Classical Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Theater at Geffen Hall to Be Named for Two Key Donors

      by

      The Wu Tsai Theater will honor a $50 million gift from Joseph Tsai, a founder of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, and Clara Wu Tsai, a philanthropist.In late 2020, as coronavirus infections surged and cultural institutions shuttered, the fate of the long-delayed renovation of David Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, was uncertain.Then came a $50 million gift from Joseph Tsai, a Taiwanese-born billionaire co-founder of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, and his wife, Clara Wu Tsai, a philanthropist. The donation moved the project forward, accelerating construction so the hall could reopen in October, a year and a half ahead of schedule.In a nod to role of the Tsai family, Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic announced on Wednesday that the main auditorium in the hall would be named the Wu Tsai Theater.“It really took courage,” Katherine Farley, the chairwoman of Lincoln Center’s board, said of the gift in an interview. “And that courage inspired other people, and it made a big, big difference.”The gift represents one of the Tsai family’s biggest ventures so far into the performing arts. Joseph Tsai, who trained as a lawyer and serves as vice chairman of Alibaba, is more frequently associated with athletics. He is the primary owner of the Brooklyn Nets and has played an important role in helping the N.B.A. expand in China. The couple has previously contributed to universities, hospitals and social justice projects, among other gifts.Clara Wu Tsai, who is also a member of Lincoln Center’s board, said in an interview that she and her husband were moved by the opportunity to create jobs for New Yorkers and help make the performing arts more accessible. Also being named for the Tsais: a concert series aimed at increasing racial and ethnic diversity in the arts and bringing together performers of different genres.“My dream is that we have a full hall of diverse audiences and that we get programming in there that really showcases the versatility and flexibility that the hall was created to offer,” she said.Geffen Hall’s $550 million renovation will bring both aesthetic and acoustic improvements, with wavy beech wood walls and seats that wrap around the stage. Other additions meant to draw people in include a 50-foot digital screen in the lobby that can broadcast concerts to the public and a studio looking out onto Broadway.The hall is set to reopen on Oct. 7, with a concert featuring Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” among other pieces, before an audience of emergency medical workers and construction workers who took part in the hall’s renovation. Two galas and an open house weekend will follow later in the month.Clara Wu Tsai said she was confident that audiences would turn out, despite lingering concerns about the coronavirus and changing habits around going to live performances.“Everybody’s waiting to hear what will be one of the best concert halls in the world,” she said. “The timing is going to be good.” More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Under Pressure to Cut Russian Ties, Maestro Forms New Orchestra

      by

      Teodor Currentzis, who has been criticized for his association with a Russian bank, has enlisted European benefactors to finance his new group, Utopia.The conductor Teodor Currentzis, who has faced scrutiny since the start of the war in Ukraine because of his ties to a state-owned bank in Russia, announced on Monday that he would form a new international ensemble with the support of donors outside Russia.The ensemble, to be called Utopia, will bring together 112 musicians from 28 countries, many of them soloists and principal players in renowned orchestras, for a European tour that is to begin this fall and go through 2023, according to a statement. The group will rely on ticket sales as well as donations from European benefactors to finance its operations, the statement said.Currentzis, who has made a career of defying conventions in classical music, said he wanted the new group to shake up the traditional model of orchestras, in which musicians play together for years in the same concert halls. He said in a statement that the new group would “leave behind the framework of respectable institutions which, while being blessed can also be doomed to create what could be described as a certain standardized international sound.”“We are stepping into a more experimental field of searching for the perfect sound with masterful musicians who all crave it,” he added.The statement did not address Currentzis’s future with his longtime ensemble, MusicAeterna, which has drawn fire for its reliance on VTB Bank, a state-owned Russian institution that has been sanctioned by the United States and other countries but remains the ensemble’s main sponsor. Representatives for Currentzis and MusicAeterna did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.The statement did not offer details about Utopia’s European benefactors, except to say they included a private foundation called Kunst und Kultur DM.Currentzis has faced pressure in recent months to secure financing outside Russia for MusicAeterna, which he founded in Siberia in 2004. He has also been criticized for remaining silent on the war and working with associates of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, including some who sit on the board of MusicAeterna’s foundation. Several of the ensemble’s engagements have been canceled or postponed since the start of the war because of concerns about the ensemble’s benefactors.Still, MusicAeterna has pushed forward with engagements in Russia and abroad. In recent days, Currentzis, who was born in Athens but was awarded Russian citizenship by Putin in 2014, has led performances before sold-out crowds at the prestigious Salzburg Festival in Austria.Some of his artistic partners praised his decision on Monday to form Utopia.Matthias Naske, the artistic director of the Vienna Konzerthaus, who has said he would not engage MusicAeterna until it secured independent financing, called Utopia an important achievement. The new group will perform at the concert hall in October, during a tour that includes stops in Luxembourg and Germany.“I am grateful to Teodor Currentzis for his commitment and look forward to many encounters with his new project in the interest of cultural life in Vienna,” Naske said in a statement. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Santtu-Matias Rouvali Knows His Way Around a Score, and a Farm

      by

      YLÖJÄRVI, Finland — “Here I grow peas,” the conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali said, gesturing to a plot of land the size of a small room. “Why? I just love fresh peas.”That pea garden is a blip in the scale of Rouvali’s property here — a farm, dating back to the 16th century, on over 34 acres. It is among this place’s wildflowers, evergreens and moss-covered rocks that he feels most at ease, especially compared with where he’s more often seen: inside the world’s major concert halls, whether at the podium of his Philharmonia Orchestra in London or as a guest with ensembles like the New York Philharmonic, where he is a contender to become the next music director.“I was never someone who wants to be famous,” said Rouvali, 36. “But of course, with this profession it comes automatically.”Rouvali has structured his life so that he can spend as many weekends as possible on his farm, about 20 minutes outside Tampere, in the southwest of Finland. One morning this month, he was at the start of a welcome break between the Philharmonia’s performances not far away in Mikkeli and another to come in early August at the Edinburgh International Festival.Rouvali conducting the Philharmonia in 2019.Kaupo KikkasHe and his wife, Elina, live in the property’s main house but make use of all the surrounding buildings. They include a sauna, a guesthouse with music and pole-dancing studios, and a garage with a room for Rouvali to slaughter and skin the game he hunts, like ducks and deer. He fishes in the nearby lake, where he was having a beach built (along with a waterfront sauna). They eat everything he kills and fill the table with dishes made from other local ingredients, such as foraged chanterelles or new potatoes from a neighbor.“I need this,” Rouvali said, “to kind of rest and have a mental break and not really think about music.”When he is at work, Rouvali has developed a reputation as a lively conductor, one who revels in experimentation and fluid interpretations, and who has a gift — befitting his background as a percussionist — for internal rhythms and harmonies. When he returns to the Philharmonic next season, for his third engagement there, it will be with a precious two weeks of the season’s real estate, in varied programs that include repertory mainstays and local premieres by Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Magnus Lindberg.In a time when every guest’s appearance with the Philharmonic has the air of an audition, ahead of Jaap van Zweden’s departure from the podium in spring 2024, Rouvali’s concerts come with added scrutiny and pressure. He acknowledged as much himself, though only at a whisper in the privacy of his own yard.The Philharmonic, for its part, doesn’t have anything to add. Its music director search, said Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s chief executive, is “a very confidential and sacrosanct process, and we just don’t discuss it.”“I need this,” Rouvali said of his time at home, “to kind of rest and have a mental break and not really think about music.”Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesRouvali is a charismatic, natural leader — a trait that has endeared him to musicians in rehearsal.Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesROUVALI WAS BORN in Lahti, Finland, to two members of that city’s orchestra. He played piano, and learned violin from his mother, but he eventually settled on studying percussion seriously — mostly, the mallet instruments. A fan of much music beyond the classical concert hall, he also took up jazz and rock, and was comfortable at the seat of a drum kit.Music brought him to Finland’s storied Sibelius Academy, and it was there that he made a decisive move to devote himself to conducting. “Maybe to play triangle can be a little boring,” Rouvali said. “I always loved a symphony orchestra, and as a conductor you can do more. So I thought, Why not?”He had already studied briefly with Jorma Panula, the teacher and mentor of Finnish conducting luminaries like Esa-Pekka Salonen, Susanna Mälkki and Osmo Vänskä. As a master’s student, Rouvali later worked with the podium veterans Leif Segerstam and Hannu Lintu, who gave him an essential bit of advice: You can do whatever you want at the podium, but you just have to make sure everyone understands it.In other words, Rouvali said, “It has to work, and it has to work around the world.”That freedom helped to inform his style today: one in which he retains some of a drummer’s gestures, but also in which that physicality is an expressive vessel for open, sometimes trial-and-error interpretations with a liberal use of rubato. “As a conductor, I play the orchestra,” he said. “And if I were a violin player, I wouldn’t always play the same. Sometimes, it’s not the best idea, but it makes the live performance fun.”Musicians tend to listen. Rouvali discovered at an early age that he is a natural leader, with a sense of empathy that has endeared him to instrumentalists in rehearsals. He also learned, he said, from his parents’ and his own experiences playing under various conductors. But his charisma is for the most part innate; he carries himself as if cheerfully unaware of his position in classical music.Rouvali studies scores at his piano, building out his interpretations from inner voices and rhythms.Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesThat may be what once made him a good candidate for the Finnish reality TV show “Not Born to Rock,” which assembled a group of classical musicians to form a band. In one episode, they were shown learning how to dress like a rock star; in another, how to party like one. As a group called Taltta, they ended up writing a song that they performed at a music festival. “Of course it was just for entertainment,” Rouvali said. “But it’s good to take part in those things.”Rouvali’s lightness belies scholarly rigor. He studies scores at the piano slowly, beginning with foundational inner voices and harmonies and working his way outward to melody. It’s a method that shows in his performances, which prioritize unexpected, often revelatory sounds other conductors might overlook; the opening motive of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, rather than recurring, coursed throughout the entire work in his Mikkeli performance with the Philharmonia.He first appeared with that ensemble in 2013. Not long after, he started as the chief conductor of the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra — a tenure that comes to an end with the coming season. Another chief conductor post followed in 2017, with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra in Sweden. At the same time, he began as the Philharmonia’s principal guest conductor, ahead of being named as Salonen’s successor and taking over in 2021.Salonen said that when he called Rouvali to offer him the principal guest post, Rouvali was at a Finnish kiosk buying a six-pack of beer. Rouvali responded, “Yeah, that sounds great” with an emphatic expletive, then told the cashier, “I’ll have another one.”ROUVALI’S RELATIONSHIP with the Philharmonia has been a happy one so far; his appointment to chief conductor was the result of a vote by the musicians. Michael Fuller, a double bassist in the orchestra, said that Rouvali’s interactions with them are more or less nonverbal, so closely attuned are they to each other. That held true during recent rehearsals in Mikkeli, where he was shaping phrases more than keeping time — to the degree that he regularly, without warning, ran from the podium to hear the music from farther back in the hall.“He’s able to get results very quickly,” Fuller said. “There’s so much that he can do just through his beat. All the sudden he’ll do this thing, and the piccolo or harp will come out of the texture, and you’re like, ‘Wow, I’ve never heard this that way before.’ It’s all connected to this kind of pulse that he radiates.”Rouvali studies music in the main house of the farm, which dates back to the 16th century.Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesThat comes in handy, said the Philharmonia horn player Kira Doherty, because of the “unfettered” view Rouvali has of the scores they take up. “With him, it’s like he still has this fresh, almost first-time thing that, in looking at the score, brings out things that nobody has done before,” she added. “Some of them are bonkers, and later he’s like, ‘I’m not going to do that anymore.’ But he’s trying it, and it’s a way of engaging with the actual act of creativity.”The reception has been mixed. When Rouvali made his New York Philharmonic debut in 2019, Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times wrote that “every gesture expressed some element of the music.” But last season, the critic Zachary Woolfe was much cooler, finding that Rouvali’s interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony “tipped into plainness.”Rouvali has nevertheless garnered praise within the industry. Salonen said that, “first of all, he conducts the orchestra, not the audience, so the gestures are really focused and all carry something essential.” He added: “The guy has got a very good rhythm, a sense of tempo, of pulse. And that gives the orchestra a certain kind of security that allows them to express themselves quite clearly.”Rouvali on his lawn, which is kept trim by a robot mower nicknamed Jens.Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesBorda, the Philharmonic’s chief executive, said that their time together has often been lighthearted and fun. Once, in New York, the actor Bradley Cooper appeared in her box accompanied by Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue. They all went to meet Rouvali afterward, and, according to Borda, Wintour told him, “Maestro I love your shirt, is it Prada?” He responded, simply, “No, my mom got it from a friend in Lahti.”He is, Borda, said, “a conductor very much on the rise.” Whether that rise entails a post at the Philharmonic is an open question, even for Rouvali.At the farm, while Rouvali’s robotic lawn mower, nicknamed Jens, roamed the garden like a curious dog, he thought about how he would respond to an offer from New York. “I’d probably say, ‘Let me have a beer and call you back,’” he said. There would be much to consider: what the lifestyle change would mean for his time at home — with his wife and their children, with the high school friends who join him every year for the start of Finland’s hunting season — and what it would mean for his post at the Philharmonia.“It’s hard to say yet,” Rouvali said. “Let’s see if they even ask. But has there ever been a conductor who says no to the New York Phil?”Salonen said that, regardless, he hopes Rouvali remains with the Philharmonia “for a long time.” Rouvali feels similarly, but added that if there’s a moment to take on a lot of work, it’s now, while he’s still young. He doesn’t want to be a conductor who works well into old age; he has the farm, after all.“I do find that he’s wandered out from the forest,” Doherty, the Philharmonia player, said, “and he’s going to do some amazing stuff, then one of these days just wander back into his forest-dwelling life.” More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Minnesota Orchestra Names Thomas Sondergard as Music Director

      by

      The Danish conductor succeeds Osmo Vänskä, who led the ensemble through the most tumultuous period in its history.The Minnesota Orchestra, after the departure of a longtime leader who shepherded the ensemble through the most tumultuous period in its history, announced on Thursday that the Danish conductor Thomas Sondergard would become its next music director.Sondergard, who has conducted the orchestra several times in the past year, currently leads the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and will continue to do so. In Minnesota, he succeeds Osmo Vänskä, who led the group for about 19 years — including during a lockout that was one of the most bitter labor disputes in classical music in recent history.A former principal conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, Sondergard first conducted the Minnesota Orchestra in December, leading Richard Strauss’s tone poem “Ein Heldenleben,” among other pieces.“It was just a beautiful, open-minded, warm, interested first meeting with the ensemble,” Sondergard, 52, said in an interview. “I just felt instantly that there was a connection.”Sondergard brings an anti-authoritative spirit to an orchestra that, perhaps more than most, values a democratic approach, following a contentious period between musicians and orchestra leadership about a decade ago. In Scotland, he said, he has sought to encourage a collaborative ethos among musicians by asking them to rehearse — and sometimes perform — without a conductor during one week of the year; instead, the concertmaster steps in when a leader is required.“Musicians have long educations and loads of ideas about how music-making can be done,” Sondergard said. “They aren’t puppets.”In a news release announcing the appointment, R. Douglas Wright, the orchestra’s principal trombone, said that in the performance of “Ein Heldenleben,” Sondergard “trusted the musicians to do our job in a way that gave us great freedom.”The chair of the orchestra’s board of directors, Joseph T. Green, said he believed Sondergard would prove to be a “powerful advocate” for the musicians.A timpanist who joined the Royal Danish Orchestra in 1992, Sondergard has served as guest conductor for ensembles around the world, including the Berlin Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Seattle Symphony. In April, Sondergard returned to the Minnesota Orchestra to conduct Debussy’s “La Mer” and Stravinsky’s “Symphony in Three Movements.”Sondergard starts as music director designate in the 2022-23 season before formally stepping into the position in fall 2023; he’ll adopt the group’s missions, including helping the company weather the ongoing effects of the pandemic shutdown and diversifying both the ranks of the orchestra and of the composers whose music it plays. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Teodor Currentzis and MusicAeterna Face Scrutiny Over Russian Ties

      by

      Teodor Currentzis and the ensemble MusicAeterna have faced backlash in the West over their partnership with a state-owned bank in Russia.SALZBURG, Austria — Teodor Currentzis is revered as one of classical music’s most original voices, a rebellious conductor who can breathe fresh life into well-known works. In this European cultural capital, where artists, agents and impresarios gather each summer, he is omnipresent, his name emblazoned on banners and brochures. His fans travel from around the world to hear his performances.But this summer, it is not just his music that is the talk of the Salzburg Festival, one of classical music’s premier events. Currentzis — who is conducting a new double bill of Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” and Carl Orff’s “De Temporum Fine Comoedia” here beginning Tuesday — and his ensemble, MusicAeterna, are drawing attention for another reason: their ties to Russia.Amid the war in Ukraine, Currentzis and MusicAeterna have been assailed for their reliance on VTB Bank, a state-owned Russian institution that has been sanctioned by the United States and other countries but remains the ensemble’s main sponsor. Currentzis and the ensemble have been denounced for their silence on the war and criticized for working with associates of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, including some who sit on the board of MusicAeterna’s foundation.This scrutiny has complicated the career of Currentzis, one of the industry’s most in-demand stars. And it has rattled the 102-year-old Salzburg Festival, whose leaders have stood by MusicAeterna even as it has been shunned by other cultural groups.“It’s not that I’m a coward; it’s so sensitive,” Markus Hinterhäuser, the festival’s artistic director, said in an interview. “We are not for Putin. There is absolutely nothing to discuss about that.”Currentzis and his musicians are now at the center of a debate about how cultural groups should handle artists linked to Russian institutions. Many have cut ties with close associates of Putin, such as the conductor Valery Gergiev, a longtime friend and prominent supporter of the Russian president, who was once a fixture at the Salzburg Festival.Currentzis, center, with the MusicAeterna choir and the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra.Marco BorrelliiOther Western institutions, however, have been criticized for overreach after they canceled performances by Russian artists not associated with Putin, and even with some who had spoken out against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.The Bartok-Orff double bill features the MusicAeterna choir. And its appearance, with Currentzis in the pit, has already drawn protests from politicians, artists and activists, who say the festival should not provide a forum to MusicAeterna during wartime.“He belongs to the system of Putin,” Vasyl Khymynets, the Ukrainian ambassador to Austria, said in an interview. “He hasn’t criticized this brutal war, yet he has the chance to be presented on one of the most famous stages in Europe and probably in the world.”Our Coverage of the Russia-Ukraine WarGrain Blockade: A breakthrough deal aims to lift a Russian blockade on Ukrainian grain shipments, easing a global food crisis. But in the fields of Ukraine, farmers are skeptical.An Ambitious Counterattack: Ukraine has been laying the groundwork to retake Kherson from Russia. But the endeavor would require huge resources, and could come at a heavy toll.Economic Havoc: As food, energy and commodity prices continue to climb around the world, few countries are feeling the bite as much as Ukraine.Inside a Siege: For 80 days, at the Avtostal steelworks, a relentless Russian assault met unyielding Ukrainian resistance. This is how it was for those who were there.The esteemed pianist Evgeny Kissin, a frequent performer in Salzburg, said that while he would not object if Currentzis appeared with a Western orchestra, MusicAeterna’s ties to the Russian government were problematic.“In the current situation, groups funded by the Russian state should not be allowed to perform in the civilized world,” said Kissin, who was born in Moscow and is now based in Prague, citing Russia’s “criminal war in Ukraine.”Currentzis, through his representatives, declined to comment.Since founding MusicAeterna in Siberia in 2004, Currentzis has sought to defy labels. He is known as an uncompromising classical musician but has also earned a reputation as a punk, a goth and an anarchist. Born in Athens, he went to Russia in his 20s to study music and now carries a Russian passport. (Putin awarded him citizenship by presidential decree in 2014, the Russia news media reported.)Currentzis began his career as an outsider trying to build artistic centers away from the traditional bases of Moscow and St. Petersburg, including at the Novosibirsk State Opera in Siberia and in the industrial city of Perm. He stood up to the Russian authorities, including in 2017, when his friend and collaborator Kirill Serebrennikov, one of Russia’s most prominent theater directors, was detained in Moscow, a move seen as retribution for his critical portrayals of life under Putin.More recently, Currentzis has worked to win the support of the establishment, finding a partner in VTB Bank, which since 2016 has helped finance MusicAeterna’s concerts and recording projects. With that bank’s support, Currentzis opened a base for the ensemble in St. Petersburg in 2019.The invasion of Ukraine, on Feb. 24, coincided with his 50th birthday. That same day, he led a birthday concert with MusicAeterna in St. Petersburg, where he conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He performed the same piece again two days later in Moscow before an audience of more than 1,500 people, according to Russian news reports.Soon after, the ensemble began to face questions about its benefactors, and a performance at the Philharmonie de Paris was canceled while one at the Bavarian State Opera was postponed to 2024. In Vienna, a planned benefit concert in April in support of Ukraine was canceled after activists and officials — including Khymynets, the ambassador — objected to the idea of featuring Russian artists at an event for Ukraine.Some presenters were concerned about hosting an ensemble with ties to several prominent Russian officials, including Andrey Kostin, the chairman of VTB Bank; Alexander Beglov, the governor of St. Petersburg; and Elvira Nabiullina, the governor of Russia’s central bank. They all sit on the board of the MusicAeterna Cultural Initiatives Support Fund.Currentzis after a performance in Perm, Russia, in 2019. James Hill for The New York TimesOthers were sympathetic to Currentzis and his musicians, believing that if they expressed opinions on the war they could face punishment in Russia. As criticism of the group has intensified, they have faced pressure to speak out against the invasion, and to secure financing outside Russia.In March, SWR Symphony Orchestra in Germany, where Currentzis is the chief conductor, issued a statement calling for peace, though it did not criticize the Russian government or Putin. “Teodor Currentzis and the members of the SWR Symphony Orchestra unequivocally support the common appeal for peace and reconciliation,” the statement said.Louwrens Langevoort is the artistic and managing director of the Cologne Philharmonic. In an interview, he recalled that Currentzis, while smoking a cigarette in his dressing room after an appearance with the SWR Symphony there in late March, said he longed for an “ideal world” in which he could work in both Russia and the West.“He was really aware that something has to be done,” Langevoort said. “Pressure came from all sides and he — for reasons of safety for all parties living in Russia — would not make any declaration.”Even some of Currentzis’s staunchest supporters are pushing the ensemble to find new backers. Among them are Matthias Naske, the artistic director of the Vienna Konzerthaus, who said in an interview that his hall would not engage MusicAeterna until “completely independent financing of the orchestra is secured.” Currentzis will still be allowed to perform there, he added.“Teodor Currentzis is an exceptional artist who uses the power of music to stand up for humanistic values,” he said. “He feels responsible and sticks to his ensembles in Russia that he has built up there. It is wrong to punish him for not abandoning his musicians.”In Salzburg, leaders of the festival have sought to counter accusations that they are endorsing Russia’s cultural aims. The opening ceremony of the festival on Tuesday included a work by Valentin Silvestrov, Ukraine’s best known living composer. A keynote speech, by the Bulgarian-German writer Ilija Trojanow, was titled “The Tone of War, the Keys of Peace.”Hinterhäuser said he did not want to force MusicAeterna’s artists to speak out against the war.“They are not soldiers; they are not responsible for what’s happening,” he said. “It’s not a collective guilt.”The festival’s other ties to Russia have also come under scrutiny. One of the sponsors of the production of the double bill is GES-2 House of Culture, which is affiliated with the Russian oligarch Leonid Mikhelson. He was sanctioned by the United Kingdom and Canada — though, crucially for Salzburg, not in the European Union — after the invasion.Currentzis, who made his debut in Salzburg in 2017 with Mozart’s Requiem and “La Clemenza di Tito,” has tried to shift the focus back to his art. Last week at the festival, he led a performance of Shostakovich’s “Babi Yar” Symphony, featuring members of the MusicAeterna choir and the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra.Alexander Meraviglia-Crivelli, the artistic and executive director of that orchestra, said he had asked his players after the invasion whether they wanted to go forward with the concert. Nearly all wanted to play, he recalled, though a Ukrainian musician expressed concerns about appearing alongside Russian artists.“We strongly believe that in the arts and education, exclusion and cancellation are the wrong thing,” he said.Currentzis’s defenders have pointed to his performance of the Shostakovich symphony, which was written to remember the 1941 massacre of Jews near Kyiv by Nazis, as a statement of his views on the current war. But the performance was planned long before, and Currentzis made no remarks at the concert.At the end of the final movement, he held the hall in prolonged silence. Then he smiled as the audience erupted into a standing ovation that lasted for more than seven minutes.Joshua Barone contributed reporting from Salzburg, Austria, and Milana Mazaeva from New York. More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Conductor Dies After Collapsing During Performance in Munich

      by

      Stefan Soltesz was in the middle of Richard Strauss’s “The Silent Woman” when he fell from his podium shortly before the end of the first act.MUNICH — Stefan Soltesz, a prominent and in-demand Austrian conductor, died on Friday night after collapsing during a performance at Munich’s main opera house.Mr. Soltesz, 73, was conducting the Richard Strauss opera “The Silent Woman” at the Bayerische Staatsoper, or Bavarian State Opera, when he fell from his podium shortly before the end of the first act. He was pronounced dead at a hospital several hours later, said Michael Wuerges, the spokesman for the company.“At some point, the music stopped,” said Sebastian Bolz, 35, a research assistant in the music department at Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, who attended the performance with his wife. He said that they did not see the conductor’s fall shortly before 8 p.m., but that they did hear calls for help from the stage and orchestra pit.Mr. Wuerges said that the theater’s on-site doctor and a heart specialist from the audience attended to Mr. Soltesz. Shortly after the conductor’s collapse, the curtain fell on the stage and Tillmann Wiegand, the artistic operations manager of the Bavarian State Opera, announced that there had been an emergency and that there would be an immediate 30-minute intermission.Once the audience filed back into the auditorium at the end of the break, Mr. Bolz said, Mr. Wiegand reappeared onstage to announce that the remainder of the performance would be canceled. Shortly before 11 p.m., the State opera’s general manager, Serge Dorny, used Twitter to announce Mr. Soltesz’s death. “We are losing a gifted conductor,” he wrote. “I lose a good friend.”Deaths at the podium are rare, but Mr. Soltesz is the fourth conductor to collapse midperformance at the National Theater, the Bavarian State Opera’s main venue, since the early 1900s.In 1911, the Austrian conductor Felix Mottl collapsed at age 56 during his 100th performance of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” and died 11 days later; the German maestro Joseph Keilberth died at age 60 at the podium in 1968 during a performance of the same work. Most recently in Munich, in 1989, the Italian conductor Giuseppe Patanè collapsed at age 57 during Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” and died hours later at a hospital.At Berlin’s Deutsche Opera in 2001, Giuseppe Sinopoli, 54, an intensely physical maestro, had a heart attack while conducting Verdi’s “Aida.” He died at a hospital hours later.Mr. Soltesz, who was born in 1949 in Hungary, conducted at major opera houses across Europe over the past four decades. He held musical directorship positions at the State Theater of Brunswick, in Germany, from 1988 to 1993, and at the Flemish Opera in Antwerp and Ghent, in Belgium, from 1992 to 1997. His most recent appointment was in Essen, Germany, where he led that city’s opera house, the Aalto Theater, as well as the Essen Philharmonic from 1997 to 2013.“He took this Central German theater in Essen and he turned it, in 17 years, into one of the best ensemble houses in Europe, and he turned the Essen Philharmonic into an absolute A-grade orchestra,” the Australian opera director Barrie Kosky, who collaborated with Mr. Soltesz on four productions at the Aalto Theater in the early 2000s, said on Saturday after learning of Mr. Soltesz’s death. Mr. Kosky was speaking from Salzburg, Austria, where he was rehearsing a new production of Janacek’s “Kat’a Kabanova” that he is directing next month at the Salzburg Festival.During his career, Mr. Soltesz also led performances throughout Asia, and in 1992, he made his United States debut with the National Opera with a performance of Verdi’s “Otello” at the Kennedy Center in Washington. Mr. Soltesz is survived by his wife, Michaela Selinger, a mezzo soprano.“He was a very fine, refined musician, and music, you know, was first. He came second,” Mr. Dorny, a Belgian impresario who said he had known Mr. Soltesz since the 1990s when he ran the Festival of Flanders, said on Saturday.“He was the perfect diener for the art form,” Mr. Dorny added, using the German word for servant.On Friday night, Mr. Soltesz was conducting a revival of Mr. Kosky’s 2010 production of Strauss’s rarely performed “The Silent Woman,” as part of the Bavarian State Opera’s summer festival. Mr. Soltesz had previously led other revivals of the production. And it was one of several throughout Germany that he and Mr. Kosky had worked on together.“He was an amazing musician,” Mr. Kosky said, singling out Mr. Soltesz’s interpretations of Strauss for high praise, adding, “He understood the idea of orchestra accompanying, and understood the idea of the architecture of an act — or a three-act opera. He understood that, and he was at home in the pits. That was his home.”“In a world of dilettantes,” Mr. Kosky said, “he was the real thing.” More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Baltimore Symphony’s New Conductor Breaks a Racial Barrier

      by

      Jonathon Heyward is the first person of color to be the orchestra’s music director in its 106-year history.For decades, the 25 largest orchestras in the United States have been led almost exclusively by white men.That is going to change. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra announced on Thursday that it had chosen Jonathon Heyward, a rising African American conductor, as its next music director. He will begin a five-year contract in Baltimore at the start of the 2023-24 season.Heyward, 29, who grew up in Charleston, S.C., the son of an African American father and a white mother, will be the first person of color to lead the orchestra in its 106-year history. In an interview, he said that he would work to expand the audience for classical music by bolstering education efforts and promoting underrepresented artists.“This art form is for everyone,” he said.Heyward will succeed Marin Alsop, the first female music director of a top-tier American orchestra, whose tenure in Baltimore ended last year. His appointment comes amid a broader reckoning in classical music over severe gender and racial disparities.The choice to hire Heyward is a milestone for Baltimore, where Black residents make up more than 60 percent of the population.“We are inspired by his artistry, passion and vision for the B.S.O., as well as for what his appointment means for budding musicians who will see themselves better reflected in such a position of artistic prominence,” Mark Hanson, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, said in a statement.Heyward, who is the chief conductor of the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie in Germany, has garnered a reputation as a sensitive and charismatic conductor. His appointment comes at a challenging time for orchestras, with many ensembles, including Baltimore’s, struggling to win back arts patrons because of the pandemic — a crisis that has exacerbated long-term declines in ticket sales and forced arts groups to look for new ways to reach audiences, including through livestreaming.The Baltimore Symphony recently announced that it would cut 10 concerts from its coming season at Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, its longtime home, amid tepid ticket sales. Attendance in Baltimore during the 2021-22 season averaged at 40 percent of capacity, down from 62 percent in 2018-19.Heyward said that he was confident audiences would eventually return, and added that he would work to make the orchestra more relatable by programming a wider variety of works, featuring a greater diversity of performers and moving some concerts away from traditional venues.“It’s simply a knack of being able to really understand what the community needs and listening to what the community needs and then being able to get them in the door,” he said.Although Heyward has been based in Europe for much of his career, he has started to appear more frequently in the United States. Last spring, he led several concerts in Baltimore, including the orchestra’s first performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15, as well as a benefit concert for Ukraine. He is scheduled to appear with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra at Lincoln Center in early August, leading a program that features the violinist Joshua Bell.In 2017, when Heyward was 25, he was widely praised for a series of performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, when he substituted at the last minute for an ill conductor. That program included a premiere by the composer Tania León, as well as works by Stravinsky, Glinka and Leonard Bernstein.“He knew when to lead and when to follow, effortlessly balancing his roles as a natural showman and sensitive collaborator in service to the music,” the critic Rick Schultz wrote in The Los Angeles Times.The conducting field has long struggled with a lack of diversity. In recent years, there has been only one Black music director in the top tier of American orchestras, and just a handful of leaders have been Latino or of Asian descent.With turnover expected soon at several major orchestras, there are signs of change. This season, Nathalie Stutzmann takes the podium at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. She will be only the second woman to lead a top-tier American orchestra.Heyward will also be among the Baltimore Symphony’s youngest leaders. He began studying cello at 10. A graduate of the Boston Conservatory, he later served as an assistant conductor of the Hallé Orchestra in England, under its longtime music director, Mark Elder.Heyward said that his own experience of falling in love with classical music had convinced him of its enduring appeal.“If a 10-year-old boy from Charleston, South Carolina, with no music education background, with no musicians in the family, can be enamored and amazed by this, by the best art form there is — classical music — then I think anyone can,” he said. “I plan on trying to prove that in many, many ways.” More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Classical Music Has a Hazy Future in Lincoln Center’s Summers

      by

      The day had been hot and muggy. But a mild breeze was blowing at Lincoln Center by the time the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra took the stage in Damrosch Park on Tuesday evening.The pianist Conrad Tao played an elegantly unruffled Mozart concerto and a daydreamy “Rhapsody in Blue.” Apart from a sprinkling of small performances last summer, this orchestra hadn’t been assembled since 2019, but it sounded comfortable and spirited.In just three years, the group has become an anachronism. The festival whose name it bears — Lincoln Center’s premier summertime event before the pandemic — is no more. The center’s summer, once a messy assortment of competing series and festivals, has finally been streamlined under a single label: “Summer for the City.”Planned by Lincoln Center’s president, Henry Timms, and its artistic chief since last year, Shanta Thake, Summer for the City has hoisted a 10-foot disco ball over the plaza fountain and includes outdoor film screenings, spoken word, social dance, comedy shows and an ASL version of “Sweeney Todd.”Five of New York’s dance companies will come together next month for a few days of performances. And starting on Friday, the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra moves inside to Alice Tully Hall for five programs: 10 concerts over two weeks.Louis Langrée, the orchestra’s music director since 2002, led the performance on Tuesday.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesBut despite that packed little orchestral season, other musical experiences that once appeared under the Mostly Mozart rubric have vanished along with the name — including guest ensembles, intimate recitals, and the new music that flows out of the classical tradition and is embodied by the International Contemporary Ensemble, long in residence at the festival but absent this year.Up in the air is the ultimate fate of the Mostly Mozart orchestra, a high-quality, carefully built and expensive group whose music director, Louis Langrée, has been on its podium since 2002. Though Thake told the orchestra on Friday that it would be a part of the summer next year, things get hazier beyond that. And while her vision for the season is still developing, this first iteration seems to have intentionally moved away from swaths of music and performance that have been central to the center’s identity for decades.Which is not to say that Lincoln Center’s summers have been just one thing. As Joseph W. Polisi, a longtime president of the Juilliard School, describes in “Beacon to the World: A History of Lincoln Center,” recently published by Yale University Press, the initial thought was that the center’s own programming would happen primarily in the summertime, so as not to compete in fall and spring with the constituent organizations for which it serves as a landlord, like the Metropolitan Opera and New York Philharmonic.As the campus was being conceived, summer was imagined to be a good time for folk-ish operas and musicals, like “Oklahoma!” or Copland’s “The Tender Land,” or perhaps a film festival; it’s in the DNA for the center’s summer offerings to be ambitious but accessible, populist but serious.The pianist Conrad Tao was the soloist in several works on the program, including a Mozart concerto and “Rhapsody in Blue.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThe flutist Jasmine Choi played in William Grant Still’s “Out of the Silence.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThough Summer for the City is taking place largely outdoors, the novelty in those early years was being inside: Midsummer Serenades — A Mozart Festival, which started in 1966 and was renamed Mostly Mozart six years later, was the first festival in New York to take place in an air-conditioned hall.The campus’s Community/Street Theater Festival of the early 1970s morphed, a few years later, into Lincoln Center Out of Doors, a free, outdoor, eclectic mélange: Ballet Hispánico and bluegrass, string quartets and a doo-wop opera, and eventually a helping of social dance as Midsummer Night’s Swing.Mostly Mozart grew to be perceived as stodgy and listless in this company. When Jane Moss — like Thake, a hire from outside classical music — became the center’s artistic leader in the early 1990s, it was believed that part of her brief was to eliminate it. After the Lincoln Center Festival, which hosted ambitious international touring productions, was founded in the mid-90s, Mostly Mozart, which had once lasted up to nine weeks, dwindled from seven to four. A musicians’ strike in 2002 was another existential crisis.But instead of spiking Mostly Mozart, Moss took a firmer hand with the programming, hired Langrée as a partner, and broadened the offerings — eventually to something closer to Slightly Mozart. In 2017, amid budget and management crises, the Lincoln Center Festival folded and Mostly Mozart was set to expand by up to 50 percent to partly compensate. The festival orchestra entered the opera pit for the first time in 2019; there were dance theater productions and the lauded New York premiere of “The Black Clown”; Langrée’s contract was renewed through 2023.During the center’s pandemic silence in 2020, though, Moss decided to step down. And here we are: Mostly Mozart, instead of being expanded, has been eliminated.In a joint interview with Timms, Thake said that this year’s Summer for the City should not necessarily be seen as the model for all to come. “It’s definitely a unique moment,” she said. “We’re coming out of a two-year pandemic. This is our first full expression of what is possible.”Starting on Friday, the orchestra moves inside to Alice Tully Hall for five programs: 10 concerts over two weeks.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesReferring to the center’s Restart Stages initiative from 2021, she added: “There had been some proven success in experimentation. What you’re seeing this year is a continued explosion of form, and putting it all under one umbrella.”Summer for the City has the spunky feel of Joe’s Pub, the cabaret space that Thake ran, along with other Public Theater initiatives like Under the Radar and Public Works, before she was hired by Lincoln Center. It also feels like a throwback to the Community/Street Theater Festival and Out of Doors tradition from the early ’70s.That can yield wonderful programming, and much civic good. Growing up just outside the city, I found Midsummer Night’s Swing — with its tango-ing, salsa-ing crowd — exciting and glamorous, the definition of a New York summer night.But those offerings existed in an ecosystem in which classical music — broadly construed as far as style, period and form — was another pillar, not a fringe.Thake insisted in the interview that classical programming has found its way into Summer for the City in more varied, informal ways: as an accompaniment to blood drives and a mass wedding ceremony, and in the form of music-and-meditation sessions in the David Rubenstein Atrium.Timms added: “In terms of volume, probably, the amount of classical music being presented hasn’t changed much. The nature of it has changed, to some degree, though not fundamentally.”Uh-huh.The two leaders implied that the reconception of the summer is pulling the center more toward the role of host, welcoming as many people as it can onto campus, while the constituent organizations handle or at least share the presenting — especially in the classical sphere. The idea, for example, is that the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s small set of Summer Evenings concerts can basically take care of what was once Mostly Mozart’s cozy A Little Night Music series, as well as its other solo and chamber events.Other musical experiences that once appeared under the Mostly Mozart rubric have vanished along with the name — including guest ensembles, intimate recitals and new music.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThe danger, of course, is that in reducing redundancies and internal competition, the city simply ends up with less.It’s true that the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra’s compressed season — which began with a week of mentoring and performing alongside student musicians — promises to showcase talented young guest artists. On Aug. 5 and 6, Langrée leads Mozart’s Requiem, a few days before Jlin’s arrangement of that work is the score for Kyle Abraham’s recent dance “Requiem: Fire in the Air of the Earth” — the kind of artistic cross-pollination that should be the center’s stock in trade.Even more important, the orchestra’s Tully concerts are choose-what-you-pay, a ticketing philosophy that should be a model for the center’s whole year. A range of excellent music, painstakingly prepared and performed at the highest level for affordable prices: That is true populism.Instead, classical music, even in its ever-struggling nonprofit form, gets cast as the elitist hegemon for which scrappier alternatives must be found — certainly if much-vaunted “new audiences” are going to be attracted.But classical programming should not be considered a chore, or a bone thrown to a dwindling audience — a familiar one rather than “new.” No, serious performance is a jewel, of which Lincoln Center is one of the few remaining supreme presenters. Conrad Tao playing Mozart with a superb orchestra for free or cheap: That is the core of the center’s mission. Its job is to cultivate audiences for and increase access to that.Which is not to say that change is impossible. Is a resident orchestra with an appointed music director the only way to fulfill Lincoln Center’s mission? Perhaps not. But is there a way of programming such an orchestra so that it could be an integral part of a diverse, adventurous summer season? Yes. Could it be joined to opera, recitals, new music and guest ensembles in broadening what I think Timms and Thake are trying to do: to foster inexpensive interactions with great performance? Absolutely.“We’re still getting our feet under us,” Thake said. “And seeing again, how can we continue to be responsive? How can we move through this season and get a sense of what worked, what didn’t work, what’s next for all of us?” More