Classical Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Lincoln Center Revives Summer for the City, Hoping to Draw New Fans

      by

      The festival will include hip-hop, Korean arts, Mostly Mozart and a flock of 200 flamingo lawn ornaments.Lincoln Center will bring back its Summer for the City festival this year, the organization announced on Monday, continuing its efforts to attract new audiences by embracing a wide variety of genres, including pop and classical music, social dance and comedy.There will be a weeklong celebration of hip-hop, performances by the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra and a Korean cultural festival. A flock of 200 neon-pink flamingo lawn ornaments will adorn a pool near David Geffen Hall, part of a reimagining of the center’s outdoor spaces by the Broadway costume and set designer Clint Ramos.“The hope is to transform the campus — to upend people’s expectations of what Lincoln Center is,” Shanta Thake, the center’s chief artistic officer, said in an interview. “To allow people to just come and play and understand that this isn’t a precious palace on a hill, but a place to inspire joy.”Under Henry Timms, Lincoln Center’s president and chief executive, the organization has worked in recent years to appeal to a younger, more diverse crowd. Its efforts have led to some grumbling among fans of more traditional genres, who say the center is not doing enough to promote classical music. Some elements of the Mostly Mozart rubric have been reduced in recent years, including guest ensembles, intimate recitals and performances of new music that flows out of the classical tradition.The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra will perform 13 concerts over three weeks, beginning with a program on July 22 that features Mozart’s Concerto No. 2 for Flute, with the soloist Jasmine Choi, as well as the Korean folk song “Arirang” and Soo Yeon Lyuh’s “Dudurim.” The performance is also part of Korean Arts Week, which includes K-pop bands, DJs and a film festival.It will be Mostly Mozart’s last season with Louis Langrée, who has been the ensemble’s music director since 2002. His contract expires this year.Thake said that Mostly Mozart would maintain a presence after Langrée’s exit. She said that the center was in talks with the orchestra about future seasons, and that they were discussing how Mostly Mozart “fits within the values of Lincoln Center,” including efforts to reach new audiences and promote inclusivity.“There’s no doubt that the orchestra will maintain a central place in our programming going forward,” she said.Hip-hop will be front and center as part of a celebration of its 50th anniversary, with performances by J.Period, Rakim and Big Daddy Kane.An opera based on Octavia E. Butler’s novel “Parable of the Sower,” by the folk and blues musician Toshi Reagon and the composer Bernice Johnson Reagon, will get its New York City premiere at Geffen Hall on July 14.Social dance returns on June 14 with a performance of Cuban music by the singer Lucrecia and the salsa band 8 Y Más. The giant disco ball that hung over the main plaza last year, also designed by Ramos, will be back too.More than 300,000 people attended last year’s festival, which aimed at helping New York City heal after the upheaval brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. More than three-quarters of them had never before bought a ticket to a Lincoln Center offering, according to the center.Thake said she was not overly concerned about skeptics who worry that the center’s identity has changed too much.“To those people I say, It’s wonderful that you have found a home at Lincoln Center and what a gift it has been that Lincoln Center has been a home for so many for so long,” she said. “All that we are doing right now is opening up that invitation. And really having many, many more New Yorkers be able to say the exact same thing. That’s a real gift, and something that not only we can do, but something that we really have to do.” More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Review: Contemporary Music Champions Celebrate With the Hits

      by

      The Boston Modern Orchestra Project threw itself a sparsely attended 25th-anniversary party at Carnegie Hall. Those who didn’t go risk FOMO.Reviews of classical music concerts generally serve two purposes: Those who went can compare their observations with those of critics, and those who didn’t can see whether they missed out on anything special.Only a small group could possibly benefit from this review in that first sense, because the Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s Carnegie Hall debut on Saturday night attracted less than half a full house. To the rest: You missed out on some of the finest orchestral playing heard in the city this year.Staffed by freelancers, this orchestra — known as BMOP, and led by Gil Rose — has consistently earned rave reviews, and honors including Musical America’s Ensemble of the Year award. To celebrate its 25th anniversary, the group threw itself a party at Carnegie, with a program of music that showed off these players’ chops across a varied landscape of cutting-edge music.Each piece was having its New York premiere: a concerto for orchestra by Lisa Bielawa (mellifluous and tart, by twists and turns); a half-hour work from Lei Liang (pensive in textural moments, dramatic at climaxes); and “Play,” the award-winner that put Andrew Norman on the map (unbelievably manic yet still emotionally involving).

      Andrew Norman: Play by Boston Modern Orchestra ProjectHas your FOMO set in yet? If so, don’t feel bad: BMOP is rare among orchestras in that the ensemble records much of what it performs. Everything at Carnegie can be heard on different albums devoted to each composer. Still, there’s something thrilling about hearing these dedicated players in a space like Carnegie.That was clear from the opening seconds of the Bielawa. Titled “In medias res,” it opens with close-harmony dissonance in the horns, a reflection of Bielawa’s taste for both modernism as well as conventional sonic beauty, an edgy opening salvo from an instrument famous for mellow coloring.If the piece occasionally loses rhythmic dynamism, there is frequently a sumptuous element of orchestration on offer. And in the final moments of the second movement, you might hear a slight influence of Philip Glass’s furiously churning symphonic music. This might be a conscious tip of the cap — Bielawa has long been a vocalist in the Philip Glass Ensemble — or it might reflect her protean engagement with orchestral traditions writ large.

      Lisa Bielawa: In medias res by Boston Modern Orchestra ProjectEither way, this nearly half-hour work achieved a sustained richness that is too seldom heard in concerts by the so-called major American orchestras. When those organizations commission new music, it’s usually shorter. But with BMOP, contemporaneity is the whole point, so composers can take the time they need.Wide-canvas potential worked to Liang’s advantage as well. In his piece, “A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams” — inspired by the landscape paintings of Huang Binhong — the composer often alternates between wisps of percussion and full-blast density. But the climaxes, satisfying and riotous as they may be, are not the final destination; even after the climactic-seeming tutti riffs in “The Shedding of Landscapes” comes a restive percussive section. A piece like this needs real space on a program, as it had on Saturday.After intermission, BMOP took on “Play,” its most famous contribution to the orchestral literature. In liner notes for the album version, Norman wrote, “I wish you all could see ‘Play’ performed live.” That’s because the piece has a meta level: It’s not just about the beautifully active sounds that he conceives, but also about how sections of the ensemble interact.That is especially true of the second movement, which can seem somewhat airy on the recorded version. Live, you get a sense of how percussionists in the orchestra are able to switch various other sections “on” or “off,” thanks to dramatic woodblock claps. There’s an aleatoric conception at work here, too: The choices of the percussionists can augment what parts are played by the rest of the orchestra. On Saturday, music for prepared-sounding piano took on a prominent role.In the outer sections, though, “Play” seemed galvanic in a way that was familiar from BMOP’s celebrated recording. Rose launched into the vicious opening movement at a tempo a touch more frenetic than on the album, but it was still marvelously controlled.The title of Saturday’s concert, “Play It Again,” was in part a reference to the Norman. But it was also a reminder that, unlike traditional orchestras — which often commission a new piece, play it once and then stuff the score in an archive — BMOP actually revisits the work it solicits and champions.In 2016, Rose told The New York Times, “I don’t like to put a lot of money into marketing.” Instead, the funds go into the playing. The artistic fruits of that approach were gratifyingly confirmed during the poorly attended show on Saturday. But what if BMOP, instead of renting Carnegie for one night, were made Perspective artist for a full season there? Then audiences in New York might enjoy a season of sparkling contemporary music from artists who really know how to play it.Boston Modern Orchestra ProjectPerformed on Saturday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan; bmop.org. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Review: András Schiff Wears Two Hats at the New York Philharmonic

      by

      Taking a cue from Mozart, András Schiff appeared with the New York Philharmonic as both piano soloist and conductor.There was a time, during darker days of the pandemic, when orchestral concerts departed from their usual formats — worn-down cookie cutters of a curtain-raiser, concerto and symphony — and turned into something more unpredictable, and open-minded.Out of an abundance of caution, ensembles avoided repertoire like the immense works of Mahler and instead turned to smaller-scale music, sometimes rarities and often from the Classical and Baroque eras. String quartets shared billing with Lieder and chamber symphonies. Concerts began to look more like variety shows.But as masks requirements loosened and vaccine records stopped doubling as passports, classical music started to look more like its old self, and not for the best. Once again, any concert with more than three works stands out as a treat — such as the New York Philharmonic’s performance with the pianist András Schiff acting as both soloist and conductor, at David Geffen Hall on Friday.Like a concert from the era of pandemic livestreams, it consisted of two Classical piano concertos and two orchestral works, with a changing ensemble size that, at its largest, was still small. Schiff’s appearance was part of his residency with the orchestra, a series that began with a solo recital on Tuesday and continues this week with a comparatively traditional program in which he will play Bartok’s Third Piano Concerto, and a chamber music afternoon at the 92nd Street Y next Sunday.Schiff approached Friday’s program more as he would one of his recitals, which these days are long but often rewarding, essayistic assemblages announced from the stage rather than advertised in advance. He contrasted concertos in D major and minor, and made explicit the connections between two Mozart works — arguments that were more persuasive from the keyboard than from his perch as conductor.Leading from the piano is a throwback to Mozart’s time, and can be fascinating to witness. When Mitsuko Uchida does it, for example, she treats the orchestra as an extension of her instrument — a mode of expression somewhat perversely, but beautifully, in service of her interpretation. Onstage at Geffen Hall, Schiff had more the appearance of a fan beating along to a recording, gesturing with the music instead of truly guiding it.Because of that, the purely orchestral sections of the program were the weakest. Schiff, as in his touch at a keyboard, relished the extremes of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony — the opening truly pianissimo, the forzando notes truly explosive. But without much else in the way of an overarching vision, the piece grew indistinct by the second movement, which, in taking its time, also lost its sense of shape and direction, an andante con moto without its moto. After intermission, the Overture from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” music that punishes any performance that falls short of precise, was more of the same: hellfire-frightening chords at the start, then an insistent emphasis on articulation, patient to the point of slackness, over broader phrasing.It was nevertheless a gift to hear this repertoire — beloved, if overprogrammed — in the renovated Geffen Hall for the first time. So far, as the Philharmonic adjusts to its new home and the auditorium undergoes further tuning, smaller-scale works have benefited most from the more generous acoustics. The last time I came across Schubert’s “Unfinished” there, under Alan Gilbert’s baton in 2015, the low strings were virtually inaudible in the mood-setting, crucial opening bars; on Friday they rumbled, immediate and under the skin.And the hall’s transparent sound rewarded the lean wit of Haydn’s Piano Concerto No. 11 in D, at the top of the program. Here, Schiff was more in his element: stately, with a kind of dry humor in the cadenzas, his touch often gentle but, when sharp, amplified by the bright sound of his Bösendorfer piano.He followed the “Don Giovanni” Overture, attacca, with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 — treating them as one, and emphasizing their shared dark-to-light journeys from D minor to major. Schiff’s entrance in the first movement may have been overly strong, turbulent where moody would do, but his solos in the Romanze were exquisitely arialike.Schiff’s most characterful work, though, was in the Rondo finale, in which he rendered the cadenza as a grander conclusion, interjecting the “Don Giovanni” chords, then layering the overture and the concerto in clever counterpoint. Playful and unexpected, it was reflective of an artist who, even if not thoroughly successful on one night, possesses an undeniably brilliant musical mind.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats on Sunday and Tuesday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Spotlighting Lady Macbeth’s Anguish: Can What’s Done Be Undone?

      by

      With radical adaptations of Verdi’s “Macbeth” and Puccini’s “Tosca,” Heartbeat Opera shows why it’s so vital to New York’s music scene.Heartbeat Opera, a small, nimble company that has received its share of plaudits over the years, is on the cusp of a milestone birthday: its 10th. But there was a time recently when it didn’t know whether it could go on, its artistic director, Jacob Ashworth, said.Speaking from the stage after opening night of Heartbeat’s two-part spring festival on Tuesday, Ashworth said that the departure of the company’s founding artistic directors during the pandemic put its future in doubt.On the evidence of the new, radical reconceptualizations of Puccini’s “Tosca” and Verdi’s “Macbeth” — Heartbeat’s first mainstage shows since 2019, which opened this week at the Baruch Performing Arts Center — the company hasn’t skipped a beat.Taken together, the operas demonstrate the strengths that make Heartbeat so vital to New York’s opera scene. “Lady M,” an utterly original recreation of Verdi’s opera that places Lady Macbeth’s doubts and moral quandaries at its center, is an astonishing display of the company’s musical imagination, theatrical instincts and intellectual firepower. “Tosca,” more ambitious but less successful, shows how Heartbeat, agile and daring, can quickly align with an issue as urgent as the women’s rights movement in Iran, where uprisings in the fall captured international attention.A scene from “Lady M,” with Algozzini and Kenneth Stavert as Macbeth.Russ Rowland“Lady M” is Heartbeat at its best. The production’s director, Emma Jaster; its music director and arranger, Daniel Schlosberg; and its original adapters, Ashworth and Ethan Heard, have reoriented the audience’s point of entry into one of Verdi’s most distinctively colored scores, trimming the length, the orchestrations and the list of characters to reveal the work’s core. Macduff, the chorus, Macbeth’s big Act IV aria — all scrapped.In typical stagings, Lady Macbeth comes across as an unsubtle, unrepentant harridan whose abrupt crisis of conscience in the opera’s final act stretches credulity. The soprano role offers a string of marvelous set pieces — a hell-raising letter scene, a chaotic drinking song, a spellbinding sleepwalking scene — but they rarely form a coherent arc.Heartbeat starts with Lady Macbeth’s breakdown as the essential truth of her character and then molds the narrative to fit it. The show begins with Lady Macbeth in bed, sobbing uncontrollably, full of remorse for all the blood she has helped to shed. Her crying is so relentless that Macbeth, irritated and unmoved, gets up to go sleep on the couch. Then, the action flashes back to the score’s beginning, in which Macbeth — often treated as a weak-willed hero buffeted by supernatural forces and a monstrous wife — appears as a cool, calculating, sociopathic yuppie handing out his business card to members of the audience. The witches prophecy that he will climb the corporate ladder.In Heartbeat’s telling, Lady Macbeth, no longer the scapegoat for her husband’s foul behavior, is the one who is led astray by an avaricious spouse. The Macbeths’ desire for public glory finds an outlet in the hollow vanities of social media, represented throughout the show by a ring light, its bright cast a reminder of manipulated reality rather than truth.As Lady Macbeth, Lisa Algozzini charted the gradual degradation of a woman forced to reflect her husband’s ambitions back to him. Her “La luce langue” — haunted, fearful and quivering with uncertainty — became an elegy for people that she and Macbeth had not yet murdered, and “Una macchia” had a raw guilt to it. Algozzini simplified the cabaletta in the letter scene and skipped the high D flat in the sleepwalking scene, but her performance was still filled with gripping details. Kenneth Stavert, as Macbeth, showed a bright, open baritone sound that had depths of strength and propulsion.Schlosberg, with the vision of a master sculptor, chipped away at Verdi’s score to reveal new contours and continuities in the music and action. He didn’t so much reduce Verdi’s orchestration as reinvent it for an ensemble of six musicians (including himself as conductor and pianist). Samuel George’s trombone playing was jauntily demonic and, in its brief imitations of a French horn, somehow noble. Paul Wonjin Cho’s wild, soused clarinet solo in the drinking song injected instability into a predictable aria form. At one point, the percussionist Mika Godbole bowed a vibraphone to make it sound like a glass harmonica. They played like a band possessed, and the use of electronics added an otherworldly texture bubbling with disruption. It was flat-out brilliant.Anush Avetisyan and Chad Kranak in “Tosca,” set in an unnamed religious dictatorship that requires women to wear hijab and abide by stringent social norms.Russ RowlandThe orchestrations for “Tosca” never quite rose to that level. Schlosberg started with an unassailable idea to feature three cellos and a double bass — a nod, probably, to the famous cello quartet in Act III — but despite the handsome string playing, the instrumentation was too bare to deliver the score’s romance.“Tosca” had one of those Heartbeat concepts that lends itself to a zeitgeist-y epithet, along the lines of its Black Lives Matter “Fidelio” in 2018 and a #MeToo “La Susanna” in 2019. But the depth and ingenuity of the company’s engagement consistently erases any suspicion of topical opportunism.Staged by the Iranian American director Shadi G. and adapted by her in collaboration with Ashworth, “Tosca” had a show-within-a-show structure. They set Puccini’s opera — a melodrama roiled by sex, murder and the abuse of power — in an unnamed religious dictatorship that requires women to wear hijab and abide by stringent social norms. Even the ushers and musicians wore head scarves. We see a cast of singers staging a traditional production of “Tosca,” set in Rome, under the watchful eye of security forces and morality police, who stalk the edges of the stage and take note of the performers’ violations of the country’s moral code.Shadi’s framing introduced a fresh sense of danger. At one point, the police drag the actor portraying Cavaradossi (the tenor Chad Kranak) offstage and beat him. He desperately lunges back onto the stage only to be clawed back into the wings. It was harrowing to watch.Still, the staging could feel forced and, at times, risible, as security forces popped up, Whac-a-Mole style, in unexpected places. The singers — including Anush Avetisyan (a Tosca with a dark-hued voice), Gustavo Feulien (an elegantly underplayed Scarpia) and Joseph Lodato (a vocal standout as Angelotti) — brought a sense of scale and subtlety to their assignments that suited Baruch’s black box theater.In a way, “Lady M” expresses a more compelling sense of displacement. In its final minutes, Lady Macbeth and the witches sang the refugee chorus. As a choice it felt unusual, then somehow inevitable. Here was a woman mourning a homeland that wasn’t gone but still unavailable to her, because she had lost her way — proof, if any were needed, that Heartbeat certainly hasn’t. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Stephen Hough Revisits His Youth, in Playful Fragments

      by

      In his new memoir, “Enough: Scenes From Childhood,” Stephen Hough recalls his artistic and sexual coming-of-age with a light touch.On the cover of the book “Enough: Scenes From Childhood,” out this week from Faber & Faber, a young Stephen Hough sits at the piano, wearing a velvet jacket stitched with sequins and fake pearls. He’s dressed as Liberace.“Obviously, there’s a gay subtext to that costume,” Hough said in a recent video interview. “Even then, I loved the outrageousness of it, even though I was quite shy.” There’s a hint of subversion, something Hough maintains today with a twinkle permanently in his eye.Hough, an English pianist and composer, has carried his lifelong love of creative writing into two previous books: “Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More,” and a novel, “The Final Retreat.” Where Hough described his novel as “Sibelian” in form, “Enough,” a collection of vignettes on childhood and Hough’s troubled adolescence, is, in his words, more Debussyan: “In the ‘Préludes,’ the way he writes the piece titles at the end of the preludes, not at the beginning, with dots — I love this idea of hinting at things, suggesting things.”Playful suggestion abounds in Hough’s memoir, from the cover onward. (The first part of the title is a play on his regularly mispronounced surname, the second on Robert Schumann’s “Kinderszenen.”) “I do like shocking people, and I think that’s part of what keeps me onstage,” he said.The critic Alexandra Coghlan said that there is a lightness of touch in both Hough’s playing and writing, “allowing him to explore some big topics on the page — his Catholic faith, his homosexuality, life as an artist — without becoming po-faced or preachy.” Among stories of “chucky” eggs (boiled hard, then mashed with seasoning) and his family’s tenuous Beatles connection, Hough recalls the time, at age 4, when he inserted his third finger up a neighborhood boy’s rectum. “Later, I would use it to trill long at the top of the keyboard in the Liszt First Concerto,” he writes, nonchalantly.Despite a scrapbook style, “Enough” retains a loose chronology, beginning with his family’s first piano, a “pretty bad one” with yellowed keys and a rosewood frame, bought for £5 in an antique shop near his home, in an area between Liverpool and Manchester; and ending after the Hough won the Naumburg International Piano Competition in 1983, at 21.In lieu of descriptions of pianos he’s loved — “It’s like meeting someone on holiday and having a romance: You know that you can’t see them again so best not to be too involved,” he said — Hough focuses on relationships with family and teachers, and an early musical life of hymns, nursery rhymes and “sweet, teeth-rotting tunes” from the world of light music.Hough performing with the New York Philharmonic in 2019. In his memoir, he describes an early musical life of hymns, nursery rhymes and “sweet, teeth-rotting tunes” from the world of light music.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesHough’s writing is deeply sensual, “because I had such a lack of it in my childhood,” he said. The post-World War II period that saw colorful developments in art and music — he turned to David Bowie and Marc Bolan in his teens — coincided, in Hough’s world at least, with “horrible food”: his grandmother’s “desiccated baking,” or overboiled sprouts that “looked like comatose slugs.” That peculiarly British trait of blandness, Hough said, “comes right through from the Victorian suspicion of pleasure.”“Only in our literature have we allowed ourselves to enjoy words in a sensual way,” he added. “You think of the great poets right through the era, that’s the only place where we have let go of the tight corsets and collars.”Before he had any idea of the concept, Hough knew that he was gay. Later, he learned what the word “homosexual” meant: “I thought, ‘How disgusting is that!’ And then two seconds later, I thought, ‘Hey, wait a minute, that’s me!’”His adolescence was full with contradictions about sexuality, particularly as he converted to Catholicism. Later, his route to self-acceptance came through celibacy. A busy professional life after his Naumberg win helped distract him, though he was tormented by the constant possibility of guilt — mainly through unconscious thoughts, like sex dreams. “This was my scrupulous theological line on overdrive, really,” he said, ”but it was distressing, I have to say, many times in my life.”Hough’s parents — loving of him, but not especially of each other — contained similar conflicting multitudes. His father, a member of the now-defunct Liberal Party, was anti-Europe but not aligned with the political right’s position on the issue, was prudish and chivalrous around women yet also a serial adulterer. “He was just outside of every box that you could imagine,” Hough said, “in the most interesting way.”His mother was irrepressible. Despite saying that she was solely attracted to men before her death, “there were so many clues along the way,” Hough said. “Maybe she was part of a kind of sexual fluidity before it was known as that; maybe she enjoyed physical affection with women without feeling the need to say, ‘I’m a lesbian.’”At 10, Hough enrolled at Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester. What followed was a dark period for him (he suffered a nervous breakdown) and the school (some of his teachers would later go to prison for child abuse), before he moved to the Royal Northern College of Music, where “something sparked into life.”Three life-changing moments came in a short period: the inaugural BBC Young Musician of the Year competition; his first Catholic Mass; and his discovery of Edward Elgar’s setting of the John Henry Newman poem “The Dream of Gerontius.”“It turned me around in every way: musically, religiously, personally,” Hough said of the Elgar. “You can taste it really: that era of late Victorian camp, high-church life.”Hough had been interested in composing, but was forced to stop studying it as he focused on piano while at the Royal Northern College of Music. (John Corigliano encouraged him to restart in the 1990s.) In contrast to his many piano teachers — including “Miss Felicity Riley,” an orange-lipped teacher from the next village, the avuncular Gordon Green and the fearsome Adele Marcus — Hough didn’t feel the need to return to composition lessons.“I think it’s a little bit like writing words,” he said. “I don’t think Henry James had creative writing lessons, but he read and he knew the grammar, and so he set off on a journey with it.” That method — of writing music by absorbing musical grammar — informs his compositions, which “are always felicitous, viz., most recently his delicately allusive first string quartet,” the music critic Michael Church wrote in an email, referring to “Les Six Recontres” (2021), which evokes flavors of the French neo-Classical set Les Six.“Enough” concludes in New York: Hough gained a scholarship to the Juilliard School, and fell in love with a city slowly coming to terms with what would become the AIDS crisis.“As the 1980s moved on, it was like a cloud in the sky on a sunny day,” Hough said. “Gradually it began to be darker and darker, and this extraordinary life of clubbing, fun and parties became very different in flavor.”But while the book ends with Hough’s life in turmoil, there’s one final suggestion: that better things are coming. More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Jascha Heifetz in the Case of the Violinist and the Fanatical Doorman

      by

      Nothing seemed amiss when a car dropped Jascha Heifetz back at the King David Hotel on April 16, 1953, after a recital at Edison Hall in Jerusalem.Heifetz had played the program, which included Richard Strauss’s E flat violin sonata, to his usual exacting standards and to thunderous applause.A lone doorman greeted his car, sandwiched between two police Jeeps, when it arrived at the hotel just after midnight. Having safely ferried Heifetz and his entourage — his bodyguard, his son, his accompanist — to the King David, the Jeeps drove away.The bodyguard got out of the car first and went through the hotel’s revolving door. Heifetz, carrying his violin case, was next. But before he could enter, the doorman rushed up to him, speaking Hebrew words Heifetz couldn’t understand.This was no doorman. He held an iron bar in his hand and brought the weapon down on Heifetz’s right arm, smashing his hand.Though Heifetz’s violin case deflected the blow, he clutched his hand in pain. As he entered the lobby, his bodyguard ran in pursuit of the attacker but found only the bar, wrapped in newspaper, a few feet from the hotel.Heifetz in Beersheba in April 1953. His next stop was Edison Hall in Jerusalem. A week before the Jerusalem recital, he received a note warning him not to play Strauss.via Getty ImagesSeventy years later, the man who attacked Jascha Heifetz has not been identified. A faction called Han oar Haivri (or Hebrew Youth), later linked to several right-wing extremist groups, took responsibility, but no one has ever been held accountable.Later, one man said he knew the assailant’s identity. This man, a future speaker of the Knesset, had good reason for his knowledge, having direct ties to the underground group that had sent Heifetz a threatening note about his choice of repertoire.An unsolved mystery involving a world-renowned violinist, the State of Israel’s early years, the shadows of collective trauma, and the uneasy mix of art and politics — this story ticked all of my professional and personal boxes.Figuring out what happened — through interviews with historians and those who knew Heifetz, looking at contemporary newspaper accounts and digging in archives — helped me make sense of this historical moment at a time when Israel is once again at a critical inflection point.HEIFETZ WAS ATTACKED because he had dared on this tour to play the sonata by Strauss, a composer then banned in Israel for his Nazi collaborations. In 1953, the State of Israel was just five years old and the Holocaust was still a very live memory. Playing the work of German composers — particularly Wagner — could still provoke extreme emotional reactions.A week before the Jerusalem concert, Heifetz had received a letter from an underground terrorist group: “You ought to know, as we do, that you dared play a Nazi melody in the Holy Land on the eve of Yom Hashoah” — or Holocaust Remembrance Day — “music composed by a partner to the destruction of our people.”The note warned: “Beware and never again repeat this crime.”A compilation of Heifetz’s program lists, which includes the April 16, 1953, concert in Jerusalem.Library of CongressTop government officials implored Heifetz to drop the Strauss from his repertoire. But no one could tell Heifetz, who was born in Vilnius and moved to the United States in 1917, what music to play, and the Strauss sonata was a particular favorite. “There are only two kinds of music — good music and bad music,” Heifetz told the officials.Audiences had applauded the sonata in Haifa, The New York Times reported, but in Tel Aviv, responded with stony silence.After the threatening note, Heifetz decided the Jerusalem recital would go on as planned but with tightened security. And any whiff of pickets or protests would scuttle the Strauss from the program.THE MAN WHO CLAIMED to know who attacked Heifetz was Dov Shilansky. A Holocaust survivor from Lithuania, he was determined never to let himself, or Israel, forget. In 1989, a year after his election as Knesset speaker, Shilansky urged lawmakers to read the names of each Holocaust victim, as six million felt like an incomprehensible number. “Every Person Has a Name” is now part of Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremonies all across Israel.Shilansky arrived in Israel in 1948 on the Altalena, a ship that sank when Israeli Defense Forces opened fire, killing 19 people. Most on the ship, Shilansky included, were members of Irgun, the right-wing underground resistance group.Shilansky maintained close ties to the group when Irgun morphed into a political party headed by Menachem Begin. In September 1952 the group was concerned with protesting Israel’s intent to receive 3 billion marks (or about $715 million) in reparations from Germany. Israel desperately needed the money to absorb the enormous number of Holocaust refugees.Both the right and left criticized the agreement, but consensus was that reparations could spur Israel forward rather than keep it focusing on an unspeakable atrocities. Shilansky, now 28 and married with a son, could not abide this. “I found no rest,” he wrote in his memoir “Diary of a Hebrew Jail.” “Whatever I did, that fact pierced my brain and pierced it again. I was a citizen of a treasonous nation; my inaction was one endorsement of that treason.”A month after the reparations agreement was signed, Shilansky brought a briefcase containing a device made out of six pounds of explosives to the office of the Israeli Foreign Ministry in Tel Aviv. Police arrested him before the device detonated, and he received a 21-month prison sentence.He was in jail when the agreement went into effect on March 27, 1953 — three weeks before the attack on Heifetz outside the King David Hotel. And he would still be in prison when a dozen members of another extremist group, Malchut Yisrael, were convicted in August of attempting to bomb the Ministry of Education building.“There are only two kinds of music — good music and bad music,” Heifetz told top government officials when they asked him to drop the Strauss from his program.via Getty ImagesHEIFETZ WASN’T SERIOUSLY INJURED in the attack beyond bruising and an eventual scar. Nor did his violin sustain any damage. But his assault seemed to chasten Israel’s media and chattering classes.Before, the Israeli press had seemed almost gleeful in its attacks on Heifetz for daring to play music by a banned composer. But as international papers, including The Times, hotly took notice, the tone became more conciliatory. Even the group that took responsibility for the attack, in a call to the Voice of Israel radio station, said it intended to damage Heifetz’s violin, not him.Heifetz now had to decide: should he continue his tour or leave Israel? His instinct was to flee, enraged, “that music had been made a political pawn,” as his son Robert recalled in a 1988 article for The Strad magazine. But the same officials who had implored Heifetz to nix the Strauss sonata now urged him to carry on. So, too, did David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister.Two days after the assault, over tea, Ben-Gurion apologized to Heifetz on behalf of the nation. As he later wrote in his diary, he asked Heifetz to continue, and “to play Strauss as well.”Heifetz continued. But the Strauss sonata was not on the program of his next concert, a benefit in Rehovot for the Chaim Weizmann Institute. Still, security guards and police filled the concert hall, though the only misadventure was when police noisily tried to break up a band of pigeons cooing on the rooftop.Despite having to hold his bow “rather gingerly between thumb and forefinger,” Heifetz was his usual near-flawless self. The audience applauded enthusiastically. But his bowing hand still hurt, and he canceled his final appearance in Tel Aviv.Three days later, hand still bandaged, Heifetz was back on tour, playing in Italy.DOV SHILANSKY BECAME A LAWYER and started his own firm. When the Likud party swept into power in 1977, making Menachem Begin prime minister, Begin rewarded his longtime friend Shilansky with a deputy minister post.In 1982, Shilansky told the historian Tom Segev that he knew who had attacked Heifetz, but would not say who it was. By then, Shilansky was embroiled in another music-related controversy.At the end of a concert by the Israeli Philharmonic in 1981, the orchestra’s conductor, the Indian-born Zubin Mehta, told the audience that the encore would be by Richard Wagner; anyone who felt uncomfortable was free to leave, he said, and the musicians would not take offense. (A violinist and trombonist, both Holocaust survivors, walked out.)It was the first time Wagner had been played officially in Israel since 1938, and reactions quickly turned ugly. Press attacks brought up all the old arguments, but Shilansky added something new.In a radio interview, he grew angry at Mehta’s chutzpah and suggested that he “go back to India.” He later said his comments had been taken out of context: he’d meant that Mehta should “leave Israelis in peace.”Begin said little publicly, but privately defended Shilansky in a letter to the Israel Philharmonic: “He saw our people in the process of annihilation. He himself was in a Nazi concentration camp.”WAS SHILANSKY RESPONSIBLE for the attack on Heifetz? The time frame doesn’t seem to work; Shilansky wasn’t released from prison until months after the assault. And he didn’t match the assailant’s description: a “tall, dark thug.”But several newspaper reports say that on April 12, Shilansky received a 10-day furlough for his second son’s birth. (That son, Shafir Shilansky, also a lawyer, did not return requests for comment.) Begin was the boy’s godfather. Shilansky would have been free when Heifetz received the blow to his bowing arm.When I brought this up to Segev, he insisted Shilansky wasn’t the attacker, that it wasn’t his style. It “makes absolutely no sense,” Segev said. I’m inclined to agree. A more plausible culprit might be a Malchut Yisrael member convicted in August 1953. Most were minors; their whereabouts at the time could not be definitively established.As Shilansky rose to power, his vociferous criticism of efforts to play German composers, and his passionate arguments that even speaking the German language could cause tremendous harm, never wavered. But whatever he knew about the Heifetz attack he took to the grave.FOR ME, THE ATTACK on Heifetz became less a mystery to solve than a thorny emotional and political journey to the heart of Israel’s founding, a reminder of its contradictions and aspirations. For Heifetz, it was simpler.“He just thought it was a stupid thing this man did,” Ayke Agus, the author of “Heifetz as I Knew Him” and a close friend, said in an interview. “He would tell anybody who called him up for an interview that he didn’t like to mix politics and music.”Anna Lou Dehavenon, the widow of pianist William Kapell, told Heifetz’s biographer John A. Maltese about meeting Heifetz for dinner in Paris during his 1953 tour. “I said to Jascha, ‘What has happened to your hand?’ And, of course, he didn’t want to talk about it.”Heifetz remained an active supporter of Israel. He visited a final time in 1970 for a five-week tour with the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. Upon meeting prime minister Golda Meir, Heifetz handed her a check for about $25,000 and told her “to do with it as she sees fit.”This trip may have been more harmonious because of another decision Heifetz made: Early drafts of his recital programs included a Strauss piece, but he chose not to play it. More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Music

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

      by

      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

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Music

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

      by

      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