Classical Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      She Wrote for the Piano’s Extremes: Bronfman on Ustvolskaya

      by

      Yefim Bronfman discusses Galina Ustvolskaya’s Fourth Sonata, which he will play at Carnegie Hall on Monday.Galina Ustvolskaya, a reclusive composer who lived in St. Petersburg, Russia, from her birth in 1919 to her death in 2006, has acquired a reputation for works of unearthly spiritual strength and formidable technical demands. “Your fingers literally bleed,” the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja has said of playing them.But if Ustvolskaya’s few, grim compositions are works of violent extremes, the brutally loud cluster chords that often smash their way dissonantly through them are tempered with moments of quiet, rapt tranquillity.It’s that prayerful side of a composer who wrote for God as much as for mortals that appeals to the pianist Yefim Bronfman, who performs her Sonata No. 4 (1957) alongside sonatas by Beethoven and Chopin at Carnegie Hall on Monday.Ustvolskaya insisted that her music was not susceptible to ordinary analysis, and she vowed that no influences could be traced in it; even without her efforts, it would still sound unique. After all, as the historian Simon Morrison has written, Ustvolskaya “challenged the conventions not just of art, but of our understanding of art” — writing not “for workers in obeisance to official aesthetics,” but turning “music into work.”Still, no music exists entirely outside history. Asked in an interview to choose a favorite page from the Fourth Sonata, an 11-minute piece in four brief, continuous movements, Bronfman discussed how Ustvolskaya’s work extends traditional forms, as well as its political context. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.An excerpt from the final movement of Ustvolskaya’s Fourth Sonata.SikorskiUstvolskaya’s music has only really become prominent outside Russia since around the end of the Cold War. How did you come across it?I never really knew her until seven or eight years ago, when a conductor asked me to perform her “Composition No. 2” for piano, percussion and eight double basses. Somehow the performance never happened, but having studied the score, there was something very special about it. I started looking into her other music, of which there is not very much. I spoke to Markus Hinterhäuser, who recorded all the sonatas. It’s been a fantastic experience, I have to say, very different from anything else I have ever played in my life.I didn’t find any connection to anybody, except Beethoven maybe. Everybody leads toward Beethoven in a direct way or an abstract way. Hers is an extremely abstract way. As Beethoven grew older, his sonata form got shorter and shorter. Hers relate to that. No matter how short a movement, there is always a sonata form in it. Sometimes the development section is only a few notes, but then there’s a clear indication of the recapitulation in each movement.Music usually has a life span. The music starts and ends, and then life begins anew. But a piece by Ustvolskaya — you play it, and it lingers for a long time. It’s almost like a meditation. It gives you a very peaceful feeling playing it.Do you see it as religious or at least spiritual music in that sense?Not religious, but very spiritual. She grew up in Soviet times, and religion was prohibited. A lot of people who leaned toward religion experienced it in a spiritual way, not in a biblical way. That’s how I feel about Ustvolskaya.So you hear her personal introversion in her music as well?Definitely, I hear total loneliness. She’s talking to the universe and she doesn’t want to be involved with anything else. I don’t feel there is any gravity to the music; most music has an epicenter, but hers is in slow motion, out there. That is not to say there are no explosions; there are very violent explosions. But they are usually followed by very serene and soft sounds.I have to say that she’s also a very Russian composer in the sense that one always hears bells. Bells and choruses, human voices, like in the second movement of this sonata, it begins with bells, and there is a chorale. The third movement is all bells.The third movementMarkus Hinterhäuser, piano (Col Legno)Some of it sounds quite close to chant.Right. She’s maybe more connected to medieval music, but with a very modern voice. You know, it’s very hard to talk about this music because one needs to hear it and experience it.She herself said that she didn’t want us to analyze her music, that it should just be felt.Correct, and she didn’t want to appear influenced by anybody. Even Shostakovich, her teacher, she rejected. She felt a regret for how much he tried to influence her, and she tried to throw it all out. I don’t think there is even one inch of his music in hers. She is completely unrelated to anything before her or after her, which is quite fascinating.So much of Shostakovich’s work was shaped by his political context. Do you hear similar struggles in her later work?Shostakovich suffered a lot from being persecuted by the authorities. He wrote a lot of Soviet music to please the authorities, and so did she. But music like the sonatas has nothing to do with politics; it’s totally apolitical music.It’s interesting that she was able to create that space, given the traditional Western clichés about composers working in Soviet society.I’m sure she experienced the same as other composers who wanted their voice to be heard, and were not allowed. A lot of composers at this time were much more creative writing between the notes than in the notes. The message was always hidden. A little bit like Schumann, in a different time and for different reasons.Ustvolskaya wrote six piano sonatas over four decades. Why perform this one?I picked it because it’s not so violent. Especially the last movement, it has those cluster chords but most of it is very peaceful and has a very beautiful, meditative quality that I think is needed for this program, after the intensity of Beethoven’s “Appassionata.”Is there a page of the score that you particularly enjoy or that is revealing of her?I like the middle section of the second movement, where it’s “pppp”: It’s almost like human voices coming from another world or from space, in the middle of this violent piece. I also love the murmurs of the trills in the last movement; you have those long notes against them — for me that’s very special.The opening of the fourth movementMarkus Hinterhäuser, piano (Col Legno)Those trills, to my ears, suggest the first movement of Schubert’s last sonata.It definitely has an echo of that. They go through the whole movement, those trills, then the cluster chords with sforzandos, then you have a pianissimo progression. It has a fascinating sonority and imagination.Ustvolskaya was fastidious about how people performed her music. She reacted strongly against people being particularly expressive with it. And she’s asking an enormous amount of you. How possible is it to distinguish between a “ppp” and a “pppp,” a “fff” and a “ffff”?Dynamics are relative, in all music. “Piano” means “piano” only in context with what comes before and follows after. The same thing with her. If it’s “ppp” it’s one sound, but if it’s “pppp” it has to be softer; there’s no magic to it. You find an instrument on which you can really differentiate between dynamics, that’s all we can do.Every composer I have worked with is different. Stravinsky said just play the notes, play what’s written and don’t exaggerate. I imagine she belonged to the same school; she wanted you to execute exactly what is on the page. The music speaks for itself. You don’t need to work hard to make it sound the way it should.Will you play her other sonatas in concert?I really want to. Why not? She’s a good composer, I think a great composer. She has a strong message, however abstract it is, and rare, but there’s something there that has a magnetism to it. More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Franz Mohr, Piano Tuner to the Stars, Is Dead at 94

      by

      “I play more in Carnegie Hall than anybody else,” he said of his career adjusting instruments for Horowitz, Gould and others, “but I have no audience.”Franz Mohr, who in his 24 years as the chief concert technician for Steinway & Sons brought a musician’s mind-set to the mechanics of important pianos and the care of those who played them, died on March 28 at his home in Lynbrook, N.Y., on Long Island, where he lived. He was 94.His son Michael, the director of restoration and customer services at Steinway, confirmed the death.“I play more in Carnegie Hall than anybody else,” Mr. Mohr said in 1990, “but I have no audience.”Sometimes a string would snap or a pedal would need adjusting during a concert, and he would step into the spotlight for a moment. But he did much of his work alone, on that famous stage and others around the world. He might have been mistaken for a pianist trying out a nine-foot grand for a recital — until he reached for his tools and began making minute adjustments, giving a tuning pin a tiny twist or a hammer a slight shave.For years, he went where the pianists went. When Vladimir Horowitz went to Russia in the 1980s, Mr. Mohr traveled with him, as did Horowitz’s favorite Steinway. Mr. Mohr made house calls at the White House when Van Cliburn played for President Gerald R. Ford in 1975, and again in 1987, when Mikhail S. Gorbachev was in Washington for arms-control talks with President Ronald Reagan.Mr. Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa, wanted Cliburn to play one of the pieces that had made him famous — Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 — but there was no orchestra. Instead, Cliburn played some Chopin and, as an encore, played and sang the Russian melody “Moscow Nights.”“I was amazed that Van Cliburn, on the spur of the moment, remembered not only the music but all the words,” Mr. Mohr recalled in his memoir, “My Life with the Great Pianists,” written with Edith Schaeffer (1992). “The Russians just melted.”He also attended to performers’ personal pianos. The pianist Gary Graffman, whose apartment is less than a block from the old location of Steinway’s Manhattan showroom, and Mr. Mohr’s home base, on West 57th Street, recalled that Mr. Mohr would come right over when a problem presented itself.“If he came because I broke strings, he would replace the strings,” Mr. Graffman said in an interview. But if more extensive work was needed — if Mr. Graffman’s almost constant practicing had worn down the hammers and new hammers had to be installed, for example — “he would take out the insides of the piano and carry it half a block to the Steinway basement. He would work on it and carry it back.” (The unit Mr. Mohr lifted out and took down the street is known as the key and action assembly, a bewildering combination of all 88 keys and the parts that respond to a pianist’s touch, driving the hammers to the strings.)Franz Mohr was born in Nörvenich, Germany, on Sept. 17, 1927, the son of Jakob Mohr, a postal worker, and Christina (Stork) Mohr. The family moved to nearby Düren when he was a child; in 1944, when he was a teenager, he survived an air raid.His interest in music began not with pianos but with the viola and the violin. He studied at academies in Cologne and Detmold and, in his 20s, played guitar and mandolin in German dance bands.He was playing Dixieland music one night when he spotted a woman on the dance floor. “I fell in love with her as soon as I saw her and said to my friends, ‘That is the girl I’m going to marry,’” he recalled in his memoir. Her name was Elisabeth Zillikens, and they married in 1954. Besides his son Michael, she survives him, as does a daughter, Ellen; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Another son, Peter, died in 2019.Tendinitis forced Mr. Mohr to give up performing when he was in his 20s, his son said, and he turned to pianos, answering a want ad from the piano manufacturer Ibach that led to an apprenticeship. Another advertisement, in 1962, sent him to the United States.It said that Steinway was looking for piano technicians — in New York. A devout churchgoer, he had made a connection with a German-speaking Baptist church in Elmhurst, Queens, that showed him the ad. He contacted Steinway and was soon hired as an assistant to William Hupfer, the company’s chief concert technician.Before long, he was tuning for stars like the famously eccentric Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, who came to New York to make recordings. (In Toronto Gould relied on another tuner, Verne Edquist, who died in 2020.)Mr. Mohr not only worked on the piano at the recording studio, he also rode around New York with Gould. “He loved Lincoln Town cars,” Mr. Mohr wrote in his memoir. “That is all he would drive. He once said to me: ‘Franz, I found out that next year’s model will be two inches shorter. So, you know what I did? I bought two Town Cars this year.”He succeeded Mr. Hupfer as Steinway’s chief concert technician in 1968. The job made him the keeper of the fleet of pianos that performers could try out before a concert in Steinway’s West 57th Street basement. They could choose the one they were most comfortable with, but there were pianos that were off limits — Horowitz’s favorite, for example.Sometimes, maybe with a wink, Mr. Mohr would let pianists try it out.  “He’d regulate Horowitz’s piano to make it feather-light and capable of an enormous range of sound,” the pianist Misha Dichter recalled. “When I’d see Franz in the Steinway basement, I’d ask to try that piano when it was parked in a corner. He’d conspiratorially look over his shoulder and then give me the OK. It was like starting up a Lamborghini.”Mr. Mohr, who retired in 1992, said in 1990 that the first time he tuned Arthur Rubinstein’s piano, before a recital at Yale, he cleaned the keys. Then he proudly told Rubinstein what he had done.“Young man,” Rubinstein told him as they stood in the wings with the audience already in their seats, “you didn’t know, but nobody ever cleans the keys for me. It makes them too slippery.”Mr. Mohr had to find something to gum up the keys and find it fast, before the lights went down. The stickiest thing he could get his hands on backstage was hair spray. “I went pssst up, pssst down,” he said. “The audience laughed. But he loved it.” More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Singing, and Signing, Beethoven’s ‘Fidelio’ in Los Angeles

      by

      The Los Angeles Philharmonic and Deaf West Theater are working on an innovative production conceived for both hearing and deaf operagoers.LOS ANGELES — DJ Kurs has been the artistic director of the Deaf West Theater, a theater company created here by deaf actors, for the past 10 years. But he had never seen the Los Angeles Philharmonic or been to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, its renowned home, even though he grew up in Southern California.He will be there this week, though, leading seven actors from Deaf West in an innovative production of “Fidelio,” Beethoven’s opera about the rescue of a political prisoner, in a collaboration with a cast of singers and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The actors — along with a chorus from Venezuela whose members are deaf or hard of hearing and will also be signing — will be center stage on opening night Thursday, expressively enacting the lone opera of a composer who had progressive hearing loss while writing masterpiece after masterpiece. In this “Fidelio,” the singers will stay in the background.“Opera itself as an art form, it has not been accessible to our world,” Kurs, 44, said the other day through a sign-language interpreter. Deaf West, he said, had been approached in the past about collaborating on operas but had always declined.But after nearly two years of not performing because of the pandemic — and after watching an energetic tape of Leonard Bernstein conducting “Fidelio” — Kurs decided to accept this offer to work with the Philharmonic and its music director, Gustavo Dudamel.Indi Robinson and Gregor Lopes, deaf actors, rehearse a scene from Beethoven’s opera “Fidelio.”Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThe extraordinary nature of the endeavor was clear as singers and actors gathered last week for rehearsals at a United Methodist church in Toluca Lake, in the San Fernando Valley, some 10 miles from Disney Hall. Each day was a mix of languages, movement and simultaneous translations — between voiced German, Spanish and English and signed American Sign Language and Venezuelan Sign Language.For the production, 135 singers, actors, choir members (singing and signing), and orchestra players, along with Dudamel, who will conduct the production, will fill a stage that usually just accommodates an orchestra.“We are creating the dance of the double-cast,” said Alberto Arvelo, the director of the production, in which each character is portrayed by both a singer and an actor. “We have been conceiving ‘Fidelio’ for both audiences — we want to create to create an opera for a deaf audience as well. From the first bar of the opera.”For the actors, who are accustomed to performing in musicals including “Spring Awakening,” which has been part of Deaf West’s repertory, adapting to a more operatic style has been something of an adjustment.“It’s a challenging and terrifying experience,” said Russell Harvard, the actor playing Rocco, the jailer, after rehearsing a scene where he took Leonore to the dungeon to see her husband (husbands: a singer and an actor) sleeping on the floor. “I have never done anything like this before.”Josh Castille, a deaf performance artist acting the role of Florestan, left, worked with the director, Alberto Arvelo, center, and Ian Koziara, the tenor singing the role of Florestan.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThe actors have to translate German (the language of Beethoven’s opera, and one that few of them know, so lip-reading is not an option for most) into American Sign Language. And they have to get used to the florid, multiple repetitions of a single word or line in the score, all of which are second nature for opera singers used to coloratura runs, and find ways to convey, with signs, the big moments when a singer sends a single note soaring through the hall.“Oh gosh — it is stressing me out,” said Amelia Hensley, the actor portraying Leonore, who disguises herself as a man named Fidelio to get a job in the jail where her husband, a political prisoner, is being held, in the hopes of saving him.“I have to hold my sign for an incredibly long time because the note is held that long,” she said. “It’s difficult for me to understand because I don’t hear. And I want to make sure that the deaf audience will understand me and understand why I’m holding this out, because it’s not natural to the language to hold a sign that long.”This production of “Fidelio” is opening less than a month after “CODA” won the Academy Award for best picture, and Troy Kotsur, who used to be member of Deaf West, won the Oscar for best supporting actor, the first deaf man to be so honored by the academy. Deaf West is developing a musical version of “CODA.” (Dudamel and his wife, Maria Valverde, said in an interview they had seen the movie three times.)This production is steeped in classical music history, since Beethoven experienced hearing loss in the last decades of his life. (“Ah, how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than in others,” the composer and musician wrote in 1802 in an anguished letter addressed to his brothers that came to be known as the Heiligenstadt Testament.)María Inmaculada Velásquez Echeverria, the artistic director of White Hands Choir.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThat history intrigued Dudamel as he was arranging a 250th anniversary celebration of Beethoven’s birth just before the pandemic. “It was how to make the opera be part of these two worlds — the two worlds of Beethoven,” he said.And it is what drew Deaf West to this project; its members considered what Beethoven faced writing and conducting while dealing with a steady decline in his hearing.“Maybe he did it through feeling the vibrations of the music?” Kurs said. “I don’t know Beethoven’s exact process, but there’s a similarity to how I experience music. I’ve never heard music in my entire life, but I think that I understand it.”There is much debate among biographers and musicologists about Beethoven’s level of hearing at various points in his career. He wrote and revised “Fidelio” over the course of nearly a decade, from its first performance in 1805 to the substantially revised version of 1814. By 1813, he had several ear trumpets made. By 1818, he began carrying pads of paper for people to write down what they were saying to him. While he was able to continue composing as his hearing deteriorated, it became increasingly difficult for him to perform and conduct.“It never really affected his ability to compose or orchestrate because he was wildly creative throughout his life,” said Theodore J. Albrecht, a retired professor of musicology at Kent State University, who has written extensively about Beethoven.Jan Swafford, a Beethoven biographer, said the composer began reporting hearing loss as early as 1798. “He would not have lost pitch as much as color,” he said of its onset.In the original plan, before the pandemic, this production was to be presented in Europe, with Dudamel conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra along with the White Hands Choir, a group of deaf and hard of hearing performers associated with El Sistema, the music education program in Venezuela where Dudamel trained. After the tour through Europe was canceled, Dudamel revived the idea here in Los Angeles, this time working with his own orchestra and Deaf West, the renowned Los Angeles-based theater.Dudamel is familiar with the complexities of leading an orchestra, singers and a choir; he is also the music director for the Paris Opera. But this week, he will also be leading the deaf and hard-of-hearing actors from Deaf West and choir members from Venezuela.The conductor Gustavo Dudamel, left, worked with members of the opera’s cast and chorus at a recent rehearsal.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesDudamel told Kurs he had to some extent been prepared for this because of his work at the podium, especially as someone who conducts orchestras all over the world, with players who speak many different languages. (Some orchestra players disdain overly verbal conductors in any language, preferring to work through the music.)“In a way, a conductor needs to have sign language conducting the orchestra,” Dudamel told Kurs during a break in a rehearsal. “You cannot say anything. You can only show them.”Valverde, an actress and filmmaker, is producing a documentary about the White Hands Choir, whose members wear distinctive white gloves, and was there filming the choir as her husband led it in rehearsal.The aspirations of this performance will be signaled from first notes of the overture.The Venezuelan choir will use choreography and facial expressions to convey the power of the overture which opens the opera: The other day, it was wide smiles and hands raised to the air in a representation of fireflies. “Fidelio’s overture is especially optimistic,” Arvelo, the director said. “In such a dark story, the overture starts with this moment in major tones. We were like: How can we transmit this with images?”During the spoken stretches of the opera, the audience will hear nothing: the actors will communicate the dialogue in sign language, which will be translated on supertitles cast above the stage.The production will last for three nights.“I think it’s going to be a mixed audience,” said Chad Smith, the head of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “There will be a lot of the L.A. Phil audience who are coming to hear Gustavo and the LA Phil perform one of the great works from the canon.”Smith added that the hope was to also have people who are deaf or hard of hearing, who are in the space for “perhaps the first time.”The experience has proved to be as powerful for the opera singers as for the actors. Ryan Speedo Green, the bass-baritone who appeared as Uncle Paul in “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” at the Metropolitan Opera last year, and is the singing counterpart to Russell Harvard’s Rocco, said this was the most inclusive opera he had ever witnessed.“People want to see themselves onstage,” he said. “For once in my life, I’m going to be someone’s voice and they’re going to be my action. He is my body and my action and my intent and my physical interpretation. And I am his voice to the audience, to the hearing audience. We are one entity — Rocco. He is attached to me, as much as I am attached to him.” More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      The Boston Symphony cancels its European tour over virus concerns.

      by

      The Boston Symphony Orchestra announced on Monday that it was canceling a four-city tour of Europe because of concerns about the spread of the coronavirus in Europe and the United States.The orchestra said the tour, which was to have included stops next month in Germany, Austria and France, was not feasible because of the potential for the virus to disrupt travel. The orchestra has recently reported a surge in cases among players and members of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus.“Given the ongoing presence of Covid, brought home by its unfortunate impact on a significant number of our own artists, we must keep as our first priority the health and safety of everyone involved with the Boston Symphony Orchestra,” Gail Samuel, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, said in a statement. “Sadly, the only prudent and responsible course of action is, with deep regret, to cancel the European tour.”Many classical music ensembles hoped to resume global tours this year after the long hiatus brought by the pandemic. But the persistence of the Omicron variant has continued to complicate plans.The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra recently announced it was canceling a tour of Japan and South Korea in June because of concerns about the virus.Orchestra tours have been a staple of classical music going back decades, when the biggest ensembles in the United States and Europe began leading whistle-stop visits to global capitals. In those days, tours served not just artistic purposes but also commercial ends, giving orchestras exposure to new markets and, occasionally, lucrative sponsorships.Tours are no longer the moneymakers they used to be, except for a small number of elite ensembles like the Vienna Philharmonic. But they bestow international prestige on orchestras — an attractive prospect for donors — and give ensembles an opportunity to build cohesion.Overseas trips came to a halt at the outset of the pandemic, when classical touring was one of the first industries to shut down. (At the end of January 2020, before the disruptions caused by the coronavirus were widely felt in the United States, the Boston Symphony announced that it was canceling a tour of Asia.)Other ensembles have plans to go overseas in the coming months. The New York Philharmonic is planning a residency at a festival in Usedom, Germany, next month. The Philadelphia Orchestra is planning a tour of Europe in late summer. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Ukraine Benefit Featuring Russian Ensemble Is Canceled in Vienna

      by

      A planned benefit concert in support of Ukraine was canceled in Vienna on Monday amid concerns about the Russian-based ensemble it was to feature, MusicAeterna, which is led by the conductor Teodor Currentzis and is supported by a state-owned bank in Russia.The concert, organized by the Konzerthaus in Vienna, one of Austria’s premier halls, was to take place on Tuesday and feature MusicAeterna, which is based in St. Petersburg and is financed in part by VTB Bank, one of Russia’s largest financial institutions. The United States and other western countries have recently imposed sanctions on the bank because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.The Vienna Konzerthaus said it canceled the concert after the Ukrainian ambassador to Austria, Vasyl Khymynets, expressed concern about featuring Russian artists at an event meant to benefit Ukraine. The ensemble’s founder, Mr. Currentzis, who was born in Athens, is a charismatic conductor who has built a large following in Russia and abroad.“The Vienna Konzerthaus cannot ignore the political dimension of the performance of a St. Petersburg-based orchestra at a time of immense suffering caused by the Russian Federation’s war of aggression against Ukraine,” Matthias Naske, the hall’s chief executive and artistic director, said in a statement. “We understand and share the despair over the war crimes in Ukraine and condemn this aggression without reservation.”The Konzerthaus said that it would suspend ticket sales for future appearances by MusicAeterna until the group secured an independent source of financing. But it also said it would allow MusicAeterna to perform a separate concert planned for Monday night. (The ensemble already performed at the hall on Sunday.)Mr. Khymynets and the Ukrainian foreign ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.The cancellation of the benefit concert comes as tensions between Russia and the west continue to reverberate in the performing arts. Several high-profile Russian artists have lost global engagements in recent weeks because of their ties to the government of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.MusicAeterna, renowned for its intense, electric performances, has come under scrutiny for its connections to VTB Bank, which has helped finance some of its tours and recording projects. Mr. Currentzis called for peace in Ukraine in a statement issued last month by the SWR Symphony Orchestra in Germany, where he is chief conductor, though he has not directly criticized the Russian government or Mr. Putin.“Teodor Currentzis and the members of the SWR Symphony Orchestra unequivocally support the common appeal for peace and reconciliation,” the statement said. The orchestra has said it was aware of MusicAeterna’s association with VTB Bank, but it has continued to defend Mr. Currentzis. “From today’s perspective, this is certainly problematic, but it has existed for a longer period of time,” the statement said, referring to the bank’s support for MusicAeterna.The benefit concert in Vienna was to feature works by Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and others.MusicAeterna is set to perform in Germany, Austria and France in the coming weeks. Mr. Currentzis is scheduled to lead the ensemble in a production of Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” at the Salzburg Festival this summer, paired with “De temporum fine comoedia” by the German composer Carl Orff. The Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany, another major concert hall, said on Monday it had no plans to cancel a series of engagements this week by MusicAeterna. More

    • 88 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Outspoken Composer to Lead International Contemporary Ensemble

      by

      George E. Lewis, a Columbia scholar who has documented how Black composers have been excluded from experimental music, will lead the renowned group.A composer and scholar who has spoken forcefully about the exclusion of Black artists from experimental music will lead the renowned International Contemporary Ensemble, the group announced on Friday.George E. Lewis, a professor of music at Columbia University known for his groundbreaking work in electronics, will take the helm as artistic director later this month. Lewis, 69, a trombonist and frequent collaborator with the ensemble, will be the first Black leader in its 21-year history. He said in an interview that he hoped to bring more of a multicultural focus to one of New York’s premier new music groups, and to feature a wider variety of artists.“I’m looking to bring newer people who happen to have great ideas, but who might be overlooked by other ensembles or institutions, to the forefront so they can be noticed by everybody,” Lewis said. “It’s a sense of widening the community.”Lewis is an influential voice in the effort to “decolonize” classical music, at a time when the field is reckoning with questions about racial injustice and a legacy of exclusion.“The composers and improvisers are not the ones producing the sounds of colonialism,” he wrote in a recent essay. “Rather, it is the music curators and institutions who have been composing and improvising colonialism.”Lewis has called on music schools to recruit more young composers who belong to racial and ethnic minority groups. He has also said that ensembles should commission more works from composers of color.“There is no reason why major music institutions that tout themselves as international should continue to present all-white programs,” he wrote in the essay.The International Contemporary Ensemble, with its 35 members, has long been an important outlet for modern composers — including Lewis, long revered among avant-garde jazz fans. In 2011, the ensemble premiered his “The Will to Adorn,” inspired by a Zora Neale Hurston essay and also the title of a 2017 album of his works made by the ensemble.Lewis will replace Ross Karre, a percussionist who after five years as artistic director is stepping down to take a teaching position at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. The ensemble was co-founded and led for years by the flutist Claire Chase.The group’s leaders said Lewis, a board member since 2018, had long had an outsize influence on their work.“George’s impact on this ensemble is almost immeasurable,” Rebekah Heller, a bassoonist and board member, said in a statement. “His voice and his vision have been quietly shaping the musical direction of our collective.”Lewis said he hoped to help the ensemble move beyond rigid notions of genre, in part by encouraging artists to listen to each other through improvisation.“At a certain point, classical music becomes so fluid that it becomes like a permeable membrane where you start to realize that it’s a point of connection rather than a set of practices or a set of received histories,” he said. “It’s something that accretes and accumulates new information, rather than something that excludes or does gatekeeping.” More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Review: A ‘St. Matthew Passion’ Balances Grandeur and Calm

      by

      Bernard Labadie led the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and three choirs, in Bach’s sprawling, meditative masterpiece.Of Bach’s two surviving Passions, “St. John” is the more fiery, dramatic and troubling. “St. Matthew” is something like its wise and contemplative sibling.And that’s how the “St. Matthew Passion” came across on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, with Bernard Labadie leading the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, along with three choirs and a half-dozen soloists. That is the battery of musical forces required for Bach’s Lenten masterpiece, which over nearly three hours recounts the death and resurrection of Jesus, with reflective asides in the form of chorales, recitatives and da capo arias.Bach’s score begins as if its volume were being carefully turned up. Here, it was more like a radio dial finding a station, with the orchestra unsteady before settling into flowing momentum. Under Labadie’s baton, the music was unwaveringly measured but balanced; its flashes of grandeur didn’t need to be overstated to land powerfully. From the start: The opening calmly built toward what the conductor John Eliot Gardiner has called an aural analogue to an “altarpiece by Veronese or Tintoretto” — immersive, its elements gaining sweep from their interplay.The Orchestra of St. Luke’s played with qualities of historically informed performance but not a wholesale devotion to it in the strings’ lightly gliding bows, judicious ornamentation and the use of largely modern instruments. Split into two groups, it also had two concertmasters: Krista Bennion Feeney, a violinist with a gift for elegant phrasing, and Benjamin Bowman (who has the same role with the Metropolitan Opera’s orchestra), impressively agile and clear. Stephen Taylor’s humane oboe took on the character of a vocal soloist, and Mélisande Corriveau’s viola da gamba had crisp, authoritative articulation befitting her prominent placement at center stage.But the performance’s stars may have been the choirs: La Chapelle de Québec and the Handel and Haydn Society Chorus, and the boys of the St. Thomas Choir aloft in the first ring of boxes, all virtually without fault in trickily woven polyphony and memorable even in passing moments like the jolting vigor of “Sind Blitze, sind Donner.”Julian Prégardien, center, as the Evangelist, a role he sang with a raconteur’s conviction and excitement.Richard TermineAs the Evangelist, the tenor Julian Prégardien (inheriting a role from his father, Christoph) recounted Matthew’s story with conviction and excitement; tellingly, he was the only soloist not singing with a score in hand. Expressive, with a soft and sympathetic upper range, he was also at times less steady and assured at full voice — unable to match the quaking turmoil of “Und siehe da” following Jesus’s death.Jesus was sung by the bass-baritone Philippe Sly with stoic fatalism, his smooth warmth rending for its tragic dignity in lines like “Du sagest’s,” then shattering in its resigned agony at his final words, “Eli, Eli, lama asabthani?”Joshua Blue, a tenor stepping in for the ill Andrew Staples, had a consistent brightness — much like his fellow soloist, the soprano Carolyn Sampson, who after warming up bounded through runs with skillful control and enunciation. The young countertenor Hugh Cutting was on less sure footing in similar passages, in which his intonation was unreliable compared with smoother legato melodies. Those were where he shined and showed the most promise: Cutting possesses penetrating strength and a lushness that doesn’t come easily to his voice type. His instrument might not be fully formed, but his “Erbarme dich” was.Another standout was Matthew Brook, who during Part I was chameleonic in arias attached to Judas and Peter but in Part II took a solemn turn: first in “Komm, suß Kreuz,” then in “Mache dich, mein Herze, rein,” which he sang soothingly, with the rocking phrases of a lullaby.That aria was all the more moving for how unforced its sentiment was. The “St. Matthew Passion” is more meditation than melodrama, and this reading carried that belief to the final measure — its dissonance barely held, the slightest tension resolving with the grace of the restfulness it’s meant to reflect.Orchestra of St. Luke’sPerformed at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Review: A Chinese Concerto and a Romantic Classic Gaze Back

      by

      The New York Philharmonic, under Long Yu, played works by Rimsky-Korsakov, Qigang Chen and Rachmaninoff at the Rose Theater.The New York Philharmonic played Russian music on Thursday, for the third week in a row. It was yet another argument against President Vladimir V. Putin’s claims that his country’s culture is being canceled in the West.That wasn’t the only political resonance of the orchestra’s concert on Thursday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center. It is still all too uncommon for Chinese composers and artists — especially conductors — to be featured by American orchestras outside of Lunar New Year celebrations. But this program was led by Long Yu, experienced with the Philharmonic over the past decade, and included a substantial work by Qigang Chen.They are two of China’s most eminent classical artists. Yu leads no fewer than three major ensembles there: the China Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Shanghai and Guangzhou symphonies. And Chen served as music director for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.But though the New York Philharmonic has played three of his pieces in the past, they have all been on Lunar New Year programs; this was his subscription series debut. And his pristine cello concerto “Reflet d’un Temps Disparu” (“Reflection on Time Past”), written in the mid-1990s, was the highlight on Thursday.The aim of the half-hour, single-movement work is by now a familiar one: to bring together traditional Chinese sounds with the forces of a Western orchestra. But Chen, who studied in France with Olivier Messiaen in the 1980s, makes the interaction both surprising and natural.The melodic germ is “Meihua san nong,” an ancient tune whose title is often translated as “Three Variations on the Plum Blossom.” The cello soloist — here the eloquent, calmly commanding Gautier Capuçon — begins alone, notes subtly bending to evoke the twang of a qin. (It’s in a version for that Chinese zither that “Meihua san nong” is best known.)A woozy veil of winds casts a cloud of Messiaen-style European modernism, quickly settling into more openhearted warmth. But darkness keeps threatening, from groans in the low winds and brasses, and the cello’s line shifts from quietly clicking taps to pizzicato plucks of gonglike resonance — echoed in a large battery of percussion, including temple blocks.Trills and brushy arpeggiated motifs conjure the Bach suites at the center of the cello’s repertory, as the solo line goes back and forth from anxiously repetitive riffs to serene, expansive lyricism. The cello doesn’t quite lead the orchestra, but its music keeps being echoed within the ensemble; the soloist is something like a diamond in a ring, supported by and glinting onto its setting.Before the piece ends in wisps, it climaxes in a huge, lushly Romantic, quite saccharine explosion, like something out of John Williams.Or out of Rimsky-Korsakov, whose “Tsar’s Bride” Overture opened the concert. Or Rachmaninoff, whose “Symphonic Dances” followed intermission. These dances, like Chen’s concerto, are Proustian music, evocations of the Russian past presented in a modern, occasionally even jazzy, light. (The work’s alto saxophone solo is one of its most distinctive elements.)With its ingenious recastings of Russian Orthodox chants and the Catholic “Dies Irae,” this can be a grand, mesmerizingly intense score, a danse macabre written as World War II was underway. But while Thursday’s performance under Yu had robustness and dash, it was ever so slightly square — loud and quick, when warranted, but overall mellow in its impact.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More