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      Bruno Walter, a Conductor Who Found Truth Through Beauty

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      A survey of Walter’s recorded output is fascinating for the ways in which it reveals him reinventing the traditions he was seen to represent.“Truth can be repulsive,” Bruno Walter, a conductor whose life had taught him that fact all too well, once said. “But Mozart has the power to speak truth with beauty.”If there was one composer that Walter, who was able to make beauty from truth like few others until his death in Beverly Hills in 1962, was most associated with during his career, it was that Viennese master; the story of Walter’s life, the conductor said, could be told as “the history of the development of a love for Mozart.”Listen to any of the famous stereo recordings Walter made in the twilight of his life with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra, and it is easy to understand why. Take just the introduction to the E flat symphony, No. 39, from 1960. Stately, mellow, warm, it sings with contentment, backed with a faith strong enough that when troubles darken the scene, you can practically hear Walter transfigure them with an understanding smile. It’s a gesture of benevolence, yet he makes it sound glowingly apt, even characteristic of Mozart. Not for nothing did the critic Neville Cardus once suggest that to witness Walter conduct was to be “visited by an act of grace.”Mozart: Symphony No. 39 in E flatColumbia Symphony Orchestra, 1960 (Sony)Writers often dignified Walter with spiritual metaphors — the author Stefan Zweig compared the beam on his face while conducting to “the countenance of the angels when they look upon God” — and it is revealing of his artistry that they were exactly what Walter aspired to achieve. For him, the Germanic music from Bach to Strauss was pure, uplifting, redemptive. It offered an “unchanging message of comfort,” he wrote in his memoir “Theme and Variations”; its “wordless gospel proclaims in a universal language what the thirsting soul of man is seeking beyond this life.”His authority, lightly worn, came not from technique or intellectual heft, but from “his love and his faith,” the New York Times critic Olin Downes wrote after a concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1946. “Love, and not merely interpretive comprehension of what he is playing. Abiding faith in the music he represents.”More than that, Walter seemed after World War II to restore the luster of a vanished, even discredited tradition. He spoke like a German Romantic, and he conducted like one, too, tracing his influences back through the Vienna of Gustav Mahler and on to Richard Wagner, whose writings read during secret trips to a Berlin library as a boy.Walter, left, with his fellow conducting luminaries Arturo Toscanini, Erich Kleiber, Otto Klemperer and Wilhelm Furtwängler.Ullstein Bild, via Getty ImagesWilhelm Furtwängler forced that shared heritage through his intense and idiosyncratic style, and his association with Nazism. Walter, though, had the moral stature of an exile from the Third Reich, and he presented his inheritance unsullied, with an irresistible eloquence that made the classics sound “as natural as breathing,” the Virgil Thomson wrote in 1954.Part of the fascination of listening to Walter’s conducting now — coupling an exceptionally worthwhile 77-disc Sony box set, capturing his American career after he took refuge in California in 1939, with older and live material available on labels including Pristine — lies in hearing him reinvent the traditions he was seen to embody.Brahms: Symphony No. 1 in C minor, finaleVienna Philharmonic Orchestra, 1937 (Pristine)The same movement with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1953(Sony)And with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra in 1959Sony)There is the antique charm of Walter’s prewar activity, above all in Vienna; the remarkable and somewhat surprising solidity and strength that marked his interpretations during his collaboration with the New York Philharmonic; the radiance of his late, stereo recordings, serene but spry. Yet throughout there is a constant, distinctive search for a simple, singing sense of expression, for a pliancy of line, for a sophistication and sensitivity that lay in more than technical precision.“There is a German verb, musizieren, which means to make music,” Thomson wrote in a review of one of Walter’s Philharmonic concerts in 1941, suggesting that the word applied more to him than to those, like Artur Rodzinski and Dimitri Mitropoulos, who had also conducted that orchestra. “Walter musiziert,” Thomson went on. “And that is a pleasure for those who like music with their concerts.”WALTER WAS NOT ALWAYS the dignified protector of Germanic music that he fashioned himself as after World War II, as his excellent biographers Erik Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky have shown.Born Bruno Schlesinger to a middle-class Jewish family in Berlin in 1876 — he changed his name to take an early job in Breslau (modern-day Wroclaw, Poland) and later converted to Christianity — he had youthful success as a pianist, deciding to become a conductor only after seeing Hans von Bülow in the flesh.Much of his career was spent in the opera pit, from his debut in Cologne, Germany, in 1894 through his tenure from 1913 to 1922 as general music director of Munich, where Nazis demanded his ouster, and his expulsion in 1938 from the Vienna State Opera, where he had assisted Mahler at the start of the century and learned that he could never be the tyrant that his mentor had become.Conducting Mahler’s scores with angstless classicism, Walter took them as his own, likely at the expense of creative energies that had once had Viennese critics writing about his own compositions in the same breath as those of Schoenberg and Zemlinsky. If his focus in the opera house was on Mozart, Wagner and Strauss, he nevertheless did his part for contemporaries, including Schreker, Korngold, Pfitzner and Smyth. His essentially conservative tastes — atonality for him was close to immorality — had freer rein over time; the Sony box contains just one work, Barber’s First Symphony, that was written after Mahler’s death in 1911.If anything, Walter’s fate at the hands of Nazism encouraged him still more strongly to shine the light of the canon against “the dark powers of hell,” as he called them. He had become the music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1929, but was forced to leave because of threats against his concerts early in 1933. He went to Austria, where he was greeted as a hero.Wagner: ‘Die Walküre’Lotte Lehmann, soprano; Lauritz Melchior, tenor; Vienna Philharmonic, 1935 (Pristine)The recordings he made with the Vienna Philharmonic then, with their portamento and their way of easing lyrically into the beat, have a tragic quality, and some of them — a mournful Brahms First; the turbulent Mahler Ninth captured live weeks before the Anschluss in 1938 — seem understandably burdened with the outside world. But rarely has there been such repose as in the slow movement of his “Jupiter” Symphony, such drama as in his excerpts from “Die Walküre,” such delight as in his Beethoven Sixth.VIENNA FELL, and, after a year or so in Paris, Walter settled in Los Angeles. The prospect of working in the United States had been attractive since at least World War I, and he had made his New York debut in 1923, when The Times admired “a sensitive musician, forceful without violence.” Over time, he became deeply respected, seen as the grand old man of the Germanic canon, though he was never a box office draw.Having declined the leadership of the New York Philharmonic in 1942, he agreed to it for two seasons in 1947, serving humbly as the musical adviser rather than music director of the orchestra Mahler had once headed. Although he played his part in postwar reconciliation in Europe after 1946 — taping “Das Lied von der Erde,” definitively, with Kathleen Ferrier in Vienna in 1952 — his musical home would remain New York, and his family home, Hollywood.There is an absorbing collision of traditions in the recordings that Walter made after 1941 with the Philharmonic, an ensemble whose manner could be as mighty as his was mild; it is a testament to his powers that the compound was alchemical rather than destructive.Reared on the perfectionism of Arturo Toscanini, New York critics habitually accused Walter of a carelessness with details that was fundamental to his style.“This idea of precision in orchestral playing is very recent,” Walter told an interviewer in 1960. “It was a necessary reaction to a certain lackadaisical way of attacking tasks, and Toscanini in forwarding it did a wonderful service. But now precision has become an ideal, which is wrong.”Mahler: Symphony No. 1 in DNew York Philharmonic, 1954 (Sony)The hours of politely insistent rehearsal tapes in Sony’s box go some way to refuting the charge, and if some of the recordings do the opposite, many nevertheless reveal the happy confluence of Walter’s elegance and the Philharmonic’s thrust, albeit in a repertoire narrower than he presented in concert. His most dramatic liberties were reined in; tempo fluctuations became slighter. The warmth remained, as a wartime Beethoven “Eroica” and Fifth demonstrate, but there could also be a firmness in attack, even in Haydn and Mozart; a sensational Brahms cycle from the early 1950s studio is shockingly fiery, and still more so in live accounts from the same time that are preserved on Pristine.Fiery is not a word one could use to describe Walter’s last recordings, made after a heart attack in March 1957 all but ended his concert career. He had worked with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra in New York, a freelance group that was cheaper for his record company, Columbia, to hire than the full Philharmonic; the ensemble’s Californian namesake was formed specifically for him to reprise the standard repertoire in stereo, despite his fears (for a while proven correct) that to do so “condemned our whole former work to obsolescence,” as he wrote to his producer.The results, which perhaps betray the inexperience of the ensemble too often, represent less a reversion to Walter’s prewar type than a rarefied era of their own; they exude luminosity. He remade his Beethoven and Brahms in majestic fashion, dwelled admiringly on Bruckner, and added to his earlier Mahler, not least with a touching Ninth and a vast First that astounded Leonard Bernstein. His final session, in March 1961, preserved Mozart overtures that bubble with vitality; that of “Der Schauspieldirektor” positively bursts with the joy of a man of the theater, rejoicing, once again, in finding truth through beauty.Mozart: ‘Der Schauspieldirektor’Columbia Symphony Orchestra, 1961 (Sony)“What I want from music is happiness,” Walter had said in an interview with The Times in 1956 that celebrated his 80th birthday and his 63rd year on the podium. “People want happiness — why should we give them unhappiness? When the pursuit of happiness finds its satisfaction in music it is the highest possible satisfaction in man.” More

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      Toshi Ichiyanagi, Avant-Garde Composer and Pianist, Dies at 89

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      A former protégé of John Cage who was once married to Yoko Ono, he was part of a lively experimental music scene in New York and became a leading modern composer in Japan.Toshi Ichiyanagi, an avant-garde pianist and composer whose works mixed international influences, made unusual use of musicians and instruments, and combined music with other media, died on Oct. 7 in Tokyo. He was 89.The Kanagawa Arts Foundation, where he was general artistic director from 1996 until last year, said he died in a hospital. No cause was given.Mr. Ichiyanagi came to New York from Japan in the 1950s to study at the Juilliard School. While there he met Yoko Ono, whose parents had moved the family from Japan to Scarsdale, N.Y., in the early 1950s. Ms. Ono was also interested in experimental music and had studied briefly at Sarah Lawrence College.She and Mr. Ichiyanagi eloped in 1956 and immersed themselves in the experimental art and music scenes of the era, including the radical Fluxus movement. Mr. Ichiyanagi took a course taught by the composer John Cage at the New School (Ms. Ono sat in on the sessions), absorbing many of his Minimalist ideas.Mr. Ichiyanagi and Mr. Cage toured together, sometimes with Ms. Ono, and Mr. Ichiyanagi was instrumental in bringing Mr. Cage to Japan in 1962, introducing his music there. In the same period, Ms. Ono and Mr. Ichiyanagi hosted performances at their loft in TriBeCa that included music, dance and poetry. (“THE PURPOSE OF THIS SERIES IS NOT ENTERTAINMENT,” an announcement for one program said.)The marriage lasted until 1962. Ms. Ono later married John Lennon.In the early years of his career, Mr. Ichiyanagi staked out his claim as one of the most adventurous composers and performers of his day.In May 1961 he gave a recital at Carnegie Hall. His program included works by Mr. Cage, Morton Feldman and others, as well as one of his own pieces. Eric Salzman, describing Mr. Ichiyanagi’s performance of his work in a review for The New York Times, wrote that “a high, distant, cold glissando rubbed somehow out of the innards of the piano and a furious rumble of elbows and fists on the keyboard.”He was gaining attention beyond New York as well.“Tokyo music circles are buzzing about a recent concert which featured Toshi Ichiyanagi’s ‘IBM,’” The Star Tribune of Minneapolis reported in February 1962, “an electronic composition which had several novelties: a boy striking matches and dropping them into a bowl, which he proceeded to smash with a hammer; a man kicking a chair and scraping it on the floor; and finally another man stringing paper tape about the stage and into the audience, making a giant spider web.”Later that year, The Honolulu Star-Bulletin covered Mr. Ichiyanagi’s performance at the University of Hawaii.“Toshi Ichiyanagi’s ‘Music for Piano No. 4’ explored the harmonics of hand-stroked piano strings,” the newspaper reported, “and apparently, though frequently inaudible, the sounds to be derived from thrumming on the instrument’s wooden framework.”In 1966 Mr. Ichiyanagi joined with the conductor Seiji Ozawa and the composer Toru Takemitsu to create Orchestral Space, an annual festival that introduced new, mostly experimental works in Japan.“The experience called ‘Orchestral Space ’68’ mapped some new territory for the audiences,” Edmund C. Wilkes of The San Francisco Examiner wrote of that year’s festival in Tokyo. “Not all of it is habitable, but there were prospects that pleased.”Mr. Ichiyanagi’s works were not all experimental. As his career advanced he wrote operas, orchestral and chamber pieces, and other more conventional works. He also took an interest in traditional Japanese music, and in 1989 he began touring with his Tokyo International Music Ensemble — the New Tradition, a group that performed contemporary compositions played at least in part on instruments like the koto, an ancient member of the string family.The group became less active as its members aged and gave its last performance in about 2000, according to Tokyo Concerts, Mr. Ichiyanagi’s management agency.He continued to create new works into his 80s. His Ninth Symphony, which had its premiere in 2015 in Tokyo, was a meditation on the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima power plant in Japan in 2011 and on the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.Mr. Ichiyanagi received numerous honors throughout his career, including Japan’s Order of Culture in 2018.The Asahi Shimbun via Getty ImagesMr. Ichiyanagi was born into a musical family on Feb. 4, 1933, in Kobe, Japan, and grew up in Tokyo. His father, Shinji Ichiyanagi, was a cellist, and his mother, Mitsuko, gave piano lessons in their home and was Toshi’s first piano teacher.He later studied composition, first in Japan and then at Juilliard.After several years in New York, Mr. Ichiyanagi returned to Japan in 1961. He stayed there for most of his life.In 1963, he married Sumiko, a writer, and they had a son, Kei, in 1964, who survives him. Ms. Ichiyanagi died in 1993.Mr. Ichiyanagi composed more than 200 works and made a number of recordings for Japanese record labels.He often composed with his own notation system, spurning the traditional five-line Western sheets, and his imaginative scores could be considered artwork. Several are collected in the Museum of Modern Art.Having studied piano as a child, he first turned to composition as an inadvertent consequence of World War II.The family had to evacuate Tokyo when it was under bombardment, and young Toshi did not touch a piano for three years. When the family returned to the city after the war ended, they found that much of their property had burned down but the piano was still standing.“We had virtually nothing else left — no scores, nor anything else for studying music,” Mr. Ichiyanagi said in a 2016 interview for an oral history project conducted by the Kyoto City University of Arts. “So I just played it on my own in whatever way, and that turned my interest to music composition. It wasn’t like I started it with any clear ideas or plans.”Hisako Ueno More

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      Review: Dimming the Lights for Sensuously Flowing Bach

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      The harpsichordist Jean Rondeau played the “Goldberg” Variations at Weill Recital Hall with patience and a vibrant yet subtle touch.A quiet battle over lighting simmers in classical music. During concerts, halls tend to be kept bright enough for audience members to be able to find their cough drops and consult their programs. But where’s the focus and drama in that? The brightness can come across as stilted and bland compared with what it’s like at a movie or play. But the lights have stayed, mostly, on.For his return to Carnegie Hall on Thursday evening, though, the superb harpsichordist Jean Rondeau turned them off.He made Weill Recital Hall, the most intimate of Carnegie’s three spaces, unusually dark for his performance of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations. The only illumination was a dim spot on him and his instrument. The effect was nocturnal, even séance-like, adding extra dreaminess to his brief improvisation at the start that flowed into the familiar opening of Bach’s gentle Aria.Despite the dramatic lighting and that surprising prelude, this “Goldbergs” avoided attention-grabbing thrills. Rondeau, 31, is not an artist of stark contrasts or broad colors. His theatricality is patient and natural; his touch is vibrant but subtle.This rendition of the “Goldbergs” — Bach’s set of 30 variations on that Aria — was not the kind to exaggerate or even emphasize the, well, variation. (Mahan Esfahani, another leading harpsichordist of the younger generation, does that vividly on his 2016 recording.) Rondeau’s version more takes the form of an unfurling carpet: variety in its pattern, but one long piece of fabric.This impression of sustaining a single arc is all the more remarkable given the considerable length of his rendition. His performance of the “Goldbergs” on Thursday had roughly the same dimensions as the 106-minute recording he released earlier this year — of a piece that often runs half an hour shorter than that.Rondeau gets to that duration by opening up small pauses and spaces for breath and ornamentation, gradually increasing the run time without (usually) taking tempos that come off as unduly slow.The result isn’t lugubrious on the album, and it isn’t in performance, either. Rondeau’s Bach is a voyage taken with sensual but serene, silvery lightness of texture and moment-by-moment flexibility, though it took some time on Thursday to acclimate to what, over the first half-hour or so, seemed almost homogeneous.But by the ardent legato flow of his 13th Variation — a steadily unwinding lyricism made possible by the precision of his technique — the accumulating power of the interpretation was clear. Even with a substantial pause between the 17th and 18th variations, Rondeau maintained a sinuous connection between the tension of the harmonic wanderings in the first and the strumming release of the second.In the 20th, the clarity of his finger work allowed him to bend, shape and blur the meter without losing the pulse. He refused to milk the melancholy of the sprawling 25th, maintaining an elegant restraint that coursed into the virtuosic combination of courtliness and dense, smoky chromatic fireworks in the late variations.The return of the Aria after this odyssey was hardly a safe, secure homecoming. Rondeau ornamented it so elaborately — though, still, so unshowily — that it felt like yet another variation. Another stop on an ongoing journey, not the end.Jean RondeauPerformed on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Clara Schumann and Florence Price Get Their Due at Carnegie Hall

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

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      Music Thwarted by the Holocaust Will Now Be Published

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

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

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

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

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

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      in Music

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

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