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      Jessye Norman Rejected These Recordings. Should They Be Released?

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      The maestro was in a foul mood. And the singer was unhappy. The Berlin Wall had fallen almost a decade earlier, but Leipzig, in the former East Germany, still left something to be desired when it came to an opera star’s material needs.The conductor Kurt Masur and the soprano Jessye Norman — whose album collaboration on Strauss’s “Four Last Songs” was already a classic — had joined the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra to start recording Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.” But things had quickly soured.“She and Masur quarreled,” recalled Costa Pilavachi, then an executive at Philips Classics, the label making the recording. “It was a very, very difficult couple of weeks.”With costs spiraling and spirits low, the label eventually abandoned its plan for a complete “Tristan” and focused on excerpts featuring Isolde, a character Norman had never put on record beyond the famous “Liebestod.” But even this curtailed effort was never released.Until now. Those “Tristan” excerpts are perhaps the most eagerly anticipated part of “Jessye Norman: The Unreleased Masters,” coming from Decca — part of Universal Music Group, which acquired Philips years ago — on March 24.Jessye Norman singing from “Tristan und Isolde”Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra; Kurt Masur, conductor (Decca)The collection consists of three albums recorded with different orchestras and conductors over a period of nine years. One thing they have in common: Norman, one of the most beloved singers of our time, did not approve their release before her death, at 74, in 2019.“When she passed on, I raised with Decca: Isn’t it time to revisit these?” said Cyrus Meher-Homji, an executive at Universal in Australia. The label approached Norman’s estate, which gave its blessing.James Norman, her brother, said in a statement to The New York Times, “There’s no way of knowing whether Jessye would ever have approved the releases per her very high standards, as the subject was not one we ever discussed.”But, he added, they had frequently discussed her philanthropic interests, “and we see the releases as a way to help the estate to advance those interests.”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.Fosse Dancers: The thrill of “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’,” a revival of the 1978 musical is, aptly, its dancers. All are principals. No two are alike, not even a tiny bit. And that’s the way Fosse wanted it.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.However worthy the beneficiary, though, should labels and estates sanction the release of material that artists rejected?Sometimes, the label answers with a clear no: Maria Callas’s final studio recording, for example, was judged artistically inferior and canned. And sometimes, an unsanctioned album comes out during an artist’s lifetime. In the early 1980s, Deutsche Grammophon put out a “Tristan” against the wishes of the notoriously recording-shy conductor Carlos Kleiber, leading to the severing of his relationship with the label.After Kleiber died, his estate remained adamant that other material languishing in the vault should stay there. The family of Sergiu Celibidache, another conductor who frowned on recording, took the opposite position, allowing the release of many albums after his death.This question is more familiar in the literary world. Most of us are thankful that Max Brod didn’t burn Franz Kafka’s unpublished works at the author’s request. But in 2006, when a volume of uncollected material by the poet Elizabeth Bishop was published, the scholar Helen Vendler wrote that Bishop would have greeted it “with a horrified ‘No.’”Martha de Francisco, a record producer who worked with Norman (though not on the projects included in the new set), said, “We’re really all the time thinking of what is the artist’s integrity.”But the nature of that integrity is often far from straightforward. Artists’ wishes can be ambiguous or ambivalent. And some observers believe that the value to posterity of certain material can in some cases supersede even clear wishes. As far as the criteria, though, most admit that it’s more or less “I know it when I hear it.”For Norman, approving recordings was a painstaking and protracted process, even when the answer ended up being yes. “She was extraordinarily professional, and an extraordinarily severe critic of her own work,” said Anthony Freud, then one of her producers and now the general director of Lyric Opera of Chicago.That would seem to give weight to her “no.” But those who spoke with her over the years about these unreleased projects suggest that she wasn’t always resolute about them, and that her reasons for not giving her approval were vague or fixable.“She was a great artist, and she had the right to decide what the public would hear and what the public wouldn’t hear in terms of her commercial output,” Pilavachi said. “She definitely did soften: She was less militant when I spoke to her, maybe 10 years ago, for the last time. She was much more willing to discuss some of this.”The earliest of the three projects is a collaboration with one of her champions, the conductor James Levine, drawn from live performances with the Berlin Philharmonic. The repertory includes the “Four Last Songs” — seven years after her sublime 1982 rendition with Masur — and, from 1992, Wagner’s “Wesendonck Lieder.”“She was thrilled with the ‘Wesendoncks,’” Pilavachi said. “But she wasn’t happy with one note in one song in the ‘Four Last Songs.’ She wanted us to redo that with Levine and the Berlin Philharmonic, and it just never happened. I had extensive conversations with her throughout the ’90s about it.”There was talk of using the Masur recording to patch the note she indicated. (While memories of her complaint are now blurry, it might have been in the first song, “Frühling,” though nothing in any of the four with Levine stands out as blatantly off.) But the original tapes of the older album turned out to have been recycled. The label couldn’t see its way to releasing the Wagner songs alone, so the whole project stayed in storage.These “Four Last Songs” are sleeker than the luscious version she set down with Masur, while Norman’s voice, even if it had lost some easy opulence, was still majestic and flexible. The “Wesendoncks,” which she had already recorded twice, are excellent: brooding, urgent and lush, the orchestra glistening.Norman came up with the idea for the next project, which brought together three queenly characters: Haydn’s “Scena di Berenice,” Berlioz’s “La Mort de Cléopâtre” and Britten’s “Phaedra,” all recorded with Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in February 1994.Pilavachi said Norman had vague misgivings about the Berlioz; Meher-Homji said her complaint in that work was less about her performance than the sound.“By the late 2000s, she approved some of the material,” Meher-Homji said. “She approved the Britten, and she approved the Haydn, but she didn’t like the mix on the Berlioz. And I could understand why. The sound was really hollow; she wanted it tightened up. The orchestra sounded like it was playing in a bathtub.”The mix was adjusted for the new release, and sounds properly balanced, with the Bostonians glittering. Her singing in the Berlioz is slightly more pressed and less plush than it had been with Daniel Barenboim a decade earlier, but she is still fully in command. The Haydn is magisterial but tender; the Britten, blistering and articulate.There is a case to be made that Norman’s objections to these two recordings were minor, and that the performances are worthy of standing alongside her prime work. But that still leaves the “Tristan” — which poses the thorniest questions.In a way, it is the most precious of the set, setting down a role that Norman never sang in full, one for which her capacious but thrusting voice was, in theory, beautifully suited. Its afterlife has also been the messiest of the three albums: The documentation related to the recording is scant and faded, as are the memories of those who worked on it.The similarity between the surnames of Kurt Masur and the tenor Thomas Moser initially caused confusion about who had sung Tristan. More bizarre, when Decca announced the new set last fall, it led with the blazing news that through overdubbing Norman had recorded both Isolde and the supporting role of Brangäne. It took two and a half months for the label to correct itself: Brangäne was actually the mezzo-soprano Hanna Schwarz.Norman, left, performing with Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.Lutz KleinhansMeher-Homji said that at some point after the sessions had ended in April 1998, Cord Garben, the recording’s producer, flew to England to play the edit for Norman. “She listened and said nothing,” Meher-Homji said. “There were plans to continue, and she decided she didn’t want to.”Pilavachi believes the troubled recording process had irretrievably colored her view of it. “She didn’t have any objections to her own singing,” he said. “I think she didn’t want to listen to all the tapes, having had such a lousy experience in Leipzig. I don’t think she had ever listened to it properly so that she could say yes or no.”Dominic Fyfe, Decca’s label director, said: “Obviously this was done quite late in her career. We’re perfectly well aware there may be people who react and say this should not have been released. There may be some controversy around it. But I think on balance, collectively, we all felt that the strengths of the recording outweigh many of the weaknesses.”It’s true: There are strengths and weaknesses to the “Tristan” excerpts. Norman’s voice is richly vehement and full of mystery. Her sensibility is lively, even if Masur’s conducting tends to be limp. Her diction is pungent; the tone has her familiar echoey depth — far plummier than Schwarz’s Brangäne — if fewer sumptuous colors. Some longer phrases are heavy lifting; the high notes are not all comfortable; and some of the intonation wavers in softer passages of Isolde’s Narrative and Curse. The album gives great pleasure, but, more than the other two, one can understand Norman doubting it.When Pilavachi would see her in New York, he would ask her about these projects. “She became less negative about them as time went on,” he said. “But when I went back to London and I would follow up, I wouldn’t hear back. Or I’d send her the masters again, but I don’t know if she ever listened to them. With time she lost interest in them.”The liner notes for the new set thoroughly describe the equivocal position the recordings hold in Norman’s body of work. “It’s important that people appreciate that she had misgivings,” Fyfe said.But that context will not be available on streaming platforms. There, these albums will appear as indistinguishable from music that Norman did approve.“In a digital world,” Fyfe said, “it’s slightly out of our hands.”James Norman said in his statement, “We did agonize some about approving the release of something about which Jessye had some concerns.” But whatever the ethical quandaries, it is certainly the legal right of Norman’s estate and her label to approve the release of this new set. Now it is up to listeners — and to history — to judge.“Common sense is right to prevail,” said Freud, her onetime producer. “I’m not trying to second guess why an artist might have a problem with a recording. But there are clearly recordings that are of a quality that deserves to be heard, and there are other recordings that aren’t. I suppose logically, to me, the answer needs to lie in the quality of the result somehow. Is it good?” More

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      What to See This Spring in NYC: Broadway Shows, Concerts and More

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      “Life of Pi” and Laura Linney on Broadway, Lise Davidsen at the Met Opera, SZA on tour: Here’s what we’re looking forward to this season.Broadway | Off Broadway | Dance | Classical | PopBroadway‘PARADE’ It doesn’t exactly scream out for the big splashy Broadway musical treatment, does it, this disturbing tale of Leo Frank, accused of the rape and murder of a teenage girl and lynched by an antisemitic mob in Georgia in 1915? And yet, the original 1998 production grabbed Tony Awards for the book, by Alfred Uhry, and the score, by Jason Robert Brown. Almost 25 years later, Michael Arden directed a well-received Encores! production, starring Ben Platt, that had a blink-and-you-miss-it short run. Thankfully the production is headed to Broadway, again featuring Platt as Frank and Micaela Diamond as his wife, Lucille.In previews; opens March 16 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, Manhattan.‘SHUCKED’ When the crop starts to fail in the small town of Cob County, an expert “corn doctor” arrives to help, but is he really a huckster? That’s the kernel of this cornpone musical comedy, anyway. Well-received in a premiere run at the Pioneer Theater Company, it promises earworm songs and many laughs — sounds amaizing. The book is by the Tony Award winning “Tootsie” writer Robert Horn, with songs by Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally. The ubiquitous Jack O’Brien directs.Previews begin March 8; opens April 4 at the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan.‘LIFE OF PI’ The long, tense standoff between a 16-year-old boy and a Bengal tiger stuck on a lifeboat is a tale of hope and survival first told in Yann Martel’s award-winning 2002 novel. A decade later, it became an Oscar-winning film directed by Ang Lee, and most recently has been adapted for the stage by Lolita Chakrabarti — the 2021 West End production won five Olivier Awards. The kid keeps surviving, so a stop on Broadway seems like a good next step. Hiran Abeysekera, who starred in London, will reprise the role of Pi, with Max Webster directing. No, no actual tigers will be among the cast; the puppetry and movement direction is by Finn Caldwell, with puppet design by Caldwell and Nick Barnes.Previews begin March 9; opens March 30 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, Manhattan.Hiran Abeysekera, left, with puppeteers operating the Bengal tiger in “Life of Pi.”Johan Persson‘PETER PAN GOES WRONG’ What’s the worst that could happen? When the Mischief Theater Company, which staged “The Play That Goes Wrong,” takes on the J.M. Barrie classic about a boy who won’t grow up, a few flying mishaps are sure to happen. This farce, which premiered in the West End in 2015, arrives to Broadway this spring, with Adam Meggido directing the chaos.Previews begin March 17; opens April 19 at the Barrymore Theater, Manhattan.‘THE THANKSGIVING PLAY’ You can’t please everyone … but you can try! A troupe of super progressive artists creates a culturally sensitive elementary school pageant that embraces both Thanksgiving and Native American Heritage month (without the participation of any actual Native Americans) in this satirical comedy by Larissa FastHorse. After a well-received premiere at Playwrights Horizons in 2018, the show arrives on Broadway, with Rachel Chavkin (“Hadestown”) directing.Previews begin March 25; opens April 20 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan.Jennifer Bareilles, left, and Margo Seibert in “The Thanksgiving Play.”Jenny Anderson for The New York Times‘NEW YORK, NEW YORK’ What’s old is new when Broadway hosts a new musical inspired by a 1977 film about young artists with big dreams in the big city after World War II. It ain’t easy, but if they can make it here, they can make it anywhere (or so we’re told). The musical includes classics like the title number, as well as new songs — and a huge cast. The score is by Kander and Ebb, with an original story by David Thompson with  Sharon Washington and additional lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Susan Stroman directs.Previews begin March 24; opens April 26 at the St. James Theater, Manhattan.‘ROOM’ Like “Life of Pi,” also opening this spring, “Room” has gone from best-selling novel to award-winning film and now to a Broadway production. The play, adapted by Emma Donoghue from her 2010 novel about a mother and son held captive in a shed for years, has songs and some theatricalized aspects, like an older alter ego for young Jack. The essence of the story, though, about hope, imagination and resilience, remains the same. The songs are by the Scottish artists Kathryn Joseph and Cora Bissett, and Bissett (“Roadkill”) directs.Previews begin April 3; opens April 17 at the James Earl Jones Theater, Manhattan.‘SUMMER, 1976’ The casting alone, with Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht, ought to get you to the box office. Set in Ohio in the year of the bicentennial, David Auburn’s latest is about the budding friendship between Diana (Linney), an artist and single mother, and Alice (Hecht), a naïve housewife. As the nation celebrates independence, the women grapple with motherhood, ambition and intimacy and aim for their own sense of freedom. Daniel Sullivan directs.Previews begin April 4; opens April 25 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan.‘GOOD NIGHT, OSCAR’ Sean Hayes plays the impossible-to-describe pianist, performer and incomparable wit Oscar Levant in this new play by Doug Wright. Levant famously did a number of television interviews with Jack Paar when Levant talked openly and perhaps a bit scandalously about his battles with depression and mental illness. The play premiered last year at the Goodman Theater in Chicago to raves like this one from The Chicago Tribune: “It’s a stunner of a lead performance: moving, empathetic, deeply emotional and slightly terrifying.” Anticipation is in the air. Lisa Peterson directs.Previews begin April 7; opens April 24 at the Belasco Theater, Manhattan.Sean Hayes in “Good Night, Oscar.”Liz Lauren‘PRIMA FACIE’ On “Killing Eve,” Jodie Comer proved to be transfixing, so this riveting solo show will certainly be a highlight of the spring season. The play comes with trigger warnings — Comer plays a lawyer who ruthlessly defends men accused of sexual assault, but then she suddenly finds herself on the witness stand. Comer won the 2022 Evening Standard Award for best actress for her West End performance in the role. The play, by Suzie Miller, is directed by Justin Martin. STEVEN McELROYPreviews begin April 11; opens April 23 at the Golden Theater, Manhattan.Jodie Comer in “Prima Facie.”Helen MurrayOff BroadwayBEDLAM THEATER Those of us who grew up in New England all thought Lizzie Borden did it — she gave her mother 40 whacks with an ax, and when that was done, she gave her father 41. Or so went the story of the infamous Borden, who was actually acquitted in the murder trial of her father and stepmother in Fall River, Mass., in 1893. Bedlam Theater takes an irreverent look at the story in “Fall River Fishing,” an absurdist dark comedy about unrequited love, self-loathing and disappointment.In previews; opens Feb. 26 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan.Following that play, Bedlam will stage “The Good John Proctor,” by Talene Monahon, a sequel of sorts to Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” focusing on the young Salem women in the time leading up to the infamous witch trials.Opens March 11 at the Connelly Theater.‘BLACK ODYSSEY’ The playwright Marcus Gardley knows his classics and has created imaginative riffs on Molière’s “Tartuffe,” and Federico García Lorca’s “The House of Bernarda Alba.” Now he’s going back a wee bit further to Homer’s Odysseus saga, about a warrior who faces daunting challenges in finding his way home. Gardley places us in contemporary Harlem, where the soldier Ulysses Lincoln relies on his ancestors and family history to help him on his journey to reunite with his family. Stevie Walker-Webb (“Ain’t No Mo’”) directs.In previews; opens Feb. 26 at Classic Stage Company, Manhattan.James T. Alfred, at right, in “Black Odyssey.”Jeenah Moon for The New York Times‘HOW TO DEFEND YOURSELF’ After a sorority sister is raped, some college students start their own self-defense class. And as they create a space to release their pent-up rage, they struggle with how best to respond — seek systemic change, or learn to land a palm strike? Or both? The play by Liliana Padilla was developed at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago and won the 2019 Yale Drama Series Prize. The Off Broadway production will be directed by Padilla, Rachel Chavkin and Steph Paul.In previews; opens March 13 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan.‘THE COAST STARLIGHT’ This title refers to the Amtrak daily route that runs between Los Angeles and Seattle, with unbelievable scenery along the way. Keith Bunin’s play — which premiered at La Jolla Playhouse in 2019 — ponders what might be going on inside the minds of several people traveling solo on this train and fantasizes the encounters they might have with one another in a different reality. At least one of them holds a dangerous secret. Tyne Rafaeli directs.In previews; opens March 13 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Manhattan.‘THE STRANGE UNDOING OF PRUDENCIA HART’ It’s hard to believe it’s been 12 years since I was first captivated by this National Theater of Scotland production at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This wild tale of a stuffy academic who attends a conference in a Scottish border town and somehow, surrealistically, finds herself dancing with the devil is told with an immersive approach that can be intoxicating for an audience member. You can take that literally — the show is being presented at the McKittrick Hotel in a pub environment, as it was in Edinburgh and at the hotel in 2016-17. The writer, David Greig (“The Events”), has a knack for yearning and fantasy, and “Prudencia” is unlikely to get old anytime soon.Previews begin March 8; opens March 13 at the McKittrick Hotel, Manhattan.‘WHITE GIRL IN DANGER’ Tired of being a “Blackground player” in the soap opera town of Allwhite, Keesha Gibbs is determined to take center stage in this new musical comedy with book, music and lyrics by the Tony and Pulitzer Prize winner Michael R. Jackson (“A Strange Loop”). And as you might surmise from the title, there is indeed a killer on the loose in Jackson’s mash-up of soaps and melodramatic movies. Lileana Blain-Cruz directs.Previews begin March 15; opens April 10 at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater, Manhattan.From left, Liz Lark Brown, Latoya Edwards and NaTasha Yvette Williams at a reading of “White Girl in Danger.”Lauren Lancaster for The New York Times‘DÍA Y NOCHE’ This coming-of-age story, set in El Paso, Texas, in 1984, is about racism and class struggle experienced through the unlikely friendship between a Chicano punk-rock kid and a Black upper-middle-class nerd who is gay and closeted. Carlos Armesto directs the LAByrinth Theater Company production, written by LAB actor/playwright David Anzuelo.Previews begin March 18; opens March 26 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan.RED BULL THEATER Even we Elizabethan geeks might not be familiar with “Arden of Faversham,” a 16th-century thriller from the quill of an anonymous playwright (Shakespeare? Marlowe? Thomas Kyd?). A wife is having an affair and, with her lover, plots the murder of her wealthy husband; naturally, things get complicated. Jesse Berger directs the adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher and Kathryn Walat for Red Bull Theater.Previews begin March 6; opens March 16 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan.For 20 years, Red Bull has, thankfully, continued to keep many great classic plays alive for contemporary audiences — they’ll also stage Francis Beaumont’s hilarious comedy “The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” directed by Noah Brody and Emily Young this spring.Previews begin April 17; opens April 27 at the Lucille Lortel Theater.‘KING JAMES’ The timing could hardly be better for this show, arriving onstage just a few months after LeBron James broke the all time NBA scoring record. This play by Rajiv Joseph (“Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo”), which follows two LeBron super fans who forge an unlikely bond during the basketball player’s days with the Cleveland Cavaliers, is a study of the important place sports can hold in some of our lives. I don’t even like basketball (I’m too short), and I still can’t wait! Glenn Davis and Chris Perfetti will revisit the roles they played at Steppenwolf Theater Company, where the play had its world premiere last year. Kenny Leon directs.Previews begin May 2; opens May 16 at Manhattan Theater Club.‘DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES’ This world premiere musical brings together the composer and lyricist Adam Guettel (“Floyd Collins”) and the playwright Craig Lucas (“An American in Paris”) for the first time since their musical “The Light in the Piazza.” Adapted from J.P. Miller’s 1962 film and 1958 teleplay, the story about a couple’s yearslong battle with alcoholism doesn’t sound super uplifting, but the creative team has quite a track record. Michael Greif (“Dear Evan Hansen”) directs the Atlantic Theater Company production. STEVEN McELROYOpens May 5 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan.Dance‘COPPELIA’ In “Coppelia” (1870) the old toymaker Dr. Coppelius is obsessed with creating a female doll so realistic that she can be — and is — mistaken for a human girl. But that’s not enough: Through magic spells, he tries to bring her to life. In 2023, our magic is artificial intelligence, and in Morgann Runacre-Temple and Jessica Wright’s ingenious “Coppelia,” which Scottish Ballet brings to Sadler’s Wells theater in London, Dr. Coppelius is a charismatic Steve Jobs figure in a black turtleneck, dominating technicians and androids as he attempts to create the perfect woman. The heroine, Swanhilda, is a journalist investigating Coppelius’s NuLife laboratory; her boyfriend Franz comes along and, just as in the 19th-century original, falls for the nonhuman Coppelia. The ballet won rave reviews after its debut at the Edinburgh Festival last year. ROSLYN SULCASMarch 2-5, Sadler’s Wells, London.JORDAN DEMETRIUS LLOYD Like so many dance artists, the choreographer and dancer Jordan Demetrius Lloyd has spent the past few years resourcefully creating work outside of theaters. In 2020, he directed the stirring, contemplative short film “The Last Moon in Mellowland,” a poem in images. Last summer, his site-specific “Jerome” drew crowds of dance lovers and curious passers-by to a schoolyard in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. With his latest project — his first evening-length commission — Lloyd returns to the theater, both embracing its familiarity and testing out new directions, as he finds himself “on not the other side but another side of the pandemic,” he said in a phone interview. In “Blackbare in the Basement,” at Danspace Project, he and seven dancers extend on ideas from “JEROME” while considering the particularities of this hallowed downtown performance space and the history of the artists who have moved through it. SIOBHAN BURKEMarch 9-11, Danspace Project, Manhattan.From left, Paul Hamilton, Keely Garfield and Angie Pittman.Whitney BrowneKEELY GARFIELD As a choreographer and performer, Keely Garfield has long blurred the lines between irony and sincerity, the absurd and the profound. Her unpredictable works, unafraid of kitsch, are costume pageants with room for prayer, feats of endurance and bravery that don’t disguise awkwardness and vulnerability. Garfield is also a yoga teacher, an urban Zen integrated therapist and a hospital chaplain. Her newest piece, “The Invisible Project,” is her first to explore explicitly the crossover between her work as a choreographer and her work in wellness, experimenting with how endurance, patience, healing and catharsis can be danced. If compassionate presence is an aim, the cast is ideal: Opal Ingle, Angie Pittman, Paul Hamilton and Molly Lieber. BRIAN SEIBERTMarch 10-12 at N.Y.U. Skirball, Manhattan.TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY The question of how to stay current, relevant, haunts every dance company built on the vision of a single choreographer. What happens when that person is no longer here? Six years after the death of the postmodern trailblazer Trisha Brown, her company has, for the first time, commissioned a new dance from another artist: the Cuban-born Judith Sánchez Ruíz, a member of the Brown company from 2006 to 2009. Now living in Berlin, Ruíz combines a visceral understanding of Brown’s work with her own daring, intensely physical approach to movement invention. In addition to Ruíz’s “Let’s talk about bleeding,” with a score by the Cuban composer Adonis Gonzalez, the company’s Joyce Theater season features two of Brown’s collaborations with the sound artist Alvin Curran, “For M.G.: The Movie” (1991) and “Rogues” (2011). And Ruíz is not the only fresh voice on the program: Five of the troupe’s eight dancers are new. BURKEMay 2-7, Joyce Theater, Manhattan.Thaji Dias and Amandi Gomez from Nrityagram Dance Ensemble.Ravi ShankarNRITYAGRAM DANCE ENSEMBLE About a decade ago, Nrityagram — unsurpassed exponents of the Indian classical form Odissi — came to the Joyce Theater with surprise guests. They were members of Chitrasena Dance Company from Sri Lanka, experts in that nation’s Kandyan tradition. A collaboration among the dancers, all female, brought out both the shared ancient roots of the two styles and their differences: the more sinuous refinement of Odissi, the folksier verve of Kandyan. They danced to different drummers and found a new harmony. The two companies return together to the Joyce with a new program, “Ahuti,” or “Offering.” One change is the presence of men, who come from the Chitrasena side — bare-chested, virile, spinning end-over-end through the air. They are a novelty in Nrityagram performance, introducing a complementary energy and adding to a larger-than-usual cast, a more populous party. SEIBERTMay 9-14, Joyce Theater, Manhattan.ClassicalCARNEGIE HALL Last year, the Vienna Philharmonic’s Carnegie visit was upturned by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the last-minute dumping of its guest conductor, the Putin-affiliated Valery Gergiev. Things should be much calmer when the orchestra returns for three days of works by Schoenberg, Strauss, Mendelssohn, Brahms and Bruckner — all led by Christian Thielemann, a master of this repertoire (March 3-5). Another Carnegie staple, the English Concert, brings Handel’s oratorio “Solomon” (March 12); later, its fellow period ensemble Les Arts Florissants, led by the essential William Christie, comes with an all-Charpentier program for Holy Week (April 26).Among visiting pianists are the gracefully intelligent Alexandre Tharaud, playing works including his transcription of the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony (March 26); Seong-Jin Cho, who heroically flew in to salvage those Vienna concerts last February (April 12); and the mighty Beatrice Rana, taking on Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata (April 20). Other recitals include the cellist Alisa Weilerstein’s multimedia Bach show “Fragments” (April 1); the continuation of the Danish String Quartet’s Schubert-inspired “Doppelgänger” project, with a premiere by Anna Thorvaldsdottir (April 20), who has also written the latest installment of the flutist Claire Chase’s sprawling, multi-decade initiative “Density 2036” (May 25). Chase appears as well as the soloist in Kaija Saariaho’s “Aile du songe,” with Susanna Mälkki and the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra (May 9).Other ensembles are bringing local premieres to Carnegie: the Philadelphia Orchestra, presenting John Luther Adams’s “Vespers of the Blessed Earth” with the vocal group the Crossing (March 31); and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which over two evenings is performing Thierry Escaich’s Cello Concerto, with Gautier Capuçon, and Thomas Adès “Air,” for violin and orchestra, with Anne-Sophie Mutter (April 24 and 25). The Met Orchestra continues its tradition of postseason Carnegie appearances, led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, in Brahms’s “Ein deutsches Requiem” and a program that includes Renée Fleming and Russell Thomas in Act IV of Verdi’s “Otello,” as well as the world premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s “Lear Sketches” (June 15 and 22).Susanna Mälkki conducting at Carnegie Hall.Chris LeeNEW YORK PHILHARMONIC The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, whose career continues to thrive in the face of a terminal brain cancer diagnosis, returns to the Philharmonic podium to lead the local premiere of his “Meditations on Rilke” and Schubert’s “Great” Symphony (March 9-12). Then, the orchestra’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, leads Messiaen’s immense “Turangalîla-symphonie,” featuring Jean-Yves Thibaudet as the piano soloist (March 17-19), followed by Bach’s similarly expansive “St. Matthew Passion,” with vocalists including Nicholas Phan, Davóne Tines, Paul Appleby, Tamara Mumford and Philippe Sly (March 23-25).More firsts come in the New York premiere of Felipe Lara’s Double Concerto, featuring Claire Chase on flute and Esperanza Spalding on bass and led by Susanna Mälkki (March 29-31); the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition winner Yunchan Lim’s Philharmonic debut in Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto with James Gaffigan (May 10-12); the U.S. premiere of Chick Corea’s Trombone Concerto, led by Marin Alsop and featuring the orchestra’s principal trombone, Joseph Alessi (May 25-27); the world premiere of Julia Wolfe’s large-scale “unEarth” (June 1-3); and the New York premiere of John Luther Adams’s “Become Desert” (June 8-10).METROPOLITAN OPERA Earlier this season, the Met announced that it would devote more resources and calendar time to contemporary works and, inevitably, new productions. But revivals are still the bread and butter of a repertory house, and many this spring have something to look forward to. When Robert Carsen’s elegant production of “Falstaff” returns (March 12-April 1), it will feature as the decadent title character the German baritone Michael Volle — a solemn presence known for embodying Wagner heroes like Wotan and Hans Sachs — in his first Verdi role. Carsen’s similarly clean, and sobering, “Der Rosenkavalier” (March 27-April 20) will be a vehicle for the soprano Lise Davidsen, the Met’s reigning diva, who is making her role debut as the Marschallin.Lise Davidsen, at right, in “Ariadne auf Naxos.” This season she will make her role debut as the Marschallin in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier.”Marty Sohl/Met OperaYannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director, has been largely absent so far this season, but will take the podium for Puccini’s “La Bohème” (April 21-28, then May 2-14). And the conductor Thomas Guggeis, turning 30 this year and on a rapid rise abroad, as the general music director of Frankfurt Opera and a substitute for Daniel Barenboim in a high-profile Berlin “Ring” cycle last fall, makes his Met debut leading another Wagner work: “Der Fliegende Holländer,” in the first revival of François Girard’s obtuse 2020 staging (May 30-June 10).PARK AVENUE ARMORY Recital spaces are preciously rare in New York, and few can compare with the Armory’s intimate and acoustically rich Board of Officers Room. There, the French baritone Stéphane Degout, with the pianist Cédric Tiberghien, will present an evening of art songs from composers including Fauré, Schubert, Debussy and Lili Boulanger (April 3 and 5). The tenor Allan Clayton — revered abroad and recently celebrated locally in the title roles of “Hamlet” and “Peter Grimes” at the Metropolitan Opera — comes next with the pianist James Baillieu for a program of works by Schumann and Nico Muhly, as well as Clayton’s countrymen Henry Purcell, Michael Tippett and Benjamin Britten (April 27 and 29). Later, the young pianist Pavel Kolesnikov brings his account of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, which he has performed alongside the choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, as well as an eclectic mix of works inspired by Joseph Cornell’s “Celestial Navigation” (May 22 and 24). JOSHUA BARONEPopWEYES BLOOD The clarion-voiced Natalie Mering, under the name Weyes Blood, makes intricately wrought Laurel Canyon folk-pop updated for an era of millennial unease. She wrote many of the songs on her stirring 2022 album “And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow,” as hymns to the collective epidemic of loneliness brought on by the pandemic. Mering’s music is intimate but sweeping; she uses her own personal experiences to access larger and more generalized undercurrents of emotion. It will be heartening to hear a song like the anthemic single “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody” performed live, with a venue full of voices proving the communal sentiment of its title. LINDSAY ZOLADZMarch 3 and 4 at Brooklyn Steel.Weyes Blood performs at Primavera Sound Festival in Barcelona, Spain, in 2022.Jordi Vidal/Redferns, Getty ImagesSZA In the details of a song and in the shape of her career, SZA’s timing has been utterly her own. To sing about relationships and ambitions that unfold as messily as everyday life, SZA — Solana Imani Rowe — writes melodies and lyrics that seem to be spilling out spontaneously: crooning, pausing, suddenly racing, then curling neatly into a hook. Her recordings have arrived with the same kind of unpredictability. She released her debut album, “CTRL” in 2017; five years later, in 2022, she expanded it to a deluxe version that was half again as long, then went on to release an entire new album, “SOS.” In the meantime, an ever-expanding audience found their own lives in her songs: in their desires, jealousy, doubts, seductions, setbacks and triumphs, and in their leisurely grooves. SZA is touring arenas this year, and singalongs will likely join her, phrase for eccentric phrase. JON PARELESMarch 4 and 5 at Madison Square Garden, Manhattan.YO LA TENGO Since forming nearly four decades ago, the Hoboken indie-rock legends Yo La Tengo have been staggeringly consistent: The trio of Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, and James McNew never seems to tire in its search of eclectic new elements to bring into its ever-expanding sonic universe. Still, the band sounds particularly inspired on its latest (and 17th!) album, the richly enveloping “This Stupid World,” which flickers from despair to hard-won hope and moves fluidly between jammy abstractions (“Sinatra Drive Breakdown”) and succinctly rendered indie-pop (“Fallout,” “Aselestine”). Both of those sides of “This Stupid World” are likely to translate well live, but the new album probably won’t be the set list’s only focus — naturally, their back catalog runs pretty deep. ZOLADZMarch 18 at Brooklyn Steel.SOLANGE Futuristic R&B, righteous jazz, gospel, performance art, poetry, sculpture, film and opera are all part of a generation-spanning seven-event series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music curated by Solange Knowles for Saint Heron, her project to preserve and celebrate Black culture. Named “Eldorado Ballroom” after a historic Black music hall in Houston, the series begins March 30 with a concert headlined by the ambitious, electronics-loving songwriter Kelela, along with the adventurous R&B songwriters Res and KeiyaA. On April 7, the long-running gospel group Twinkie Clark and the Clark Sisters are paired with a program of spiritual choral compositions by Mary Lou Williams. And on April 8, the pioneering free-jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp shares a bill with the poet Claudia Rankine and the avant-garde vocalist Linda Sharrock, in her first New York City concert since the 1970s. The whole series offers deep, promising connections. PARELESBegins March 30 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. More

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      Joshua Bell’s London

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      “The first time I came to London, I was 17,” the violinist Joshua Bell, now 54, told me. We were at dinner together following a recent performance of his at Wigmore Hall, a small but renowned concert hall. “I came with my parents to make my first album,” he continued. “This was in the ’80s, and I remember thinking there wasn’t a lot of variety in food. Now, of course, it’s great.”Mr. Bell estimates he’s been to London around 70 times since then.“One of the problems with classical music is that it’s developed a reputation of formality,” Mr. Bell said. “In fact, classical music can be the most exciting thing to watch.”So no, the virtuoso and onetime child prodigy doesn’t live in London. But you could say he’s a professional visitor. His London is one of exquisite taste, uncommonly good food and a handful of tiny places you’d breeze right by if you didn’t know they were there — with, of course, a measure of music.Mr. Bell tends to favor lesser-known places, with one very notable exception: the Royal Albert Hall. “The Royal Albert Hall has this thing called the Proms. They take out the seats on the lower level, and people line up down the street to get in,” he said. “All these people are standing up like it’s a rock concert, and it’s Beethoven symphonies. It’s incredible.”Here are five of his favorite places to visit in London.1. J.&A. BeareA technician works on a violin at J.&A. Beare in central London. The shop has a collection of precious violins that can be viewed. “In August 2001, I walked into Charles Beare’s shop to pick up a set of strings, and Charles Beare said to me, ‘You have to take a look at the Huberman violin, it’s on its way to Germany.’” The instrument, made by Antonio Stradivari in 1713 and known as the Gibson ex Huberman, was legendary. “I knew the famous story of the violin,” Mr. Bell said, recounting its theft from a dressing room at Carnegie Hall in 1936.J.&A. Beare sells more modest violins as well as world-class ones like the one Mr. Bell uses.At the shop in 2001, Mr. Bell fell in love with a violin made by Antonio Stradivari in 1713.“Charles Beare put me in a room with the violin and after a few notes, I was shaking with excitement. I was in love with it. I had a concert at the Royal Albert Hall — at the Proms — and used that violin that very night.”Even if you’re not in the market for a multimillion-euro violin, J.&A. Beare is worth a visit. The shop is open to the public — but if you want to see the collection of nearly priceless violins, book ahead.2. TrishnaThe tasting menu at Trishna, in Marylebone, is partly what draws Mr. Bell.“I did an event in New York with Salman Rushdie,” Mr. Bell said. “At one point, we were talking about London and he recommended Trishna. I love Indian food, but Trishna is not your typical Indian restaurant. The problem with Indian food for me is that I want to try a lot of things. I don’t just want to have one lamb curry as my dinner.” Instead, Mr. Bell likes to get the five-course tasting menu — “and a crab dish that’s really great,” he said.Trishna’s cozy interior.The Michelin-starred restaurant, with its private nooks, mirrored walls, delicately gilded surfaces, feels a like special occasion kind of place. It’s also best to come hungry. “I like places where they just get the tasting menu because I eat everything,” says Mr. Bell. “I like the person cooking it to choose what he wants to present.”3. Wigmore HallThe exterior of Wigmore Hall, a 552-seat concert venue in Marylebone.“Wigmore Hall doesn’t have name recognition to the general public,” said Mr. Bell of the 552-seat concert hall in Marylebone. With its small stage and red velvet seating, Wigmore Hall has a hushed, intimate appeal. “One of the problems with classical music is that it’s developed a reputation of formality. I’ve actually seen classical musicians admonish the audience for clapping at the wrong time. In fact, classical music can be the most exciting thing to watch.”With its small stage and red velvet seating, Wigmore Hall has a hushed, intimate appeal.“Having said that, it’s nice that there are places like Wigmore Hall where you know everyone understands. It’s like for an actor to do theater in a place where people really get it. And Wigmore Hall has history for me personally. The first concert there — I think it was 1901 — was played by the teacher of my teacher, Ysaÿe, the greatest violinist at the end of the 19th century in Europe. I feel the history when I walk on the stage.”4. Baglioni HotelThe Baglioni Hotel is a favorite of Bell’s when he’s performing at the Proms, an annual series of classical music concerts.When days are packed with rehearsals and evenings are given to performing, proximity to one’s bed is important — as is a nice hotel around that bed. And so when Mr. Bell plays at the Royal Albert Hall, he always stays at Hotel Baglioni, a stone’s throw away. “It’s an Italian boutique hotel and has a very intimate feel,” he said. “It feels like people know you there, and the rooms have this sort of very sexy vibe — they’re just very boudoir-like and dark. I sleep better in those kinds of rooms.”Its location also means he can “walk to the rehearsals and back — you can also walk right across the street to Hyde Park. It’s my home when I’m at the Proms.”5. Fidelio Cafe“It’s clearly a passion project for the owner,” Mr. Bell said of Fidelio Cafe, “who loves classical music and food and puts them together.” (Mr. Bell is seated at a table on the left.)Gabriel Isserlis“Very few places like this exist — or dare to offer this,” said Mr. Bell of Fidelio Cafe. The “this” in question is the intersection of a sweet little bistro and live, world-class classical music.Imagine a small cafe where the walls are papered in actual sheet music, a grand piano greets you at the front door and the menu — with its home-roasted granola, slow-cooked aubergine and roasted cherry tomato bruschetta — seems crafted from the morning’s farmer’s market.It’s also “about the uniqueness of having a meal in an intimate space while hearing chamber music,” Mr. Bell said. “It’s clearly a passion project for the owner, who loves classical music and food and puts them together.”“One of my dreams is to open a food-slash-music venue,” he added. “When I see places like Fidelio, I love that people are thinking outside the box and celebrating classic music in such an usual way.”Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2023. More

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      Classical Music to See and Hear in Spring 2023

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      This spring, Gustavo Dudamel, the Philharmonic’s next music director, conducts the big deal symphony, the Met Opera stages Terence Blanchard’s “Champion”; and in Chicago, Riccardo Muti says farewell.It was a hint about as subtle as a siren when the New York Philharmonic announced its current season a year ago: Gustavo Dudamel, the superstar conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, would be coming to New York as a guest in May 2023 to lead Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.One of the repertory’s most sprawling and profound works, Mahler’s Ninth has been played by the Philharmonic almost exclusively under the batons of its music directors. It’s not an assignment the orchestra gives rising hotshots or conductors it sees once a decade. It’s the kind of musically knotty, deeply emotional score you want led by the artists closest to you.That was just one of many suggestions that Dudamel, 42, would, before too long, join the ranks of New York music directors, a group that has included eminences like Mahler, Toscanini, Bernstein and Boulez. And so it came to pass: Earlier this month, the Philharmonic said that he would succeed Jaap van Zweden in the position, for a five-year term beginning — because of classical music’s oddly glacial planning cycles — in the 2026-27 season.But before all that comes Mahler’s Ninth, which Dudamel has convincingly, with tenderness and naturally unfolding intensity, recorded with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The three New York performances, May 19-21, were already sure to be well attended, given the famous conductor and the beloved piece. Now, since the concerts will be Dudamel’s first appearances on the Philharmonic’s podium since the announcement, these will be some of the hottest tickets in town this spring.When Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” opened the Metropolitan Opera’s 2021–22 season, in a run that sold out several performances, it was a landmark: the first time the company had put on the work of a Black composer. Now Blanchard’s earlier opera, “Champion,” from 2013, is coming to the house, beginning April 10.As in “Fire,” themes of identity, sexuality and the negotiation of traumatic memories dominate. “Champion” tells the true story of the closeted gay boxer Emile Griffith, who knocked out his opponent, Benny Paret, during a 1962 title bout; Paret never recovered consciousness and died 10 days later. At the Met, two bass-baritones share the role of Griffith: Ryan Speedo Green plays him as a young athlete in his prime, and Eric Owens, as an aging man looking back on his complicated past.A scene from Terence Blanchard’s “Champion,” in James Robinson’s production at Opera Theater of Saint Louis.Ken Howard/Opera Theatre of Saint LouisIn the wake of the box-office success of “Fire,” the Met — which has been struggling with ticket sales and said in December that it would withdraw $30 million from its endowment to cover costs — rushed “Champion” into production, part of a coming burst of contemporary operas aimed at broadening the audience. The staging reunites members of the team that helped make “Fire” vivid: the director James Robinson, the choreographer Camille A. Brown — the step dance routine that she conceived for “Fire” stopped the show — and the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Three veterans, Latonia Moore, Stephanie Blythe and Paul Groves, round out the cast.It is unusual for the Met (or any company) to unveil two new productions of Mozart operas back to back. And even rarer for both to be led by one conductor: in this case, Nathalie Stutzmann, a former mezzo-soprano turned maestro making her Met debut on the podium for “Don Giovanni” and “Die Zauberflöte.”Replacing a dreary, unilluminating Michael Grandage production on May 5, the new “Giovanni” is an import from the Paris Opera, where the much-discussed Dutch director Ivo van Hove and his colleagues put onstage what Joshua Barone described in The New York Times as “a de Chirico-like set populated by handsomely dressed people in a state of sexy desperation.” (It can hardly help but be an improvement on the Grandage.)Stutzmann, who started at the Atlanta Symphony this season — the only female music director leading one of the 25 largest American orchestras — conducts a promising cast, including Peter Mattei, a star in the title role at the Met for the past 20 years, as well as Adam Plachetka, Federica Lombardi, Ana María Martínez, Ying Fang and Ben Bliss.The situation with “Die Zauberflöte,” opening on May 19, is slightly complicated. The Met is planning to retain its existing production — which the director Julie Taymor and the designer George Tsypin filled with plexiglass and fanciful puppets — in its abridged, English-language, family-friendly form as “The Magic Flute,” now a holiday-season tradition.Performed in full and in German, the new-to-the-company “Die Zauberflöte,” a much-traveled staging directed by Simon McBurney, has the orchestra spilling over onto risers placed onstage and contemporary-style costumes. Stutzmann’s cast here includes Erin Morley, Lawrence Brownlee, Thomas Oliemans, Kathryn Lewek and Stephen Milling.Dudamel’s appointment is perhaps the biggest news in music this season: a new beginning. But the other crucial conductor move in America this spring signals the end of an era.Riccardo Muti is bringing his 13 years leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to a close in June.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesAt 81, Riccardo Muti — a fixture on the country’s major podiums since the 1970s and the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra during the ’80s — is bringing to a close a 13-year tenure at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with performances of Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis,” June 23-25.Despite being an experienced Beethoven interpreter and a specialist in huge choral works, Muti stayed away from the notoriously thorny “Missa Solemnis” for decades, until he led it — with radiant dignity and grandeur — at the Salzburg Festival in 2021.“I always felt too small,” he said in an interview last year on Chicago radio, “never I felt ready to perform this huge monument, because it’s so deep, so vast.” Muti and other great conductors are not known for this kind of humility or patience, so these performances will be the fruit of uncommonly many years of study and thought.Given that the Chicago Symphony has not yet appointed his replacement, Muti will remain a crucial presence next season, and possibly beyond. But this “Missa Solemnis” — with the chorus coached by a distinguished guest, Donald Palumbo, the chorus master at the Met — is nevertheless sure to be a love fest between a superb orchestra and a conductor it has revered. More

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      Gustavo Dudamel, Superstar Maestro, Meets New York

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      On his first visit to the city since being named the New York Philharmonic’s next music director, he eagerly played the role of celebrity conductor.Gustavo Dudamel, groggy after a late-night flight from Los Angeles but still in good spirits, wandered into a roomful of New York Philharmonic employees, board members and donors on Monday afternoon and beamed.“I feel like Mickey Mouse,” he said as people approached to shake hands and pose for photos.It was Dudamel’s first visit to New York since being named the Philharmonic’s next music and artistic director — a post he will assume in 2026, after the conclusion of his tenure at the Los Angeles Philharmonic — and he was already playing the role of celebrity conductor.During his two-hour appearance at David Geffen Hall, the Philharmonic’s home, Dudamel, 42, offered few specifics about his vision, saying he needed more time to get to know the city and the orchestra. But he put on full display some of the qualities that made him the Philharmonic’s choice: charisma, charm and an ability to bring fresh excitement to classical music.He took part, with childlike giddiness, in a contract-signing ceremony. (“Are these presidential pens?” he asked as he prepared to put his name on the five-year document, which he had already signed electronically earlier this month, when the Philharmonic, in a major coup, poached him from Los Angeles.)He took questions from the Philharmonic’s leaders and the news media, weighing in on the future of classical music; his tenure at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which he has led since 2009; and his sports allegiances. (After initially declining to take sides in Mets versus Yankees, he said he was a fan of the Cardenales de Lara of Barquisimeto, Venezuela, his hometown; but also of the Los Angeles Dodgers, because of their Brooklyn heritage; and finally he declared, with an air of hesitation, “I love the Yankees, too.”)Dudamel with Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive. “I always said you would have a ticker-tape parade when you came to New York,” she said.James Estrin/The New York TimesAnd he mingled with the orchestra’s musicians, praising their sound; discussing Mahler’s Symphony No. 9, which they will perform together in May; and thanking them for the gifts they had provided while the orchestra worked to woo him. (He told the cellist Maria Kitsopoulos that her homemade cheesecake was a crucial reason he had decided to move to New York.)Christopher Martin, the orchestra’s principal trumpet, who helped lead the search for a music director, embraced him. Among the orchestra’s players, Dudamel was the favorite from the start.“This is like a dream, seeing you here,” Martin said. “Nobody can believe it.”Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, who hired Dudamel in Los Angeles in 2007, when he was 26, and spent the past year trying to lure him East, led a conversation with Dudamel on the stage of Geffen Hall before he took questions from the media.“I always said you would have a ticker-tape parade when you came to New York,” she said after cheers and whistles erupted in the hall.Dudamel said it was too early to lay out his plans for the orchestra, saying he did not want to impose his vision yet. But he reiterated his interest in creating an education program in New York similar to Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, known as YOLA, which is modeled on El Sistema, the Venezuelan social and artistic movement in which he trained.He quoted the Spanish poet and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno in describing the need to do more to connect with residents, particularly in poor neighborhoods: “The freedom of the people is in their culture.” When a reporter suggested he might call the New York version of his youth orchestra “YONY,” Dudamel smiled, saying, “I love the name.”“This is part of my DNA: to work with young people, to work with communities, to bring the orchestra to the community,” he said. “The New York Philharmonic, as the center of the artistic and musical life of this city, has to play a role, a very important role, in education.”Dudamel will be the first Hispanic leader of the Philharmonic in a city where Latinos make up about 29 percent of the population. When a reporter from Telemundo, the Spanish-language network, asked what Dudamel made of this milestone, he said he had not given it much thought. Then he said he hoped his journey from Barquisimeto to some of the world’s most prestigious stages would be an inspiration.“This can be a model so that girls, boys, young people, can have the certainty that dreams can always be achieved,” he said. “You have to work deeply, have a lot of discipline, and a lot of love for what you do, but it can be achieved.”Throughout the day, a recurring topic was Dudamel’s hair, which has been a subject of fascination since he broke onto the international scene in his early 20s.During a reception, a board member, Angela Chen, asked why he kept it shorter now, compared with his early days. “It feels more fresh this way,” he said, moving his fingers through his famous curls, which have started to gray. “One day it will be very white.”Sort of presidential: Dudamel at the ceremonial signing, with the board co-chairs, Peter May, left, and Oscar Tang. Behind him are Gary Ginstling, the orchestra’s executive director, and Deborah Borda.James Estrin/The New York TimesAt the news conference, Dudamel said he was no longer a “young promise” but that he still felt connected to the energy of his youth.“When I was 24 — 23, 24, 25 — it was crazy; I was a wild animal, not only because of my hair,” he said. “I keep that wild animal Gustavo that is always there — only with less hair.”Dudamel at moments seemed to be still processing his coming move to New York, which he has described as one of the most difficult decisions of his life.When he saw the actor and filmmaker Bradley Cooper, a friend, before the news conference, he said being in New York felt surreal.“I don’t know where to place myself right now,” he told Cooper.On his phone, he showed Cooper a photograph he had seen in Geffen Hall of Leonard Bernstein, a storied predecessor at the Philharmonic with whom he is often compared. (Cooper is directing and starring in a coming film about Bernstein.) In the photo, Bernstein is standing in an elevator after a performance with his eyes closed.“That says everything,” Dudamel said. “That exhausted look. He gave everything for music.”At the end of his visit, Borda led Dudamel on a tour of Geffen Hall, which reopened last fall after a $550 million renovation. As Dudamel looked on, she scrolled through a digital display of the Philharmonic’s past music directors — Toscanini, Mahler, Pierre Boulez, Bernstein — comparing the length of their tenures. They stopped by the new restaurant adjacent to the lobby; on the way out, Dudamel, a whisky fan, marveled at a bottle of 18-year-old Macallan.In a brief interview before leaving, Dudamel said he was exhausted but happy to finally celebrate his appointment with the orchestra, which he has conducted 26 times since making his debut in 2007.“I feel that I am blessed in life to have the opportunity to come here — to have the opportunity to extend the family that I have built in Los Angeles,” he said. “There’s a connection between all of this. It’s a big step. It’s beautiful.” More

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      Review: A New Opera Puts Real Emotions in a Fantasy Garden

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      Kate Soper’s “The Romance of the Rose,” which had its long-delayed premiere at Long Beach Opera, showcases her signature quick-shifting eclecticism.SAN PEDRO, Calif. — “What is art?” the composer Kate Soper asked at the beginning of “Ipsa Dixit,” her last big stage work, from 2016.In her tender, whip-smart new opera, “The Romance of the Rose,” which premiered this weekend at Long Beach Opera, she quotes a chunk of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” that poses another query: “What is love?”No one has ever accused Soper of shying away from the big questions. And her works go about answering them studiously but sensuously — with earnestness, wit, whimsy, self-awareness and music that ranges freely among, for a start, Baroque madrigals, power ballads and barbed modernism.In “Ipsa Dixit,” she answers the question “What is art?” with, more or less, the piece’s title: It is whatever I say it is. In “The Romance of the Rose,” the answer to “What is love?” is something like: It’s a lot of conflicting things, in a scary, delicate balance. It’s every thing.Over a decade in the making and based on the medieval epic of the same name — nearly 22,000 lines of octosyllabic Old French couplets — “The Romance of the Rose” adapts some of the poem’s strands while adding inventions of Soper’s own. (She usually writes her librettos, often with interpolations from other authors, ancient to modern.) In an allegorical garden, the Dreamer guides the Lover as she pines for a rose: “What a perfect symbol for a dream of love!”Aroused and confused, the Lover is set upon by the God of Love, Lady Reason and Shame — and all have advice that’s at once persuasive and suspect, compelling and incomplete, about how the Lover should feel, about what love means.As the loose, stylized, funny, often poignant plot progresses, these allegorical characters seem to lose their moorings; in Soper’s world, even stock figures can’t be trusted to maintain their points of view. (This isn’t, or isn’t just, the old battle between head and heart.) The fatal seductiveness of narcissism; ambivalence about performing; the nature of reality — it’s all, ambitiously, here.I should insert what has become a standard caveat about this composer: Describing “The Romance of the Rose” might make it sound dry and bookish, but it isn’t. Soper’s text is so sly and eloquent — “Since the truth’s thus riddled with such tears, the essential question’s not ‘What is the truth?’ but ‘Who cares?’” — and her music so eclectic and quick-shifting that her work keeps you engaged even when you’re a bit baffled. Like her other stage pieces, “Rose” is high culture and low, talky but agile, brainy but — and! — feeling.Few composers are as interested in, or as gifted at, exploring the transitions and the middle ground between speaking and singing, which gives Soper’s works a familial relationship to book-based musical theater. There’s something of “Hadestown” in this new piece’s opera-pop-Broadway amalgam and mythological milieu, even though Soper’s vision is less folksy and more crystalline — more like Sondheim in its precision and cleverness, its laughing-crying lucidity about life’s complications, if not in its sound.Her vision of musicals extends from sumptuous golden-age lyricism through “Phantom of the Opera”-style rock belting to contemporary confessional intimacy, though she’s also unafraid of astringency, complexity and moments of plain noise. There is also the lovely, pared-down tunefulness that gives away Soper’s early-career roots as an aspiring singer-songwriter: She writes in an online essay about “The Romance of the Rose” that the germ of an aching torch-song duet for Idleness and Pleasure (two minor characters who nod toward a Greek chorus), a highlight of the score, dates back to those days.Like a true singer-songwriter, Soper trusts economy of musical expression. Christopher Rountree, Long Beach Opera’s music director, conducts an ensemble of nine, but often the instrumental textures are sparer than even those modest forces. In one memorable passage at the end of the first act, the Dreamer’s elegy is accompanied by the slow calligraphy of a solo viola.Lucas Steele, center, surrounded by cast members in “Rose,” directed by James Darrah, the new head of Long Beach Opera.JJ GeigerIt’s Long Beach Opera’s luck to have ended up with the piece after its premiere — planned for April 2020 at Montclair State University’s Peak Performances series — was canceled by the pandemic.Long Beach, which in 2019 premiered Anthony Davis’s “The Central Park Five” before it went on to win a Pulitzer Prize, has had some internal rockiness in the past year over its commitment to inclusion efforts but also a new artistic director, James Darrah, who has staged “The Romance of the Rose” at the Warner Grand Theater here.Darrah’s production is a mixture of scrappiness and chic, and emphasizes the otherworldliness of Soper’s conception. Prairie T. Trivuth’s set, lit starkly by Pablo Santiago, depicts the garden as a pristine white courtyard dotted with potted plants and, eventually, dripping with blood. Molly Irelan’s costumes, with period cuts, vivid fabrics and sparkling touches, further the opera’s mood of pert pastiche. Its Baroque references connect medieval France to the glittery splendor of 17th-century allegorical court masques.In keeping with Soper’s stylistic variety, the cast comes from a range of musical backgrounds but shares a commitment to making the bountiful, erudite text legible. (The supertitles, for once, aren’t really necessary.) As the Dreamer, Lucas Steele has a sweet voice and Disney-prince ingenuousness with a self-referential wink. Radiating a charming mixture of naïveté and intelligence, Tivoli Treloar has a light mezzo-soprano flexible enough to convey all the Lover’s changes of perspective.As the God of Love, Phillip Bullock travels from airy falsetto to basso profundo depths. Anna Schubert is a fiercely articulate Lady Reason, Laurel Irene a punkish Shame. Tiffany Townsend and Bernardo Bermudez bring rich-toned gusto to Idleness and Pleasure, here a couple of louche lounge lizards.“The Romance of the Rose” isn’t perfect. The piece experiments with giving each of the three main allegorical foils a distinctive live-electronic vocal processing identity — Lady Reason, angular vocoding; the God of Love, echoey reverb; Shame, angry distortion. But even if it had been more perfectly executed, this conceit feels like a complication too many in an already complicated piece.Soper’s previous major stage works, “Here Be Sirens” (2014) and “Ipsa Dixit,” were substantial single acts. Conceiving “The Romance of the Rose” in two acts was Soper setting a new challenge for herself, not just in length but also in structure. What, in theater, should prompt an intermission, and what brings the audience back for more? What hunger in the first act does a second act satisfy; what crisis is resolved?These are questions that “The Romance of the Rose” doesn’t entirely solve. The second act feels like more of the same, with a somewhat blurrier version of the characters having the same debates they had before the break. (The production could be clearer in the final half, too.)Discussing the piece later with the friend I brought to the performance, I thought that Shame, which we learn at the beginning is our “urge for self-annihilation” — “an emissary from the gut to foil both the head and the heart” — might have been more effectively introduced as a crisis at the end of the first act. The war that ensues between her and the rest of the dramatis personae might then have given the second act higher and sharper stakes.Shame’s role in the first act as an equal point in the allegorical triangle surrounding the Lover might be true to the original poem. But in the opera this figure feels like the odd one out, rather than the singular nihilistic force opposing everyone else onstage.It’s a criticism, sure. But the fact that my friend and I spent hours going over what we enjoyed and what we might tweak about “The Romance of the Rose” gives you a sense of the piece and its marvels, its ability to stick in the mind and soul. After all, a lesson of the opera is that, for better or worse, we can’t help wanting to perfect the things we love.The Romance of the RoseThe final performance is on Saturday at the Warner Grand Theater in San Pedro, Calif.; longbeachopera.org. More

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      Friedrich Cerha, 96, Who Finished Another Composer’s Masterpiece, Dies

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      His skill in completing Alban Berg’s “Lulu” almost 40 years after Berg’s death was considered one of the greatest operatic achievements of the 20th century.Friedrich Cerha, an Austrian composer and conductor who was best renowned for taking on the arduous task of completing Alban Berg’s unfinished “Lulu,” and whose skill in the effort confirmed that work as one of the greatest operatic achievements of the 20th century, died on Tuesday in Vienna. He was 96.His death was announced by his publisher, Universal Edition. It did not specify a cause.Mr. Cerha wrote several stage works, of which three — “Baal,” “Der Rattenfänger” and “Der Riese vom Steinfeld” — were produced by the Vienna State Opera. He composed orchestral, chamber and other music that found rare stylistic range within the broad confines of postwar modernism. He was a crucial figure in the rebuilding of the Viennese new-music scene, cofounding and then conducting its leading ensemble, Die Reihe. And he was a dedicated teacher to his students, who included the composer Georg Friedrich Haas.But at least outside Austria, Mr. Cerha was known less for his own work than for his celebrated contribution to another composer’s masterpiece.Berg had not quite finished orchestrating “Lulu” when he died in December 1935, although the opera, a successor to his earlier “Wozzeck,” had already become a cause célèbre for critics of Nazi cultural policies. He had set “Lulu” aside earlier that year to write his Violin Concerto and returned to it in the fall only to be struck down, partway into its third act, with an infected abscess.From its Zurich premiere in 1937 on, “Lulu” was staged in a two-act form that offered evidence of the work’s stature yet disfigured the composer’s theatrical and musical design. But by the early 1960s, scholars led by George Perle had become convinced that Berg had considered “Lulu” all but complete, and that the available materials, including a short score, made a realization both possible and necessary. Berg’s widow, Helene, banned any such thing, and his publisher, Universal Edition, publicly followed her lead. Privately, it did not.Mr. Cerha, meanwhile, had long been interested in the Second Viennese School, of which Berg was a part. Mr. Cerha had studied with former members of Arnold Schoenberg’s circle and had programmed a work by Anton Webern for the debut concert of Die Reihe, in March 1959. In June 1962, Mr. Cerha saw Karl Böhm lead “Lulu” at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna and found the two-act truncation painful to watch. The next day, he went to the offices of Universal Edition, asked for whatever documents they had and set secretly to work.A scene from Mr. Cerha’s completed edition of Berg’s “Lulu,” staged by the Paris Opera in 1979. Colette Masson/Roger-Viollet, via Granger The task was considerable. Nine hundred or so bars of one of history’s most complex scores were left to orchestrate, and although Berg’s intricate structure meant that material from the first two acts could be reused in the third, some imagination was still needed. It took Mr. Cerha until 1974 to finish it, before making further revisions after Mrs. Berg died in 1976.There was pressure, too — far more than most composers faced in their own work. “Lulu” already had a towering reputation, and its effective banning by the Nazis had kept it a political symbol after the war. When the Paris Opera finally staged Mr. Cerha’s edition, on Feb. 24, 1979, it offered “perhaps the most important and glamorous operatic premiere since the end of World War II,” Harold C. Schonberg wrote in a front-page review in The New York Times.Mr. Cerha’s contributions were so successful that he became almost a ghostwriter: He revealed “Lulu” at its full greatness, while shying away from the spotlight.His fellow composers were impressed. Pierre Boulez, who conducted the premiere, said Mr. Cerha had worked “with great care, competence and mastery.” Mr. Perle wrote that “nowhere does one have the impression that a hand other than the composer’s has had to take over.”Gyorgy Ligeti went further, saying in 1986 that Mr. Cerha, a friend, had a “total lack of vanity, which enabled him to enter wholeheartedly into the way of thinking of a congenial yet nevertheless different composer, and to sacrifice thousands of hours, and days, of his own composing.”“No one else,” Ligeti added, “could have done that.”Friedrich Paul Cerha was born in Vienna on Feb. 17, 1926, the only child of Paul and Marie (Falbigel) Cerha. His father was an electrical engineer. Friedrich learned the violin from about age 6 and had written a few compositions by the time of Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938.Like his parents, young Friedrich despised Nazism, but was conscripted first to aid the Luftwaffe in air defense and later, in 1944, into the Wehrmacht. He deserted, was caught, was sent to the front and deserted again, this time walking hundreds of miles south from Göttingen, in the middle of Germany, through the Thuringian Forest and into the mountains of Tirol, where he hid at high altitude in a hut at Lamsenjoch.The experience of fascism, and of his freedom from it, left Mr. Cerha with a lifelong reluctance to adhere to aesthetic dogmas, or even to focus solely on music; he painted, and sculpted a stone chapel in woods near his second home in Maria Langegg. After studying in Vienna at the conservatory and the university, from which he earned a doctorate in 1950, he spent three summers at Darmstadt, Germany, the hothouse of the European avant-garde, but did not lastingly embrace a single compositional school over another.“I have never fanatically advocated artistic goals,” Mr. Cerha told Universal Edition’s magazine in 2012. “I always acted from an inner conviction.”The legacy of the war is particularly audible in “Spiegel,” a frightening array of seven soundscapes for orchestra and tape that was arguably Mr. Cerha’s most important work. Dating from 1960-61, its clouds of sound resemble the far shorter, more static works that Ligeti wrote around the same time, like “Atmosphères,” and it made Mr. Cerha famous.But “Spiegel,” which he wrote without regard for practicality and did not premiere as a cycle until 1972, is also quite different, with narrative elements that add up to a terrifying hour-plus portrayal of disastrous force. In “Spiegel VI,” a maniacal march slams into nervous strings and winds, the brass braying grotesquely in the ensuing carnage; in “Spiegel V,” relentless drumrolls herald a consuming darkness — the abyss.“The pieces were invented in a purely musical way,” Mr. Cerha wrote in notes for a recording on the Kairos label. “It was only long after their completion that I understood the degree to which this work was influenced by the horrors of my war experiences and the limitless joy of freedom that I felt as a deserter in the midst of nature.”His wife, Gertraud Cerha, a musician herself, whom he married in 1951, was the keyboard soloist in the 1960 premiere of a serialist piece for harpsichord and ensemble, “Relazioni fragili.” She survives him, as do two daughters, Ruth and Irina, and two grandchildren.For some critics, the “Lulu” experience seemed to draw out a Bergian expressivity in Mr. Cerha’s style, and some of his later works — “Nacht” for orchestra, say, or his “8 Sätze nach Hölderlin-Fragmenten” for string sextet — indeed have a familiar, muted lyricism to them, though others do not. He bridled at the suggestion, however: His own works were his, alone.“That was very strange,” he told Universal Edition of this purported influence. “Before the third act of ‘Lulu’ had its world premiere, nobody ever connected me to Berg, but in the years after, this suddenly happened all the time. People detected a connection to Berg, which is of course nonsense.” More

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      Review: ‘In Seven Days’ Conjures the Creation, With Video

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      The New York Philharmonic, conducted by Ruth Reinhardt, played Thomas Adès’s “In Seven Days,” for piano, orchestra and moving image.When will the New York Philharmonic stop importing all things Los Angeles?First, New York poached the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s chief executive — then, earlier this month, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s conductor.And concerts this week bring more: images of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, projected over the stage of David Geffen Hall. It’s getting ridiculous!Not that you would recognize Disney Hall in this form. The images of the building have been abstracted as part of the film accompaniment to Thomas Adès’s 2008 piano concerto “In Seven Days,” which the (New York) Philharmonic is performing with the pianist Kirill Gerstein under the baton of Ruth Reinhardt, in her debut with the orchestra.Adès’s music here, some of the best and most moving he has written, was conceived alongside Tal Rosner’s video. The half-hour piece is described by its creators as a “concerto for piano with moving image,” drawing on footage of Disney Hall and the Royal Festival Hall in London, the two spaces for which it was commissioned.Some of the film is lovely; I like the evocation of a shadowy, glinting jungle, and shifting, expanding geometric shapes conjure the jazzy, mid-20th-century look of Saul Bass’s movie title sequences. But on Thursday the endless kaleidoscope fractals mostly felt like a busy albatross around the score’s neck.And what a score. This is Adès at his most confident, elemental and ingenious. Brilliantly, the chaos of genesis at the start is not immediately chaotic, but rather an assertive, spiky motif with the slightest off-kilter dip to the rhythm, like something trying to catch its breath, to gather itself. The darkness of the universe is a brooding, gorgeous aria; the creation of the stars, a superhigh undulation amid glassiness, scattered through the piano and orchestra.Grim density flows into shining expanses, but this composer’s changeability and the creativity of his instrumental combinations keep it from ever sounding saccharine or sodden. Gerstein, who has played the piece many times, calmly negotiated its furious runs, granitic chords and tender wandering. For an encore, he gave Adès’s arrangement of the lonesome Berceuse from his opera “The Exterminating Angel.”The concerto offers a tantalizing impression of organic development and proliferation. That same quality was present — if in a quite different, more formally minimal vein — on Monday at Geffen’s new, intimate Sidewalk Studio in Julius Eastman’s “Femenine,” a piece from the mid-1970s that has been central to this composer’s posthumous rediscovery.At the Sidewalk Studio space, members of the Talea Ensemble and the Harlem Chamber Players performed Julius Eastman’s “Femenine.”Chris LeeSmall cells of material — including annunciatory themes as compelling as Adès’s — repeat (and repeat and repeat) and slowly evolve through the 70-minute work, over the ceaseless wintry shake of sleigh bells. The performers on Monday, a group drawn from the Talea Ensemble and the Harlem Chamber Players, juxtaposed, as Eastman intended, rhythmic alertness and regularity with woozy, oozing, shaggy sprawl.The Philharmonic can certainly play the Adès concerto, but its textures were not as clear or vivid on Thursday as they can be: the darknesses not as brutal nor the transparencies as shimmering. Grazyna Bacewicz’s motoric Overture for Orchestra, which opened the program, felt thick, too.After intermission, Dvorak’s Fifth Symphony was sometimes overly forceful. Reinhardt gave welcome prominence to the winds, but this orchestra doesn’t tend to dance gracefully, which made the internal movements heavy. By the Finale, though, more drama was made out of contrasting dynamics, with a candied, fairy-tale character to both the wistfulness and the high spirits.At the start of the concert, Reinhardt told the audience that the Philharmonic wanted to respond to the recent earthquake in Turkey and Syria, a lovely idea. But that response turned out to be an awkwardly played rendition of a cliché: the second movement of Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D, best known as the “Air on the G String.”Couldn’t the ensemble have simply dedicated the whole concert — or at least Adès’s concerto, a musical depiction of the wonders and terrors of nature — to those affected?New York PhilharmonicThis program is repeated through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More