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      At the Met This Season, Opera Was Icing on the Cake

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      Amid a labor battle, the continuing pandemic and war in Ukraine, it often felt as though the real drama was in simply putting on a show.Has there ever been a Metropolitan Opera season like the one that just ended? In which the stuff onstage — the homicidal brides, mystical pharaohs and longing stepsons — felt so anticlimactic? Over the past eight months, amid a labor battle, a pandemic that surged again and again, and a war, it was as if the real drama was in simply getting the doors open. Once that was achieved, what followed was almost beside the point.Or, to put it more accurately, what followed was like icing on the cake. Rarely has it felt so sweet to be inside the gilded Met, has opera seemed — whatever you thought of a given work, singer or production — so much a gift. A groundswell of gratitude was palpable throughout the season, which finished on Saturday evening with Verdi’s “Rigoletto.”You felt it in the explosive ovation that greeted a virtuosic step-dance sequence in Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the season as a double milestone: the first production since the pandemic lockdown in March 2020, and the first work at the Met by a Black composer since its founding in 1883.You felt it in the cheers for Lise Davidsen’s vast, star-making Ariadne; Nadine Sierra’s sensual Lucia di Lammermoor; Matthew Polenzani’s earnestly agonized Don Carlos; Allan Clayton’s quivering Hamlet; and the chorus’s shimmering “Prayer for Ukraine” at a benefit concert in March.The soprano Lise Davidsen in the title role of Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos.”Marty Sohl/Met OperaYou felt it in the roaring curtain calls at the revival of “Akhnaten,” which proved once again that Philip Glass’s idiom has been welcomed by the Met audience as wholeheartedly as those of Mozart or Puccini.Around this time a year ago, it seemed like the great battle would be returning after a canceled 2020-21 season. Bad blood was in the air: The Met’s unions were furious at the company’s general manager, Peter Gelb, for his insistence that unpaid furloughs were the only way it could survive the long lockdown. The situation grew so bitter that it seemed possible a strike or lockout would keep the Met closed past the planned opening night.But the promise of coming back after 18 months proved too strong to resist, and the unions and management came — warily — to terms. No one who was at the outdoor performances of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony over Labor Day weekend, or, especially, at the return indoors for Verdi’s Requiem on the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, will forget the relief and joy of the Met once again making live music at Lincoln Center.The Met returned to indoor performance with a concert of Verdi’s Requiem for the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.Richard Termine/Met OperaThe opening months of the season had an air of triumph. There was the sold-out success of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones”; a series of ambitious revivals, including the Met’s first performances of the brooding original version of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” and Wagner’s six-hour “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” the longest opera in its repertory; and Matthew Aucoin’s recent “Eurydice,” in which a sprawling orchestra thrashed Sarah Ruhl’s winsome version of the Orpheus myth.Then the rise of the Omicron variant in late fall began to claim performances, festivals and concerts. The Vienna State Opera was closed for almost a week. But the Met buckled down, strengthening its already stringent health protocols and dipping into a broad pool of covers to fill in for sick artists. With luck on its side, it stayed open through the winter — and into yet another rise in cases this spring.Broadway shows kept canceling at the last minute or closing entirely, but the Met, America’s largest performing arts institution, never did. That will be Gelb’s legacy from this troubled period, along with the landmark “Fire” and the unrelenting position he took after the invasion of Ukraine, when he declared that the Met would sever ties with artists who supported President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. That ultimatum had one singer in mind: the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, the company’s leading diva, who criticized the war but remained silent about Putin. In a coup, Gelb replaced her as Puccini’s Turandot with the Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska, who drove the audience wild when she wrapped herself in a Ukrainian flag to take her bow.The Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska wrapped herself in her country’s flag to take her bow after “Turandot.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesGelb’s Netrebko decision wasn’t universally praised, and other major opera houses now seem to be inclined to welcome her back, classifying her as merely a prominent Russian, not a hardcore Putinist. But within the Met, the moral clarity of the war proved a unifying force: At the benefit concert for Ukraine, some players in the orchestra even applauded Gelb, their nemesis during the grueling furlough, as he declared from the stage that they were “soldiers of music.”Somewhere in the midst of politics and the virus was opera. Under the focused baton of Sebastian Weigle, “Boris Godunov” was memorably grim in the concentrated form Mussorgsky gave it before a hodgepodge of revisions; “Meistersinger,” expansive enough that it really does seem to convey a whole world, was relaxed and sunny, and gently comic as led by Antonio Pappano.Simon Stone’s technically savvy staging of Donizetti’s “Lucia,” set amid the malaise of a contemporary postindustrial American town, didn’t translate its bold concept into a convincing portrayal of its pathetically suffering title character. The Met’s de facto house director these days, David McVicar, offered a grayly old-fashioned production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos.”Simon Stone’s new staging of “Lucia di Lammermoor” had a bold concept but little grasp of its title character.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDavidsen, in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos,” a mythic creation of flooding tone, also lavished her soaring soprano on Eva in “Meistersinger” and Chrysothemis in Strauss’s “Elektra,” her voice almost palpable against your skin. The mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard brought silvery elegance to Cherubino in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” and the Composer in “Ariadne.”There were sympathetic soprano star turns from Ailyn Pérez as a fiery soloist in the Sept. 11 Requiem and a girlish Tatiana in “Eugene Onegin,” Eleonora Buratto as a reserved Madama Butterfly and Elena Stikhina as a kindly Tosca — as well as from Sonya Yoncheva, in a solo recital of shadowy sensitivity.While Blanchard’s score moved comfortably between bars, college parties and fraught, tender nocturnes, “Fire” was fairly turgid as drama, its individual sequences clear but the broader conflicts driving its characters obscure. (It was telling that the most dazzling sequences in this opera were Camille A. Brown’s dances.)Perhaps most remarkable about the offerings this season were the three — count ’em — works from the past five years: “Fire,” “Eurydice” and Brett Dean’s “Hamlet,” which set to seething music Matthew Jocelyn’s moodily distilled version of Shakespeare. The Met has not had so many recent operas on a single year’s lineup since the early 1930s, even if that number is notable only in the context of the stubbornly backward-looking world of opera.Not long ago, the idea of three contemporary operas in a Met season would have been preposterous. This was largely because the company’s longtime music director, James Levine — while he expanded the repertory significantly and presided over a handful of premieres — didn’t prioritize newer work.Among the Met’s contemporary offerings this season was “Hamlet,” featuring, from left at front, Allan Clayton in the title role and Brenda Rae as Ophelia.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut his successor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, agrees with Gelb that contemporary operas are crucial, both artistically and for expanding the company’s audience. And Nézet-Séguin is putting his money where his mouth is: He conducted both “Fire” and “Eurydice,” and leads Kevin Puts’s “The Hours” in the fall and Blanchard’s “Champion” next spring. (The early months of this season, though, were an exhausting workload when coupled with his duties as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra: He dropped out of a run of “Le Nozze di Figaro” to take a four-week sabbatical around the new year.)The continuing transition out of the Levine era has been obvious not just in the repertory, but also in the orchestra’s sound — which was noticeably lighter and lither in three works closely associated with Levine: “Meistersinger”; Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress,” led by Susanna Mälkki; and “Don Carlos,” which Nézet-Séguin brought to the Met for the first time in its original French.This change is for better and worse. The ensemble played these pieces with brisker transparency and perhaps more varied colors; Nézet-Séguin’s textures in “Don Carlos,” airier than Levine’s, felt of a piece with the elegant nasality of French. In “Hamlet,” conducted by Nicholas Carter, the orchestra was ferocious. But a certain grandeur is now missing, more often than not: the weight of Levine’s “Meistersinger” prelude, for one thing, and the gleefully straight-faced bombast of Baba the Turk’s entrance in his performances of “The Rake’s Progress.”Even a frequent operagoer or critic can’t see everything or everyone. I missed a new, family-friendly abridgment of Massenet’s fairy-dust “Cendrillon.” And after opening a new production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” on New Year’s Eve, the baritone Quinn Kelsey — acclaimed in the title role — came down with Covid-19 and missed a few performances, including the one I attended. But I got to see his credible replacement: the baritone Michael Chioldi, finally getting his first big role at the Met after years as a stalwart of the New York opera scene.That was one of four performances at the opera house that I watched in a single weekend in early January, during the first Omicron wave. Such a marathon was an extraordinary exclamation point on the Met’s achievement in merely keeping the lights on.It wasn’t enough to taste opera after a year-and-a-half fast. I wanted to gorge. More

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      Klaus Mäkelä, 26, Takes Podium at Storied Concertgebouw Orchestra

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      The Finnish maestro, a rapidly rising star in classical music, has been named the new chief conductor of the 133-year-old Amsterdam ensemble.Klaus Mäkelä, a 26-year-old Finnish maestro on a rapid rise, will be the next chief conductor of the storied Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, the ensemble announced on Friday, after a several-year search following the dismissal of Daniele Gatti over sexual assault allegations in 2018.“It means very much,” Mäkelä, who currently leads the Orchestre de Paris and the Oslo Philharmonic, said during a news conference. “It’s wonderful to have found this family of musicians. We really share the same ambition and passion.”Because of Mäkelä’s existing posts, he is on an initial 10-year Concertgebouw contract that begins this fall with the title of artistic partner, with a commitment of five weeks a season; he will not fully assume the podium as chief conductor until 2027, at which point he will appear with the group for a minimum of 12 weeks.“For me, the best result, artistically, is always to commit,” he said, referring obliquely to Paris and Oslo. “I value my commitments to my two dear orchestras.”Mäkelä, who was originally trained as a cellist, has quickly become not necessarily a critical darling, but an institutional one. He has appeared with some of the world’s top ensembles in ambitious repertory — such as Mahler, and contemporary music by the Peruvian-born composer Jimmy López — and will make his New York Philharmonic debut in December.His age is a sharp contrast to that of the 133-year-old Concertgebouw, which has been led in recent decades by classical music eminences like Bernard Haitink and Mariss Jansons, but has also been in a state of instability since Jansons’s departure in 2015. Gatti took the podium a year later, but was abruptly dismissed in 2018 following sexual assault allegations — which he denied, and which were part of a wave of #MeToo-related firings in the field, including James Levine and Charles Dutoit.Since then, the Concertgebouw has been led by guest conductors, who inevitably attracted speculation, if scrutiny. The British maestro Daniel Harding picked up Gatti’s American tour dates, an engagement that was seen as something of a road test. And this season, Ivan Fischer began his tenure as the orchestra’s honorary guest conductor.Jörgen van Rijen, the Concertgebouw’s principal trombone, said in the news conference that the ensemble had “taken our time” in its search. “It was necessary,” he added. “It was a moment of an orchestra like us to sit back and think what do we want for the future, and who we want to do that with.”Mäkelä said that he hoped his initial five-week commitment would increase over time, and that he would begin conducting opera “as soon as the schedule allows it.” (The Concertgebouw is a partnering ensemble of the Dutch National Opera.) He said that he was also eager to begin recording, to join a vast, revered catalog of albums the group has put out over the years.“This is a truly extraordinary orchestra and there is nothing like it,” Mäkelä said. “There are too many qualities to start, but I am a sound-oriented conductor, and this orchestra — when you hear it once, you will not forget it.” More

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      A Conductor’s Tumultuous, Invaluable Tenure Ends in Minnesota

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      After 19 years, Osmo Vänskä is leaving a Minnesota Orchestra that once again stands proud after a nearly disastrous lockout.MINNEAPOLIS — Osmo Vänskä has said goodbye to the Minnesota Orchestra once before. But this time, it’s for real.In October 2013, at the nadir of one of the darkest periods any major American orchestra has faced, Vänskä resigned in protest over a lockout that was diminishing — and would come close to destroying — this ensemble, which he had spent a decade drilling to perfection as its music director.A few days later, blazing a trail for conductors to side openly with their players during labor strife, he led three concerts with the orchestra’s musicians, whose management had exiled them from their own hall. Vänskä asked the adoring audience members to withhold their ovations after his encore of Sibelius’s “Valse Triste,” a dance with death that he led in fury. He left in silence, and to tears.Eight seasons later, any tears at his departure will be because of his triumph.The Minnesota Orchestra stands proud again. That lockout ended shortly after Vänskä’s angry resignation, and he returned in April 2014, as if by popular acclamation. After 19 years as the ensemble’s conductor, he bids farewell with Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 at Orchestra Hall here on Sunday.“I don’t want to say this is a happy family, because there is not a happy family in the world,” Vänskä, 69, said jokingly during an interview last week. “But it is as happy as it is possible to have.”His departure is a moment to take stock of why his tenure, one of the most tumultuous in the history of American orchestras, has been so important.Vänskä conducting the orchestra on June 2 in a program that ended with Jaakko Kuusisto’s Symphony.Travis AndersonBorn and trained in Finland, Vänskä, a dynamic podium presence, arrived in Minneapolis in 2003, declaring that he would make the Minnesotans “the best orchestra in this country in four or five years.” He pursued that ambition with an intensity that he now admits was too aggressively intolerant of imperfections in rehearsal. But there was a time around a decade ago when critics habitually hailed the ensemble as one of the greatest in the country — or anywhere — for its willingness to take risks, its rhythmic verve, its crisp articulation and its unanimity of purpose.Ask Vänskä — who led the orchestra on a diplomatic mission to Cuba in 2015 and a pioneering tour to South Africa in 2018 — what he is most proud of, and he lauds the musicians for always playing, he said, as though their work is about “more than getting a paycheck.”Consult the recorded legacy he has left with the BIS label, one at least equal in stature to those of predecessors including Dimitri Mitropoulos and Antal Dorati, and it would be difficult to disagree. If Vänskä’s Mahler cycle misfired in symphonies that need more extroversion than reserve, it also includes a Tenth that is among the most convincing available. His Sibelius remains admired, richer than his taut, biting earlier set with the Lahti Symphony. His enthralling Beethoven still sounds as fresh as it did when it first came out, and remains arguably the finest such survey of the century so far.These are signal achievements, but Vänskä’s time in charge has been about more than the pursuit of musical excellence. There was ample proof of that, though, in a concert here on June 2 that ended with the premiere of his friend Jaakko Kuusisto’s Symphony — an unsparing, frightening reflection on mortality that was left unfinished at Kuusisto’s death in February from a brain tumor and completed by his brother, Pekka.Now, after a lockout and a pandemic lockdown, what seems to matter more than national or international acclaim is that the ensemble tries to be the best it can be for this city, which Vänskä — with Erin Keefe, his wife of seven years and the orchestra’s concertmaster — will continue to call home.“We are stronger when a crisis comes if we are connected to this community,” he said. “We have to be there for this community, and then they will take care of us.”Being there requires first of all that the Minnesota Orchestra continues to exist, an imperative that was once not as obvious as it should have been. “We have to be there for this community,” Vänskä said, “and then they will take care of us.”Jenn Ackerman for The New York TimesAlthough the ensemble’s underlying finances have improved since the lockout, its chief executive Michelle Miller Burns said, it continues to face the sobering constraints familiar to many orchestras. Even before pandemic restrictions ravaged its income in the last two years, the balanced budgets that had steadily built confidence after 2014 had yielded to a record deficit of $8.8 million in 2019 — a reminder of grimmer times.The spirit and structures of transparency, consultation and collaboration that emerged from the lockout served the orchestra then and during the pandemic. In September 2020, the musicians willingly took a temporary 25 percent pay cut to help right the finances, and no full-time administrative staff were laid off. Vänskä chose to forgo 35 percent of his salary.Despite the pain, no major problems are expected in coming negotiations over the musicians’ contract, which expires in August. The financial plan remains to try to raise revenue, rather than impose cuts.“Every decision we make, we are making it together,” said Sam Bergman, a violist and the chair of the orchestra committee. “There is a greater trust level than there would be if it was just decisions handed down from on high.”Much of that collaborative impulse has come from the musicians, as well as Burns and her predecessor, Kevin Smith, but Bergman said that Vänskä had also taken a leading role in helping to foster a healthy culture at the orchestra, not least in an artistic planning process that includes musicians more meaningfully, such as in auditions and repertory choices.“When you have musicians and an administration that want a collaborative working model, a music director who is too easily threatened could potentially be a huge impediment,” Bergman said. “He has embraced the idea that the musicians need to take some ownership of the organization, and to lead in the way that we interface with the community. And he didn’t have to do that.”That has been particularly true of the players’ efforts to address racism in classical music and beyond. Their work predated the murder of George Floyd here in May 2020, Bergman said, but intensified after it. The issue struck even closer to home in February, when Minneapolis Police Department officers fatally shot Amir Locke in an apartment across the street from the stage door.Concerts that included Joel Thompson’s “The Seven Last Words of the Unarmed” in May came with an exhibition mounted in conjunction with the George Floyd Global Memorial; after Locke’s name was spray painted onto Orchestra Hall during protests, the administration invited teen artists to commemorate him more formally.Among other initiatives, the orchestra has also started a musician-led project to record works by Black composers, including Margaret Bonds and Ulysses Kay, that have not received professional recordings. And it continues to work with the Sphinx Organization, three of whose affiliates held one-year positions in the strings this season, and whose Virtuosi ensemble shared the stage last week.Vänskä at the June 2 Minnesota Orchestra performance in Minneapolis, where he plans to continue living after stepping down as music director.Travis AndersonAll this is intended to be just a beginning, though one that goes further than the token efforts of many other orchestras. Laurie Greeno, a former co-chair of Orchestrate Excellence — one of the two main community groups that sprang up during the lockout — and who later joined the board of directors, said the board was eager to diversify a roster that remains 84 percent white.“If you look at just the demographics out 30 years,” Greeno said, “this organization will not exist if it’s not relevant.”Vänskä, for his part, has embraced this agenda in planning recent seasons; subscription programs in Minnesota now routinely include at least one work by a composer of color.“We cannot say that this is our style, and we just play this and that,” he said of the inherited canon, and insisted that elevating underrepresented composers does not mean compromising on quality or taking a box-office risk. “No. We have to change.”Vänskä’s blend of musical ability and steadfast local commitment will make him difficult to replace. He will serve as conductor laureate, but the organization remains in no hurry to confirm his successor, four years after he announced that he would leave.“Someone who is going to really embrace what and who this orchestra is, is really important,” Burns said of the search committee’s priorities. “I think that is going to be well indicated by how engaged and active in this community our next music director is.”The roster for next season offers few clues. Fabien Gabel and Dima Slobodeniouk have been mentioned in rapidly changing lists of candidates in the local press. Otherwise, there is a blend of experienced hands like Donald Runnicles, midcareer maestros like Thomas Sondergard and Pablo Heras-Casado, and younger possibilities, including Dalia Stasevska and Ryan Bancroft, a Californian who, at 32, was recently announced as the chief conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic.Vänskä has no immediate plans to raise another orchestra to the heights that he insists on. His brief dalliance as music director of the troubled Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra ends this year, and he is in no rush to find a new long-term post.“The orchestra must be ready to work hard,” he said of any potential music directorship. “There are orchestras that don’t want to work, and we both start to hate each other pretty soon. The good thing is that it is not a must for me to get a new job. I can guest conduct until it comes to the end.”He continued: “That’s the only thing I can do, to make music. If I stopped right now, I would go mad in a month.” More

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      Ingram Marshall, Minimalist Composer of Mystical Sounds, Dies at 80

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      An influential figure in American experimental music, he was part of a group of composers who stripped music down to basic elements and used digital sounds.Ingram Marshall, a minimalist composer known for the mystery and melancholy of his works, which featured sounds as disparate as San Francisco fog horns and Balinese bamboo flutes, died on May 31 in New Haven, Conn. He was 80.His wife, Veronica Tomasic, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.Mr. Marshall was an influential figure in American experimental music, part of a group of composers who, beginning in the 1960s, stripped music down to basic elements of rhythm and tempo and incorporated digital sounds. A self-described “expressivist,” he was known for haunting, mystical works that fused various traditions, among them European Romanticism, Indonesian gamelan and electronics.“A musical experience should be enveloping,” Mr. Marshall said in a 1996 interview for Yale University’s Oral History of American Music. “Almost in a narcotic way. Not to be zoned out or in a trance exactly, but to be really wrought up in it. If you can do that, I think you’ve done something.”He produced a varied body of work, including chamber pieces for renowned ensembles like the Kronos Quartet, brass sextets, choral works and solo guitar pieces. Much of his music blended conventional instruments with prerecorded, computer-manipulated sounds.“His music was very emotional, but not in a saccharine, neo-Romantic way,” the composer John Adams, a longtime friend, said in an interview. “It was his own very unique, very sentimental style, but sentimental in the very best sense of the word.”An admirer of Romantic-era composers like Sibelius and Bruckner, Mr. Marshall had a deep knowledge of the Western classical canon that informed his style, even as he veered in new directions.“He was not afraid of being very direct and expressive,” said Libby Van Cleve, an oboist who directs the Yale oral history project and for whom Mr. Marshall wrote three pieces. “His biggest impact was just having the courage to write such deeply heartfelt and expressive music in the electronic realm.”Ingram Douglass Marshall was born on May 10, 1942, in Mount Vernon, N.Y., in Westchester County, to Harry Reinhard Marshall Sr., a banker, and Bernice (Douglass) Marshall, an amateur pianist.At the encouragement of his mother, he began singing at a young age and joined a church choir. His interest in music deepened, and in 1964 he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in music from Lake Forest College in Illinois. He later attended Columbia University and then the California Institute of the Arts, where he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1971 and taught classes in electronic music.Mr. Marshall in 2005. “A musical experience should be enveloping,” he once said. “Almost in a narcotic way. Not to be zoned out or in a trance exactly, but to be really wrought up in it.”Thomas McDonald for The New York TimesWhile at the California Institute, he met several Indonesian performers and became entranced by their music. Intent on immersing himself in Indonesia’s sounds, he secured a Fulbright grant and traveled to the country for four months in 1971.The visit was a turning point. He soon began incorporating into his music elements of Indonesian culture, including the gambuh, a traditional Balinese flute. He adopted a more unhurried style, a development he attributed to his immersion in Indonesian music.“I realized that the ‘zip-and-zap, bleep-and-blap’ kind of formally organized electronic music I had been trying to do simply wasn’t my way,” Mr. Marshall said in the Yale interview, speaking about his experience in Indonesia. “I needed to find a slower, deeper way of approaching electronic music.”In 1981, he produced one of his best-known works, “Fog Tropes,” a somber meditation that paired field recordings of foghorns in the San Francisco Bay Area with brass instruments.“A lot of people are reminded of San Francisco when they hear this piece, but not I,” Mr. Marshall once said. “To me it is just about fog, and being lost in the fog. The brass players should sound as if they were off in a raft floating in the middle of a mist-enshrouded bay.”Mr. Marshall’s admirers lauded the spiritual quality of his works. Some drew comparisons to the so-called holy minimalists of Eastern Europe, including the prominent Estonian composer Arvo Pärt.“True, he does not write explicitly liturgical music, nor does he cultivate any priestly airs,” Adam Shatz wrote in a 2001 article about on Mr. Marshall in The New York Times. “But his music is some of the most stirring spiritual art to be found in America today.”The composer Steve Reich, another friend, said the mystery in Mr. Marshall’s work made it distinct. He described the music as a mix of American spirituality, “impenetrable, mysterious Northern fog and mist,” and gamelan.“Ingram can’t be pinned down so easily,” Mr. Reich said in an interview. “It’s not just minimalism, or whatever other moniker you want to put onto it, but it’s radiantly intelligent and beautiful.”After more than 15 years in California, Mr. Marshall returned to the East Coast in 1990, settling in Hamden, Conn., outside New Haven. He continued to compose and teach, serving as a part-time lecturer at the Yale School of Music from 2004 to 2014.Along with his wife, Mr. Marshall is survived by a son, Clement; a daughter from a previous relationship, Juliet Simon; and four grandchildren.While he was not religious, Mr. Marshall sometimes spoke about the spiritual power of music. He said he hoped that after disasters, artists could help bring understanding to the world.“Composers, poets and artists always feel useless in the wake of calamity,” he told The Times in 2001. “We are not firemen; we are not philanthropists or inspirational speakers. But I think it is the tragic and calamitous in life that we try to make sense of, and this is the stuff of our lives as artists.” More

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      Ingram Marshall Built and Obscured Monoliths of Sound

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      The composer and pianist Timo Andres remembers his former teacher, who “gave the impression that all of music was at our feet.”I first came to know the composer Ingram Marshall, who died on May 31 at 80, as a campus personality. Benevolent and slightly spectral, he’d glide into Yale’s music library, where I had a work-study job as an undergraduate student, and I’d help him find scores and recordings. I already knew a few of his pieces, and was a bit awe-struck chatting with their creator. His musical and real-life personalities seemed directly related: unhurried, easygoing, more likely to follow a train of thought than pursue a rigorous argument, but unafraid to let the conversation become serious or philosophical.Our conversations broadened during my time learning with Marshall in graduate school. His teaching style was distinctly unrigorous but discursive and all-encompassing. In a lesson, we were as likely to discuss a Bergman film or the best way to cook wild mushrooms as we were to analyze whatever I was working on. Mostly, he was content to leave my music as I’d written it; on certain occasions, he’d point out a passage and say, “I like that part, it could last longer.” He encouraged me to take my time, focus on my ideas, and see them through.Marshall became a friend — simply a great hang, and endlessly interesting to talk with. We’d drive out to Sleeping Giant State Park north of New Haven, Conn., for hikes along the river, or further into the country to hunt for morels and chanterelles in his secret spots. He consorted easily with composition students; he treated us as colleagues, and as a result we weren’t afraid to speak openly around him.Around the same time, I started to find great pleasure in playing Marshall’s music, particularly the solo piano piece “Authentic Presence” (2002). A grand fantasia in the tradition of Schubert and Chopin, it is full of contradictions and unexplainable things. The rhythmic language vacillates widely between insistent pulse and total freedom. Sometimes, the phrases are like run-on sentences; elsewhere, they are poetic, rhetorical, filled with pauses and hesitations. The music looks simple on the page, spare on indications almost to the point of inscrutability — a challenge to interpreters to form their own ideas, but also a gesture of respect, entrusting the music to its performer’s care. “Authentic Presence” manages to feel weighty while also ephemeral, grand without grandiloquence, understated in its execution yet unafraid of dramatic gesture.These qualities, constants of Marshall’s style over his entire career, made his voice one of the most personal and distinctive of any composer in recent memory. With an unlikely fusion of loose, stream-of-consciousness forms and old-school contrapuntal technique, he constructed monoliths of sound, then obscured them. He wove elaborate textures out of canons, inversions, elongations and diminutions. His gamelan-inspired arpeggios undulate gently in and out of sun and shadow. Frequent quotations and references give the music a sense of porousness and mutability. Everything coexists in what feels like a physical acoustic space — rich and reverberant, but also distant, held at a remove, seen through a dense fog. Above all, there is the emotional flavor of it. For him, music wasn’t just an abstraction, an intellectual game of pitches and forms. It was also about expressing something sincerely.In much the same way, Marshall’s use of technology was never for its own sake. He valued gear only insofar as it allowed him to achieve a musical and expressive result. In the spacious “Gradual Requiem,” composed in the late 1970s, an idiosyncratic ensemble — of piano, mandolin, synthesizer, Balinese flute, prerecorded choirs and eight-channel tape delay — guides the listener through a gently epic musical journey of sound design as composition, with electronic and acoustic elements blending seamlessly, cushioning and enveloping one another. This requiem creates a sacred space without words, using layer upon layer of reverberation and delay to build an infinitely large cathedral around the music.Much of the music closest to Marshall’s heart was sacred: New England shape-note songs, Bruckner motets, the gamelan music of Java and Bali. Though he’d grown up a Methodist choir boy, his own beliefs were similarly varied and idiosyncratic, and a deep sense of spirituality runs through his work. Grief recurs, as does coming to terms with death, even finding a kind of ecstatic joy in its anticipation. “Bright Hour Delayed,” from “Hymnodic Delays” (1997), takes the boisterous Sacred Harp hymn “Northfield” as its theme: “How long, dear savior, O how long / shall this bright hour delay?” Marshall slows it down by a factor of four, splays the voices and leaves its melodies hanging plaintively in the air, echoing into the distance like a musical question mark.In “Kingdom Come” (1997), grieving becomes a kind of ritual, connecting the individual to the universal pool of human grief. The piece opens with a chain of A-minor chords, spiraling upward (a reference to Marshall’s beloved Sibelius) then slowly, painfully, drifts downward in an aching lament. We land in a deep, murky F-major stew, out of which bits of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” emerge. (Charles Ives, another composer who used that hymn tune, is a clear reference point; Marshall and I shared adoration for our fellow New Englander, particularly his ability to combine seemingly disparate elements into a potent emotional salmagundi.) As it gathers momentum, “Kingdom Come” becomes a procession in slow motion, a chorus of mourners gathering. Despite its troubled affect and a couple of jolting outbursts, it is not histrionic music; it always looks inward in its search for associations, allusions and meaning.Marshall’s eclectic approach to composition appealed to me. I felt I’d found a mentor who related to music the way I wanted to: with curiosity, open-mindedness and little regard for historical period or genre. He gave the impression that all of music was at our feet in an enormous pile, fodder for inspiration. That’s not to say he liked everything or was uncritical. He could be bluntly dismissive of composers he considered overly academic, technically flashy or too eager to please. But his default approach to life and music was one of generosity.People who knew him often observed that Marshall seemed to be egoless; he didn’t strive, network or self-promote the way artists of my generation have been trained to do. He did have an ego, of course, as one must to pursue an artistic craft so single-mindedly; he just managed to keep it admirably separate from his personal interactions. Though he didn’t strive for fame and fortune, he certainly wished for wider acclaim. On his blog, Old Man of the Woods, in 2013, he lamented the “minor little” commissions he was getting. “There has been nothing of substance, just a few chamber and solo pieces. Frankly, it’s kind of depressing not to have a major work under way on the drafting table.”The source of the frustration was not always external; he was a slow and painstaking writer, at times laboring over a piece for years before he molded it into a form that satisfied him. But once he had done this, he took great pleasure in hearing his own music and was justly proud of what he felt to be his most successful works. And in his own funny, quiet way, he relished attention and affirmation of his creative struggles. A few months ago, I was interviewed about his work on Joshua Weilerstein’s music podcast, and Marshall was thrilled. “I loved all that adulation,” he wrote to me in an email. (Weilerstein conducted my piano concerto “The Blind Banister,” in 2015.)In 2016, Marshall mentioned that he would like to write something for me — a concerto, perhaps. I immediately called up his old friend and steadfast champion, John Adams, who wrangled a commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The next year, “Flow,” a chamber concerto, emerged, and seemed to capture a little bit of everything from Marshall’s voice. The piece begins in beatific, C-major stasis, as a jaunty hymn gathers momentum in canonic form. Then, a series of escalating ruminations on another hymn, “Shall We Gather at the River?,” first on a solo viola, build up to a fiery orchestral tutti. Then, suddenly, we’re in Indonesia, piano and percussion leaping forward in music as puckish and energetic as anything Marshall ever wrote. Pentatonic arpeggios pile up in multiple keys; a polytonal roar escalates and evaporates. Marshall labored over the final page. When the last revision arrived, days before the premiere, I was moved to find that its closing notes were a quote of my own piano piece “At The River,” which I had dedicated to him in 2011.Of the many obscure, unpublished, unrecorded works from Marshall’s catalog, my favorite is a setting of Emily Dickinson’s “As Imperceptibly as Grief” — particularly because it feels almost secret. Marshall was never quite satisfied with the song, and never got around to revising it. The last line “Our Summer made her light escape / Into the Beautiful” is extended over five repetitions, gently rocking between C and F, the simplest chords imaginable. Over barely a minute, it conveys a sense of timelessness, and also of time drawing to a close. But the song doesn’t end with a fade-out. The final gesture comes as a surprise: a sudden, brilliant cascade from opposite ends of the keyboard toward the center, a carillon from the beyond. That “bright hour,” long delayed, has arrived at last. More

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      Review: For Franck’s 200th, an Organist Pays Grand Tribute

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      Paul Jacobs has completed his survey of the major solo organ works of César Franck, whose birthday year is passing with scattered observances.It has not been the happiest 200th birthday year for César Franck. “What Happened to One of Classical Music’s Most Popular Pieces?” this newspaper asked a few months ago — the headline to an account of how Franck’s Symphony in D minor, once a standard, largely vanished from concert programs.That symphony has not been widely revived even for this anniversary year, and Franck’s most often heard piece is probably his lush, musing Violin Sonata. But he spent decades at the organ console of Ste.-Clotilde in Paris and as a professor of that instrument at the Paris Conservatory; in his lifetime, he was best known as an organist and a teacher.So it is fitting that among the most prominent 2022 celebrations — indeed, one of the few 2022 celebrations — has come from Paul Jacobs, one of the finest organists and teachers of our day. Jacobs played six of Franck’s pieces at a concert in March, and on Tuesday another six, completing the set of this composer’s 12 major organ works.Both recitals took place at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Midtown Manhattan, known informally as “Smoky Mary’s” for what is said to be lingering hints of incense in the air. Its organ, built by the Aeolian-Skinner company, was installed in 1932 and has been lovingly kept since then; it is one of the major instruments of New York, capable of filling a space whose reverberation gives music both clarity and room to breathe.Paul Jacobs, one of the finest organists and teachers of our day.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIn March, Jacobs played the three pieces Franck wrote in the late 1870s, and the three sprawling, pensive chorales that were the great product of 1890, the year he died. The 75-minute, intermissionless program on Tuesday pushed further back in time, to the “Six Pièces pour Grand Orgue” that were written soon after Franck took up his position at Ste.-Clotilde, in 1858, and published in 1868.These are Romantic outpourings, their structures grand, if improvisatory in feel. Yet Jacobs kept them from turning turgid — his tempos flowing while conveying the weight and depth of the music. He began the “Fantaisie” with mysterious, almost meterless delicacy, like the prelude to “Parsifal”; in the “Pastorale,” his palette extended to spicy burnt umber and milky pale blue, mellow oboe and sweetly piercing flute.Jacobs’s textures were also beautifully varied in the “Prière,” the trumpet mellowed by the vast space without losing its focus; the “Prélude, Fugue et Variation” was a wistful nocturne, sensitively controlled and never overblown. The “Final” moved from roaring lows to shimmering highs, its dotted-rhythm motif bounding before its pile-on conclusion.Jacobs played the “Final” third. His even apter finale to the concert was the “Grand Pièce Symphonique,” which lasts nearly half an hour and influenced a generation of large-scale solo organ works. Here it was clear in its hovering veils of sound, its quietly lyrical serenity and its toccata flurries, before a steady, triumphal ending.If Franck is to have such scattered tributes this year, at least Jacobs has done him justice.Paul JacobsPerformed on Tuesday at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Manhattan. More

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      At La Scala, ‘La Gioconda’ Gets Ready to Travel Through Time

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      In a new staging at La Scala, “La Gioconda” will capture the full range of human emotion in a dreamlike Venice, with dashes of Kubrick and Fellini.“La Gioconda,” by Amilcare Ponchielli, established the composer as a creator of operas on par with Verdi after its 1876 premiere at La Scala in Milan. Yet while individual numbers such as the “Dance of the Hours” and the aria “Cielo e mar” (“The Sky and the Sea”) have achieved lasting fame, the lyric drama in four acts only occasionally receives new productions.This month, La Scala is mounting one by Davide Livermore, an Italian director. The last performances of “La Gioconda” at the house took place in 1997, in a revival of the staging by Nicola Benois from the 1950s, which had starred none other than Maria Callas and Giuseppe di Stefano.The sopranos Saioa Hernández and Irina Churilova will take over performances as the title character from Sonya Yoncheva, who fell ill with the flu during rehearsals. The cast, under the baton of Frédéric Chaslin, also includes Daniela Barcellona as Laura, Anna Maria Chiuri as La Cieca and Roberto Frontali as Barnaba.The libretto by Arrigo Boito, based loosely on the Victor Hugo play “Angélo, Tyran de Padoue,” takes place in 17th-century Venice. La Gioconda, a ballad singer, fights off the advances of Barnaba, a spy of the Venetian State Inquisition. She is in love with a Genoese nobleman, Enzo, who is disguised as a sea captain; he in turn loves Laura, who has been forced to marry a leader of the Inquisition. After saving Laura’s life and allowing her to escape with Enzo, La Gioconda stabs herself to death; Barnaba bends over her body and screams that he has drowned her mother, La Cieca.Mr. Livermore’s staging envisions Venice as a dreamscape, filled with fog and ghosts wandering the lagoon.Marco Brescia & Rudy Amisano/Teatro alla ScalaIn Mr. Livermore’s staging, Venice becomes a dreamscape where ghosts wander along the lagoon. The city can disappear at any moment, recreating both the sensory perceptions of La Cieca, who is blind, and the fog that frequently envelopes its buildings. Inspirations for the sets, by Mr. Livermore’s production team Giò Forma, include the French cartoonist known as Moebius — in particular his book “Venise Celeste” — and the Fellini film “Casanova.”Mr. Livermore emphasized the importance of mounting operas that helped shape national values in the aftermath of Italian unification in the 19th century. “It was a period in which art educated society about solidarity, loyalty,” he said. Today, he continued, “it is up to the director to show things to society which it doesn’t see.”He considers La Cieca a “profoundly mystic” character who is stigmatized much in the way that “haters” mob people on social media. In this reading, when Barnaba and his constituents claim that she can see despite being blind and declare her a witch, they are in fact expressing fear of her spiritual powers.Mr. Livermore points to the genius of the librettist Boito for capturing a full range of human emotion within three hours of opera. “It could make for a great television series,” he said by video conference from Milan. “Boito wanted to tell of love, sex, hatred, betrayal, the desire for revenge — the sky.”Boito wrote under the pen name of Tobia Gorrio as a member of the Scapigliatura, an anti-bourgeois movement of artists and intellectuals in 1860s Milan. Mr. Livermore considers the group “the true avant-garde of its time,” pointing to moments in the opera that shock the audience in thriller-like fashion.Inspirations for the sets include the French cartoonist known as Moebius — in particular his book “Venise Celeste” — and the Fellini film “Casanova.”Marco Brescia & Rudy Amisano/Teatro alla ScalaMr. Chaslin, the conductor of the production at La Scala, believes that “La Gioconda” drew essential impulses from Verdi while opening the door for his final operas, “Otello” and “Falstaff,” for which Boito provided the librettos (he also helped revise “Simon Boccanegra”). Verdi had stopped producing operas for 16 years after the 1871 premiere of “Aida.”For both Mr. Livermore and Mr. Chaslin, the sinister character of Barnaba is a kind of prototype for Iago, Otello’s scheming officer. Further down the line, “La Gioconda” was an important steppingstone toward the “verismo” operas at the turn of the 20th century — for which Puccini, a student of Ponchielli, is the best-known representative.Mr. Chaslin draws a parallel between the title characters of “La Gioconda” and “Tosca,” both stories “of a woman who prefers to die than cede to a man who wants to possess her.” He also points to modern elements in Ponchielli’s score such as Barnaba’s final utterance: Rather than sing a high note, as per convention, he exclaims “Ah!” in what is indicated in the libretto as a “suffocated scream,” while the orchestra races with a rising chromatic scale to the chilling close.The composer’s vocal writing is, meanwhile, a tour de force for the soloists. Mr. Chaslin calls it a “vicious cycle” that since the opera is not regularly performed, it requires singers who are both fit for the task and willing to invest the time in learning the music.The opera also requires choristers ranging from monks to shipwrights (La Scala’s production features a chorus of over 120). Mr. Chaslin noted the “gigantic” proportion of the ensemble numbers, in particular the third-act finale, which comes right after the “Dance of the Hours.”“La Gioconda” is in fact the only opera-ballo (or opera with dance, roughly in the vein of the grand opera tradition) besides “Aida” to remain in repertoire. The score will be performed in full, as is tradition at La Scala.Costumes by Mariana Fracasso travel freely between the centuries. Barnaba and his assassins evoke both the commedia dell’arte stock character Pulcinella (a burlesque figure who wears baggy white clothing and a tall white hat), as depicted by the 18th-century Venetian artist Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, and the killers from the Stanley Kubrick film “A Clockwork Orange.”Meanwhile, the theme of the Inquisition will be stripped of any allusions to the Roman Catholic Church and rather be depicted as a secret, oppressive power. Within this reading, the rosary of La Cieca that is passed to Laura is merely a symbol of mystical spirituality.The final scene draws inspiration from Alejandro Aménabar’s horror film “The Others.” “We discover that Barnaba is the only one still alive,” Mr. Livermore said. “And he still desires blood and sex in a horrendous manner.”After La Gioconda takes her own life, her spirit is reunited with that of La Cieca. And she will, Mr. Livermore said, “probably remain suspended on the lagoon of Venice for eternity.” More

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      La Scala Woos a Younger Audience

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      Like so many cultural institutions, opera houses need to instill passion in the ticket holders of the future.Even an iconic opera house like La Scala must create programming to build the audience of tomorrow. One-third of today’s audience is under 55 years old. But Dominique Meyer, the artistic director and chief executive, is determined to make the house even younger.Since 2009, the theater has offered operagoers under 30 the possibility of attending previews of performances, which are usually reserved for private audiences, and a pass, which gives access to backstage tours, workshops and more. The subscription package, Under30, grants four performances for the price of one and the opportunity to meet artists at a happy hour.Mr. Meyer credited the efforts of his predecessors Stéphane Lissner and Alexander Pereira for their efforts, noting that the subscribers are “very faithful.” He wants to make sure, however, that they remain so: The house’s internal surveys have revealed that audience members between 30 and 40 are the hardest to retain.“It is not as if one’s salary suddenly becomes three times as big when you turn 30,” he explained. “All of a sudden, they have to pay full price, and the tickets are not as good as before.”As such, starting next season, the house will offer loges to those 35 and under at 50 percent of the normal price (370 euros to 920 euros, or $396 to $986, for a four-person loge). There will also be weekly performances offering half-priced tickets — including the opportunity to enjoy free drinks and socialize in specially reserved areas. (Tickets at normal price run up to €150 euros for ballet and €250 for opera.)“Every opera lover has made friends during a performance,” said Mr. Meyer. “We want to support this kind of communal environment.”He also hopes to “open the theater’s doors” to new potential audience members. Last July, the house orchestra, chorus and ballet toured different parts of the city as part of the initiative La Scala in Città (La Scala in the City), offering free tickets. On one occasion, in the Porta Romana District, dancers performed at Mysterious Baths, the swimming pool and cultural event center, in a program of excerpts from works by Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Léo Delibes, Ólafur Arnalds and more.Dominique Meyer, La Scala’s artistic director and chief executive, in the theater next to a statue dedicated to the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini. Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesMr. Meyer recalled that the only problem were the mosquitoes, which pestered the dancers, especially when they had to hold still. La Scala in Città will be repeated this September on a larger scale, including the young singers of the opera house’s academy, ballet school and children’s choir.This season also saw the launch of the subscription package Un palco in famiglia (A loge for the family), for which adults pay full price and can bring their children for €10 to €15 a head. Materials designed especially for minors are distributed at performances.Meanwhile, since 2014, the theater has mounted productions made for children, welcoming more than 200,000 visitors. This season featured a children’s version of Rossini’s “La Cenerentola” (“Cinderella”), which was also streamed on La Scala’s website.Next season will, for the first time, feature a newly commissioned work, “Il Piccolo Principe” (“The Little Prince”), based on the classic French children’s novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. All productions are under one hour so that young visitors don’t grow bored, and they include child performers to further stimulate interest in the art form.The house has welcomed back most of another audience sector: tourists. They now make up 22 percent of total listeners, down from 30 percent before the pandemic.Mr. Meyer says that while visitors from Asia and Russia have not returned, the Europeans — and the Americans — are back. Of this group, the largest fraction (18 percent) is from Switzerland, followed by France (14 percent) and the United States (13 percent). The cities best represented are Vienna, Paris, London and New York.“If we are diligent and continue,” said Mr. Meyer, “we are certain to win a new audience.” More