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      With a Sound Forged in War, Iannis Xenakis Embraced Chaos

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      The Greek-French composer, who was born 100 years ago, created a revolution in music.“Greeks are like that,” the composer Iannis Xenakis said in 1967. “They are a people continually in search of themselves, always ready to launch out into all kind of rapid, violent actions, and end up by not finding themselves.”He was in his prime when he made that comment, known internationally for his music and collaborations with, for example, Le Corbusier. Yet the search never stopped, and Xenakis managed to stay elusive until his death in 2001, along the way building a legacy that is being observed this year, the centennial of his birth.The premiere of “Metastaseis,” in 1955 in Germany, put Xenakis in the company of the era’s respected composers. Admirers and opponents alike were struck by the work’s sheer violence of the masses of sound, which were constructed not by notes, but by ever-changing glissandos going up and down, and landing briefly into visceral clusters of pitches.It was something new and exciting. The composers of the Darmstadt School, then the powerhouse of avant-garde music, had been focused on serialism, and the belief that every aspect of composition should be under control, measured and organized in a highly abstract manner. But Xenakis, in an article titled “The Crisis of Serial Music,” took issue with the likes of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, essentially accusing them of leading music into an impasse.Xenakis, for his part, embraced chaos. A Greek French artist born in Romania, he went to explore it through philosophy and science, as the ancient Greeks did; “I felt I was born too late — I had missed two millennia,” he used to say. In the first chapter of “Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition,” a dense 1971 treatise on compositional technique and methods, he wrote about the “collision of rain with hard surfaces” or “the song of cicadas in a summer field” as inspirations for his concept of stochastic music, an approach to writing music that was concerned with large numbers, chance and probabilities, which were manipulated to achieve a particular goal. (“Stochos” means “target” in Greek.)Another example he gave: Imagine a large crowd of people demonstrating in the streets. They chant slogans in waves from front to rear, determining where to go next. Suddenly, the enemy attacks, dispersing the crowd by firing machine guns into the air and into the crowd itself. “After sonic and visual hell,” Xenakis wrote, “follows a detonating calm, full of despair, dust and death.”DURING WORLD WAR II, Xenakis joined the Greek Communist resistance and fought against Italian and German occupying forces. That was short-lived, however: In late 1944, Winston Churchill ordered British troops to suppress the Communists and keep Greece within the Western sphere of influence. Their ideals were crushed within a few weeks. On Jan. 1, 1945, a shell from a Sherman tank scarred Xenakis for life.“He told me once,” the composer Pascal Dusapin recalled in a recent documentary, “that he keeps trying to reproduce the sound he heard when the shrapnel went into his face.”There is no shortage of explosions, at extremities of force, in Xenakis’s music — whether in “Terretektorh” (1966), one of the first modern spatial compositions, or “Jonchaies” (1977), in which the full dynamic power of 109 musicians slowly builds up after a surprisingly melodic introduction. “Keqrops” (1986), on the other hand, starts with a sonic blast, with a solo piano trying to catch up and penetrate the massive orchestral sound.It wasn’t just the sound of war that shaped Xenakis. He spoke with vigor about the “fantastic spectacle” created by the German occupiers when, while the air was filled with echoes of whistling bullets and explosions, enormous military searchlights lit up the night. Those memories directly affected the “Polytope” series, a daring journey toward a creative assemblage of architecture, light show and electronic music, usually on a grand scale.He talked about his wartime experience with sinister overtones. And if one thing stands out in his music, it is the absence of “human pathos and emotional compulsion,” said the cellist Arne Deforce in an interview. But that style, leaning toward the extreme, egoless but at the same time natural — in the way a deafening storm is natural — had its origins on the streets of Athens.“Xenakis has been discovered — liberation!” the composer Reinhold Friedl said. “To lose oneself in the sound was intoxicating. He was a freedom fighter against the bourgeois distinction of new music.”Laszlo Ruszka /INA, via Getty ImagesXenakis left Greece in 1947, while the country was being torn apart by civil war, after hiding in Athens. He was sentenced to death, officially for political terrorism. (A pardon came only after the end of the right-wing junta, 27 years later.)A young civil engineering graduate, he initially wanted to go to the United States but never made it beyond Paris. After a few harsh, depressing weeks of getting to know the city, he found a job with the architect Le Corbusier. He also studied with the composer Olivier Messiaen from 1951 to ’53, whose interest in non-Western music inspired Xenakis to follow suit. (In 1978, having exploring the music traditions of Southern and Eastern Asia, he created “Pléïades,” a 45-minute, multicultural tour de force for six percussionists.)Xenakis’s relationship with Le Corbusier went on to be both fruitful and celebrated, leading to the creation of the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. And as Xenakis garnered fame, his dramatic past stirred up fantasies for many people, especially during May 1968 protests in Paris. A banner reading “À bas Gounod! Vive Xenakis!” (“Down with Gounod! Long live Xenakis!”) was hung from the windows of the Paris Conservatory, and Xenakis said on television, “It’s not just about sound and music; it’s about transforming people, too.” Unlike his Italian contemporary Luigi Nono, though, Xenakis refrained from sharing strong political statements, and left mixed impressions on the public.The composer Reinhold Friedl, who directs the Berlin-based contemporary music ensemble zeitkratzer, remembered his discovery of Xenakis in the mid-1980s: “Xenakis has been discovered — liberation! To lose oneself in the sound was intoxicating. He was a freedom fighter against the bourgeois distinction of new music.” The music writer Ben Watson, however, criticized Xenakis’s lifelong commitment to classical instruments: “Ironically, Xenakis’s lack of interest in alternative methods of realizing music — such as free improvisation (which he calls ‘a fashion, like jazz’) — fixes 19th century methods as absolute.”Xenakis nevertheless was revolutionary in music. “Concret PH” (1958), a short musique concrète piece used for the Philips Pavilion, along with Edgard Varèse’s “Poème Électronique,” is the first known occurrence of granular synthesis, a basic part of any electronic artist’s vocabulary today. As a pioneer of electronic music, Xenakis was also behind the creation of UPIC, a graphic sound synthesizer.The relationship between the graphic and the auditory was essential for Xenakis. He typically created a graphic score first, then meticulously transformed it into a traditional one. The means of production notwithstanding, he opened new horizons through the use of clouds or masses of sound. “Do not think in pitches but in sound processes,” said Deforce, who frequently performs Xenakis’s demanding solo cello pieces “Nomos Alpha” (1966) and “Kottos” (1977). “That perspective has been one of the big game-changers Xenakis realized in Western art music.”The baritone Holger Falk said in an interview that Xenakis’s music “feels like diving into a world of rituals that pushes you beyond your everyday consciousness.” Falk often sings Xenakis’s “Aïs” (1980), a dazzling, sonorous piece about death that makes use of exaggerated falsetto, lip smacks and neigh-like glissandos, accompanied by a large orchestra. John Eckhardt, a double bass player, used the word “ritualistic,” to describe his state of mind when performing “Theraps” (1975-76), along with “focused and heroic.”Glimpses of these feelings can be reached by listening, too. Heard live, the music pins you to your seat. How did Xenakis manage that? Perhaps it is the urgency with which he tackled the unknown, went beyond known musical idioms and clichés, and thus found something both unique and universal. His works resemble natural events both terrifying and awe-inspiring: storms, the formation of branches, tsunamis. But instead of mimicking the forces of nature, his music is a force of nature on its own. More

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      After 13 Years, a Zesty Haydn Survey Makes Its Mark

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      Jean-Efflam Bavouzet has released a rare, 11-volume collection of the composer’s 62 piano sonatas.Jean-Efflam Bavouzet faced both good and bad news in 1989.This French pianist, still then making his way as what a New York Times review from around that time called “a rigorously severe modernist,” had earned his first recording contract, with a small label of impeccable taste.But at the same time, his right hand had been diagnosed with functional dystonia, a painful muscle condition that has blighted the careers of many musicians.Unable to bite into octaves as he usually could, Bavouzet had to abandon his hopes of recording Bartok. What to do instead? He eventually chose Haydn, four or five of whose piano sonatas he had in his repertoire at the time. It was just about the only music he could still play.Cleanly articulated, a little cheeky and taking the composer seriously but never too seriously, the tone of that buoyant recording was amply summed up by the title of the booklet notes that his fellow pianist Zoltan Kocsis wrote for the release: “Haydn Without Wig.”Three decades later, that is exactly what Bavouzet, 59, has delivered on a far greater scale with the release last month of the 11th and final volume in his flamboyant, ebullient, brilliant survey of Haydn’s 62 sonatas on the Chandos label, with a few sets of variations and some other works thrown in for the fun of it.An addition, 13 years in the making, to a discography that already includes similarly excellent explorations of Debussy and Beethoven, Bavouzet’s Haydn is unmatched in its zest and its wit. But it is also substantial, informed and deeply rewarding.Sonata No. 35 in A flat: Rondo(Chandos)Moreover, it is a scarce achievement. Routine is the pianist of stature who records the Beethoven sonatas, but pianists who release even one or two albums of Haydn are all too rare, and few indeed have paid the arguably underperformed composer such sustained attention.“I did it with the most intense pleasure,” Bavouzet said in an interview. “Out of 62 sonatas, you have probably 25 indisputable masterpieces that we know, that are on concert programs — not enough, but still. Playing them is wonderful, absolutely wonderful. But they didn’t bring me the same joy as discovering the much less-known sonatas and bringing them to life.”The spirit of discovery suffuses every bar that Bavouzet has recorded, whether reinterpreting one of the almost symphonically sonorous sonatas from Haydn’s days in London in the early 1790s, or reinvigorating a slighter, two-voiced partita or divertimento from the late 1750s.“Haydn wrote all these sonatas almost as a laboratory of musical experience, an IRCAM for its time,” Bavouzet said, referring to the French avant-garde institute that Pierre Boulez founded in 1977. “These were a place where he could experiment and see what works.”“What I will miss the most, now that I have covered everything,” Bavouzet said, “is the joy of discovering one of the early sonatas.”Aurélien Bergot for The New York TimesIt’s the distinctly forward-thinking quality Bavouzet hears in Haydn that makes his set an especially valuable antidote to the view that all but the latest or the grandest of the composer’s piano works offer meager fare compared with his string quartets or symphonies — the idea that they are pieces written for amateurs that require “all our historical sympathy” to appreciate now, as the pianist Charles Rosen, a Haydn interpreter himself, wrote in “The Classical Style.”“When I was a student at the Paris Conservatory in the late ’70s, early ’80s,” Bavouzet recalled, “Haydn was a composer you would consider playing if you were not totally, fully equipped to master a Beethoven sonata — a composer that was too ‘easy,’ so to speak.”But Bavouzet was convinced otherwise by hearing Sviatoslav Richter play four of the sonatas at La Grange de Meslay, an abbey near Tours, France, where the Russian master held an annual festival. Richter had 19 of the sonatas in his repertoire, and counted the composer among his favorites.“Dear Haydn, how I love you!” Richter wrote privately in 1971. “But other pianists? They’re rather lukewarm towards you. Which is a great shame.”Bavouzet, who recalled taking Martha Argerich’s mother along to the performance, said: “We went to hear the maestro, Richter, of course, but we were thinking, four sonatas of Haydn — that’s very light, that’s not a real concert program. The revelation was that when the concert finished, we were totally fed with centuries of musical gestures. Richter did not miss any opportunities to make it sound as modern, as striking as possible. It was incredible, how Richter played Haydn onstage.”From Richter, Bavouzet borrowed a taste for playing Haydn on a Yamaha piano, and he is equally eager to draw connections across the centuries in his own work. “I love the analogy of Haydn throwing arrows into the future,” he said, “and these arrows land on the page of Schumann, of Brahms, of Prokofiev, of Stravinsky.”Haydn’s Sonata No. 50 in D: Largo e sostenuto(Chandos)Beethoven’s Op. 10, No. 3 in D: Largo e mesto(Chandos)Sometimes those arrows don’t fly terribly far, though they still strike true. The slow movement of No. 50, as numbered by the scholar H.C. Robbins Landon, is a Largo e sostenuto in D minor, and stares straight at its kin in Beethoven, the brooding Largo e mesto of Op. 10 No. 3; draw out the dramatic opening of No. 33 in C minor, the most substantial of the earlier works, and you find yourself in the anguished sound world of Schubert’s last sonata.But in other works, Haydn displays the range of a longbowman. The Moderato of No. 44 in F looks to Prokofiev with its repeated notes; the trio of No. 12 in A, when practiced at half the speed, struck the pianist as being so close to Chopin or even Scriabin that he recorded it that way as a postscript to the fifth volume; the Adagio of the Piano Concerto in G, among the three that Bavouzet recorded as a side project with Gabor Takacs-Nagy and the Manchester Camerata, inspired a nod to Poulenc in its cadenza.The original version of Sonata No. 12 in A: Trio(Chandos)Bavouzet’s version of the Trio(Chandos)If Bavouzet feels free to engage in a little bit of anachronism when the time seems right — partly inspired by period-instrument pioneers like Paul Badura-Skoda, his Haydn has a touch more spontaneity to it than Paul Lewis’s strict rigor or Marc-André Hamelin’s awe-inspiring bravura allows in their hugely admirable recent recordings — that’s because the composer left the pianist plenty of choices to make, especially in the earlier works.“What I will miss the most, now that I have covered everything,” Bavouzet said, “is the joy of discovering one of the early sonatas, where you have absolutely no indications, and it is sight-readable quite easily, but you start working on it and there is the feeling of a bottomless well.”Recording Haydn’s sonatas, in other words, is not entirely like recording Beethoven’s, even after a decision has been taken as to how to make enjoyable, coherent programs out of them. Beethoven’s scores are comparatively explicit about how they should be played, although they are, of course, open to interpretation. Haydn’s are far less so.“You try to dig,” Bavouzet continued, “and every time you dig you find new beauties, and new ideas, and you start embellishing, putting clothes on a rather naked skeleton, and you try to have a valid dynamic plan, and your interpretation takes shape, trying to make it as interesting as possible, with your taste, with your instinct, with the knowledge you have. You have this joy of bringing it to life with all the tools you can imagine.”Sometimes the problems are specific to a work — how to interpret the crazily brief finale of No. 41, for instance, in which Bavouzet imagines that Haydn suddenly decided that he had something else to do the day he wrote it — but the pressing ones are common. There is ornamentation, or an implied cadenza.Sonata No. 41 in A: Finale(Chandos)Then there is the fraught issue of whether to take repeats indicated in the second halves of sonata-form movements — a practice Haydn adhered to but his successors sought to escape from — and, if so, whether to include codas within the repeats, so that the endings would effectively be played twice. Consulting with the scholars Laszlo Somfai and Marc Vignal for the sake of historical accuracy, Bavouzet found himself moving repeat markings around for the sake of flow.One aspect of the choices involved in filling in Haydn’s blanks has convinced Bavouzet that these works are much more profound than they often get credit for. “We easily forget that the solemn Adagio,” another great champion of the composer, Alfred Brendel, once wrote in an article about Schubert, “originated in Haydn.”If Haydn the joker is amply on display here, the pauses that he so often uses before delivering his punch lines can suggest something much deeper, Bavouzet said.“You can read them as a pause to have an effect on what comes next,” he said, “but you also can read them as a pause of reflection, a moment when Haydn asks if all this agitation and activity is actually in vain. He is stopping because he is doubting, in a moment of introspection, which of course gives a totally different, almost philosophical attitude to this continuous energy.”Sonata No. 62 in E flat: Finale(Chandos)That’s particularly true, Bavouzet said, of the later sonatas, as in the first movement of No. 53 in E minor, which has 14 pauses to deal with, or in the finale of the culminating sonata, No. 62 in E flat, which is the last work programmed in his collection aside from a little Allegretto that he offers as an epilogue, holding the pedal down in dreamy nostalgia for his years of work.“The task is never anything other than absolutely fascinating, but for the performer it is also testing, and even risky,” Bavouzet writes of all these decisions in the booklet notes for his sixth volume, defending a mini-cadenza of his that takes the jolly finale of No. 36 in a momentarily dark direction.“He must, even more than usual, create his own world, his own logic, left only to hope that, in the absence of tangible evidence, he will not distance himself too far from the composer’s intentions, which remain forever unknowable,” Bavouzet continues. “The more my work progresses down this course, the more an almost infinite horizon of interpretive possibilities opens up before me, all of them valid.”And that, this project confirms, is one of the many elations of Haydn. 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      Review: A Molten Song Recital, Without Comic Relief

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      The mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo doubled down on melancholy in a superb concert at the Park Avenue Armory.There wasn’t comic relief on offer at Emily D’Angelo’s recital on Friday at the Park Avenue Armory. Not a giggle, not a wink. Her rare smile during the performance was wistful. The subjects she sang about were, for the most part, longing, death and tears.Instead of leavening the gravity, D’Angelo, joined by the pianist Sophia Muñoz in the Armory’s Board of Officers Room, doubled down. Her program was like her mezzo-soprano voice: a flood of melancholy, molten but articulate.Rarely, though, is it so pleasurable to linger in so much pain. The event — D’Angelo’s first American solo appearance — gave a small audience the treat of an intimate encounter with one of the world’s special young singers.Still in her 20s, and emerging on the international scene just in the past few years, D’Angelo has a rich, mellow voice, an encompassing serenity and confidence. But with a slight press on the gas her tone turns stern and flashing, almost scary. In “I’ve Heard an Organ Talk Sometimes” — one of her three selections from Aaron Copland’s “12 Poems of Emily Dickinson” — her sound really did take on organlike amplitude.The first half of her program borrowed some numbers from her debut solo album, “Enargeia,” released last year — but now in new company, like the two austere songs by Schoenberg that followed Hildegard von Bingen’s “O frondens virga,” a sober introduction.But while on “Enargeia,” lush, woozy instrumental arrangements turned some of the tracks lugubrious, on Friday, with just Muñoz’s gentle, sensitive piano accompaniment, they felt both more restrained and more affecting, D’Angelo’s voice even more direct. Shorn of its new age-y trappings, Sarah Kirkland-Snider’s “Nausicaa” was a consolatory prayer, and two Missy Mazzoli pieces smoldered without being too heavy.There was nothing affected about her singing or her presence. D’Angelo wore a black vest over a sleeveless top with drawstring pants and a pixie haircut, looking a bit Peter Pan and a bit Joan of Arc. Her hand resting on the edge of the piano’s curve, gently leaning into the instrument, she had the casual assurance of an experienced cabaret artist.So it wasn’t surprising to find she also has a gift for pull-up-a-chair storytelling, whether in Randy Newman’s “Wandering Boy” or Rebecca Clarke’s “The Seal Man” — the words clear without being overenunciated, her manner patient, as if she had all the time in the world. She was superb in Cecilia Livingston’s monologue “Penelope,” in its 2020 version for mezzo, which starts with a watery tremble in the piano and moves to a series of slow-burning, sometimes fiery questions: “What is it to be waiting? What is it to be waiting for you?”Near the end came a series of nocturnes — here true premonitions of death — by Clarke, Fanny Mendelssohn and Florence Price. Before D’Angelo’s encore, a glowing account of the Dvorak chestnut “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” she closed the written program with Clara Schumann’s “Lorelei,” about that folkloric temptress.The Heinrich Heine poem that Schumann sets describes the Lorelei’s singing as “wundersame, gewalt’ge”: wondrous and powerful. D’Angelo’s is, too.Emily D’AngeloPerformed on Friday at the Park Avenue Armory. More

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      Jorja Fleezanis, Violinist and Pioneering Concertmaster, Dies at 70

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      “Being a concertmaster is terribly demanding,” she once said, “but women can handle the job as well as men can. I know that.”Jorja Fleezanis, a dynamic violinist and dedicated teacher who was one of the first women to serve as concertmaster of a major symphony orchestra in the United States, died on Sept. 9 at her home in Lake Leelanau, Mich. She was 70.The Minnesota Orchestra, in which Ms. Fleezanis played from the first chair for two decades, said the cause was “a cardiovascular event.”The concertmaster holds a key position with an orchestra, with considerable responsibility for defining its sound. Ms. Fleezanis was “a cornerstone player” in the Minnesota Orchestra, Osmo Vanska, its music director from 2003 to 2022, said in a phone interview.“You need to be hearing the whole score and acting as second in command to the conductor,” Ms. Fleezanis explained to The Boston Globe this year. “You need to understand all the possible interpretive ways the conductor can go at that moment, so you’re prepared to make a sharp left, or a gentle left. And you create that unification, that sense of ensemble, almost instantaneously.”Concertmasters often take solo turns, too, playing concertos with their own orchestras. Ms. Fleezanis used those opportunities to advocate for works that audiences were otherwise unlikely to hear from guest violinists — by Benjamin Britten, say, or Roger Sessions — and to promote new scores. She gave the premiere of John Adams’s Violin Concerto, in St. Paul in 1994, collaborating on a pathbreaking piece that won the Grawemeyer Award for composition a year later.For much of the history of the professional orchestra, the post of concertmaster had been reserved for men. Ms. Fleezanis, a “rebel with a violin,” as The Pioneer Press of St. Paul called her, sought to change that from early in her career.“Being a concertmaster is terribly demanding,” she told The Cincinnati Post in 1976, “but women can handle the job as well as men can. I know that.”Ms. Fleezanis at first looked likely to break barriers at the San Francisco Symphony, which she joined as a second violinist in 1980, becoming its associate concertmaster in 1981. Sharing the first stand with Raymond Kobler, she played so “splendidly,” the critic Robert Commanday wrote in The San Francisco Examiner in 1988, that she struck observers “as the stronger of the two, and often the real leader of the section.”In a decision that Mr. Commanday described as “not very defensible,” the San Francisco Symphony’s music director, Herbert Blomstedt, stuck with his man, even after it became clear that the cost would be Ms. Fleezanis’s departure. She accepted the overtures of Mr. Blomstedt’s predecessor, Edo de Waart, who was eager to bring her to his new ensemble, the Minnesota Orchestra.Hired as acting concertmaster in 1988, she was technically not the first woman to hold the full title of concertmaster at a major orchestra; by the time her position was made permanent early in 1989, Emmanuelle Boisvert had begun work as the concertmaster of the Detroit Symphony. But Ms. Fleezanis was a trailblazer at a time when the gender composition of American orchestras was starting to become more equitable.With her frank personality and her palpable intensity onstage, she was in large part responsible for the resurgence of the Minnesota Orchestra, which came to be widely regarded as one of the finest in the nation early in Mr. Vanska’s tenure, not least for the crisp precision and risk-taking sensibility of its strings. Like its concertmaster, the orchestra performed “with the kind of furious finesse that every composer prays for,” the critic Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker in 2005.“Early in my career I was told, ‘If you play like that in every concert, you’ll burn out,’ but I knew that wasn’t right,” Ms. Fleezanis said when she left the orchestra to become a professor at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in 2009. “Playing with full commitment gives back: It revitalizes me.”Ms. Fleezanis during a rehearsal for a weeklong Minnesota Orchestra program in 2006 presenting the work of then-emerging composers. Missy Mazzoli, left, was one of them. Greg Helgeson for The New York TimesJorja Kay Fleezanis was born on March 19, 1952, in Detroit. She was the younger of Parios and Kay Fleezanis’s two children. Her parents, who were Greek immigrants, were not musicians but loved music.She began learning violin at age 8, studying in Detroit with Ara Zerounian and Mischa Mischakoff, the former concertmaster of Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Symphony. She later attended the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she played for the young James Levine in his University Circle Orchestra, and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.It was still rare for women to be admitted to major orchestras when Ms. Fleezanis finished her studies. The Chicago Symphony’s music director, Georg Solti, required her to win three separate auditions and to play concerts right under his eye before he was willing to hire a “girl,” as he called her, for his second violin section in 1975. Her kinetic style did not match the staid demeanor of her colleagues, though, and she was all but alone among men. She left after a single season.“A solid musician with a big sound and surprising reserves of energy,” as The Cincinnati Enquirer described her in 1976, Ms. Fleezanis returned to Ohio to lead the newly formed Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra. There she founded the Trio d’Accordo, a string trio. She later started the FOG Trio with the cellist Michael Grebanier and the pianist Garrick Ohlsson. An inspirational pedagogue, she held posts at the San Francisco Conservatory, the University of Minnesota and a variety of other institutions. She retired from the Jacobs School in 2020.While at the San Francisco Symphony, Ms. Fleezanis met Michael Steinberg, a former critic for The Boston Globe who was that orchestra’s publications director and artistic adviser. They married in 1983; he died in 2009. She is survived by her brother, Nickolas.In a 2009 conversation with Sam Bergman, a Minnesota Orchestra violist, Ms. Fleezanis said her husband had stoked her interest in unusual and new works. She recorded Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas, but she also recorded pieces by Stefan Wolpe and Aaron Jay Kernis. Nicholas Maw wrote a sonata for her, and John Tavener made her the “Divine Eros” in his vast, mystical “Ikon of Eros,” written for the Minnesota Orchestra’s centennial in 2002. After her husband’s death, she started a commissioning fund in their joint names.“There is a huge body of genius out there,” Ms. Fleezanis told Mr. Bergman, reflecting on the repertoire as she found it. “It’s just a question of how limited you want to choose to be.” More

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      Review: Julia Wolfe’s ‘Her Story’ Looks Back on Women’s Suffrage

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      Julia Wolfe’s “Her Story,” a commemoration with an eye toward the future, premieres in the state where the 19th Amendment achieved ratification.NASHVILLE — It was here, a little more than a hundred years ago, that the 19th Amendment crossed the threshold into ratification and granted millions of women the right to vote.That wasn’t so assured. Ratification was needed from at least 36 states. By summer 1920, that number had reached 35, and Tennessee provided the decisive tipping point — but only narrowly, passing by a single vote in its House of Representatives.Such fragility has been borne out in the decades that followed: The Equal Rights Amendment, which was introduced in 1923, has yet to be adopted. Some see women’s rights as again coming under assault from restrictive abortion laws across the country, and hear casual misogyny continuing to course through politics, up to the level of presidential elections.So you can understand the muted celebration in Julia Wolfe’s “Her Story,” an oratorio-like work that originated as a commemoration of the 19th Amendment yet sobers as much as it rouses. It has a ferocity that is literally written into the score, but also an absence of resolution as it looks back to suffrage with one wary eye toward the future steps this country still needs to take for something resembling true equality.“Her Story” premiered here on Thursday — fittingly, given its subject, at the Nashville Symphony, alongside works by Joan Tower and Florence Price — with a notice that suggested it would be recorded for future release, as well as a list of heavyweight co-commissioners that promises coming performances in Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and Washington.It joins Wolfe’s body of large-scale, historically minded works that lean toward oratorios — what the National Public Radio journalist Tom Huizenga recently called, to Wolfe’s delight, “docu-torios.” First came “Steel Hammer,” about the legend of John Henry, in 2009; then “Anthracite Fields,” a 2015 meditation on Pennsylvania’s coal mines that went on to win the Pulitzer Prize; and, most recently, “Fire in my mouth,” which premiered at the New York Philharmonic in 2019 with a sweeping account of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.Like those, “Her Story” resists a heavy hand but is smaller by comparison — in scale, with 10 members of the Lorelei Ensemble in lieu of, say, a 100-plus-person chorus, and in length, with a running time of about a half-hour. Its two movements, though, are just as concentrated, and if anything more poetic and thus haunting in their ambiguity.It arrived on the second half of what the Nashville Symphony’s music director, Giancarlo Guerrero, declared, with a bit of extravagance (if a whiff of paternalism), would be one of the most historic nights in classical music, featuring what had been billed as “trailblazing women.” In the field’s own progress toward gender equality — programming, while slowly evolving, still overwhelmingly favors white men, preferably dead — a better concert might one day present three female composers without so much fanfare.But the Nashville Symphony, to its credit, played each work with absolute commitment and passion. The Tower — her “1920/2019,” which premiered in New York as part of Project 19 at the Philharmonic — was lent a monumental grandeur; the Price, her Piano Concerto in One Movement, featuring a warmly expressive Karen Walwyn, an infectious pleasure. And “Her Story,” with tension, crashing swells and dramatic momentum, was given more than the dutiful reading often heard in premiere performances.The first movement, “Foment,” is a drawn-out setting of a letter from Abigail Adams to her husband, John Adams, in 1776, that reads, in part: “I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and more favorable than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could.” Wolfe borrows isolated phrases for the final lines, “We will foment a rebellion” and “We have no voice.”The oratorio included theatrical touches by a team including the director Anne Kauffman and the designers Jeff Sugg and Márion Talán de la Rosa.Kurt HeineckeWolfe’s other recent oratorios have been busy, multimedia presentations. On Thursday, “Her Story,” directed by Anne Kauffman, featured subtle lighting and scenic design by Jeff Sugg, and deceptively demure costumes by Márion Talán de la Rosa; but it was all analog, a modest complement to the music rather than a competitor as in “Anthracite Fields” and “Fire in my mouth.”Here, then, Wolfe’s style of clear, direct vocal expression landed with unmissable impact. Her orchestral writing, meanwhile, pulsed with Minimalist gestures — phrases that repeatedly swirled upward, steady rhythmic support in the strings — while also nodding to grooving rock in drum kits and electric guitars.And when the score swerves from its Minimalist influences, it’s to arresting, moving effect. Violins deliver harmonic glissandos that echo in the vocal treatment of the word “husband,” which warps, melting downward. Wolfe shatters the rhythmic unison of her singers with dense, overwhelming fogs of phrases that return to unity with new focus and force.Motion is baked into the score; the Lorelei singers gasp and cover their mouths. In the second movement, “Raise” — a triptych of texts taken from antagonistic labels used against women agitating for the right to vote, a political cartoon and a speech by Sojourner Truth — orchestra members accusingly point at the vocalists at the mention of labels like “bolshevik,” “communist” or “anarchist.”During the opening section of “Raise,” the labels are almost entirely accompanied with the prefix “un,” which is isolated in both the score — highlighting its “wrongness” relative to convention — and signs held up by the singers: “unstable,” “uncivil” and, ultimately “un-American.” Later mentions of “screaming” and “hysterical” aren’t too far from “nasty woman.” Like much of the staging, those signs don’t interfere but could just as easily be excluded. Then again, Handel’s oratorios are today presented both staged and not; and Thursday was hopefully far from the last dramatic interpretation of “Her Story.”As the second movement continues, it becomes more stylistically volatile, and engrossing. An interlude plays off a cartoon, which in turn played off a pacifist song, that says “I didn’t raise my girl to be a voter,” in a gruff musical treatment that gives way to a galvanizing setting of Sojourner Truth’s words.That final stretch has the makings of a triumphant finale. The orchestra crests and retreats under a unified front of female voices with a fortissimo, accented “I am strong.” And yet they are virtually alone in the closing measures, joined only by the lingering ring of percussion. Isolated, perhaps, but determined nevertheless.Her StoryThrough Saturday at the Nashville Symphony Schermerhorn Symphony Center, Nashville; nashvillesymphony.org. More

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      Review: Outshining a Premiere, a Group Announces Its Arrival

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      The ensemble Orlando Furioso was the highlight of a concert featuring Kate Soper’s new but brief work “HEX.”Kate Soper’s work, like that of so many other artists, was disrupted by the pandemic. But she weathered the moment with the same creative ingenuity she has brought to her music and dramatic projects in the past.When her hotly anticipated opera “The Romance of the Rose,” originally scheduled for April 2020, was canceled, Soper began to post spare yet smartly filmed excerpts online. And though the world premiere date for “Rose” still isn’t known, she has pressed forward on multiple fronts. Soper released an excellent album — “The Understanding of All Things” — while also sharing selections from “HARK,” a new play, on YouTube.She also contributed a work of short fiction, “ClearVoice,” to McSweeney’s for an “audio issue” of the literary journal last year. (That’s also available as a series of videos online, though fans should spring for the deluxe, print-plus-audio version that better suits her story’s witty-then-philosophical sendup of software installation manuals and commercial uses of classical music.)But now it’s 2022, and live performance is again the norm. What about a return to ambitious dramatic works onstage for Soper? The program for the season-opening concert from Wet Ink Ensemble — the pathbreaking group in which Soper plays a crucial role — held out precisely this promise. Presented by the ensemble at Roulette on Wednesday, the evening included the world premiere of Soper’s “HEX,” advertised as a “dramatic satire in which a new music ensemble inadvertently opens the gates of Hell.”“HEX,” though, ultimately proved to be a trifle. The 19-minute piece — really just an extended comedic sketch — starts in media res, with multiple classical pianists taking turns in the execution of a conceptual-art stunt. They must repeat a single, foreboding (and supposedly medieval) musical figure some 78,000 times, after which, it’s said, the Devil will be summoned.But this enticing setup drags on with little musical development. Eventually, the Devil — played with subtle menace by Rick Burkhardt — duly makes his appearance. He takes his turn at the piano, bringing with him some welcome musical embellishment of the oft-repeated material. But just as things are getting interesting, the curtain falls.In Soper’s script, the mortal musicians’ conceit is presented as a lazy effort from a group of busy artists who are having trouble making their schedules align. (They also need something suitably “flashy” yet easy to produce for a grant proposal.) This was self-awareness that sliced close to the bone, and that seemed to explain why Soper was the only member of Wet Ink performing on Wednesday.Supporting her, instead, was the chamber group Orlando Furioso, led by the Chilean drummer-composer Vicente H. Atria. These virtuosic musicians were the (ghostly) players onstage who were charged with responding vividly — if too briefly — to impromptu variations on the repetitive pianistic motif.In addition to bringing stray sparks of vibrancy to “HEX,” Atria’s group also helped to save the concert — and to make it, on balance, a success — with its own 40-minute set, which marked the release of its new, self-titled album on the Aguirre label.Making liberal use of microtonal harmony and hypnotic, ostinato rhythms — as well as the occasional stylistic smash-cut, reminiscent of John Zorn — Orlando Furioso announced itself on Wednesday as a punchy, creative force on the New York scene. The high point of its set was “Raso, Sarga, Tafetán,” an 11-minute composition by Atria. After the performance, he described it from the stage as a study in layered patterns; that was hardly necessary, however, since the piece’s swinging, sinuous interplay had spoken for itself.

      Orlando Furioso by Orlando FuriosoIn the early going, this work provided a delirious blend of material for the keyboardist Andrew Boudreau, the cellist Daniel Hass, the trumpeter David Acevedo and the woodwind specialist David Leon (who doubled on clarinet and saxophones throughout the concert).Atria’s rhythms had a welcoming, social propulsion, and the microtonality of his writing for keyboard proposed an individual — even insular — language. (Boudreau played on a synth setup that mimicked an atypically tuned harpsichord.) Atria’s other works on the program hit with a similar specificity, including the driving “Bootstrap Bernie”; and Soper guested with the group, too, lending crisply beaming vocals to the piece “En Tornasol.”Give credit where it’s due to Wet Ink Ensemble. Even when it couldn’t assemble for a focused display of its own prowess, the group was able to help shine a light on up-and-coming artists. On Wednesday, that was plenty — even revelatory.Kate Soper and Orlando FuriosoPerformed on Wednesday at Roulette, Brooklyn. More

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      What Music to Expect at Queen Elizabeth II’s Funeral

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      For centuries, the format of British royal funerals has largely stayed the same, with a history that tells the story of both the monarchy and music.What is the sound of a monarch’s death — the music and noise that commemorates the end of one regal life in preparation for the one to come?Music plays an enormous role in British royal ceremonies, particularly funerals, like Queen Elizabeth II’s on Sept. 19, which function as both state and religious rituals. Because the British monarch is also head of the Church of England, the sounds of these events are often tied to the Anglican musical tradition, springing out of the post-English Reformation Church.Since 1603, much of the royal funeral’s format has stayed the same, while some aspects shift to reflect the time and the monarch. The result is a striking combination of diverse works that tell both the story of the British monarchy and British music.The rites performed in the Church of England service come from the Order of the Burial of the Dead from the Book of Common Prayer. First published in 1549, it provided services and ways of daily worship in Anglican churches. The musical portions of the liturgy offered the text that has been set by composers for funerals — royal and otherwise.Those texts are called Funeral Sentences, collectively called the Burial Service, and are broken up into three parts: Opening Sentences, sung when the priests meet the body at the church; Graveside Sentences, for when the body is buried or interred; and the Last Sentence, sung after the priest throws earth onto the body.During the funeral, Sentences are separated by psalms, which are read or sung, and anthems (choral works accompanied by instruments, another musical element of the Book of Common Prayer’s liturgy). In addition, royal funerals have featured outdoor processions, including wind, brass and percussion instruments in the 17th century and, in the 20th, imperial military bands.Here is an overview of significant moments in the history of such music, from Elizabeth I to Princess Diana and the present.Elton John played a version of his song “Candle in the Wind” at Princess Diana’s funeral in 1997.Paul Hackett/Associated PressElizabeth I, 1603Elizabeth I’s funeral, at Westminster Abbey, began the tradition of grand royal services. It was the first such ceremony to use the Anglican rites and feature its associated musical liturgy. While we do not know conclusively what was performed, illustrations and surviving accounts from musicians mention the outdoor procession featuring trumpeters and the combined choirs of the Chapel Royal and Westminster Abbey. The setting most likely used for the burial service is by Thomas Morley (1557-1602), possibly written in anticipation of the occasion and often considered the first of its kind. Morley’s setting reflects the solemnity of both the text and the occasion, and it became standard for royal funerals until the 18th century.Mary II, 1695Musical innovations made to the royal funeral began with Mary II and the inclusion of new music by Henry Purcell (1659-95), including one Graveside Sentence: “Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts.” Referred to as “Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary” (Z. 860), including the march and canzona also performed, Purcell’s setting of “Thou knowest, Lord” might have been composed to match Morley’s Sentences, accompanied by “flatt, mournful Trumpets” mirroring the vocal parts. Purcell’s “Funeral March” was a new, thunderous addition, opening with deep, heavy drums before the trumpets enter, both mournful and heraldic.Anne, 1714Anne’s funeral, at Westminster Abbey, showcases the royal funeral integrating new music into already existing settings of the Burial Service. Alongside Morley’s Opening Sentences were Funeral Sentences from the Chapel Royal organist William Croft (1678-1727). Croft’s Burial Service became the choice for royal funerals to come, and though it was written for Anne’s funeral, it was most likely not completed until 1722. He would use Purcell’s “Thou knowest, Lord” as one of the Sentences within his Burial Service, writing in his “Musica Sacra” (1724) that he “endeavoured, as near as possibly I could, to imitate that great Master and celebrated Composer.” Anne’s funeral also included a new anthem by Croft, “The Souls of the Righteous.”Caroline, 1737The death of Caroline, the wife of George II, brought about a musical addition to the royal funeral befitting the Hanoverian queen. George commissioned a funeral anthem from George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) who had known Caroline as a child. Handel’s anthem, “The Ways of Zion Do Mourn” (HWV 264), is a monumental work that at the Westminster Abbey funeral “took up three quarter of an hour of the time,” The Grub-Street Journal described, and employed almost 200 performers. While an anthem, the various parts of the work recall the Lutheranism of Caroline and Handel, featuring quotations of that faith’s music. Notably, Mozart would use the melody of the anthem’s first chorus for his Requiem (1791).Victoria, 1901Like so much about Victoria’s reign, her funeral was exceptionally different from that of her predecessors. Unlike previous monarchs, she requested a royal public funeral at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, and a private burial next to Prince Albert at Frogmore House, near Windsor. Because the public service prioritized the funeral as state function over the utility of burial, Croft’s Burial Service here is more an appeal to tradition rather than a liturgical and religious need. Accordingly, Purcell’s “Thou knowest, Lord” and “Man that is born of woman,” by S.S. Wesley (1810-1876), are referred to as anthems instead of Funeral Sentences, rationalizing their inclusion in the service. The end of the ceremony featured music by Gounod, Tchaikovsky, Spohr and Beethoven, wresting the funeral music from the hands of British composers.RECENT ROYAL FUNERALS may offer insight into this tradition’s future. Princess Diana’s funeral, in 1997, featured Croft, but the anthem and procession choices embodied Diana the person: John Tavener’s “Song for Athene,” Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind,” and the second half of the “Libera me, Domine” from Verdi’s Requiem. With Tavener and Verdi, non-Protestant music and liturgy were included for the first time in a royal or state funeral; and all three works evoke a solemnity and majesty both timely and timeless.Similarly, Prince Philip’s participation in his own funeral’s planning shows through in his choice of musical selections. Along with Croft were the hymn “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” a nod to his naval roots, and two pieces commissioned by him: Benjamin Britten’s “Jubilate Deo,” written for St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, and a setting of Psalm 104 by William Lovelady, arranged for four voices and organ. This musical flexibility shows another shift in the royal funeral tradition as it continues into the 21st century.So, what can we expect for Elizabeth II? It has been 70 years since Britain has witnessed the sovereign’s funeral, and so much has changed in that time. Britain has entered a new era, post-Brexit, in which there may be a call to return to the music of old. But many composers have thrived in the second Elizabethan Age — as wide-ranging as Britten and Errollyn Wallen — with her coronation as a testament to musical innovation similar to Elizabeth I.Britain’s future is unknown, and the end of Elizabeth II’s reign may be a turning point. Her funeral will sound like so many that came before. But it may also sound like the music of a new age.Imani Danielle Mosley is an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Florida. She specializes in the music and culture of postwar Britain, Benjamin Britten, English modernism and 20th-century opera. More

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      Lars Vogt, Acclaimed Pianist and Conductor, Is Dead at 51

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      Piano technique for Mr. Vogt was a means to expression, not an end in itself. He avoided repertoire that called for mere virtuosity.Lars Vogt, a sensitive, communicative pianist whose warmth as a collaborator made him an outstanding chamber musician and a conductor of growing stature, died on Monday at a clinic in Erlangen, Germany. He was 51.His manager, Celia Willis, said the cause was esophageal cancer, which Mr. Vogt had learned he had in March 2021. He had spoken frankly about his prospects while continuing to perform, up until a few weeks before his death.“Music is just such an amazing thing. I find that even more in these times, when I spend a lot of time in hospitals and with doctors, and of course wondering how things are going to go,” Mr. Vogt said in an online interview with the pianist Zsolt Bognar in July, “and yet in music you get transported into this world where you forget everything.”Mr. Vogt created and shared those worlds in sublimely free, quite personal detail, and he had little interest in show for the sake of show. His was a “loving” approach to the piano, he told Pianist magazine in 2016, one that tried “to get the sound out of the keyboard, rather than into it.”If the results could sometimes seem idiosyncratic, at his best he played with “a sense of perfect equilibrium, a balance of lines that sounded simple and natural, but could only have been the result of thoughtful calibration,” as Allan Kozinn of The New York Times wrote in a review of a recital in 2006.Technique for Mr. Vogt was a means to expression, not an end in itself. He avoided repertoire that called for mere virtuosity — he once recorded an album of pieces written for children — and he eventually unburdened himself of the pressure placed on pianists to memorize the works they learn, so he could perform without the nervousness he had long felt onstage.He took the time to involve himself deeply in the works he played solo, which came mostly from the high Germanic tradition — ranging from Bach, whose “Goldberg” Variations he recorded to acclaim, to contemporary composers like Thomas Larcher. It was the music of Brahms, however, that was always closest to Mr. Vogt, for the solace of its melancholy.Mr. Vogt’s last public appearances, in which he played Brahms, were in June at Spannungen, a chamber music festival that he founded in 1998 that takes place in an Art Nouveau hydroelectric power plant in Heimbach, Germany. (Its name translates to “Voltages” as well as “Tensions.”) And it was in chamber music that he excelled, especially with the violinist Christian Tetzlaff and his sister, the cellist Tanya Tetzlaff.Mr. Vogt recorded Brahms and Dvorak with the Tetzlaffs as a trio and, with Mr. Tetzlaff, set down fervently expressive accounts of violin sonatas by Mozart, Schumann and Brahms. Those exquisite recordings, made for the Ondine label, were widely judged worthy of reference status not because they aimed to be a final word on the works involved, or even appeared to be, but because the audible generosity of their partnership made for a unique focus and intensity.“This is chamber-playing at its most humane,” the critic Richard Bratby wrote of their recording of Beethoven’s Opus 30 sonatas in Gramophone last year, “impossible to hear without feeling a renewed love and admiration for music and performers alike.”It was also as an avowed collaborator, rather than as a more forceful leader, that Mr. Vogt took on conducting, which he decided to explore after stepping in at short notice to lead Beethoven from the keyboard with the Camerata Salzburg early in the 2010s.“There was no conductor, just a very good concertmaster, and it was so much fun, so easy,” he recalled of that concert in an interview with Gramophone magazine in 2017. “I rang my agent afterwards from the taxi to the airport and said, ‘I need to know how far I can go with this. It doesn’t matter which orchestra it’s with, I just love it so much.’”Hired after a single concert, Mr. Vogt became the music director of the Royal Northern Sinfonia, based in Newcastle, England, in 2015; together, they recorded the Beethoven concertos with a sparkling pliancy and the Brahms with an unusual tenderness of touch. He took the same post with the Chamber Orchestra of Paris in 2020 and remained there until his death.Conducting is “like chamber music,” Mr. Vogt told Gramophone. “I want to encourage the character of the music, encourage people to go to their limits of expression, and ideally get them to the state that they want to do that, enjoy searching to the depths.”Mr. Vogt performing a program of Mozart, Schubert and Brahms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesLars Vogt was born on Sept. 8, 1970, in Düren, near Cologne, the third child of Marie-Luise Vogt, a secretary, and Paul Vogt, an engineer who also played soccer to a high standard. He and his siblings learned music as just one of many youthful activities, soccer included.But Mr. Vogt’s first piano teacher saw promise soon after he had started at age 6. He won a national competition for young musicians at 14, and at the same time began studying with the renowned pedagogue Karl-Heinz Kämmerling at the Hanover University of Music and Drama (now the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media). Their lessons continued informally until Mr. Kämmerling died in 2012, when Mr. Vogt succeeded his teacher as professor of piano at that university.Suitably firmed up technically under Mr. Kämmerling’s demanding tutelage, Mr. Vogt took second prize at the Leeds International Piano Competition in 1990. That experience proved as important for the personal relationships it brought as for the international tours that followed.On the podium during the Leeds final for Mr. Vogt’s intelligent if introverted reading of the Schumann Piano Concerto was the English maestro Simon Rattle; their partnership became one of the many friendships through which the pianist thrived musically, not least during a stint in the 2003-4 season as the pianist in residence at the Berlin Philharmonic, which Mr. Rattle then led.Mr. Rattle also planted the seeds that bloomed into Mr. Vogt’s podium career. He told him after a joint appearance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl in 1991 — an American debut in which the pianist “exercised his command with personality and poise” in Beethoven, John Henken wrote in The Los Angeles Times — that he would be a conductor within a decade.That comment “hit me like a lightning bolt, because I’d never thought of it,” Mr. Vogt told The Scotsman in 2015. “I guess he noticed how curiously I observed what he was doing. I was fascinated at what miracles can be achieved by something that doesn’t — ideally — produce any sound.”Mr. Vogt’s first marriage, to the composer Tatjana Komarova, ended in divorce. He married the violinist Anna Reszniak, the concertmaster of the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra, in 2017. She survives him, as do his parents; his siblings, Karsten Vogt and Ilka Fischboeck; and his daughters, Emma Vogt, Charlotte Kuehn and Isabelle Vogt, an actress with whom he recorded melodramas by Schumann and Strauss.“He was at once the wildest and most sensitive musician I know,” Mr. Tetzlaff, who performed with Mr. Vogt for 26 years and considered him his “closest comrade,” said of the pianist in an interview with Van magazine shortly after Mr. Vogt’s death.“I’ve met a lot of musicians who have become very successful by talking about themselves, presenting themselves well, and who seem to have no experience with doubt,” Mr. Tetzlaff went on. “But I learned that music can only speak fully in freedom and love. It’s a thing you only experience with very few musicians, artists like Lars.” More