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      Richard Taruskin, Vigorously Polemical Musicologist, Dies at 77

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      Author, critic, teacher and public intellectual, he was an unabashed flamethrower who challenged conventional thinking about classical music.Richard Taruskin, a commanding musicologist and public intellectual whose polemical scholarship and criticism upended conventional classical music history, died early Friday in Oakland, Calif. He was 77.His death, at a hospital, was caused by esophageal cancer, his wife, Cathy Roebuck Taruskin, said.An emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a specialist in Russian music, Mr. Taruskin was the author of a number of groundbreaking musicological studies, including the sweeping six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. He was also a contributor to The New York Times, where his trenchant, witty, and erudite writings represented a bygone era in which clashes over the meaning of classical music held mainstream import.“He was the most important living writer on classical music, either in academia or in journalism,” said Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, in a recent interview. “He knew everything, his ideas were potent, and he wrote with dashing style.”At a time when the classical canon was considered sacrosanct, Mr. Taruskin advanced the philosophy that it was a product of political forces. His bête noire was the widespread notion that Beethoven symphonies and Bach cantatas could be divorced from their historical contexts. He savagely critiqued this idea of “music itself,” which, he wrote, represented “a decontaminated space within which music can be composed, performed and listened to in a cultural and historical vacuum, that is, in perfect sterility.”Mr. Taruskin was the author of groundbreaking musicological studies, including the sweeping six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University PressHis words were anything but sterile: Mr. Taruskin courted controversy in nearly everything he wrote. In the late 1980s, he helped ignite the so-called “Shostakovich Wars” by critiquing the veracity of “Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov” (1979), which portrayed the composer as a secret dissident. (Mr. Volkov is a journalist, historian and musicologist.) Drawing on a careful debunking by the scholar Laurel Fay, Mr. Taruskin called the book’s positive reception “the greatest critical scandal I have ever witnessed.”In a contentious 2001 Times essay, Mr. Taruskin defended the Boston Symphony’s cancellation of a performance of excerpts from John Adams’s “The Death of Klinghoffer” after Sept. 11 that year, arguing that the opera romanticized terrorism and included antisemitic caricatures. Even in advocating for what some criticized as censorship, he underscored a central component of his worldview: that music was not neutral, and that the concert hall could not be separated from society.“Art is not blameless,” he wrote. “Art can inflict harm.” (His writings, too, could inflict harm; Adams retorted that the column was “an ugly personal attack, and an appeal to the worst kind of neoconservatism.”)Mr. Taruskin’s most consequential flamethrowing was his campaign against the movement for “historically authentic” performances of early music. In a series of essays anthologized in his 1995 book “Text and Act,” he argued that the use of period instruments and techniques was an outgrowth of contemporary tastes. He didn’t want conductors like Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Roger Norrington to stop performing; he just wanted them to drop the pretense of “authenticity.” And many did.“Being the true voice of one’s time is (as Shaw might have said) roughly 40,000 times as vital and important as being the assumed voice of history,” he wrote in The Times in 1990. “To be the expressive medium of one’s own age is — obviously, no? — a far worthier aim than historical verisimilitude. What is verisimilitude, after all, but correctness? And correctness is the paltriest of virtues. It is something to demand of students, not artists.”Mr. Taruskin had a no-holds-barred approach to intellectual combat, once comparing a fellow scholar’s advocacy for a Renaissance philosopher to Henry Kissinger’s defense of repression at Tiananmen Square. He faced accusations of constructing simplistic straw men, and lacking empathy for his historical subjects. Following a 1991 broadside by Mr. Taruskin contending that Sergei Prokofiev had composed Stalinist propaganda, one biographer complained of his “sneering antipathy.” Mr. Taruskin’s response? “I am sorry I did not flatter Prokofiev enough to please his admirers on his birthday, but he is dead. My concern is with the living.”But his feuds were often productive: They changed the conversation in the academy and the concert hall alike. Such hefty arguments, Mr. Taruskin believed, might help rescue classical music from its increasingly marginal status in American society.“I have always considered it important for musicologists to put their expertise at the service of ‘average consumers’ and alert them to the possibility that they are being hoodwinked, not only by commercial interests but by complaisant academics, biased critics, and pretentious performers,” he wrote in 1994.Mr. Ross said: “Whether you judged him right or wrong, he made you feel that the art form truly mattered on the wider cultural stage.” Mr. Taruskin’s polemics, he added, “ultimately served a constructive goal of taking classical music out of fantasyland and into the real world.”Richard Filler Taruskin was born on April 2, 1945, in New York City, in Queens, to Benjamin and Beatrice (Filler) Taruskin. The household of his youth was liberal, Jewish, feistily intellectual and musical: His father was a lawyer and amateur violinist, and his mother was a former piano teacher. He took up the cello at age 11 and, while attending the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & the Arts), voraciously consumed books on music history at the New York Public Library.At Columbia University, Mr. Taruskin studied music along with Russian, partly to reconnect with a branch of relatives in Moscow. He stayed for his Ph.D., with the music historian Paul Henry Lang as his mentor, as he researched early music and 19th-century Russian opera. He also began playing the viola da gamba in the New York freelance scene and, while subsequently teaching at Columbia, led the choral group Cappella Nova, which gave acclaimed performances of Renaissance repertoire. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1986.Mr. Taruskin conducting the choral group Cappella Nova in 1983. The group, which he led, was acclaimed for its performances of Renaissance repertoire.Keith Meyers/The New York TimesIn the 1970s, musicology was still largely focused on reviving obscure motets and analyzing Central European masterworks. Mr. Taruskin participated in the “New Musicology” movement, a generation of scholars that shook up the discipline by drawing on postmodern approaches, feminist and queer theory, and cultural studies.“Richard had a very keen sense of the political stakes of music history,” said the scholar Susan McClary, a pioneer of New Musicology, in an interview. “He also was an extraordinary musician. And so he was not going to sacrifice the music itself for context; these always went together for him.”While researching Russian composers for his doctorate — at a time when scholars largely dismissed them as peripheral figures — Mr. Taruskin realized how 19th-century politics had insidiously shaped the classical canon. It was no coincidence, he forcefully argued, that Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven were so well-regarded: Their popularity and acclaim represented the aftereffects of a long-unacknowledged, and deeply rooted, German nationalist ideology. His monographs on Russian opera and Musorgsky redefined the study of music in Eastern Europe, chipping away at longstanding myths.In 1984, Mr. Taruskin began writing for the short-lived Opus Magazine at the invitation of its editor, James R. Oestreich. After Mr. Oestreich moved to The New York Times, Mr. Taruskin contributed long-form essays to the paper’s Arts & Leisure section that poked at composers who were often treated as demigods; the section’s mailbag soon filled with irate readers. (He had no qualms about sending letters of his own, mailing curt postcards to prominent music critics to lambast their errors or logical fallacies.) His writings for The Times and The New Republic were later collected in the books “On Russian Music” and “The Danger of Music.”Mr. Taruskin attending an international conference in his honor at Princeton University in 2012. He was a larger-than-life figure at conferences of the American Musicological Society, and his presentations were blockbuster events. Jessica Kourkounis for The New York TimesTeaching a Stravinsky seminar at Columbia inspired the two-volume “Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions,” a seminal 1996 study that upended the cosmopolitan image that the composer and his acolytes had long cultivated. Mr. Taruskin drew attention to traditional Slavic melodies that Stravinsky had embedded within “The Rite of Spring,” and how the composer himself had deliberately obscured the folk roots of his revolutionary ballet.The Oxford History of Western Music, published in 2005, grew out of Mr. Taruskin’s undergraduate lectures at Berkeley and his dissatisfaction with textbooks that presented a parade of unassailable masterpieces. In more than 4,000 pages, he wove intricate analyses alongside rich contextualization, revealing musical history as a fraught terrain of argumentation, politics, and power.Critiques of the “Ox” abounded — that it betrayed its author’s personal grudges, that it unfairly treated modernists like Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez. But it remains a central, seemingly unsurpassable text. “This is the last time anyone’s going to tell this story,” Dr. McClary said. “And it was told in a way that was just as good as it ever possibly could have been.” (Her own criticism of the Ox is perhaps the most enduring: Mr. Taruskin’s survey almost entirely ignores Black musical traditions.)Garbed in a purple blazer, Mr. Taruskin was a larger-than-life figure at conferences of the American Musicological Society, where his presentations were blockbuster events. In recent years he refrained from giving papers in favor of attending talks by his many former pupils.He married Cathy Roebuck, a computer programmer at Berkeley, in 1984 and lived in El Cerrito, Calif. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his son, Paul Roebuck Taruskin; his daughter, Tessa Roebuck Taruskin; his sister, Miriam Lawrence; his brother, Raymond; and two grandchildren. Among Mr. Taruskin’s numerous awards was Japan’s prestigious Kyoto Prize, which he received in 2017. His most recent book was the 2020 compilation “Cursed Questions: On Music and Its Social Practices.” When he died, he was working to complete a book of essays that would serve as an intellectual biography.Despite his highhanded persona, Mr. Taruskin had a soft side known to colleagues and students. For years he sparred with the music theorist Pieter van den Toorn over the meaning of Stravinsky’s music — Mr. Taruskin arguing that it could not be separated from the politics of the 20th century, Mr. van den Toorn seeing such concerns as extrinsic to the scores.Nevertheless, Mr. Taruskin dedicated one of his books to Mr. van den Toorn. The inscription: “Public adversary, private pal.” More

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      Martin C. Dreiwitz, Who Took Student Musicians on World Tours, Dies at 91

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      He combined his love for travel and music to turn the Long Island Youth Orchestra into a globe-trotting powerhouse.Martin C. Dreiwitz, who drew on his twin passions for travel and classical music to found the globe-trotting Long Island Youth Orchestra, conducting his student musicians before audiences as close as Great Neck and Brookville and as far away as Karachi and Kathmandu, died on June 20 at a hospital near his home in Oyster Bay, N.Y. He was 91.Steven Behr, the president of the orchestra’s board of directors, said the cause was a heart attack.The orchestra may have counted some 100 performers, but Mr. Dreiwitz (pronounced DRY-witz) was practically a one-man show: He raised the funds, he scouted for new members, he cajoled parents to bring snacks on rehearsal days, and he conducted every performance from its founding in 1962 to his retirement in 2012.He was also the orchestra’s travel agent. In addition to playing four concerts a year, mostly at a performance hall on the campus of Long Island University Post in Brookville, N.Y., the orchestra went on a summer tour, almost always abroad, with multiple stops and often on multiple continents. One trip, in 1977, took them to Greece, Kenya, the Seychelles, India, Sri Lanka and Israel, with every detail arranged by Mr. Dreiwitz.Though he trained as a classical clarinetist, Mr. Dreiwitz was, in fact, a travel agent by trade, and he used his skills and connections to plot intricate journeys that even a professional orchestra might shrink from. He took pride in being among the first Western orchestras to play in places like Pakistan and Nepal, performing sold-out shows with students who often had never before left Long Island.He treated his musicians like adults, and saw his mission as one less about pedagogy than about preparation for a professional music career. He eschewed the typical youth orchestra fare — Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” — in favor of deep cuts from Mozart and Rossini and avant-garde composers like Virgil Thomson (a personal friend, who sometimes used the orchestra to test-run his latest work).He also tended to steer clear of Broadway scores, though he did have a soft spot for the music of George Gershwin, especially “Porgy and Bess,” and often included selections from that opera on the orchestra’s summer tour.Mr. Dreiwitz saw travel as another form of preparation. It was, he insisted, important for budding violists and clarinetists to learn how to perform at their best in strange new venues, in strange new cities, in front of strange new audiences.But he also simply loved the challenge of planning, say, a five-week trip for 85 students across five countries in East Asia. In between raising money and running rehearsals, during the school year he would dash off on reconnaissance trips, scouting each site for an upcoming tour — arranging hotels (or just as often private homes), checking out venues, even taste-testing restaurants. When the students arrived, months later, everything would be perfect.The orchestra ran on a shoestring budget, especially early on, when Mr. Dreiwitz refused to charge tuition. Instead, funds came from family donations, annual candy sales and, quite often, his own pocket. Every spring he offered a $2,500 scholarship to be split among the three best high school seniors, as judged by an outside panel.The Long Island Youth Orchestra in 1974. Alumni have gone on to play in most of the country’s major symphonies, and they populate countless chamber groups and academic music departments.Lester Paverman for The New York TimesMr. Dreiwitz’s hard work paid off. The orchestra’s 4,000 (and counting) alumni have gone on to play in many of the country’s major companies, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and they populate countless chamber groups and academic music departments.Mr. Dreiwitz could be stern and exacting on the podium, but, many of his former musicians said, he ran the orchestra like a family, fostering a vibe of collegiality instead of competitiveness.“I don’t twist anyone’s arm to join,” he told The New York Times in 1964. “They’re giving up their own time because they love music and want an opportunity to play. I don’t think you can find a more enthusiastic group of musicians any place.”Martin Charles Dreiwitz was born in Weehawken, N.J, on June 15, 1931, and raised in Brooklyn. His father, Samuel Dreiwitz, worked in the fur industry, and his mother, Charlotte (Silver) Dreiwitz, was a homemaker.He is survived by his two sons, Tuan Dinh and Dung Dinh.A gifted musician even as a child, he played clarinet and graduated from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & the Arts), and he majored in music at the University of Chicago. Along the way he studied under woodwind luminaries like Simeon Bellison, the principal clarinetist for New York Philharmonic, and Anthony Gugliotti, who held the same post with the Philadelphia Orchestra.After graduating from college in 1953, he moved to Europe, where he traveled and studied to be a conductor, including a stint with Wilhelm Furtwängler in Vienna.He returned to the United States in the early 1960s and settled in suburban Long Island, hoping to find a job conducting. To make ends meet, he took a job as a travel agent and offered private clarinet lessons on the side.One day in 1962, one of his particularly talented students put down his instrument and frowned.“I’ve gotten this far,” Mr. Dreiwitz recalled the student saying, “and now I must wait years, until I get into a major orchestra, before I get some really good experience. Where do I go from here?”The seed was planted, and took root: Mr. Dreiwitz held auditions for what he initially called the North Shore Symphony Orchestra in September 1962. He started with just 52 musicians, and they held a concert the next spring. A few years later, he took them on their first trip, to Chicopee, Mass.It was stop and go in the early years, with Mr. Dreiwitz hitting up Nassau County music teachers to find promising players. But by the end of the 1960s, he no longer needed to. Eager students lined up outside his travel agency to audition, and every year he had a wait list. The orchestra went on its first overseas trip, to Europe, in 1971.He took emeritus status in 2012, handing the baton to Scott Dunn, a former student. He continued to come in to rehearsals at L.I.U. Post, though less and less often, and then not at all.But Mr. Dreiwitzhad one more hurrah. In 2018, hundreds of alumni returned for a concert in his honor, and he even mounted the podium, to conduct a selection from his beloved “Porgy and Bess.” More

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      William Herschel Is Famous for Science. What About His Music?

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      The accomplished astronomer was, one historian said, “the Einstein of his time.” But before he surveyed the sky, he was a prolific musician.Within the four-square opening of William Herschel’s Symphony No. 8 is a phrase that sounds like one of the delicately reorchestrated pop songs in “Bridgerton.” The first violins play a goading, syncopated refrain as the harmony lurches underneath, slithering to a resolution before launching into grand second subject. It’s a standout moment, and an earworm.That is, if you ever get the opportunity to hear it.If Herschel (1738-1822) is talked about today, it’s probably not for his music. He’s better remembered in the world of science, as a distinguished astronomer notable for discovering Uranus, infrared radiation, Saturn’s moons Enceladus and Mimas; for the idea that stars are born and die like other living things; and for a rigorous approach to cataloging the night sky on his sweeps of the skies that set in motion a method of conducting scientific research.“He was the Einstein of his time,” said Sarah Waltz, an associate professor of music history at University of the Pacific in California. “But of course, Herschel was much better at music than Einstein was.”This year is the bicentennial of Herschel’s death, and an occasion to explore his musical life. The range of works that survive today — 24 symphonies, a dozen concertos, the same number of violin sonatas, six published harpsichord sonatas, music for church services — suggests he was no compositional slouch.But does he stand out in the crowded marketplace of 18th-century symphonies, among the reigning works of Mozart and Haydn? Assessing one of the few commercial recordings of Herschel’s compositions, the Gramophone critic Stanley Sadie wrote that this is “no music of the spheres,” and bemoaned its structural predictability and lurching modulations.Perhaps, though, composing was one of many tools in the arsenal of a talented and successful freelance musician who plied his trade until the age of 44. He had been born in Hanover, Germany, in 1738, the son of an oboist who led that city’s military band. Intellectual curiosity was encouraged in the family, with William and his brother Jacob engaging in detailed musical debates in the margins of their correspondences. William learned to play the oboe, violin and organ, and followed his father into the band. But, as war with France loomed in 1757, he fled to England.In the early 1760s, Herschel worked as a teacher, composer, performer and impresario across northern England. Although he would later be regularly employment as an organist, his contemporary and peer Edward Miller noted his particular talent on the violin: “Never before had we heard the concertos of Corelli, Geminiani and Avison, or the overtures of Haydn performed more chastely, or more according to the intention of the composers than by Mr Herschel.”Herschel was not entirely happy with a freelancer’s life. “From one place to another; from one social circle to another; from one lifestyle to another; —— what an intolerable condition!” he wrote in 1761. A paper trail of his many movements exists almost by accident, with most of his symphonies including the precise locations of their composition: Pontefract, Leeds, Sunderland, Richmond.However, Herschel was unwilling to entertain a move to the busy but musically competitive London. So, after a brief stint as organist of Halifax Parish Church in West Yorkshire — according to Miller, he informed the panel in his audition that he had already accepted a better offer elsewhere — he moved to Bath in 1776, entering a city of emergent upper-class sophistication, with a budding intellectual scene and the newly built Octagon Chapel, from which Herschel constructed a small musical empire built around oratorio performances and subscription concerts.Several years earlier, William’s sister Caroline had followed her brothers to England. Accounts of her story also obscure her early musical interest. The first woman to receive the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the first published woman to publish scientific research and the first female scientist to receive a salary, Caroline moved to England after an intervention from her brother — to rid her from a life of household drudgery following the death of their father — and began to take singing lessons, eventually becoming the resident soprano in William’s oratorio performances, at a time when performing families were in fashion.Herschel believed that music belonged as one of the four liberal arts of the quadrivium, alongside arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. With the aid of two 18th-century books by the Cambridge scholar Robert Smith — “Harmonics” and “A Compleat System of Opticks” — he began to tackle astronomy with the same autodidactic zeal employed when learning English through the dense texts of John Locke. And one of his first homemade Newtonian reflector telescopes brought about a change that would turn Herschel into an overnight celebrity: the discovery, in March 1781, of Uranus, which he initially believed to be another comet. Herschel obsequiously named that planet Georgium Sidus to the delight of King George III, who later offered him a salary with the title of “the King’s Astronomer.”The position involved taking a large pay cut from his profitable music business, but Herschel nevertheless abandoned music to focus his gaze on the heavens. As the Herschels moved to Slough to be closer to the king, the telescopes got bigger, the surveys more ambitious and the celebrity more intense.Although Herschel’s musical compositions had ground to a halt with the move, there is mystery surrounding his relationship with Haydn, who visited the observatory in June 1792. In “Essays in Musical Analysis,” classic volumes from the 1930s, Sir Donald Tovey concluded that looking through Herschel’s famed 40-foot telescope provided the cosmic inspiration for the famous opening of Haydn’s oratorio “The Creation.” The problem: Records show that Herschel was out of town at the time. But perhaps Caroline, at this point his trusted assistant, could have ushered Haydn toward his moment of clarity?Waltz, the music historian, and Woody Sullivan, an astronomy professor from the University of Washington, are currently undertaking a critical biography of Herschel that combines science with music.“We’re trying to remind people that a musician at this time period is not necessarily a composer first, the way that we think of them today,” Waltz said. “They were composing as part of the package.”Much like Herschel’s pathbreaking surveys of the heavens, studying his life requires starting with the big picture, then adding details, piece by piece. More

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      Review: Before Riccardo Muti Leaves Chicago, a Verdi Farewell

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      “Un Ballo in Maschera” is the last in a series of Verdi operas led in concert by the Chicago Symphony’s music director, who departs after next season.CHICAGO — Mortality, the fragility of life, permeates Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” from its lonely first measures.As the opera opens, a crowd sings while a ruler sleeps. For those who love him, it is a state that should bring him rest and refreshment. For those who conspire against him, it is a premonition of his hoped-for death. That battle — between vitality and the grave — continues to the score’s crushing finale.It was particularly hard to avoid thinking of endings during the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s sumptuous performance of “Ballo” here on Thursday evening. Riccardo Muti, the ensemble’s music director since 2010, will depart after next season. And after more than a decade dotted by acclaimed concert versions of his beloved Verdi in Chicago, this is his last opera with this superb orchestra. (Saturday and Tuesday bring two final chances to hear it.)More proof of life’s fragility: Covid-19 very nearly derailed the run.After missing performances here in April because of a positive test, Muti tested positive again last Thursday, leaving that weekend’s concerts to another conductor and putting “Ballo” — which requires more rehearsals than a normal subscription program — in serious jeopardy.But on Thursday, there was Muti, who turns 81 next month. While the bags under his eyes looked heavier than usual, even from a seat in the balcony, he was still stomping on the podium and vigorously pumping his arms downward to draw out the weightiest marcato emphases. He was still crouching nearly to the floor when he wanted the volume softer, and reaching toward the ceiling to summon thunderous climaxes.Muti brings a gleaming, even fearsome clarity to Verdi’s operas.Todd Rosenberg/Chicago Symphony OrchestraVerdi is his life’s work. Few who chat with him for more than a minute or two avoid a passionate lecture about how this composer’s scores remain underrated for their sophistication: messily conducted, vulgarly sung and damnably staged.This positions Muti conveniently in the role of savior: finally wiping the grime from long-dirty windows. Whatever he may think, he is not the only conductor who tries to do Verdi justice, but there is no question that he brings to these operas a gleaming, even fearsome clarity.And stretching back to his performances of the Requiem as the Chicago Symphony’s music director designate in 2009, Verdi has provided a series of exclamation points on his tenure here. Never have I attended an opera performance as breathtakingly focused and ferocious as their “Otello” in 2011. “Macbeth” (2013) was a grimly propulsive march, and “Falstaff” (2016) a witty wonder, a smile in the shape of a symphony orchestra. Only “Aida,” in 2019, struck me as excessively controlled and arid.A tense tale of disguises and deceptions, “Ballo” is by far the strangest of this collection, a product of Verdi’s middle-period experimentations in emotional ambiguity and sometimes jarring juxtapositions of tone. (It premiered in 1859, after “Les Vêpres Siciliennes” and “Simon Boccanegra,” and before “La Forza del Destino.”)The opera is an eerie combination of melodrama and lighthearted, operettalike moments, with a homoerotic whisper over its central love triangle: Renato kills his best friend, Riccardo, because Riccardo is in love with Renato’s wife, Amelia, but it can be hard to tell which one of them arouses Renato’s jealousy more.The quality of the singers, in some of opera’s most fiendishly difficult roles, has varied in the Verdi pieces Muti has led here. But the work of his orchestra has been consistently agile and virtuosic, an ideal vehicle for his goal of bringing out rarely heard details without stinting overall blend and drive.So in this grand but tight “Ballo,” you heard — as you usually don’t — the slight, sour instrumental harmonies under the conspirators’ bitter laughter. Later, as those assassins plotted, their crime was sternly echoed in the resonance and unanimity of the evocative combination of harp and plucked double basses.Meli, left, as Riccardo, with Yulia Matochkina as Ulrica.Todd Rosenberg/Chicago Symphony OrchestraAs Amelia admitted her love to Riccardo, the strings trembled with a softness as palpable as it was audible; those strings had earlier roared with sinewy bristle when Riccardo asked a fortune teller who his killer would be. The prelude to the second act mingled lyrical expansion, somber brasses and a strangled stutter in the cellos; the Chicago winds these days combine artfully, their variety of textures united by their shared phrasing.Especially memorable on Thursday were the understated eloquence of John Sharp’s cello solo during Amelia’s aria “Morrò, ma prima in grazia,” and the spine — sometimes strong, sometimes shadowy — provided by the timpanist David Herbert. “Ballo” is full of simmering quiet, from which the full orchestra was able, time and again, to suddenly explode with savage, Mutian precision.The Chicago Symphony Chorus — prepared by Donald Palumbo, here for a stint after the end of the season at the Metropolitan Opera, where he is the chorus master — sounded richly massed, and sometimes terrifyingly robust, but not turgid. Even forceful phrases did not cut off abruptly; consonants and vowels alike felt rounded and full.Best among the featured singers were the mezzo-soprano Yulia Matochkina, commanding as the soothsayer Ulrica, and the soprano Damiana Mizzi, sprightly but silky as the page Oscar, a rare Verdian trouser role. The baritone Luca Salsi was an articulate, occasionally gruff Renato. The tenor Francesco Meli — like Salsi, a Muti favorite — was brash and ringing as Riccardo; his generosity faltered only occasionally at the very top of his range.When the accompaniment was spare and the vocal line floating, the soprano Joyce El-Khoury sang Amelia with soft-grained delicacy, though her tone narrowed as more pressure was placed on it. With her sound brooding, she effectively projected her character’s pitifully unmitigated sorrow. But she and Meli were pressed to their limits by the ecstatic end of their Act II duet.Singing the main conspirators were two talented bass-baritones: Kevin Short and (especially solid) Alfred Walker. The baritone Ricardo José Rivera; the clear, forthright tenor Lunga Eric Hallam; and the sweet-sounding tenor Aaron Short showed the care with which the orchestra cast even tiny roles.But the star of the show was never in doubt. This was not Muti’s final performance in Chicago, not by a long shot. There was nevertheless special poignancy near the end, hearing — from the voice of a character named Riccardo, no less — a dying farewell to “beloved America.”Un Ballo in MascheraRepeats Saturday and Tuesday at Symphony Center, Chicago; cso.org. More

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      U.S. Orchestras Playing More Works by Women and Minorities, Report Says

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      The recent discussions over racial justice and gender disparities appear to have accelerated efforts to bring more diversity to classical music.American orchestras have long fallen short when it comes to performing compositions by women and people of color, sticking to a canon of music dominated by white, largely male composers.But the protests over racial justice and gender disparities in the United States appear to have prompted some change.Compositions by women and people of color now make up about 23 percent of the pieces performed by orchestras, up from only about 5 percent in 2015, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Institute for Composer Diversity at the State University of New York at Fredonia.The increase comes amid a concerted effort in the performing arts to promote music by women and people of color, prompted in part by the #MeToo movement and the death of George Floyd.“The change that has been talked about for a very long time has suddenly been tremendously accelerated,” Simon Woods, president and chief executive of the League of American Orchestras, which helped produce the report, said in an interview.The coronavirus pandemic, which posed a threat to many institutions, seems to have also contributed to the change. Before the pandemic started, many ensembles took a more traditional approach to programming, planning their seasons years in advance. The virus has appeared to have led to experimentation.“The pandemic has been kind of a jolt to the patterns that we’ve known for so long,” Woods said, allowing orchestras “to be much more responsive.”Over all, ensembles seem to be embracing more music written by contemporary artists. This season, works by living composers made up about 22 percent of the pieces performed by orchestras, compared with 12 percent in 2015. The report was based on data from hundreds of orchestras across the United States.Many ensembles in recent years have taken steps to nurture the composing careers of women and people of color. The New York Philharmonic, for example, in 2020 started Project 19, a multiyear initiative to commission works from 19 female composers to honor the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which brought women the right to vote.While orchestras have shown a greater willingness to program works by living composers in recent years, several obstacles remain, including that some new music is performed only once.The League of American Orchestras, aiming to make works by living composers a more permanent part of the orchestral landscape, announced an initiative last month to enlist 30 ensembles in the next several years to perform new pieces by six composers, all of them women. More

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      At Cliburn Competition, Pianists From South Korea, Russia and Ukraine Triumph

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      The war in Ukraine loomed over the prestigious contest in Texas, named for the pianist Van Cliburn, who won a victory in Moscow at the height of the Cold War.For 17 days, the young artists competed in what some have called the Olympics of piano-playing: the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Texas, one of classical music’s most prestigious contests.On Saturday, the results were in: Pianists from South Korea, Russia and Ukraine prevailed in this year’s contest.Among the winners are Yunchan Lim, 18, from Siheung, South Korea, who became the youngest gold medalist in the Cliburn’s history, winning a cash award of $100,000; Anna Geniushene, 31, who was born in Moscow, taking the silver medal (and $50,000); and Dmytro Choni, 28, of Kyiv, winning the bronze medal ($25,000).“I was so tired,” Lim, who played concertos by Beethoven and Rachmaninoff in the final round, said in a telephone interview. “I practiced until 4 a.m. every day.”“Texas audiences are the most passionate in the world,” he added.The war in Ukraine loomed over this year’s contest, which began in early June with 30 competitors from around the world, including six from Russia, two from Belarus and one from Ukraine.The Cliburn, held every four years in Fort Worth, had drawn criticism in some quarters for allowing Russians to compete. The decision came as cultural institutions in the United States were facing pressure to cut ties with Russian artists amid the invasion.The Cliburn stood by its decision, citing the legacy of Van Cliburn, an American whose victory at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958, during the Cold War, was seen as a sign that art could transcend politics.Choni, the Ukrainian competitor, said he felt proud to represent his country at the competition. He said he almost cried at the beginning of the awards ceremony on Saturday, when a previous winner of the Cliburn, Vadym Kholodenko, who is also from Ukraine, played the Ukrainian national anthem.“It was so touching,” Choni said in a telephone interview. “The situation right now has probably put some additional pressure on me, but it’s just an honor for me to be here.”Geniushene, the Russian pianist, who left Russia for Lithuania after the invasion and has been critical of the war, said she felt uplifted to see a mix of countries represented among the winners.“It’s a huge achievement,” she said in a telephone interview. “We all deserve to be on the stage.” More

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      San Antonio Symphony to Dissolve Amid Labor Dispute

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      The decision will make San Antonio the largest American city without a major orchestra.For almost nine months, the musicians of the San Antonio Symphony were on strike, resisting steep cuts proposed by management that they said would destroy the ensemble. As the dispute dragged on, much of the 2021-22 season was canceled, the players found part-time jobs and mediators tried to negotiate a compromise to save the 83-year-old orchestra.The impasse came to an end on Thursday with the announcement that the symphony had decided to file for bankruptcy and dissolve. The symphony’s board, which had argued that maintaining a large orchestra had grown too costly, especially during the coronavirus pandemic, said it did not see a path forward.“With deep regret,” the board said in a statement, “the board of directors of the Symphony Society of San Antonio announces the dissolution of the San Antonio Symphony.”The board said the musicians’ demands to preserve jobs and pay would require “agreeing to a budget that is millions of dollars in excess of what the symphony can afford.”The decision will make San Antonio, with a population of 1.5 million, the largest American city without a major orchestra.“When you have a major American city which is not able to support an orchestra, it loses history and tremendous inspiration which has been brought to the community,” said Simon Woods, president and chief executive of the League of American Orchestras. “It’s just incredibly sad.”Many of the orchestra’s players were caught off guard by the announcement and said they were disheartened that a compromise could not be reached. Since the strike began in late September, some have been working as substitutes in other orchestras, including in Boston, New York, Dallas and Nashville.“It is sad and it is completely unnecessary,” said Mary Ellen Goree, the former principal second violin of the orchestra, who was involved in negotiations. “I very much wish that our leadership had removed themselves without burning down the organization.”For years, orchestras in the United States have faced existential questions. Many have struggled to stay afloat with the decline of the old subscription model of season tickets, dwindling revenues at the box office, an increasing reliance on donations and turnovers in leadership.The pandemic, which forced many orchestras to cancel concerts for a season or longer, has exacerbated those problems. The majority of orchestras were able to return to concert halls this past season, relying on government grants and an uptick in donations, but others struggled to reopen.In San Antonio, the orchestra’s administrators cited the pandemic in justifying the need for steep cuts, including slashing the size of the full-time ensemble by more than 40 percent, to 42 positions from 72, shortening the season and reducing pay by almost a third.The musicians resisted those moves, accusing administrators of mismanagement and greed. The dispute grew unusually bitter, with the orchestra cutting off health insurance for the striking players.The board continued to defend the cuts, saying they were necessary to avoid a financial crisis. The musicians, in turn, accused managers of exploiting the pandemic to push through reductions in pay and benefits.Goree, who joined the orchestra in 1988, said its musicians would continue to look for ways to play in the community under a new name. Over the past several months they have held concerts independent of the symphony at a local church, raising money on their own. They hope to soon announce a fall season.“San Antonio is a major city and it can support a major orchestra,” she said. More

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      Review: The Met Opera Orchestra Raises a Glorious Noise

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      The orchestra’s power in theatrical music was on display in two concerts at Carnegie Hall led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin.Over two nights at Carnegie Hall, Yannick Nézet-Séguin led the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in an awesome display of its might. After an eventful season, in which concerns beyond music sometimes pulled attention from the stage, these back-to-back concerts were a reminder of the orchestra’s pre-eminence in theatrical material.Each concert paired excerpts from an opera with a programmatic piece, an inherently dramatic form that depicts a story or a character using instrumental forces. The performance on Wednesday matched Richard Strauss’s “Don Juan” with Act I of Wagner’s “Die Walküre,” and Thursday’s all-Berlioz program placed arias and an interlude from “Les Troyens” alongside “Symphonie Fantastique,” a groundbreaking work that sounds more like a music drama than a symphony.Opening with “Don Juan” felt like a statement of purpose. Here were world-class musicians tackling a bravura symphonic poem that established the modernist bona fides of the 25-year-old Strauss. The orchestra flaunted the depth and breadth of its tone in the opening motif, an upwardly swinging phrase dripping with swagger. The horns covered themselves in glory, and the concertmaster David Chan and the oboist Nathan Hughes contributed shapely solos. At one point, the ensemble’s sound grew so frenzied it turned strident. At the end, the crowd roared.The opera had come to the concert hall, and it was going to raise a glorious noise.This was Nézet-Séguin the extrovert, who deploys the orchestra in the opera house like an instrument of fate, keeping the baseline volume at mezzo forte. The orchestra comes across as an external force that acts on the characters rather than one that sympathetically expresses their innermost feelings. The best opera conductors, though, know when a scenario calls for one or the other.In that light, the ending of “Don Juan” revealed a weakness: Nézet-Séguin is more effective at big moments than small ones. Strauss gives his swashbuckling Don Juan a poetic, even philosophical, demise, but with Nézet-Séguin, he just sort of dropped dead.You could hear Nézet-Séguin working out the dynamic emphases in real time at Carnegie. Wagner built the twilight setting of Act I of “Die Walküre” out of mellow, amber-colored instruments — cellos, bassoons, clarinets, horns. Nézet-Séguin, though, focused less on mood and more on intoxicating, surging romance. It certainly sounded as if Siegmund and Sieglinde’s fateful union was blessed by their father, Wotan, king of gods: Nézet-Séguin summoned divine — that is, awesome — playing from the musicians.Christine Goerke (Sieglinde) and Brandon Jovanovich (Siegmund), both Wagner veterans, are not singers to be blown off a stage. Goerke, who has sung Brünnhilde, easily navigated Sieglinde’s music with her dramatic soprano, cresting the climaxes instead of getting washed-out by them.Jovanovich had the more grueling part. The writing for Siegmund constantly pushes a tenor into a muscle-y sound at the top of the staff, and Jovanovich’s bottom notes paid the price, taking on a gravelly gurgle. The middle and top of his voice remained virile, handsome and taut, and his narration cycled through a remarkable series of emotions — vulnerable, proud, sweet, disdainful, morally upright — before finding transcendence.Eric Owens, glued to his score, couldn’t suppress the nobility of his bass-baritone as the brutish Hunding; instead he channeled the character’s villainy with an obdurate, distrustful manner.After “Die Walküre,” Nézet-Séguin insisted that the cello section stand for applause — a touching acknowledgment of the leading role it played. He also teased audience members as they moved up the aisles to leave: “We do have an encore planned,” he said, stopping people in their tracks — “it’s called tomorrow night’s concert.”The mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato performed excerpts from Berlioz’s “Les Troyens” on Thursday.Evan Zimmerman/Met OperaAt the start of the next evening, the strings’ quicksilver quality in Berlioz’s “Le Corsaire” Overture indicated a very different concert was in store.Nézet-Séguin took pains to quiet the orchestra for Joyce DiDonato’s two arias from Berlioz’s “Les Troyens.” DiDonato’s mezzo-soprano is not the typical one for the role of Dido — full, rich, expansive — but she defied expectations, sharpening her light, glittery timbre into a blade for the scena that culminates in “Adieu, fière cité.” Rattled and debased after Aeneas abandons her, Dido fantasizes about murdering the Trojans, but eventually, she accepts her fate, recalling sensuous memories of her time with the questing hero. DiDonato cast a spell, ending the aria on a thread of sound, her Dido a shell of her former self — but what an exquisite shell it was.There was fun, too: Nézet-Séguin bounced joyfully to the rollicking bits of “Le Corsaire” and dug deep into the twisted, macabre finale of “Symphonie Fantastique,” with its cackling ghouls and sulfurous air.After raising hell, Nézet-Séguin pivoted again, welcoming DiDonato back to the stage for an encore, Strauss’s “Morgen.” As he calmed the orchestra to a whisper, DiDonato and the concertmaster Benjamin Bowman intertwined their silvery sounds. This time, Nézet-Séguin got the balance just right. More