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      New Effort Aims to Bring More Contemporary Music to Orchestras

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      An initiative by the League of American Orchestras will enlist 30 ensembles to perform works by six living composers, all of them women.Many orchestras, eager to demonstrate a commitment to contemporary music, have taken pride in programming works by living composers in recent years. But when the glamour of the premiere fades, many of those works all but disappear from the standard repertoire, rarely to be performed again.Now a group of nonprofit leaders is working to make new music a more permanent part of the artistic landscape. The League of American Orchestras on Thursday announced an initiative that will enlist 30 ensembles over the next several years to perform new pieces by six composers, all of them women.“There’s too much great music that gets lost and is never heard after its premiere,” Simon Woods, the league’s president and chief executive, said in an interview. “We thought, ‘We need to solve that.’”While many orchestras are eager for the prestige of commissioning new works, Woods said they are not as focused on playing pieces that have premiered elsewhere.“Orchestras should be patrons of new work,” he said. “But still, the second performance and the third performance are really important. Because it’s only when one hears a work a few times that it sort of snowballs and it has a chance of getting a toehold in the repertoire. Building that momentum is really important.”The League, in partnership with the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation and American Composers Orchestra, has been working since 2014 to bring more diversity to orchestral programming, including awarding commissions to female and nonbinary composers.The initiative announced on Thursday will build on those efforts, pairing each of the six composers with five ensembles. The program, which will cost at least $360,000, will be financed by the Toulmin foundation.The six composers are the British-born Anna Clyne, who works in the United States; Sarah Gibson, who is also a pianist; the Hong Kong-born Angel Lam; Gity Razaz, an Iranian American; Arlene Sierra, an American based in London; and Wang Lu, a China-born composer and pianist, who lives in Providence, R.I.Wang said in an interview that it was often difficult for contemporary composers to find orchestras interested in playing new works after they have premiered.“As a composer, I can’t just like knock on the door and say, ‘Hey, this is my music, why don’t you play it?’” she said.Wang, who is working on a new piece that the New York Philharmonic is to premiere in January, said the league’s initiative would give artists more opportunities to develop. “You can only get better by working with orchestras,” she said in an interview. “Only by listening can you improve.”The initial group of orchestras taking part are the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, San Diego Symphony, Kansas City Symphony and the Sarasota Orchestra. Those ensembles will begin to premiere and perform the works by the composers next season.In the coming months, the league will choose the remaining 24 ensembles that will take part in the program. More

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      ‘A Vocal Figure Skater’ Makes His Mark as an Operatic Hamlet

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      The British tenor Allan Clayton’s portrayal of the title role in Brett Dean’s opera is personal, emotional — and a breakthrough.The tenor Allan Clayton was in near-constant motion and almost always onstage. At a dress rehearsal of Brett Dean’s “Hamlet” at the Metropolitan Opera a few weeks ago, he staggered, capered, fell to his knees, leaped into a grave and dueled to the death — all while singing Dean’s difficult, vocally shimmering, emotionally shifting music. Taking a bow afterward, alone on the huge stage, Clayton looked slightly dazed, drenched in sweat and understandably exhausted.“Hamlet,” which runs through June 9 at the Met, was a breakthrough for the British-born Clayton when the opera premiered at the Glyndebourne Festival in 2017.Writing in The New York Times, the music critic Zachary Woolfe said Clayton was even better at the Met. “His tone is sometimes plangently lyrical, sometimes sarcastically sharp,” Woolfe wrote. “Without losing the character’s desperation, Clayton now makes Hamlet more persuasively antic and wry — more real.”In an interview a few days before the May 13 Met premiere, Clayton said he was both “a more canny singer” and more stable than when he first sang Hamlet. “It is a wonderful role,” he said. “But emotionally it’s very hard. It dredges up issues in my personal life which were true in 2017 and are still true now, and completely inform what I do onstage.”His father, he explained, died when he was in his 20s; his relationship with his mother is difficult; he went through a traumatic breakup with a girlfriend during the rehearsal period for the opera. In short, his life had some eerie parallels with that of Hamlet. As he told The Telegraph in 2018, “an awful lot of difficult stuff got drawn on and dredged up.”Now, he said, he is “better able to distinguish between the character and my reality.”Clayton’s Hamlet with, from left, Sarah Connolly as Gertrude and Rod Gilfry as Claudius.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesClayton offstage looks very much like his Hamlet onstage: bearded, slightly rumpled, in jeans and a loose T-shirt. Friendly and funny, he takes the British art of self-deprecation to Olympic levels and is clearly prone to excessive self-doubt. Just two months ago, he said, he had to lecture himself sternly when a dress rehearsal of Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes” had gone poorly in his view (his description is colorfully unprintable) a day before its Royal Opera House premiere.“I often go through, I can’t do this, it’s too hard, too stressful, and I’m not doing anything useful, like being a doctor or nurse or teacher,” he said. “But I sat in my flat on that day and thought, If I am not going to enjoy myself, why do this job?”His performance was acclaimed by the British press. “His tenor has gained heft,” said John Allison, the editor of Opera Magazine, in a telephone interview. “And he had the lyricism and the power, and a rawness and vulnerability that made his portrayal of the character as an oddball dreamer so affecting.” (Clayton is scheduled to perform the role again, at the Metropolitan Opera House, in October.)Clayton, who grew up in Malvern in the southwest of England, began to sing at 8, in his school choir, led by a teacher who followed the Vienna Boys Choir model, and had the students do both concerts and tours. At 10, he won a choral scholarship to the Worcester Cathedral School, founded by Henry VIII. “We sang everything,” he said. “Carols by Britten, work by George Benjamin, as well as the older things.”Although Clayton modestly said he “wasn’t particularly talented at anything,” he was encouraged to apply to Cambridge University. “No one in my family had even been to university,” he said. He was accepted as a choral scholar, and began to learn about opera and lieder while studying archaeology and anthropology. “Something just clicked in the second year,” he said of his singing. “I thought maybe I could do this.”After earning a postgraduate degree at the Royal Academy of Music, work came steadily. Pivotal experiences, he said, included several roles with the Leeds-based Opera North and his first title role, in Britten’s “Albert Herring” at Glyndebourne in 2008.But performing Castor in Barrie Kosky’s 2011 production of Rameau’s “Castor and Pollux” proved “a game-changer,” Clayton said. “I realized I wasn’t a particular ‘type’ of tenor, neither Italianate or ‘English.’ I just sing like I sing.”“I realized I wasn’t a particular ‘type’ of tenor, neither Italianate or ‘English.’ I just sing like I sing,” Clayton said.Tonje Thilesen for The New York TimesKosky, who has directed Clayton in six operas, called him his “tenor muse” in an interview. “He has the openness and ability to access his inner emotional landscape that you more usually find with actors,” he said, “but with a distinctive and beautiful voice.”A small role in George Benjamin’s “Written on Skin” (2012) was Clayton’s first experience of having a part written for him. “To have someone write something for you, do an almost forensic investigation into your vocal ability, was thrilling,” he said.Working with Dean on “Hamlet” was even more intense. First, Dean said, he recorded Clayton delivering several of the character’s soliloquies, “to hear where his voice sat, and his natural rhythms.” In workshops, Dean could “see and hear how he used the words and that influenced how the rest of the piece unfolded.”By the time he finished writing the second act, he added, “Allan’s ease at singing high without having to belt it out, the flexibility and ease in his voice, were very much in my head.”Matthew Jocelyn, whose libretto boldly cuts and reweaves different folio versions of Shakespeare’s text, said hearing Clayton in the workshops was useful in both practical and intuitive ways. “He is a vocal figure skater,” he said, and “has that mobility that allows him to twirl and to land, to go to the extremes, both emotionally and vocally. Basically, he showed us we didn’t need to be afraid of anything.”Clayton said he read and researched the play, but he felt he had to be as truthful and personal as possible in the part. It felt natural, he added, to explore Hamlet’s darkness and imbue him with a febrile physicality. “I move easily, have always liked sport, and it seemed like a natural extension of Hamlet’s character,” he said. “He is light on his feet both mentally and physically.”The director of the opera, Neil Armfield, said that Clayton’s freedom as a performer made many of the staging ideas come to life. “He is a beautiful physical performer, has the freedom of a ballet dancer without any self-consciousness,” he said. “That fueled a physical sense of something adolescent about Hamlet, his attachment to grief, his breaking of the social rules, his mischievousness and hyperactive glee.”Clayton is at an important moment in his career, said the conductor Mark Elder, who has worked with him on several occasions, most recently on “Peter Grimes.” Clayton’s voice has filled out, Elder said, “but the strength and passion in his singing has not obscured its delicacy and gentle expressiveness.” The roles he chooses in the next years, Elder added, “are going to be crucial for him.”Asked about this, Clayton hesitated. “Casting directors don’t know what to do with me, and I don’t know what to do with myself,” he said. “But as long as I am working with interesting people and trying new things, I think I’ll be happy.” More

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      Carnegie Hall Musters Stars for a Benefit Concert for Ukraine

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      Headliners from the fields of classical music, jazz and Broadway joined forces to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine and show solidarity with its victims.It was not a typical chorus on the stage of Carnegie Hall: the acclaimed pianist Evgeny Kissin reading from a sheet of paper as he sang Leonard Bernstein’s “Somewhere” with a gathering that included the actor Richard Gere, the mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard and the Broadway star Adrienne Warren.But there they were — four members of the full company that took part in Monday night’s benefit concert in support of Ukraine, an array of star power singing onstage as members of the Ukrainian Chorus Dumka of New York joined from the aisles.“Hold my hand and I’ll take you there,” they sang. “Somehow. Someday. Somewhere.”It was that kind of night at Carnegie Hall, as artists from many disciplines and the institution itself came together to speak out against the Russian invasion of Ukraine and show solidarity with its victims.The stars sang Leonard Bernstein’s “Somewhere” for the finale.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesThe Ukrainian Chorus Dumka, an amateur ensemble that specializes in secular and sacred music from Ukraine, opened the concert with the Ukrainian national anthem. Diplomats foreign and domestic offered thanks and spoke about the power of the arts in times of crisis. In between songs, the mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves paused and choked up briefly while speaking about her husband, a doctor, who was in attendance just a day after returning from Ukraine, where he had been helping provide medical care.And there was a message from Ukraine’s first lady.“Music heals and inspires, music boosts hope and confidence,” the first lady, Olena Zelenska, said in a prerecorded video message that played early in the program. “Today’s event is a reminder that Ukraine is an integral part of world culture.”“Music on this stage is a separate important victory,” she added. “It is a sign of unity of our cultures against the chaos and grief of war. And all of you who are in this hall today are our effective and true allies in this cultural struggle.”The hall displayed the blue and yellow colors of Ukraine’s flag.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesThe evening included more than a dozen artists and ensembles. There were performances by the jazz vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, the violinist Midori, the singer Michael Feinstein, the soprano Angel Blue and the Broadway singer Jessica Vosk. Mr. Kissin appeared toward the end of the program — first with the violinist Itzhak Perlman to play John Williams’s Theme from “Schindler’s List,” and then to play Chopin’s Scherzo No. 2 alone.In an interview with The New York Times before the concert, Mr. Kissin said that playing in the benefit felt “so natural for me that I can’t even call it a decision.”“Unfortunately, I am too old and not qualified to take a gun and go to fight in the Ukraine, so I’m doing everything I can: sending money and taking part in concerts for the Ukraine,” he said. “As a Jew who was born and grew up in Russia, I, having belonged to the greatest victims of the Russian xenophobia, I have always felt solidarity with all its other victims, including the Ukrainians.”How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 6Gavriel Heine. More

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      Simon Preston, Acclaimed Organist and Conductor, Dies at 83

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      A force in the world of choral music, he was considered one of the most important English church musicians of his generation.Simon Preston, an organist, conductor and composer who was an instrumentalist of consummate, intelligent virtuosity and a force in the early-music movement, died on May 13. He was 83.Westminster Abbey, where Mr. Preston served as organist and director of the choir from 1981 to 1987, announced the death. The announcement did not say where he died or cite a cause.Mr. Preston, who was admired as one of the most important English church musicians of his generation, was an archetypal product of a choral tradition that, with unstinting energy and an insatiable demand for high standards, he reinvigorated — and eventually moved beyond. His solo career took him to organ lofts across the world, and he recorded prolifically, including with the conductors Yehudi Menuhin in Handel, Seiji Ozawa in Poulenc and James Levine in Saint-Saëns.He took to the organ as if born for it. Determined to spend his life playing the instrument even as a child, he joined the hallowed choir of King’s College, Cambridge, at age 11 and became its organ scholar as an undergraduate in 1958. When the dashing and dynamic Mr. Preston took his first post at Westminster Abbey, in 1962, he was said to be the youngest organist at the royal church since Henry Purcell, three centuries earlier.After a brief stint covering for Peter Hurford as master of the music at St. Albans Cathedral in 1968, Mr. Preston took charge of the choir at the Cathedral of Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1970; he also lectured at the university. He brought out a fervent, firm tone and an impressive agility in the Christ Church singers, just as he did in those he returned to at Westminster Abbey, where he directed the music for the wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson in 1986.Enjoying the time and concentration that studio conditions demanded, he made each group in turn a lively presence on record in the 1970s and ’80s, setting down acclaimed accounts — often with the period instrument specialists of the English Concert and the Academy of Ancient Music — of composers from Haydn back to Handel and Purcell, and beyond to Lassus and Palestrina.The Musical Times commented in 1988 that “his work with the choirs of Christ Church, Oxford, and Westminster Abbey set standards of excellence which are regarded as points of reference.”But Mr. Preston, who maintained a vigorous solo schedule throughout that period, came to chafe at the tedious routine of playing and conducting regular services. He decided to leave the abbey and to concentrate on his freelance career, one that came to include more than a decade spent working with the Deutsche Grammophon label on the organ works of Bach, in whose more grandly scaled compositions he excelled.“It was hard to imagine that anyone could have displayed the mighty Skinner instrument of St. Bartholomew’s Church, said to be the largest pipe organ in New York, more fully and effectively,” critic James R. Oestreich of The New York Times wrote in reviewing one of Mr. Preston’s many recitals in the city in 1992.“His wonderfully colorful registrations,” Mr. Oestreich continued, “presented in wildly imaginative juxtapositions, made it seem on one hand as if he were intimately familiar with this instrument, but on the other as if he were sharing fresh and spontaneous discoveries of its rich possibilities with the audience.”Simon John Preston was born on Aug. 4, 1938, in Bournemouth, a town on the south coast of England. His inspiration to take up the organ was George Thalben-Ball, whom he heard when he was 5 on a shellac record of Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries.”“I suppose you could say I came from a church family,” Mr. Preston, who started studying piano when he was old enough to read the psalter, and who later more than dabbled at the harpsichord, said in an interview with The Musical Times. “My uncle played the organ at the local church, my parents were both worshipers there, and my aunt taught in the local church school. We had a harmonium at home, and I used to fiddle around on that.”While singing at King’s College, he trained under the organ scholar Hugh McLean, into whose prestigious former post he would move after studies at the Royal Academy of Music. He returned to King’s at an auspicious moment; the new organist and director of music, David Willcocks, was to markedly raise the stature of a choir now widely known for its Christmas broadcasts. Mr. Preston contributed an arrangement of the carol “I Saw Three Ships” that remains in festive use, at King’s and elsewhere.“Already something individual is to be heard in the King’s recordings made at that time,” Gramophone magazine wrote in a profile in 1967, noting “the glow of Preston’s accompaniments to the choral works by Orlando Gibbons and in the Advent Carol Festival of 1961.”When Mr. Preston graduated to Westminster Abbey, he became little short of a phenomenon; he drew audiences unlike any of his elder colleagues, toured the United States and Canada in 1965, and made records for the Argo label that were characteristically both fastidious in their preparation and flamboyant in their execution.“From any point of view it would be hard to find fault,” The Times of London wrote in 1965 of a release of Reubke and Reger. “Technical difficulties,” the review continued, “are smoothly dealt with, leaving the organist-listener in a glow of vicarious triumph.”Mr. Preston was one of the more eager advocates of Messiaen in Britain, and he took Messiaen’s style as his model in his own early choral and instrumental compositions, including the solo “Alleluyas,” written in 1965.Later, and in a more personal language that reflected deeper experience, he wrote a “Toccata” that toys with the legacy of Bach’s Toccata in D minor — arguably the most famous organ work of all, yet one, as he wrote in the score, that “repays a certain amount of scrutiny.” He also composed and performed music for the soundtrack of the 1984 film “Amadeus.”Mr. Preston married Elizabeth Hays in 2012. She survives him. Further information on survivors was not immediately available.The radio host Bruce Duffie asked Mr. Preston, in a 1990 interview, if the itinerant life of an organ soloist was fun. It was, he said.“You suddenly find an instrument which is just the one that you want to play very much indeed. Even when it’s not the greatest instrument, there’s always something to be got from it; some new twists, some new sounds somewhere. Actually trying to work the very best out of a rather recalcitrant instrument is still fun.”“It’s lonely, though,” he continued. “You’re on your own. You’re a solo performer. There’s nothing much around. You can be stuck in some cold cheerless church, or overheated cheerless church, and it can be grim from that point of view.“But no, I think it’s fun.” More

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      The ‘Philosopher King’ of Percussion Starts His Next Chapter

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      Steven Schick, a renowned figure in contemporary music, had nearly burned out as a performer. But a new recording project shows he’s hardly finished.SAN DIEGO — Since its first performance, in 1976, Iannis Xenakis’s “Psappha” has been at the core of the solo percussion repertory.Not that it really had competition: When it premiered, a repertory for solo percussion barely existed. But “Psappha” shook the nascent field with its tension between flexible instrumentation and rigorous beat, between stark rhythms and kaleidoscopic colors. The 14-minute piece, in which the player presides over a sprawling array, came across as a strikingly modern abstraction of an ancient ritual, teetering between sober and ecstatic.Steven Schick managed the precarious balance between those two qualities as he recorded the pounding final minute on a recent afternoon in a studio at the University of California campus here, where he has taught since 1991.“Not even my 20-year-old self could have done that,” said a smiling Schick, 68, over the control room speakers when he was done. “That was pretty good.”Renowned for the ease and lucidity with which he handles the piece’s polyphonic intensity, Schick had already recorded it for a Xenakis collection released in 2006. But this new take will become part of “Weather Systems,” a multialbum project setting down his latest thoughts on a body of work he has commanded for nearly half a century. The opening installment, “A Hard Rain,” which compiles some of the foundational pieces he learned when he was starting out as a musician, was released on Friday.The series might seem, at first glance, like a nostalgic farewell to these works. After all, as his sweat and heavy breathing when he finished the recording session made clear, percussion is, more than most instrumental music-making, a young person’s game.But after a foray into conducting — his tenure leading the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus, which began as something of a lark and lasted 15 years, is ending in June — Schick is focusing anew on solo performance.“My percussion playing was saved by starting to conduct,” he said in an interview on the patio of his home in La Jolla. “The repertory is not that large. ‘Psappha’ I’ve played a thousand times. So I was really on the verge of burning out.”It was a renewal cemented during the pandemic.“I didn’t miss conducting,” he said. “And I actually didn’t really even miss teaching in person. I certainly didn’t miss playing concerts. But it was like an itch to practice. It felt like being 19 or 20: not learning these pieces because I had a concert, just doing it because I wanted to.”“Weather Systems,” then, is part textbook, part scrapbook, part lockdown diary, part communion with his younger self, part accumulation of new works. Looking to his past and sketching his future, it is intended as the magnum opus of a figure the composer Michael Gordon has called “the philosopher king of percussion music.”Schick was born in Iowa, growing up first on his family’s farm, then in a small town nearby. (“A Hard Rain” alludes to the precipitation that obsesses every farmer, as well as to the deluge of the pandemic.)“The elementary school band teacher sent home an instrument list for the parents to decide what their kids would play,” he said. “And at the top were the ones I wanted: violin, and French horn sounded kind of exotic. But down at the very bottom was drums, with an asterisk that the parents didn’t have to buy the drums, just the sticks. And my mother was frugal; I was the eldest of five.”Schick, practicing a piece by Sarah Hennies that includes a bowed vibraphone and a flour sifter, is “the god of a certain kind of percussion playing,” Hennies said.John Francis Peters for The New York TimesSo a drummer he became, playing in marching band and some rock ’n’ roll groups. What classical music he knew was from his mother, a talented amateur pianist. She took him to see the New York Philharmonic on tour — Seiji Ozawa conducting Debussy’s “La Mer.”“And I thought, Whoa,” Schick recalled. “I just knew that wasn’t the marching band.”Planning to become a medical doctor (his father’s aspiration before farming), Schick soon transferred to the University of Iowa, where an influx of money from the Rockefeller Foundation had established an unlikely hotbed of contemporary music. When he was asked by the pianist James Avery, a faculty member, to work with him on Stockhausen’s “Kontakte” — a long, raucous electroacoustic classic created in the late 1950s — Schick was thrust into the heart of experimental music.“It was the moment there was no turning back,” he said.With a talent and work ethic that allowed him to memorize huge amounts of complex music, Schick swiftly stood out for his magnetic, theatrical performances, notable as much for the movement, almost choreographic in its fluid elegance, as for the sound.“You have to imagine the 1980s,” said Gordon, one of the trio of composers who founded the collective Bang on a Can. “People came onstage to play contemporary music with the music pasted on huge pieces of cardboard. It was: ‘I’m doing very serious work; this is very hard; this music is very complicated.’ And Steve, from the beginning, what really shocked everyone is that he decided he’s not playing anything unless he plays it by memory. And once he was freed from having to have the music, he’s an incredibly dynamic performer.”Bang on a Can brought him on as a founding member of its All-Stars chamber ensemble, a new challenge for a solo specialist. Establishing himself in San Diego, where he turned his class of graduate students into the touring ensemble Red Fish Blue Fish, he continued to be the rare artist equally interested in the complex tangles of Brian Ferneyhough and Charles Wuorinen; the open-ended spareness of Morton Feldman and John Cage; and the Post-Minimalist rock inflections of Gordon and his cohort.All these styles come together in “The Percussionist’s Art,” his 2006 book that is a kind of memoir in music: poetic and thoughtful, but without stinting on detailed measure-by-measure advice for his fellow performers.“He wrote about these pieces in the same way I would hear pianists talk about the classic pieces in their repertoire,” said Ian Rosenbaum, a member of the quartet Sandbox Percussion. “He wasn’t talking about them in terms of sticks and the technical things; he was talking about them in terms of feelings and emotions. It was a dimension of interpretation that I had never really considered before.”Schick on the beach near his home in La Jolla, Calif. “It turns out I’m a better player than I was,” he said.John Francis Peters for The New York TimesSchick developed a reputation as a player whose technique could handle any obstacle. “Any reasonable composer would think: This is Steve Schick; he can play anything; I’m just going to write a virtuoso showpiece, and every impossible thing I can think of,” said John Luther Adams, a close friend and collaborator, who wrote the suite “The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies” for Schick in 2002.“I did exactly the opposite,” Adams went on. “I gave him this piece which requires a kind of Butoh virtuosity, this nearly frozen slow-motion virtuosity.”Schick, of course, took it in stride and made it his own, as he does with almost every musical dare. Lacking enough hands for an old Bang on a Can piece, he figured out that he could attach sleigh bells to his ankles and dance the part.He has filmed performances without audience in the Arctic tundra and in misty Canadian mountains, and, four years ago, led the San Diego Symphony in a stirring interpretation of Adams’s “Inuksuit” at the U.S.-Mexico border, with musicians on both sides. He will play in Tyshawn Sorey’s epic, glacial “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)” this fall at the Park Avenue Armory, having participated in the premiere at the Rothko Chapel in Houston in February.“Weather Systems” is being released on the Islandia Music Records label, founded by the cellist Maya Beiser, another close friend and a fellow founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars. “I knew I wanted to do a big project with Steve,” she said. “It worked out perfectly that he was in this moment in his career when he wanted to refocus on his solo work.”A collaboration with the audio engineer Andrew Munsey, “A Hard Rain” is a meditative two hours of music, with the dark resonance of a cave — and, in Kurt Schwitters’s “Ursonate,” a flood of Dada babble. Next up will be an installment of radio-play-type pieces for speaking percussionist by George Lewis, Vivian Fung, Pamela Z and Roger Reynolds.And, further in the future, an album including “Psappha.” Schick’s new recording recreates the situation of his practice studio on campus during the pandemic, when limited space meant that hanging gongs surrounded his setup for the Xenakis. The result is a barely audible but palpable shimmer around the beats that bleeds into the pauses — a subtle heightening of the ritualistic nature of the piece, and an indelible record of Schick’s life over the past couple of years.“Steve is really the god of a certain kind of percussion playing,” said Sarah Hennies, a player and composer who studied with him in San Diego. “The music of ‘Psappha’ is ecstatic and transporting and powerful. But the way Steve plays it, it doesn’t feel like he’s showing off, which is what a lot of people want to do.”And Schick has grown only more economical in his gestures, the distribution of his energy.“All these percussion solos from that period of time were written for young, acrobatic people,” he said of the “Hard Rain” collection. “So the question is, what does an aging body, but a more experienced body, have to offer? And it turns out I’m a better player than I was. I don’t waste any time.” More

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      In Cleveland, Schubert Outsings Even the Mighty ‘Otello’

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      After playing Schubert’s Ninth Symphony just before the pandemic lockdown, the Cleveland Orchestra shone in its return to the sprawling work.CLEVELAND — On the morning of Friday, March 13, 2020, the Cleveland Orchestra played Schubert’s Ninth Symphony. The musicians were in concert dress, but just a handful of people were in the seats of Severance Hall. Pandemic bans on public gatherings were going into effect, and this would be the last concert here before the long lockdown.A section of the symphony was released a few weeks later, as part of the premiere episode of a new podcast from the ensemble. By way of introduction, its longtime music director, Franz Welser-Möst, spoke about what he’d felt as he led the second movement: “I thought, all of a sudden, this might be the last time I ever conduct this orchestra again.”Amid the anxiety and uncertainty of early April 2020 in New York, I remember listening to him say that, and bursting into tears. So I have rarely had a sweeter experience with music than returning to Severance on Friday morning and listening to the Clevelanders and Welser-Möst play, yes, Schubert’s Ninth.This is music of stark shifts between celebration and melancholy, ballroom grandeur and drawing-room wistfulness, between forcefulness and expansiveness. It is a sprawling work that nevertheless, when done well, unfolds with a sense of inevitability through all its changes.Welser-Möst said on the podcast that the performance for the near-empty hall — with everyone “calm but extremely, extremely focused” — was “as close to perfection” as he’d ever heard the orchestra sound. That this wasn’t hyperbole became clear when the full symphony was released on the in-house record label that the ensemble started during the pandemic.On Friday, too, the notion of perfection came to mind. The Clevelanders played, as usual, with clarity, poise and adroit balances among the sections, elegance without reticence, urgency without pressure, airiness without weightlessness. But while descriptions of their precision and transparency sometimes make them seem cool, even chilly, this was poignant, humane, truly warm music-making.The first movement was brisk — as is Welser-Möst’s wont — but easygoing in its phrasing, without exaggeration, even in emphasis. As I felt when I heard this ensemble play Dvorak’s Fifth Symphony here in 2015, there was one foot in aristocratic Vienna, the other in a country meadow; I don’t know another American orchestra that lilts with such unforced gracefulness.Heat radiated off the high strings in the second movement, before softening to a gentleness that surpassed that of the recent recording. The passing of a line among different instruments — cello, flute, clarinet, oboe — was an understated layering of liquidities of different densities.The Scherzo was lushly garrulous until it relaxed into spacious calm; the fourth movement had the panache of bursts of golden powder. Throughout, Schubert’s huge section repeats weren’t drudgery, but displays of quietly accumulated power, of material subtly yet thoroughly transformed.From left on platform, Raymond Aceto, Pene Pati, Tamara Wilson, Welser-Möst, Limmie Pulliam, Christopher Maltman, Jennifer Johnson Cano, Owen McCausland and Kidon Choi, with the Cleveland Orchestra, after Verdi’s “Otello.”Roger Mastroianni/Cleveland OrchestraSuch was the quality of the symphony, and the intensity of the emotions it conjured, that it slightly overshadowed the main event of the weekend: Verdi’s opera “Otello,” which was given as a semi-staged concert on Saturday (and will be repeated this Thursday and Sunday).The operatic repertory has been a glory of Welser-Möst’s tenure here. The pandemic sadly spiked a run of Berg’s “Lulu,” but “Otello” is a sweeping orchestral showcase. (I won’t soon forget the Chicago Symphony’s ferocious rendition under Riccardo Muti at Carnegie Hall in 2011.)And the playing was excellent, with attention to detail in moments like the slight wooziness that enters the rhythms as the first-act drinking song grows drunker. The third act progressed toward a finale of controlled nobility; the opening of the fourth was an elegy of mellow, mournful winds, their music seeming to exhale into being taken up by the low strings.But overall Welser-Möst flew through the score at a clip; coupled with this ensemble’s lithe textures, even at its loudest and most powerful, there was sometimes a sense of skating atop the music. The opera impressed; it didn’t shock or wound.In the title role, the tenor Limmie Pulliam had a healthy, attractively grainy tone, with a hint of weeping in it. Once he got past some dropped high notes in “Ora e per sempre,” he sang with burnished security, and acted — even in this semi-staged setting — with moving sobriety.The soprano Tamara Wilson, as Desdemona, gained authority and tonal richness as the performance went on, her high notes strong and clear. But from the start, the baritone Christopher Maltman oozed juicy seductiveness as an imposing Iago.Jennifer Johnson Cano’s mezzo-soprano was smoothly plangent as Emilia; the tenor Pene Pati was a sweetly ingenuous Cassio. The chorus, directed by Lisa Wong, was far more nuanced than usual in this piece, even while wearing face masks; I heard harmonies in the opening scene that were new to me.Whatever the quibbles, few ensembles are ready to do Schubert’s Ninth and “Otello” back-to-back with such accomplishment. Part of it is doubtless the enchanted, silvery atmosphere of Severance, but there is always a sense of occasion when this orchestra performs.Not that everything is perfect. Attendance has been down this season from prepandemic averages, as it has been for many arts institutions; the question is whether those numbers will rebound or settle into a disconcerting new normal.And while Welser-Möst has filled many important positions over the past few years, there are still a handful of openings, none more conspicuous than the concertmaster seat that has been vacant since William Preucil was fired in 2018 after an investigation revealed he had engaged in sexual misconduct and harassment. The orchestra’s principal trombonist was also fired then, for the same reason; that chair remains empty, too.But there was nothing to fear this weekend from either of those corners of the ensemble. Peter Otto, the first associate concertmaster, gave a solo in Berg’s “Lyric Suite” — which preceded the Schubert on Friday — that had the self-effacing eloquence for which Cleveland is justly renowned. (Solos from this orchestra often, in the best way, don’t feel like solos at all.) And in the first movement of the Schubert, the trombones played with an uncanny evocation of doleful distance, as if they were on a nearby hilltop rather than right in front of us.It speaks to the depth of this extraordinary ensemble’s roster that what should have been its weaknesses ended up as particular strengths. And it was so, so good to be back here.OtelloThrough May 29 at the Severance Music Center, Cleveland; clevelandorchestra.com. More

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      Review: Henry Threadgill’s Music From Two Perspectives

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      At Roulette, the composer and his ensemble performed a pair of multimedia sets based on a single composition.The most reductive observation I can provide about the composer and improvising multi-instrumentalist Henry Threadgill’s activity at Roulette this weekend is that he debuted some truly exciting new chamber music. Because he offered a lot more, too.His multimedia programming stretched across Friday and Saturday, each evening running more than two hours. While the first set was titled “One” and the second — in playfully nonspecific fashion — was called “The Other One,” both contained takes on his composition “Of Valence,” for three saxophones, two bassoons, two cellos, along with a tuba, a violin, a viola, piano and percussion.Threadgill, 78, has long deployed playfulness, ambition and unusual configurations in his work. His 1979 album “X-75 Volume 1” engaged a nonet of four basses, four winds and one vocalist.In 2016 he won the Pulitzer Prize for music, for the double album “In for a Penny, in for a Pound,” which put the spotlight on Zooid — his late-career group that includes a tuba, acoustic guitar, cello, drums and Threadgill’s own flute and alto saxophone. Players in that ensemble improvise over quasi-serialized sequences of intervals (befitting a composer who in conversation is as likely to bring up Elliott Carter as Duke Ellington).

      In for a Penny, In for a Pound by Henry ThreadgillBut this weekend’s shows were something new. The tuba player Jose Davila, the cellist Christopher Hoffman and pianist David Virelles are some of Threadgill’s closest collaborators, and capable of lending marching-band panache to his most contrapuntally complex music. Joining a larger group, their sound drew directly on the Zooid language — and some of its freer applications, as heard in Ensemble Double Up — while the multimedia cast a new light on this composer’s late style.

      Double Up, Plays Double Up Plus by Henry ThreadgillThose multimedia elements included collaged photographs of street debris that Threadgill took during the mass exodus from New York at the beginning of the pandemic, projected onto a screen; live recitations of prose written to accompany the images; looping, pretaped vocal choirs, with all parts voiced by Threadgill; and video essays that cut between footage of yet more chamber music and the composer’s droll sermonizing about smartphones and distraction.Threadgill didn’t pick up an alto saxophone or a flute for live performance, though the video did feature him on bass flute. His instrumental contributions were limited to a pair of brief piano-plus-vocal moments, which were affecting in their vulnerability but a touch too tentative to come across as secure. (His pretaped choirs were more vocally assured.)Henry Threadgill conducting his ensemble.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOtherwise, he focused on conducting the 12-player ensemble. On Saturday, they sounded as though in lock-step with his every surprise rhythmic feint — producing an obliquely danceable, straightforwardly joyous Threadgillian energy.At one juncture, in the second hour of both nights, a string trio of the cellist Mariel Roberts, the violist Stephanie Griffin and the violinist Sara Caswell played staggered lines that seemed to tease traceable canonic patterning, but which remained melodically and rhythmically independent. It was tightly plotted, and resisted easy parsing; yet it didn’t sound much like Zooid’s zigzagging interplay.A new sheen came from electronically manipulated cymbal tones, courtesy of the drummer Craig Weinrib. (The transducers he used to manipulate those metallic timbres were a tribute to the late percussionist Milford Graves, to whom the music was dedicated. The performances as a whole were dedicated to the pioneering critic and musician Greg Tate, who died last year.)The ensemble at Roulette.Wolf DanielThese droning metallic timbres stood in subtle, ghostly contrast to the vibrato sound production of the string trio. Next, the tenor saxophonist Peyton Pleninger developed a solo from downward-plunging motifs in the strings. As he built up a frenetic, improvisatory energy from melodic cells, the string players began treading into extended technique, with scraping, at-the-bridge bowing and lightly plucked pizzicato.Alongside Weinrib at his drum kit, some crying alto sax figures from Noah Becker inspired beautiful portamento lines from Griffin’s viola, as well as the entry of both bassoonists playing brooding long tones at first, before turning to peppery, explosive bursts. The gradual swelling of instrumental forces continued; on Saturday, this section contained a galvanic sense of swing, even through Threadgill’s successive, minute changes in tempo.Sometimes, when you wanted the groove to keep going, a quickly arcing exclamation from the ensemble and surprise jolt in the rhythm would bring everything to a dramatic, unexpected finish — at which point Threadgill would, for example, go back to reciting sections of his prose against projections of paintings by his daughter, Nhumi Threadgill. Or he would sit near the stage while some video played, showing Henry Threadgill moving various talismans around a horizontally resting mirror. In tandem, a voice-over track delivered the composer’s observations about contemporary life.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIf Threadgill’s spoken or sung texts stopped short of narrative, they were by turns gripping or humorous as cultural criticism. One laugh-out-loud video involved him recalling both his and a barista’s annoyance at a coffee house customer who, immersed in texting, couldn’t manage to get out an order.But while the audience was invited to join the composer in grouchy irritation, this wasn’t the sole purpose of the vignette. Instead, this morsel harmonized thematically with Threadgill’s broader concerns about what we throw away too easily, including our attention. When his spoken text referred to rat populations and their proximity to outdoor diners, his pretaped vocal choir started to chant about something “crawling up my leg.” Such lighthearted moments had a way of balancing out the text’s more serious attributes — not least about the nature of inequality in New York, before and during the pandemic.While the precise placement of videos and spoken texts changed from night to night, the musical sequence was largely the same. The advantage of Saturday’s set was its increased tightness — in the ensemble as well as in the multimedia transitions. If some form of this vibrant chamber orchestra music makes it to a recording, it should be accompanied by documentation of the experience in the hall (similar to the way a studio recording of Anthony Braxton’s opera “Trillium J” contained a video of its semistaged premiere, also at Roulette).Threadgill thanks an appreciative audience with a broad grin.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“Of Valence” occasionally approached being too much to take in during a single sitting, so it was good that Roulette booked the show for two nights. This longstanding, farseeing venue in Brooklyn is the only place in the city with the chops to pull off a crisp presentation of Threadgill’s multimedia, as well as the willingness to let this composer go for it all.Henry ThreadgillPerformed on Friday and Saturday at Roulette, Brooklyn. More

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      ‘A form of hope’: As air-raid sirens sound, a Lviv orchestra opens a summer festival with Mozart’s Requiem.

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      Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York TimesThe audience members took their seats among boxes of medicine, first-aid kits and intravenous tubes. The orchestra was missing four men who are now fighting on the war’s front lines. A handful of guest singers who had fled bombings and bloodshed stood onstage with the choir.The war in Ukraine has upended the meticulous planning that has gone into the Lviv Philharmonic’s annual summer music festival for four decades. But for musicians and the audience, the show must go on.Even as the space — a Baroque, pastel-colored chamber in western Ukraine — has became a coordination site for humanitarian supplies during the war, it has remained a home to musicians and choirs. This spring, instead of playing upbeat music at the festival’s first performance, the orchestra decided to open with Mozart’s Requiem.The concert, performed on Friday night, was a tribute to the Ukrainians lost in three months of war.“This is a place now for medicine — for the body and the soul,” said Liliia Svystovych, a teacher in the audience. “We understand that a requiem is about mourning, that it is sad music. But it is like a prayer. And a prayer is always a form of hope.”About an hour before the concert started, air-raid sirens began to wail.Iolanta Pryshlyak, the director of Lviv’s International Symphony Orchestra, was preparing to delay the concert until the all-clear sounded. As she waited in a back room where doctors were packing up medical supplies, she took phone calls from volunteers who were driving aid to Ukraine’s embattled east.Ms. Pryshlyak, 59, is not only the orchestra director now. Since the invasion began, she has also directed the flow of supplies that pass through the theater on their way to the war’s front lines. It is her base for both jobs.She had been up since 4 a.m., and she was tired: “I’m just running on autopilot.”Still, she was looking forward to a night of music. “War makes your heart like a stone,” she said. “But music can soften it again.”Downstairs, the orchestra’s conductor, Volodymyr Syvokhip, put on a suit in his office as a baritone soloist sang arpeggios in a nearby room.For weeks, performers had rehearsed amid towers of humanitarian aid boxes as volunteers and doctors organized supplies all around them. Sometimes the musicians would help the aid workers. And sometimes the medics would stop their work to listen to them play.“We are supporting each other through this, in some way,” Mr. Syvokhip said with a smile.As he went onstage, Mr. Syvokhip told the audience that as air-raid sirens sounded in Lviv, a bomb in the eastern Kharkiv region had reduced a cultural center to rubble, and with it, the local theater.When the requiem ended, members of the orchestra and their audience were in tears.“The sound of those alarms and sirens combined in our heads with the words of the conductor, and we understood why musicians must not keep silent,” said Natalia Dub, a headmistress at a local academy.She had put as much care into her appearance this year as she had for summer festivals before it, with red lipstick and a string of pearls.“We need to come here,” she said. “This is the place we need to be most of all.” More