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      A Monkish Conductor Who Expressed His Faith Through Music

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      A new 69-disc box of Dimitri Mitropoulos’s recordings are an opportunity to reassess a conductor who remains out of reach.When Dimitri Mitropoulos was putting together the programs that he would conduct in 1947 as a guest of the New York Philharmonic — the ensemble he later led in a fraught tenure from 1949 to 1958 — he likely could not have predicted which item on his typically eclectic lists would be the most controversial.One week, this “strangest and most curiously gifted” of conductors, as Olin Downes of The New York Times called him, preceded Gershwin’s Piano Concerto with the American premiere of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, at a time when Mahler’s works were regarded with incredulity. The week before, Mitropoulos, the Greek American music director of the Minneapolis Symphony, had offered firsts of Bartok and Barber. Before that, he had given a Thanksgiving premiere of Krenek’s Symphony No. 4, a serial work with “about as much savor to it as a pasteboard turkey,” the critic Virgil Thomson quipped.Yet none of that caused the caustic ire reserved for Strauss’s “Alpine Symphony.” “A composer would be a little embarrassed to confess to the authorship of a score like this today,” Downes railed after the Philharmonic concert on Nov. 20, joking that only an atomic bomb had been left out of its “sensational and expensive sounds.” If the parting of Strauss’s thunderstorm was “mellifluous,” he admitted, it was still “sentimental in the most bourgeois vein,” music “from which one would have expected Mr. Mitropoulos long since to have graduated.”Even so, the “Alpine Symphony” was the kind of gospel that Mitropoulos, a missionary for new and underappreciated music whose hair-shirt devotion and tall, bald figure evoked the monks he had thought of joining as a boy, could preach aflame in inspiration. Listen to a Philharmonic broadcast from Nov. 23, and you hear a Strauss not of banality but spirituality; what Downes dismissed as mawkish, Mitropoulos conducts as rapture.Strauss’s “Alpine Symphony”New York Philharmonic, 1947 (Music & Arts)Conducting was a calling for Mitropoulos, an alpinist who felt closest to God in the mountains but expressed his faith enduring trials of music. His aim, he wrote to his muse, Katy Katsoyanis, in 1947, was “to surpass the material, to annihilate it, reduce it to nothing, so that the spiritual achievement becomes an absolute morality.” It was also carnal, an act of metaphysical love between conductor and orchestra that this largely celibate gay man, as his exemplary biographer William R. Trotter portrays him, saw as “another expression my unlived sexual life.”Painstakingly committing the tiniest details of scores to memory, Mitropoulos seemed not to direct music but to emanate and embody it, fists flailing and feet flying. He was, on principal, a collaborator, one who worshiped the charitable example of St. Francis of Assisi and refused to wield a baton, which he saw as a symbol of subjugation. But his ability to unify gesture and tone paradoxically appeared imperious to some, even authoritarian, a denial of spontaneity and specificity of style.Either way, if Mitropoulos’s detractors granted that his erratic interpretations, driven tempos and taut, sinewy sound served some music spectacularly well, ministering to the downtrodden of the world’s (male) composers was not what his times demanded.Mitropoulos, an alpinist who felt closest to God in the mountains, in 1949.NY Phil Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital Archives“Mr. Mitropoulos conducts the wrong pieces magnificently,” Thomson surmised after his Philharmonic debut, in 1940; a reputation for coarseness in the canon of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms would undo him when New York critics sought blood over a decade later.The stature of “the most masterful of all modern conductors,” as the critic Neville Cardus anointed him, has since wilted in the egotistical heat cast by his erstwhile protégé, constant betrayer and eventual successor: Leonard Bernstein.A new, 69-disc Sony Classical box of Mitropoulos’s recordings might grant an opportunity to reassess the conductor, but if there is far too little of what Thomson thought of as the “right” music to be heard in it, there’s hardly enough of the “wrong” music to challenge the conventional wisdom either. The real Mitropoulos remains frustratingly out of reach.Sony is not at fault here. Releasing many of Mitropoulos’s recordings for the first time in the digital era, it has filled the last gaping hole in the discography of the Philharmonic’s post-Toscanini decades. The blame lies with the label that recorded Mitropoulos for much of his career, Columbia, whose executives chose Eugene Ormandy over interpretive insight and stuck Mitropoulos with the leftovers, deploying him as a concerto accompanist and offering him scant chance to fulfill his mission. The decision was commercial; the pity is lasting.Mitropoulos was born in Athens in 1896. He was young when he began to study piano; soon enough, if he wasn’t joining his uncles to pray in the monasteries of Mount Athos, he was spending his Saturdays leading scratch ensembles at home. At the Athens Conservatory, he trained as a keyboard virtuoso of firebrand talents and as a composer of Romantic tastes. Aside from some transcriptions, he rarely performed his own works later on, but he made his podium debut in 1915 with his tone poem “Tafi” (“Burial”).After a brief spell in Brussels, Mitropoulos went to Berlin to study composition with Ferruccio Busoni, then worked as an assistant conductor at the State Opera there. But the modernist impulses he came to feel in Weimar-era Berlin, influencing both his inclinations in the repertory and his formidable last compositions, were of little use back in Greece, where duty bade him return in 1924 to lead the Conservatory Orchestra in Athens, a poor ensemble he turned into a listenable one.His breakthrough came in 1930, when one of his patrons hired the Berlin Philharmonic for him to conduct a concert: After Egon Petri withdrew from Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, Mitropoulos took up the solo part as well. Repeating that shocking display of musical ability elsewhere drew the attention of Serge Koussevitzky, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s director, who invited him to be a guest conductor. Upon that debut, in 1936, the Boston Herald said that “his body, even more than the notes of the score, seems the source of the music.” Critics gossiped of finding Toscanini’s heir.Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3: Allegro ma non troppoRobin Hood Dell Orchestra of Philadelphia, 1946 (Sony Classical)When Mitropoulos returned to Boston in January 1937, he added a date with the Minneapolis Symphony, now the Minnesota Orchestra, which Ormandy had jilted for Philadelphia the year before. “Mitropoulos appeared to be a fanatic who had sold his soul to music” wrote a local critic, who described conducting “so full of blood, muscle, and nerves as to seem alive and sentient.” Mitropoulos was announced as the music director within a couple of weeks, and would stay for 12 years.Mitropoulos’s stint in the Twin Cities was radical in more than just repertoire, challenging the godlike halo of other conductors with his asceticism. He lived in dorm rooms at the University of Minnesota. Spending on little but his habit of catching a double feature, he gave his salary away, much of it to the players whose privations he shared on endless tours. His sexuality remained private, the closet one act of discipline among many; the summer of 1943 was spent doing exhausting manual labor for the Red Cross.Mitropoulos’s marked copy of Schoenberg’s “Erwartung.”NY Phil Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital ArchivesThere were tribulations in the music to which Mitropoulos exposed his listeners in the five-thousand-seat Northrop Auditorium, too. Alongside recent music from Rachmaninoff and Vaughan Williams came the dissonances of Schoenberg, Krenek and Artur Schnabel, the pianist whose First Symphony even Milton Babbitt described as “murderously complex” after hearing Mitropoulos’s unhappy performance of it in 1946.The Minneapolis recordings in Sony’s box give no more hint of such ambition than a pioneering Mahler Symphony No. 1. Mitropoulos chafed at the early recording process, but his style is audible through dismal sound. Dynamics are extreme, and accents are firm. If his Schumann Second suffers from his wrestling, Beethoven’s “Pastoral” — the only one of that composer’s symphonies that he recorded — sounds aptly brawny today. And his burly rhythmic insistence makes unexpected triumphs of Franck’s Symphony and Rachmaninoff’s “The Isle of the Dead.”Mahler’s Symphony No. 1: Stürmisch bewegtMinneapolis Symphony, 1940 (Sony Classical)The question was never whether Mitropoulos would leave Minneapolis, but for which ensemble and when. He took charge of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s summer concerts from 1945 to 1948, but Ormandy proved immovable. Boston looked likely until Koussevitzky’s homophobia — abetted by the ambitious Bernstein’s evident outing of Mitropoulos, his youthful crush, to his new mentor — ended that path. The last orchestra standing was the New York Philharmonic, an overworked, underpaid orchestra with a fearsome reputation.“I have to go,” Mitropoulos told his Minneapolis concertmaster, Louis Krasner, “even though I know I am probably going to my doom.”Doom awaited, although there was success before the fall. The repertoire was again catholic, ambitious, brilliantly risky. His “Elektra” and “Wozzeck” were historic. Plenty of Schoenberg’s scores received hearings; difficulties rehearsing the monodrama “Erwartung” led Mitropoulos to ask Katsoyanis whether his compulsion for “distorted and screwy beauty” was just an “egotistical occupation” with “the pleasure of self-destruction.” It almost was after Milhaud’s colossally challenging “Christophe Colomb” humiliated him in November 1952. He had a heart attack within weeks.Mitropoulos never drew the loyalty from the Philharmonic that he had secured in Minneapolis; the players took advantage of his financial generosity or publicly threw their parts of a Webern work at his feet. Snide remarks about his private sexuality were common, and Bernstein gossiped conspiratorially that it was wrong for a bachelor to hold such a post. Mitropoulos was reduced to tears before the orchestra’s hostility. Trotter writes that this saintly figure once grew so exasperated that he threatened the players with the tyranny of George Szell.Mitropoulos, center, with the conductor Herbert von Karajan to his left and his erstwhile protégé Leonard Bernstein to his right.Don Hunstein, via NY Phil Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital ArchivesThe standard account is that standards plummeted, that Mitropoulos’s fervent intensity inevitably generated rough playing; The Times remarked in 1955 that it was “a sin to let the Philharmonic play like this.” That decline is not wholly apparent in Sony’s box, though in Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet,” among other works, there are moments of horrifying playing.Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10: AllegroNew York Philharmonic, 1954 (Sony Classical)Dig through the criminal number of concertos — few of them as valuable as Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1 with David Oistrakh — and there are worthwhile records to be heard: consuming Mendelssohn; fierce accounts of Shostakovich’s Fifth and Tenth; an astonishingly brutal Vaughan Williams Fourth, Mitropoulos’s most exhilarating recording. Of Strauss, there is only a tired excerpt from “Salome.” For Mahler, you must turn to his stunning broadcasts, above all a Sixth from 1955.Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 4: Finale con epilogo fugatoNew York Philharmonic, 1956 (Sony Classical)Even as critics lauded Mitropoulos’s appearances with the Metropolitan Opera — his recording of Barber’s “Vanessa” from 1958 is gorgeous — they made him a scapegoat as they demanded the end of a dreary era in the Philharmonic’s history, dating back to Toscanini’s departure in 1936.“The Philharmonic—What’s Wrong With It and Why” ran a Times headline on April 29, 1956, as the critic Howard Taubman savaged its deterioration. Bernstein was announced as co-conductor for the 1957-58 season that October; it would be Mitropoulos’s last, though he returned for a Mahler Festival in 1960, while Bernstein began to profit from the repertory path he had blazed.By then, Mitropoulos was working himself into the grave after another massive heart attack. His last concert was in Cologne, Germany, a Mahler Third whose finale has an irradiant glow. He died as he sought to, falling from on high — not from a mountain, but from the podium in Milan, on Nov. 2, 1960. He was 64. More

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      Review: Nico Muhly’s Moody Concerto for Two Pianos

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      In its American debut with the New York Philharmonic, “In Certain Circles,” featuring Katia and Marielle Labèque, had a freedom born from confidence.Jaap van Zweden, the New York Philharmonic’s music director, designed an atmospheric program around the American premiere of Nico Muhly’s “In Certain Circles” at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday night.A concerto for two pianos and orchestra, “In Certain Circles” was written for the sisters Katia and Marielle Labèque, who performed the world premiere in Paris last year and returned to the work on Wednesday, in a program that also featured erotically charged works by Debussy and Wagner. “In Certain Circles” is an exciting new piece — focused, phantomlike, unafraid of sentiment — from a composer who has been in the public eye, and the cross hairs of critics, since shortly after earning his master’s degree from the Juilliard School in 2004.Muhly became classical music’s darling. He worked with Philip Glass and Björk. There were profiles in the media and plenty of commissions, including the film score for “The Reader,” and a full-scale opera, all by the time he was 30 years old.That opera, “Two Boys,” had its premiere at the English National Opera in 2011, and when it arrived at the Metropolitan Opera two years later, it sounded unripe. It was moody for sure — a detective story whose unease came from efficient musical motifs and natural, if plain spoken, recitative. Still, it felt like the soundtrack to a film that wasn’t there. “Marnie,” which came to the Met in 2018, was something less — a strained sophomore effort in search of maturity.“In Certain Circles” is something more. It’s moody too, but there’s a freedom born from confidence that makes it satisfying. Here, Muhly develops musical ideas without being constrained by elements like plotting and vocal setting, as in the operas. It’s not that he’s suddenly employing the rigorous architecture of, say, a Beethoven symphony. Instead, like Debussy, he seems motivated by the sounds of the instruments themselves. They tell him where to go.The tone of “In Certain Circles” is consistent — wispy and vaguely ominous — but Muhly is able to tell a three-part story with it. The orchestration is weblike yet spare, and somehow the two pianos are muffled within it. It’s a neat sleight of hand: Muhly scores the instruments in roughly the same range and gives the orchestra strong, independent lines, creating the sense of an encroaching threat.In the first movement, “L’Enharmonique” — the name comes from Rameau — the orchestra takes an antagonistic stance toward the pianos. The brasses bray at them. The piccolos hector them like circling crows. All the while, the two pianists run and run, playing long, highly patterned stretches of 16th notes, unable to catch their breath. Then they repeat a series of rising chords that end on unstable tone clusters — a stairway to nowhere.At the end of the movement, as the orchestra finally falls away, a musical fragment from Rameau emerges from the mist in a sweetly sad, delicate moment.The Labèque sisters favor rhythmic precision and quick, sharp action — a solid way to achieve clarity in the double piano repertory — and they use dynamics rather than color to define phrases. On Wednesday, Katia Labèque, playing the Piano I part, finished phrases with a flourish of the hand and hopped up from her stool to use the force of her shoulders. Marielle, more collected, connected her notes fluidly.In the second movement, “Sarabande & Gigue,” the orchestra suddenly sympathizes with the soloists by supporting the piano parts. The flutes echo the melodic line, like an act of kindness, and the strings provide harmonic reinforcement.Named for two Baroque dances, the title is a bit of a feint: Muhly has both embraced and refused the forms. Yes, he wrote a saraband in its traditional three-quarter time, but it’s suspended, its feet hovering above the ground with a patient, forlorn, undanceable tune, played by Katia with sensitivity. The gigue, in compound time, whirls chaotically.In the last movement, “Details Emerge,” the pianos assert themselves with rumblings in the bass and contrasting flights in the keyboard’s upper reaches. The orchestra reacts: The piccolos go wild, and the percussionists clash their cymbals and clap their whips. The Rameau fragment returns in the piano, but as an imperfect recollection. The orchestra, emboldened, winds up for the kill, but the piece ends abruptly, as if the lights went out before any victor in the concerto’s battle could be determined.The evening’s other pieces — Debussy’s “Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune” and “La Mer,” and Wagner’s “Prelude and “Liebestod” from “Tristan und Isolde” — beautifully contextualized Muhly’s concerto, even if their sensuality eluded van Zweden at the podium.Both preludes were delivered by the Philharmonic players with generically sweeping strings and overly strict tempos. These pieces are about as explicit as classical music gets without a graphic-content warning. But at Carnegie Hall, they didn’t give off much steam.New York PhilharmonicPerformed Wednesday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Du Yun Revisits Her Early Music Theater at NYU Skirball

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      A program at NYU Skirball pairs “Zolle” and “A Cockroach’s Tarantella,” youthful works from when the composer felt “like a fish out of water.”When the composer Du Yun was a doctoral student at Harvard in the early 2000s, she felt like a fish out of water.“Very much out of water,” Du Yun, 44, said in a recent interview. “It was my first time not in a conservatory setting since I was 6.”But Du Yun — now the Pulitzer Prize-winning conjurer of exhilaratingly elusive and often moving sound worlds — did have a rich community of artistic collaborators. She was a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, the group of new-music specialists started in 2001 by the flutist Claire Chase, a fellow Oberlin conservatory graduate. And when the ensemble had an opportunity to create an original work of theater, Du Yun, who was resistant to opera, instead wanted to stage a set of songs.“I just began writing stories,” she said, as an exercise. “And then I used those stories for a kind of structure.”Fanciful, allegorical and open to interpretations personal and political, they became “Zolle,” which premiered in 2005. A tale of a wandering soul in the afterlife, it was followed a few years later by a work set in what Du Yun sees as a preparational “before-life”: “A Cockroach’s Tarantella,” a fable about a pregnant cockroach’s longing and plans to become human. Now, the two have been paired — an interplay that casts both in a new light — for a diptych that will be presented at NYU Skirball on Friday and Saturday.In the early months of the pandemic, Du Yun recorded “A Cockroach’s Tarantella” with the JACK Quartet, the players accompanying her narration in elevated speech. Its sense of yearning for another, freer life was freshly affecting at a time when the album could be heard only at home in isolation. (In 2021, Los Angeles Opera made a digital short called “The Zolle Suite.”)With the return of live performance, “A Cockroach’s Tarantella” and “Zolle” were staged together in October at the Lucerne Theater in Switzerland, directed by Roscha A. Säidow, who also did the surreal scenic and costume design. Du Yun acted as the narrator, and another vocalist took on the role in “Zolle” she had previously sung.That production is being adapted for Skirball, played by members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, with Du Yun storytelling onstage and, again, a new singer: Satomi Matsuzaki, from the rock band Deerhoof. In an interview after a recent rehearsal, Du Yun spoke about how the two works speak to each other, and to different audiences, and what it’s like to revisit them now. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.What makes “Zolle” and “A Cockroach’s Tarantella” a diptych?Before I finished “Zolle,” I just thought it was so melancholic, because it starts with this woman being dead, and it has to do with so many sorrows, and she’s stuck in her memories. And then I realized: You know what? I need to write a really funny piece — sort of like a “life before” thing.Stylistically they are quite different.There is a small musical relation, but other than that I wanted to have a contrast. In “Zolle,” the writing is very full-bodied, with a group of instruments and singers. But I wanted “Cockroach” to be simple: a string quartet that behaves like one instrument, with a narrator.I also want to tell you, I was doing horribly at Harvard with writing fugues. They were like, You have to write a Bach fugue. And I was like, Why can’t it be a Du Yun-style fugue? I grew up and memorized all this Bach; it’s in my head and it’s in my hand. But I never understood why on these tests it had to be resolved a certain way. So in “Zolle” there’s a bit of Baroque style, and that was my way of proving that I could do it, and do it my way.Kamna Gupta, right, rehearsing members of the International Contemporary Ensemble ahead of the Skirball performances.Jasmine Clarke for The New York TimesThese invite a lot of different interpretations. I’ve seen “A Cockroach’s Tarantella” compared to Kafka, for example, though on the surface it seems more like “Rusalka” or “The Little Mermaid.”It was much more “Little Mermaid,” right? Wanting to be human and let go of who she was, and then having that struggle. When I wrote it, I was also very frustrated with the idea of heaven — the idea of it, the betterment, the pursuit of happiness. I’ve written this before: At the time, I was living in government-subsidized housing that had a lot of cockroaches, so I became fascinated by them and learned that, you know, they can just release eggs for their entire life. It’s kind of mind-boggling.So like “Zolle” had people thinking about immigration and belonging, “Cockroach” had funny moments but hit audiences differently. You can see it as being about this female body thing, but I also have a Chinese version of it, and women in their 30s and 40s were really crying when they saw it because of lines like “I want to be pregnant out of love.”Right. For all its levity, it’s actually profound.It’s very profound.And I feel like, standing alone, each piece can be open to X and Y reading. But pairing them changes that. The “Tarantella” has so much hope and defiance, but when you follow it with the lonely afterlife of “Zolle,” it becomes devastating.Audiences connect with these however they do. But I want to mention that when we recorded the digital short of “Zolle” for LA Opera and I was narrating some of the portions, I got really, really emotional. I was thinking about Asian hate, and it really got to me because this piece was almost 20 years ago and it still rings so true. There is a line of saying something like “I am an immigrant, even in this ghost world.” Then I realized it’s something that me, you know, as an immigrant I will always carry with me. [Du Yun was born in Shanghai and moved to the United States to study at Oberlin.]What else are you feeling as you revisit these works?You know, this is the International Contemporary Ensemble’s 20th anniversary season. We feel like 100 years old, but we’re also transitioning into another era with George Lewis as the new leader.But this was the first stage production the International Contemporary Ensemble ever did. So even though they’re moving into different models and we’re bringing in Satomi — I’m a big fan of Deerhoof — this feels like a kind of homecoming. Which is fitting, because these pieces are really about homecoming. Homecoming, but also sending off as well. More

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      Composers Give New Shape to Ornette Coleman’s Jazz

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      A group of artists are reimagining the 1959 album “The Shape of Jazz to Come” for Bang on a Can’s Long Play festival.Bang on a Can had big plans for 2020.Before the pandemic started, this classical music collective was busy planning its most ambitious festival yet in New York City: a three-day event called “Long Play,” with acts stretched across multiple venues in Brooklyn.In moving beyond their storied, single-day marathons, Bang on a Can was signaling new ambitions, and was going toe-to-toe with other major avant-garde bashes like the Big Ears Festival in Tennessee.Of course, those designs were plowed under. So Bang on a Can reacted nimbly and quickly by commissioning artists from those scuttled dates to write solo pieces that were premiered online. Those “pandemic solos,” as they have been called, became a tradition of their own. (Some of them showed up as programming last year at the collective’s summer festival.)Still, there was a sense of something lost.“We had this gigantic idea of how to expand the marathon into Long Play,” David Lang, the composer and Bang on a Can co-founder, told The New York Times in April 2020. “I’m sure we’ll do that again, should the world ever get back to normal.”Now, it’s normal — enough — for another go at it. Long Play comes to New York City this weekend at seven venues in Downtown Brooklyn, from Friday afternoon through Sunday evening. There are familiar names on the lineup, but also ones that suggest Bang on a Can has its ears open to the work of younger artists. (Friday night’s sets by Jeff Tobias and the Dither guitar quartet offer some of that generational variety.)The festival won’t be a retread of the 2020 program. “Mostly, this is new stuff,” Lang said in an interview. And a sparkling highlight comes at the close, on Sunday night: a thorough, multilayered reimagining of the saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman’s 1959 album “The Shape of Jazz to Come.” The performance will feature a band led by Coleman’s son, Denardo, who held the drum chair in his father’s groups over several decades (including in “Haven’t Been Where I Left,” a piece the elder Coleman, who died in 2015, wrote and sometimes performed with the Bang on a Can All-Stars).Denardo Coleman, left, and Tacuma during a recent rehearsal.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesThis weekend’s take on “Shape” will also include a 20-person ensemble, conducted by Awadagin Pratt and playing new arrangements of all six compositions from the album. These have been written by a dizzyingly varied roster of artists — including the vocalist and electronics virtuoso Pamela Z (who arranged “Lonely Woman”) and the orchestral and big band composer David Sanford (who took on the boppish “Chronology”).“There are all these threads that go through the festival,” Lang said. “Threads of young composers, and threads of dead composers. And threads of modernist music and threads of free jazz.”The idea is for audiences to be able to follow their own stylistic predilections. “But all of these threads lead to this piece, and to this concert,” Lang noted. “We designed some of the concerts to interfere with other concerts; nothing interferes with this concert.”To prepare for this festival climax, Denardo Coleman has been rehearsing his own core group of players on a weekly basis. On a recent afternoon, in a modishly designed living and rehearsal space near Penn Station in Manhattan, he drilled the group, now called Ornette Expressions, through the album’s six tunes, twice.The performers come from different generations: Ulmer, left, played wth Ornette Coleman in the 1970s, while Moran didn’t get to know him until the 2000s.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesAlthough the music comes from “Shape,” the musicians come from different generations. The guitarist James Blood Ulmer and the bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma both played with Coleman’s father in the 1970s. In an interview after a rehearsal, Coleman said that the ensemble’s pianist, Jason Moran, hadn’t made his way to Ornette Coleman’s home until the early 2000s; he was already a leading light in the contemporary jazz scene, and quickly built a rapport with one of the great melodists of the field’s avant-garde.Filling out the ensemble are two up-and-coming musicians: the saxophonist Lee Odom and the trumpeter Wallace Roney Jr. The first time they all played one of the compositions, “Peace,” they hewed somewhat closely to the original, an emotionally complex work that manages to be at once mournful and finger-snapping.After a break — and after Moran had to leave — the tune took a turn, with Roney plugging his trumpet into a wah-wah pedal. This time, his electric trumpet lines wove around Odom’s acoustic, prayerful alto sax playing: even more searching and heated.Roney, on trumpet.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times“We’re doing our arrangement right now,” Denardo Coleman said after the take was over, though he added that “it may not be that way” at the concert on Sunday. It’s likely to turn out different because the day of that rehearsal, he had only just received the finished arrangement. And much of the balance between his group and the sinfonietta was yet to be hashed out.In a phone interview, Z said “everybody was asked to write for this sinfonietta.” There was “a little side note,” she added, saying to “also please leave space for Denardo’s ensemble to jump in, here and there.”When arranging “Lonely Woman” — perhaps Ornette Coleman’s most famous melody — she brought the work in line with her own electronic music. “I played with the music the same way that I play with sampled sound. I really stretched it out, and I compressed it.”Odom on saxophone.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesUlmer on guitar.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesStill, her contribution is entirely acoustic — unlike many of her solo sets. “It starts out with really high harmonics on the strings and bowed vibes,” Z said. “And the first time you hear the melody, it’s played a quarter of the speed that it’s supposed to go, being played on a tuba. So I just had a lot of fun, playing with time in it.”That’s exactly what Denardo Coleman was hoping for. “The way my father would have approached it would have been that everybody had equal participation,” he said. “Meaning he wasn’t just the leader and everybody was there to make him sound good. If you had an idea, you could take it.”Hence, Coleman said, each arranger’s freedom in working with the original tunes.“It wasn’t as if we said ‘OK, just orchestrate the song the way it is,’” he said. “They may reconstruct, deconstruct, turn it inside out, something else. The tune — the composition — is just a starting point. That just leads you into some other territory. And that other territory is what it’s really about.” More

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      Carnegie Hall Announces Its 2022-23 Season

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      The presenter is planning a return to full-scale programming for its 2022-23 season. Our critics and writers chose 15 highlights.After scaling back its current season as it grappled with disruptions brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, Carnegie Hall announced on Tuesday that it would return to full programming next season with a slate of more than 150 concerts.The 2022-23 season, which is scheduled to run from September to June, will feature the presenter’s typical variety of soloists and ensembles, but with an earnest focus on female musicians and composers.“We wanted to show that in every area of music, whether it’s jazz, classical or world music, there are truly extraordinary women who are recognized as such on the world platform,” Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said in an interview.The season’s lineup includes the eminent pianist Mitsuko Uchida and the singer-songwriter Rhiannon Giddens, who each will organize a series of Perspectives concerts; the flutist Claire Chase, as artist in residence; and appearances by conductors including Marin Alsop, who will lead the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra in its Carnegie debut, and Susanna Mälkki, who will lead the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, which is traveling to Carnegie for the first time in more than a half-century.The enterprising flute player Claire Chase will perform as Carnegie’s artist in residence.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesProgramming has also been inspired by the war in Ukraine. In February, the hall will host the Lviv National Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine, whose performance will include Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, featuring the Ukrainian American pianist Stanislav Khristenko.“This is a turning point in history,” Gillinson said. “It’s really, really important that a dictator does not win. We felt we needed to very overtly support Ukraine.”Carnegie had originally planned to open the season with a three-concert engagement by the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra, Gillinson said. But the hall abandoned those plans after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, when Gergiev, a longtime friend and supporter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, became the target of widespread condemnation.Instead, the Philadelphia Orchestra and its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, will take the stage on opening night, Sept. 29, performing Ravel’s “La Valse”; Gabriela Lena Frank’s “Chasqui” from “Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout”; Dvorak’s Symphony No. 8; and Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1, featuring the Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov. (The Philadelphians rescheduled their own opening night to accommodate Carnegie, in one of multiple appearances at the hall next season; it’s not the first time during the war in Ukraine that Nézet-Séguin has come to the hall’s rescue.)Gillinson said that he was optimistic about audiences turning out. Attendance since the hall reopened in October has been relatively strong, around 88 percent, compared with 91 percent before the pandemic, though there have been fewer concerts over all.Among the offerings, here are 15 highlights chosen by New York Times critics and writers.The pianist Maurizio Pollini at Carnegie in 2019.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesMaurizio Pollini, Oct. 16Pollini turned 80 this year, so take what opportunity you can to hear this most stimulating of pianists, especially in the repertoire that he has made distinctive across the six decades of his career. He plays Schumann’s “Arabeske” and the Fantasy in C, before a second half of Chopin, including the Ballade No. 4 and the Scherzo No. 1. DAVID ALLENCity of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Oct. 22While this ensemble’s outgoing music director, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, doesn’t plan to take up the podium of another orchestra any time soon, she is at least taking up the baton for this tour stop that features Elgar’s Cello Concerto, with the charismatic Sheku Kanneh-Mason; Debussy’s “La Mer”; and, most notably, the New York premiere of Thomas Adès’s “The Exterminating Angel” Symphony. JOSHUA BARONELos Angeles Philharmonic, Oct. 25-26Absent from Carnegie for more than three decades, the Philharmonic has instead been more likely to perform at Lincoln Center. Now, the orchestra will give the New York premieres of Gabriela Ortiz’s “Kauyumari” and Violin Concerto, with María Dueñas as soloist, as well as Arturo Márquez’s “Fandango for Violin and Orchestra,” featuring Anne Akiko Meyers. JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZJean Rondeau, Oct. 27This harpsichordist’s recent recording of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations is meditative, sensuous even when sprightly, and, at an hour and 45 minutes, long. The variations become worlds to lose oneself in, less taut dramas than engulfing studies in texture and sound, an effect that may well be amplified when he plays the work in the intimate Weill Recital Hall. ZACHARY WOOLFEBeatrice Rana, Oct. 28Praise be to Beatrice Rana, a sensitive, perceptive pianist who is starting to do the hard work of challenging the biases of the inherited repertoire. She will play Clara Schumann’s youthful Piano Concerto with Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Rana returns for a comparatively traditional recital of Bach, Debussy and Beethoven on April 20. ALLENThe bass-baritone Davóne Tines at Carnegie last year.Jennifer TaylorDavóne Tines, Nov. 3His voice and presence both serene yet simmering, this bass-baritone, a creative programmer as well as a gifted singer, has been touring with his reinvention of the traditional Mass, which incorporates music past and present, including works by Caroline Shaw, Bach, Margaret Bonds and Julius Eastman, and spirituals reimagined by Moses Hogan and Tyshawn Sorey. WOOLFEBerlin Philharmonic, Nov. 10-12When this eminent orchestra last appeared at Carnegie, in 2016, it played Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. Performing there for the first time under its current chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko, it brings back the Seventh, then does it again two nights later. In between is a program of Andrew Norman, Mozart and Korngold — the grand Symphony in F sharp, which Petrenko has lately championed. WOOLFECleveland Orchestra, Jan. 18America’s finest orchestra makes just a single appearance next season, but with a program that draws fascinating parallels between the two favorite composers of its music director, Franz Welser-Möst. Berg’s “Lyric Suite” weaves its way around Schubert’s darkly unfinished Symphony No. 8, before a rare performance of Schubert’s late, reflective Mass in E flat. ALLENThird Coast Percussion, Jan. 20In a collaboration with the dance organization Movement Art Is, this reliably innovative percussion quartet will continue to refresh its repertory. Already adept at works by John Cage, Steve Reich and Dev Hynes, at Carnegie the group will perform Tyondai Braxton’s “Sunny X,” Jlin’s “Perspective” and its own arrangements of selections from Philip Glass’s “Aguas da Amazonia.” SETH COLTER WALLSPhiladelphia Orchestra, Jan. 28One Rachmaninoff piano concerto is daunting. But all four of them in a single evening, and his “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini”? That herculean task has never been attempted at Carnegie, but Yuja Wang will take it up the keyboard, with Nézet-Séguin conducting, in a program to celebrate the composer’s 150th birthday. HERNÁNDEZYannick Nézet-Séguin leading the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie earlier this year.Chris LeeLviv National Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine, Feb. 15Since the Russian invasion, many members of the Lviv National Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine have been separated — some staying in the country, others fleeing as refugees. At Carnegie, they will be united to play Brahms’s “Tragic Overture,” the Tchaikovsky concerto with Khristenko and Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, as part of a tour led by the Ukrainian American conductor Theodore Kuchar. HERNÁNDEZMitsuko Uchida, Feb. 24The most recent Carnegie appearances by Uchida, one of our reigning and most sensitive pianists, have been in works by Schubert and Mozart, two composers on which she built her reputation. More underrated, but no less accomplished, are her Beethoven interpretations, a sampling of which comes in a program of his cosmic final piano sonatas. BARONEEnsemble Intercontemporain, March 25This group’s music director, Matthias Pintscher, will lead Schoenberg’s Five Pieces, Op. 16, and Pintscher’s “Sonic Eclipse.” But the real succulent on offer is “Derive 2,” a grand (and long-revised) work by Pierre Boulez, the avant-gardist who founded Ensemble Intercontemporain. WALLSPhiladelphia Orchestra, March 31As in recent months, Nézet-Séguin and this ensemble — one of the three he leads, including the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, another Carnegie fixture — are virtually in residency next season. Their most intriguing program is this contrast between John Luther Adams’s climate meditation “The Vespers of the Blessed Earth,” featuring the choral group the Crossing, and Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” WALLSClaire Chase, May 25Chase’s “Density 2036” — a multi-decade initiative to commission a new flute repertory leading to the centennial of Varèse’s “Density 21.5” — has thus far not been fare for the Carnegie crowd. But the project is moving uptown from the Kitchen, with Parts I and II on May 18, followed a week later by Part X: a world premiere by Anna Thorvaldsdottir. BARONE More

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      Denouncing War, Ukrainian Musicians Unite for a World Tour

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      The newly formed Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra will perform in Europe and the United States this summer, using music to oppose the Russian invasion.The Russian invasion has devastated cultural life in Ukraine, forcing renowned musical ensembles to disband and leading to an exodus of conductors, composers and players.Now some of Ukraine’s leading artists, with the help of the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the Polish National Opera in Warsaw, are uniting to use music to express opposition to Russia’s continuing attacks. They will form a new ensemble, the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, and make an 11-city tour of Europe and the United States in July and August, the orchestra announced on Monday.“This is something we can do for our country and for our people,” Marko Komonko, a Ukrainian violinist who will serve as the orchestra’s concertmaster, said in an interview. “It’s not much, but this is our job.”The 75-member orchestra, which will be made up of Ukrainian refugees as well as musicians still in the country, will appear at several European festivals, including the BBC Proms in London for a televised performance on July 31. It will make stops in Germany, France, Scotland and the Netherlands, before heading to the United States to perform at Lincoln Center and at the Kennedy Center in Washington. Proceeds from the concerts will benefit Ukrainian artists.The orchestra will be led by the Canadian Ukrainian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, who came up with the idea for the ensemble, eager to find a way to help musicians and others in Ukraine.“We want to show the embattled citizens of Ukraine that a free and democratic world supports them,” Wilson said in an interview. “We are fighting as artistic soldiers, soldiers of music. This gives the musicians a voice and the emotional strength to get through this.”Marko Komonko, the orchestra’s concertmaster, said: “This is something we can do for our country and for our people. It’s not much, but this is our job.”via Marko KomonkoWilson pitched the idea to her husband, Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, who offered the company’s support and persuaded the Polish National Opera to assist as well. The orchestra will assemble in mid-July in Warsaw for rehearsals and hold an opening concert at the Wielki Theater, home to the Polish National Opera.Gelb said it was important that artistic groups spoke out against the Russian invasion. Shortly after the invasion began, the Met announced it would not engage performers or institutions that supported President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Last month, the Met staged a concert in support of Ukraine; banners forming the Ukrainian flag stretched across the exterior of the theater, bathed in blue and yellow floodlights.“This is a world situation that is far beyond politics,” Gelb said in an interview. “It’s about saving humanity. The Met, as the largest performing arts company in the United States and one of the leading companies in the world, clearly has a role to play and we’ve been playing it.”The Freedom Orchestra will perform a variety of works, including the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov’s Seventh Symphony; Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2, featuring the Ukrainian pianist Anna Fedorova; Brahms’s Fourth Symphony; and Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 6Gavriel Heine. More

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      One Night, Several String Quartet Premieres

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      The JACK Quartet and the Danish String Quartet presented new works that nodded to the past and spoke to the present.On Thursday evening, two eminent string quartets presented premieres in New York. At Merkin Hall, the JACK Quartet unveiled Patricia Alessandrini’s “A Complete History of Music (Volume 1),” Khyam Allami’s “Ma-a a-ba ud me-na-gin Ma-a di-di-in” and George Lewis’s “String Quartet 4.5.” Not far away, at Zankel Hall, the Danish String Quartet paired Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” with Lotta Wennäkoski’s new “Pige.” Our critics were at both events.JACK QuartetYou always remember your first.The first live concert you attended after the initial pandemic lockdown, that is. So the JACK Quartet will always hold a place in my heart. But after that outdoor performance, at the Morris Museum in New Jersey in August 2020, it was back to a long digital-streaming relationship for me and the group. So seeing them in person again on Thursday evening, almost two years later, felt like another of this era’s many happy reunions.Appearing at Merkin at the tail end of “Bridges,” a series presented by the Kaufman Music Center and the John J. Cali School of Music at Montclair State University, the JACK — Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violins; John Pickford Richards, viola; Jay Campbell, cello — now had optimal indoor acoustics to show off their uncanny clarity and agility in these three premieres.In the cheekily titled, 12-minute “A Complete History of Music (Volume 1),” the quartet’s skittering, airy playing is translated, through electronic processing, into fragments of recordings of works from the classical canon, which seem to mistily surround the live sounds.The results might have been clearer over the super-sophisticated speaker system at Empac, the experimental arts center in upstate New York where the piece was workshopped earlier this month. At Merkin, you could make out a chorus in the first section — heard faintly, as if from a distant room. In the final section, “Appendix 2” (there is no “Appendix 1”), the electronics were still very quiet, and impossible to identify, but had a certain density, a soft sumptuousness.A trembling motif passes around the four instruments in Allami’s “Ma-a a-ba ud me-na-gin Ma-a di-di-in,” gradually overlapping in waves for a kind of dusky, shaggy old-school Minimalism. The piece feels shorter than its 19 minutes, the music receding and rebuilding with a carefully wrought naturalness, and ending in a serene coda of slow, hazy unison chords.Before the JACK played his “String Quartet 4.5,” Lewis — the eminent composer and scholar recently named the next artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble — said from the stage that he wrote the piece “against complacency,” as a reminder for audiences to “stay alert.” This is a political posture, but it’s also a declaration of Barnum-style showmanship, and the 17-minute work richly delivered, commanding attention like a ringmaster conjuring acrobats.The acts included sudden slides; a long unison squeal; a tiny, precious duet of little scratches between the first violin and the cello; and a passage of nearly lilting, Mendelssohnian delicacy. The other players twinklingly twittered as Campbell’s hand slid up and down the neck of his cello, for a woozy ondes Martenot effect. Near the end, crunchy grinding gave way to balletic glassiness. It was a spectacularly varied circus — and serious fun. ZACHARY WOOLFEThe JACK Quartet, from left: Austin Wulliman, Christopher Otto, Jay Campbell and John Pickford Richards on Thursday at Merkin Hall.Joan JastrebskiDanish String QuartetThe men of the Danish String Quartet — the violinists Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen and Frederik Øland, the violist Asbjørn Nørgaard and the cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin — are masters of juxtaposition.Their enlightening “Prism” albums trace lines from Bach’s fugues to late Beethoven and works of the 20th century. Another series, “Doppelgänger,” pairs Schubert’s final quartets (and his finest piece of chamber music, the String Quintet in C) with premieres that respond to them.“Doppelgänger” has had a delayed start in New York. Because of the pandemic, Part I will arrive here last; on Thursday, the second installment came first, featuring the famous “Death and the Maiden” Quartet (D. 810) and Wennäkoski’s “Pige.”Nørgaard introduced “Death and the Maiden” as “almost the definition of the Romantic string quartet,” though you wouldn’t have guessed that at first in the group’s interpretation — a controlled accumulation that built toward a sprinting and desperate tarantella.This work’s nickname comes from Schubert’s earlier song “Der Tod und das Mädchen,” whose funereal opening serves as the theme for the second movement. Sørensen, as the first violin, was a stand-in for the Maiden, his articulation at the start delicate, even reticent. As the music becomes more animated, it lashes out and retreats, torn between fury and woe; the Danish players opted for restraint, their command of the score absolute but their passion understated.In the second movement, they revealed the power in Schubert’s pauses, particularly with a patient ending, like an attempt to prolong its moment of peace. That couldn’t last forever, though: At the coda of that tarantella finale, here impressively cohesive amid increasingly frantic chorales and unstable runs, Death arrives in a sudden minor-key turn, delivered in grandly Romantic fashion.“Pige” (Danish for “Girl”) shifts the focus from Death to the Maiden. As response pieces go, this one reflects less on the quartet — though nods to it abound, as in a version of Schubert’s long-short-short rhythm — and more on the original song. Schubert’s quartet never quotes the Maiden’s verse, which gets its due in the first movement of “Pige,” a series of phrases that start and disintegrate in wispy fragments and fading arpeggios.Throughout, Wennäkoski balances extended technique and expressive lyricism, sometimes layering the two, but bringing the instruments together for affecting silences. Then comes the bright, episodic finale, “The Girl and the Scrapbook,” which takes flight with up-bow flourishes and a casual reference to Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” In the final measure, the cellist (Schubert’s voice for Death in the quartet) tears a sheet of paper — “slowly and continuously,” the score says, at a forte.The group followed “Pige” with a transcription of “Der Tod und das Mädchen,” a straightforward treatment with a touch of frostiness in trilled harmonics. That could have been a baked-in encore, but the Danish players returned with another arrangement: of “Der Doppelgänger,” the series’s namesake.They referred to it as “one of Schubert’s best songs.” I’d agree, and add that it’s also one of his most terrifying, which they teased out by building on its harmonic ambiguity for a tension almost as discomfiting as the thought of death itself. JOSHUA BARONE More

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      Joyce DiDonato Wants Music to ‘Build a Paradise for Today’

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      The star mezzo-soprano’s album and concert program “Eden” addresses climate change by planting seeds both real and metaphorical.What are the duties of an artist toward society? As Russia invades Ukraine, as racism persists in the United States, this age-old question remains very much of the moment. And the list of issues to take a political stand on, whether by choice or suggestion, grows ever longer.The one taken up by the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato in her latest project, an album and concert program called “Eden,” is climate change.Employing a broader repertoire than DiDonato’s typical focus on the Baroque — Wagner, Mahler and a new commission from Rachel Portman in counterpoint with Cavalli, Gluck and Handel — the program reflects on what this star singer sees as humanity’s disconnect from nature. If the result is more mystical than activist, DiDonato’s aim remains, as her liner notes say, a prompt for her listeners “to build a paradise for today.”Touring since early March and arriving at Carnegie Hall on Saturday with the period-instrument ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro under the conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, the concerts are staged by Marie Lambert-Le Bihan. At performances, plant seeds are handed out to audience members, and, as part of an educational initiative, local children’s choirs — some ongoing, others formed for the occasion — sing “Seeds of Hope,” a song collated by the teacher Mike Roberts from lyrics and melodies written last year by 11- to 13-year-old students at a school near London.In an interview, DiDonato spoke about her project and the issues it raises, picking a favorite page from Portman’s “The First Morning of the World,” which features text by Gene Scheer. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.What were the origins of this project?It emerged about five years ago from the last big project I did with Il Pomo d’Oro, “In War and Peace.” I struggled for about two years to try to reconcile how to put climate change onto the stage in a way that made people want to come and experience it. I’m essentially an optimistic person, and I think my biggest strength is to prompt people to relief and hope, which is hard to do when you’re looking at a pretty dire situation.In a naïve way, it falls under that category of a disconnect, from me to you and me to the world that I’m living in: When I look at music and the natural world; I see harmony; I see balance; I see all kinds of forces working together to create an ecosystem, to create a symphony, to create an environment where everything has the chance to thrive. So, I’ve married those two, and I’m putting it out under the invitation to say, in a really simplistic way: What seeds are you planting with your words, with your actions, with your tweets, on your balcony?You start the program by singing the trumpet part to Ives’s “The Unanswered Question.” How did you select the repertoire?We knew that it had to start in a mystical and magical way. The Ives is infinite, but you have this insistent question that keeps coming back, and you have a progressively complicated and chaotic non-answer. I just don’t know of anything that summarizes the 21st century more accurately than that.That piece was on Gene’s mind in writing the poetry for “The First Morning of the World.” His line “there is a language without question marks” is a bridge from the Ives. We’re hoping to demonstrate what it is to be fully connected to nature, which happens in Mahler’s “Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft,” certainly in Handel’s “Ombra mai fu,” but also to demonstrate that ripping apart, that complete disconnect from nature that the Myslivecek warns about. We feel deeply in the “Piante ombrose” of Cavalli a sense of desolation and despair. The answer finally comes in the Mahler and the Wagner — and the Handel.What do you admire in the music of Rachel Portman, which has predominantly been for film?She wasn’t necessarily on my radar as a composer, but her name came up from several different sources. I listened to her “Leaves and Trees,” and it was clear that she had a very personal connection to the natural world.What she gave us I wouldn’t classify as cinematic at all, but it feels perfect for trying to create the nurturing and tranquil side of nature. There’s an unease because the singer hasn’t yet learned to speak this language of nature that is in the text, but the language is present from the beginning in the flute.Rachel Portman’s ‘The First Morning of the World’EratoThere’s something comforting about that first bird sound that you hear in the morning. You’ve gone to bed reading all the headlines, and right before you pick up your phone to see the horror of the day, you hear the bird. There’s something primal in us that goes, “Well, here comes another day.”The Portman song ends with “Teach me to sing notes that bloom like a canopy of leaves,/Meant to do nothing but feel the sun.” That would seem to imply that music can’t do much in the world, but you write that the album is a “call to action.” What can your audience really do in the face of climate change?I think they can do extraordinary things, personally, but the extraordinary things are at a local level. I get completely overwhelmed if I’m trying to solve world peace or climate change. But when I do little things, and again I know this sounds so naïve, I’ve come to believe that it’s really the only way forward.Literally, the call to action in this is planting seeds. We are giving seeds to every concertgoer who comes, and if everybody takes a pot of dirt, puts them in, gives them a little bit of water, we will have planted thousands and thousands of plants across the course of this tour.The other huge part of this project is planting seeds of music in kids. I don’t know of very many more effective ways to grab kids and to empower them than choral music. That is one practical way in which this project is calling people to action.So what do you think the role of an artist should be in politics?I think some artists embrace more humanitarian aspects, and some are just called to get through the day and do the best they can — and I think all of it is OK. You can’t put one stamp on an artist and say, “Because you call yourself an artist, you’re required to do X, Y and Z now.” But you also can’t pretend that art and politics are not intertwined.I don’t think we can make a blanket statement about what artists should and shouldn’t do, but if they want to talk about politics, and they want to use their music as it has been done for centuries, then they are allowed to do that.You want to get your message out to as many people as possible, understandably, but you are touring this program on five continents. Has this project led you to question the priorities of your own industry?For sure, what has been heavy on my mind is that I want people to take care of the environment and I’m getting on a plane to travel around the world. But I don’t think it’s enough to just do a 90-minute drive-by concert for people who can afford the tickets and move on to the next. That’s why we are leaving behind a green souvenir in the hands of everybody who comes to the concert. I think even more profoundly of the effect that it’s going to have on these kids, to join a world-class artist on the stage.Of course, we’re finding more ways to travel on the ground if we can, and finding ways to do carbon offsetting. I know it’s not a perfect solution. The biggest thing is, the impact that we leave behind has to be lasting. More