed the strength of the American military-industrial complex.The creative team behind “Grounded,” an adaptation of an acclaimed Off Broadway play, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, which commissioned the opera, grew disturbed by how the new opera was being portrayed. They worked behind the scenes to push the Washington National Opera to make it clear that General Dynamics, which has been a major sponsor of the opera company since 1997, had nothing to do with the creation of the opera.“I felt action was needed to guarantee that the audience would see ‘Grounded’ knowing that it is solely the work of its creators,” Tesori, a major Broadway composer who has expanded into opera, said in a statement to The New York Times. She added that she had only recently become aware of the philanthropic support of General Dynamics.The composer Jeanine Tesori said that “action was needed to guarantee that the audience would see ‘Grounded’ knowing that it is solely the work of its creators.”An Rong Xu for The New York TimesOn Tuesday, after days of negotiations, Washington National Opera posted a statement seeking some distance from its benefactor.“For the sake of clarity,” the statement said, “no sponsor or supporter of W.N.O. had any involvement in the creation of ‘Grounded’ or in the contents of its libretto.”The company changed its website, whose “Grounded” page had described General Dynamics as its “presenting sponsor,” to clarify that the company is a “W.N.O. season sponsor.” It also rewrote its promotional text for the opera, removing some militaristic language, including a line that had described its protagonist as a “hot shot F-16 fighter pilot, an elite warrior trained for the sky” and a line noting that “war ‘with all the benefits of home’ isn’t clear-cut.” The new description cut a reference to the “horror of war.”An early rendering of the set of the opera “Grounded.”Design and rendering by Mimi LienThe episode highlights the difficulties that cultural institutions sometimes face in protecting the integrity of their art while cultivating rich donors. The Kennedy Center, the parent organization of Washington National Opera, has in recent years faced pressure to cut ties with some benefactors, including tobacco companies.General Dynamics has long been a sponsor of Washington National Opera, providing more than $500,000 to the company each year in recent years. Gregory S. Gallopoulos, a senior vice president at General Dynamics, is a member of the opera company’s board.Timothy O’Leary, the general director of Washington National Opera, said in an interview that General Dynamics had no input on “Grounded,” or any other works.“No sponsor has any say in our artistic decisions, or ever could,” he said. “Any sponsor who tried to interfere in that way is not a sponsor from whom we would accept support.”The “Grounded” opera, adapted from a play by George Brant, was announced by the Met in 2017, part of an effort by the company to promote contemporary opera. The Met agreed to co-produce the opera with Washington National Opera ahead of its planned Met premiere in 2025.The New York Times described the play it is based on as a “haunting portrait of a woman serving in the United States Armed Forces coming under pressure as the human cost of war, for combatants as well as civilians, slowly eats away at her well-armored psyche.”Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, described the work as an “antiwar opera” and said that it provided a nuanced portrayal of the costs of war. He said he had advised his counterparts in Washington to take swift action once concerns started spreading on social media about the opera’s support from General Dynamics.“If this misperception was not corrected, it would be very bad for the work,” he said in an interview. “The work would be somehow tainted before anybody ever got a chance to see it.”General Dynamics on Tuesday declined to comment on the controversy, but said in a statement, “We are proud to support the arts.”Phebe N. Novakovic, the chairman and chief executive of General Dynamics since 2013, is an opera buff who grew up listening to recordings on a Victrola record player with her Serbian grandmother. Shortly after she rose to the top of the company, General Dynamics became a full-season sponsor of Washington National Opera.When asked in a 2016 interview why the company was such a big supporter of the opera, Novakovic cited her grandmother’s influence.“I have honored both her memory and my love of that form of human expression through supporting the opera,” she said at the Economic Club of Washington. “We get folks from all over our company coming to the opera.” More

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      Illuminating Rachmaninoff’s Vespers, a Pinnacle of Russian Sacred Rep

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      Steven Fox and the Clarion Choir are tending to a less well-known part of the composer’s canon for his 150th birthday: His choral works.In a classical music world obsessed with anniversaries, be they grand or modest, the 150th birthday of the Russian émigré composer Sergei Rachmaninoff has inevitably drawn notice. Just as inevitably, commemorations have tended to focus on his war horses: the symphonies, piano concertos and solo piano works.It seems to have fallen to Steven Fox and his excellent choirs to tend to Rachmaninoff’s motley but treasurable body of choral works. The sacred ones, particularly — with their flowing yet restrained lyricism and none of the bombast or sentimentality often associated with the composer — represent the very best of Rachmaninoff.On Wednesday, Fox, the artistic director of the New York-based Clarion Music Society, will return to his alma mater — Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H. — to lead the Clarion Choir in Rachmaninoff’s exquisite All-Night Vigil, a pinnacle of the rich Russian Orthodox repertory. They will repeat the performance on Friday at Carnegie Hall.Fox, 44, first conducted the work — commonly called the Vespers, after a liturgical service included in it — as part of a senior project at Dartmouth in 2000. He also handled the logistics — simple enough, you might think, because Russian Orthodox practice bans musical instruments, using only voices.But those voices must be special, combining virtuosity with smooth blend. The basses, in particular, have to travel comfortably and sonorously below the clef, and typically, professional ringers are needed to fill out an amateur performance. (Clarion will feature Glenn Miller, the current go-to American basso profundo, in its two performances.)And to boot, the text is not quite in Russian but in antiquated Old Slavonic.“I can’t say I knew exactly what I was doing at that time,” Fox said in an interview. “There was a point about a week before the concert when I felt overwhelmed. I remember calling my adviser in tears and saying: ‘It’s too much. I can’t keep track of all the details.’ But leading up to the performance, even during it, I just felt calm. That really was the moment I discovered that I wanted to pursue conducting as a profession.”Fox has since made specialties of Russian Orthodox music in general and Rachmaninoff in particular. He and Clarion have presented the Vespers often at New Year in New York and recorded it beautifully for Pentatone.Fox, who first tackled the Vespers as an undergraduate at Dartmouth, has since made specialties of Russian Orthodox music in general and Rachmaninoff in particular.Olivia Galli for The New York TimesThe performances this week are just one part of Fox’s yearlong celebration of the Rachmaninoff anniversary. At New Year, he led Clarion performances of the composer’s other great sacred work, the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. And in March, he conducted the Cathedral Choral Society, of which he is music director, and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in a stirring rendition of “The Bells,” Rachmaninoff’s tribute to Edgar Allan Poe, at the National Cathedral in Washington.Still to come, in November, are the cantata “Spring” and “Three Russian Songs,” with Clarion at St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York City, where Fox lives.Might Fox worry about the appropriateness of celebrating a son of Russia so deeply rooted in its culture as Russia wages war on Ukraine?“I did have misgivings,” he said. “My main concern was singing liturgical music, given the church’s role in what is happening now. But as I thought more about Rachmaninoff’s story, I thought in a way it relates to what many Ukrainians are experiencing. He kind of kept politics at arm’s length for a long time, but at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, he said: ‘I have no choice. I have to leave.’”In the end, Clarion added a program note for the New Year performances of the Liturgy: “There is a terrible war taking place in the part of the world from which this beautiful music comes. As we sing tonight, we pray for peace in the New Year.”And Leonid Roschko, an Orthodox priest and a basso who sang the Deacon in those performances, added a prayer to the Liturgy: “That Thou mightest enlighten with the light of Thy divine wisdom the minds of those darkened with hardness of heart, and protect the people of Ukraine from any harm.”On study and work travels to Russia before the invasion, Fox honed another specialty, Baroque music. He founded Musica Antiqua St. Petersburg, which called itself the nation’s first period-instrument orchestra. He also unearthed what he calls “the earliest known Russian symphony,” from about 1771, by the Ukraine-born Maksym Berezovsky.Back in New York, Fox took the lead in reviving the Clarion Music Society, which had fallen idle shortly after the death of its founder, Newell Jenkins, in 1996. Fox took it over in 2006 and, while expanding its range and pushing it to new heights of virtuosity, he furthered his own ventures into early music, notably including that of Bach.So when the New York Philharmonic asked him to cover for Jaap van Zweden during a run of Bach’s towering “St. Matthew Passion” in March, he was eager to do it. No matter that rehearsals were to begin the day after the “Bells” performance in Washington.“I know the piece, and it would have been hard to say no,” Fox said. “Jaap and I got on very well. I admired his intensity. I thought he knew the score really well, and yet every time I went back to his office, he was studying it more, preparing.”Van Zweden reciprocated the sentiment: “Steven Fox comes from the same school of interpreting Bach that I do,” he said in an email. “His excellent ears and good ideas were a real asset. I have asked him back next year when we do the Mozart Requiem at the New York Philharmonic.”And Fox continues to till Russian soil. Spurred by the renowned music publisher Vladimir Morosan, Fox has been exploring music by Alexander Kastalsky. For Naxos, he recorded “Memory Eternal to the Fallen Heroes” with Clarion, and prepared Clarion and the Cathedral Choral Society to take part in Leonard Slatkin’s recording of an expansion of that work, “Requiem for Fallen Brothers,” with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s.Morosan has described Kastalsky as “a seminal figure upon the landscape” of the early 20th century. Yet he remains so obscure in the West that he didn’t even register in the 2001 edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. What other rarities might Fox and Morosan unearth? More

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      When La Scala Is Sold Out, You Can Still Get In (Online)

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      The opera house’s new streaming service provides live and on-demand performances, as well as extras like backstage glimpses and educational programs.La Scala’s audience can now be anywhere.The opera house in Milan is sharing select performances online through LaScalaTv, a platform that started streaming in February. Its first live offering was a broadcast of Verdi’s opera “I Vespri siciliani,” conducted by Fabio Luisi and featuring such soloists as Marina Rebeka and Luca Micheletti.The program also includes concerts and ballets. On May 11, Alberto Malazzi conducts “Petite Messe Solennelle” by Rossini, to commemorate the anniversary of La Scala’s restoration and reopening after World War II. The ballet “Romeo and Juliet” by Sergei Prokofiev takes the screen to choreography by Kenneth MacMillan on June 28.The on-demand library also includes performances for children, starting with a staged concert based on carnival celebrations called “Lalla & Skali and … the Enchanted Mask.”The platform is part of a wider effort to modernize La Scala’s infrastructure, including an extensive educational outreach program using the technology and plans for subtitles on seat backs.Mirjam Schiavello, left, and Matteo Sala in a performance of “Lalla and Skali and … the Enchanted Mask” at La Scala, part of the house’s on-demand offerings for children.Brescia and Amisano/Teatro alla ScalaDominique Meyer, the theater’s current artistic director and chief executive, said that technological advances in recent years had made it easier for an opera house to widen its reach.“It is a real leap,” he said, recalling the difficulties he faced in 2013 when starting a platform for the Vienna State Opera during his tenure there. “Most people have a faster internet connection, which is extremely important when viewers want to watch a stream in 4K.”The equipment available for in-house operations has also advanced rapidly. Small, robotic cameras can capture performances in the dark without necessitating changes of light, leaving on-site viewers undisturbed. And microphones can easily transmit quality sound.Performances on LaScalaTv are available in either ultra high definition or high definition. The most expensive offering, a live program at the highest resolution, costs 11.90 euros (about $13), while a children’s program at the lower resolution costs €2.90. The audio track is uniformly transmitted in AAC, a compression format of a higher grade than MP3.Mr. Meyer has prioritized a wide view of the stage. “It was important to me to respect a certain distance,” he said. “One doesn’t need close-ups that show the sweat on the face of Gilda at the end of ‘Rigoletto.’”He also wants to capture dance performances at a healthy distance. “If you come too close, it looks like the dancer’s head is about to hit the top of the screen,” he said. “A principle of the whole project was that there would not be too many cuts, and that the viewer would have the liberty to focus where he or she pleases.”Cameras at La Scala can capture performances for online audiences without disturbing viewers in the opera house itself. Brescia and Amisano/Teatro alla ScallaIntermissions provide glimpses backstage and facts about La Scala’s history. Recent offerings have included a tour of the theater’s museum, home to such treasures as a manuscript page from Verdi’s “Nabucco” and a portrait of the soprano Maria Callas.Mr. Meyer said that the house had just scratched the surface of the possibilities and that “there was a lot to tell,” citing “the rehearsals, what happens behind the scenes, the [costume and set] workshops.”Of central importance is bringing some of these stories to younger viewers. The theater has started by creating a network of 200 schools in Italy to bring students into contact with opera.For example, a live rehearsal of Puccini’s “La Bohème” was recently followed by a livestream of the performance itself. A documentary about Bellini’s “I Capuleti e i Montecchi” was combined with an on-demand viewing of the opera itself. This September will bring the first ballet program, revolving around Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.”The house is also teaming up with RAI, Italy’s state broadcaster, to share footage from the 1970s and ’80s, including performances under the conductors Claudio Abbado and Riccardo Muti. The main sponsor of LaScalaTv is the bank Intesa Sanpaolo, and the Cariplo Foundation is supporting the dissemination of content to schools.A scene from “La Bohème” at La Scala. A recent stream of a rehearsal for that opera was followed by a livestream of the performance itself.Brescia and Amisano/Teatro alla Scalla“We brought in about €40.5 million in sponsorship revenue last season,” Mr. Meyer said. “That is huge in Europe. All these projects are being financed.”In the theater, subtitles will be installed this summer on the backs of chairs with translations in Italian, English, French, German and Spanish, using the same software as the streaming platform (eventually there will be eight languages). On May 29, La Scala unveils its new website — which includes a digital magazine — coinciding with its presentation of the 2023-24 season.Italian viewers thus far make up half the streaming service’s audience. Another fourth comes from other European countries. Outside Europe, the highest numbers are currently in the United States and Russia.In-house, Mr. Meyer said, La Scala has regularly sold out this season. “We of course can’t create more seats,” he said. “This technology allows us to expand our audience, also to children.” More

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      Review: Jonathon Heyward Debuts With the Philharmonic

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      Jonathon Heyward, the incoming, barrier-breaking music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, leads the New York Philharmonic this week.On paper, this week’s New York Philharmonic program had plenty going for it: balance, an up-and-coming conductor, an established soloist. But at David Geffen Hall on Thursday, the concert was only sometimes on the verge of grand, and just as often one or two kindling sticks short of a true fire.Still, the show provided an opportunity to catch the rising star Jonathon Heyward, who was making his Philharmonic debut, filling in for Karina Canellakis. In a few months, he will become the first Black music director of the Baltimore Symphony. And, from the start of Thursday’s performance, his reputation for dramatic feeling and attention to dynamics seemed to be well earned.Heyward drew dynamism from the orchestra, without any recourse to stentorian volume, in the opening minutes of Zosha Di Castri’s “Lineage,” an 11-minute piece from 2013. Like some of her works on the recent portrait album “Tachitipo,” this one derives momentum from hairpin turns that link together drone-ish states and startling streams of motivic activity. But toward the end of the work, in some hushed moments of still-busy writing, the Philharmonic’s interpretation slackened — sounding tentative, or short of full commitment.

      Tachitipo by Zosha Di CastriSomething similar transpired during Brahms’s lengthy and majestic Violin Concerto, which followed. Initially, Heyward had the full attention of the Philharmonic players. During the opening movement, he subtly shaped a dramatic pause not long before the entrance of the soloist, Christian Tetzlaff; the orchestra responded with tactile precision to his dramatic, yet not too mannered, method of navigating the transition.Tetzlaff‌ was as impressive here as on a recent recording of this piece on the Ondine ‌label; though his approach was obviously well-drilled in advance, he also proved sensitive here to Heyward’s beat. And his expert handling of Joseph Joachim’s first-movement cadenza — with playing that varied in its timbral effects, from rough-hewn to silvery to robustly expressive — showed an invention that had been missing for a stretch of time in the broader ensemble playing.Sometimes, Tetzlaff seemed to toss off a line reading, appearing none too studied, but in service of setting up explosive precision. A bit of that moment-to-moment interpretive sensibility in the surrounding orchestral material might have proved equally thrilling.Thankfully, after intermission, a greater nimbleness prevailed during Lutoslawski’s Concerto for Orchestra. Although it is not as formally radical as other works in this Polish modernist’s catalog, Heyward and the orchestra found a great wealth of rambunctious material to savor. The first movement’s folk-like melody had a singing quality that contrasted nicely with some moments of raging, post-Stravinsky exclamation. The gentler middle movement had an air of transporting mystery. And the passacaglia of the third movement progressed with persuasive momentum.The final work also dispelled a sense I had that the Brahms might have been hobbled by the slightly chilly acoustic of the recently renovated Geffen Hall. In the Lutoslawski, there were some rounded, warm sounds that had been missing during the appropriate passages in the Brahms. But the orchestra is still getting used to its new home, and Heyward is still getting used to this orchestra; with time, a program like this might find a better tone.And he will be back. After Saturday’s performance — which is followed by a Nightcap program drawn up by Di Castri — Heyward will be absent from Geffen Hall only until he leads the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra there in August.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More