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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

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      Galileo Forgery’s Trail Leads to Web of Mistresses and Manuscripts

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      The unmasking of a fake Galileo manuscript this summer brought renewed attention to a colorful, prolific early-20th-century forger named Tobia Nicotra.When the University of Michigan Library announced last month that one of its most prized possessions, a manuscript said to have been written by Galileo around 1610, was in fact a 20th-century fake, it brought renewed attention to the checkered, colorful career of the man named as the likely culprit: Tobia Nicotra, a notorious forger from Milan.Nicotra hoodwinked the U.S. Library of Congress into buying a fake Mozart manuscript in 1928. He wrote an early biography of the conductor Arturo Toscanini that became better known for its fictions than its facts. He traveled under the name of another famous conductor who had recently died. And in 1934 he was convicted of forgery in Milan after the police were tipped off by Toscanini’s son Walter, who had bought a fake Mozart from him.His explanation of what had motivated his many forgeries, which were said to number in the hundreds, was somewhat unusual, at least according to an account of his trial that appeared in The American Weekly, a Hearst publication, in early 1935.“I did it,” the article quoted him as saying, “to support my seven loves.”When the police raided Nicotra’s apartment in Milan, several news outlets reported, they found a virtual forgery factory, strewn with counterfeit documents that appeared to bear the signatures of Columbus, Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, Martin Luther, Warren G. Harding and other famous figures.Investigators had also found a sort of shrine to his seven mistresses, at least according to The American Weekly. The article described a room with black velvet-covered walls, with seven panels featuring paintings, sketches and photographs of the women — one of whom was said to be a “novelty dancer,” and another an “expert swimmer” — with fresh flowers in front of each. “The pictures in some cases displayed their physical attractions with startling frankness, but they were in general highly artistic,” the article noted.“Incidentally,” the publication added, “he had a wife.”Over the years Nicotra’s counterfeits have fooled collectors and institutions, sown confusion, and been denounced by the esteemed Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who collected musical manuscripts and who wrote an article in 1931 naming Nicotra as a forger. Now Nicotra is back in the news, thanks to the Galileo forgery in Michigan, which was unmasked by Nick Wilding, a historian at Georgia State University who showed that the paper it had been written on had a watermark dating from the late 18th century, more than 150 years after Galileo supposedly wrote it. He also linked it to several other Nicotra forgeries.“Either he thought he was just invincible, or he was maybe just incredibly desperate,” Wilding, who is working on a biography of Galileo, said of Nicotra. While other forgers have been more prolific, Wilding said, few have been as daring — or as talented.“Everything Nicotra does is plausible; there are no jarring anachronisms,” he said. “He knows enough to try and get it right.”This manuscript was one of the University of Michigan Library’s most prized possessions when it was thought to be by Galileo. It was unmasked this summer as a 20th-century forgery, most likely by Nicotra.via University of Michigan LibraryThere is relatively little concrete information about Nicotra, and, given that he was a professional forger, the existing documentary evidence must be taken with a grain of salt. “The facts just seem to slip away from him,” Wilding said. While some accounts say he was 53 at the time of his trial, a birth certificate suggests he may have been 44. Contemporary news accounts, and interviews with several scholars who have studied him, however, begin to give some sense of the man and his prolific career.A courtroom sketch of Nicotra that appeared in The American Weekly portrays him as a balding, thin-faced man with glasses perched on a pointy nose, sporting a mustache and goatee, and wearing either a thick scarf or some kind of furry, Astrakhan-like collar on his coat.Nicotra cast a wide net in the types of documents he counterfeited, and seems to have possessed real talent and learning. He forged a poem he claimed was by the Italian Renaissance poet Tasso, musical manuscripts by leading composers, and was even said to have started a minor international incident by creating a fake Columbus letter identifying his birthplace as Spain, not Italy, prompting the mayor of Genoa to write a lengthy rebuttal reaffirming Columbus’ Italian ancestry.An account of his 1934 conviction by The Associated Press, which ran in The New York Times under the headline “Autograph Faker Gets Prison Term,” described how Nicotra operated: “His method was to visit the Milan Library and tear out the fly leaves of old books or steal pages of manuscript and write on them the ‘autographs’ of famed musicians. The librarians of Milan testified that he had ruined scores of their books.”In 1928, he sold what appeared to be a signed Mozart aria called “Baci amorosi e cari,” supposedly written by the composer at age 14, to the Library of Congress.“It was so special because first of all it was unknown, so it wasn’t reported in any of the thematic catalogs of Mozart at that time,” Paul Allen Sommerfeld, a music reference specialist at the Library of Congress, said in an interview. “He claimed that he found this manuscript and then published the song.”The library paid $60 for the document, which was later believed to have been composed by Nicotra himself.Nicotra said he was the son of a botany professor, and he wrote in one letter that he had graduated with a music degree from a conservatory in Naples in 1909. “We don’t know whether that’s a true fact or not,” Wilding said.When he published his biography of Toscanini in 1929, early critics noted that it contained a number of errors. It is seen as even more unreliable today.“It’s mostly invented conversations and so on,” said Harvey Sachs, the author of a definitive 2017 biography, “Toscanini: Musician of Conscience.” “Just made-up stuff.”His conviction in 1934 made headlines around the world, including in The New York Times.In 1932, Nicotra toured the United States while masquerading as Riccardo Drigo, an Italian conductor and composer who had been the conductor of the Imperial Ballet in Russia and who may be best remembered for the arrangement of “Swan Lake” he created after Tchaikovsky’s death. (The Associated Press reported that Nicotra had been “feted widely in the United States as the former orchestra conductor of the Czar of Russia.”) Apparently no one realized that Drigo had died two years earlier, in 1930.“My main way of characterizing him would be ‘bold,’” said Erin Smith, who wrote her master’s thesis on Nicotra at the University of Maryland in 2014. “He was able to carry on with this for a good number of years.”Nicotra was also known for forging works by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, an early-18th-century composer who died at the age of 26 and whose posthumous fame attracted forgers. One Pergolesi forgery wound up in the collection of the Metropolitan Opera Guild. When Christie’s auctioned it in 2017, it described it as an “intriguing forgery, once thought to belong to the hotly debated Pergolesi canon” and cited authorities who list it as “created by the prolific forger Tobia Nicotra.” It fetched $375.The discovery of the Galileo leaves open the question of what happened to the many other forgeries Nicotra created, which he was quoted as saying could number as many as 600.“I don’t know if he did 600, but I’m sure he did more than the little we’ve found so far,” said Richard G. King, an associate professor emeritus at the University of Maryland School of Music, who has been researching Nicotra. “I don’t think people are willfully hiding these things, but it’s just hard to find them.”Unless an institution has a record of buying documents from Nicotra, Wilding said, it may be hard to identify other forgeries. He suggested that documents by figures Nicotra habitually forged that lack clear provenance before the 20th century “are probably really worth looking at very, very closely.”Nicotra eventually ran afoul of the law after selling the fake Mozart manuscript to Walter Toscanini, who persuaded detectives in Milan to investigate the case. Nicotra was convicted, fined 2,400 lire and sentenced to two years in prison.Some accounts suggest that Nicotra was let out of prison early, because the Fascist government wanted his help forging signatures. That story, notes Wilding, “is just too good to be ignored, and maybe too good to be true.” More

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      Hobart Earle Leads the Odesa Philharmonic to Berlin

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      “I certainly never planned on being a music director in a time of war,” says Hobart Earle, who has conducted this Ukrainian orchestra for 30 years.BERLIN — There was a warm ovation as the musicians of the Odesa Philharmonic Orchestra came onstage here on Tuesday evening, and cheers when the ensemble played the Ukrainian anthem. Applause greeted the conductor Hobart Earle’s spoken introduction in German.But none of that was as loud as the roar from the crowd at the Philharmonie when Earle switched to Ukrainian. To hear that language spoken in front of dozens of Ukrainian musicians in a Western European capital was a stirring sign of the defiant survival of Ukraine — and its culture — in the face of Russia’s war of aggression. (The concert can be viewed at mediathek.berlinerfestspiele.de through Sept. 17.)That defiance was particularly powerful coming from an orchestra from Odesa, whose port holds the key to the Black Sea and the global grain trade. The city may be the most strategically and symbolically crucial prize of the war as it drags on.The Philharmonic, which dates its modern history to the 1930s, was performing in Berlin for the first time, but it was led by an old friend: Earle, born in Venezuela to American parents, has been the orchestra’s conductor for 30 years, an unusually long tenure these days.“I never imagined that I would be a long-term music director,” Earle said in an interview the day before the concert. “And I certainly never planned on being a music director in a time of war.”The program of works by Myroslav Skoryk, Mykola Lysenko, Alemdar Karamanov and Sibelius came together rapidly after Winrich Hopp, the artistic director of Musikfest Berlin (part of the Berliner Festspiele), contacted the orchestra in early July. Earle, who had left Ukraine in February, flew back to Odesa to rehearse an ensemble that had been largely silenced for six months by the war.“How could I not go back to try and put this orchestra together again?” he said.With the Ukrainian government granting permission for male players to travel, even though men of military age are now barred from leaving the country, the performance could go forward. Even a double bass broken in transit could not dim the high spirits of the occasion, and what Earle called “the indomitable Odesa humor.”“Any orchestra is a mirror of its city,” he said. “Odesa is very well known in the former Soviet Union as a capital of humor. It’s a city where it’s so important during hard times, this ability to be flexible in the face of problems and to live life with a smile.”Below are edited excerpts from our conversation.Earle conducting the Odesa ensemble in Berlin in a program of works by Myroslav Skoryk, Mykola Lysenko, Alemdar Karamanov and Sibelius.Fabian SchellhornWhat has happened to the orchestra and the players during the past six months?My last concert was on Feb. 12, and the mood was going downhill really fast: “Maybe the American intelligence has something here; why are they sounding such an alarm; maybe this is really going to happen.” And we played — unplanned — the overture to Lysenko’s great Ukrainian opera “Taras Bulba,” one of our old war horses.After the war broke out, we didn’t know what was going to happen next. After the invasion of Crimea, in 2014, we had done a flash mob playing “Ode to Joy” in the fish market, and we tried to get permission to do that again, at sites around Odesa. But we couldn’t get permission. So we decided [to release online] the audio of the last movement of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s 21st Symphony, the last big piece we played before the pandemic. It’s a kaddish he dedicated to the victims of the Warsaw ghetto. We took the music and added images from the concert hall and the war, but also images of Ukrainian life — to try and make it not terribly bleak, like there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, and we released that at the end of March.Had everyone stayed in Odesa?Some people had gone abroad, and some went to villages in western Ukraine. We have a lot of split families now — that’s very common, with wives and children abroad. But as people came back, the orchestra started playing weekly chamber concerts in May.Several of the players were in civilian defense units. One of our stagehands was actually in the army — he would be here except he had concussions and high blood pressure and got some time off, but he was on the front. Our principal clarinet is also in the armed forces, but his function right now is not fighting; he’s helping the wounded and driving ambulances. But they let him have time off to come with us.What was it like for you to return to Ukraine?It was rather sad, because the city is historically one of the great cosmopolitan cities of Europe. During the summer it’s usually bursting, and it’s empty now. But you can feel some life coming back on the streets, and in the restaurants and cafes.How did you initially connect with this orchestra?I came to the Soviet Union with a chamber orchestra from Vienna in 1990. With this orchestra, we had been doing rarely performed American music in Austria, and rarely performed Austrian music in America. And someone said we should take our American program to the Soviet Union. Almost none of us had ever been there before.One of the cities was Odesa, and I was then invited to come guest-conduct the Philharmonic. I came in April 1991, not speaking a word of Russian. I speak some Western European languages and English, but there wasn’t any ability to communicate. This was terra incognita, the Iron Curtain. And through an amazing turn of fate, there was one viola player from Cuba, and I could speak Spanish with him, and he was my translator. And it all grew out of that. If not for that, I wouldn’t have had any real chance of continuing. “Any orchestra is a mirror of its city,” Earle said. “Odesa is very well known in the former Soviet Union as a capital of humor.”Fabian SchellhornCan you tell me about program you’ve brought to Berlin?The basic idea was to focus on three composers. We start with Skoryk — part of his 1965 score for a classic of Soviet film called “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.” This piece is called “Childhood”; it’s happy children’s music, very folkloric, and there’s so much folklore in Ukrainian culture and history. The idea was to go directly from this children’s music into an elegy by Lysenko — a piano piece, in a new orchestral version. And we’re dedicating this pairing to the children who are suffering so badly in this war.And Karamonov’s Third Piano Concerto?Nobody wrote music like this in 1968, not in the Soviet Union, not in Western Europe. He was a Crimean Tatar Muslim, and his father was exiled to Siberia, so in 1944 Karamanov wasn’t in Crimea but in Moscow with his mother, or else he would have been sent there as well.He went away from avant-garde music and came back to Crimea and this is one of the first pieces he wrote there. It’s a very religious piece: He was Muslim, but he had an experience that turned him totally toward Christianity, which was remarkable in the Soviet Union. He was very interested in jazz and all these forbidden things. It’s very reflective music; you can feel in some places the influence of Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, but that’s just fleeting moments. Other times you can feel these blues harmonies — with a deep religious underpinning. And a fascinating ending, totally unexpected: His words were that this is a rain, a spiritual rain.And the Sibelius?Winrich Hopp said we should play something in which the orchestra can really shine. And I came to Sibelius’s Second Symphony, which has the whole underpinning of patriotism. And we wanted to end with something upbeat. This music, the sort of narrative of this symphony, is something which now, during this war, we feel differently. This piece has a lot of dark moments, but that last movement …Has the issue of playing Russian music with the orchestra come up?I did a Shostakovich Five in Poland at the beginning of February, and that music fit the atmosphere so precisely. I’ve been asked a lot about Russian music. But Ukrainians just do not want to hear it now, and I think we need to respect that.Have you been able to explore Berlin during your stay?I realized that I haven’t been here since the fall of the Wall! So I’m exploring it. I found the site of the old Philharmonie, where the Berlin Philharmonic played. But there’s a sadness to being in Berlin now. It’s still a construction site. And it makes you wonder how many years it is going to take to rebuild Ukraine. More

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      After New York, Jaap van Zweden Will Lead Seoul Philharmonic

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      He will begin a five-year contract as music director of the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra in 2024, after stepping down from the New York Philharmonic.Jaap van Zweden, the New York Philharmonic’s music director, surprised cultural leaders and audiences last year when he announced he would leave his post in 2024, saying the pandemic had made him rethink his priorities.Now he has started outlining his post-New York plans: He will begin a five-year contract as music director of the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra in January 2024, the ensemble announced on Sunday.Sohn Eun-kyung, the Seoul Philharmonic’s chief executive, said in a statement that van Zweden would help “upgrade” the quality of the ensemble and turn it into a “world-class orchestra,” according to South Korean news media reports.Van Zweden, who was in Hong Kong where he serves as music director of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, could not be immediately reached for comment.His publicist, Mary Lou Falcone, said: “This is about building something — the building of an orchestra, as he did in Hong Kong. That’s what he does.”The move is another unconventional choice by van Zweden, 61, an intense and meticulous maestro from the Netherlands who came to New York in 2018, only to have his tenure interrupted by the pandemic, which forced the Philharmonic to cancel more than 100 concerts and impose painful budget cuts.While the Seoul Philharmonic is among Asia’s most prominent ensembles, it has struggled in recent years with financial problems and management woes. The current music director, the Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä, recently announced he would not renew his three-year contract when it expires later this year.Van Zweden, who served as music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra before coming to New York, was at one point, while leading the Dallas ensemble, America’s best-paid conductor, earning more than $5 million in a single season.Van Zweden agreed to step down from his post in New York after the 2023-24 season, a year later than he had initially planned, to give the orchestra time to settle into David Geffen Hall, scheduled to open in October after a $550 million renovation, and to search for a successor. His six-year tenure will be the shortest of any Philharmonic music director since Pierre Boulez, the French composer and conductor who led the orchestra for six seasons in the 1970s.He will leave his post in Hong Kong in the spring of 2024, after 12 years, and assume the title of conductor laureate.In an interview last year, van Zweden said the pandemic had prompted him to reconsider his relationship with the New York Philharmonic, as well as with his family, which he rarely got to see during his time on the road. He said he felt it would be the right moment to move on, with the orchestra set to move into its new home.“It is not out of frustration, it’s not out of anger, it’s not out of a difficult situation,” he said at the time. “It’s just out of freedom.” More

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      In His Twilight, a Conductor Revisits Where His Career Dawned

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      Michael Tilson Thomas, in the face of an aggressive brain cancer, returned to his roots to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood.LENOX, Mass. — Michael Tilson Thomas had just brought the first movement of Copland’s Symphony No. 3 to a radiant close here at Tanglewood on Saturday night when applause broke out at the back of the Shed.And why not? Copland’s score is one of the works most associated with the Boston Symphony, and he wrote parts of it on these very grounds. It was music, Thomas has suggested, “that the world would come to accept as the sound of America.”The applause went on, until it sounded like just a single admirer was left clapping, insistently. Thomas turned, smiled, and joked, “I agree.”He always has agreed, and this great American maverick will to the end. The conductor, 77, underwent surgery last year to treat glioblastoma, a lethally aggressive brain cancer, and in March he announced that he was permanently reducing his activities. “I intend to stick around for a bit,” he said then; despite the odds, he has.So Thomas could have been forgiven reflectiveness, if not more, leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra in concerts on Saturday and Sunday, Copland in one and Ives in the other. After all, for all his might and ideas as the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, a tenure that lasted from 1995 to 2020 and defines his career, it was the Boston Symphony with which he made his way, and Tanglewood where that part of his life began.Thomas emerged as a Tanglewood fellow, arriving here for the first time in 1968 and winning the Koussevitzky Prize for an outstanding student conductor a year later. He was named the Boston Symphony’s assistant, associate, and principal guest conductor in turn — the latter a title he shared with Colin Davis — and until his departure in 1974, he drew note for programs that put the new in the context of the old, as well as for recordings that still sound fresh, lush and keen, including a glorious Piston Second and a pungent “Rite of Spring.” Four instrumentalists who played with Thomas then — the bassists Lawrence Wolfe and Joseph Hearne, the violinist Ikuko Mizuno and the violist Michael Zaretsky — played with him last weekend, too.But in a recent interview with The New York Times, Thomas said that he felt “calm and resigned” about his circumstances, and though the Tanglewood grounds seemed to flower for him with a special resplendence, there was little sense of a farewell to these performances, little sense of there being some grand valedictory message, even if there were those in the audience who stood to welcome him before he had conducted a note.There was just Michael Tilson Thomas, doing Michael Tilson Thomas things.And what things. Thomas is understandably not so excitable on the podium now, but he is anything but disengaged, and, standing throughout the concerts, his old theatricality still takes the odd bow. His right hand dominates, keeping a steady if revealing beat, and his interest in carefully shaping details is still there, as is his accuracy of gesture. Clarity appears to be his aim, and he spent a lot of his time dealing with balances in each of the four works he conducted: holding a hand up here, twinkling his fingers there, sprinkling experience into the routine.Since his days exploring the avant-garde as the conductor the Monday Evening Concerts in the 1960s, Thomas has considered the concert hall to be a place of inquiry and thought, of connections and contrasts, and the Shed was no different on these occasions. He still has things to say.Saturday’s concert could have been political if Thomas had wanted it to be, but he voiced nothing explicit. The program put Copland’s symphony, which was given with typically heartfelt commitment, in conversation with “Dubinushka,” a jaunty though trite little tribute that Rimsky-Korsakov based on a workers’ song and offered to the Russian revolutionaries of 1905, and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, which the composer wrote specifically for American audiences ahead of a tour in 1909.Thomas, left, conducting Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, with Alexander Malofeev as the soloist.Hilary ScottAlexander Malofeev, 20, was the soloist, which made the performance delayed compensation for a collaboration between him and Thomas that had been canceled in March, when the Montreal Symphony Orchestra declared that it would be “inappropriate” for the Moscow-born pianist to perform. Entirely innocent to begin with, Malofeev had condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine days earlier, calling it a “terrible and bloody decision” after another concert in Canada had been called off far in advance. Thomas, a devoted supporter of up-and-coming musicians in his founding of the New World Symphony and in other work, was clearly pleased that they could perform together here, beaming during the ovations.You could hear why: Malofeev is already a special pianist. Plenty of young artists use the Rachmaninoff to show off sparkling technical skills, and Malofeev had those in abundance. But he was interested in something more than that. The first movement was broad, dreamy, nightmarish, the left hand disrupting melodic lines; the cadenza was unsettlingly introspective. The second movement became a balm, the third a triumph, and if that finale was dangerously soaked in schmaltz, well, that’s Rachmaninoff for you. Thomas, to his credit, went where Malofeev took him, and brought the orchestra along, too.Sunday’s concert offered an opportunity for Thomas to make more of an interpretive statement with the season-ending performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a Tanglewood tradition. He did, in a sense, sticking to the way his Beethoven has been of late, steadier and heftier than the new norm.With the Tanglewood Festival Chorus on hand, along with a vocal quartet of Jacquelyn Stucker, Kelley O’Connor, Ben Bliss and Dashon Burton, this was stoic Beethoven, calm, confident and controlled, lyrical in the slow movement but tender rather than rapt — Beethoven of the here and now, in other words, and not of the beyond. Some hard-thwacked timpani aside, it was also firmly of the old school. With its forward woodwinds and its resolute strength of line — the fugue in the finale was downright stubborn — it almost reminded me of Otto Klemperer.Charles Ives’s “Psalm 90,” an ethereal yet cosmically dissonant prayer for soprano, tenor, chorus and organ, prefaced the Beethoven in a characteristically ear-dislocating bit of Thomas programming, though he left the choir director, James Burton, to conduct. Ives worked on it for years, and he eventually came to think of it as his farewell to composition; its ending is profoundly comforting.“So teach us to number our days,” its text reads in part, “that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”Perhaps there was a message, after all. More

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      A Star Maestro, Fighting Brain Cancer, Finds Peace in Music

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      LENOX, Mass. — The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, during his half-century career in music, has led many performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with its rousing “Ode to Joy” finale.But when he took the podium on Sunday at Tanglewood, the summer music festival here in the Berkshires, Thomas felt different. It had been more than a year since he was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, which has drained him of energy and forced him to confront his mortality earlier than he expected. He has emerged with new appreciation for the wonder in Beethoven’s music and the electricity of live performance.“It feels really great,” Thomas, 77, said after the performance. “It feels restorative.”Thomas, the former music director of the San Francisco Symphony, who has spent his career as a musician studying questions of time and existence, knows that his days are limited. He has taken bucket-list trips to Tahiti and Nova Scotia with family and friends; organized journals on life and art that he has kept for more than 60 years; and started contemplating the music to be played at his memorial service.But he refuses to be confined by his illness. “Even in a situation where the time is short, whether in rehearsal or in life, you can accept and forgive yourself,” he said. “You can say, ‘I had this much time and this is what I could accomplish.’ And that’s fine. I am at peace with it.”He has continued to compose and record favorite piano pieces. A devoted educator, he is working on a new set of videos exploring musical ideas.And he is planning an ambitious slate of concerts through at least next summer, in San Francisco, Miami, Cleveland, New York and beyond, tackling Mahler symphonies, a specialty; cantatas by Olivier Messiaen; and a new cello concerto by the film composer Danny Elfman.After Sunday’s concert at Tanglewood, Thomas received a standing ovation that lasted more than six minutes.Hilary ScottThomas’s return to Tanglewood, where he led two programs with the Boston Symphony Orchestra over the weekend, was especially poignant. This was where his career took off: In 1969, after winning a prize here, he was named assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony, where he remained for more than a decade.Some in the orchestra worried that cancer would prevent Thomas from making the journey to Tanglewood, his first appearance at the festival since 2018. But he arrived with energy and humor, mentioning his health struggles only briefly at the first rehearsal. During several days of intense sessions with the orchestra, he showed his trademark wit and fastidiousness, leaping from his stool when he wanted more energy from the players, and flashing a thumbs-up when they mastered tricky passages.“He’s irrepressible,” said Lawrence Wolfe, the orchestra’s assistant principal bass. “He’s not going to let his illness overpower him. He doesn’t dwell on it. He simply rises above it.”Before he was diagnosed with cancer, Thomas was at the height of his career, an elder statesman of classical music, known by the nickname M.T.T., who was revered for his mastery of the standard repertory and for championing American composers.In 2020, after 25 years, he stepped down from the San Francisco Symphony, where he was credited with transforming the ensemble into one of the best in the nation. He also won accolades for being a founder of the New World Symphony, a training orchestra for young artists in Miami, in 1987.Then, last summer, he learned he had glioblastoma, one of the most lethal forms of brain cancer, which also afflicted President Biden’s son Beau Biden, and Senator John McCain. His doctors estimated that he might have only eight months to live. He underwent surgery to remove a tumor and withdrew from performances for several months.Frightened and exhausted, he struggled to come to terms with his diagnosis. He was also eager to stay busy.“There was an initial moment of shock and sort of ‘OK, so I’m going to gird my loins here and finish and accomplish all these things,’” he said.Thomas has an ambitious slate of concerts planned through at least next summer, in San Francisco, Miami, Cleveland, New York and beyond.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesAs he recovered from surgery, his outlook began to change. He became less focused on achievement and more interested in relaxation and deep thought. He was also eager to spend more time with loved ones, including Joshua Robison, his husband and manager.“I began to accept and even be appreciative of those quiet moments of restfulness in which I could cast my mind back over people and experiences in music that connected us all in a profound way,” Thomas said.Slowly, he has returned to the stage, making a triumphant appearance with the New York Philharmonic in November, his first concert since announcing he had cancer, followed by engagements in Los Angeles, Miami and San Francisco, where he lives.In March, saying he was “taking stock of my life,” he announced he would step down as artistic director of the New World Symphony to focus on his health.Though he often feels tired and sometimes has difficulty studying scores, his artistic instincts and drive remain intact. His illness has forced him to learn to be more efficient in his conducting, he said.“I feel more exhausted, more on edge physically, more on the edge of my nerves, than I have felt over the years,” he said. “On the other hand, I’ve learned that I can make some wonderful things happen without having to push myself so much physically.”In January, he appeared with the pianist Emanuel Ax in Los Angeles, in a program that included Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Ax recalled that Thomas was intensely focused on the music, seemingly determined not to let his illness interfere.“You just felt like everything is going to go on the way it always has,” Ax said. “I know intellectually that’s not true, but that’s how he makes you feel. He’s handling this in just an incredibly positive and creative way.”At Tanglewood on Sunday, Thomas and the musicians received a standing ovation from the audience of 7,000 that lasted more than six minutes. He basked in the applause, beaming as he shook hands with the players onstage.After the concert, people lined up to thank Thomas and take photos. Many were in tears, unsure whether they might see him again at Tanglewood.“You have brought so much musical joy into my life,” said Maressa Gershowitz, a Connecticut-based photographer who brought her children and grandchildren to the performance.At a reception later that day, Thomas spoke about the potential of orchestras to achieve a “unifying sense of purpose” when they played pieces like the Ninth Symphony.“There’s a unified dedication to making the music very special, and that’s totally what I felt in these last days with the wonderful members of the B.S.O.,” he said before a crowd of friends and musicians and staff affiliated with the Boston Symphony. “I was very grateful in this last part of my life to have the opportunity reconnect with them, and with you.”Despite occasional setbacks, Thomas eagerly seeks out opportunities to make music, especially with close friends. On Monday morning, he invited the cellist Yo-Yo Ma to his rental near Tanglewood to fulfill a longtime wish, to play the piano part alongside Ma in Debussy’s Cello Sonata.Ma said that he was struck by the imagination in Thomas’s playing, and that he felt questions of life and death have been palpable in the conductor’s music since his diagnosis.“Everything that we see in culture deals with the space between life and death,” Ma said. “When you’re faced with such a severe diagnosis, you obviously are thinking about your whole arc of life.”Thomas said that he felt “calm and resigned” about the possibility of death. As he has come to terms with his illness, he said that he had found comfort in a Buddhist teaching: “Things are not what they seem. Nor are they otherwise.”“That seems to be so much the essential mystery of music and art and everything else,” he said.Lately, he has been listening to a song by Schubert, “Wandrers Nachtlied,” which he said reminded him of the need to let go of unimportant struggles. The text of the Schubert song reads:Ah, I am weary of this restlessness!What use is all this joy and pain?Sweet peace!Come, ah come into my breast!“Why all this desire and pain still?” Thomas said. “For what next accomplishment? For what position? For what sized type will my name be printed in, any of that nonsense. These experiences have taken me further down the road of not caring about any of that any more. And now I can be at peace.” More

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      An Orchestra Brings Harmony to a Region of Discord

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      The Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra unites players from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine with a message of peace and dialogue.In February, Grigory Ambartsumyan, a 22-year-old Ukrainian violinist of Armenian descent, awoke in Kyiv to the sound of bombs. It was the beginning of Russia’s assault on his country, and the coming days and weeks were a blur of restless nights in bomb shelters.Now, six months later and with war still raging, Ambartsumyan and dozens of his fellow musicians with the Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra have reunited in Tsinandali, a bucolic village in Georgia for the fourth annual Tsinandali Festival of classical music. It’s been a difficult three years since the orchestra debuted in September 2019, given the coronavirus pandemic (which stopped it from performing at the festival for two years), as well as continuing tensions between Georgia’s neighbors Azerbaijan and Armenia, and, of course, the lingering war in nearby Ukraine.This year, there is an urgent sense of camaraderie and hope among these young musicians and the festival organizers in this historically volatile region. Some 80 performers from seven countries from the Caucasus region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea and a few neighboring nations — Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine — will play three of the 19 concerts at the festival, which runs Sept. 2-11.Members of the orchestra celebrate after their Mahler performance in 2019.Tsinandali Festival“If we don’t establish a new relationship across borders with music, we are going to lose the opportunity to plant some seeds in the hearts of these young musicians,” said the Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda, the music director of the Tsinandali Festival. “You have to start with the young people to solve problems through connections rather than divisions.”The orchestra opens this year’s festival on Friday with “Adagio” by the Ukrainian modern composer Bohdana Frolyak (along with pieces by Brahms and Beethoven). The concert will be conducted by Oksana Lyniv, also Ukrainian, who in 2021 became the first woman to conduct at the Bayreuth Festival.The Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra is the brainchild of Martin Engstroem, the director of the well-heeled Verbier Festival in Switzerland. In 2018 he was hired, along with Avi Shoshani, the secretary general of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra, by the private-equity investor George Ramishvili, a Georgian, to start a music festival in his home country. The festival began in September 2019 on an estate northeast of the capital of Tbilisi once owned by the 19th-century Romantic poet Prince Alexander Chavchavadze.But Engstroem and Shoshani didn’t just want to put on another summer festival for the elite. “I felt one needed to create a festival in this part of the world with a message,” Engstroem said, something “humanitarian and geopolitical.”The Tsinandali Festival is held on the grounds of an estate northeast of Tbilisi once owned by the 19th-century Romantic poet Prince Alexander Chavchavadze.Tsinandali FestivalLike many classical music festivals, the festival celebrates the works of major European composers — but it also includes music from the Caucasus, as well as Turkey and other countries that border the region, where tensions stretch back hundreds of years, including between Turkey and Armenia and, more recently, Azerbaijan and Armenia, as well as Russia and Georgia.The State of the WarA New Counteroffensive: Ukraine has long vowed a major push in the southern region of Kherson to retake territory seized by Russia. It may have begun.Nuclear Plant Standoff: After renewed shelling intensified fears about a nuclear accident at the Zaporizhzhia power plant, United Nations inspectors arrived in Ukraine for a high-stakes visit to the Russian-controlled station.Russia’s Military Expansion: President Vladimir V. Putin ordered a sharp increase in the size of Russia’s armed forces, a sign that he expects a prolonged war — an outcome Ukraine has incentive to avoid.Unusual Approaches: Ukrainian troops, facing strained supply lines, are turning to jury-rigged weapons and equipment bartering among units.“Georgia and this region of Tsinandali are right in the center of where countries have been fighting forever,” Engstroem said.“Now, more than, ever, a dialogue is so important. We have seen that classical music is a universal language,” he added. “It’s relatively easy for kids from different backgrounds to create a common language through music.”For Ambartsumyan, the violinist, this year’s festival seems like a miracle. After enduring the bombardment of Kyiv earlier in the year, he remained in the city to study at the Ukrainian National Tchaikovsky Academy of Music this summer before traveling to Tsinandali for rehearsals. Speaking through a translator in a video interview, Ambartsumyan fought back tears as he talked about his journey in the last six months and recalled several friends killed in the war.“Starting in February, the explosions woke me up at night, and people were running and hiding everywhere,” he said. “It was such a tough time. And these past two years have been hard because I’m both Armenian and Ukrainian.”He was referring to the simmering clash between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. It’s a conflict that much of the world seems to not know much — or care much — about, he said.“In 2019 I met an Azerbaijan girl in the youth orchestra, and I remember her saying that we can communicate together, all of us, despite the tension between Armenia and Azerbaijan,” he said. “It’s important for me and other musicians to realize that peace is the most important thing in life.”War has also touched other members of the Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra.“We were a little bit scared when the festival started in 2019 because there is always something going on or that could explode at any time,” said Diana Sargsyan, 23, an Armenian violinist. “And then Armenia and Azerbaijan fought for 44 days in 2020. I had brothers in the war, and I was always thinking about them.”The Tsinandali Festival continued in 2020 and 2021 but on a smaller scale and without the Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra.Tsinandali FestivalAlthough the orchestra didn’t reunite in 2020 and 2021 (the Tsinandali Festival continued, but on a much smaller scale), many of the young musicians stayed in touch and hoped they would play this year.“People might wonder how we can sit next to each other, but it’s OK for us,” Sargsyan added. “The language we speak is music. It doesn’t matter which country you come from. We are all the same.”It’s a sentiment echoed by Ekaterine Tsenteradze, 25, a Georgian oboist who remembers the brief war between her country and Russia as a child.“I was 12 in 2008, and I remember seeing Russian soldiers in the streets,” Tsenteradze said, referring to the occupation of Georgia by Russian forces in August 2008 before a cease-fire was brokered after 12 days. “I have this fear again now. It feels like another country could be next. We’re in peace now and playing music, but it could all change.”Ambartsumyan said he found a certain pleasure that the orchestra would play works by Prokofiev and Shostakovich, two composers who were repressed by the Soviet regime, for the festival’s closing performance on Sept. 11.The conductor Derrick Inouye, the ensemble’s assistant conductor, working with the orchestra this month in rehearsal.Tsinandali Festival“It will be emotional for me because in their music there is a small grain of tragedy, but also underlying a lot of their music is a satire of the government,” he said. Ambartsumyan said it was an ironic bit of programming in 2022, given that music written to criticize the Russian government is being played decades later in a region where Russian aggression is once again in the headlines.“When I saw Prokofiev and Shostakovich on the program, I thought to myself, ‘perfect!’” he said. “I know a little something about what these two composers went through.” More