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      Conductor Dies After Collapsing During Performance in Munich

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      Stefan Soltesz was in the middle of Richard Strauss’s “The Silent Woman” when he fell from his podium shortly before the end of the first act.MUNICH — Stefan Soltesz, a prominent and in-demand Austrian conductor, died on Friday night after collapsing during a performance at Munich’s main opera house.Mr. Soltesz, 73, was conducting the Richard Strauss opera “The Silent Woman” at the Bayerische Staatsoper, or Bavarian State Opera, when he fell from his podium shortly before the end of the first act. He was pronounced dead at a hospital several hours later, said Michael Wuerges, the spokesman for the company.“At some point, the music stopped,” said Sebastian Bolz, 35, a research assistant in the music department at Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, who attended the performance with his wife. He said that they did not see the conductor’s fall shortly before 8 p.m., but that they did hear calls for help from the stage and orchestra pit.Mr. Wuerges said that the theater’s on-site doctor and a heart specialist from the audience attended to Mr. Soltesz. Shortly after the conductor’s collapse, the curtain fell on the stage and Tillmann Wiegand, the artistic operations manager of the Bavarian State Opera, announced that there had been an emergency and that there would be an immediate 30-minute intermission.Once the audience filed back into the auditorium at the end of the break, Mr. Bolz said, Mr. Wiegand reappeared onstage to announce that the remainder of the performance would be canceled. Shortly before 11 p.m., the State opera’s general manager, Serge Dorny, used Twitter to announce Mr. Soltesz’s death. “We are losing a gifted conductor,” he wrote. “I lose a good friend.”Deaths at the podium are rare, but Mr. Soltesz is the fourth conductor to collapse midperformance at the National Theater, the Bavarian State Opera’s main venue, since the early 1900s.In 1911, the Austrian conductor Felix Mottl collapsed at age 56 during his 100th performance of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” and died 11 days later; the German maestro Joseph Keilberth died at age 60 at the podium in 1968 during a performance of the same work. Most recently in Munich, in 1989, the Italian conductor Giuseppe Patanè collapsed at age 57 during Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” and died hours later at a hospital.At Berlin’s Deutsche Opera in 2001, Giuseppe Sinopoli, 54, an intensely physical maestro, had a heart attack while conducting Verdi’s “Aida.” He died at a hospital hours later.Mr. Soltesz, who was born in 1949 in Hungary, conducted at major opera houses across Europe over the past four decades. He held musical directorship positions at the State Theater of Brunswick, in Germany, from 1988 to 1993, and at the Flemish Opera in Antwerp and Ghent, in Belgium, from 1992 to 1997. His most recent appointment was in Essen, Germany, where he led that city’s opera house, the Aalto Theater, as well as the Essen Philharmonic from 1997 to 2013.“He took this Central German theater in Essen and he turned it, in 17 years, into one of the best ensemble houses in Europe, and he turned the Essen Philharmonic into an absolute A-grade orchestra,” the Australian opera director Barrie Kosky, who collaborated with Mr. Soltesz on four productions at the Aalto Theater in the early 2000s, said on Saturday after learning of Mr. Soltesz’s death. Mr. Kosky was speaking from Salzburg, Austria, where he was rehearsing a new production of Janacek’s “Kat’a Kabanova” that he is directing next month at the Salzburg Festival.During his career, Mr. Soltesz also led performances throughout Asia, and in 1992, he made his United States debut with the National Opera with a performance of Verdi’s “Otello” at the Kennedy Center in Washington. Mr. Soltesz is survived by his wife, Michaela Selinger, a mezzo soprano.“He was a very fine, refined musician, and music, you know, was first. He came second,” Mr. Dorny, a Belgian impresario who said he had known Mr. Soltesz since the 1990s when he ran the Festival of Flanders, said on Saturday.“He was the perfect diener for the art form,” Mr. Dorny added, using the German word for servant.On Friday night, Mr. Soltesz was conducting a revival of Mr. Kosky’s 2010 production of Strauss’s rarely performed “The Silent Woman,” as part of the Bavarian State Opera’s summer festival. Mr. Soltesz had previously led other revivals of the production. And it was one of several throughout Germany that he and Mr. Kosky had worked on together.“He was an amazing musician,” Mr. Kosky said, singling out Mr. Soltesz’s interpretations of Strauss for high praise, adding, “He understood the idea of orchestra accompanying, and understood the idea of the architecture of an act — or a three-act opera. He understood that, and he was at home in the pits. That was his home.”“In a world of dilettantes,” Mr. Kosky said, “he was the real thing.” More

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      Baltimore Symphony’s New Conductor Breaks a Racial Barrier

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      Jonathon Heyward is the first person of color to be the orchestra’s music director in its 106-year history.For decades, the 25 largest orchestras in the United States have been led almost exclusively by white men.That is going to change. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra announced on Thursday that it had chosen Jonathon Heyward, a rising African American conductor, as its next music director. He will begin a five-year contract in Baltimore at the start of the 2023-24 season.Heyward, 29, who grew up in Charleston, S.C., the son of an African American father and a white mother, will be the first person of color to lead the orchestra in its 106-year history. In an interview, he said that he would work to expand the audience for classical music by bolstering education efforts and promoting underrepresented artists.“This art form is for everyone,” he said.Heyward will succeed Marin Alsop, the first female music director of a top-tier American orchestra, whose tenure in Baltimore ended last year. His appointment comes amid a broader reckoning in classical music over severe gender and racial disparities.The choice to hire Heyward is a milestone for Baltimore, where Black residents make up more than 60 percent of the population.“We are inspired by his artistry, passion and vision for the B.S.O., as well as for what his appointment means for budding musicians who will see themselves better reflected in such a position of artistic prominence,” Mark Hanson, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, said in a statement.Heyward, who is the chief conductor of the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie in Germany, has garnered a reputation as a sensitive and charismatic conductor. His appointment comes at a challenging time for orchestras, with many ensembles, including Baltimore’s, struggling to win back arts patrons because of the pandemic — a crisis that has exacerbated long-term declines in ticket sales and forced arts groups to look for new ways to reach audiences, including through livestreaming.The Baltimore Symphony recently announced that it would cut 10 concerts from its coming season at Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, its longtime home, amid tepid ticket sales. Attendance in Baltimore during the 2021-22 season averaged at 40 percent of capacity, down from 62 percent in 2018-19.Heyward said that he was confident audiences would eventually return, and added that he would work to make the orchestra more relatable by programming a wider variety of works, featuring a greater diversity of performers and moving some concerts away from traditional venues.“It’s simply a knack of being able to really understand what the community needs and listening to what the community needs and then being able to get them in the door,” he said.Although Heyward has been based in Europe for much of his career, he has started to appear more frequently in the United States. Last spring, he led several concerts in Baltimore, including the orchestra’s first performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15, as well as a benefit concert for Ukraine. He is scheduled to appear with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra at Lincoln Center in early August, leading a program that features the violinist Joshua Bell.In 2017, when Heyward was 25, he was widely praised for a series of performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, when he substituted at the last minute for an ill conductor. That program included a premiere by the composer Tania León, as well as works by Stravinsky, Glinka and Leonard Bernstein.“He knew when to lead and when to follow, effortlessly balancing his roles as a natural showman and sensitive collaborator in service to the music,” the critic Rick Schultz wrote in The Los Angeles Times.The conducting field has long struggled with a lack of diversity. In recent years, there has been only one Black music director in the top tier of American orchestras, and just a handful of leaders have been Latino or of Asian descent.With turnover expected soon at several major orchestras, there are signs of change. This season, Nathalie Stutzmann takes the podium at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. She will be only the second woman to lead a top-tier American orchestra.Heyward will also be among the Baltimore Symphony’s youngest leaders. He began studying cello at 10. A graduate of the Boston Conservatory, he later served as an assistant conductor of the Hallé Orchestra in England, under its longtime music director, Mark Elder.Heyward said that his own experience of falling in love with classical music had convinced him of its enduring appeal.“If a 10-year-old boy from Charleston, South Carolina, with no music education background, with no musicians in the family, can be enamored and amazed by this, by the best art form there is — classical music — then I think anyone can,” he said. “I plan on trying to prove that in many, many ways.” More

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      Classical Music Has a Hazy Future in Lincoln Center’s Summers

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      The day had been hot and muggy. But a mild breeze was blowing at Lincoln Center by the time the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra took the stage in Damrosch Park on Tuesday evening.The pianist Conrad Tao played an elegantly unruffled Mozart concerto and a daydreamy “Rhapsody in Blue.” Apart from a sprinkling of small performances last summer, this orchestra hadn’t been assembled since 2019, but it sounded comfortable and spirited.In just three years, the group has become an anachronism. The festival whose name it bears — Lincoln Center’s premier summertime event before the pandemic — is no more. The center’s summer, once a messy assortment of competing series and festivals, has finally been streamlined under a single label: “Summer for the City.”Planned by Lincoln Center’s president, Henry Timms, and its artistic chief since last year, Shanta Thake, Summer for the City has hoisted a 10-foot disco ball over the plaza fountain and includes outdoor film screenings, spoken word, social dance, comedy shows and an ASL version of “Sweeney Todd.”Five of New York’s dance companies will come together next month for a few days of performances. And starting on Friday, the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra moves inside to Alice Tully Hall for five programs: 10 concerts over two weeks.Louis Langrée, the orchestra’s music director since 2002, led the performance on Tuesday.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesBut despite that packed little orchestral season, other musical experiences that once appeared under the Mostly Mozart rubric have vanished along with the name — including guest ensembles, intimate recitals, and the new music that flows out of the classical tradition and is embodied by the International Contemporary Ensemble, long in residence at the festival but absent this year.Up in the air is the ultimate fate of the Mostly Mozart orchestra, a high-quality, carefully built and expensive group whose music director, Louis Langrée, has been on its podium since 2002. Though Thake told the orchestra on Friday that it would be a part of the summer next year, things get hazier beyond that. And while her vision for the season is still developing, this first iteration seems to have intentionally moved away from swaths of music and performance that have been central to the center’s identity for decades.Which is not to say that Lincoln Center’s summers have been just one thing. As Joseph W. Polisi, a longtime president of the Juilliard School, describes in “Beacon to the World: A History of Lincoln Center,” recently published by Yale University Press, the initial thought was that the center’s own programming would happen primarily in the summertime, so as not to compete in fall and spring with the constituent organizations for which it serves as a landlord, like the Metropolitan Opera and New York Philharmonic.As the campus was being conceived, summer was imagined to be a good time for folk-ish operas and musicals, like “Oklahoma!” or Copland’s “The Tender Land,” or perhaps a film festival; it’s in the DNA for the center’s summer offerings to be ambitious but accessible, populist but serious.The pianist Conrad Tao was the soloist in several works on the program, including a Mozart concerto and “Rhapsody in Blue.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThe flutist Jasmine Choi played in William Grant Still’s “Out of the Silence.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThough Summer for the City is taking place largely outdoors, the novelty in those early years was being inside: Midsummer Serenades — A Mozart Festival, which started in 1966 and was renamed Mostly Mozart six years later, was the first festival in New York to take place in an air-conditioned hall.The campus’s Community/Street Theater Festival of the early 1970s morphed, a few years later, into Lincoln Center Out of Doors, a free, outdoor, eclectic mélange: Ballet Hispánico and bluegrass, string quartets and a doo-wop opera, and eventually a helping of social dance as Midsummer Night’s Swing.Mostly Mozart grew to be perceived as stodgy and listless in this company. When Jane Moss — like Thake, a hire from outside classical music — became the center’s artistic leader in the early 1990s, it was believed that part of her brief was to eliminate it. After the Lincoln Center Festival, which hosted ambitious international touring productions, was founded in the mid-90s, Mostly Mozart, which had once lasted up to nine weeks, dwindled from seven to four. A musicians’ strike in 2002 was another existential crisis.But instead of spiking Mostly Mozart, Moss took a firmer hand with the programming, hired Langrée as a partner, and broadened the offerings — eventually to something closer to Slightly Mozart. In 2017, amid budget and management crises, the Lincoln Center Festival folded and Mostly Mozart was set to expand by up to 50 percent to partly compensate. The festival orchestra entered the opera pit for the first time in 2019; there were dance theater productions and the lauded New York premiere of “The Black Clown”; Langrée’s contract was renewed through 2023.During the center’s pandemic silence in 2020, though, Moss decided to step down. And here we are: Mostly Mozart, instead of being expanded, has been eliminated.In a joint interview with Timms, Thake said that this year’s Summer for the City should not necessarily be seen as the model for all to come. “It’s definitely a unique moment,” she said. “We’re coming out of a two-year pandemic. This is our first full expression of what is possible.”Starting on Friday, the orchestra moves inside to Alice Tully Hall for five programs: 10 concerts over two weeks.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesReferring to the center’s Restart Stages initiative from 2021, she added: “There had been some proven success in experimentation. What you’re seeing this year is a continued explosion of form, and putting it all under one umbrella.”Summer for the City has the spunky feel of Joe’s Pub, the cabaret space that Thake ran, along with other Public Theater initiatives like Under the Radar and Public Works, before she was hired by Lincoln Center. It also feels like a throwback to the Community/Street Theater Festival and Out of Doors tradition from the early ’70s.That can yield wonderful programming, and much civic good. Growing up just outside the city, I found Midsummer Night’s Swing — with its tango-ing, salsa-ing crowd — exciting and glamorous, the definition of a New York summer night.But those offerings existed in an ecosystem in which classical music — broadly construed as far as style, period and form — was another pillar, not a fringe.Thake insisted in the interview that classical programming has found its way into Summer for the City in more varied, informal ways: as an accompaniment to blood drives and a mass wedding ceremony, and in the form of music-and-meditation sessions in the David Rubenstein Atrium.Timms added: “In terms of volume, probably, the amount of classical music being presented hasn’t changed much. The nature of it has changed, to some degree, though not fundamentally.”Uh-huh.The two leaders implied that the reconception of the summer is pulling the center more toward the role of host, welcoming as many people as it can onto campus, while the constituent organizations handle or at least share the presenting — especially in the classical sphere. The idea, for example, is that the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s small set of Summer Evenings concerts can basically take care of what was once Mostly Mozart’s cozy A Little Night Music series, as well as its other solo and chamber events.Other musical experiences that once appeared under the Mostly Mozart rubric have vanished along with the name — including guest ensembles, intimate recitals and new music.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThe danger, of course, is that in reducing redundancies and internal competition, the city simply ends up with less.It’s true that the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra’s compressed season — which began with a week of mentoring and performing alongside student musicians — promises to showcase talented young guest artists. On Aug. 5 and 6, Langrée leads Mozart’s Requiem, a few days before Jlin’s arrangement of that work is the score for Kyle Abraham’s recent dance “Requiem: Fire in the Air of the Earth” — the kind of artistic cross-pollination that should be the center’s stock in trade.Even more important, the orchestra’s Tully concerts are choose-what-you-pay, a ticketing philosophy that should be a model for the center’s whole year. A range of excellent music, painstakingly prepared and performed at the highest level for affordable prices: That is true populism.Instead, classical music, even in its ever-struggling nonprofit form, gets cast as the elitist hegemon for which scrappier alternatives must be found — certainly if much-vaunted “new audiences” are going to be attracted.But classical programming should not be considered a chore, or a bone thrown to a dwindling audience — a familiar one rather than “new.” No, serious performance is a jewel, of which Lincoln Center is one of the few remaining supreme presenters. Conrad Tao playing Mozart with a superb orchestra for free or cheap: That is the core of the center’s mission. Its job is to cultivate audiences for and increase access to that.Which is not to say that change is impossible. Is a resident orchestra with an appointed music director the only way to fulfill Lincoln Center’s mission? Perhaps not. But is there a way of programming such an orchestra so that it could be an integral part of a diverse, adventurous summer season? Yes. Could it be joined to opera, recitals, new music and guest ensembles in broadening what I think Timms and Thake are trying to do: to foster inexpensive interactions with great performance? Absolutely.“We’re still getting our feet under us,” Thake said. “And seeing again, how can we continue to be responsive? How can we move through this season and get a sense of what worked, what didn’t work, what’s next for all of us?” More

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      At This Summer’s Aix Festival, the Only Laughter Is Bitter

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      With two grim premieres among the offerings, Monteverdi’s sharp “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” was the highlight of a week of opera.AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — Few opera institutions have as strong a track record in new work as the Aix-en-Provence Festival. Two of the most significant pieces of the 21st century have originated here: “Written on Skin,” in 2012, and “Innocence,” which premiered last year.But the lesson of the festival is that you can’t just pop out a masterpiece a decade. You have to chug away with commissions, big and small, year in and year out, knowing that the vast majority will be, if not duds, then far from perfect.A tiny percentage of new operas end up with lasting importance, and that’s the numbers game Aix is playing. Sheer volume is key, as the Metropolitan Opera, with its recent pledge to present at least two contemporary titles a season, is learning.Aix, too, is putting on two premieres at this year’s edition, which runs through July 23. Neither fully satisfies, but I have great respect for the festival’s commitment to the contemporary as a pillar of its programming.The larger of the two is “Il Viaggio, Dante,” which dares to condense not just all three books of “The Divine Comedy” but also the poet’s early “La Vita Nuova” into two intermissionless hours. So Dante, recalling his past during a midlife crisis, is accompanied through hell and purgatory to paradise by a crowd: Virgil, his poetic model, as well as Beatrice, his eternal love; Santa Lucia, who spurs his journey; and his younger self.While Frédéric Boyer’s libretto spans a tremendous amount of material, the text doesn’t feel rushed, but as calmly solemn, prayerlike and formal as a ceremony of Gregorian monks, with choral incantations interjected throughout. And the prominent French composer Pascal Dusapin has responded with music of nearly unmitigated portentousness.His sound world is brooding, with grimly hovering drones, enhanced by electronic effects, under heated declamation. The orchestra rises to groaning roars — though these climaxes are more poised than raw — that tend to cut off abruptly, leaving the hazy resonance of bells and a shimmering battery of percussion before the next slow buildup.There is artful work here, as when a passage of droning is softly sandwiched by choral writing: a moist, mossy grumble below, women’s voices above. Young Dante — a trouser role, here sung by the clarinetty mezzo-soprano Christel Loetzsch — has a monologue of medieval-style spare purity mourning the loss of love. And near the end, Beatrice and Lucia’s vocal lines quiver and swoop like birds around a low, sober, sonorous chorale.The mythic, dreamlike pace recalls Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande” and Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle,” but Dusapin’s approach is without much variety or tension. Hell’s range of sinners presents a clear opportunity for Bartok’s strategy — evocative showpieces as different doors are opened — but the score of “Il Viaggio, Dante” remains resolutely, drearily homogeneous: dully dyspeptic even in paradise.One of this summer’s premieres at Aix was a Pascal Dusapin opera based on Dante with, from left, Maria Carla Pino Cury and Jean-Sébastien Bou.Monika RittershausWhatever the opera’s flaws, though, it is hard to imagine it being better presented than it was here. At its premiere on Friday at the Grand Théâtre de Provence, Kent Nagano led the orchestra and chorus of the Opéra de Lyon in a rigorously elegant performance. The baritone Jean-Sébastien Bou was a steady but intense, impassioned Dante.Most important, with a video prologue and a coolly stylish set, the veteran director Claus Guth shaped the oratorio-like piece into a form approaching coherent narrative. Set in our time, his staging shifts among a country-house interior, a forbidding forest and the netherworld of “Inferno” — here a spare, surreal space, part circus (sparkly white suit), part Kubrick (weird twin girls), part Lynch (ominous walls of curtains and eerie howling).Shorter — just an hour, with a mere handful of performers — is “Woman at Point Zero,” performed on Sunday at the black-box Pavillon Noir. Based on the Egyptian writer and activist Nawal El Saadawi’s 1975 novel about the pressures and limitations on women in a patriarchal society, the piece depicts a filmmaker interviewing a sex worker who has been imprisoned for killing an abusive pimp.Neither Dima Orsho (Fatma, the prisoner) nor Carla Nahadi Babelegoto (Sama, the interviewer) overplayed as their lines moved from speaking to light recitative-style singing to full keening in Laila Soliman’s focused, minimal staging.It was unusual and heartening to see an opera that had women directing, conducting, composing and libretto-writing, as well as starring. Kanako Abe led and abetted — slapping her side and making clicking and murmuring noises — six musicians of Ensemble ZAR, who played a multicultural array of instruments, including cello, accordion, duduk (an Armenian cousin of the English horn), daegeum (a Korean bamboo flute) and the bowed Persian kamancheh, among others. But Bushra El-Turk’s score created few new or intriguing colors from these unusual combinations, and Stacy Hardy’s libretto flattened the two women and their interaction into cliché.The other premiere is “Woman at Point Zero,” with music by Bushra El-Turk and featuring, from left, Dima Orsho and Carla Nahadi Babelegoto.Jean-Louis FernandezThe characters who feel the freshest at this year’s Aix Festival are populating Ted Huffman’s vivid staging of Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea.” Almost 400 years old, “Poppea” is startlingly contemporary in the gray zone of morality it occupies. Almost no one is entirely likable or unlikable; lust and ambition are simultaneously reveled in and condemned.At the jewel-box Théatre du Jeu de Paume — which seats fewer than 500, an ideal intimacy for Baroque opera — there is barely a set. Pretty much the only element is a huge pipe, half painted white, half black, hanging over the action, perhaps a symbol of the fate that never quite falls on the adulterous, power-hungry leads.Sexy onstage sex may be even rarer than sexy sex writing, but Huffman has guided his cast in scenes that are genuinely seductive, heated by Monteverdi’s exquisitely sensual music. The secret? For all its bare bodies and physical contact, this modern-dress (and undressed) production, which opened on Saturday, realizes that eroticism comes not just from lovers pawing each other, but also from distance. Similarly, having the performers spend their time between scenes at the sides of the stage, watching their fellow singers, somehow increases our sense of the characters’ depth and reality.To hear young, fresh artists in this piece, in this theater, was a joy. Fleur Barron was a wounded Ottavia, Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian an agonized Ottone, Alex Rosen an angry Seneca, Maya Kherani a delicate Drusilla. Miles Mykkanen was uproarious, but not grotesque, as the opera’s two old women; Julie Roset was an alert Amore; and there was subtle supporting work from Laurence Kilsby, Yannis François and Riccardo Romeo.Their tones inflamed and acute, Jacquelyn Stucker and Jake Arditti were a Poppea and Nerone driven nearly mad with desire. The chorus before their aching final duet, “Pur ti miro,” has been cut, keeping this coronation a private reverie on which we spy.Leonardo García Alarcón conducted a small but potent group from his ensemble, Cappella Mediterranea, with almost improvisatory spikiness, but without losing polish. (Playing with larger forces on Monday, Alarcón and Cappella Mediterranea’s concert version of Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo” felt a bit more diffuse, though Mariana Flores’s Euridice produced a serene final lament.)When it is performed at this level, “Poppea” is acidic and exhilarating. You giggle in astonishment at what these characters are capable of, and at what you’re capable of sympathizing with.This year’s festival is of superb quality but almost entirely without comedy: Besides the two bleak premieres, there are Romeo Castellucci’s mass-exhumation staging of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony, a contemporary-refugee Rossini rarity, an icy “Salome” and an “Idomeneo” evoking nuclear disaster. In that dour company, Monteverdi’s bitter laughter will have to do. More

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      A Conductor’s Career, Cut Short, Still Blazes on Recordings

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      With an abundance of albums out on multiple labels, we have as complete a portrait of the Toscanini protégé Guido Cantelli as we are ever likely to.Frost glazed the ground, and mist hung in the air, as a brand-new Douglas DC-6B took off from Orly Airport near Paris early on Nov. 24, 1956. The plane was headed for Shannon, Ireland, and then New York.It would arrive at neither.About 15 seconds after it left the ground, the plane dipped slightly below its path, clipped an unlit house, and plunged into the village of Paray-Vieille-Poste. The authorities never found the cause of the crash; all but one of the 35 people aboard died.Among them was Guido Cantelli, 36, a “comet of a conductor,” as one critic called him, and the protégé of Arturo Toscanini. In just eight years, Cantelli had shot from obscurity to a career whose brightness still blinds today. Frequently a guest of the New York Philharmonic, which he was on his way to conduct, he had been announced as the music director of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan a week before the crash.Brahms’s Symphony No. 3: Poco AllegrettoPhilharmonia Orchestra, 1955 (Warner)Perhaps it is the manner of Cantelli’s death, the waste of it, that explains some of the fervency of interest that has come to surround him. It is hard to think of many conductors whose careers can be examined in similarly pinpoint — if admittedly macabre — detail, to get closer to what could have been.After all, not only are all of Cantelli’s studio recordings for EMI, chiefly with the Philharmonia Orchestra of London, to be found in a 10-disc Warner box, but his meteoric progress can also be tracked from week to week, as an extraordinary proportion of his radio broadcasts with the Philharmonic, the NBC Symphony and other groups have been restored and released on labels including Testament, Music & Arts and Pristine. We now have as complete a portrait of Cantelli as we probably ever will.And what a portrait. Forget the what-ifs that smoked from those Parisian flames. Forget the mystery of how the history of music in the United States might have been rewritten if Cantelli, and not Leonard Bernstein, had succeeded Dimitri Mitropoulos at the Philharmonic, as Mitropoulos had apparently wished. Forget, too, the lament that Cantelli barely had time to mature, as if the efforts of a younger musician are necessarily of inferior worth.Emerging as if fully formed in the works of Schumann and Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Debussy, Cantelli was arguably the greatest conductor who never quite was — as the New York Times critic Olin Downes wrote in 1953, one who “understands the notes and wraps his heart around every one of them.”Earnest, tense and introverted, Cantelli was not the copycat he often stood accused of being, as if the mark of Toscanini was disqualifying in a century in which his mentor’s influence was vast. Even if he wielded a tension of rhythm, a ferocity of line and a strictness of discipline that were familiar, those traits were tempered with an elegance of expression, a taste in color and a mania for details that he tortured himself and his musicians to perfect. He treated all music as song, and he sang it with the care he thought it deserved.Schumann’s Symphony No. 4: LangsamPhilharmonia Orchestra, 1953 (Warner)Singing itself played only a minor role in Cantelli’s training. Born in Novara, Italy, on April 27, 1920, he was the second son of a military bandmaster who stood him on a table to conduct a band when he was 5.Cantelli learned the piano as well as the trumpet, horn and several percussion instruments as a boy, and he was quickly taken to study with the organist of the Basilica di San Gaudenzio. He sang in the choir and first directed it at age 8; wrote a Mass at 10; and started substituting at the organ when he was 14, even playing themes from “Tristan und Isolde” during services.He could often be seen in the gallery of the Teatro Coccia, reading scores by torchlight; other evenings were spent tuning a radio he had saved for with his allowance, or with his records, those of Toscanini foremost among them. He entered the Milan Conservatory in 1939 and completed a seven-year composition course in three, but he was no composer. Shortly after graduating, in 1943, he made his debut leading “La Traviata” at the Coccia, a theater Toscanini had opened in 1888.Cantelli with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 1955.via The New York Philharmonic Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital Archives After German troops occupied Novara that September, Cantelli was sent to a concentration camp on the Baltic coast, and was worked so close to death that he ended up weighing just 80 pounds. The way the story was later told, to promote him as an antifascist just as courageous as Toscanini had supposedly been, he refused to collaborate with the Nazis and eventually became a hero of the Partisans, one supposedly hours from being shot when the Allies liberated Milan.Not quite, according to Cantelli’s biographer, Laurence Lewis, who describes him as basically apolitical. The Germans probably deported him, a weak conscript, to a labor camp because he declined to fight, if he was ever given the choice, and after a few months they drafted him to serve the rump Italian Social Republic of Mussolini. En route back, he escaped from a hospital and returned to Novara, where he forged documents for the Partisans while working at a bank. He married his sweetheart, Iris, the day Mussolini was shot.After the war, Cantelli found food scarce and opportunities scarcer. He debuted with La Scala’s orchestra outdoors in July 1945, but didn’t return until May 21, 1948. Coincidentally, Toscanini was in the theater that night, and was confronted with a vision of his youth. Within days, the world’s most famous conductor was in the Cantellis’ tiny Milan apartment, playing his latest record and inviting Cantelli to spend a few weeks conducting the NBC Symphony.Cantelli, then 28, arrived in New York at the end of December, and he was swept into a world filled with musical eminences and fawning socialites. Toscanini declared him an honorary son. Four concerts followed in January and February, each of them broadcast, each a sensation. There was a remarkably passionate account of Hindemith’s “Mathis der Maler” Symphony alongside elegant Haydn one week; a stingingly potent Tchaikovsky “Romeo and Juliet” with Casella the next; and a heated Bartok Concerto for Orchestra another.Haydn’s Symphony No. 93: Presto ma non troppoNBC Symphony Orchestra, 1949 (Pristine)“We sense in Mr. Cantelli a musician with a destiny before him,” Downes wrote after the last program, of music by Ravel and Franck. Toscanini took Cantelli to see the Rockettes to celebrate before his voyage home; he would return each winter, adding long stints with the Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony that outlasted his appearances with the NBC, which folded in 1954.Throughout Cantelli’s career in the United States, there were criticisms of his repertoire, which ran from Frescobaldi and Monteverdi to Barber and Dallapiccola but turned out to be repetitive from season to season. There were also more fundamental complaints that he was too much the precisionist. “Other men mature from uncontrolled passion to control,” Downes wrote after his debut with the Philharmonic, in January 1952. “Mr. Cantelli’s way may be to graduate from control to release.”That control was hard-earned. Cantelli didn’t read around a composer’s life, or consciously filter music through his own aesthetics; he just read scores, and without the memory of a Toscanini or a Mitropoulos he learned them, painstakingly, through their melodies. It was not unusual, he said in 1955, for him to pace a room singing an obscure bassoon line during the six hours a day he studied.From left, Dimitri Mitropoulos, John Corigliano Sr. and Cantelli around 1950.via The New York Philharmonic Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital Archives He fixated on how to release notes as well as attack them, on how to give a line an end as well as a beginning, on how to attain a balance that let parts sing through. But if his fastidious lyricism endowed his Mozart and his Rossini with grace as well as drive, his ability to twist a score taut also gave his Mendelssohn, and even his Debussy, immense cumulative force.Cantelli’s perfectionism found its ultimate expression in his fanatical sessions in London with the Philharmonia. Ravel’s “Pavane pour une Infante Défunte,” to take one example, took him 20 tense takes to get its six minutes of music right, during which he stormed offstage, the harpist Renata Scheffel-Stein cried and the horn player Dennis Brain feared his lip would crack.Ravel’s “Pavane pour une Infante Défunte”Philharmonia Orchestra, 1952 (Warner)Now remastered and available on Warner, many of the resultant recordings remain impressive: Cantelli’s heavenly way with Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll,” his serious-minded brilliance in Dukas’s “L’Apprenti Sorcier,” his justly famous Schumann Fourth, his consuming Debussy “La Mer,” dark as the depths.In some accounts, though, he prefers suavity over the sweat-drenching volatility he could incite live. His Brahms First captivates in the studio, but it blazes with the Boston Symphony, from 1954, on Pristine. His Philharmonia Beethoven Seventh dances happily, but the same symphony stuns on a Music & Arts release from a 1953 performance that, an astonished Downes wrote, seemed to invoke the composer’s “spirit brooding gigantic over the universe.”It’s plenty enough to raise the question of why Cantelli did not take a major post until his crisply rendered “Così Fan Tutte” at La Scala in 1956 forced that house to make him an offer he could not refuse. Appearing as a guest with a handful of prestigious, quite different ensembles offered him “more in the way of interest, execution, and variety of expression than he could obtain from any single orchestra,” one profile paraphrased him as saying.The Philharmonic counterfactual is too far from the truth even to ask. At the time of his death, Cantelli had planned to devote most his time to La Scala, his cherished Philharmonia aside; his bond with the New York players had already broken.His sole recording with the Philharmonic, a Vivaldi “Four Seasons,” is his worst studio effort, and the exertion he had to put into overcoming the orchestra’s intransigence once led him to collapse in the Carnegie Hall wings. Despite outstanding performances — vigorous yet finessed — in the spring of 1956, Cantelli had been so furious at the players’ antics then that he begged the Philharmonic’s management to relieve him of his contractual obligations that November. They refused.Strauss’s “Don Juan”New York Philharmonic Orchestra, 1956 (Pristine)And then he was gone.In New York, where the ailing Toscanini was not told of his heir’s death, Mitropoulos led Strauss’s “Tod und Verklärung” in his memory with the Philharmonic, a performance that — unlike Cantelli’s own rapturous accounts — seems to dissolve in grief.In Milan, La Scala’s orchestra played Handel’s “Largo,” the last piece he had led, from the pit as his hearse paused outside the theater. Its former music director, Victor de Sabata, offered to conduct; the players preferred that Cantelli do so himself, one last time. More

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      Amid Ukraine War, Orchestras Rethink ‘1812 Overture,’ a July 4 Rite

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      Some ensembles have decided not to perform Tchaikovsky’s overture, written as commemoration of Russia’s defeat of Napoleon’s army.With its earsplitting rounds of cannon fire and triumphal spirit, Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” has been a staple of Fourth of July festivities across the United States for decades, serving as a rousing prelude to glittering displays of fireworks.But this year many ensembles, concerned about the overture’s history as a celebration of the Russian military — Tchaikovsky wrote it to commemorate the rout of Napoleon’s army from Russia in the winter of 1812 — are reconsidering the work because of the war in Ukraine.Some groups have decided to skip it, arguing that its bellicose themes would be offensive during wartime. Others, eager to show solidarity with Ukraine, have added renditions of the Ukrainian national anthem to their programs to counter the overture’s exaltation of czarist Russia. Still others are reworking it, in one case by adding calls for peace.For the first time since 1978, the storied Cleveland Orchestra is omitting the work from its Fourth of July concerts, which feature the Blossom Festival Band. “Given the way Russia is behaving right now and the propaganda that is out there, to go and play music that celebrates their victory I just think would be upsetting for a lot of people,” said André Gremillet, the president and chief executive of the orchestra. “Everyone would hear that reference, complete with the cannons, to the current war involving Russia. It would be insensitive to people in general, and certainly to the Ukrainian population in particular.”The reconsideration of the “1812 Overture” is the latest example of the difficult questions facing cultural institutions since the war began.Arts groups have come under pressure from audiences, board members and activists to cut ties with Russian artists, especially those who have expressed support for President Vladimir V. Putin. Some have also faced calls to scrap works by Russian composers, including revered figures like Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Mussorgsky.Many groups have resisted, arguing that removing Russian works would amount to censorship. But there have been exceptions. The Polish National Opera in March dropped a production of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov,” one of the greatest Russian operas, to express “solidarity with the people of Ukraine.” The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London, the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra in Wales and the Chubu Philharmonic Orchestra in Japan have all recently abandoned plans to perform the “1812 Overture,” citing the war.The overture, which runs about 15 minutes, is unabashedly patriotic, featuring Russian folk songs and a volley of cannon fire set to the former Russian national anthem, “God Save the Czar.” Some renditions include vocal lines from a Russian Orthodox text, “God Preserve Thy People.”While Tchaikovsky was not particularly fond of his overture when it debuted in Moscow in 1882, it has since become one of classical music’s best known pieces.Since the 1970s, when the Boston Pops began playing it before crowds of hundreds of thousands along the banks of the Charles River, the overture has become a popular part of Fourth of July celebrations across the United States. It is performed each year by hundreds of ensembles in big cities and small towns; local governments often supply howitzers for the overture’s stirring conclusion.Interpretations of the piece have changed over time, said Emily Richmond Pollock, an associate professor of music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While it was first used to celebrate the Russian empire, it later became synonymous with American democracy. Now, in some circles, it symbolizes authoritarianism in modern Russia.“It has been used for different purposes throughout history,” Pollock said. “In 2022, with ambivalence about Russian power, it has come to mean something different. And it could mean something different again in the future.”In recent weeks, more than a dozen ensembles in Connecticut, Indiana, New York, Ohio, Wisconsin and Wyoming and elsewhere have decided to forgo the piece because of concerns about backlash from Ukrainians and others opposed to the war. Some have replaced the piece with works by Americans, including the film composer John Williams, and standards like Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and “America the Beautiful.”The Hartford Symphony Orchestra in Connecticut, which has played the overture since 1995, felt that “celebrating a Russian military victory is just too sensitive a topic right now” and removed the piece from its program, said Steve Collins, the ensemble’s president and chief executive.“The risk of offending and running afoul of our Ukrainian American friends — the very people we want to support — far outweighed any benefit to playing this piece,” he said. “It just wasn’t that important, in our final analysis, to perform this piece this summer.”The Grand Teton Music Festival in Wyoming decided to skip the work in part because it did not want to alienate Ukrainians, including those affiliated with the festival.“We did not think it was appropriate to program a work that featured sounds of cannons accompanying ‘God Save the Czar,’ given what is happening in Ukraine,” said Emma Kail, the festival’s executive director. “We thought we’d build a new tradition and keep it all American this year.”Other ensembles, including the Boston Pops and the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, which typically perform the overture before large audiences on live television spectacles, are planning to proceed with the piece this year.“We play this to celebrate independence and freedom and people who are willing to sacrifice a lot to make that happen,” said Keith Lockhart, the conductor of the Boston Pops, which will also perform the Ukrainian national anthem.Lockhart said that in a time of war, the overture could serve as a reminder of the perils of aggression. In 1812, he noted, Russia was fending off an invasion from a more powerful country, much like Ukraine is today.“In that fight, the Russians were the Ukrainians of 2022,” he said. “It’s not just as simplistic as ‘Russia, bad.’ It is the attempt of authoritarian powers to dominate other powers that is bad.”How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 6Gavriel Heine. More

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      Richard Taruskin Was Classical Music’s Towering Intellectual

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      Richard Taruskin, who died on Friday, is remembered by his former editor at The New York Times and elsewhere.His keeper, not his editor, I used to call myself in affectionate jest — and with enormous pride and respect.He was a force of nature. He was larger than life. He was one of a kind. Choose your cliché.Richard Taruskin, a music historian of towering intellect and erudition who delighted in stirring up good trouble, died on Friday at 77. Physically, he was a bear of a man, and his manner, though typically warm and upbeat, could occasionally seem gruff and untamed. He suffered fools not at all. He rode herd on the musicological and critical communities, sending unsolicited — indeed, dreaded — postcards to colleagues with capsule critiques, noting errors or inanities, often scathingly.Yet he was a joy to work with. His writing was brilliant, profound, stylish and witty, scarcely in need of editing, except for length. He never tired of trying to fit, say, a 2,500-word peg into a 1,500-word hole. That was not so much a problem at Opus, the small, free-form record magazine where I started working with him, in the mid-1980s. But it became a serious issue a few years later, at our next stop, the Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times, with its hard-and-fast space limitations. Richard’s sparkling prose was not something you — or he — ever wanted to cut wholesale.But even this proved unproblematic. We would tighten a piece sentence by sentence, word by word, and Richard welcomed suggestions. He eventually took the process as a challenge, a puzzle that we would solve together.His was the most nimble and retentive mind I’ve ever worked with closely over time. It was almost scary to hear him quote from memory a paragraph of something he had read a decade or two before virtually verbatim. And he seemed to have read everything.It came as a particular jolt recently to hear that what Richard was dying of was cancer of the esophagus. With suddenly renewed force, I recalled the circumstances of our early work together, at Opus. That started while he was writing his first oversized book, “Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions,” which in 1996 ultimately weighed in at two volumes and 1,757 pages. Richard would work on Stravinsky for three or four weeks, then take a week off between chapters and write for Opus. In one of those breaks, he might produce six or seven 500-word CD reviews, a 1,000-word think piece, two 2,500-word essays and a 4,000- or 5,000-word blowout. They arrived in a fat manila envelope, which, when opened, reeked of cigar smoke. (Cigars are said to be a risk factor for esophageal cancer.)Cigars, it happens, were something of an odd leitmotif in Richard’s biography. The story was told — vividly, by Peter Kang in Columbia College Today in 2005 — that Richard, as a young pup at Columbia University in 1961, saw a distinguished-looking man enter the music library with a lighted cigar and informed him that smoking was not permitted there. “When the man left,” Kang wrote, “the library staff quickly told Taruskin that the smoker he had just admonished was world-renowned musicologist and professor Paul Henry Lang.”And therein lies another, larger tale. Richard went on to earn his Ph.D. at Columbia under Lang’s tutelage, writing about Russian opera in the 1860s, a topic that led to several of his many books of essays. Nor was it lost on Richard that Lang’s magnum opus, “Music in Western Civilization,” from 1941, remained in wide use as a textbook at Columbia and elsewhere. Emulating his mentor with an eye toward producing a textbook, Richard embarked on a magnum opus of his own in 1991.That work grew and grew and grew, as Richard reveled in the opportunity to say his “two cents’ worth about everything.” Finally published in six volumes by Oxford University Press in 2005 as “The Oxford History of Western Music,” it is an endlessly informative, often opinionated page-turner — all 4,272 pages of it.Well, no, perhaps not all. The sixth volume of “The Ox,” as the tomes have come to be known, consists of a chronology, a bibliography and a 146-page small-type index: sheer tedium to deal with. Clearly, “The Ox” would not be the svelte textbook Richard may have envisioned — though he went on to compress it, in collaboration with the music historian Christopher H. Gibbs, to produce a “college edition,” at a mere 1,212 pages.After his time with Lang, Richard fell under the wing of Joseph Kerman, “the second-most- famous musicologist of those days,” as he called him, who was overseeing the start-up of a new journal, 19th-Century Music, which became what Richard called his “scholarly home” for a time. In 1987, he joined Kerman as a fellow professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained (emeritus since 2014) until his death.In addition to academic pursuits, Richard began to write more popularly for the short-lived Opus, The New Republic and The Times, developing a reputation as America’s public musicologist, a role he gloried in. On receiving the Kyoto Prize in Japan in 2017 for his contributions to the arts and philosophy, he said of his Times work, “I found it congenial to write about music in relation to what are always the primary concerns of any newspaper, that is, social and political issues.” He also loved having “access to the largest audience a writer on classical music in America could ever dream of having.”The international acclaim that Richard achieved was all merited and wonderful, but for me it does not eclipse some of my favorite memories of him, as a youngish performer in New York. Whenever I hear the viola da gamba solos in the Bach Passions played politely and limply, as they so often are, I yearn to hear Richard, whose gamba playing had the same grit and guts and flair as his writing.Fortunately, he lives on in my mind’s ear. More

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      ‘Country House Operas’ Offer a Glimpse of Opera’s Future

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      Steeped in romantic history, smaller “country house operas” such as Grange Park Opera, west of London, offer a leisurely pace and less overhead.When the British TV host Bamber Gascoigne unexpectedly inherited a 350-acre estate in 2014 from his 99-year-old great-aunt, he was stunned by the inheritance tax bill he was facing, not to mention the upkeep of a crumbling 50-room house once briefly owned by Henry VIII.His solution: Set up a registered charity, or trust, to turn it all into an arts center, including a summer opera festival looking for a new home. Like an intervention by the gods in a Wagner opera, the tax bill was slashed, a 700-seat theater was built in about 11 months and the well-heeled came to frolic at West Horsley Place, which had been largely frolic-free for decades.The success of Grange Park Opera (its current season runs through July 17), about 23 miles west of London, is an example of a symbiotic relationship between old English country estates that benefit from becoming a British charity and a thirst for highbrow arts and socializing away from the bustle of the capital in the summertime.A recent performance of “La Gioconda” at Grange Park Opera. Marc BrennerIt is one of several so-called country house operas around Britain. Others include Garsington (in a temporary structure on the Getty estate) and The Grange Festival (in a dilapidated Greek Revival mansion, which was Grange Park Opera’s first home, starting in 1998). There is also Glyndebourne, which in 1934 began daylong outings to an opera in the country, complete with champagne while strolling the grounds, picnics on lawns or tucked away in garden corners, and lavish meals in dining rooms sheltered from the elements.“If you go to the opera in London, you have to scramble for a drink at the interval or gulp down something to eat in 20 minutes,” said Wasfi Kani, the founder and chief executive of Grange Park Opera. “But instead of just a few hours in an evening, you can make it a half day, have a walk in the country and enjoy your dinner at a leisurely pace.”That pace — and an unofficial dress code of tuxedos and evening gowns — also harks back to the opera of old. To some, the country house operas are not only steeped in the romantic history of upper-crust England, but, ironically, may also provide a glimpse of how opera may survive.“Houses like Grange Park are somewhat the future of opera because they are smaller and have less overhead, which is appropriate for dwindling audiences,” said the Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja, who returns to the festival this summer in “La Gioconda” after opening the opera house in 2017 with “Tosca.” “They built all of it in less than a year, and right up to the last minute. We were doing ‘Tosca,’ and the soprano was singing ‘Mario, Mario, Mario’ to the sound of drilling.”Christina and Bamber Gascoigne in 2017. The couple turned West Horsley Place, a centuries-old English estate, into the current home of Grange Park Opera.Grange Park OperaThe company, which usually stages four operas or musicals each summer, has an annual operating budget of around 4 million pounds, about $4.9 million, and a full-time staff of about 12 (with 300 to 400 part-time workers during the summer). Like most other country house operas, it is funded entirely by ticket sales and donations, receiving no government money.Mr. Gascoigne, the original host of the popular TV show “University Challenge,” died in February at 87. But his vision to make West Horsley Place a trust — similar to a U.S. nonprofit organization — is intact, and the opera company, a separate charity, has a 99-year lease on the estate.The core of the 50-room mansion dates from the 15th century, and Mr. Gascoigne’s great-aunt, Mary Innes-Ker, the Duchess of Roxburghe, was its last resident (her ashes are buried beneath the orchestra pit). She lived alone for years in an almost Miss Havisham-like existence where few visitors went beyond the front rooms. When she died in 2014, the home and grounds were in disrepair.“Every time there was a new drip, she thought: Get a new bucket,” Mr. Gascoigne was quoted as saying in 2018.Ms. Kani had been looking for a new home for Grange Park Opera, since its previous home was quite far for its core London audience. She read about Mr. Gascoigne and the house and debt he was being saddled with. It seemed like a moment to seize.A picnic on the grounds of West Horsley Place.Richard LewisohnTurning the property into an arts center with an opera house seemed like a fine idea to Mr. Gascoigne and his wife, Christina. Many of the home’s furnishings and artworks — along with silver, crystal, servants’ outfits and even a long-lost pencil and chalk drawing that thrilled Sotheby’s experts — were auctioned to offset the remaining tax bill and pay for repairs on the house. Mr. Gascoigne gave up about £20 million in assets to create the trust.“Grange Park Opera approached Bamber and me at the perfect time,” said Ms. Gascoigne, who was married to Mr. Gascoigne for 57 years. “What was a potential financial burden became almost a community service for Bamber in his final years.”And his legacy plays out in a five-year-old opera house and the meandering gardens, honoring opera’s leisurely origins when the European elite had little more to do on a given day than listen to opera and fuss with their formal wear.“I’ve always said that a third of them come because it’s an amazing place, a third of them come to see the opera and a third of them to say they’ve been there,” Ms. Kani said. More