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      Clara Schumann and Florence Price Get Their Due at Carnegie Hall

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      Two works by these composers have been marginalized in classical music, but they were never forgotten, as their histories show.Two composers marginalized by history will take center stage at Carnegie Hall this week.On Friday, the Philadelphia Orchestra will perform Florence Price’s Symphony No. 3 and Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto, which is making its Carnegie debut with Beatrice Rana as the soloist 187 years after its premiere.Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Philadelphia ensemble’s music director, called the concert, which sandwiches those two pieces between classics by Ravel, an example of varying artistic perspectives. “A work of art is a viewpoint from an artist,” he said in an interview. “And if you have only one part of society that always gets their viewpoint heard, we constantly hear one viewpoint. It’s so important to have different viewpoints.”As a result of rediscoveries and shifting approaches to programming, works by Schumann and Price have migrated to classical music’s mainstream in recent years, with attention from major orchestras, especially Philadelphia, and recordings on prestige labels like Deutsche Grammophon. But they were never truly forgotten, as their histories show.Schumann: Piano Concerto in A minorIn 1835, the piano concerto by Schumann (then Clara Wieck, not yet married to the composer Robert Schumann) premiered at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, Germany, under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn. She was just 16, but already famous as a composer and virtuosic performer. The work earned ovations, and later, the Viennese demanded three performances in one season. But after Robert Schumann’s journal, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, among others, reviewed it as a “lady’s” composition, she shelved it.The concerto’s second edition didn’t come about until 1970, according to Nancy B. Reich’s biography “Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman.” (The pianist Michael Ponti is believed to have made the first recording in 1971.) Decades of work by musicians and musicologists culminated in Schumann’s widely celebrated 200th birthday in 2019. But despite new recordings by Ragna Schirmer and Isata Kanneh-Mason, who recently debuted the concerto with the Baltimore Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, major orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, continue to ignore it.Some artists have shrugged off the concerto, which Schumann completed when she was 15, as the work of a teenager. But it has had a long-ranging influence on some of the most beloved piano concertos that came after it.“It was written at a pivotal point in the history of the genre,” Joe Davies wrote in “Clara Schumann Studies,” published by Cambridge University Press last year. “It invites a powerful reimagining of what the concerto can be and do. Stylistically and expressively, she put her own stamp on the genre.”In an interview, Rana, who called the concerto “a genius work in many ways,” said: “I think that it’s very, very underestimated — the intellectual value of this concerto in the history of music.” Schumann’s nontraditional, through-composed form, seamless without breaks between movements, Reich has noted, bears the influence of Mendelssohn’s First Piano Concerto. Rana called it as revolutionary as concertos by Liszt and Robert Schumann, both of which it predates by over a decade.Yannick Nézet-Séguin leading the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie in a program featuring Florence Price’s music in February.Steve J. ShermanThe concerto’s powerful march opening, deceptively simple in its orchestral unison, contains the five-note motif that unites the themes across its three movements. In its transformative second movement Romanze, a tacit orchestra listens to the piano sing an exquisite love duet with a solo cello — an instrument that both Robert Schumann and Brahms featured in their concerto’s solo movements. Its final, longest movement displays the full breadth of Clara’s pianistic prowess and personality.Alexander Stefaniak, the author of “Becoming Clara Schumann,” writes that Robert emulated her form and improvisatory style; Robert also inverted Clara’s piano entrance in his piano concerto (also in A minor). Based on that, you could consider her reach extending to Grieg’s and Rachmaninoff’s first concertos, which echo Robert Schumann’s. Brahms might even have been inspired by her third movement Polonaise in his First Concerto’s third-movement Hungarian dance.“You can see she was a great virtuoso because what she writes is very challenging for the piano,” Rana said.At Carnegie, Nézet-Séguin intentionally avoided the cliché of programming Schumann with her husband’s work. For him, she and Price stand on their own. As composers, they had “the self-confidence to believe in what they wanted to bring to the world,” he said. “They are works that have no equivalent.”Price: Symphony No. 3 in C minorPrice’s Third Symphony is a work rooted in the traditions of symphonic Romanticism and classical Black composition, simultaneously adding to and expanding the expectations of orchestral technique. “A cross-section of Negro life and psychology” is how she described it in a letter to Sergei Koussevitsky, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s music director, in 1941. That was a year after the symphony’s premiere, with Valter Poole and the Michigan W.P.A. Symphony, which was positively received in the Detroit press and even earned a mention in Eleanor Roosevelt’s syndicated column, “My Day.”Price’s music, Nézet-Séguin said, is “like a great wine that really ages very well.” He and the Philadelphia Orchestra released a Grammy Award-winning recording of her First and Third Symphonies last year. Since then, he added, “We keep exploring all the finesse and the detail and the language.”Philadelphia’s recording of the Third is the most high-profile, though not the first. (That was by Apo Hsu and the Women’s Philharmonic, released in 2001.) The album comes after decades of artists championing Price’s work, including luminaries like Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price, as well as present-day virtuosos like Michelle Cann, Samantha Ege and Randall Goosby, whose live recording of the violin concertos with the Philadelphia Orchestra will be released on the Decca label next year.Rae Linda Brown, in her book “The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price,” described the Third Symphony as a reflection of “a maturity of style and a new attitude toward Black musical materials.” Rather than applying African American music idioms through melody and harmony alone, Price incorporates conventions of form, texture, rhythm and timbre, an approach she also used in her Concerto in One Movement (1934), Violin Concerto No. 1 (1939) and Violin Concerto No. 2 (1952). Her percussion section calls for snare drum, cymbals, triangle, orchestral bells, castanets, wood blocks and sand blocks, to name a few; and she expands the brasses and woodwinds beyond the sets of twos from her earlier works. The first and final movements feature more contrapuntal motion and tonal ambiguity.Nézet-Séguin said that during a rehearsal, a Philadelphia Orchestra member mentioned that Price probably played a lot of Bach, and that the third movement Juba-Allegro’s melody seemed to be a reference to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3. That speaks to another core aspect of her style: her use of the African American musical procedure of signifyin(g), in which older works and forms are referred to and transformed in new, unexpected directions.The juba dance movement of Price’s Third features asymmetrical phrasing, rhythmic complexity and interaction between sections. The cool trio section, with habanera rhythms and a muted trumpet, and her use of a modified jazz progression for the main theme, reflects a creative palette that crosses time, region and culture.UNLIKE SCHUMANN’S CONCERTO, Price’s symphony is not making its Carnegie Hall debut. But it has been performed there only once before — by the Gateway Music Festival Orchestra this year. By contrast, according to the hall’s archives, the Ravel works on Friday’s program, “Le Tombeau de Couperin” and “Boléro,” have been performed there 48 and 114 times.“We’ve had too much of the white European male for too long,” Nézet-Séguin said, adding that it was time to aim “for a certain kind of balance in terms of what we see on our concert stage.”Nézet-Séguin is an established Price champion by now; he and the Philadelphians brought her works to five European cities this summer alone. And Rana can say the same about Schumann, having toured the concerto with Nézet-Séguin, and having prepared a recording to be released in February.“The only way to give dignity to a piece is to listen to it,” Rana said. “It needs to be played. It needs to be heard.”Sarah Fritz, a musicologist who is writing a book about Clara Schumann, teaches at the Westminster Conservatory of Music at Rider University.A. Kori Hill is a musicologist, freelance writer and staff member of the nonprofit ArtsWave. She lives in Cincinnati. More

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      Music Thwarted by the Holocaust Will Now Be Published

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      G. Schirmer will publish more than 400 pieces by Jewish composers, allowing them to be heard on a wider scale.As fascism spread in Europe in the 1930s, Jewish artists and composers struggled to have their music heard. They faced persecution by the Nazis, and were banned by orchestras and cultural institutions because of their Jewish identity. Many fled abroad.As a result, hundreds of works by promising composers were lost or neglected. But a group of researchers and publishers is now working to ensure that their music is heard again.G. Schirmer, a major music publishing house, and Exilarte, an organization at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, announced on Thursday an initiative to publish more than 400 pieces by Jewish composers whose careers were disrupted by the Holocaust, making it possible for them to be performed and recorded on a wider scale.“Our understanding of the 20th century is incomplete without these composers,” Robert Thompson, the president of G. Schirmer, said in an interview. He added that it was vital to guarantee that “composers who were silenced during World War II are not forgotten and their legacies are restored.”The list of music to be published includes more than 300 songs, 100 chamber music pieces, 50 orchestral works and other pieces, in genres including classical, opera, jazz and film music. The first works will be published next spring.“The Nazis wanted a world in which the music of Jewish composers would have been banned and forgotten,” Gerold W. Gruber, Exilarte’s founder and chairman, said in a statement. “It is therefore our obligation to counteract these policies by rescuing the music of exiled composers from oblivion.”Walter Arlen, whose family fled persecution in 1939, is among the composers to be published.Exilarte ArchiveMore than two dozen composers are represented. They include Walter Arlen, a 102-year-old who was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna. He longed to study music professionally in Austria, but he and his relatives fled in 1939 to escape persecution by the Nazis.Arlen’s songs and piano pieces will be among the first to be published by G. Schirmer. In a telephone interview from his home in California, Arlen said that he was humbled his works would reach a broader audience.“It’s a lovely experience,” he said. “It’s not easy to be published. I lived long enough to be part of it, to see it happen.”He added that it was important that Jewish voices are remembered. “Six and a half million Jews were killed in the Holocaust,” he said, “including a lot of composers and musicians.”Other notable artists whose work will be published include Julius Burger, a Vienna-born pianist, composer and conductor, who fled to the United States in 1938; and Walter Bricht, whose career in Austria was cut short after it was revealed that he had Jewish grandparents, and who also left for the United States in ’38.The initiative builds on longstanding efforts by Exilarte, which was founded in 2006 to recover, restore and study music banned by the Nazis. Michael Haas, a senior researcher at Exilarte, said that the works by these composers represent an overlooked part of the repertory.“It has the potential to be enormously appealing to the public and to musicians,” he said in an interview. “This is an opportunity to start investigating an area of 20th century music which has been completely unrecognized.” More

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      Review: Gustavo Dudamel Comes to Town, Megawatt Appeal on Display

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      Dudamel led his Los Angeles Philharmonic in two concerts at Carnegie Hall that included a scorching New York premiere by Gabriela Ortiz.Over two nights at Carnegie Hall, Gustavo Dudamel defied expectations.Dudamel is the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic — one of the country’s top orchestras — a collaborator of choice for pop artists like Billie Eilish and the voice of Wolfgang Amadeus Trollzart in the animated film “Trolls World Tour.”But at Carnegie, this celebrity conductor refused to take a solo bow, choosing instead to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Los Angeles players and absorb one standing ovation after another as part of their rank. The only thing that made him pop — besides, of course, his megawatt charisma, corkscrew curls and elegantly powerful restraint on the podium — was his white dress shirt amid a sea of black.Dudamel’s personal appeal and his ability to fire a city’s — and donors’ — enthusiasm for classical music have landed him on wish lists for the music directorship of the New York Philharmonic if he doesn’t renew his contract with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which ends in 2026. (Jaap van Zweden, New York’s maestro, is leaving in 2024.)On Tuesday night, Dudamel conducted the New York premiere of Gabriela Ortiz’s blazing violin concerto “Altar de Cuerda,” with the stupendous soloist María Dueñas, and Mahler’s First Symphony. The next night, he and his players unveiled two more local premieres — Ortiz’s brief “Kauyumari” and, with the violinist Anne Akiko Meyers, Arturo Márquez’s “Fandango,” along with Copland’s Third Symphony.The new pieces brought undeniable pizazz to Dudamel’s tightly conceived programs, in which passing similarities among the works encouraged listeners to draw connections.“Altar de Cuerda,” or “String Altar” — the seventh of Ortiz’s “Altar” pieces — set a high bar that was unsurpassed over the two nights. It begins with a scorching statement in the violin, with whacks of triangle and crotales (spooky sounding cymbals) that rise off the stage like puffs of smoke in a roiling brew. At a few points, the woodwind and brass musicians played tuned crystal cups that conjured ritualistic magic.Little of what Ortiz wrote for the solo violinist is classically beautiful, yet Dueñas was wholly captivating. Her tone was scratchy and possessed in fiendish runs, leaps and double and triple stops. She could also produce brilliance and high-frequency top notes that pinged like artificial sound effects. Low-pitched trills had a guttural quality, and she slashed at the violin so furiously she could have drawn blood from its strings.Dueñas, the soloist in Ortiz’s “Altar de Cuerda,” was wholly captivating.Chris LeeFor the cadenza, Dueñas played a series of repeated figures in a free tempo, like an actor teasing out the subtleties of a line with different inflections. The emotions, though, weren’t merely joy and sadness; there was also worry, self-consciousness, maybe even shame.Remarkably, Dueñas is just 19 years old.Dudamel expertly controlled the coiled tension of “Altar de Cuerda,” a feat he repeated with the Ortiz piece that opened the second night’s program. He clearly connects with her compositions; he organized the irrepressible energy of “Kauyumari” into a churning engine of sound, and its fanfares presaged the arrival of Copland’s symphony — with its interpolation of “Fanfare for the Common Man” — after intermission.Where “Kauyumari” draws on a Mexican creation story, Márquez’s “Fandango” draws on that country’s music, turning the orchestra into a lively rhythm section that allowed Meyers’s violin to sing with a silky tone, even if her passagework could be difficult to hear.The Mahler and Copland symphonies, the evenings’ longest pieces, took pride of place after intermission on their programs. Each begins with the falling interval of a fourth in the woodwinds, supported by strings, but the effect couldn’t be more different. In the Mahler, there’s traditionally an eerie evocation, a world of frost gently warming to life. Dudamel’s rendition felt plain; he seemed much more at ease with the hopeful yearning of Copland’s open octaves — upright, columnar, blindingly bright.In both symphonies, Dudamel subverted tradition. Conductors tend to emphasize the grotesque elements of Mahler’s First, but Dudamel aligned himself with the flute’s fluttery bird song over the clarinet’s bizarre, intriguing cuckoo calls and the heroic horns over the blaring, nasally trumpets. In the Copland, you would never have recognized the second movement’s almost twee character in Dudamel’s insistent, spirited treatment of its delicately interlocking motivic cells.Ultimately, he brought the pieces closer together — making the Mahler a little more human in its warm, unrushed spaciousness, and the Copland a little more mysterious.Coming out for an encore on Wednesday, Dudamel held up his index finger, as if to say, “OK, we’ll do one more,” and the audience roared. After a brief, whirring, mischievous selection from Copland’s ballet “Billy the Kid,” Dudamel exited, this time for good, and the lights went up.It was the kind of tease that leaves audiences wanting more. And with the question of the New York Philharmonic hanging in the air, it remains to be seen how much more New Yorkers will get.Los Angeles PhilharmonicPerformed on Tuesday and Wednesday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      She Knew the Cello. The Acting She Learned With Cate Blanchett.

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      Sophie Kauer was a cellist studying for a degree when a friend urged her to audition for “Tár.” She watched Michael Caine videos on acting and dove right in.Lydia Tár commands with the gravitational pull of a planet: Everyone and everything, including the camera in “Tár,” Todd Field’s epic about a fictional maestro, lives in her shadow. But when Lydia (Cate Blanchett), who has been accused of sexual harassment, sets her sights on Olga, a rising Russian cellist, she is confronted with a foil of sorts. Is the young woman disarmingly naïve or particularly cunning?In reality, Sophie Kauer, who plays Olga, is a British-German cellist who, after responding to a vague open casting call practically on a lark, found herself months later plunked down in front of Blanchett shooting two-hander scenes in Berlin. She was 19 and had never acted in her life.“Sometimes I feel like everything’s happening backwards,” Kauer, now 21, said recently on a video call from a professor’s classroom at the Norwegian Academy of Music, where she is studying for a classical music performance degree. “I’ve kind of just been dropped into the thick of it, which is both wonderful and so weird at the same time.”Kauer appeared grateful, dazed and remarkably well-adjusted about the film and the attention. She has been meticulous about scheduling classes around press duties to maintain her school’s mandatory 80 percent attendance rate.Born in London, she picked up the cello at 8 and has always been naturally driven — she speaks five languages, and for early auditions developed her Russian accent through YouTube videos. (After she was cast, two dialect coaches took over.)“If I want to do something, then I’ll just do it,” Kauer said, not with arrogance but rather the air of someone who is self-assured about her passions. Music, she emailed after we spoke, “has been my absolute rock through everything. But what I really don’t like is being put in a box and told that classical music is all I am allowed to do or I am not sufficiently serious about my career.”Kauer spoke about the casting process, working with Blanchett, and what she thinks about that Juilliard scene. These are edited excerpts from our interview.‘Tár’: A Timely Backstage DramaCate Blanchett plays a world-famous conductor who is embroiled in a #MeToo drama in the latest film by the director Todd Field.Review: “We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist; we care about her because she’s art,” our critic writes about the film’s protagonist.An Elusive Subject: Blanchett has stayed one step ahead of audiences by constantly staying in motion. In “Tár,” she is as inscrutable as ever.Back Into the Limelight: The film marks Field’s return to directing, 16 years after “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children” made waves.Big-Screen Aesthetics: “Tár” was among several movies at the New York Film Festival that offered reflections on the rarefied worlds of classical music and visual art.What has your life been like these past few weeks?I’m still getting the hang of all of this. Every interview I do is completely different and I learn so much from it. I just think it’s so surreal that someone wants to talk to me. [Laughs]How did you become involved in the film?My friend sends me a casting call that has been posted in our school Facebook group, saying, “Look, they’re looking for a young cellist who could do a Russian accent and feels comfortable in front of a camera. I think you should apply for this.” And I was like, “Oh, but I don’t do any acting. I wouldn’t get it.” And she was like, “Oh, just apply. It’ll be fun.”I wasn’t really thinking about what size the role was. I had a Zoom audition with [Field] and I was like, “This is so cool. I’m going to tell my grandkids that I did a Zoom audition with Todd Field.” Then I got a call asking if I could send a recording of the piece you hear Olga playing in the film, the Elgar Cello Concerto. I had played it before, but I had to get it back in my fingers in like a day and send it straight away. They were really cryptic the week after. It wasn’t until I actually was put on a Zoom call with Avy Kaufman [a casting director] and Todd that I found out I had got the part. No one had actually explained it to me.Kauer in the film. It’s not clear whether her character is naïve or cunning. “That’s the thing — you are not meant to know,” she said.Focus FeaturesDid you have any acting experience?When the occasional Shakespeare compulsory play came around [in school], I’d play the noble man in the background with the painted-on beard who says “Aye” three times or something like that. [Laughs] That was the extent of it.Michael Caine did these lessons on film acting [available on YouTube]. That was very technical, but I picked up a lot. I kind of figured it out as I went along. When I would have days or hours off, I asked Todd if I would be allowed to watch everyone else act their scenes. I was trying to pick up everything that they were doing,What was it like to go from no acting experience to suddenly working opposite Cate Blanchett?I remember I saw her for the first time she put out her hand and she said, “Hi, I’m Cate.” And you’re just like, “I know!” [Laughs] And then I had to [rehearse with] her after having met her five minutes before.I quickly learned that she’s one of the world’s loveliest people, and she’s so supportive and generous. I would even go as far to say that I learned to act from her and Todd.Olga has a very specific dynamic with Lydia. She seems to be the only one Lydia can’t fully control. Why is that?That’s the thing — you are not meant to know. We have no idea if Olga was just super naïve and very caught up with her life going exactly to plan and her achieving her wildest dreams. Or if she’s super calculating and knows exactly what she’s doing. Part of me would like to think that she’s smart, and the other part of me wants to think that she’s careless and young and kind of free. None of us actually really know the entirety of our characters. I don’t think Todd does either. What do you make of how the film examines notions of power in the world of classical music?The release of this film is very timely because the Independent Society of Musicians just released a study saying that sexual harassment, bullying and racism is at its all-time worst in the classical music industry, and that people feel like they can’t speak out about it because they’re freelancers. And when they do speak out, they face repercussions and are not rebooked.It’s perfect that this film is coming out now. I also think the fact that it’s a woman in a position that a man would stereotypically be in is really good, and in a way is slightly less offensive. People kind of just see the problem for what it is, rather than getting offended.The film has been discussed at length within the framework of the culture wars, in particular with the scene at Juilliard when a student expresses discomfort playing music written by straight white men. Lydia has no patience for him. As someone in these classrooms, do you have sympathies for either side in that Juilliard scene?Of course I do. We need to be open to discussing it and including all these new voices that have been unheard for so long — music by women or including more cultures and ethnicities. And we can’t just forget what has gone before because this is what our whole history is based on. I can’t wake up tomorrow and say, sorry, I’m never going to play a piece written by a white male composer again. Because unfortunately that is just how history is, and that is the vast majority of our music.You can’t exclude the majority of music history because you don’t identify with it. But I also do think that the point he makes is very relevant. There is very little representation for a lot of genders and ethnicities and cultures, and classical music may have been a bit slower to evolve. But it is evolving. Every time I watch, my sympathy for each character changes. Sometimes I think Lydia is totally right, and other times I’m like, no, Max, he’s the one who’s totally right.What’s next for you?I am still in the middle of studying for my music degree, so I have a lot of stuff to catch up on. I’m looking forward to being a musician again. But I did enjoy the acting a lot. I’m still very young, so I’m kind of seeing what happens and taking it one thing at a time. I would like to hope that this isn’t my last project. It was really quite something. More

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      Finishing Bach’s Organ Music, With Help From 118 Composers

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      A new project completes Bach’s plans for his kaleidoscopic “Orgelbüchlein,” with a 21st-century touch.One of the most enduring mysteries that Johann Sebastian Bach left for us comes in the form of his “Orgelbüchlein,” a collection of chorale preludes for organ.From autograph manuscripts that detail titles of the chorales, it’s clear that Bach planned to compose 164 of them, spread throughout the Christian liturgical year. But he wrote only 46 such pieces, leaving 118 mysteriously untouched.A completely satisfactory explanation doesn’t exist. But a 15-year project to finish what Bach began — from a decidedly 21st-century perspective — is nearing its conclusion: The whole collection recently premiered in Britain, and Edition Peters will soon publish the sheet music in full.“The project is nothing if not kaleidoscopic,” said William Whitehead, who curated the new collection. “It’s eclectic in capital letters.”Where pianists who play Bach’s music have “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” organists have the “Orgelbüchlein” — German for “Little Organ Book,” which consists of the chorale preludes BWV 599-644. Today, the “Orgelbüchlein,” as close as Bach ever came to a full hymnal, is a cornerstone of the organ repertory.As a teaching manual and a compositional model, “the ‘Orgelbüchlein’ has influenced composers ever since Bach taught the music to his pupils,” said Russell Stinson, an emeritus professor of music at Lyon College and the author of a monograph on the collection. “Certain works from Johannes Brahms’s ‘Eleven Chorale Preludes for Organ’ (Op. 122) unmistakably bear the stamp of Bach’s ‘Orgelbüchlein.’”The exercise of taking a single-verse chorale melody and turning it into a brief, often elaborate prelude, was followed by composers including Robert Schumann, Max Reger and Anton Webern. Evidence exists of a setting of Bach’s “O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort” by Webern from 1906, at the prompting of his teacher Arnold Schoenberg.Whitehead’s own “Orgelbüchlein” project was inspired by a 17-year-old student of his who wrote an “Orgelbüchlein”-style chorale prelude on the English carol “Of the Father’s Heart Begotten” about 15 years ago.Bach planned to write 164 chorale preludes for the collection but completed only 46.Fine Art Images/Heritage Images, via Getty ImagesThe title page of Bach’s “Orgelbüchlein” from the collection of the Berlin State Library.Fine Art Images/Heritage Images, via Getty Images“I remember listening to it thinking: If this 17-year-old kid can do this, why can’t we get the cream of European composers to put their minds to this task, and see if we can fill in all these tantalizing gaps?” Whitehead said. The finished collection features a host of eminent composers, representing a range of aesthetics: Gerald Barry, John Rutter, Louis Andriessen, Thea Musgrave and Kalevi Aho all respond to the same brief. So did the American musician Nico Muhly.The collection started as a collaboration between the organ and composition departments of Trinity College London, where Whitehead was teaching at the time. After getting a few established composers on board (Giles Swayne and Judith Bingham were early supporters), it became clear to Whitehead that the project was worth seeing through completely.That started what Whitehead called an “archaeological expedition” — searching for the hymns and plainchants Bach intended to set but that have since disappeared or gone out of fashion. The research also involved consulting multiple existing editions of Bach’s “Orgelbüchlein,” to which Whitehead and the project’s academic adviser, John Scott Whiteley, have contributed a new discovery: a single held note, added to the tenor voice in the penultimate bar of “Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten” (BWV 642), that is currently omitted from modern editions.Whitehead organized thousands of notes contributed by 118 composers, all of which are separated into themed volumes. (The third, “Catechism, Penitence and Communion,” was released at the end of September.) Coming up with an assignment for contributors was difficult; leaving it at “something modern in your own style that reflects the ethos of the ‘Orgelbüchlein’” seemed too sparse, Whitehead said.The key to success, Whitehead said, was to find “a single idea pursued to the ultimate degree.” He added, “Many composers manifestly told me they found it a very difficult task indeed.”Whitehead also sought contributions from figures outside the world of contemporary composition: figures like Andreas Fischer and John Butt, who are more commonly associated with research or performance. A variety of responses followed accordingly. Andrew Keeling’s chorale, for example, took inspiration from reggae; James O’Donnell contributed a deft Brahms imitation; the baritone and composer Roderick Williams chose to reflect the quotidian in what Whitehead described as a “wonky tango.”From a decidedly 21st-century perspective, the finished collection features a host of eminent composers, representing a range of aesthetics.Julian Guidera“Contributing as a composer to a project such as this is so hugely intimidating,” Williams, who set “Ich weiss ein Blümlein hübsch und fein,” said in an email. He added, “There was never any point in trying to replicate Bach’s invention, his contrapuntal skill or the theological profundity of his response. So I chose a different tack; comparing our digital 21st century to Bach’s age suggested a response from me that reflects some of today’s values (or lack thereof).”Whitehead has been less daunted, and wears the implications of completing Bach lightly. “Once you’ve taken the ‘Orgelbüchlein’ out of the church setting, why not recreate the ethos in a secular way or jocular way?” he said. “Nearly all of the pieces are in a musical style Bach wouldn’t immediately recognize, so, there’s a kind of distancing ‘ab initio’ in the project.”For others, like the composer Roxanna Panufnik, who contributed a setting of Severus Gastorius’s melody “Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan,” the project was an opportunity to bring her closer to Bach. “For me, he is the master,” she said in an email. “His music always, without fail, instills a feeling that all is well in the world, and I feel his harmonic language is more Romantic than that of the Romantics.”Whitehead made a similar point when he said that “the ‘Orgelbüchlein’ pieces are dense technical exercises on one level, but are poetic explorations of symbolism, too — if you’ve defined ‘affekt’ in the rather general way, that it’s a mood picture.” Panufnik’s approach was to avoid close study of the text in favor of her own independent harmonization of the set chorale, one of a number of varied responses to Whitehead’s hope of creating what he described as a “unified sense of ‘affekt.’”Finding emotional unity across over a hundred composers was always going to be impossible, but contributors seemed buoyed by that fact. “Anything that brings our wonderfully and stylistically diverse composer community together is a good thing,” Panufnik said, adding, “I feel we should all be collaborating on projects more often.” More

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      Review: A Conductor Takes a Victory Lap With Her Orchestra

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      Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla has returned to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, now as a guest, for a tour that stopped at Carnegie Hall.When Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, a rapidly rising young Lithuanian conductor, announced last year that she would step down from her post as the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s music director, her statement had the euphemistic wording of a breakup.“This is a deeply personal decision,” she said at the time, “reflecting my desire to step away from the organizational and administrative responsibilities of being a music director at this particular moment in my life and focusing more on my purely musical activities.”But she was being honest: An outlier in classical music, at 36 she would rather dedicate time to her own interests and her growing family than be tied to an orchestra. When I met her in January, as she was preparing a new production of Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen” in Munich as part of a year dedicated to various iterations of that opera, she said lightheartedly, “I’m not sure the big orchestras will be interested in having me if I say I’ll do only ‘Vixen’ for the whole season.”If more proof of Gražinytė-Tyla’s sincerity were needed, she has also delivered on the final part of her statement that “we shall continue to make music together in the coming years.” She is touring with the Birmingham, England, ensemble, now as its principal guest conductor. One of their stops was at Carnegie Hall on Saturday night: a program that was something of a victory lap not only for her six-season tenure with these players, but also for the group’s pandemic-delayed centennial celebrations from 2020.Among those celebrations was a series of commissions that included Thomas Adès’s “The Exterminating Angel” Symphony, a four-movement adaptation of his 2016 opera that had its New York premiere on Saturday.“The Exterminating Angel” is one of the great operas of our time — a work of wicked humor and dark beauty that befits both the 1962 Luis Buñuel film that inspired it and the overwhelming dread and instability we try to live with today. (Now, its story of surreal, indefinite imprisonment in a single room comes off as prescient and all too familiar.) The sound world Adès conjures throughout is dramaturgically airtight: shifting harmonies, the eeriness of an ondes Martenot, dense forces of cosmic immensity.It’s a lot to take in, and there have been few opportunities; “The Exterminating Angel” is an expensive production, with a sprawling principal cast and an orchestra of Wagnerian heft. Adès conducted the American premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in 2017, and given the house’s unreliable continued support of contemporary work, however successful, it’s difficult to imagine a revival any time soon.Thankfully, Adès has made further music from the score: the solo piano Berceuse, written for Kirill Gerstein, and this symphony, which cleverly echoes the opera without excerpting it. Gone is the eerie ondes Martenot, though it lives on in swinging glissandos in the strings; still intact, however, is the opera’s excess and horror, made all the more unsettling by the orchestra’s coolly crisp, virtually objective delivery on Saturday.The first movement, “Entrances,” nods at the grotesquerie and layered textures of the opening scene; “March,” from an interlude between Acts I and II, could just as easily be called “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Firing Squad,” with martial terrors reminiscent of Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony. The grim lyricism of Adès’s love songs and lullabies returns with another Berceuse, followed by the finale, “Waltzes,” a rhapsodic assemblage that evolves into a relentless danse macabre analogue to the opera itself.Had the symphony not come after an intermission, it would have been a whiplash response to the work that opened the program: Elgar’s sparely orchestrated and often quiet Cello Concerto in E minor, featuring Sheku Kanneh-Mason as the soloist. He’s an expressive musician, who defaults to a wide, emotive vibrato — especially in his encore, a harmonious arrangement of Bach’s “Komm, süsser Tod” for five cellists. Gražinytė-Tyla deferred to him as the concerto’s narrator, with modest accompaniment and rarely blooming grandeur.And a compelling narrator he was. Kanneh-Mason plays with the seeming spontaneity that can come only from extreme discipline, but also a freedom that occasionally slides into flawed intonation. And in a work as plain-spoken as the Elgar, his elevated articulation was more Shakespeare than, say, the Chekhov it should have been. But all that could be forgiven for the sheer charisma of his performance.The most traditional showcase of the Birmingham ensemble’s sound under Gražinytė-Tyla was in Debussy’s “La Mer,” which closed the evening in a transparent interpretation that revealed the piece’s rich, subtly maximal orchestration. Gražinytė-Tyla’s reading wasn’t the most volatile, but it was revealing in its clarity, balancing texture upon texture below a gracefully buoyant melody in the brasses or winds.Players in every section of the orchestra responded to her gestures — sometimes efficiently small, sometimes evocative of a swerve or plunge — with lived-in ease. Gražinytė-Tyla might not be attached to them full time, but neither is she fully detached. Whatever she has decided to do, to reconcile her own interests with that of this orchestra, it’s working.City of Birmingham Symphony OrchestraPerformed on Saturday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Geoff Nuttall, First Among Equals in Acclaimed Quartet, Dies at 56

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      With the St. Lawrence Quartet, he played with such enthusiasm that often he swept himself from his seat. At the Spoleto Festival USA, he was a shaping force.Geoff Nuttall, a charismatic musician who played boldly as the first violinist of the acclaimed St. Lawrence String Quartet for more than three decades, and who was widely admired as the leader of the chamber music series at the Spoleto Festival USA, died on Wednesday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 56.The cause was pancreatic cancer, the quartet’s management company, David Rowe Artists, said.Mr. Nuttall founded the St. Lawrence in Toronto in 1989 with the violinist Barry Shiffman, the violist Lesley Robertson and the cellist Marina Hoover. Training with the fabled Tokyo and Emerson quartets and taking first prize at the Banff International String Quartet Competition in Canada in 1992, they came to prominence quickly and distinctively, with Mr. Nuttall first among the group’s equals.“The quartet’s stage manner was hip and casual,” though it had “an unmistakable seriousness of intent,” the critic Alex Ross wrote in The New York Times after its New York debut at the 92nd Street Y in 1992. “The performance had a dangerous, unchecked edge,” Mr. Ross reflected on a performance of Berg, “I have never heard anything quite like it. In the future, this quartet should make its presence felt.”The St. Lawrence did so. Its repertoire was individual, even quirky, focusing as strongly on new music by the likes of Osvaldo Golijov as on older scores. It recorded pieces by the contemporary composers Jonathan Berger and John Adams with the same intensity as those by Shostakovich, Schumann and Tchaikovsky that it released on the EMI label. (Mr. Adams wrote the St. Lawrence two quartets as well as the quartet-and-orchestra “Absolute Jest.”)If the quartet’s palpable commitment remained characteristic — even as the violinists Scott St. John and Owen Dalby and the cellist Christopher Costanza replaced outgoing members — that was because its brio seemed to emanate bodily from its longstanding first violinist. Mr. Nuttall often played with such enthusiasm that he swept himself from his seat.“Nuttall is the St. Lawrence’s ‘secret weapon,’ as the rest of the group admits,” Mr. Ross wrote in The New Yorker in 2001. “His phrasing often upsets the central pulse of a movement, and the others either follow his lead or scramble to restore rhythmic order. As a result, despite the rigorous discipline of the quartet’s rehearsal process, many passages sound riotously improvised.”Mr. Nuttall’s electrifying ability to engage flowed from his deep desire to communicate even at the expense of other, blandly technical virtues, and he was fully aware of the risks of failure; indeed, he welcomed them as imperative to a good performance.Mr. Nuttall, a vinyl collector whose living room held more than 10,000 LPs that offered as much inspiration from Miles Davis as from the Busch Quartet, told American Artscape in 2014: “A string quartet is officially really about being together. You really want to be unified and blended together. And I remember being inspired by ‘Nashville Skyline,’ the Bob Dylan record. He does a duet with Johnny Cash. It’s such a great record, and they’re not together at all. They’re totally doing their own thing, but it’s totally unified and really powerful at the same time.”“And that was a great lesson on ensemble playing,” he continued. “Because if each one of the duet is doing their own thing in a really committed and convincing way, even if you’re saying the same thing, which they were in that case, it can be more powerful.”Mr. Nuttall performing with Livia Sohn in 2010 in a chamber music concert in New York. Jennifer Taylor for The New York TimesGeoffrey Winston Nuttall was born on Nov. 22, 1965, in College Station, Texas, to John and Suzanne (Shantz) Nuttall. His mother was a nurse; his father a physics professor who relocated from Texas A&M University to the University of Western Ontario, Canada, when Geoff was 8.He took up the violin shortly after the family moved to London, Ontario, and played in his first quartet at age 10 or 11. He studied with Lorand Fenyves, a renowned former concertmaster of the Israel Philharmonic and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, at the University of Toronto, the school from which he graduated.With the St. Lawrence, Mr. Nuttall was later in residence at the Juilliard School, Yale University, and the Hartt School of Music. He and his colleagues joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1998, leading its chamber music program and making the music of Franz Joseph Haydn — Mr. Nuttall’s favorite composer and one whom he thought was perpetually overlooked — as much a core of their campus activities as of their concert programs.“Arrestingly dynamic teamsmanship among the four players allowed every gesture to be for the moment and every moment to be in your face,” the Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed wrote of a 2018 recital of Haydn’s six Op. 20 works, which the St. Lawrence also recorded with gritty drama rather than poised elegance. “The string quartet as theater doesn’t get more exhilarating.”What Haydn’s music demands, Mr. Nuttall said in a presentation at Google in 2017, is “active participation, active listening, following the game.”He had a rare talent for inspiring exactly that with his spirited talks during concerts about what made music worth getting fully involved with. That, along with his eclectic taste in repertoire, made him the ideal frontman to succeed Charles Wadsworth as the director and host of the early-summer Spoleto chamber series in Charleston, S.C., in 2009.Mr. Nuttall performing this year. He was 10 or 11 when he first played in a quartet. Bill StruhsThe St. Lawrence played regularly at Spoleto from 1995, and for Mr. Nuttall, South Carolina became a home away from his Bay Area home.He married Livia Sohn, another violinist, in a Charleston garden in 2000. She survives him along with their two sons, Jack and Ellis, his mother, and his sister, Jenny Nuttall. “It was an inspired choice,” Johanna Keller wrote of the Spoleto appointment in The New York Times in 2013. “Mr. Nuttall turns out to be chamber music’s Jon Stewart,” she continued, a “creatively daring, physically talented performer who can go goofball in a nanosecond, maintaining a veneer of entertainment while educating his base about serious matters.”Mr. Nuttall did not particularly mind the comparison.“Whether you’re 7 years old and have never seen a violin up close or you’re an expert with a doctorate in music, I want you to leave humming, elated, or having felt emotionally put through the ringer,” he explained to the Charleston Magazine in 2019.“Music connects us all. There’s no secret code to understand in order to feel moved.” More

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      How the Philharmonic’s New Home Sounds, From Any Seat

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      After a major renovation, the acoustics throughout David Geffen Hall are strikingly consistent — but complicated.Over the past week at David Geffen Hall, the New York Philharmonic’s overhauled home, I’ve listened from the new block of seating behind the orchestra — so close to the players that I could almost read the percussionist’s music. I’ve sat in the last row of the third tier, as far from the stage as you can get. And I’ve been in the critic’s usual spot on the main level.It was striking how acoustically similar these three experiences were. The new Geffen seems to have achieved a rare distinction in its engineering for sound: consistency. No seat in the hall — at least the vastly different ones I’ve had in numerous visits so far — is appreciably better or worse than any other.Last week, after a handful of opening events, I wrote that the hall — an acoustical and aesthetic problem since its opening in 1962 — had a mightily improved sound. And I maintain that things have gotten better. But as I’ve spent more time there, and as the Philharmonic has audibly begun to settle into it, my feelings about that “mightily” have become more complicated.Simply being in the new Geffen is more immediate and intimate than it was before this long-awaited, long-delayed transformation. The blond-wood hall now has 2,200 seats, 500 fewer than it did, and the stage has been pulled forward into the auditorium to allow for seating to be wrapped around it. The general impact on what used to be an enormous, dreary barn is a flood of warmth, even conviviality. Substantially expanded public spaces (and more bathroom stalls) haven’t hurt.This all has an effect on our perception of the acoustics, but with each successive concert I’ve begun to detect some subtle gaps between the more inviting visuals and the elusive sound of the hall.The Reopening of David Geffen HallThe New York Philharmonic’s notoriously jinxed auditorium at Lincoln Center has undergone a $550 million renovation.Reborn, Again: The renovation of the star-crossed hall aims to break its acoustic curse — and add a dash of glamour.‘Unfinished Business’: After a 17-year run in Los Angeles, Deborah Borda returned to the New York Philharmonic, which she led in the 1990s, to help usher it into its new home.San Juan Hill: Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Expert Assessment: Right after the reopening our critic wrote that the renovation had a mightily improved sound. In the weeks that followed his feelings became more complicated.Geffen sounds clear, clean and straightforward; there’s nothing distorted or echoing, no weird balances or flabby resonances. But that cleanness can sometimes seem like coolness: an objective, almost clinical feeling, matched by the hard white light glaring on the orchestra. (Compare it with Carnegie Hall, in every respect a golden bubble bath.)This quality can make soft passages beautifully lucid at Geffen, and solos come off with precision, as if the hall were pointing an index finger at the players, one by one. In the first subscription program in the new space — a brassy set of pieces that made Christopher Martin, the principal trumpet, the performances’ assured star — the no-fat sound brought the audience to its feet at the superloud ending of Respighi’s “Pines of Rome.” The lack of sonic plumpness also helps make Geffen superb with amplification.But the Philharmonic’s second subscription program — led on Thursday by its music director, Jaap van Zweden — was mellower and more strings focused, featuring Debussy’s silky “Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune”; an American premiere by Caroline Shaw, featuring her vocal octet Roomful of Teeth; and Florence Price’s hearty, recently rediscovered Fourth Symphony.Here a certain lack of warmth and richness of blend — perhaps partly the Philharmonic’s sometimes blunt playing, and partly the room — detracted more from the music. Unlike in the first program, when the strings and woodwinds were occasionally swamped at full volume and density, they were plainly audible on Thursday. But those instruments — the violins and violas, for example, especially higher in their ranges — didn’t have ideal presence and color. Unlike in some halls, their sound doesn’t bloom even up in the third tier.So the Debussy was taut, but not sensual. Price’s Fourth was rhythmically agile and spirited, but lacked the robustness, the lushness — the sense of sonic, and thus spiritual, abundance — that the Philadelphia Orchestra brought to her First Symphony at Carnegie in February.At least these opening programs have been a fresh vision of what a major orchestra can and should play, with women and composers of color, past and present, looming just as large — if not more so — than the grand old masters. Even if that chestnut “Pines of Rome” provided the rousing finale of the first program, living composers dominated it. Marcos Balter’s new “Oyá” paired the Philharmonic with live-produced electronics (by Levy Lorenzo) and flashing lights (by Nicholas Houfek) to turn the hall into a heaving, pounding belly of a beast, darkly — and, over 15 minutes, tediously — evoking the Yoruba goddess of storms, death and rebirth.The Philharmonic’s first concerts this season have been dominated by living composers, including Caroline Shaw, front left, who performed with her ensemble Roomful of Teeth on Thursday.Chris LeeAnd the orchestra brought back Tania León’s “Stride,” which premiered at Geffen in 2020 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize last year. Progressing with somber uncertainty but unfailing nobility, it’s a strong piece. And it’s good general practice to revive successful contemporary works, gradually folding them into the repertory rather than just generating premiere after premiere.Best was the first Philharmonic performances of an underrated 2003 masterpiece by John Adams, “My Father Knew Charles Ives,” which weaves Ivesian controlled chaos into autobiographical musical depictions of sublime mountain vistas on both the East and West coasts, along with tender suggestions of the scratchy radio foxtrots Adams’s parents might have heard as they were courting.On this week’s program, the Debussy standard is just 10 minutes long; the remaining hour of music consists of Shaw’s premiere and the Price symphony, which was written some 80 years ago but had its belated first performances in 2018.The Philharmonic hasn’t played Price’s music on a subscription program before. While her Fourth Symphony lacks the stirring hymn of her First’s slow movement and the inspired slyness of the Juba dance in her Third, it does have a sprawling yet stylishly developing first movement, a sensitive Andante, its own swinging Juba and a feisty finale. Shaw’s “Microfictions,” Vol. 3, is — like her contemporary classic “Partita for Eight Voices” — a combination of the angelic and quotidian, of singing, speech, breathing, pitch bending and wailing, though the piece lacks the inspired variety of “Partita.” The orchestral accompaniment is both playful, with lots of drizzly irregular pizzicato, and ominous.After the concert on Thursday, Roomful of Teeth moved to the hall’s new Sidewalk Studio — visible from the street at the corner of 65th and Broadway — for the first Nightcap program of the season: a set of six pieces, including several world and New York premieres, that showed off the group’s talent for dreamy floating harmonies and uncanny, even otherworldly, effects.The Sidewalk Studio is also being used for daytime chamber music performances under the rubric NY Phil @ Noon; last week, a shaky rendition of Mozart’s “Kegelstatt” Trio was outweighed by a polished, graceful take on Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet. The small space’s acoustics are lively, regardless of whether the music is amplified.Geffen still prompts some raised eyebrows when it comes to tastefulness. A David Smith sculpture has been shoved into a corner of the lobby and blocked by protective wire. Clearly wanting to echo the “sputnik” chandeliers that elegantly rise as the lights dim before performances at the Metropolitan Opera, the hall’s designers devised “fireflies”: flickering polyhedrons that do a tacky little up-and-down show before the orchestra tunes. The public spaces have grown in size, but are also now strewn awkwardly with furniture and stanchions.But some questionable décor hasn’t kept the space from being inviting. With a few minutes left until the concert on Thursday, laptops had been opened; wine was being sipped; newspapers were being read; friends were sitting, chatting, laughing. It was bustling but not even close to unpleasantly packed, like in the old days. It was a space that was, in the best sense, being used. More