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      Simon Preston, Acclaimed Organist and Conductor, Dies at 83

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      A force in the world of choral music, he was considered one of the most important English church musicians of his generation.Simon Preston, an organist, conductor and composer who was an instrumentalist of consummate, intelligent virtuosity and a force in the early-music movement, died on May 13. He was 83.Westminster Abbey, where Mr. Preston served as organist and director of the choir from 1981 to 1987, announced the death. The announcement did not say where he died or cite a cause.Mr. Preston, who was admired as one of the most important English church musicians of his generation, was an archetypal product of a choral tradition that, with unstinting energy and an insatiable demand for high standards, he reinvigorated — and eventually moved beyond. His solo career took him to organ lofts across the world, and he recorded prolifically, including with the conductors Yehudi Menuhin in Handel, Seiji Ozawa in Poulenc and James Levine in Saint-Saëns.He took to the organ as if born for it. Determined to spend his life playing the instrument even as a child, he joined the hallowed choir of King’s College, Cambridge, at age 11 and became its organ scholar as an undergraduate in 1958. When the dashing and dynamic Mr. Preston took his first post at Westminster Abbey, in 1962, he was said to be the youngest organist at the royal church since Henry Purcell, three centuries earlier.After a brief stint covering for Peter Hurford as master of the music at St. Albans Cathedral in 1968, Mr. Preston took charge of the choir at the Cathedral of Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1970; he also lectured at the university. He brought out a fervent, firm tone and an impressive agility in the Christ Church singers, just as he did in those he returned to at Westminster Abbey, where he directed the music for the wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson in 1986.Enjoying the time and concentration that studio conditions demanded, he made each group in turn a lively presence on record in the 1970s and ’80s, setting down acclaimed accounts — often with the period instrument specialists of the English Concert and the Academy of Ancient Music — of composers from Haydn back to Handel and Purcell, and beyond to Lassus and Palestrina.The Musical Times commented in 1988 that “his work with the choirs of Christ Church, Oxford, and Westminster Abbey set standards of excellence which are regarded as points of reference.”But Mr. Preston, who maintained a vigorous solo schedule throughout that period, came to chafe at the tedious routine of playing and conducting regular services. He decided to leave the abbey and to concentrate on his freelance career, one that came to include more than a decade spent working with the Deutsche Grammophon label on the organ works of Bach, in whose more grandly scaled compositions he excelled.“It was hard to imagine that anyone could have displayed the mighty Skinner instrument of St. Bartholomew’s Church, said to be the largest pipe organ in New York, more fully and effectively,” critic James R. Oestreich of The New York Times wrote in reviewing one of Mr. Preston’s many recitals in the city in 1992.“His wonderfully colorful registrations,” Mr. Oestreich continued, “presented in wildly imaginative juxtapositions, made it seem on one hand as if he were intimately familiar with this instrument, but on the other as if he were sharing fresh and spontaneous discoveries of its rich possibilities with the audience.”Simon John Preston was born on Aug. 4, 1938, in Bournemouth, a town on the south coast of England. His inspiration to take up the organ was George Thalben-Ball, whom he heard when he was 5 on a shellac record of Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries.”“I suppose you could say I came from a church family,” Mr. Preston, who started studying piano when he was old enough to read the psalter, and who later more than dabbled at the harpsichord, said in an interview with The Musical Times. “My uncle played the organ at the local church, my parents were both worshipers there, and my aunt taught in the local church school. We had a harmonium at home, and I used to fiddle around on that.”While singing at King’s College, he trained under the organ scholar Hugh McLean, into whose prestigious former post he would move after studies at the Royal Academy of Music. He returned to King’s at an auspicious moment; the new organist and director of music, David Willcocks, was to markedly raise the stature of a choir now widely known for its Christmas broadcasts. Mr. Preston contributed an arrangement of the carol “I Saw Three Ships” that remains in festive use, at King’s and elsewhere.“Already something individual is to be heard in the King’s recordings made at that time,” Gramophone magazine wrote in a profile in 1967, noting “the glow of Preston’s accompaniments to the choral works by Orlando Gibbons and in the Advent Carol Festival of 1961.”When Mr. Preston graduated to Westminster Abbey, he became little short of a phenomenon; he drew audiences unlike any of his elder colleagues, toured the United States and Canada in 1965, and made records for the Argo label that were characteristically both fastidious in their preparation and flamboyant in their execution.“From any point of view it would be hard to find fault,” The Times of London wrote in 1965 of a release of Reubke and Reger. “Technical difficulties,” the review continued, “are smoothly dealt with, leaving the organist-listener in a glow of vicarious triumph.”Mr. Preston was one of the more eager advocates of Messiaen in Britain, and he took Messiaen’s style as his model in his own early choral and instrumental compositions, including the solo “Alleluyas,” written in 1965.Later, and in a more personal language that reflected deeper experience, he wrote a “Toccata” that toys with the legacy of Bach’s Toccata in D minor — arguably the most famous organ work of all, yet one, as he wrote in the score, that “repays a certain amount of scrutiny.” He also composed and performed music for the soundtrack of the 1984 film “Amadeus.”Mr. Preston married Elizabeth Hays in 2012. She survives him. Further information on survivors was not immediately available.The radio host Bruce Duffie asked Mr. Preston, in a 1990 interview, if the itinerant life of an organ soloist was fun. It was, he said.“You suddenly find an instrument which is just the one that you want to play very much indeed. Even when it’s not the greatest instrument, there’s always something to be got from it; some new twists, some new sounds somewhere. Actually trying to work the very best out of a rather recalcitrant instrument is still fun.”“It’s lonely, though,” he continued. “You’re on your own. You’re a solo performer. There’s nothing much around. You can be stuck in some cold cheerless church, or overheated cheerless church, and it can be grim from that point of view.“But no, I think it’s fun.” More

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      The ‘Philosopher King’ of Percussion Starts His Next Chapter

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      Steven Schick, a renowned figure in contemporary music, had nearly burned out as a performer. But a new recording project shows he’s hardly finished.SAN DIEGO — Since its first performance, in 1976, Iannis Xenakis’s “Psappha” has been at the core of the solo percussion repertory.Not that it really had competition: When it premiered, a repertory for solo percussion barely existed. But “Psappha” shook the nascent field with its tension between flexible instrumentation and rigorous beat, between stark rhythms and kaleidoscopic colors. The 14-minute piece, in which the player presides over a sprawling array, came across as a strikingly modern abstraction of an ancient ritual, teetering between sober and ecstatic.Steven Schick managed the precarious balance between those two qualities as he recorded the pounding final minute on a recent afternoon in a studio at the University of California campus here, where he has taught since 1991.“Not even my 20-year-old self could have done that,” said a smiling Schick, 68, over the control room speakers when he was done. “That was pretty good.”Renowned for the ease and lucidity with which he handles the piece’s polyphonic intensity, Schick had already recorded it for a Xenakis collection released in 2006. But this new take will become part of “Weather Systems,” a multialbum project setting down his latest thoughts on a body of work he has commanded for nearly half a century. The opening installment, “A Hard Rain,” which compiles some of the foundational pieces he learned when he was starting out as a musician, was released on Friday.The series might seem, at first glance, like a nostalgic farewell to these works. After all, as his sweat and heavy breathing when he finished the recording session made clear, percussion is, more than most instrumental music-making, a young person’s game.But after a foray into conducting — his tenure leading the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus, which began as something of a lark and lasted 15 years, is ending in June — Schick is focusing anew on solo performance.“My percussion playing was saved by starting to conduct,” he said in an interview on the patio of his home in La Jolla. “The repertory is not that large. ‘Psappha’ I’ve played a thousand times. So I was really on the verge of burning out.”It was a renewal cemented during the pandemic.“I didn’t miss conducting,” he said. “And I actually didn’t really even miss teaching in person. I certainly didn’t miss playing concerts. But it was like an itch to practice. It felt like being 19 or 20: not learning these pieces because I had a concert, just doing it because I wanted to.”“Weather Systems,” then, is part textbook, part scrapbook, part lockdown diary, part communion with his younger self, part accumulation of new works. Looking to his past and sketching his future, it is intended as the magnum opus of a figure the composer Michael Gordon has called “the philosopher king of percussion music.”Schick was born in Iowa, growing up first on his family’s farm, then in a small town nearby. (“A Hard Rain” alludes to the precipitation that obsesses every farmer, as well as to the deluge of the pandemic.)“The elementary school band teacher sent home an instrument list for the parents to decide what their kids would play,” he said. “And at the top were the ones I wanted: violin, and French horn sounded kind of exotic. But down at the very bottom was drums, with an asterisk that the parents didn’t have to buy the drums, just the sticks. And my mother was frugal; I was the eldest of five.”Schick, practicing a piece by Sarah Hennies that includes a bowed vibraphone and a flour sifter, is “the god of a certain kind of percussion playing,” Hennies said.John Francis Peters for The New York TimesSo a drummer he became, playing in marching band and some rock ’n’ roll groups. What classical music he knew was from his mother, a talented amateur pianist. She took him to see the New York Philharmonic on tour — Seiji Ozawa conducting Debussy’s “La Mer.”“And I thought, Whoa,” Schick recalled. “I just knew that wasn’t the marching band.”Planning to become a medical doctor (his father’s aspiration before farming), Schick soon transferred to the University of Iowa, where an influx of money from the Rockefeller Foundation had established an unlikely hotbed of contemporary music. When he was asked by the pianist James Avery, a faculty member, to work with him on Stockhausen’s “Kontakte” — a long, raucous electroacoustic classic created in the late 1950s — Schick was thrust into the heart of experimental music.“It was the moment there was no turning back,” he said.With a talent and work ethic that allowed him to memorize huge amounts of complex music, Schick swiftly stood out for his magnetic, theatrical performances, notable as much for the movement, almost choreographic in its fluid elegance, as for the sound.“You have to imagine the 1980s,” said Gordon, one of the trio of composers who founded the collective Bang on a Can. “People came onstage to play contemporary music with the music pasted on huge pieces of cardboard. It was: ‘I’m doing very serious work; this is very hard; this music is very complicated.’ And Steve, from the beginning, what really shocked everyone is that he decided he’s not playing anything unless he plays it by memory. And once he was freed from having to have the music, he’s an incredibly dynamic performer.”Bang on a Can brought him on as a founding member of its All-Stars chamber ensemble, a new challenge for a solo specialist. Establishing himself in San Diego, where he turned his class of graduate students into the touring ensemble Red Fish Blue Fish, he continued to be the rare artist equally interested in the complex tangles of Brian Ferneyhough and Charles Wuorinen; the open-ended spareness of Morton Feldman and John Cage; and the Post-Minimalist rock inflections of Gordon and his cohort.All these styles come together in “The Percussionist’s Art,” his 2006 book that is a kind of memoir in music: poetic and thoughtful, but without stinting on detailed measure-by-measure advice for his fellow performers.“He wrote about these pieces in the same way I would hear pianists talk about the classic pieces in their repertoire,” said Ian Rosenbaum, a member of the quartet Sandbox Percussion. “He wasn’t talking about them in terms of sticks and the technical things; he was talking about them in terms of feelings and emotions. It was a dimension of interpretation that I had never really considered before.”Schick on the beach near his home in La Jolla, Calif. “It turns out I’m a better player than I was,” he said.John Francis Peters for The New York TimesSchick developed a reputation as a player whose technique could handle any obstacle. “Any reasonable composer would think: This is Steve Schick; he can play anything; I’m just going to write a virtuoso showpiece, and every impossible thing I can think of,” said John Luther Adams, a close friend and collaborator, who wrote the suite “The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies” for Schick in 2002.“I did exactly the opposite,” Adams went on. “I gave him this piece which requires a kind of Butoh virtuosity, this nearly frozen slow-motion virtuosity.”Schick, of course, took it in stride and made it his own, as he does with almost every musical dare. Lacking enough hands for an old Bang on a Can piece, he figured out that he could attach sleigh bells to his ankles and dance the part.He has filmed performances without audience in the Arctic tundra and in misty Canadian mountains, and, four years ago, led the San Diego Symphony in a stirring interpretation of Adams’s “Inuksuit” at the U.S.-Mexico border, with musicians on both sides. He will play in Tyshawn Sorey’s epic, glacial “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)” this fall at the Park Avenue Armory, having participated in the premiere at the Rothko Chapel in Houston in February.“Weather Systems” is being released on the Islandia Music Records label, founded by the cellist Maya Beiser, another close friend and a fellow founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars. “I knew I wanted to do a big project with Steve,” she said. “It worked out perfectly that he was in this moment in his career when he wanted to refocus on his solo work.”A collaboration with the audio engineer Andrew Munsey, “A Hard Rain” is a meditative two hours of music, with the dark resonance of a cave — and, in Kurt Schwitters’s “Ursonate,” a flood of Dada babble. Next up will be an installment of radio-play-type pieces for speaking percussionist by George Lewis, Vivian Fung, Pamela Z and Roger Reynolds.And, further in the future, an album including “Psappha.” Schick’s new recording recreates the situation of his practice studio on campus during the pandemic, when limited space meant that hanging gongs surrounded his setup for the Xenakis. The result is a barely audible but palpable shimmer around the beats that bleeds into the pauses — a subtle heightening of the ritualistic nature of the piece, and an indelible record of Schick’s life over the past couple of years.“Steve is really the god of a certain kind of percussion playing,” said Sarah Hennies, a player and composer who studied with him in San Diego. “The music of ‘Psappha’ is ecstatic and transporting and powerful. But the way Steve plays it, it doesn’t feel like he’s showing off, which is what a lot of people want to do.”And Schick has grown only more economical in his gestures, the distribution of his energy.“All these percussion solos from that period of time were written for young, acrobatic people,” he said of the “Hard Rain” collection. “So the question is, what does an aging body, but a more experienced body, have to offer? And it turns out I’m a better player than I was. I don’t waste any time.” More

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      In Cleveland, Schubert Outsings Even the Mighty ‘Otello’

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      After playing Schubert’s Ninth Symphony just before the pandemic lockdown, the Cleveland Orchestra shone in its return to the sprawling work.CLEVELAND — On the morning of Friday, March 13, 2020, the Cleveland Orchestra played Schubert’s Ninth Symphony. The musicians were in concert dress, but just a handful of people were in the seats of Severance Hall. Pandemic bans on public gatherings were going into effect, and this would be the last concert here before the long lockdown.A section of the symphony was released a few weeks later, as part of the premiere episode of a new podcast from the ensemble. By way of introduction, its longtime music director, Franz Welser-Möst, spoke about what he’d felt as he led the second movement: “I thought, all of a sudden, this might be the last time I ever conduct this orchestra again.”Amid the anxiety and uncertainty of early April 2020 in New York, I remember listening to him say that, and bursting into tears. So I have rarely had a sweeter experience with music than returning to Severance on Friday morning and listening to the Clevelanders and Welser-Möst play, yes, Schubert’s Ninth.This is music of stark shifts between celebration and melancholy, ballroom grandeur and drawing-room wistfulness, between forcefulness and expansiveness. It is a sprawling work that nevertheless, when done well, unfolds with a sense of inevitability through all its changes.Welser-Möst said on the podcast that the performance for the near-empty hall — with everyone “calm but extremely, extremely focused” — was “as close to perfection” as he’d ever heard the orchestra sound. That this wasn’t hyperbole became clear when the full symphony was released on the in-house record label that the ensemble started during the pandemic.On Friday, too, the notion of perfection came to mind. The Clevelanders played, as usual, with clarity, poise and adroit balances among the sections, elegance without reticence, urgency without pressure, airiness without weightlessness. But while descriptions of their precision and transparency sometimes make them seem cool, even chilly, this was poignant, humane, truly warm music-making.The first movement was brisk — as is Welser-Möst’s wont — but easygoing in its phrasing, without exaggeration, even in emphasis. As I felt when I heard this ensemble play Dvorak’s Fifth Symphony here in 2015, there was one foot in aristocratic Vienna, the other in a country meadow; I don’t know another American orchestra that lilts with such unforced gracefulness.Heat radiated off the high strings in the second movement, before softening to a gentleness that surpassed that of the recent recording. The passing of a line among different instruments — cello, flute, clarinet, oboe — was an understated layering of liquidities of different densities.The Scherzo was lushly garrulous until it relaxed into spacious calm; the fourth movement had the panache of bursts of golden powder. Throughout, Schubert’s huge section repeats weren’t drudgery, but displays of quietly accumulated power, of material subtly yet thoroughly transformed.From left on platform, Raymond Aceto, Pene Pati, Tamara Wilson, Welser-Möst, Limmie Pulliam, Christopher Maltman, Jennifer Johnson Cano, Owen McCausland and Kidon Choi, with the Cleveland Orchestra, after Verdi’s “Otello.”Roger Mastroianni/Cleveland OrchestraSuch was the quality of the symphony, and the intensity of the emotions it conjured, that it slightly overshadowed the main event of the weekend: Verdi’s opera “Otello,” which was given as a semi-staged concert on Saturday (and will be repeated this Thursday and Sunday).The operatic repertory has been a glory of Welser-Möst’s tenure here. The pandemic sadly spiked a run of Berg’s “Lulu,” but “Otello” is a sweeping orchestral showcase. (I won’t soon forget the Chicago Symphony’s ferocious rendition under Riccardo Muti at Carnegie Hall in 2011.)And the playing was excellent, with attention to detail in moments like the slight wooziness that enters the rhythms as the first-act drinking song grows drunker. The third act progressed toward a finale of controlled nobility; the opening of the fourth was an elegy of mellow, mournful winds, their music seeming to exhale into being taken up by the low strings.But overall Welser-Möst flew through the score at a clip; coupled with this ensemble’s lithe textures, even at its loudest and most powerful, there was sometimes a sense of skating atop the music. The opera impressed; it didn’t shock or wound.In the title role, the tenor Limmie Pulliam had a healthy, attractively grainy tone, with a hint of weeping in it. Once he got past some dropped high notes in “Ora e per sempre,” he sang with burnished security, and acted — even in this semi-staged setting — with moving sobriety.The soprano Tamara Wilson, as Desdemona, gained authority and tonal richness as the performance went on, her high notes strong and clear. But from the start, the baritone Christopher Maltman oozed juicy seductiveness as an imposing Iago.Jennifer Johnson Cano’s mezzo-soprano was smoothly plangent as Emilia; the tenor Pene Pati was a sweetly ingenuous Cassio. The chorus, directed by Lisa Wong, was far more nuanced than usual in this piece, even while wearing face masks; I heard harmonies in the opening scene that were new to me.Whatever the quibbles, few ensembles are ready to do Schubert’s Ninth and “Otello” back-to-back with such accomplishment. Part of it is doubtless the enchanted, silvery atmosphere of Severance, but there is always a sense of occasion when this orchestra performs.Not that everything is perfect. Attendance has been down this season from prepandemic averages, as it has been for many arts institutions; the question is whether those numbers will rebound or settle into a disconcerting new normal.And while Welser-Möst has filled many important positions over the past few years, there are still a handful of openings, none more conspicuous than the concertmaster seat that has been vacant since William Preucil was fired in 2018 after an investigation revealed he had engaged in sexual misconduct and harassment. The orchestra’s principal trombonist was also fired then, for the same reason; that chair remains empty, too.But there was nothing to fear this weekend from either of those corners of the ensemble. Peter Otto, the first associate concertmaster, gave a solo in Berg’s “Lyric Suite” — which preceded the Schubert on Friday — that had the self-effacing eloquence for which Cleveland is justly renowned. (Solos from this orchestra often, in the best way, don’t feel like solos at all.) And in the first movement of the Schubert, the trombones played with an uncanny evocation of doleful distance, as if they were on a nearby hilltop rather than right in front of us.It speaks to the depth of this extraordinary ensemble’s roster that what should have been its weaknesses ended up as particular strengths. And it was so, so good to be back here.OtelloThrough May 29 at the Severance Music Center, Cleveland; clevelandorchestra.com. More

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      Review: Henry Threadgill’s Music From Two Perspectives

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      At Roulette, the composer and his ensemble performed a pair of multimedia sets based on a single composition.The most reductive observation I can provide about the composer and improvising multi-instrumentalist Henry Threadgill’s activity at Roulette this weekend is that he debuted some truly exciting new chamber music. Because he offered a lot more, too.His multimedia programming stretched across Friday and Saturday, each evening running more than two hours. While the first set was titled “One” and the second — in playfully nonspecific fashion — was called “The Other One,” both contained takes on his composition “Of Valence,” for three saxophones, two bassoons, two cellos, along with a tuba, a violin, a viola, piano and percussion.Threadgill, 78, has long deployed playfulness, ambition and unusual configurations in his work. His 1979 album “X-75 Volume 1” engaged a nonet of four basses, four winds and one vocalist.In 2016 he won the Pulitzer Prize for music, for the double album “In for a Penny, in for a Pound,” which put the spotlight on Zooid — his late-career group that includes a tuba, acoustic guitar, cello, drums and Threadgill’s own flute and alto saxophone. Players in that ensemble improvise over quasi-serialized sequences of intervals (befitting a composer who in conversation is as likely to bring up Elliott Carter as Duke Ellington).

      In for a Penny, In for a Pound by Henry ThreadgillBut this weekend’s shows were something new. The tuba player Jose Davila, the cellist Christopher Hoffman and pianist David Virelles are some of Threadgill’s closest collaborators, and capable of lending marching-band panache to his most contrapuntally complex music. Joining a larger group, their sound drew directly on the Zooid language — and some of its freer applications, as heard in Ensemble Double Up — while the multimedia cast a new light on this composer’s late style.

      Double Up, Plays Double Up Plus by Henry ThreadgillThose multimedia elements included collaged photographs of street debris that Threadgill took during the mass exodus from New York at the beginning of the pandemic, projected onto a screen; live recitations of prose written to accompany the images; looping, pretaped vocal choirs, with all parts voiced by Threadgill; and video essays that cut between footage of yet more chamber music and the composer’s droll sermonizing about smartphones and distraction.Threadgill didn’t pick up an alto saxophone or a flute for live performance, though the video did feature him on bass flute. His instrumental contributions were limited to a pair of brief piano-plus-vocal moments, which were affecting in their vulnerability but a touch too tentative to come across as secure. (His pretaped choirs were more vocally assured.)Henry Threadgill conducting his ensemble.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOtherwise, he focused on conducting the 12-player ensemble. On Saturday, they sounded as though in lock-step with his every surprise rhythmic feint — producing an obliquely danceable, straightforwardly joyous Threadgillian energy.At one juncture, in the second hour of both nights, a string trio of the cellist Mariel Roberts, the violist Stephanie Griffin and the violinist Sara Caswell played staggered lines that seemed to tease traceable canonic patterning, but which remained melodically and rhythmically independent. It was tightly plotted, and resisted easy parsing; yet it didn’t sound much like Zooid’s zigzagging interplay.A new sheen came from electronically manipulated cymbal tones, courtesy of the drummer Craig Weinrib. (The transducers he used to manipulate those metallic timbres were a tribute to the late percussionist Milford Graves, to whom the music was dedicated. The performances as a whole were dedicated to the pioneering critic and musician Greg Tate, who died last year.)The ensemble at Roulette.Wolf DanielThese droning metallic timbres stood in subtle, ghostly contrast to the vibrato sound production of the string trio. Next, the tenor saxophonist Peyton Pleninger developed a solo from downward-plunging motifs in the strings. As he built up a frenetic, improvisatory energy from melodic cells, the string players began treading into extended technique, with scraping, at-the-bridge bowing and lightly plucked pizzicato.Alongside Weinrib at his drum kit, some crying alto sax figures from Noah Becker inspired beautiful portamento lines from Griffin’s viola, as well as the entry of both bassoonists playing brooding long tones at first, before turning to peppery, explosive bursts. The gradual swelling of instrumental forces continued; on Saturday, this section contained a galvanic sense of swing, even through Threadgill’s successive, minute changes in tempo.Sometimes, when you wanted the groove to keep going, a quickly arcing exclamation from the ensemble and surprise jolt in the rhythm would bring everything to a dramatic, unexpected finish — at which point Threadgill would, for example, go back to reciting sections of his prose against projections of paintings by his daughter, Nhumi Threadgill. Or he would sit near the stage while some video played, showing Henry Threadgill moving various talismans around a horizontally resting mirror. In tandem, a voice-over track delivered the composer’s observations about contemporary life.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIf Threadgill’s spoken or sung texts stopped short of narrative, they were by turns gripping or humorous as cultural criticism. One laugh-out-loud video involved him recalling both his and a barista’s annoyance at a coffee house customer who, immersed in texting, couldn’t manage to get out an order.But while the audience was invited to join the composer in grouchy irritation, this wasn’t the sole purpose of the vignette. Instead, this morsel harmonized thematically with Threadgill’s broader concerns about what we throw away too easily, including our attention. When his spoken text referred to rat populations and their proximity to outdoor diners, his pretaped vocal choir started to chant about something “crawling up my leg.” Such lighthearted moments had a way of balancing out the text’s more serious attributes — not least about the nature of inequality in New York, before and during the pandemic.While the precise placement of videos and spoken texts changed from night to night, the musical sequence was largely the same. The advantage of Saturday’s set was its increased tightness — in the ensemble as well as in the multimedia transitions. If some form of this vibrant chamber orchestra music makes it to a recording, it should be accompanied by documentation of the experience in the hall (similar to the way a studio recording of Anthony Braxton’s opera “Trillium J” contained a video of its semistaged premiere, also at Roulette).Threadgill thanks an appreciative audience with a broad grin.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“Of Valence” occasionally approached being too much to take in during a single sitting, so it was good that Roulette booked the show for two nights. This longstanding, farseeing venue in Brooklyn is the only place in the city with the chops to pull off a crisp presentation of Threadgill’s multimedia, as well as the willingness to let this composer go for it all.Henry ThreadgillPerformed on Friday and Saturday at Roulette, Brooklyn. More

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      ‘A form of hope’: As air-raid sirens sound, a Lviv orchestra opens a summer festival with Mozart’s Requiem.

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      Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York TimesThe audience members took their seats among boxes of medicine, first-aid kits and intravenous tubes. The orchestra was missing four men who are now fighting on the war’s front lines. A handful of guest singers who had fled bombings and bloodshed stood onstage with the choir.The war in Ukraine has upended the meticulous planning that has gone into the Lviv Philharmonic’s annual summer music festival for four decades. But for musicians and the audience, the show must go on.Even as the space — a Baroque, pastel-colored chamber in western Ukraine — has became a coordination site for humanitarian supplies during the war, it has remained a home to musicians and choirs. This spring, instead of playing upbeat music at the festival’s first performance, the orchestra decided to open with Mozart’s Requiem.The concert, performed on Friday night, was a tribute to the Ukrainians lost in three months of war.“This is a place now for medicine — for the body and the soul,” said Liliia Svystovych, a teacher in the audience. “We understand that a requiem is about mourning, that it is sad music. But it is like a prayer. And a prayer is always a form of hope.”About an hour before the concert started, air-raid sirens began to wail.Iolanta Pryshlyak, the director of Lviv’s International Symphony Orchestra, was preparing to delay the concert until the all-clear sounded. As she waited in a back room where doctors were packing up medical supplies, she took phone calls from volunteers who were driving aid to Ukraine’s embattled east.Ms. Pryshlyak, 59, is not only the orchestra director now. Since the invasion began, she has also directed the flow of supplies that pass through the theater on their way to the war’s front lines. It is her base for both jobs.She had been up since 4 a.m., and she was tired: “I’m just running on autopilot.”Still, she was looking forward to a night of music. “War makes your heart like a stone,” she said. “But music can soften it again.”Downstairs, the orchestra’s conductor, Volodymyr Syvokhip, put on a suit in his office as a baritone soloist sang arpeggios in a nearby room.For weeks, performers had rehearsed amid towers of humanitarian aid boxes as volunteers and doctors organized supplies all around them. Sometimes the musicians would help the aid workers. And sometimes the medics would stop their work to listen to them play.“We are supporting each other through this, in some way,” Mr. Syvokhip said with a smile.As he went onstage, Mr. Syvokhip told the audience that as air-raid sirens sounded in Lviv, a bomb in the eastern Kharkiv region had reduced a cultural center to rubble, and with it, the local theater.When the requiem ended, members of the orchestra and their audience were in tears.“The sound of those alarms and sirens combined in our heads with the words of the conductor, and we understood why musicians must not keep silent,” said Natalia Dub, a headmistress at a local academy.She had put as much care into her appearance this year as she had for summer festivals before it, with red lipstick and a string of pearls.“We need to come here,” she said. “This is the place we need to be most of all.” More

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      Combing the Beach, and the Archives, to Revive ‘The Wreckers’

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      In the early 20th century, Smyth was probably the most famous female composer of her generation, but her music fell out of the repertoire. Glyndebourne Festival Opera is bringing back her 1906 maritime opera.LEWES, England — Late last fall, there was an unusual sight on a beach in southern England: a team of staff members from Glyndebourne Festival Opera combing the shingle for flotsam and jetsam, then carting it off in wheelbarrows for use onstage.It is an unusually true-to-life approach for one of Glyndebourne’s productions this season — “The Wreckers,” by the British composer Ethel Smyth. The action is set among an impoverished seaside community in 18th-century England, whose inhabitants make their living from scavenging the wreckage of ships they have driven ashore (as many did, historically).Glyndebourne staff members have combed a nearby beach in southern England for flotsam and jetsam to use onstage.Sam StephensonGlyndebourne is lavishing a lot of effort on “The Wreckers,” which, despite premiering in 1906, has been staged professionally only a handful of times. For nearly three years, Glyndebourne’s archivist has been combing through documents and old musical scores to assemble a new performing edition that matches the composer’s intentions as closely as possible. A production of this news restored version, which runs Saturday through June 24, will be sung in French, as the original was.A chorus of over 50, a team of dancers and a 75-piece orchestra have been hired to give the production some oomph. And, as a mark of respect, “The Wreckers” has been placed in pole position as the summer festival’s opening show, displacing the operatic big-hitters that generally take up this spot.“We’re trying to do Ethel justice,” Robin Ticciati, Glyndebourne’s music director, said in an interview. “Quite honestly, it’s about time someone did.”Robin Ticciati, Glyndebourne’s music director. Ethel Smyth is “someone who has a ferocious sense of what she believed in,” he said, “and that comes through in the drama.”James BelloriniIn the first decades of the 20th century, Smyth was probably the most famous female composer of her generation, but now her work is almost never heard. She was championed by Mahler and by the conductor Thomas Beecham, who proclaimed “The Wreckers” a masterpiece and put it on at the Royal Opera House in London. In 1903, Smyth became the first woman to have a work staged at the Metropolitan Opera (and, astonishingly, remained the only one until 2016).Yet after her death in 1944, Smyth’s music gradually faded from the repertoire. There were fewer and fewer outings for her symphonies, choral works or chamber pieces, and even fewer stagings of her six operas. Only a handful of recordings exist: The sole version of “The Wreckers” currently available is from a 1994 live performance.Patient advocacy by the American conductor Leon Botstein yielded a production of “The Wreckers” at the Bard SummerScape Festival in 2015 at Bard College in New York, and there have been scattered performances of Smyth’s other works since. In November, the Houston Opera will also put on “The Wreckers” in its own new staging.Smyth might have arched an eyebrow: near nothing for decades, then two new shows at once.Leah Broad, a music historian at Oxford University who is writing a group biography that includes Smyth, said “gender prejudice” was one of the chief reasons Smyth’s music was so little performed.“There are other issues, but that’s a lot to do with it,” Broad said. “She’s a really significant historical composer.”Smyth in 1943. In the first decades of the 20th century, she was probably the most famous female composer of her generation, but now her work is almost never heard. Kurt Hutton/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesSmyth also has one of the great life stories in musical history. Brought up in a military household, she was initially forbidden from studying music by her father, but she eventually won out and attended the Leipzig Conservatory in Germany in 1887.Although she dropped out after a year, unimpressed by the teaching, while she was there she met Dvorak, Grieg and Tchaikovsky — who wrote in his diary that Smyth was “one of the few women composers whom one can seriously consider to be achieving something valuable.”A formidable networker, Symth later befriended many well-known people, including George Bernard Shaw and Empress Eugenie of France, and she had much-gossiped-about romantic affairs with both men and women.Smyth got many of her works performed and won a degree of acceptance, but always battled the assumption that what she was doing was essentially second-rate. Writing in The Times of London in 1893, a critic praised her “virile” compositions and commended “the entire absence of the qualities that are usually associated with feminine productions.”More humiliatingly, Smyth was often treated as the butt of a joke — as famous for her forceful personality, many dogs and penchant for wearing men’s suits as anything she had written. Virginia Woolf, who carried on an intimate correspondence with the much-older Smyth, nonetheless complained in her diary that becoming the subject of Smyth’s affections was like being “caught by a giant crab.”In 1910, Smyth became involved with the women’s suffrage movement. Two years later, she was sent to Holloway prison in London for several months after throwing a rock through the window of a government office. When Beecham visited her in jail, he later recalled, he was astonished to see Smyth conducting an exercise-yard performance of her rousing “March of the Women” from a cell window “in almost Bacchic frenzy, with a toothbrush.”“The Wreckers” stage at Glyndebourne. The show starts on Saturday and runs through late June.James BelloriniLike much of Smyth’s music, “The Wreckers” is an intense experience. Inspired by visits the composer made to remote coastal villages in Cornwall, in southwest England, it centers on a local preacher’s wife, Thirza, who is torn between her sense of duty to her puritanical husband and her love for a kindhearted fisherman.Not incidentally, Smyth was herself involved in a romantic triangle with the opera’s librettist, the married American poet Henry Brewster, and his wife, Julia. “There’s such passion in the love music,” said Karis Tucker, who sings Thirza at Glyndebourne. “She knew what she was writing about.”Ticciati said the score had both power and remarkable range, sounding “sometimes like Brahms, then Mendelssohn, then French exoticism, even late Debussy.” He added: “You think: ‘What is this?’ And then you realize that this is Ethel Smyth; this is what she sounds like.”As well as conjuring a fogbound maritime atmosphere, infused with snatches of folk song and sea shanties, Smyth seems to find particular relish in crowd scenes, as her supposedly God-fearing villagers prepare to lynch shipwrecked sailors before turning on each other.Tucker and the chorus of “The Wreckers” rehearsing last month.Richard Hubert SmithThere’s more than a hint of “The Crucible” about “The Wreckers,” and as Broad, the music historian, pointed out, the pre-echoes of another seafaring work, Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes” (1945), are even stronger. “Britten owned a score of ‘The Wreckers’; it’s right there in his library,” Broad said. “He was never polite about Ethel Smyth’s music, but he was clearly influenced by it.”Finally, more of us will get the opportunity to make up our own minds. In addition to the Houston production, Glyndebourne will take a semistaged version of its “Wreckers” to the BBC Proms festival this July. The Proms is making Smyth a major focus and spotlighting other works of hers, including Mass in D and Concerto for Violin and Horn.“She’s so overdue her moment,” Broad said. “When you hear her, it’s like a gap in music suddenly gets filled.”Fearlessly inventive, sensuous and sometimes shocking, “The Wreckers” is a fine testament to the woman who created it, Ticciati said. “She’s someone who has a ferocious sense of what she believed in, and that comes through in the drama,” he argued.“I don’t want to say Ethel was larger than life,” Ticciati added, “because I think that was her life.”The WreckersMay 21 through June 24 at the Glyndebourne Festival in Lewes, England; glyndebourne.com. More

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      Alexander Toradze, Idiosyncratic Pianist, Dies at 69

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      A defector to the U.S., he was admired for his prowess in the Russian repertory, but his individualistic approach “was not for everyone — or for all repertoire.”Alexander Toradze, a Georgian American pianist and Soviet defector whose idiosyncratic and bravura performances of Russian composers were either loved or hated, died on May 11 at his home in South Bend, Ind. He was 69.The cause was heart failure, his health having been deteriorating since 2019, his manager, Ettore F. Volontieri, said.Mr. Toradze was also stricken with heart failure, as it was later diagnosed, on April 23 during a performance with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra in Washington State. Though he had to be helped onstage at the start because of weakness, he completed the concert and was hospitalized afterward, Mr. Volontieri said.Mr. Toradze specialized in Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff and other Russian composers. His concerts this spring were to include a performance of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Illinois Philharmonic, scheduled for May 14.Mr. Toradze, whom friends and colleagues called Lexo, won the silver medal at the 1977 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, though members of the jury were divided, with some finding his playing disturbingly percussive.The critic Peter G. Davis, however, was among his fans: He wrote in The New York Times two years later that “his playing had the best sort of éclat and brilliance in that it stemmed directly from the character of the music rather than from a desire to show off.”“His tone,” he added, “was glittering but never clattery; the poise and precision of his interpretation had elegance as well as tremendous visceral excitement.”In a 1984 review, Donal Henahan of The Times wrote of Mr. Toradze’s playing, “It is the distinctive Russian style of an older generation, still alive in this era of stamped-out international virtuosos.”Mr. Toradze defected to the United States in 1983, presenting himself at the American Embassy in Madrid for asylum during a tour with the Bolshoi Symphony Orchestra. According to the critic and author Joseph Horowitz, a close friend and artistic adviser to Mr. Toradze, it was a dramatic defection that involved highway chases in Spain and an attempted kidnapping by the K.G.B. in a restaurant.Mr. Toradze in 2001. His idiosyncratic performances tended to divide critics, with some loving his style and others finding it disturbing.Chris Lee for The New York TimesThree months later, Mr. Toradze embarked on an American tour with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. During his career he performed with major U.S. orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, as well as the Berlin Philharmonic and the London Symphony Orchestra, among others.In 1991, he was appointed to a newly endowed professorship in piano at Indiana University South Bend, where he created the Toradze Piano Studio, inspired by the intense, all-encompassing training of Soviet music schools. His studio consisted of former and current students, who presented mostly Russian repertory in marathon concerts in the United States and Europe.His students also played soccer, and the Toradze Studio team won the university championship three years in a row. “Soccer is not very good for the hands,” Mr. Toradze told The Times in 2002, “but it’s great for the brain.”A gregarious host, he enjoyed giving late-night dinners and boisterous parties for his students, many of whom he recruited from Russia and Georgia. He retired from the university in 2017.While he was widely admired, Mr. Toradze’s individualistic approach “was not for everyone — or for all repertoire,” Mr. Horowitz wrote in an appreciation published after Mr. Toradze’s death. “Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto was one piece that could not survive a Lexo onslaught.”The Times critic Bernard Holland, reviewing a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in 1988, wrote that Mr. Toradze’s “customary extravagance would have ill fit this music’s classical restraint, so his tactic was to seek the other extreme.” The results, he said, “alternated between the weird and the inaudible.”Mr. Toradze acknowledged such responses. “I always anticipate outraged attacks,” he said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun in 1992.Alexander Davidovich Toradze was born on May 30, 1952, in Tbilisi, Georgia, to the composer David Toradze and the actress Liana Asatiani. He attended the Special Music School for Gifted Children in Tbilisi and the Moscow Conservatory, graduating in 1978.While he was a student in Moscow, Mr. Toradze listened to illicit broadcasts of the Voice of America program “Jazz Hour.” To him, he said, jazz represented artistic freedom. When performing in Portland, Ore., during a Soviet-sponsored tour in 1978, he learned that Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson were to perform twice the next day. Much to the irritation of his manager, he decided to skip a rehearsal in Miami to attend the concerts. Ms. Fitzgerald invited him onstage, where he told her that she was a “goddess for people in the Soviet Union.”Mr. Toradze’s small catalog of recordings includes a 1998 disc of Prokofiev’s five piano concertos, with Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra, and Shostakovich piano concertos, with Paavo Järvi and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony.Mr. Toradze, a practicing Orthodox Christian, advised young artists to get in the habit of praying before performances. Speaking about Liszt’s variations on a theme of Bach, he told The Times in 1986: “Bach’s cantata describes worrying, complaining, doubting and crying. Many of these feelings were part of my life. But the piece moves steadily and heavily toward a fantastic final chorale in major, with the words, ‘What God does is well done.’ That is my credo.”His marriage to the pianist Susan Blake ended in divorce in 2002. He is survived by his sons, David and Alex; a sister, Nino Toradze; and his longtime partner, the pianist Siwon Kim.After defecting to the United States, Mr. Toradze lamented the imposition of strict union rules regarding rehearsal times that could prevent an orchestra from practicing to the end of a concerto, even if the musicians were just a few bars short. But he appreciated the high-quality instruments on offer.“In Russia, I would play many times on pianos with broken strings or broken keys,” he told the radio host Bruce Duffie in 2002.But, he added, “there are times when the piano is not well, or you are not well, but you go on anyway.” More

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      Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma, Master of the Santoor, Dies at 84

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      He single-handedly elevated a 100-string instrument little known outside Kashmir into a prominent component of Hindustani classical music.Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma, an Indian musician and composer who was the foremost exponent of the santoor, a 100-string instrument similar to the hammered dulcimer, died on Tuesday at his home in Mumbai. He was 84.Indian news reports said the cause was cardiac arrest.Over a career spanning nearly seven decades, Mr. Sharma became the first musician to propel the santoor onto the world stage, at concerts and recitals in India and elsewhere.Before Mr. Sharma started playing the santoor, it was little known outside Kashmir. Even there it was used only to play Sufiana Mausiqi, a genre of Kashmiri classical music with Persian, Central Asian and Indian roots.The santoor, a trapezoidal wooden instrument whose strings stretch over 25 wooden bridges, is played with slim wooden mallets. On the santoor, in contrast with the sitar, sarod or sarangi, the string instruments traditionally used in Hindustani classical music, it is difficult to sustain notes and perform the meends, or glides from one note to another, essential to the Hindustani musical tradition.That might be one reason it took Mr. Sharma so many years to be recognized for his artistry.At the beginning of his career, purists and critics derided the santoor’s staccato sound, and many urged Mr. Sharma to switch to another instrument. Instead he spent years redesigning the santoor to enable it to play more notes per octave, making it more suitable for the complex ragas, the melodic framework of Hindustani music.“My story is different from that of other classical musicians,” Mr. Sharma told The Times of India in 2002. “While they had to prove their mettle, their talent, their caliber, I had to prove the worth of my instrument. I had to fight for it.”He released several albums, beginning with “Call of the Valley” (1967), a collaboration with the acclaimed flutist Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia and the guitarist Brij Bhushan Kabra.Mr. Chaurasia and Mr. Sharma were close friends and frequent collaborators. Together they composed music for several successful Bollywood films in the 1980s and ’90s including “Silsila” (1981), “Chandni” (1989), “Lamhe” (1991) and “Darr” (1993). Mr. Sharma was one of the few Indian musicians who straddled the worlds of classical and popular music.In 1974, Mr. Sharma performed across North America with the sitar virtuoso Pandit Ravi Shankar as part of the former Beatle George Harrison’s 45-show “Dark Horse” concert tour, bringing Indian classical music to audiences beyond South Asia alongside some of the finest classical musicians from India — Alla Rakha on tabla, Sultan Khan on sarangi, L. Subramaniam on violin, T.V. Gopalakrishnan on mridangam and vocals, Mr. Chaurasia on flute, Gopal Krishan on vichitra veena and Lakshmi Shankar on vocals.Mr. Sharma, center, in red, in 2018 in Mumbai. He was awarded some of India’s highest honors for his contributions to Indian culture.Pratik Chorge/Hindustan Times via Getty ImagesMr. Sharma was awarded some of India’s highest honors, including the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1986, the Padma Shri in 1991 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2001.Shiv Kumar (sometimes rendered Shivkumar) Sharma was born on Jan. 13, 1938, in Jammu, India, to Pandit Uma Devi Sharma, a classical musician who belonged to the family of royal priests of the maharajah of Jammu and Kashmir, and Kesar Devi. He began singing and tabla lessons in with his father at the age of 5, showing great promise. In “Journey With a Hundred Strings” (2002), a biography of Mr. Sharma, Ina Puri wrote that he would spend hours immersed in music, practicing various instruments.“There was an obsessive element in my attitude to music even then,” she quoted him as saying. “It was the air I breathed, the reason I lived.”By age 12 he was an accomplished tabla player, regularly performing on Radio Jammu and accompanying leading musicians who visited the city. When he was 14, his father returned from Srinagar, where he had been working, with a present: a santoor. Mr. Sharma was not happy about learning a new, unfamiliar instrument. But his father was adamant. “Mark my words, son,” he recalled his father saying. “Shiv Kumar Sharma and the santoor will become synonymous in years to come. Have the courage to start something from scratch. You will be recognized as a pioneer.”In 1955, Mr. Sharma gave his first major public performance on the santoor, at the Haridas Sangeet Sammelan festival in Bombay (now Mumbai). The youngest participant at 17, he persuaded the organizers to allow him to play both the santoor and the tabla. He was reluctantly given 30 minutes to play the instrument of his choice, but on the day of the recital he played the santoor for a full hour — to rapturous applause. The organizers called him back for another recital the next day.He soon received offers to play and act in Hindi films, but after one film, the 1955 hit “Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baje,” he was determined to focus on classical music. He performed around the country in an effort to establish the santoor as a classical instrument.He moved to Bombay at 22; to make ends meet, he played the santoor on sessions for dozens of popular Hindi film songs while continuing to build his classical reputation.He is survived by his wife, Manorama; his sons, Rahul, a well-known santoor player and composer, and Rohit; and two grandchildren.After Mr. Sharma’s death, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was among those paying tribute. “Our cultural world is poorer with the demise of Pandit Shivkumar Sharma Ji,” he wrote on Twitter. “He popularized the santoor at a global level. His music will continue to enthrall the coming generations.” More