Coronavirus (2019-nCoV)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      A Requiem, Derailed by the Pandemic, Arrives When It’s Needed Most

      by

      Courtney Bryan’s Requiem, premiering Thursday after its original date was canceled last year, now follows a time of loss and upheaval.You’ve probably heard a story like this before. Courtney Bryan’s Requiem was set to premiere with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in late March 2020. In a time of incalculable loss, her music became part of another kind of casualty: the sounds that vanished from stages around the world.Like many premieres originally planned for the past year, Bryan’s Requiem, written for the vocal quartet Quince Ensemble and members of the Chicago Symphony, was stranded in limbo. But through the orchestra’s turn to online programming and a season-ending series organized by Missy Mazzoli, its composer in residence, the piece was given a new date this week, when the latest episode of CSO Sessions lands on the streaming platform CSOtv.Maybe it’s actually more fitting that the Requiem be released now, as the United States emerges from its worst days of the pandemic — over 600,000 deaths later — and the country celebrates its first federally recognized Juneteenth, a year after the emotional, nationwide peak of the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd.“I think about the loss in my own life, but I know that a lot of people have had a lot of losses during this time, due to Covid and other situations,” Bryan said in a recent interview. “So I’m really happy that this is the actual premiere.”Bryan, who is based in and from New Orleans, is a composer and performer who deals in collaboration, with an open ear to traditions like jazz and gospel — and, occasionally, to topics around racial justice like Black Lives Matter. In “Sanctum” (2015), she wove live orchestral playing in with sounds including the voices of demonstrators in Ferguson, Mo. Her oratorio “Yet Unheard” (2016) commemorated the life of Sandra Bland.Edwin Outwater leads the Quince Ensemble and members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the premiere performance of Bryan’s Requiem, now streaming.Todd RosenbergHer Requiem was meant to be more abstract — haunted by contemporary tragedies, perhaps, but not explicitly tied to any one in particular. It draws from a broad range of inspirations, including death rituals from the Anglican Church, “The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” Neoshamanism’s death rite known as the “great death spiral” and New Orleans jazz funerals, as well as text from the Bible and the traditional Catholic Mass.Its five movements — Bryan associates that number with life — begin with a gentle, a cappella harmony built from elemental “mmm” sounds before each of the four voices of the Quince singers begins to follow a unique line, with detours into half-sung Sprechstimme and percussive sibilance. The other instruments don’t enter until about seven and a half minutes in, when the clarinet and brasses offer a chorale-like interlude, mournful and dignified.The Requiem is primarily a showcase for the Quince singers. They follow that instrumental passage with repetitions of the word “listen,” in different ways: The score instructs one to exclaim, and the others to plead, chant on pitch and whisper. A bass drum resounds, signaling the start of a dirge that includes a duet of simultaneous yet lonely melodies from the clarinet and trombone. By the end, after sadly beautiful word painting with the “Kyrie eleison” text and a clarinet solo of upward runs, Bryan arrives at a finale that is less restful and resolved than a traditional Requiem’s, but more cyclical, closing with the “mmm” vocalise that started the piece.Bryan talked more about the work and its inspirations in the interview. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Was this commission specifically for a Requiem, or was that your choice?It actually goes back to when I met Quince. I was really taken not only with their music and their voices, but also how they talked about music and the things that they cared about. We bonded, and then a year after that — about four years ago — we were talking, and I told them I would like to write an a cappella Requiem.I grew up in an Anglican church and was deciding between the Catholic Mass and the Anglican Mass, and thinking of writing a Requiem, but in my own style. As I got into it, I started reading about different dying rituals from traditions around the world, how people approach funerals and the celebration of life. Then I took a pause, because it got really big. There was a lot to learn, and it was changing the way I approached it — and because we didn’t have a specific deadline, I stepped down.Later, I heard from Missy Mazzoli about a commission at the Chicago Symphony, and I knew that Quince was on the program. So I changed it. The first section is still a cappella, but then I added instruments.Even with more musicians, it’s still far from the scale of something like Verdi’s Requiem.It was already going to be chamber size. But yeah, I ended up going kind of minimal with the way I used the instruments. I checked out classic Requiems, definitely Verdi’s and Mozart’s, and the feeling I got — or even just from reading the Catholic Mass — was this feeling of rising up against death. It feels like there’s a battle or a triumph, and I found that I was most interested in thinking about death and the cyclical nature of life and death, and more, kind of, an acceptance. So all my text was Christian, but it’s my perspective on the Requiem.I was about to say, there’s a tension at the end of your piece, between triumphant language like “Death will be no more” and music that’s more unsettled and mysterious.It felt like a natural ending because it’s a life cycle; it wasn’t a triumph or an arrival point. And with the text, “The first things have passed away,” I thought it was something that was not an ending or a beginning.Performed by the Quince Ensemble with members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Edwin Outwater, conductor.When you were exploring traditions of mourning, what did you find yourself attracted to, conceptually and artistically?The one that hit home the most is just thinking about New Orleans — the idea of the celebration of life and the jazz funeral. There’s the walking of the casket from the church to the burial ground, but there’s a whole ceremony in a jazz funeral that starts with the dirge, and then it goes up-tempo to a celebration of life. So that was a major influence on the instruments that I chose: the brass band or the New Orleans ensemble. I wasn’t trying to replicate the style, necessarily, but there are little symbolic things.What do you make of the context of this Requiem’s premiere, as opposed to spring last year?I know some commissions come in response to this historic thing, and you have your own take, but this was something that I just wanted to do. That’s why it’s interesting that it took its own time and that the actual premiere is after this really profound time of loss. I find these kinds of things mysterious, how they happen. So, I hear it differently. It sort of came out of some of the work I was already doing, where I was writing music about police brutality. I wouldn’t say this piece is about that; it was a chance for me to go in deeper into these ideas about life and death.Quince asked, in the middle of the rougher parts of the pandemic, how I would feel if they just recorded the first, a cappella part and put it online for people — just something to share. The folks at the Chicago Symphony were very supportive of that, so we did. It felt good to have something like that to offer, and I feel the same way as it is being offered now. I hope it will be healing to people.RequiemStreaming at cso.org/tv. More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Musical Chairs? Why Swapping Seats Could Reduce Orchestra Aerosols.

      by

      Moving super-spreading instruments, like the trumpet, closer to air vents could limit the aerosol buildup on stage, according to a new study.If musical instruments were people, trumpets would be super spreaders. When a trumpeter blows into the mouthpiece, tiny respiratory droplets, known as aerosols, travel out of the musician’s mouth, whiz through the brass tubing and spray into the air.During a deadly pandemic, when a musician might unwittingly be exhaling an infectious virus, that poses a potential problem for orchestras. And the trumpet is not the only musical health hazard.“Wind instruments are like machines to aerosolize respiratory droplets,” said Tony Saad, a chemical engineer and expert in computational fluid dynamics at the University of Utah.A simple but radical change — rearranging the musicians — could significantly reduce the aerosol buildup on stage, Dr. Saad and his colleagues reported in a new study, which was published in Science Advances on Wednesday.The work began last summer, when the Utah Symphony began to wonder whether, and how, they could return to performing safely.“They were looking for people that could provide insight into mitigation strategies that people would have some faith in,” said James Sutherland, a chemical engineer at the University of Utah and a co-author of the study.Comparison of aerosol concentrations, both instantaneous and averaged, for the baseline scenario and for the proposed mitigation strategy.Hedworth et alThe researchers created a detailed computer model of the symphony’s concert hall, noting the location of every air vent and the rate of air flow through the HVAC system.Then they mapped the typical position of each musician. The Utah Symphony, like most modern orchestras, positioned its musicians in a standard pattern, with the string instruments at the front of the stage, followed by several rows of woodwinds and brass instruments — the flutes and oboes, then the bassoons and clarinets, and then the trumpets and French horns. The trombones and the percussion section were positioned at the very back of the stage.To model the spread of aerosols during a concert, they incorporated recent research led by Jiarong Hong, a mechanical engineer at the University of Minnesota. Working with the Minnesota Orchestra, Dr. Hong and his colleagues had measured the concentration and size of aerosol particles emitted by a variety of different wind instruments. (Among their findings: The trumpet, bass trombone and oboe posed the highest risk.)With these parameters in place, Dr. Saad and Dr. Sutherland used what are known as computational fluid dynamics simulations to model how the air, and aerosols, would flow through the Utah concert hall when all the musicians were playing.The simulation revealed complex patterns of airflow. In general, the air flowed down from the air supply vents in the ceiling to the air return vents in the floor at the back of the stage. But two distinct vortices, at the front and the back of the stage, also formed, they found. “You see these large regions that are recirculating like a big tornado,” Dr. Saad said.Aerosols can get caught in these vortices, swirling around and around the stage and building up over time.The trumpets, which emitted large, concentrated aerosol clouds, posed a particular problem. As the instruments’ aerosol plumes traveled toward the air vents at the back of the stage, they passed directly through the percussionists’ breathing zone.“We saw this and said, ‘OK, this is a big problem, we’ve got to solve this,’” Dr. Sutherland said. “And given the insight we had into how the flow was moving, we said, ‘Well, let’s move some of these instruments around.’”They knew the idea might be controversial; orchestras have generally been arranged the same way for decades, for reasons that include both acoustics and tradition. “We asked them when we started the project, ‘What constraints do we have to work with? Can we move people?’” Dr. Sutherland said. “And they said, ‘You do whatever you think you can to mitigate risk.’”A visualization of the proposed seating arrangement for the orchestra. Colors indicate the speed at which the respiratory aerosols are being emitted at (red is high, blue is low) and size indicates the amount of aerosols emitted per second.Hedworth et alThey moved the trumpets to the very back of the stage, right next to the air-return vents. Then they shifted the other wind instruments from the middle of the stage, moving them either closer to the back air vents or to the stage doors, which they suggested opening.These moves, the team hoped, would allow the aerosols to flow directly out of the concert hall, without passing through the breathing zones of other musicians or getting caught in an onstage vortex. “You want the smoker to sit close to the window,” Dr. Saad said. “That’s exactly what we did here.”Finally, they moved the instruments that do not generate aerosols at all — the piano and the percussion section — to the center of the stage. Together, these tweaks reduced the average aerosol concentration in the musicians’ breathing zones a hundredfold, the researchers calculated.Although the precise air flow patterns will be different in every venue, the general principles should hold everywhere, the team said. Orchestras can reduce the risk of aerosol spread by positioning the highest risk instruments near open doors and air return vents. (Orchestras that cannot do their own computer modeling could put a fog machine onstage and track how the fog flows, the researchers suggested.)Dr. Hong, who was not involved in the Utah study, praised the modeling work. “Simulating the flow inside an orchestra hall is not easy,” he said. “They did beautiful work in terms of characterizing flow.”But he questioned whether moving musicians was really a practical solution. “We work with musicians closely, and they don’t like to be rearranged,” he said. (He did note, however, that “for a student band, I think it’s perfectly fine.”)Instead, he proposed a different, albeit equally unconventional, solution: Masks, for the instruments. In a recent study, he found that covering the bell of a trumpet with a single layer of acoustic fabric could reduce particle emissions by about 60 percent without compromising sound quality.The Utah Symphony, for its part, proved open to rethinking the seating. And when it took the stage last fall, it did so with the stage doors open and the wind instruments at the rear.“That was a huge challenge for the musicians,” said Steven Brosvik, the president and chief executive of the Utah Symphony and Utah Opera. “But they all dove into it, and said, ‘Let’s go, let’s give it a try.’”It took a few weeks for the musicians to get comfortable with the new arrangement, and they plan to return to their traditional seating configuration this fall, Mr. Brosvik said. But the simulations gave the musicians peace of mind and allowed them to get back onstage, he said: “For us, it was life changing.”The researchers were pleased with how willing the musicians were to embrace an unusual solution, although their findings may have hit some instrumentalists harder than others. As Dr. Sutherland said, “We had to apologize to the trumpets in advance.” More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Moshing in the Rain: The Tenuous Return of the British Music Festival

      by

      Spending three days camping at a muddy music festival is a British tradition. But event operators fear that few will go ahead this summer, despite a trial last weekend.DONNINGTON PARK, England — At 5 p.m. on Friday, a metal band called Death Blooms walked onstage in a field here and launched into a pummeling track to open Download Festival, Britain’s first large-scale music festival to take place since the Covid-19 pandemic began.A second later, several hundred rain-soaked fans — including two men dressed as bananas — began careering into one another in front of the stage, arms and legs flailing, smiling ecstatically as they formed Britain’s first legal mosh pit in 15 months.After 10 minutes, Jim Ellison, one of the bananas, rushed out of the tent to catch his breath. “It’s so good to be back to normality,” said Ellison, 19. He acknowledged that most wouldn’t define normalcy as “a man in a banana costume moshing,” before cutting the interview short as Death Blooms started playing a song called “Life is Pain.”“I’m really sorry,” Ellison said, excusing himself, “but I love this tune.” He ran straight back into the pit.When the metal band Death Blooms opened Download, a mosh pit quickly formed in front of the stage.Joe Giddens/Press Association, via Associated PressSince the 1970s, music festivals have been a key part of the British summer: events where teenagers get a first taste of parent-free vacations, music fans find community and people generally get very muddy and carefree. But there is widespread concern that few events will go ahead this year despite nearly half of Britain’s population having been fully vaccinated against Covid-19. And organizers say they risk going bankrupt.Last week, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that social distancing measures would continue in England until at least July 19 — almost a month after all restrictions were planned to be lifted. Within days, several major festivals were canceled for the second year in a row, with organizers saying they couldn’t afford to pay suppliers if there was no guarantee that the events would occur.“There seems to be a whole body of evidence saying, ‘You can do outside events safely,’ but for some reason the government won’t let us,” Chris Smith, the director of WOMAD, a world music festival, said in a telephone interview. His event was scheduled for July 22, and Smith was hoping that the government would provide support so the event could go ahead.British festivals range from world-renowned events like Glastonbury — which turns a farm in southwestern England into a temporary city for one week each year — to scrappier productions like Tribfest, an event for cover bands.In 2019, almost 1,000 were held, attracting 5.2 million attendees, according to the Association of Independent Festivals, a trade body. That year, festivals generated 1.7 billion pounds, $2.3 billion, for Britain’s economy.Download was initially canceled in March. This weekend’s hastily arranged special edition was able to go ahead only because it is part of a government trial to see whether and how cultural life can return safely. Previous pilot events — two 3,000-person club nights and a 5,000-capacity rock concert in Liverpool — led to eight cases of potential coronavirus transmission, according to one of the scientists involved, Iain Buchan.Arriving on the first day of Download for a typically rainy and carefree British festival. Joe Giddens/Press Association, via Associated PressDownload 2021 had a significantly reduced capacity: The three-day metal, punk and hard rock festival usually sees over 110,000 hard-rock fans camp in Donnington Park — a set of fields next to a racetrack in Leicestershire, England — to watch bands like Slipknot and Slayer. But for the government trial, only 10,000 fans were allowed, and the lineup featured only British acts to avoid the risks of international travel and quarantines.Attendees had to take a coronavirus test before going in, and agreed to also do one five days after the festival so that scientists could see whether the event caused the spread of coronavirus. But once inside in the grounds, masks weren’t required, while headbanging, moshing and drunken conversations at the camp site were prevalent.Melvin Benn, the director of Festival Republic, Download’s organizer, said he wasn’t concerned about a coronavirus outbreak at the site given the testing system. “I probably need to be more worried about trench foot,” he said while sheltering from a downpour.Attendees also weren’t worried about catching Covid. Harry Jackson, 26, a theater technician, said that the only anxiety he’d had around the festival was doing the pre-event test. “I sat there staring at it for half an hour going, ‘Please be negative, please be negative, I don’t want to miss this,’” he said. “I consider Download my home,” he added. “It’s my family.”The organizers of Britain’s other festivals say they can only be sure that their events will go ahead this summer if the government creates an insurance initiative to guarantee their costs if the country delays its reopening again. Austria and Germany have adopted such programs, but the British government has not, despite pressure from politicians.Last month, the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, a cross-party group of lawmakers, said in a report on festivals that there would be a hole in the “lives of music lovers and makers alike” this summer as a “direct result of the government’s refusal to back insurance for the sector.”At least one festival has found a creative solution. Last month, Brainchild — a three-day event for up-and-coming musicians and theater makers that is planned for the beginning of August — asked its 2,500 attendees to agree to be refunded only half their ticket price if the event were canceled so the organizers could start paying acts and equipment suppliers.Only 106 people declined to lose the £60, Marina Blake, the festival’s creative director, said in a telephone interview. “It was extraordinary,” she said. “It shows people are so desperate to have something to look forward to,” she added, noting that such an initiative was probably not viable for large events.Ben Barlow, the frontman for Neck Deep, said during the band’s set that he was glad to be able to perform again.Katja Ogrin/Getty ImagesAt Download, the relief to be back at a festival was palpable. During the pop-punk act Neck Deep’s set, the singer Ben Barlow said, “This is our first gig in two years, and I never want to wait that long again.”“If we’re the lab rats, let’s give them a good experiment,” he added, encouraging the heaving crowd to mosh. Barlow looked close to tears several times during the set.On Saturday morning, the scene at Donnington Park was typical for a British music festival. Music fans wandered around bleary-eyed, and two interviewees said they’d decided to skip the on-site showers and instead freshen up with a combination of wet wipes and hand sanitizer.At 11:30 a.m. James Carroll, 23, stood by a stage, waiting for the day’s music to start. He was hurting a bit from moshing the day before, he said, but it was nothing that a few cans of beer couldn’t sort out. “Day two, straight back on it,” he said.Soon, a band called Lotus Eater took to the stage, its singer screaming into a microphone as his band created a cacophony behind him.Immediately, the mosh pit began again. There were no men in banana costumes this time, but soon there was someone dressed as a Tyrannosaurus rex. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Foo Fighters Bring Rock Back to Madison Square Garden

      by

      Over the weekend, Foo Fighters played Madison Square Garden, the first full-capacity concert in a New York arena since March of 2020.The house lights inside Madison Square Garden went down Sunday night, and the thousands of fans, packed like sardines in their seats, stood as if on cue. As they roared their approval, bouncing in place on the balls of their feet, the ground began to tremble. Cellphone flash lights illuminated the darkness.The sound of a keyboard echoed through the rafters. Dave Grohl, the Foo Fighters’ frontman, appeared on the stage.“It’s times like these, you learn to live again,” Grohl sang.The lyrics had seldom felt so on point.After many difficult months of illness, death, hardship and pain, and shifting limits on how many people could gather, especially indoors, arena rock returned to New York City just over a year after the city was the center of the outbreak. It was the Garden’s first concert in more than 460 days, and it drew a full-capacity crowd that was asked to show proof of vaccination to enter. Inside, people grooved, tightly packed, with few masks visible.Jaclyn Mitgang, left, and Heather Morris, at the Garden’s first concert since the pandemic. “This is a book end to what we have gone through for a year and a half,” Morris said.Nathan Bajar for The New York Times“This is a book end to what we have gone through for a year and a half,” said Heather Morris, 47, of Chicago. “We’ve survived it. We’re going forward.”The return of concerts to the garden comes at an in-between moment when it comes to the pandemic in the United States. As more and more Americans have become vaccinated against the coronavirus, deaths from Covid have fallen off considerably. But only about two-thirds of adults in the United States have gotten at least one dose of the vaccine, and there are still parts of the country where vaccinations lag.But after a year of being stuck inside, people have been eager to restart their hobbies and routines and to connect with one another again. Last week, both New York and California, where more than 70 percent of adults have received at least one dose of the vaccine, lifted virtually all coronavirus restrictions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said fully vaccinated people can resume activities without wearing a mask. The rapidly shifting rules allowed the Foo Fighters concert to go forward.Fans were asked to show proof of vaccination to enter the arena.Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesOn Sunday, a concert attendee would have had to squint to see signs of the pandemic persisting. In many ways, the evening felt like prepandemic times.In a sea of thousands, only a few patrons here or there wore face coverings. Thousands of vaccinated people, their faces bare, belted out the lyrics to well-known songs, sending aerosols flying through the air. No one seemed concerned.Fans were packed together. A sudden arm gesture could send a beer flying. Strangers hugged and high-fived. They bumped into each other in the busy concourse. They punched the air, swung their hair and danced, twisting and swaying at their seats in a state of high-decibel music-induced bliss.It was “just epic,” said Rachael Cain, 51, who was among the first people to arrive at the Garden on Sunday afternoon.But there were subtle reminders of the pandemic everywhere. Hand sanitizer pumps were clamped to the walls, and wipes could be found near any napkin dispenser. Ticketing was digital and concession buying appeared mostly cashless.At the entrances, staff members checked people’s vaccine cards with varying levels of scrutiny. Some asked for identification to match with proof of inoculation, in a slow-moving process. Other checkers simply waved people through as they flashed their passes while walking by. A small anti-vaccine protest on the sidewalk outside drew little attention.Several patrons said that the vaccine requirement helped them feel safe about returning to such a big indoor gathering.“I was expecting it to be a little longer before I came to a concert again,” said Nick Snow, 29, who was among the few fans who wore a mask while inside the arena. “The precautions with the vaccinated only, they help.”Grohl himself took care to acknowledge from the stage the unique milestone he and his band were participating in. At various points during the roughly three-hour show, he asked the crowd rhetorically if they had missed music, and mused about how good it felt to be around thousands of people while playing rock songs. The band sang “My Hero” as a tribute to those who had made the concert possible. And in a surprise cameo to celebrate the occasion, the band brought out the comedian Dave Chappelle to sing a cover of Radiohead’s “Creep.”Dave Chappelle made a surprise appearance, singing Radiohead’s “Creep.”Kevin Mazur/Getty Images“Welcome back, New York City!” Chappelle yelled as he exited the stage.The show represented the return of some old, familiar comforts that music lovers may not soon take for granted again. There was call and response; people gesturing wildly to no one in particular; fans screaming the lyrics to songs only to realize their voices were drowned out by the music; and an entire floor section jumping up and down as one wave.“I would get vaccinated 10 times over just to see a live show like this with people,” said Rich Casey, 53, of Massachusetts.Having reached the ground floor of the venue and the echoey plaza that leads to the street, Foo Fighters fans seeking one last communal experience for the night sent up a chant, reveling again in one of the band’s most well-known songs, “Best of You.”OhhhhhhOhhhhhh.Ohhhhhh.Ohhhhhh.Then they erupted in one final cheer and walked out into the New York night. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Hit Hard by Pandemic, Philadelphia Orchestra and Kimmel Center to Merge

      by

      By joining forces, the two institutions hope to bounce back from the severe losses brought by the coronavirus.The pandemic forced many American arts organizations to resort to mass layoffs and deep pay cuts as ticket sales vanished for more than a year.Now one of the nation’s most prominent ensembles, the Philadelphia Orchestra, is trying another tack as it seeks to recover from the crisis: It announced plans Thursday to merge with its landlord, the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts.“We knew we needed a big move,” said Matías Tarnopolsky, the president and chief executive of the orchestra, who is set to lead the new organization, which will be called the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Kimmel Center, Inc. “The only way forward is collaboration.”Facing severe shortfalls, cultural groups across the country are looking for ways to streamline operations and establish new sources of revenue. American orchestras, including Philadelphia’s, are particularly vulnerable after years of rising costs.The Philadelphia Orchestra, one of the nation’s best ensembles, has struggled financially. Its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, led them in 2017 at Carnegie Hall.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesThe orchestra and the Kimmel Center are betting that by pooling resources, they can better navigate the financial and artistic challenges of the post-pandemic era.The orchestra has won accolades for its artistry under the music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who also serves in that role at the Metropolitan Opera, but it has long struggled financially. After a year of mostly streaming concerts, the orchestra will begin a new season in October with a performance by the cellist Yo-Yo Ma.The merger will give the orchestra, which has tried for years to rebuild after declaring bankruptcy a decade ago, a leading spot at one of the country’s largest performing arts centers, and allow it to save on rent. (When the orchestra filed for bankruptcy in 2011, it cited the high cost of rent at the Kimmel Center, which then totaled $2.5 million a year, as contributing to its woes; it subsequently got a rent reduction.)The arrangement will allow the Kimmel Center, which is almost entirely dependent on ticket sales, the added support of the orchestra’s $266 million endowment. That endowment, which was bolstered by a $50 million gift in 2019, is now among the largest for an American orchestra.Both institutions have made painful cuts as they seek to recover from the pandemic. The orchestra lost about $26 million in ticket sales and performance fees after canceling more than 200 concerts. The orchestra’s leaders took pay cuts and its musicians agreed to reduce compensation temporarily by 25 percent.The Kimmel Center, which depends heavily on touring artists, Broadway shows and appearances by authors and public intellectuals, canceled more than 1,100 events and lost more than $42 million in ticket revenue. The center furloughed many of its 126 employees and led an emergency campaign to raise $10 million.The pandemic accelerated conversations about a possible merger, said Anne Ewers, the president and chief executive of the Kimmel Center, who initiated talks with Tarnopolsky last fall.“When the pandemic hit, every single earned revenue line was gone,” Ewers said. “I realized that our philanthropic base was not as deep and as broad as it needed to be.”The orchestra has called Verizon Hall, one of three venues at the Kimmel Center, its home since the center’s opening in 2001, playing more than 100 concerts a year there.But behind the scenes, the orchestra and the Kimmel Center sometimes clashed over schedules and programming choices, Tarnopolsky said.By merging with the Kimmel Center, he said, the orchestra would be able to expand its offerings, hosting classical music festivals, collaborating with Broadway performers and jazz artists, and taking part in outreach events and other live offerings.“It’s about seizing those opportunities rather than watching them go by,” Tarnopolsky said.The orchestra has balanced its budget in recent years as it has worked to recover from a financial crisis that drove it into bankruptcy in 2011. Despite cutting its expenses in bankruptcy, rebuilding has not been easy: In 2016, its musicians held a brief strike that began on the night of the orchestra’s season-opening gala.The pandemic has led many arts organizations to reconsider questions of structure and management, and some have come to see benefits in joining together during a time of uncertainty. The San Francisco Conservatory of Music last fall acquired Opus 3 Artists, a leading agency that was struggling with steep losses as venues around the world shut down.Ewers said she hoped the merger in Philadelphia would serve as a model for other institutions facing economic pressures.“Many people tell us there needs to be more of this kind of collaborative effort,” she said. “I’m hoping that we inspire that.” More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Renovating Its Hall, New York Philharmonic Plans a Roving Season

      by

      With David Geffen Hall under construction, the orchestra will spend most of 2021-22 at two other Lincoln Center venues.For any major music ensemble, planning a season of concerts as a pandemic stretches on is daunting. For the New York Philharmonic, there is an added challenge: The orchestra’s home, David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, is in the midst of a $550 million renovation.That will leave the orchestra roving for the next year as it tries to recover from the pandemic, which resulted in the cancellation of its 2020-21 season and the loss of more than $21 million in ticket revenue, forcing painful budget cuts.But the Philharmonic won’t travel too far. On Tuesday, it announced its 2021-22 season: a slate of about 80 concerts, compared to 120 in a normal year, spent mostly at two other Lincoln Center venues, Alice Tully Hall and the Rose Theater, with four forays to Carnegie Hall and a holiday run of “Messiah” at Riverside Church.“People are starved for live entertainment,” Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said in an interview. “There may be some slight hesitancy at the beginning, but I think people are going to come flocking back.”The season opens Sept. 17 with the pianist Daniil Trifonov playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 at Tully. Other prominent artists on the schedule include the pianists Yuja Wang and Leif Ove Andsnes; the violinists Hilary Hahn and Joshua Bell; the saxophonist Branford Marsalis, who will play a concerto by John Adams; and the conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who will lead Schumann’s four symphonies and two world premieres over two weeks in March. The Philharmonic’s principal clarinetist, Anthony McGill, will be featured in Anthony Davis’s “You Have the Right to Remain Silent.”Soloists appearing for the first time with the orchestra include the cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, who will play Dvorak’s concerto and also participate in a Young People’s Concert; the soprano Golda Schultz; the pianist Beatrice Rana; and the conductors Jeannette Sorrell and Dalia Stasevska.In its fourth year with the conductor Jaap van Zweden as its music director, the Philharmonic will also premiere a variety of works, including by the American composers Joan Tower and Sarah Kirkland Snider. Those two premieres are part of Project 19, a multiyear initiative to commission works from 19 female composers to honor the centenary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which barred the states from denying women the right to vote.A few of the concerts will be at an unusual time: The orchestra will present three Sunday matinees, the first time it has done that since the 1960s, in an effort to broaden its audience.The Philharmonic has been at the center of the recent revival of the arts in New York. The orchestra appeared at the Shed in April, its first indoor concert in 13 months. And it performed at Bryant Park last week, the first time its musicians had played together without masks since the start of the pandemic.The orchestra is taking precautions in its planning to ease fears about the virus. There will be no intermissions at least through December, to prevent crowds from gathering. Borda said the orchestra would follow guidance from the state and federal authorities in deciding other public health measures, like requiring masks or proof of vaccination.“What it will be like in September is anybody’s guess,” Borda said. “We have to remain flexible.”The Philharmonic had to make a series of painful cuts as more than 100 of its concerts were canceled. The orchestra reduced its administrative staff by about 40 percent, largely through layoffs. In December, its musicians agreed to a four-year contract that included a 25 percent cut to the players’ base pay through August 2023, with compensation gradually increasing after that, though remaining below prepandemic levels.There were some bright spots amid the turmoil. Donations increased 11 percent last year, totaling $31.5 million. The orchestra also worked to deepen its connections with city residents through two series of Bandwagon concerts, bringing first a pickup truck and then a 20-foot shipping container with a foldout stage to neighborhoods across the city, and giving local artists an opportunity to perform.Several of the organizations that took part in Bandwagon concerts, including National Black Theater, a nonprofit arts group in Harlem, and El Puente, a social justice organization in Brooklyn, will be featured in the 2021-22 season. Those collaborations will be organized by Anthony Roth Costanzo, a countertenor who produced the Bandwagon series and is also the orchestra’s artist-in-residence next season; he has also helped prepare a two-week festival focusing on identity, “Authentic Selves: The Beauty Within.”The coming season will be the first time in recent decades that the orchestra has not had access to its own hall. Its administration and Lincoln Center decided to use the shutdown to accelerate the renovation of Geffen Hall, which is set to reopen in the fall of 2022, a year and a half earlier than planned. The hall will feature state-of-the-art acoustics and a more intimate feel, with seats that wrap around the stage.Borda said much of the coming season would be devoted to preparing for the orchestra’s return to Geffen.“This hall provides an opportunity to transform ourselves,” she said, “but also to paint on an even larger palette.” More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      In Covid’s Early Days, Her Loss Resonated. She Hopes Her Hope Does, Too.

      by

      LOS ANGELES — Amanda Kloots is not surprised that she’s famous.You don’t move to New York from Ohio at 18, go to countless thanks-but-no-thanks auditions, dust yourself off again and again, or practice tap dance nightly on your small apartment bathroom floor in case a spot in the ensemble for “42nd Street” or the Rockettes opens because you think you are best suited to a life of quiet anonymity. More

    • 113 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      Bruised by the Pandemic, Carnegie Hall Plans a Comeback

      by

      New York’s premier concert hall hopes a star-studded season will draw virus-wary fans. But there’s still uncertainty.For 15 months, Carnegie Hall’s doors have been closed to the public by the coronavirus pandemic. Hundreds of performances have been canceled at the hall — one of the world’s most renowned concert spaces — and millions of dollars in ticket sales lost. Facing a financial crisis, Carnegie reduced its staff by nearly half and dipped into its endowment to survive.Now, as New York’s arts scene stirs tentatively to life, the city’s premier concert hall is planning a comeback. On Tuesday, Carnegie announced its 2021-22 season, a mix of familiar works and experimental music that its leaders hope will persuade virus-wary fans to return.“People are desperate to get back to experiencing live culture again,” Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said in an interview. “That is going to be something very powerful.”The new season, which begins in October, features artists as varied as the jazz musician Jon Batiste, who, like the violinist Leonidas Kavakos, will curate a series of Perspectives concerts; the opera stars Renée Fleming and Jonas Kaufmann; and the conductor Valery Gergiev, who will appear with both the Vienna Philharmonic and the Mariinsky Orchestra.The New York Philharmonic, whose Lincoln Center home is being renovated next season, will appear four times. The conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin will also play Carnegie four times — twice with the Philadelphia Orchestra and twice with the Met Orchestra — and Andris Nelsons will lead the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a concert performance of Berg’s opera “Wozzeck.”In addition to a host of New York and world premieres, Carnegie will turn the focus to performers historically underrepresented on its stages — devoting a festival, for example, to Afrofuturism, the genre that blends science fiction and fantasy with elements of Black history and culture.With vaccines now widely available in the United States and Europe, and infections rapidly falling, many cities have announced plans to reopen cultural venues. New York has been among the most ambitious, with a mega-concert in Central Park planned for this summer and Broadway shows set to resume in September.It remains to be seen whether audiences will flock to Carnegie and other venues as they did before the pandemic. Mr. Gillinson, citing a total anticipated budget deficit of up to $14 million for the 2019-20 and 2020-21 seasons, said Carnegie is bracing for uncertainty.“The risk financially is so huge because nobody knows how audiences will come back here,” he said. “The fact is, you don’t know the balance between the desire to attend concerts and culture and re-engage, and the worries.”The upcoming season will be more modest than usual: about 90 concerts, compared with a typical slate of 150, though more may be added depending on the state of the pandemic. With the virus still raging in many parts of the world and variants circulating, Carnegie said it planned to require concertgoers to show proof of vaccination. It has not yet decided whether to mandate masks inside its three spaces.The hall’s troubles began in March 2020, when the coronavirus forced the closure of New York’s major cultural institutions. Carnegie canceled the remainder of its season and the entire following one as well; it has been the longest closure in the hall’s 130-year history.With live performances suspended, Carnegie, a nonprofit, offered streaming performances and online classes to stay connected to its audiences. But neither provided a steady source of revenue.Mr. Gillinson began slashing the budget, imposing pay cuts of up to 10 percent for many employees and furloughing many workers. In total, 160 positions were cut, leaving 190 people on staff. (The hall plans to rehire some staff to work at concerts this fall, though the total will be less than before the pandemic.)Carnegie weathered other storms during the past year, including its board chairman, the billionaire philanthropist Robert F. Smith, admitting to taking part in a 15-year scheme to hide more than $200 million in income and evade taxes. The hall and its board stood by Mr. Smith, who remains its chairman.To help ease its financial woes, Carnegie’s board approved a plan to increase the amount the hall takes each year from its endowment, which totaled $313.1 million last year, to 6 percent, up from 5 percent. But it still likely faces years of economic pressures. The operating budget for the coming season hovers around $90 million, about 13 percent below its prepandemic level. The hall is still waiting to hear whether it will receive a $10 million Shuttered Venue Operators Grant, part of an aid program created by Congress last year to help struggling live-event businesses.Despite the headwinds, Mr. Gillinson said he was confident Carnegie and other beloved cultural institutions in New York would bounce back.“The big organizations have had a terrible hit, but on the other hand, they’re not going to cease to exist,” he said. “I don’t have any doubts whatsoever that New York will remain one of the greatest magnets for talent in the world.” More