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      For Jean-Yves Thibaudet, a Detour From Classical Is Business as Usual

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      Jean-Yves Thibaudet is playing Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-Symphonie” this week. But before, he debuted a night of jazz standards with Michael Feinstein.PALM DESERT, Calif. — “Jean-Yves, when did you start playing the piano?” Michael Feinstein asked from the stage of the McCallum Theater here on a recent Friday night.“I started when I was 5 years old,” said the star pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, whose instrument was interlocked with Feinstein’s for their cabaret-style show, “Two Pianos: Who Could Ask for Anything More?”“Oh, me too,” Feinstein responded.“We both took a different path with our approach to the piano,” Thibaudet continued, reading from an iPad on his music stand. “I studied classical music——”“And I,” Feinstein said, facing the audience, “studied nothing.”There was laughter throughout the auditorium, while onstage, Thibaudet looked tickled. Speaking during a concert, beyond introducing an encore, was new for him. But he was warming up to it quickly.Even if he was dipping into the unfamiliar on that first of many “Two Pianos” performances to come (including next season at Carnegie Hall), that’s business as usual for Thibaudet, 61, an artist who has, unusually for a classical musician, made a career of doing whatever he wants.Feinstein, left, and Thibaudet preparing for the debut of “Two Pianos” in California. The show will travel to Carnegie Hall in December.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesBrazenly himself — openly gay before many of his colleagues, abandoning traditional concert attire for couture — he has long been an eminent interpreter of classical music, but also a prolific collaborator and a soloist on movie soundtracks like Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch.” Through it all his tastes have been eclectic; he’s as likely to take on lieder as he is the Great American Songbook and the jazz of Bill Evans. Characteristically, he is following “Two Pianos” with something like its opposite: Messiaen’s thorny, monumental “Turangalîla-Symphonie,” with the New York Philharmonic, beginning on Friday.“There are soloists who only play one or two concertos a season,” Thibaudet said during one of three interviews. “I couldn’t do that. I would stop practicing. I always want to try things.”THIBAUDET WAS BORN in Lyon, France, in an environment he described as “fortunate.” His parents were music lovers who supported him through the conservatory system — including studies at the storied Conservatoire de Paris — and didn’t make much of his coming out.At school, he learned a Mozart sonata, but would also experiment with something else if it interested him. That open-mindedness is reflected in his 2021 album “Carte Blanche,” which starts with a new suite from the “Pride and Prejudice” soundtrack and continues with works from the Baroque period through the 20th century. The recording’s program, Thibaudet said, was “like going to a restaurant and having all your favorite dishes in one meal — with a lot of desserts.”Such a broad scope, and a willingness to give almost anything a chance, is essential to Thibaudet’s artistry. “Obviously if I don’t like it I won’t do it again, but I at least tried it,” he said. “My life has been so enriched by all that. Your brain is like a computer — you’re constantly feeding it. So if I play some jazz and then some Chopin, the jazz gives the Chopin a certain freedom and relaxation.”Relaxation, yes, but Thibaudet is also a proud Virgo whose lack of tension in performance would be impossible without a perfectionist’s rigor. “He is an exquisitely gifted technician,” Feinstein said. “And yet it is always the overarching intelligence behind an interpretation that makes his playing for me so special. He understands how to make any kind of music living and breathing, and never clinical.”Thibaudet won competitions as a teenager, and early in his 20s signed a recording contract with Decca. Young artists often face pressure from varied competing interests: managers, administrators, label executives. Even then, though, Thibaudet insisted on making critical decisions himself.“Two Pianos” consists largely of new arrangements, by Tedd Firth, of music by Gershwin and his contemporaries.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesDuring rehearsals, both Feinstein, left, and Thibaudet have been nudged out of their comfort zones.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesEarlier in his career, Thibaudet faced criticism for his unconventional fashion choices on the concert stage.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesHe didn’t want his first concerto recording with Decca to be of French music — “It’s not your passport that makes your repertoire,” he said — so, he programmed Liszt. He traveled with his partner at the time, and declined dinner invitations abroad, no matter how prominent the company, if he couldn’t bring him. “I was thinking,” Thibaudet recalled, “if I had a wife, of course they would invite her.”Hiccups like that, though, were rare, and overall, Thibaudet said, being open about his sexuality has made him a happy, open person. Perhaps more remarked upon, back then, was Thibaudet’s fashion. “I decided more than 35 years ago that I was not going to wear tails,” he said. “That was a battle.”Thibaudet’s clothing collection — rivaled only by those of his fine wines and Champagnes — is rich with museum-quality pieces. He had a fruitful relationship with Gianni Versace, and an especially prolific one with Vivienne Westwood before her recent death. For many years, though, writers often couldn’t resist a disapproving comment about his outfits.That cooled over time. There was one critic — Thibaudet wouldn’t name names, saying only that the newspaper was from a major city — who, after reviewing his concerts for more than two decades, wrote something along the lines of: At the end of the day, if you’re playing so well, you can wear whatever you want. “And I was like, there you go,” Thibaudet said. “It took you 25 years. Finally.”ANOTHER PILLAR of Thibaudet’s career has been collaboration. In film, one partner has been Dario Marianelli, who featured him on his Academy Award-winning soundtrack for Joe Wright’s “Atonement” in 2007. More famous is their work together on Wright’s adaptation, two years earlier, of “Pride and Prejudice,” which opens with an elegant piano solo redolent of the Classical era, “Dawn.”“All over the world people know that score,” Thibaudet said. “Then they go to hear Chopin or Debussy, and they tell me, ‘This is my first classical concert.’ I could play ‘Turangalîla,’ but they still come. It’s great.”Some of Thibaudet’s most treasured partnerships have been with singers. “The human voice produces something that you cannot do with any instrument,” he said. “It touches your soul.”He has recorded with Renée Fleming, the superstar soprano, with whom he became fast friends in the 1990s. She recalled that when she bought an apartment in Paris, he offered to take her to Ikea to help her furnish it; what she didn’t know until he pulled up was that he drove a Maserati with no trunk.“Jean-Yves is an ideal collaborator,” Fleming said. “He has tremendous personality and charm, both on and offstage, that he brings to the music, but he’s also extremely flexible and sensitive.”Sensitive, but unwilling, she added, to “put something before the public unless it is prepared to the very highest standard.” That much has been evident in his project with Feinstein, the reigning, de facto keeper of the Great American Songbook. Thibaudet and Feinstein already knew each other’s work when they met a couple of decades ago as neighbors in Los Angeles. What started as dinner-party fun — Richard Rodgers waltzes at the piano, and some improvisation — became a formal program inspired by their mutual love for Gershwin and his contemporaries.“Two Pianos” started as dinner-party fun before Thibaudet and Feinstein assembled a formal program inspired by their mutual love for Gershwin and his contemporariesRoger Kisby for The New York TimesFeinstein already knew Thibaudet’s work when the two met a couple of decades ago as neighbors in Los Angeles.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesAs a model they also looked to Yehudi Menuhin and Stéphane Grappelli’s classical-meets-jazz collaborations, Feinstein said, in which Menuhin’s parts were precisely notated while Grappelli’s left room for improvisation. To pull off something similar with two pianos, Feinstein turned to his music director, Tedd Firth, who wrote most of the arrangements.“I really wanted to focus on what they do best,” Firth said, adding, “I didn’t want to make Jean-Yves into a jazz player or Michael into a classical player, or water down either to create a neutral territory.”The result is a fantasia-like program of Lisztian virtuosity. Firth’s arrangements have orchestral heft, with the melodies of each piece flowing freely between the two pianos. Sometimes Feinstein sings; sometimes Thibaudet plays alone; always, the music has the energy and showiness of an encore.They rehearsed in Los Angeles before the McCallum Theater shows, putting in the hours of a full-time job in the days leading up to the premiere. During one of those sessions, Thibaudet behaved for a moment like a fan: He just wanted to hear Feinstein sing “Pure Imagination,” from “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.” When the two fell out of sync during a Gershwin medley, Thibaudet said to follow the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” because at roughly 120 beats per minute, it was nearly the same tempo. (“My whole life is in that piece,” he added.)By the sound check on opening night, both artists had been visibly nudged out of their comfort zones. But once the show started and the audience heard a familiar melody from Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” the auditorium resounded with applause. “That was the greatest gift that either of us could have,” Feinstein said. “It showed how excited they were to hear this music.” Feeling the energy of the house, Thibaudet said, he became “dangerously comfortable” with speaking onstage — even more so at the more assured performance the following night.“Two Pianos” seemingly has a long life ahead of it, with dates still being booked at least two seasons ahead. An orchestrated version will play this summer with the Boston Pops at Tanglewood, the Cleveland Orchestra at its Blossom Music Festival and elsewhere. But before that, its two stars will continue with their separate careers. Feinstein has a Judy Garland celebration at Zankel Hall in New York later this month. And Thibaudet, of course, has “Turangalîla.”“Maybe I need a week to readjust, but this is me,” Thibaudet said, adding with a giggle, “It’s perfectly normal for me.” More

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      Review: A Pianist’s Inheritance Inspires Little Masterpieces

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      Adam Tendler’s program of works that he commissioned from 16 composers after the death of his father is emotionally involving and musically rewarding.When the pianist Adam Tendler received an inheritance — really, a manila envelope stuffed with cash — it did not take him long to think of a smart way to put it to use.Weeks after his father’s death, and being handed that money, Tendler began to commission new piano solos around the theme of inheritance. As he recalled in an essay for The New York Times, he realized that by doing this, he could both process his grief as well as fashion a program that could live on in his creative practice.It’s a touching and sagacious concept — though hardly one guaranteed to be an artistic success. The classical world has seen a number of similar, small-scale commissioning initiatives since the beginning of the pandemic; even when they draw some of the brightest names in the field, as Tendler has done, the result has often seemed frustratingly diffuse.But Tendler’s project, “Inheritances,” registered as emotionally involving — a musically rewarding and tightly plotted 80-minute set when he performed the collection on Saturday at the 92nd Street Y, New York. It was presented in collaboration with Liquid Music, the group that helped the pianist develop the show over multiple years.Nearly every one of the 16 composers on the bill responded to Tendler’s prompt with an A-game effort. Missy Mazzoli’s “Forgiveness Machine” opens with nervy, high-register oscillations that give way to grave bass interjections, before making space for a more relaxed treatment of melody in its middle section. But the score isn’t a simplistic journey toward acceptance: Some of the initial mechanistic churning returns at the close.Other composers reveled in similar ambiguity: music that suggested some arc of understanding, while also observing the persistent notes of friction in a relationship. In its opening bars, Scott Wollschleger’s “Outsider Song” includes sustained-tone airs of mourning, stark prepared-piano pitches and bursts of extended technique. So far, so typical, you might think, at least when it comes to post-John Cage experimentalism.But before long, Wollschleger’s piece works a gorgeous changeup by allowing its more striated tones to flower into full motivic passages, beautiful on their own terms even as the overall harmonic world remains somber. Call it a small masterpiece — a term you might also apply to Timo Andres’s “An Open Book,” which moves between contrapuntal strictures and more free-associative lines with casual discipline.It was a joy to hear so much good music from so many contemporary artists — and in such quick succession; “Inheritances” moves fast, and without an intermission. Just as I was fully appreciating the dancing qualities of Angélica Negrón’s aesthetic in “You Were My Age,” the rug was pulled, giving way to the melodic gifts of John Glover’s “In the City of Shy Hunters.” When Christopher Cerrone’s hypnotic and meditative “Area of Refuge” ended abruptly, without the kind of closing, inventive flourishes I’ve come to treasure in his music, I glanced at the program notes and learned that it was written shortly after his own father’s unexpected death.If any piece appeared less distinct than what had come before, that was largely on account of the strong standard set by this cohort. Throughout, you could hear some artists plying familiar ground with assurance. That was the case with Pamela Z’s “Thank You So Much,” which relied on her practice of looping, editing and phasing samples of someone’s recorded voice — here, Tendler’s — to create motifs.Some composers took risks, as Marcos Balter did when punctuating the more abstruse edges of his piece, “False Memories,” with select, dreamy sequences of jazz-chord harmony. His program note said that this idiom was not usual for him, but that’s no reason for him to stop pursuing the line of thought in future pieces; the result on Saturday was transporting.It would have been enough for Tendler to perform these discrete compositional languages persuasively and call it a night. But there was also a sense of true dramatic stakes. The piece “hushing,” by inti figgis-vizueta, played out over archival video of Tendler as a child; the intense chordal pounding of the piece had the feel of eerie, silent-film piano accompaniment. And I teared up when Tendler spoke directly about his father over Darian Donovan Thomas’s gently reflective work “we don’t need to tend this garden. they’re wildflowers.”Tendler’s concert, by the end, amounted not only to a display of contemporary compositional force, but also a true show. The 92nd Street Y date was a one-night affair, but I hope that additional audiences can experience the live version of “Inheritances” — and that Tendler chooses to close the book on it with a recorded album.Adam TendlerPerformed on Saturday at the 92nd Street Y, New York, Manhattan. More

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      Hilary Hahn Practices in Public, Wherever and However She Is

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      BOSTON — Backstage at Symphony Hall here on a recent afternoon, Hilary Hahn opened her violin case and took out her instrument.She flipped it up to her chin, then paced around; she was warming up to play Bach for a group of Boston Symphony Orchestra staffers, as a run-through before she set out on a tour that continues in Los Angeles and Chicago this week. For the moment, she was trying to break in a new set of strings, as any violinist might.She paused. She set her pink-cased iPhone down to face her, having scouted the dressing room for an angle, then turned on its camera and pressed record. She played her Vuillaume violin toward the lens, but not exactly for it. She let it watch while she tuned and tuned again; while she repeated tricky little passages; while she sighed, composing herself. She stopped it when she was done.Hahn edited the video down to a bit more than a minute of unflashy content then posted it, with all the brisk efficiency of a social media intern, to Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. There were no retakes, no notes to her publicist. Season 6, Day 61, of #100daysofpractice was in the can.“I make a point of not picking up the part of the practice that is impressive,” Hahn, 43, said in an interview afterward. “I pick out the part that’s the actual work, where I know I was in the zone, and I wasn’t thinking about anything else.”Hahn, the artist-in-residence at the Chicago Symphony, has long thought about her role in broader terms than many superstar soloists. She has commissioned works including garlanded concertos and brief encores; taped Suzuki exercises for young students to aspire to; and given recitals for babies (all right, their parents). And this prodigy turned pre-eminence is an experienced poster, too: For years, she tweeted in the voice of her violin case.Even so, #100daysofpractice has become an unexpected phenomenon. Social media statistics are notoriously unreliable, but the hashtag counts 800,000 posts on Instagram alone, and has brought amateurs and professionals alike into a community of musicians who, for their own reasons and in their own ways, post part of their daily routine. Drawing back the veil on how musicians work when they are not onstage, Hahn is trying to relieve at least some of the negativity that can surround a crucial — yet traditionally private and largely untaught — element of a musical life.Hahn’s practice videos tend to be recorded where they can be — whether on the road, in a hotel room or at home.Sophie Park for The New York Times“I make a point of not picking up the part of the practice that is impressive,” Hahn said.Sophie Park for The New York TimesHahn came up with the idea in 2017, when she first noticed #The100DayProject, an initiative that asked creative, primarily visual artists to make something, day after day. She chose an activity that she thought she should have been undertaking with a similar commitment to regularity, but was not.“I desperately wanted to get reposted, get attention,” Hahn, laughing, recalled of a time when her social-media presence was not as formidable as it is now. “I didn’t get reposted at all, I was like: ‘I’m here! I’m doing something innovative! I’m boring my fans! Notice me!’”On one level, Hahn’s posts since are a diary of a virtuoso’s life. There’s Hahn at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice, at Wigmore Hall in London, at David Geffen Hall in New York, where she recently became the first artist to play a solo recital in the refurbished main theater. There’s Hahn on a private jet, in a hotel, and in another, and another. There’s Hahn in her Cambridge, Mass., home, with her Grammys on a side table or her guinea pigs behind her. There’s Hahn the working mother, playing with one of her two children as her impromptu accompanist, or stealing a quiet moment after midnight, exhausted.Part of Hahn’s message, she said, is that being deliberate about practice, whatever else might be going on in life, allows marginal gains to compound. That opportunity for accountability and self-discipline has attracted other soloists to join in. The pianist Dan Tepfer said that he adopted the hashtag this year to recommit to daily practice, after a grueling, monthslong tour.“I like to say that if your practicing isn’t a practice, you’re not practicing,” Tepfer said. “It truly is a practice, it’s a daily activity, and the power of practicing comes with that kind of continuity.”Hahn practicing on the stage of Symphony Hall in Boston.Sophie Park for The New York TimesHahn initially saw the project along similar lines, and to an extent still does. But as she read the replies to her posts, and spoke with fans after concerts, she saw that the posts were being interpreted as a statement about the need for musicians to accept imperfections and embrace their vulnerabilities — or as a challenge to “the toxic mentality around practice,” as she put it.“We’re just so often in classical music, really trained to beat ourselves up until we get it right, on our own,” Hahn said. “I compare it to walking into a room by yourself, and you’re looking in a mirror, and you’re having to pick out everything that’s wrong with you, and then fix it, with no ability to fix it. You’re supposed to walk out better. And it’s just such an impossible thing. You actually just walk out with all these ideas in your head of what’s wrong with you.”“I realized that we need to have a lot more self-compassion as musicians,” she added. “You can’t become someone you’re not in practice, and you can’t make the music become something that it’s not ready to be. It’s just difficult, though, to reconcile that with expectations, sometimes.”Hahn’s most powerful videos are not those in which she tosses off some Bach with all her familiar assurance, but those in which she does least with her instrument. “Practice” turns out to mean all kinds of things, from listening back to past concerts to doing near-silent left-hand studies while the laundry whirs along. But it can also mean mindfully taking a day off, or acknowledging feeling burned out, and responding appropriately.“I know some people say that’s not practice,” Hahn said on the video for Day 34 of last year’s series. “Can you count that as practice? But it is about the practice of long-term practicing, that mentality that it is — it’s a lifestyle. There’s a consistency to it, and being a consistent practicer doesn’t always mean practicing by data.”Hahn’s videos, she said, challenge “the toxic mentality around practice.”Sophie Park for The New York TimesMany of Hahn’s admirers have taken that lesson about mindfulness to heart. Another violinist, Elena Urioste, tried the project two years ago, and “promptly failed on my third day,” she wrote on Instagram. She responded with her own hashtag, #ErraticDaysofPractice.The rising violinist and hashtag devotee Nancy Zhou said that Hahn “positively reinforces the whole practice culture and what it should be,” and that she was “completely confident” that the star has had an influence.“It makes them start thinking,” Zhou said of colleagues she had talked with, “about, well, how can they more deeply and more forgivingly look at the way they practice?”Hahn said that series has been useful to her own routine, though it took her time “to be at one with the public and the private aspects of it.” And there have been periods when filming — or writing analytically about it — has interfered with practice itself. The series eventually dispelled a “cycle of commentary” that fixated on how she played “perfectly,” she said, denying that that was her intention.But even if Hahn sees her posts as modeling just one possible approach — practice isn’t perfect — and certainly not as lessons in how to practice or play the violin, she has come to accept what she calls their “greater purpose.” She has no plans to stop them just yet.“As a student, I never saw someone practice,” Hahn said. “I would sort of illegally listen to the wall, or even if I would poke my head into the window to see who was there, then you would duck down. You know, you tried to listen a little bit.”“We had no idea how people achieved what they achieved,” she continued, “and the fact that people have embraced the project, started doing it themselves, they’re getting comfortable posting stuff that isn’t polished — it feels like maybe the idea was mine, but the game changer is the pickup of this community.” More

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      Review: Verdi’s Falstaff Is Back at the Met, Enlarging His Kingdom

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      Michael Volle puts his noble voice to delightfully undignified use as the title character in Robert Carsen’s still fresh production of “Falstaff.”There’s a lot of fat-shaming in Verdi’s “Falstaff,” but the opera has never really been a candidate for revision or cancellation, probably because the victim of those insults refuses to see himself as one. Eloquent and self-aggrandizing, Falstaff proudly identifies with his stature.“This is my kingdom,” he proclaims, patting his belly, “I will enlarge it.”On Sunday, in the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of Robert Carsen’s winning production, the baritone Michael Volle delivered the line in a room at the Garter Inn surrounded by butler’s carts spilling over with ravaged plates and wine-stained tablecloths. Falstaff’s kingdom — as within, so without. Such sly touches litter Carsen’s production set in the 1950s. A decade after its company premiere, it still looks fresh and earns the kind of enthusiastic laughter rarely heard in an opera house.Beyond the appealing visuals — the yellow-chartreuse kitchen cabinets and flattering cinched-waist dresses — Carsen has provided opportunities for profundity. His lighting design with Peter Van Praet, in particular, offers clues — the raw naturalism for Falstaff’s pessimistic aria “L’onore! Ladri!” or the dusky sunset for Falstaff’s humbled reflections at the top of Act III.Volle’s Falstaff leans into those subtleties. In his most recent Met assignments — as a futilely disempowered Wotan in the “Ring” cycle and a salt-of-the-earth Hans Sachs in “Die Meistersinger” — Volle has shown himself to be a Wagnerian of long, graceful focus. As Falstaff, he puts the noble grain of his voice to deliciously undignified use. This booming, endlessly interesting antihero comports himself as an entitled, well-bred gentleman who has tired of wearing dirty long johns and waiting for the universe to right his fortunes. His solution: some Tinder Swindler-style manipulations with two well-to-do married women.Expounding a personal philosophy of honor and its uselessness in “L’onore! Ladri!” Volle sang with professorial authority, his voice emerging as if from a deep well. His smug “Va, vecchio John” flowed with syrupy self-satisfaction. When he waxed poetic about his salad days as the page of the Duke of Norfolk, his voice turned light, proud and assured — grandiloquent, yes, but also creditable.The conductor Daniele Rustioni matched Volle’s conception, leading the orchestra in a rousing, confidently shaped performance. Verdi goes for deep sarcasm in his masterfully comic score — when the men make fools of themselves in bombastic monologues, the orchestration only intensifies — and there was nothing cutesy in Rustioni’s account of it. When the brasses trilled, they belly laughed. The bassoons galumphed; the strings ennobled passages of sincerity; and the horns had it both ways, sometimes jocular, sometimes expressive.The opera’s female characters, never taking themselves — or the threat posed by badly behaved men — too seriously, often sing in ensembles rather than solos. Even so, Ailyn Pérez provided warm, elegant leadership as Alice with a glowing lyric soprano. Her rise as one of the Met’s leading ladies has been a pleasure of this season. The contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux, clearly having a ball onstage as Mistress Quickly, received exit applause for her uproarious scene with Falstaff, in which she flashed some leg and flaunted a lot of plumpy tone. The mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano was a mettlesome Meg, and as Nannetta, Hera Hyesang Park revealed a soprano as limpid as fresh water, even if a few top notes sounded hard and unsteady.As Ford, Christopher Maltman sang with a toughened baritone. Bogdan Volkov’s Fenton was sweetness itself.The relentless patter of Verdi’s vocal writing against a full, busy orchestra presents distinctive challenges. The women anchored the double vocal quartet of Act I when the men started to rush the tempo, but otherwise, ensemble singing was admirably tight. The final fugue had astonishing transparency — Lemieux’s pitched guffaws cut through effortlessly — and Carsen’s staging neatly introduced each new voice as it joined the increasingly dense musical texture on a crowded stage.Act III begins in a lonelier way — with Volle’s Falstaff crumpled in a small corner of a vast, empty space, where he is drying off and licking his wounds after being dumped unceremoniously in the Thames. A kindly waiter gives him a cup of warm wine, and he sings its praises with quietly arresting beauty. In that moment, the Wagnerian in Volle poked through, turning the humanity of Falstaff’s humbling into something sublime.FalstaffThrough April 1 at the Metropolitan Opera; www.metopera.org. More

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      Review: The Time for Prokofiev’s ‘War and Peace’ Is Now

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      After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this opera adaptation of Tolstoy seemed unperformable. But in Munich, it has become an urgent antiwar cry.MUNICH — Sergei Prokofiev died the same day as Joseph Stalin: March 5, 1953. It’s a coincidence you’re more likely to come across in the composer’s biography than in Stalin’s.Because while Prokofiev barely figures in Stalin’s life, his own was profoundly, inalterably changed by Soviet rule. Among the many documents of that is his “War and Peace,” a work contorted through forced revision into strident propaganda. Rarely performed, it opened this week on the anniversary of their deaths at the Bavarian State Opera here in a darkly urgent and sensitively executed new production haunted by the war in Ukraine.Prokofiev began to adapt Tolstoy’s novel — an expansive portrait of Moscow society around Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia, and a study in the scattered forces that shape history — in the early years of World War II, as the capital was under threat from another Western European dictator. By then, Prokofiev, who had left his homeland after the Russian Revolution, had returned and settled in the Soviet Union.His work was repeatedly inhibited by the state and subject to censorship, though he also took up nationalistic commissions like the score for Sergei Eisenstein’s film “Alexander Nevsky.” And he obliged when ordered to revise “War and Peace” to include, in its martial second half, rallying choruses and a grandly heroic treatment of General Kutuzov as a stand-in for Stalin.The edits made for a clumsily uneven work of vestigial intimacy and blunt, bombastic flag-waving. Yet when “War and Peace,” which premiered in 1946, is staged — always an event because of its sheer immensity, with more than 70 characters — the score is often received uncritically, even praised.The State of the WarRussian Strikes: Moscow fired an array of weapons, including its newest hypersonic missiles, in its biggest aerial attack on Ukraine in weeks, knocking out power in multiple regions.Bakhmut: Even as Ukrainian and Russian leaders predicted that the fall of the city could open the way for a broader Russian offensive, the U.S. intelligence chief said that the Kremlin’s forces were too depleted to wage such a campaign.Nord Stream Pipelines: The sabotage in September of the pipelines has become one of the central mysteries of the war. A Times investigation offers new insight into who might have been behind it.That is, until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine called into question the taste of performing it. The Bavarian State Opera, which had been planning this production for several years, was faced with a dilemma. Moving forward would invite controversy; calling it off would play into President Vladimir V. Putin’s claims of Russian culture being canceled in the West.The show went on, but with a rare public defense by the house’s leader, Serge Dorny, who said, “We must not limit art to the nationality of those that create it,” and with more than 30 minutes of cuts to sand down the score’s more uncomfortably chauvinistic moments. Ultimately, though, the production — staged by Dmitri Tcherniakov and conducted by the State Opera’s music director, Vladimir Jurowski, both Russian-born and sharply critical of the war — would have to speak for itself.And it does. This “War and Peace” will go down as a milestone in Jurowski’s tenure at the State Opera, and in Tcherniakov’s often divisive career. They rise to meet the moment, overcoming the work’s near untenability not only to argue for its place in the canon, but also to use it as a vehicle for a passionate statement against Russian nationalism — and, by extension, Putin himself.Tcherniakov’s staging doesn’t retell the story of “War and Peace” so much as examine Russia’s condition as a perpetual outsider and oppositional force, the cyclical ways in which it has been attracted to and at odds with the West — and the destruction those beliefs have repeatedly brought about, foreshadowed in the production’s epigraph, Tolstoy’s 1904 remarks on the Russo-Japanese War: “Again war. Again sufferings, necessary to nobody, utterly uncalled-for; again fraud, again the universal stupefaction and brutalization of men.”Andrei Zhilikhovsky as Andrei, whose death serves a more political purpose than usual in this staging.Wilfried HöslThe opera is only an impression of the novel. It follows the contrasts of the title, not by juxtaposing the battlefield and the ballroom episodically but rather by dividing them in two. The first part, peace, recounts Natasha’s engagement to and betrayal of Andrei; the second, war, focuses on the occupation and burning of Moscow. Prokofiev and the librettist, Mira Mendelson (his second wife), reduced the plot to a telling parallel between Natasha’s losing her way in her lust for Anatole and the French fashions he represents, and Russia’s falling victim to, then triumphing over, Napoleon’s invasion. Largely lost in translation is Pierre’s meandering search for meaning.In his staging, Tcherniakov brings both strands under the same roof. Literally: He sets the entire opera in the Pillar Hall of the House of the Unions in Moscow, an 18th-century building that survived the fires of 1812 and over the years hosted society balls, the music of Tchaikovsky and the show trials of Stalin; it is also where Soviet leaders, from Lenin to Gorbachev, have lain in state. Here, it is densely populated with people sheltering from some kind of conflict, as Ukrainians have in their landmark buildings.There are cots throughout, and mats for sleeping. People of all classes seem to have come together; some are in jeans or threadbare shirts, while the wealthy Pierre wears shined leather shoes, a Barbour coat, and a wool sweater and hat. Yet no matter their background, they unite to pass the time — first days, then weeks, then months. They throw a New Year’s ball with sashes made from newspaper, toss rings onto toy swords and race in sleeping bags. Private dramas play out publicly. And patriotic pageants that begin innocently turn violently real, feral and ruled by a drunken slob turned warlord.It’s a drive toward self-destruction that was matched in the pit under Jurowski’s baton. He wrangled the eclectic, if erratic, score — a succession of talky set pieces in which arias are more like brief soliloquies — into a coherent, flowing drama. In the first half, he relished dancing rhythms and shifted between Natasha and Andrei’s repeating theme, a quintessentially Prokofiev melody of a long lyrical line leaping upward, and buffo interludes from the likes of Anatole and Dolokhov, with unstoppable momentum. Then, in the second part, he resisted overblowing the choruses and orchestral explosions, making room for intricate, at times disturbingly wicked details, and shaping a long crescendo to the end of the climactic 11th scene of Moscow’s burning and Pierre’s near execution.The cast, Jurowski has said in interviews, is nearly an entire Soviet Union; there are singers from Russia, yes, but also Ukraine, Lithuania, Moldova and other former republics. Onstage, they behave like a true ensemble, with well-rehearsed excellence. There are too many soloists to name — 43 to be exact — but some stand out: Bekhzod Davronov’s bright and belligerent tenor as Anatole, Dmitry Ulyanov’s commanding bass as Kutuzov, Alexandra Yangel’s youthful but determined mezzo-soprano sound as Sonya. As Pierre, Arsen Soghomonyan had a by turns sympathetic and, against the mighty wartime orchestra, surprisingly powerful tenor.From left, Stanislav Kuflyuk, Tómas Tómasson and Kevin Conners as comical depictions of French forces.Wilfried HöslFinest among them were the Ukrainian soprano Olga Kulchynska as Natasha, with a malleable voice that traced her arc from naïve to careworn, and the Moldovan baritone Andrey Zhilikhovsky as an often aching, persuasively acted Andrei. And the chorus, ever-present, was a tireless and frightening force, even if cut back in this production. For the final scene, typically a lightly veiled paean to Stalin, the voices are eliminated entirely, replaced by an onstage brass band.With that change, though, the ending is still troubling. Andrei, who traditionally is wounded in battle and forgives Natasha as he dies, here shoots himself in the chest, mourning the loss of his beloved Russia as he knew it — a self-made victim of the violent nationalism taking hold. His death remains touching; Natasha repeatedly tries to lift him, attempting to dance the waltz that played as they fell in love.But as Andrei’s lifeless body rests at the front of the stage, ignored as the cast erects an ornate podium for Kutuzov to lie in state, Tcherniakov leaves the audience with a hopeless message. And in doing so he depicts a Russia that, despite internal dissidence and generational shifts in politics, is bound to repeat this scene again.War and PeaceThrough March 18, then again in July, at the Bavarian State Opera, Munich; staatsoper.de. Also streaming at staatsoper.tv. More

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      Michael Tilson Thomas Revels in the Present With the New York Phil

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      Thomas, who is fighting brain cancer, conducted two ruminative works, Schubert’s “Great” Symphony and his own “Meditations on Rilke.”The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas has always been a performer who communicates joy when sharing the music he loves. On Thursday, there was also a deep sense of gratitude: Speaking from the stage, he called his appearance with the New York Philharmonic “a lovely, affirming surprise.” Although he made no direct mention of his health, many in the audience understood the context: In the summer of 2021, Thomas, 78, learned that he had glioblastoma, an aggressive and terminal form of brain cancer. For him, every performance now is an opportunity to revel in the present.There are only two works on this program, both of them discursive and ruminative: Thomas’s “Meditations on Rilke,” which had its premiere in San Francisco in 2020, and Schubert’s “Great” Symphony.Thomas has always been a raconteur, and on Thursday he gave a 12-minute spoken introduction to “Meditations” from the podium. His speech may be more halting now, but the storytelling is as fluid as ever. And his quirky piece, which opens with a piano rag and quickly plunges into Mahlerian orchestration and psychic depths, needed at least some of that contextualization.“Meditations” is a song cycle for mezzo-soprano (the luminous Sasha Cooke), bass-baritone (an impassioned, rich-voiced Dashon Burton) and orchestra, with autumnal, meditative texts by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. It’s also partly an instrumental fantasy based on an episode from the life of Thomas’s father, a scion of Yiddish theater giants who was thrust into a gig as a saloon pianist in an Arizona mining town (hence that opening rag); a zigzagging thesis on the similarities between cowboy songs and Schubert lieder; and a tribute to composers whose work is most deeply imprinted on Thomas, including Berg, Copland, Schubert and Mahler.Schubert’s “Great” Symphony did not need any introduction. It’s a broadly grand piece that was praised by Robert Schumann for its “heavenly length,” though many listeners have found it in need of a rigorous edit. In Thomas’s hands, it had a brilliant moment-to-moment tautness that made you forget the expanse of Schubert’s canvas, in which fine-honed details can sometimes get lost.The orchestra reveled in all those small turns — in each of the first movement’s gentle curves and crisply articulated angles, and in the surprising juxtapositions of the second movement, which shifts from proud march to sweet tenderness. Thomas, communicating with the most economical of arm gestures, made those internal transitions of mood and harmony seamless, their logic unstintingly clear. Many conductors treat the third-movement scherzo as an exercise in dance rhythm; here, the energy was certainly propulsive, but Thomas also coaxed out a riot of colors and textures.The final movement was nothing short of a joyous celebration, and more than a few of the Philharmonic’s players had barely sounded their last notes before erupting in laughter. Whether it was from the sheer pleasure of making music with Thomas or a quiet joke he might have made from the podium didn’t really matter; their delight was palpable — and shared.Michael Tilson Thomas at the New York PhilharmonicThrough Sunday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Composers Find Transcendence, and Inspiration, at Berghain in Berlin

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      The storied Berlin techno club Berghain has changed the way some composers think about and make music.BERLIN — In 2018, after a visit to Berghain, the storied techno club here, the saxophonist and curator Ryan Muncy called the composer Ash Fure, a friend and collaborator.“God spoke to me in the subwoofers,” Muncy told her. “‘Bring me Ash Fure.’”Soon Fure, at the time a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, boarded a plane to Berlin. She and Muncy went straight to Berghain. “I remember so vividly every single detail,” Fure said in a video interview. She recalled watching as the other club-goers shed their coats and donned futuristic outfits. She explored the labyrinthine architecture, discovering vantage points from which to watch and listen. She got close to the famous Funktion-One sound system, which engulfed her with its volume but never hurt her ears. She stayed for 14 hours.“It all had this wild warping effect,” Fure said.Back in Rome, she felt the experience staying with her. “It felt really spiral,” she said, referring to Berghain. “You keep going around and around, you get deeper and deeper in this place.”Classical musicians are no strangers to clubs. In 2001, the record label Deutsche Grammophon founded a concert series, Yellow Lounge, that included performances in places like Berghain.Separately, classical artists have often attended Berghain’s techno Klubnächte, or club nights — a rave with queer origins that attracts locals and techno pilgrims from around the world, and often lasts from midnight Saturday to late Monday. They emerge with encouragement and inspiration.When Fure first went to Berghain, a performance the year before of “The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects” (2017), which she created with her architect brother, Adam Fure, was fresh in her mind. That work uses subwoofers, aircraft cables, vocalists, instruments and abstract set design and choreography to dramatize the vast scale of climate change.Fure felt at home in this genre, somewhere between abstract contemporary opera and sound art, but like many composers she had to reconcile her interests with the financial pressures of a traditional career. In 2012, Fure had started making what she described as “full-bodied, multisensory work.” But, she said, “then I would go back and try to hustle some more commissions, and I’d ultimately get a prize that gave me access to some resources. That allowed me to make another one of these weird wild things, and then I had to keep doing that cycle.”The experience at Berghain in 2018 encouraged Fure to focus more resolutely on her immersive compositions. “In so many ways, it felt like the actualization of a lot of these more private hungers and more private desires for sound and experience and collectivity,” she said. “It felt confirming that it’s possible.”That confirmation has been a common experience for composers who visit Berghain. In 2015, a friend of Wojtek Blecharz brought him to the club for his birthday. Like Fure, Blecharz, a 41-year-old composer, was interested in the physicality of sound and dissatisfied with the predictability of a typical classical concert. He found his time at Berghain literally hair-raising.“I’m quite hairy,” he said in an interview. “So all the hair on my body was vibrating with this massive energy. I could dive into the sound.”Berghain is famous for, among other things, the lines people wait on to get inside.Kay Nietfeld/picture alliance, via Getty Images“I could almost touch it,” he added. “I could float in it. That was one of the most beautiful experiences in my life as a classically trained musician.”Blecharz channeled the tactility of the techno music at Berghain into “Body Opera,” an opera installation, for up to 100 viewers at a time, that premiered in England at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2016. He provided each audience member with a yoga mat, a blanket and a pillow outfitted with an integrated transducer speaker. Touching the pillow sent sound waves directly into a listener’s body. “I realized,” Blecharz said, describing his visits to Berghain, “that it would be nice to create analogous ways to translate this experience, when you go there for the first time, and you hear this wave of sound that embraces you.”More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.“Body Opera” includes a nod to the drugs some find essential to raving. Blecharz asked audience members to consume a white, crystal powder from a small resealable bag. It was just Pop Rocks candy, but attendees didn’t know that in advance; they were meant to become sensitized to the sound of the sugar popping, and to perceive the resonating effect of their mouths.The composer Joshua Fineberg had long been interested in the mechanisms that encourage transcendent experiences, which he believed were rare at classical concerts. “You can only really get to that place in the concert world when your deep listening can take you out of yourself, which not everyone is ready to do every night,” he said in a telephone interview.In 2015, Fineberg, 53, went to a snake church outside Birmingham, Ala., in search of an ecstatic experience. With the pastor’s permission, Fineberg observed a ceremony in which a poisonous snake was passed from worshiper to worshiper. But it wasn’t until a year later, after he discovered Berghain, that he found the transcendence he was looking for.“They found this way to kind of industrialize the Gesamtkunstwerk,” or total work of art, Fineberg said. “To make, let’s say, 85 or 90 percent of the feeling of the most amazing night of your life reproducible almost every weekend.”In “take my hand,” a 2017 piece written for Ensemble Dal Niente, Fineberg used blindfolds, smoke machines and strobe lights to evoke disorientation analogous to the winding architecture and gloomy lighting of Berghain. Fineberg’s complex timbres, including a memorable overlay of harp on a bed of rich noise, remain static for long periods, in the same way that a D.J.’s tracks might stay in a limited harmonic and rhythmic world for hours.Partying at Berghain, Fineberg said, creates an “infusion of joy” into his regular life. But it has also encouraged a shift in the drama of his works. “Maybe my music can move more toward catharsis and release than in the past,” he said, “where it would have just been tension and angst.”When the viol player Liam Byrne, 40, began going to Berghain, in 2017, he noticed a surprising parallel between techno dancing and stylized Baroque choreography. The steps of Baroque dance, he said in an interview, are often the most effective ways of moving at a given speed, to a specific groove.At the club, he noticed dancers were adapting their movements to different tempos in a comparable manner. While speaking, Byrne shook his shoulders back and forth on his chair to demonstrate a step suited to the fast techno on Berghain’s main floor. Upstairs at the Panorama Bar, where the tempo is usually a little slower, dancers prefer a two-step, shuffling motion, he said.“That’s exactly like Baroque dance,” Byrne said. “That’s your pas de bourrée, your pas de gavotte.” He added, “These types of movements are perfect expressions or perfect marriages with very specific types of rhythmic feel.”A visitor inside one of Berghain’s cavernous spaces, where the composer Sergej Newski said he has seen many other classical musicians.Felipe Trueba/EPA, via ShutterstockMuch of the Baroque repertoire Byrne plays alludes to dance forms. The techno at Berghain helped him “understand the importance of your responsibility when playing dance music: to make somebody want to move, because it’s a way of giving the listener agency in the music, by inviting them in.”“You create a groove that the listener gets into,” Byrne said. “Then they’re in the piece with you. Then we’ll pay more close attention to exactly the way you’re lingering on that trill.”For other classical musicians, Berghain offers liberation from professional pressures. The violinist Ashot Sarkissjan, 46, is a member of the Arditti Quartet, which is known for its performances of thorny, avant-garde classical music. For Sarkissjan, Berghain is a refuge from the spotlight. Occasionally, he goes to the club right after a concert. “Performing is always a responsibility,” he said in a video interview. “When I’m clubbing, I don’t have it. And yet, at the same time, it’s still a musical event that I’m actively part of. It’s just me in a cocoon.”The composer Sergej Newski, 50, discovered techno music around 1994, when he was a student at the University of the Arts in Berlin. For a few years, the Love Parade, an outdoor techno party, took place on the same day as his annual ear-training finals — right under the classroom window. Since then, he has associated the music with a certain freedom that he rediscovered at Berghain.“Every composer walks alone, in a way,” Newski said in an interview. “Berghain gives him the possibility to feel like part of the crowd.” He added, “I’ve met many, many classical musicians there.”After completing her fellowship in Rome, in July 2018, Fure received a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service and moved to Berlin, where she continued visiting Berghain. In January 2020, she integrated her club experiences into a new work, “Hive Rise,” with the artist and choreographer Lilleth. In that installation-like piece, a group of performers created sound with 3D-printed megaphones and moved in abstract patterns around the space, their choreography and their futuristic outfits recalling Berghain clubgoers.“Hive Rise” premiered at Berghain. “It was crazy to be able to give back to that whole architecture that had been so transformative for me and for so many people I love,” Fure said. “It was such an incredible feeling to have my sound move through those speakers.”This October, Fure will premiere a new immersive work, “Training Ground: A Listening Gym,” at the Schwarzman Center at Yale University. She is continuing to explore the pathways Berghain opened for her.“I really think of sound as a social technology and as a somatic technology and a tool of the herd and a tool of the species,” Fure said. “Berghain activates that technology in an extremely potent way that was very formative and very singular in my life.” More

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      Lincoln Center Chooses Hearst Chief as Next Board Chair

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      Steven R. Swartz, president and chief executive of Hearst, will replace Katherine G. Farley, the longtime chair, in June.Lincoln Center faces a series of challenges in the coming years: recovering from the pandemic, reaching new audiences and making its campus more welcoming to the public.Now it will have a new board chair to help tackle those priorities: Steven R. Swartz, president and chief executive of Hearst, whom the center announced on Thursday would replace Katherine G. Farley, the longtime chair, in June.Swartz, who has been a Lincoln Center board member since 2012, said in an interview that he would continue the vision of Farley and Henry Timms, the center’s president and chief executive, who have worked to broaden its appeal beyond classical music and ballet into genres like hip-hop, poetry and songwriting.“We’ve really done an amazing job of making our campus and our programming open and accessible and inclusive,” he said. “We just want to keep it going.”Farley, who took over as board chair in 2010, said in an interview that she thought it was time for a change after the $550 million renovation of David Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, which reopened last fall, a year and a half ahead of schedule.Farley was a major force behind the renovation, a project that had languished for years, working with the leadership of the New York Philharmonic, including its president and chief executive, Deborah Borda, and the chairmen of the Philharmonic’s board, Peter W. May and Oscar L. Tang. She secured a gift of $100 million from Geffen, the entertainment mogul, in 2015 to help kick-start the renovation. (Lincoln Center, the nation’s largest performing arts complex, owns the hall and is the Philharmonic’s landlord.)“The hall is finished, all the money’s been raised, our budget is balanced,” Farley said. “It just seemed like this was the right time to pass the baton.”During her tenure, she worked to bring more racial and gender diversity to Lincoln Center’s executive ranks, helping create a fellowship to build a pipeline of board members for the entire campus.She also faced criticism during her tenure, including during a turbulent time in the mid-2010s when the center endured leadership churn and financial woes.Swartz praised Farley, describing her tenure as an “extraordinary chairmanship.” She will remain on the board’s executive committee.He said that under his leadership the center would try to reach the broadest possible audience.“Now as the city looks to recover from the pandemic,” he said, “I think the arts give us hope and give us inspiration, and they give people across the city, from all walks of life, just much-needed entertainment.” More