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      At 50, the Takacs Quartet Remains as Essential as Ever

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      Recently, the Takacs Quartet gave a recital at the University of Colorado Boulder. In many ways, it could have been perfectly routine: some Bartok and Beethoven before an adoring audience at the college where the group has taught in residence since 1986.But the Takacs simply does not do routine.The Beethoven was a perfect example, an exceptional account of the Opus 135 Quartet that was astonishingly vivid even when watched on a livestream. You could have taken any of its four movements and written pages in their praise. Perhaps what struck most, though, was just how constantly and generously each of the players — Edward Dusinberre, first violin; Harumi Rhodes, second violin; Richard O’Neill, viola; and Andras Fejer, cello — was physically and aurally in dialogue with the others, and through them, the listener.It’s that ability to communicate, among many other talents, that makes the Takacs the essential quartet of our time. It’s also one of the qualities that has kept the group so identifiably itself as time has passed: The quartet marks its 50th anniversary this year. As part of a season of celebrations, it appears with the pianist Jeremy Denk at the Frick Collection on Thursday.The Takacs has, throughout its history, been a synonym for assured, collective excellence.The name Takacs has become a synonym for assured, collective excellence, but its story is one of evolution, not stasis. Read either of Dusinberre’s eloquent memoirs relating the history of the quartet, and it becomes clear that it has been a personal drama, played out through the scores that its members rehearse and perform.Time certainly has remade the Takacs. Only one of the four young Hungarians — Gabor Takacs-Nagy, Karoly Schranz, Gabor Ormai and Fejer — who stepped into their first lesson in communist Hungary, ready with a Mozart quartet, remains. Both Roger Tapping and Geraldine Walther, the violists who followed Ormai in turn, have come and gone.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Shostakovich, Boston Symphony Style

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      Over two nights at Carnegie Hall, Andris Nelsons and the orchestra reveled in the composer’s sonic riches but played with emotional reserve.“A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.” At the start of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s all-Shostakovich concert at Carnegie Hall on Thursday, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma invoked this darkly cynical statement attributed to Stalin. Addressing the capacity crowd, which included Shostakovich’s son Maxim, Ma added: “We play Shostakovich so that no death is ever just a statistic.”Historians disagree on how Shostakovich, the Soviet Union’s most famous composer, felt about the political system that alternately boosted and threatened his career. But the juxtaposition of the individual and the collective, of a singular human experience set against the mass movements of history, drives much of the drama in his symphonic music.During the orchestra’s two-night visit to New York, the Boston players, led by their music director Andris Nelsons, gave bravura performances of Shostakovich — his 11th and 15th symphonies, as well as the Cello Concerto No. 1 — that reveled in the sonic riches of this contradiction-laden music. But there was also an emotional reserve, even primness, to much of the playing that exacerbated the music’s ambivalence and left a listener with more questions than answers.That is disappointing, given that Nelsons has made Shostakovich a central mission of his tenure in Boston. Last month, he and the orchestra capped a 10-year recording marathon of all the composer’s major works with the issue of a 19-disc box set, including Grammy-winning recordings.The quality of the music-making at Carnegie Hall was never in doubt. The Boston brass section was a marvel of cohesion, whether in the reverent chorale that opened the second movement of 15th Symphony on Wednesday or in the harrowing violence of the second movement of the 11th, performed on Thursday, which depicts the brutal repression of a peaceful protest in St. Petersburg in 1905.There were radiant solos on Wednesday by the principal cellist Blaise Déjardin and tartly virtuosic ones by the concertmaster, Nathan Cole. Shostakovich’s sarcastic humor was finely rendered in the first movement of the 15th with its cartoonish quotations of Rossini’s “William Tell” overture and in the militant jauntiness of the cello concerto’s first movement, in which the orchestra heckles the frenetic, hyperactive soloist.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      5 Classical Music Albums You Can Listen to in April 2025

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      An exceptional account of Bach’s Mass in B minor, traditional and unusual string quartets, and Thomas Adès suites are among the highlights.Bach: Mass in B MinorJulie Roset, soprano; Beth Taylor, mezzo-soprano; Lucile Richardot, alto; Emiliano Gonzalez Toro, tenor; Christian Immler, bass; Pygmalion; Raphaël Pichon, conductor (Harmonia Mundi)Raphaël Pichon and the musicians of his Pygmalion chorus and orchestra have made some extremely fine recordings over the last several years, from their Monteverdi “Vespers” to their Mozart “Requiem.” This Bach, however, is truly exceptional. It is not at all an act of staunch certainty and steadfast belief, the kind of monument that other conductors have made of this Mass. It’s a human drama, filled with the struggle and complexity of our mortal experiences. Above all, it sounds alive.Blessed with playing and singing of extraordinary virtuosity, Pichon seems determined to find every last accent of expressivity in the score, resolved to shape the smallest details in service of his broader ideas. It’s hard not to be swept away by the sheer vigor of “Cum Sancto Spiritu,” performed as if a gust of the Holy Spirit were sweeping past, or by the regal grandeur of “Et resurrexit.”Pichon is at his most breathtakingly interventionist at the first “Et expecto resurrectionem,” a moment that he sees as Bach inviting us into the darkest frailties of his faith: Everything stretches out as time dissolves and dissonance cuts at the ear. Still, this is Bach, and the “Dona nobis pacem,” though uncertain at first, grants a new dawn that blazes with resplendent light. If this is Bach for our times, then we are fortunate to have it. DAVID ALLEN‘Rare Birds’Owls (New Amsterdam)There’s a lot to keep track of with the “inverted” string quartet known as Owls: It uses two cellos instead of two violins, necessitating repertoire rearrangement; it is game to play Baroque as well as contemporary material; one of its cellists, Paul Wiancko, also composes for the group. Perhaps the most notable thing about Owls, though, is the evident joy that Wiancko, his fellow cellist Gabriel Cabezas, the violinist Alexi Kenney and the violist Ayane Kozasa find when playing together.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At Houston Grand Opera, ‘This Is a Good Time’

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      On a recent morning at the Wortham Theater Center, home of Houston Grand Opera, the orchestra was playing through the intense score of Missy Mazzoli’s 2016 opera “Breaking the Waves.” Led by the conductor Patrick Summers, the players fine-tuned eerie glissando slides and dug into Mazzoli’s creaking, scratching effects.At the same time, a few floors down, the young bass Alexandros Stavrakakis was at a coaching session, trying to find depths in the often dry Landgraf in Wagner’s “Tannhaüser.” Stavrakakis was singing his role for the first time, like the rest of the “Tannhaüser” cast — a bold move for a Wagner opera at a major company.It was a reminder of another moment when old and new came together in Houston. In 1987, the Wortham opened with a pairing that was also a kind of manifesto: Verdi’s “Aida” and the world premiere of John Adams’s “Nixon in China,” a statement that opera’s past and present could surge toward the future in Texas.At that point, it had been just over 30 years since Houston Grand Opera’s scrappy beginnings, but it already had a reputation for being the rare American company fully invested in fostering new American work.It has been an early adopter of populist innovations like above-the-stage translations and outdoor simulcasts. It has shown resilience, too: Displaced for a season when the Wortham was flooded by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, the company moved to a convention center and didn’t miss a performance.Now, at 70, it continues to be a model for the field.With many opera companies in a doom loop of shrinkage caused by rising costs and stagnant (or worse) earnings, Houston has proved an exception. Driven by creative leadership and generous donors, its programming budget has risen steadily. By this summer, its endowment will have increased to nearly $120 million — almost double what it was five years ago.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Harp Needs More Modern Music. That’s Easier Said Than Done.

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      Expanding my instrument’s repertoire takes months of practicing, experimentation and personal sacrifices. But it has made me believe in possibility.I once asked a colleague who runs a concert series what came to mind when he thought of harp music. “A nothingburger,” he replied. I laughed, not because I was shocked but because I agreed.Sure, I’m a professional harpist. So is my mother. Some of my earliest exposure to music was through classics of our repertoire, and while learning the instrument, I had my steady diet of Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Fauré and Ravel. Frankly, though, all those composers wrote more interesting works for the piano, which is better suited to quick modulations and coloristic variety.The harp has its hindrances, and a lot of composers are terrified of writing solo music for it. This instrument has 47 strings, each tuned like the white notes of a piano, with the player’s feet delegated the task of engaging flats and sharps using seven pedals. It’s an ingenious design, but only up to a point. Tuning is relatively unstable. The sound is boomy, with metal bass strings that are woofy and indistinct, like organ pedals.Why bother? Well, I can’t imagine playing the harp without interrogating its potential. If there’s anything I want for my instrument, it’s for there to be a new repertoire worthy of presenting to audiences like that of the piano or the violin. I want the harp to be a site of ingenuity. I don’t want Debussy or Ravel to be the latest composers to have written canonical works for it. Composers and harpists keep trying, but more work still has to be done for the story has to continue.The harpists who have inspired me traversed new paths. Andrew Lawrence King’s freakishly colorful and delicate recordings on period harps was a game changer in understanding the boundaries of expression in early repertoire. We owe a huge amount to Ursula Holliger, who was responsible for incredible commissions from the likes of Toru Takemitsu, Elliott Carter and Harrison Birtwistle. Take some time and listen to Zeena Parkins’s “Three Harps, Tuning Forks and Electronics,” in which a panoply of extended techniques (a flurry of scratches, fluxes and beatings on the soundboard) are organized into a beautiful and cohesive essay on form.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Natalie Dessay Stars With Her Daughter in a French ‘Gypsy’

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      The soprano Natalie Dessay and her daughter, Neïma Naouri, team up to explore one of theater’s most toxic mother-daughter relationships.That “Gypsy” is finally making its debut in France would be noteworthy enough: It took 66 years for one of the most acclaimed works in the musical-theater canon to get there.But there is an extra twist.The production running Thursday through Saturday at the Philharmonie de Paris stars the soprano Natalie Dessay and her daughter, Neïma Naouri, as Rose, the stage mother to end all stage mothers, and Louise, Rose’s long-suffering older child.“Well, that’s acting,” Dessay, 59, said when asked if there was baggage involved with bringing the show’s psychodrama to life with her daughter. “I can play the evil witch and she can play Snow White — it’s theater.”“Yes,” Naouri, 26, interjected, “but sometimes you lose yourself in the character, and I can’t tell the difference between reality and fiction.”They laughed before Dessay jumped back in. “It’s not any more complicated than anything else,” she said. “But above all it’s more pleasant since we know each other very well and we already have this mother-daughter relationship, so we don’t have to create it. We actually have fun with it.”Their bond was clear in a joint video conversation from France as the pair huddled over a phone — Naouri had helped her mother turn on the camera — keeping an animated banter going the entire time.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      More European Opera Houses Welcome Back Anna Netrebko

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      The star soprano, who lost work after Russia invaded Ukraine because of her past support of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, will return to the stage in Zurich and London.Anna Netrebko, the renowned Russian soprano, was shunned by many of the world’s leading opera companies after Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago because of her past support of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.Since then, though, a number of Europe’s most prestigious companies have welcomed her back. And next season she will return to two more major opera houses there for the first time since the war began: Zurich Opera and the Royal Opera in London.With those engagements, Ms. Netrebko will have returned to many of the world’s leading stages, with one notable exception: the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where she reigned as a prima donna for two decades.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, severed the company’s ties with Ms. Netrebko three years ago, citing her “close association with Putin.” He has said that he believes Ms. Netrebko, a citizen of Russia and Austria who lives in Vienna, has made a “disingenuous effort to distance herself from the Russian war effort.”Ms. Netrebko sued the Met, accusing the company of discrimination, defamation and breach of contract. A federal judge narrowed the suit last year to gender discrimination claims; her case is still pending.Ms. Netrebko has returned to Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Berlin State Opera, the Vienna State Opera and the Paris Opera, among others. And in recent days London and Zurich both announced that they, too, would welcome her back.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Dismissed Players Take Aim at New York Philharmonic Misconduct Inquiry

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      Matthew Muckey and Liang Wang, who were fired by the orchestra last fall, filed amended complaints saying an investigation by the Philharmonic was biased against them.Two musicians who were fired by the New York Philharmonic filed amended complaints against the orchestra on Thursday that assert they were wrongfully dismissed and that an inquiry by the ensemble had been biased against them.The players — the associate principal trumpet, Matthew Muckey, and the principal oboist, Liang Wang — were fired in October, after the Philharmonic said an investigation had uncovered what it described as credible claims against them of sexual assault and harassment.It was not the first time the orchestra had tried to dismiss them.The orchestra initially tried to fire them for misconduct in 2018, but their union challenged their dismissals and an arbitrator ordered the orchestra to reinstate them. But last year, after New York magazine reported new details of the accusations against them, the Philharmonic conducted a new investigation, suspended them and then moved to fire them. This time their union is not challenging their dismissals.The two musicians had originally filed suit against the Philharmonic and the players’ union, Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, last spring when the orchestra suspended them. They were later fired, and the amended complaints filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan are responses to those dismissals, which Mr. Muckey and Mr. Wang contend were based on an arbitrary and opaque inquiry designed to find fault against them.Mr. Muckey’s complaint said the Philharmonic and the union had engaged in a “sham process calculated to achieve a predetermined finding of wrongdoing.” Mr. Wang’s lawsuit said the inquiry was “neither impartial nor open-ended.”The Philharmonic declined to comment. (The orchestra has previously said that its inquiry uncovered “patterns of sexual misconduct and abuse of power” by the two men.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More