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      Review: ‘Ainadamar’ Turns Lorca Into Death-Haunted Opera

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      Osvaldo Golijov’s poetic 2003 work is being presented in a new production at Detroit Opera that will travel to the Met.DETROIT — Spain is “a country of death, a country open to death,” the poet Federico García Lorca wrote.Those words come from his classic lecture on “duende,” the spirit he saw as presiding over Spanish culture — the dark, earthy, imperfect, wild, morbid quality of its greatest art, music and bullfighting. When an ancient woman with barely a wisp of voice left takes the stage of a dimly lit country cabaret, cracks her way through a line of song and still gives you chills, duende is in the room.And duende should be in the room, too, for “Ainadamar,” Osvaldo Golijov’s death-haunted opera about Lorca, which opened at the newly ambitious Detroit Opera on Saturday evening in a production headed for the Metropolitan Opera in the 2024-25 season.A poetic meditation that keeps erupting in sensual, riotous flamenco rhythms, the 80-minute piece — which premiered in 2003 and was substantially revised two years later — crosses time with seductively blurry ease in David Henry Hwang’s libretto, translated by Golijov into Spanish.Part takes place in 1969, when the Catalan actress Margarita Xirgu, near the end of her life, tells a student about collaborating with Lorca decades before on his first successful play, “Mariana Pineda,” about a 19th-century martyr of Spanish liberalism.Flashbacks bring us to the summer of 1936, as Xirgu tries to persuade Lorca to escape with her to Cuba, where they will be safe from the right-wing revolt in Spain. But he refuses, and is soon killed by Nationalist forces — another saint who dies for freedom. (Ainadamar, the “fountain of tears,” is a natural spring in the hills above Granada where he is believed to have been murdered.)There is a ritualistic, dreamlike, sometimes even delirious quality to the work. Its “images” — Golijov and Hwang’s name for their three sections — each begin with a distinctive rendering of the choral ballad from the start of “Mariana Pineda,” repetitions that eventually give the sense of an endless, circular festival of mourning.Daniela Mack, left, as Lorca and Reyes in the Detroit production.Austin Richey/Detroit OperaWhile the storytelling and structure are quite grounded, even straightforward, the text has the heightened, often surreal quality of Lorca’s verse. Xirgu and Lorca’s debate about going to Cuba seems to transport them to the island in a woozy fantasy. A group of statues of Mariana Pineda join the poet in song at one point, and — just in time for Easter — the scene at Ainadamar brings in the “voices of the fountain” in a fevered vision that draws explicit comparison to the crucifixion.Xirgu’s memories and the present-tense action flow together amid the pitch-bending wails of a female choir, the “niñas.” Some of its members remain offstage, but some come on and join a small troupe of flamenco dancers, choreographed by Antonio Najarro in Deborah Colker’s stark staging here in Detroit.Jon Bausor’s set, somberly lit by Paul Keogan, is dominated by a circular playing space rounded by a translucent curtain of floor-length strings — part stylized fountain, part screen for projections, part evocation of the beaded divider you pass through at the back of a dusty small-town store.The pit orchestra is buttressed by flamenco guitars; a guitar and a box-drum cajón are played onstage. Suggestive use is made of the sampled, amplified sounds of horses’ hooves, water dripping and ominous spoken passages from ’30s radio broadcasts.In one arresting sequence, Golijov morphs gunshots into a hallucinatory beat that’s half flamenco, half techno. Ingeniously, Ramón Ruiz Alonso, the right-wing politician who was a leader in Lorca’s arrest and murder, sings his few but crucial phrases in the wailing cante jondo (or “deep song”) style.Isaac Tovar with chorus members and dancers in “Ainadamar,” which has choreography by Antonio Najarro.Austin Richey/Detroit OperaAs much as it gestures to the 1930s and ’60s, “Ainadamar” is a throwback to the turn of the 21st century, when Golijov was among the most celebrated figures in classical music.Born in 1960 in Argentina into a family of Eastern European Jewish descent, he also studied in Israel and came to live in the United States, and brought all those strands — old world and new; global north and south — to bear in a musical style of artful yet explosive eclecticism, incorporating tango, flamenco, rumba, klezmer, folk ballads and more.Within the fusty classical music world, his disparate, energetic mélange of influences was swiftly embraced amid the multiculturalism that was fashionable in the 1990s, and Golijov nearly drowned in honors and commissions: Grammys, a MacArthur “genius” grant, a festival devoted to him at Lincoln Center, a concerto for Yo-Yo Ma.His defining success, the irrepressibly percussive Afro-Latin oratorio “La Pasión Según San Marcos,” a bold updating of the tradition of the Bach Passions, premiered in 2000. (It was a good year for sprawling, polyglot recastings of religiously minded choral works: John Adams’s “El Niño,” about the Christmas story, was first heard three months later.)“Ainadamar” was one of the often achingly lovely works that followed “La Pasión” in the handful of years before Golijov ran into a wall of unbearable pressure, missed deadlines and a plagiarism kerfuffle — leading to a decade of, essentially, silence before “Falling Out of a Time,” an intense, intimate song cycle about a grieving father, appeared just before the pandemic.His work never quite went away, and “Ainadamar” is well traveled in a variety of productions. But it and him feel newly relevant in our time — even if the language of the “multiculti” ’90s has shifted to “diversity, equity and inclusion.”Spanish is still a language rarely sung in mainstream opera houses. And amid fresh calls for broader representation at all levels of the arts, Golijov’s work, while generally written for standard forces, often also gives the opportunity for performers from nonclassical traditions to contribute on their own terms. He doesn’t just translate flamenco for a symphony orchestra; he also demands a place in the pit and onstage for flamenco singers, dancers and players.But even with its creativity and beauty, “Ainadamar” has weaknesses. Though Golijov introduces enough intriguing ideas to keep the accessibility of his music from blandness — trembling marimba and warily sliding yawns of strings somehow perfectly conjure martyrdom — there is, as in much of his work, sometimes a sense of vamping when he intends the effect to be incantatory. And though it isn’t long, “Ainadamar” seems ready to end several times before it does.When it does end, though, in this production, it’s memorable, with the curtain falling on the poignant, fantastical sight of lanterns dimming underwater. Colker’s staging has an appealing simplicity that splits the difference between the realistic and more symbolic scenes, though the rotating murder sequence and the final “image” — in which past and present, living and dead, collide — could be clearer. And Tal Rosner’s projections tend to be busy or obvious — hands, droplets of water, close-ups of women crying out — more than elegant or expressive.Reyes and Mack in the production directed by Deborah Colker.Austin Richey/Detroit OperaConducted by Paolo Bortolameolli, the orchestra played with poised sobriety, and the all-important battery of percussion was lively. But the textures should be lusher to get the full hypnotic effect of Golijov’s score, and some passages of frenetic activity were vague rather than urgent.As Xirgu, the soprano Gabriella Reyes was sympathetic, with haunting rises up to ethereal floated high notes late in the piece. Vanessa Vasquez, another soprano, was tender as her student, Nuria. As Lorca, the mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack — Golijov nods to the operatic tradition of the woman-as-man “trouser role” — had mellow charm.They were impressive, but none was harrowing; the overall effect of the opera was muted, bloodless. The same was true of the flamenco singer Alfredo Tejada, who as Ruiz Alonso gets the keening lines of a call to prayer. Tejada’s wails, though, were pretty rather than heart-piercing.There was much to admire about this “Ainadamar.” But it was solid, stable, attractive — not wrenching or raw. Duende, which should have permeated the opera house, was all too hard to come by.AinadamarPerformances continue on April 14 and 16 at the Detroit Opera House; detroitopera.org. More

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      James Bowman, Who Helped Resurrect the Countertenor, Dies at 81

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      He took up the repertory for the highest male voice at a time when few were performing it. He was particularly known for two roles in Britten operas.James Bowman, a British countertenor who championed repertory for that voice at a time when few singers were attempting it and inspired more composers, including Benjamin Britten, to write for it, died on March 27 at his home in Redhill, south of London. He was 81.Terry Winwood, his civil partner, confirmed the death but said the cause had not yet been determined.When Mr. Bowman started singing professionally in the 1960s, the countertenor — the highest of the male voices, working the same range as female contraltos and mezzo-sopranos — was something of a rarity on opera and concert stages. Alfred Deller, who died in 1979, was the go-to countertenor of the day, but his voice and his acting ability were said to have been limited.“Bowman was a revolutionary talent,” the critic Rupert Christiansen, revisiting one of Mr. Bowman’s 1970s recordings, wrote in The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2019, adding that “his technique brought a new power to the countertenor repertory.”Mr. Bowman’s breakthrough came in 1967, when he was working as a teacher and was doing most of his singing in choirs. He described the moment to The Santa Fe Reporter in 1987.“A friend came up from London and told me that Benjamin Britten was holding auditions for ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’” Mr. Bowman said, referring to Mr. Britten’s 1960 opera, whose Oberon role had originally been written for Mr. Deller. “This is sort of a fairy story — I’d never done anything onstage in my life, but I wrote to Britten and I said, ‘I think I am eminently suited to the role of Oberon.’”He was invited to audition.“I knew that you could barely hear the people who had sung the part before,” he said. “So I went to Covent Garden and I made a big noise and socked them between the eyeballs — and it worked! The next thing I knew I was on tour.”Oberon became one of his signature roles. Mr. Britten wrote other works for him as well, including the part of Apollo in “Death in Venice,” the 1973 Britten opera.“James Bowman’s ringing Apollo sounded authentically unterrestrial,” Martin Cooper wrote in The Daily Telegraph, reviewing the world premiere of the piece at Snape Maltings in Suffolk, England.Mr. Bowman was heard frequently in concert settings as well, and he had a knack for deploying his musical gifts to striking effect in famed performance spaces. Tim Page, writing in The New York Times about a two-hour concert of works by Handel recorded at Westminster Abbey in 1985, called his voice “unusually versatile and pleasing.” Twenty years later, also in The Times, Bernard Holland, after catching him in a “Messiah” at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan, said that Mr. Bowman “sang the countertenor parts with a voice and a dramatic personality able to command attention in a crowd.”His performances and his dozens of recordings encouraged other singers to explore the countertenor repertory, and Mr. Winwood said he was always generous with advice and support for younger singers.“He would think nothing of hiring a studio and arranging a meeting with young singers who he had never even met,” Mr. Winwood said by email, “and I’m pretty sure he would never charge for his time.”In a tribute on the website of the London-based choir Tenebrae, Nigel Short, the choir’s director, recalled the crucial support Mr. Bowman gave him early in his career. He also shared fond memories of Mr. Bowman’s impish sense of humor.“He was such a brilliant, instinctive singer and musician, a huge character and incredibly kind and generous,” Mr. Short wrote, “but my fondest memories will always be of him giggling and snorting loudly at something totally outrageous he’d just whispered in the ears of anyone standing close by.”Mr. Bowman made for a lively newspaper interview as well. He was always eager to dispel stereotypes about countertenors, especially unflattering ones that branded them as effeminate and made them the target of jokes.“We’re a down-to-earth bunch who just happen to like singing in a high register,” he told The Sunday Telegraph of Britain in 1996. “When I look around at my colleagues, I’m struck by how normal most of them are.”When Mr. Bowman performed Handel’s “Messiah” with the St. Thomas Choir at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan in 2005, one critic wrote that he “sang the countertenor parts with a voice and a dramatic personality able to command attention in a crowd.”Jennifer Taylor for The New York TimesJames Thomas Bowman was born on Nov. 6, 1941, in Oxford, England, to Benjamin and Cecilia (Coote) Bowman. He attended the centuries-old school King’s Ely, beginning in 1951; originally a boy chorister there, he soon became head chorister. According to an obituary published by the school, he gave his first concert as a countertenor in 1959 to a small school group in a chapel at Ely Cathedral. The school now hosts an annual James Bowman Lecture promoting the creative and liberal arts.Mr. Bowman attended New College, Oxford, as an organ scholar and was a member of the New College and Christ Church choirs. In 1965 he met David Munrow, who invited him to join his Early Music Consort of London. He continued performing with that group well into the 1970s, and he was also a member of the early music choral group Pro Cantione Antiqua.Mr. Bowman and Mr. Winwood were together for 48 years. He leaves no other immediate survivors.Producing the countertenor voice, Mr. Bowman told The Sunday Telegraph, involved “using the edge of your vocal cords, and neglecting the central part, which is the bass area.”“I can sing bass,” he added. “I use my bass voice to warm up with, before I sing countertenor. But I can’t keep up a bass voice for long — it feels odd.”Although he was a champion of the countertenor and urged composers to write for it, not all of them hit the mark, he told The Independent of Britain in 1990.“People say, ‘I’ve written you an opera,’ and either the range is too wide or they want you to be something bizarre like a singing corpse,” he said. “I’ve spent my life fighting the idea of being a piece of exquisitery on a table — trying just to be a singer, not a countertenor.” More

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      As Florence Price’s Music Is Reconsidered, She Turns 135. Again.

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      The work of Florence B. Price is having a renaissance, and new, foundational details about her life and racial identity are still being discovered.By any measure, a Florence B. Price renaissance is well underway.Seven decades since her death, and nine since the groundbreaking premiere of her Symphony in E minor, her luminous music is enrapturing audiences worldwide. Most recently, the London-based Chineke! Orchestra highlighted that symphony on its debut North American tour, which has included stops at Lincoln Center and Jordan Hall in Boston, where Price herself performed as a New England Conservatory pupil. She has amassed a recorded catalog that includes recent Grammy Award-winning albums by the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Youth Symphony.This excitement stems from a half-century of scholarly and artistic work built on foundations laid by the late musicologists Barbara Garvey Jackson and Rae Linda Brown. A fluke discovery of dozens of Price’s unpublished scores at her abandoned Illinois summer home in 2009, which was then publicized in 2018, added significant momentum that has grown unabated since.While the explosion of attention is welcome, it has far outpaced a careful assessment of the historical record that may reshape how we view Price and her world. Brown, the leading authority on Price, died in 2017, before she could fully integrate the new discoveries into her magisterial biography that was published in 2020. But, knowing that there was still a great deal more to uncover, she remarked in a 2015 speech, “It is for the next generation of music scholars to tell the rest of the story.”As we take up the task of writing a new Price biography that draws on materials that were once lost, we have responded to Brown’s invitation by starting at the beginning. Here are just a few of the revelations that have led us to rethink what we know of Price, her music and the world she inhabited.To start, April 9 happens to be Price’s 135th birthday — again. The current scholarly consensus holds that she was born in Little Rock, Ark., in 1887. We believe that a preponderance of evidence, corroborated by a recently uncovered government document housed in the Library of Congress, now points to her true birth year as 1888.This small change would be a significant inconvenience for those invested in complete biographical accuracy, such as library cataloging teams. Yet such an otherwise slight discrepancy articulates the broader reality that basic facts about Price remain vexingly difficult to grasp and have emerged only through painstaking analysis of scattered and often disorganized records. Four decades ago, the historian Deborah Gray White described this dimension of Black women’s historiography as “mining the forgotten.”Through our meticulous research, we have also created a new sketch of the winding and at times traumatic multigenerational experience of racial ambiguity for Price and her family.Newly available photographs whose labels include Price’s maternal grandmother, Mary McCoy, and great-grandmother, Margaret Collins, appear to confirm that they would have been perceived as white according to post-bellum racial thought. Although no photograph of Price’s maternal grandfather, an Indianapolis barber named William Gulliver, is known to survive, local newspapers described him as “colored.” Curiously, the 1860 census lists the entire Gulliver family as “mulatto,” while the 1870 census lists them as “white.”That year, Gulliver sued Indianapolis City Schools for rejecting his daughter, Florence Irene (Price’s mother), from the white high school on racial grounds. Rather than seeking racially equitable admission, he argued that she was white by virtue of mixed European, African and Cherokee ancestry. The court disagreed, and a photograph from the time suggests that her racially ambiguous appearance placed her in the fissures of a hardening color line.In 1876, Florence Irene married a prominent dentist named James H. Smith and moved with him to Little Rock, where they both lived openly as members of the city’s Black elite. Despite their racial ambiguity, the Smiths clearly aligned themselves with Black political causes and at times continued to use the courts to resist tightening Jim Crow constructions of race, largely without success.After Dr. Smith died in 1910, however, Florence Irene deserted the family altogether to pass as white, entering what the historian Allyson Hobbs has called “a chosen exile.” The musicologist Michael Cooper has recently uncovered that she likely passed as white until she died in 1948, only five years before her daughter’s own death.One of Florence B. Price’s two daughters, Florence Louise, openly resented that sense of abandonment, passed down in family lore. Florence Irene “wasn’t the one who shouldn’t have married my grandfather,” she once wrote, “just the opposite.” No evidence currently suggests any reconnection between Florence Irene and the rest of the Price family.Price herself was well aware of racial interstices. In her final year of conservatory study in Boston, she falsely registered as a Mexican resident to avoid harassment from vocally segregationist, Southern white students — a longstanding problem for students of color.Much later in her career, on July 5, 1943, race, gender and American identity all ran through Price’s mind. In a now-famous letter to Serge Koussevitzky — her second to the influential Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor — she closed with a contemplative assertion, “I have an unwavering and compelling faith that a national music very beautiful and very American can come from the melting pot just as the nation itself has done.” And, repeating a hitherto unanswered call, “Will you examine one of my scores?”Earlier in the letter, she had written of the “two handicaps of sex and race,” the “Negro blood in my veins,” and how her Arkansas upbringing had shaped her understanding of African American folk music. Knowing of Koussevitzky’s keenness to champion American composers in wartime, Price then introduced the melting pot, not as an idealistic metaphor, but as her reality. He declined to program any of her music.Here and elsewhere, Price’s vocabulary paints a distinct self-understanding. In a document in Price’s handwriting, likely dating from 1939, she describes her maternal ancestry as “French, Indian and Spanish,” obscuring William Gulliver’s African descent. In contrast, she labeled her paternal ancestry as “Negro, Indian and English.” From this perspective, to tell Koussevitzky that she had “some Negro blood” was a sensible turn of phrase embracing an unclassifiable racial identity.In our reading, Price’s description punctured “one-drop” ideologies while affirming the creolization of her background. She wanted to complicate rigid conceptions of race, following the stance that her family had clearly taken for generations. As Hobbs has argued, the mutability of racial self-identification open to racially ambiguous people “reveals the bankruptcy of the race idea” while “offering a searing critique of racism” and “disarming racialized thinking.”And so, as we work to construct Price’s genealogical portrait and her recognition as the first African American woman composer of her stature, we consider how the dynamics of racial passing, ambiguity, colorism and — most important — her self-definition, factored into the path she charted as a creative artist.Notably, Price explained her musical style to Koussevitzky in terms of ambiguity and fusion. “Having been born in the South and having spent most of my childhood there,” she told him, “I believe I can truthfully say that I understand the real Negro music. In some of my work I make use of this idiom undiluted. Again, at other times it merely flavors my themes. And at still other times thoughts come in the garb of my mixed racial background.”Price’s capacious sense of self generated an equally capacious horizon of expression captured most clearly in her series of four solo piano works called “Fantasie Nègre.” From the first in the set, which draws upon the spiritual “Sinner, Please Don’t Let This Harvest Pass,” to the last, which weaves an original theme into rhapsodic declamations, each uses different strategies for sounding the folkloric and the fantastical of Black pasts, presents and futures.Price’s engagement with Black folk idioms in her symphonies and chamber music has also entered the spotlight as listeners have encountered these works for the first time. Often extracted for family performances, her dance-inspired “Juba” movements are especially popular. But limiting engagement to Price’s folkloric music is a mistake. As the composer George E. Lewis has argued, expanding conceptions of the possibilities in Black music must accompany an expanding understanding of Black life.A prolific song composer, Price was deeply inspired by the outstanding Black poets of her era, including Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson and Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr. She even set some of her own poetry. She was a voracious and eclectic reader who could bring extraordinary musical dynamism to texts across styles and themes. Her setting of “Debts,” by Jessie Belle Rittenhouse, is a profound meditation on the inward experience of love, while “Tobacco,” her setting of a comic poem by Graham Lee Hemminger, shows off her dry wit.Price’s approaches to the piano and organ, her principal instruments, were equally voluminous. Large-scale works like her Piano Concerto and organ suite display her virtuosic skills as a performer. Her picturesque character pieces — such as “Flame,” “Clouds” and “In Quiet Mood” — reveal a supreme colorist with an imaginative harmonic vocabulary and firm narrative sense.While recordings of these pieces display the breadth of Price’s creativity, many of her compositional ambitions went unfulfilled at the time of her death, in 1953. Drafts of two symphonies (one of which formed the basis of her tone poem “The Oak”), two piano concertos and a handful of chamber pieces are incomplete, while other major scores for chorus, piano and solo voice remain unpublished. Even so, as Price’s life and works come into sharper focus, the world will continue to find that her music cannot be contained. More

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      Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, Nun With a Musical Gift, Dies at 99

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      Born in Ethiopia, she seemed headed for a career as a concert pianist before she chose a monastic life. Her intricate piano recordings gained a cult following.“Honky tonk” and “nun” are words not often seen in combination, but in 2017, when the BBC broadcast a radio documentary about the pianist and composer Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, “The Honky Tonk Nun” was the title of choice.It was a testament to the music she made, both before and after she became a nun in the 1940s, music that drew on her classical training but seemed to partake of rhythm and blues, jazz and other influences. The relatively few who discovered it knew they had found their way to something singular.The musician Norah Jones was one who did, especially after hearing the album “Éthiopiques 21,” a collection of Sister Guèbrou’s piano solos that was part of a record series spotlighting folkloric and pop music from Ethiopia.“This album is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard: part Duke Ellington, part modal scales, part the blues, part church music,” Ms. Jones told The New York Times in 2020. “It resonated in all those ways for me.”The documentarian Garrett Bradley used Sister Guèbrou’s music in the soundtrack of “Time,” her acclaimed 2020 film about a New Orleans woman’s fight to get her husband out of prison. Alex Westfall, writing in Pitchfork about that movie and its soundtrack, called the music “the sonic equivalent to infinity — untethered by conventional meter or rhythm, as if Guèbrou’s instrument holds more keys than it should.”Fana Broadcasting, Ethiopia’s state-run news agency, announced on March 27 that Sister Guèbrou had died in Jerusalem. She was 99. The announcement did not specify when she died.“Hers were some of the most extraordinary 99 years ever lived on this earth,” Kate Molleson, who made “The Honky Tonk Nun” and wrote about Sister Guèbrou in her book “Sound Within Sound: Radical Composers of the 20th Century” (2022), said on Twitter.Sister Guèbrou (the title emahoy is used for a female monk) was born Yewubdar Guèbru on Dec. 12, 1923, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. (She changed her name when she became a nun.) Her father, Kentiba Gebru Desta, held several titles, including mayor of Gondar, and her mother, Kassaye Yelemtu, was socially prominent as well. At age 6, Sister Guèbrou was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland. There, she said in the BBC documentary, she saw a concert by a blind pianist that made a strong impression.“It remained in my mind, in my heart,” she said. “After that, I was captivated by music.”She studied violin and piano and then returned to Ethiopia in 1933 to attend the Empress Menen secondary school. After Italy, under Benito Mussolini, invaded Ethiopia in 1935 and forced its emperor, Haile Selassie, into exile, Sister Guèbrou and her family were deported to the Italian island of Asinara and then were relocated to Mercogliano, east of Naples.When the Italian occupation ended and Selassie was restored to power in 1941, Sister Guèbrou, still a teenager, accepted an offer to further her music studies in Cairo, though the Cairo climate did not agree with her. She eventually returned to Ethiopia, working for a time as an assistant in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.Ms. Guèbrou in an undated photo. After studying music in Italy and Cairo, she underwent a spiritual reassessment and became a nun, joining a monastery in Ethiopia. “I took off my shoes and went barefoot for 10 years,” she said. via Buda MusiqueShe had a chance to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London and seemed on the way to a career as a concert pianist, the BBC documentary says, but that prospect fell through for reasons Sister Guèbrou would not detail. That led her to a spiritual reassessment of her life, and by her early 20s, she was a nun. She spent 10 years in a hilltop monastery in Ethiopia.“I took off my shoes and went barefoot for 10 years,” she told Ms. Molleson. “No shoes, no music, just prayer.”She returned to her family and by the 1960s was recording some of her music; her first album was released in Germany in 1967, according to the website of a foundation established in her name to promote music education.She made several other records over the next 30 years, donating the proceeds to the poor. In the mid-1980s, she left Ethiopia and settled into an Ethiopian Orthodox monastery in Jerusalem, spending the rest of her life there. Information on her survivors was not available.Sister Guèbrou came to much wider attention in 2006. The French musicologist and producer Francis Falceto, who had been releasing albums of Ethiopian music from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s in a series called “Éthiopiques” on the Buda Musique label, made a collection of her solo pieces No. 21 in that series.“While the sound of this musician’s pensive, repetitive drawing-room études owes something to Beethoven, Schumann and Debussy — although they are studded with little arpeggios special to Ethiopian music — there is a dusky, early-blues quality to much of it,” Ben Ratliff wrote in a review in The Times. “If you’ve heard some jazz, you could think it was written by Mary Lou Williams or Duke Ellington in their own moments of making their own quiet, original drawing-room music.”Ilana Webster-Kogen, an ethnomusicologist at SOAS University of London with an expertise in Ethiopian music, broke down one track from the “Éthiopiques” album, the inviting yet complex “The Story of the Wind,” which is less than three minutes long.“First, there is a lot of classical technique in there, particularly in the interplay between the right and left hands,” she said by email. “You might think you’re listening to a sonata for those first few seconds because there is so much harmony between the right and left hand. But then it becomes immediately clear that she’s improvising, so the genre signals jazz.”And then there’s the meter of the piece.“Most Ethiopian music is written in 6/8, which you can count either as duple meter or triple meter (1-2-1-2 or 1-2-3-1-2-3),” Dr. Webster-Kogen wrote. “If you try to count, you’ll see that she really fluctuates between duple and triple pulse. This would be innovative coming from any musician, and sure, there are other Ethiopian musicians who do this — now — but the idea that they got it from a woman who has dedicated her life to prayer and charity … anyone can see that this is unusual.” More

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      Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter Reveals Himself: As a Composer

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      After more than two decades at the forefront of electronic dance music (while in a robot-style helmet), the French artist is releasing “Mythologies,” a score for traditional symphony orchestra.The most shocking part of “Mythologies,” a ballet that premiered last summer in Bordeaux, France, came after the dance was over. It was a seemingly normal moment: The composer of the music came out and took a bow.What was surprising was that his face and his wild halo of dark curls were showing. After spending more than 20 years in public behind shiny, opaque robot-style helmets as half of the pathbreaking dance-music duo Daft Punk, Thomas Bangalter was ready to be seen without barriers.“There’s nothing sensational about it,” Bangalter, 48, said on a recent video call. “It’s down to earth, my relationship to physical appearance that I feel now.”“Mythologies,” Bangalter’s first major solo project since Daft Punk announced its dissolution in February 2021, is arriving on Friday as an album on Erato, the distinguished French classical label. Conceived in 2019, long before Daft Punk’s breakup, it is a 90-minute instrumental score for traditional symphony orchestra, with nary an electronic sound in the mix.“With electronic music, it’s so hard and it takes so much time to infuse emotion in the machines,” the soft-spoken and thoughtful Bangalter said from his home in Paris. “So to write a chord or a melody and have the performers — human beings — play it and have this instant emotional quality to it, is really quite exhilarating. It’s not the fight you have against machines.”“Mythologies” revels in the palpably human effects of an acoustic ensemble: the trembling friction of bows on strings; the exhalations of breath into brasses; the grumble of bassoon, with audible clicks of fingers on keys. The ballet is a stylized parade of myths from the distant past, but for Bangalter the project also has a kind of post-apocalyptic, back-to-basics optimism: “After everything, the violin will remain.”“I’m very grateful for the freedom and the creative latitude that I was able to explore with my partner,” Bangalter said. “The only thing it’s farewell to is Daft Punk, because that is in the past, but beyond that, there are many different things yet to explore.”Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesEven without the buffed, gleamingly artificial sheen and pumping tempos of Daft Punk’s trademark sound, much of the sprawling, 23-track new album does have the clean, poised formality and propulsive rhythmic regularity of Vivaldi and Bach — and of techno.“It was definitely a journey of learning and experimenting,” Bangalter said. “How to orchestrate, as well as the value of trial and error, and also exploring the ’70s or the ’80s. But not the 1970s or 1980s — the 1880s, or the 1780s.”The 1970s and ’80s are very much in the score, though, in the form of brooding, endlessly cycling small cells of material, like that in the work of Philip Glass or Michael Nyman, both favorites of choreographers. Relentlessly repeating small cells of material is also the way many electronica songs, including Daft Punk’s, are built.No one will mistake “Mythologies” for Bangalter’s work with his longtime musical partner, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. But this new project is as much a continuum with Daft Punk as it is a break or rejection. The duo’s “Tron: Legacy” soundtrack, from 2010, blended electronic sounds with a symphony orchestra (though, unlike “Mythologies,” Bangalter didn’t arrange those orchestrations himself).A sense of ambivalence about technology permeates the slouchy, melancholy mood of “Random Access Memories” (2013), the group’s last album, which was lauded for “restoring a human touch to dance music” and celebrating liveness over computerized composition. “Mythologies” is, in a sense, another step in that direction.“It’s a break of medium, but he’s the same person,” said Romain Dumas, who has conducted the work in its live performances and on the new album.A large-scale dance score is also a return of sorts to Bangalter’s youth in Paris, where he was surrounded by choreography, both classical and modern. His mother was a ballet dancer, and his father was a songwriter and producer; as a child, Bangalter took piano lessons from a member of the music staff of the Paris Opera.But from his late teens, he and Homem-Christo began to explore a style they thought of as retrofuturist, borrowing elements from the past — disco, ’80s electropop, R&B — to build an increasingly grand vision of joyful populism, touring with an enormous pyramid-shape stage set and taking on their robot personas in a spectacle simultaneously ironic and sincere. Thanks in large part to Daft Punk, dance music went fully mainstream.Daft Punk, Bangalter’s duo with Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, announced its breakup in February 2021.Michael Falco for The New York TimesIt had been six years since the release of “Random Access Memories” when Bangalter was approached, in mid-2019, by the choreographer Angelin Preljocaj, who had used Daft Punk’s music in his work in the past.“At first, I was interested to mix electronic music and symphonic, like they did in ‘Tron,’” Preljocaj said. “But I think Thomas wanted to have a completely new experience. He proposed to me to write a completely orchestral score, and obviously I respected his desire.”Marc Minkowski, the renowned Baroque maestro who until last year directed the Opéra National de Bordeaux, where the ballet premiered, recalled: “Angelin said, ‘I have a friend who’s one of the Daft Punks.’ And they were so popular in France, it was like Abba. He told me that his friend was about to start composing, and wanted to do something completely different. And I said, ‘Wonderful.’ I love crossover; I’m a conductor, and my dream is to accompany Lady Gaga in musicals.”The ballet’s mythology theme and its music arose in tandem: Bangalter sought a kind of story scaffolding from Preljocaj to begin to structure his writing, and Bangalter’s initial sketches inspired in Preljocaj the idea of exploring a range of myths, rather than a single narrative.Bangalter read classic treatises on orchestration — the art of how to properly use the different instruments and balance them — by Berlioz and Rimsky-Korsakov. To write the score, he not only abandoned the computer, but also the keyboard, at which he would compose during the Daft Punk years.“Right away, I said I’m going to write everything at the desk,” he recalled. “I don’t want to be limited, both harmonically and rhythmically, by my own limitations at the piano.”After so many years working with machines, “to write a chord or a melody and have the performers — human beings — play it and have this instant emotional quality to it, is really quite exhilarating,” Bangalter said.Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesBut old habits died hard. “He was coming from an electronic world,” said Dumas, the conductor, “so some ideas were very odd and very difficult to do for humans. For example, in ‘Zeus,’ that’s one cell that’s repeating for like three or four minutes; that was very hard to do for an orchestra.”It’s a paradox: Bangalter clearly relished the human touch and immediacy of classical music, the sound of dozens of musicians playing together, unamplified, in Bordeaux’s 18th-century opera house. (Alain Lanceron, the head of Erato, said that Bangalter insisted on going back to the label’s original logo — “very, very classical and old-fashioned and traditional” — for the album cover.)But he also, just as clearly, missed the minute control he was used to — and the effects that only technology makes possible. When it came time for making tweaks, Dumas said, they weren’t big ones.“It was tiny elements that were changing: ‘We’re going to add a dot at this point, or change it to another dynamic and mix it with this little thing,’” he said. “As human interpreters, this kind of subtlety was kind of hard to do sometimes; it’s the kind of precision you can only have with machines.”Deep in the collaboration on “Mythologies” when Daft Punk’s split was announced, Preljocaj was surprised by the news. “I think these two guys are very, very demanding with themselves,” he said. “They are perfectionist, precise. I think they are not sure they will do something higher than the point where they were. I’m not sure of that, but it’s an intuition. And that shows the honesty of their work. They don’t want to produce something which is less than what they did.”Bangalter still shares a studio and equipment with Homem-Christo, who saw “Mythologies” in Bordeaux. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.)“I’m very grateful for the freedom and the creative latitude that I was able to explore with my partner,” Bangalter said. “So it’s behind me now, but I’m really happy about it. I’ve always liked the idea of adding facets and possibilities more than shutting down ideas. The only thing it’s farewell to is Daft Punk, because that is in the past, but beyond that, there are many different things yet to explore.”Those things might involve more film scores — he has collaborated several times with the director Gaspar Noé — as well as work that is released with greater frequency than the sometimes glacial expanses between Daft Punk albums.And “Mythologies” does not represent goodbye to electronics. “I feel I’ve learned some things in this process that I would be happy to integrate in my future creative projects,” he said. “But what has always driven me is to go in one direction and then to do the opposite.”There is one thing, though, that he has abandoned, irretrievably and happily.“My priorities in the world in 2023 are on the side of the humans, not the machines,” he said. “I have absolutely no desire or intentions to be a robot in 2023. There is absolutely not one reason I would want to be one.” More

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      Review: John Luther Adams’s ‘Vespers’ Pray for an Earth in Crisis

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      John Luther Adams’s latest premiere, “Vespers of the Blessed Earth,” is a tear-splattered departure from his usual style.Lately, the composer John Luther Adams has been thinking about art — and artists — in times of crisis.Amid war, a pandemic, political precarity and looming climate disaster, someone like him can retreat into nostalgia, or turn to an aesthetic of proselytism, or speak directly to current events as if following Brecht’s famous epigraph from his “Svendborg Poems,” “In the dark times / will there also be singing? / Yes, there will also be singing. / About the dark times.”Adams sees himself as something of a modern Monet, painting his monumental water lilies during World War I. “Like Monet, in my own lesser way, the best thing I can do now, for myself and for other people,” he wrote in a recent essay, “is what I’ve done throughout my life: to follow my art, with an ever-deeper sense of urgency and devotion.”That sense has led him to his latest work, “Vespers of the Blessed Earth,” which received its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on Friday, one night after its unveiling in Philadelphia. Rarely, if ever, has Adams written music that has been so explicitly felt, and more directly stated — but also so ineffective.In a way, the urgency of climate-related art has caught up to Adams, whose career has been an extended exercise in marveling at the natural world through music. He was once an activist but settled on full-time composition, mostly from his minimalist, longtime home in Alaska, a place lovingly and eloquently documented in his books “Winter Music” and “Silences So Deep.”And his work, while not overtly political, has come from a place of wonder and conscience, qualities that extend to his everyday life: Rather than fly, he took a train to Philadelphia from his house in New Mexico. Adams has long been a master of creating environments in sound — not tone paintings per se, but immersive, inventive evocations of, for example, bird song, the desert and, most famously, the open water in “Become Ocean,” for which he won the Pulitzer Prize (and the love of Taylor Swift). Awe-inspiring, nearly religious to experience, his music is, at its finest, a font of appreciation for forces larger than ourselves.The “Vespers,” however, are different. Over five sections, this tear-splattered score mourns and damns, and declares where in the past Adams might have simply observed. It is, he told The New York Times in an interview, unusually expressive and personal. But in its bluntness — down to a spoken-word introduction, delivered on Friday by Charlotte Blake Alston, that laid out not the structure of the piece but its purpose — it feels like the work of a less assured artist.These first performances — by the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Crossing, one of our most consistently thrilling choral ensembles — didn’t happen under ideal circumstances. The conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, withdrew because of illness; and the original soprano soloist, Ying Fang, has been recovering from a vocal cord hemorrhage. She was replaced by Meigui Zhang, and the Crossing’s director, Donald Nally, took up the podium for the Adams (while at Carnegie, Marin Alsop filled in for the concert’s second half, a precise and transparent, yet terrifyingly alive “Rite of Spring”).But the reading didn’t seem to suffer. Nally is an experienced hand in Adams’s music, having premiered and recorded his “Canticles of the Holy Wind” with the Crossing. And on Friday, he navigated with cool command the idiosyncratic layout of the “Vespers” — four choruses and four string-and-percussion ensembles arranged across the stage, with a piano and harp in the middle, then woodwinds, brass and additional instruments aloft in the balconies.Adams’s score calls for brasses and woodwinds to be perched in balconies on either side of the stage.Chris LeeIn the first section, “A Brief Descent Into Deep Time,” percussive ringing and ghostly breaths give way to geological texts — the names and colors of rocks — describing two billion years’ worth of layers in the Grand Canyon. The words, set against suspended, seemingly static strings, come quickly, unintelligible as they blend and best taken in, as with most of Adams’s music, as if letting them wash over you.Insistently downward melodic phrases appear to echo section’s title until they emerge as the idée fixe of the entire piece, doleful and reflecting a world in decline. The gesture takes form next, in “A Weeping of Doves,” as wailing vocalise; and is subtler in “Night-Shining Clouds,” as the slowly sloping sheen of harmonics in the strings.The clearest allusion to the work’s liturgical title comes in the fourth section, “Litanies of the Sixth Extinction,” which is set to the scientific binomials of 193 species Adams describes in the score as “critically threatened and endangered.” (Why that includes the Kauai O’o, the long-extinct bird whose call inspired the fifth section, “Aria of the Ghost Bird,” is beyond me.)If the litany doesn’t quite land, it’s not Adams’s fault — though he does overlay the names to the point rendering them indistinguishable, with no time to register, much less grieve for them. The bigger difficulty, though, is that since 2020, a list like this has lost its power; people routinely saw unfathomably high infection rates, and the deaths of more than one million Americans. If that hasn’t been enough to inspire collective mourning, what chance could there have been for him?The last name among the “Litanies” is Homo sapiens — uncharacteristic for Adams, and more expected of a comparatively immature artist’s rhetoric. But there is a return to form in that “Aria of the Ghost Bird,” in which the strings are again suspended, though foundational, under Zhang’s elegant but sorrowful vocal line, which is revealed to be drawn-out adaptation of the Kauai O’o call.That bird song — captured in 1987, in a recording of the last of the species — does appear as a transcription at the end, played by a piccolo and orchestral bells perched in a balcony at the rear of the hall. The moment unfurls with freedom, its long rests patient, its repeated call beautiful and heartbreakingly lonely. It’s here, as Adams turns his ear and pen back toward nature, that his music is most powerful.Philadelphia OrchestraPerformed on Friday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: ‘Fragments’ Proposes a New Kind of Cello Recital

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      Alisa Weilerstein brought her new project, a mix tape of new works and movements from Bach’s cello suites, to Zankel Hall.Alisa Weilerstein, a cellist of explosive emotional energy, gave the New York premiere of her new project, “Fragments,” at Zankel Hall on Saturday. I was there, but she wouldn’t want me to tell you exactly what happened.Journalists have been asked to include a spoiler alert if they plan to reveal the concert’s program — which I will do, so consider yourself warned.“Fragments” is a new, multiyear series in which Weilerstein plans to pair each of Bach’s six cello suites with new works she commissioned for the project in general, but not for any suite in particular.Weilerstein and her director, Elkhanah Pulitzer, are aiming to rethink how artists connect with their audiences by reconfiguring the traditional concert format, which they feel has gotten, if not quite stale, predictable. An element of surprise — and the abandonment of preconceived notions — is critical to their concept.Gone are the usual program notes, intermission, encores and set lists. On Saturday, an evening built around Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G, ushers handed out playbills that listed composers’ names but not their biographies, inspirations or influences. Left out, as well, were the pieces’ titles and the order in which they would be played.In fact, whole works would be broken up, scrambled out of order and integrated with the other pieces. The purpose, Weilerstein told The New York Times recently, came from a desire to foster “an appreciation for being in one communal space.” In that sense, the format was a success: Audience members, untethered from any explanation that could ground them, focused intently on Weilerstein and the kaleidoscope of sound emanating from the stage.The program wasn’t entirely random. Weilerstein’s unconventional means yielded a conventional arc, with a gradual start, fiery middle and contemplative end. The first selection came from Joan Tower, who contributed a single, unified, untitled piece instead of a work that could be split up and dispersed across the program: A long-held note, something of an invitation, gave way to harmony-driven momentum. The first movement of Reinaldo Moya’s “Guayoyo Sketches,” a tribute to Venezuelan coffee culture, came next. Its dusty pizzicato tremolo had the predawn rustle of someone waking up and shuffling to the kitchen to prepare the morning’s brew before the household had awakened. Without a title or program notes, though, a listener couldn’t so easily have connected Moya’s evocation with any personal experience.At times the concert felt like a TikTok-ified recital: a stream of strongly linked bits of content, broken down into parts and divorced from their original context, that came and went in brief, entertaining flashes without pause or time for reflection.Weilerstein sat on a powder-blue stool in the middle of the stage surrounded by 13 blocks resembling variously sized portions of a wall with picture molding. The scenic designer, Seth Reiser, made Weilerstein a room of her own by breaking down a wall and reassembling the scattered pieces into a circular shape that, in its own way, felt complete — fragments forming a new whole.The most compelling stretch of music came toward the end, when Weilerstein used the private wistfulness of the Bach suite’s Gigue — a quality that plenty of other players have found in it — to pivot toward a sequence of introspective pieces. The broad opening chords of Gili Schwarzman’s “Preludium” — a stand-alone piece like Tower’s — found strength in patience, and Bach’s Sarabande, already the suite’s most pensive music, felt utterly transformed in its murmuring solitude. Wrapping up the section, the ghostly harmonics of the second movement of Allison Loggins-Hull’s “Chasing Balance” and the whispered echoes of Chen Yi’s “Mountain Tune” seemed to emerge from the distant place of the Sarabande.It all was a tour de force, but those Bach movements took on a scratchy tone, coming as they did after the furious, screeching assertiveness of the third movement of Loggins-Hull’s piece and the bumblebee flight of Yi’s “Spin Dance.” And when Bach’s bouncy Courante followed that section’s extended contemplations, it sounded a little slick — a puzzle piece that had been smoothed out to fit a place where it didn’t belong.Each composer was assigned a specific color in Reiser’s lighting design, and that one bit of signposting flooded the walls as Weilerstein played — teal for Loggins-Hull, red-orange for Moya, a palate-cleansing white for Bach, and so on.But with so much randomness and manufactured confusion, I wonder whether future installments in the “Fragments” series would benefit from yet a different structure. Perhaps each Bach movement could introduce a whole work by a single composer, to give its ideas room to breathe.The program’s final piece, a greatest hit saved for last, was Bach’s Prelude, the suite’s first movement. It felt as though the preceding 60 minutes had been building to this pure, epiphanic point, turning an ending into another beginning.As concertgoers left Zankel, they were handed a set list so that they could piece together what they had seen and heard. But the catharsis of the Prelude, the comfort of its familiarity, rendered in a beautifully slender tone, made any explanation unnecessary.FragmentsPerformed on Saturday at Zankel Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Apple’s New App Aims to Make Classical Music More Accessible

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      The company says it has a fix for the unwieldy world of classical streaming. But it’s unclear how much traction a stand-alone app can get.In the streaming era, fans of classical music have had reason to grumble.It can be hard for veteran listeners to find what they want on platforms like Spotify, Tidal, Amazon and YouTube, which are optimized for pop music fans searching for the latest by Taylor Swift or Beyoncé. And for curious newcomers, it can be difficult to get beyond algorithmic loops of Pachelbel’s “Canon in D Major” and Mozart’s “Rondo Alla Turca.”Apple last week released a stand-alone app meant to address these problems. The app, known as Apple Music Classical, features a refined search engine, a sleek interface and a host of features aimed at making classical music more accessible, including beginners’ guides to different musical eras and commentary from marquee artists like the violinist Hilary Hahn and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma.Apple hopes that the app, which has been in development since 2021, when the company acquired Primephonic, a classical streaming start-up in Amsterdam, will attract die-hard classical fans and new listeners alike. But it remains unclear how much traction the app can get in a crowded streaming market, in which Apple competes with behemoths like Spotify as well as dedicated classical services like Idagio.“This is just the beginning,” Oliver Schusser, a vice president at Apple, said in an interview, adding that Apple would continue to improve and build the app’s database. “We’re really serious about this.”I spent a few days putting Apple Music Classical to the test, trying out its search, playlists and guides to classical music. (The app is currently available only on iPhone, though an Android version is in the works; at the moment, there is no desktop version.) Here are my impressions.Cutting Through the MetadataFor pop music, a listing of artist, track and album is generally sufficient. But in classical, there are more nuances in the metadata: composer, work, soloist, ensemble, instrument, conductor, movement and nickname (like Beethoven’s “Emperor” concerto or Mahler’s “Resurrection” symphony).Apple has amassed 50 million such data points, the company says, in the app — encompassing some 20,000 composers, 117,000 works, 350,000 movements and five million tracks — and its search function generally feels more intuitive than its rivals.On many streaming platforms, I have struggled to find Rachmaninoff’s recordings of his compositions. A search for his name on Spotify, for example, returns a disorderly display of his most popular works, such as “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” performed by a wide variety of artists.But on Apple Music Classical, it is easier to quickly locate his recordings because the app can distinguish between Rachmaninoff the composer and Rachmaninoff the pianist or conductor. The search function is not perfect; a Rachmaninoff track by the Chinese pianist Niu Niu also shows up in the mix of recordings by Rachmaninoff. But the app makes it much easier to hunt down specific pieces of music.A Sprawling CollectionApple Music Classical has a clean and inviting interface that mimics the main Apple Music app. But it still struggles with a problem that has long vexed classical streaming: the sheer volume of the catalog.A search for Verdi’s “Aida,” for example, turns up an eye-popping 1,330 recordings. Apple has tried to make it easier to navigate a sprawling list like that. A page for “Aida,” for example, has a brief description of the opera, an “editor’s choice” recording (Antonio Pappano and the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia) and five of the most frequently played versions.But it can still feel overwhelming. It helps to know exactly what you’re looking for: the list can be searched, scrolled or sorted by popularity, name, release date or duration. If you’re interested in recordings of “Aida” featuring Leontyne Price in the title role, for example, you can type in “Leontyne” and find her performances under the baton of Erich Leinsdorf, Georg Solti, Thomas Schippers and others.
      Opera can be especially difficult to navigate on streaming platforms because of long lists of cast members. While Apple comprehensively lists singers on each track, it can be hard to figure out quickly who the stars are when perusing albums. This could be fixed through more consistent album descriptions, or an option to enlarge album covers to make the words more legible. And while Apple has introduced the ability to search by lyrics for pop songs, no such feature exists in classical yet.Apple makes the vastness of the classical repertoire more manageable through inventive playlists, which help resurface celebrated recordings. These playlists cover a variety of genres, including opera, Renaissance music, art song and minimalism. There are also lists for composers, including the usual suspects — Bach, Mozart, Beethoven — as well as contemporary artists like Kaija Saariaho and Steve Reich. “Hidden Gems” highlights overlooked albums (“Breaking Waves,” a compilation of flute music by Swedish women, for instance, or “Consolation: Forgotten Treasures of the Ukrainian Soul”). “Composers Undiscovered” showcases lesser-known works by prominent composers, like Beethoven’s Scottish songs.Attracting NewcomersApple hopes the app will help draw new listeners to classical music, and many features are aimed at shedding its elitist image.On the home screen, the app offers a nine-part introduction called “The Story of Classical,” described as a guide to the “weird and wonderful world of classical music.” The series takes listeners from the Baroque to the 21st century, with forays further back, into medieval and Renaissance music.
      A series called “Track by Track” features commentary by renowned artists, including Hahn and Ma. The cellist Abel Selaocoe, introducing an album of pieces by Bach and South African and Tanzanian folk songs, describes how hymnal music from England and the Netherlands mixed with African culture. The pianist Víkingur Olafsson talks about feeling naked onstage when he plays Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 16, “a piece we all have to face as pianists.”Part of Apple’s mission appears to be to help elevate overlooked artists, particularly women and people of color. For example, a tab of composers begins with Beethoven, Bach and Mozart but then expands to Clara Schumann, Caroline Shaw and Errollyn Wallen, as well as William Grant Still.The pianist Alice Sara Ott and the conductor Karina Canellakis are featured on an exclusive recording of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic.
      While using the app on a recent morning, I encountered the music of Hildegard von Bingen, a 12th-century Benedictine nun and composer of Gregorian chants. Hildegard, I soon discovered, is something of a star on the app, where she is described as a scientist, mystic, writer and philosopher and sits adjacent to Tchaikovsky on a composer roster. (Many of the great composers have been given enhanced digital portraits as part of Apple’s efforts to make them more realistic; Hildegard is shown in a habit, with a piercing stare.)Hildegard’s music could easily be lost in the chaos of streaming. But in the Apple universe, it gets fresh life. More