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      Gustavo Dudamel: A Maestro at a Crossroads

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      LOS ANGELES — Gustavo Dudamel paused mid-Rachmaninoff the other morning and flashed a mischievous smile at the 92 players of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.“This part,” he said as they rehearsed at Walt Disney Concert Hall, “is like that aunt who kisses you too much.” He puckered his lips loudly three times. “My dears,” he said, looking toward the violins, “let’s try it again.”He was back on the same podium where, just two days earlier, he had broken the news to the musicians, in a shaky and uncertain voice, that he would leave his post as their music and artistic director in 2026 to take on the same job at the New York Philharmonic. It was, he said, one of the hardest decisions of his life. But now he was back in his element, making music, swaying his hips and throwing his fist into the air, and imploring the players to “liberate every bit of gravity” from their playing — “to levitate.”Dudamel, 42, the rare maestro whose fame transcends classical music, finds himself at a crossroads: not only planning to move to a new orchestra, but also into a new phase of his career. Even as his curls have started to gray, he has never quite shed the image of a wunderkind, who at the age of 12 led his first orchestra in Venezuela, where he was born, and at 26 landed the job in Los Angeles.Dudamel backstage on Thursday at his first performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic since he announced his move to New York.Philip Cheung for The New York Times“You cannot imagine how I have changed in these last years,” he said in an interview. “I’m not a young conductor anymore.”As Dudamel prepares to take the podium in New York, he is working to establish himself as a seasoned interpreter of the repertory — a maestro fluent in the symphonies of Mahler and Beethoven as well as less common fare, like a ballet by Ginastera. And he wants to continue to bring works by living composers into the mainstream.He is also eager to expand his legacy as a social activist — he was trained in El Sistema, the Venezuelan program that teaches music to children, many of them from poor families — from his coming platform in New York.“I see New York as a capital of the world, where I can send a message to the world that music is an important element of life — not only entertainment, but transformational,” he said.Dudamel has a devoted following in New York, where he was so admired that the Philharmonic decided to forgo a typical search for a music director, focusing its efforts instead on pursuing Dudamel like a “heat-seeking missile,” said Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s president and chief executive. Players admire his passion and humility; unlike most conductors, he in known for abstaining from solo bows after performances, instead preferring to gesture to highlight the contributions of the members of the orchestra.The film composer John Williams, a friend and mentor, described Dudamel as a “blessing to music” and predicted that he would be a transformative force in New York.“I can’t think of another conductor, man or woman, that I know that derives more sheer joy from music,” he said. “I don’t think you could have a better leader — a more positive person — to admit freely all kinds of things into our world, and at the same time maintain all the best traditions.”Dudamel stepping onto the stage of Walt Disney Concert Hall.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesSome have likened Dudamel to earlier titans like Leonard Bernstein, a predecessor at the New York Philharmonic, speaking of his potential to become a larger-than-life figure and to elevate the orchestra’s standing in American cultural life. Others question whether he is the product of hype. It is a lot of pressure.“Of course we will have challenges,” he said. “That is part of the beauty. Every day that you are in front of an orchestra, that you’re in front of a score of music, it’s a new challenge.”“To be afraid or worried about the risk of making mistakes is not in my head,” he added. “Never! Because I think risk is a part of life.”GUSTAVO ADOLFO DUDAMEL RAMÍREZ was born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, on Jan. 26, 1981, the son of Oscar Dudamel Vásquez, a trombonist who played in a salsa band, and Solange Ramírez Viloria, a voice teacher. His arms were too short to play trombone like his father, so he took up the violin.His grandparents initially tried to discourage his studies, worried about having another musician in the family.“One time my husband told me, ‘Can you imagine if our grandson is a violinist? Who will be able to stand all the noise in the house?’” Engracia Vásquez de Dudamel, his grandmother, recalled in an interview with the Spanish-language newspaper Hoy in 2009.But the family relented, and Gustavo enrolled in El Sistema, where his talents as a conductor were soon recognized by José Antonio Abreu, the celebrated Venezuelan educator who had founded what became El Sistema in 1975.Abreu took on Dudamel as a pupil, teaching him rhythm and phrasing, and honing his technique as a conductor, telling him to feel sound in his hands the way a flying bird feels air. He appointed Dudamel to lead the national youth orchestra and inculcated in him the zeal of an evangelist, enlisting him in his effort to spread the “social mission of art.”Dudamel said that he wants to “send a message to the world that music is an important element of life — not only entertainment, but transformational.”Philip Cheung for The New York TimesIn 2004, Dudamel became a sensation after he won the first Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition in Bamberg, Germany. One of the jurors in the competition, the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen (then the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic) phoned Borda (then the orchestra’s president) and told her he had just seen “a real conducting animal.”She invited Dudamel to make his American debut at the Hollywood Bowl the following year, in a program of works by Tchaikovsky and the Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas.“In his U.S. debut Tuesday night, a 24-year-old conductor from Venezuela with curly hair, long sideburns and a baby face accomplished something increasingly rare and difficult,” the Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed wrote of that performance. “He got a normally restive audience’s full, immediate and rapt attention. And he kept it.”Dudamel’s New York Philharmonic debut, in 2007, was just as memorable — especially after he broke a baton once used by Bernstein, which the orchestra had lent him, near the end of the concert, in the last few measures of Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5. (The baton, still in two pieces, remains in the Philharmonic’s archives.)At his New York Philharmonic debut in 2007, Dudamel was given one of Leonard Bernstein’s batons. It broke during the last few measures of Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5. Philharmonic ArchivesWhen he began his tenure in Los Angeles, in 2009, Dudamel quickly became a celebrity, forging ties with Hollywood and capturing the imagination of audiences who were unaccustomed to classical music.He set out to develop the ensemble’s sound; he has hired 42 of its musicians, about 40 percent of the orchestra. And he sought to continue Abreu’s mission, creating the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, known as YOLA, which was modeled on El Sistema.During his directorship, the Philharmonic continued to rethink the role of a modern orchestra, making the promotion of new music a priority. The ensemble, one of the most financially secure in the United States thanks to the box office revenues it gets from the Hollywood Bowl, has commissioned more than 200 works during Dudamel’s time there and brought in pop and jazz stars, helping cement its reputation for innovation.The composer John Adams, a frequent collaborator, said that Dudamel arrived in Los Angeles a “babe in the woods when it came to contemporary repertoire.”“Then he discovered he liked it,” Adams said. “And now he’s not only a wonderful interpreter, but just a wonderful champion.”As part of his focus on new music, Dudamel has sought to elevate composers from Latin America, often lamenting that the region’s composers are barely known compared to its writers and visual artists.The Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz said that Dudamel had been crucial in promoting her music, adding that it could be difficult for female composers from Latin America to gain recognition. She recalled a 2017 concert at which he featured one of her compositions before a performance by the Mexican pop singer Natalia Lafourcade, greatly expanding the audience for her music.“He’s an extremely generous person,” she said. “I’ve never felt I was with this infamous conductor where always there is some huge distance. I’ve always felt very, very close.”In 2021, Dudamel became the music director of the Paris Opera, looking to expand his repertory and build more ties to Europe, where he has been a welcome guest at prestigious orchestras including the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics. (His wife, the Spanish actress and filmmaker María Valverde, is from Madrid, and the couple maintain a home there.)Dudamel is known for forgoing solo bows, often preferring to highlight the contributions of the orchestra. Philip Cheung for The New York TimesDudamel’s ties to Venezuelan leaders, whose support was vital for El Sistema, have drawn scrutiny. He conducted at the funeral of President Hugo Chávez, and for years he resisted criticizing the government, even as a series of social and economic crises worsened in the country.In “¡Viva Maestro!,” a documentary about Dudamel released last year, he spoke about the pressure he faced, not wanting to harm El Sistema. “I’m a leader of a program,” he said. “It’s not Gustavo only. It’s thousands of children, millions of young people.”After a young El Sistema-trained viola player was killed during a street protest in 2017, Dudamel decided to speak out. “It was very difficult to see my people fighting, to see my people suffering and getting to a very violent moment,” he explained in the documentary.He issued a statement that said “enough is enough” and wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times, criticizing a government plan to rewrite the constitution. President Nicolás Maduro responded by canceling overseas tours by Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, which he has led since 1999. Many players in that group, which had been a source of national pride, left the country. And Dudamel, who had last visited Venezuela in 2017, felt unable to return, even for the funeral of Abreu, his mentor, who died the following year. Instead he arranged a memorial concert in Santiago, Chile.Dudamel finally returned to Venezuela a few months ago, shortly after touring with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Boston, New York and Mexico.As he pondered his next steps, he went to Barquisimeto to reconnect with what he described as “the genesis of my life as a musician.” He caught up with friends and family. He met with students and teachers in El Sistema. And he visited Abreu’s home, sitting in his studio and looking through his books.Dudamel said that his teacher, whom he calls “maestro” and speaks of as a father, remained “in my soul and in my brain.” He contemplated what Abreu would have made of his move to New York.“I was part of a vision — of his vision,” he said. “He saw me when I was a 9-year-old boy in Barquisimeto. I think he saw this. He saw me being in New York with the New York Philharmonic. I’m sure of that.”He added: “I can see him. I can feel him. And I believe he is happy. He’s very happy.”Adam Nagourney contributed reporting from Los Angeles, and Joshua Barone from New York. More

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      A Decidedly French “Hamlet” Returns to Paris

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      Starting in March, Ambroise Thomas’s version of the Shakespearean tragedy will be revived at the Opéra Bastille for the first time since 1938.Ambroise Thomas’s “Hamlet” had all the elements to become a blockbuster at the Paris Opera in the 19th century. With a gripping plot that unfolds over five acts, a leading baritone in the title role and innovative orchestration deploying newly invented instruments, the work had an enduring hold at the box office after its 1868 premiere.Like so many “grands opéras” that were born and bred for the company, “Hamlet” fell out of repertoire around the turn of the 20th century. Only since the 1980s has the work received a revival on stages worldwide. From March 11 to April 9, Thomas’s Shakespearean adaptation will return to the Paris Opera for the first time since 1938, in a new production directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski and starring Ludovic Tézier at the Opéra Bastille (a pre-opening for viewers under 28 takes place on March 8. Thomas Hengelbrock conducts).The company’s general director, Alexander Neef, has made it a goal to create a more specific identity for the Paris Opera by commissioning research and programming the French grand opera that once flourished there. Having experienced and admired a production of “Hamlet” at the Metropolitan Opera some 20 years ago, Mr. Neef said that the work “came up rather naturally” after his appointment.Mr. Tézier, whom he considers “not only the leading French baritone but maybe the leading baritone in his repertoire,” was also a natural choice. The singer, who is particularly coveted in the music of Verdi, in turn suggested Mr. Warlikowski as director following their collaboration on a 2017 production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos” at Opéra Bastille.For both lead performer and director, the production provides an opportunity to deepen their interpretation of a work that has played an important role in their respective careers. Mr. Tézier made debuts in both Toulouse, France, and Turin, Italy, in the title of role of Thomas’s “Hamlet” about two decades ago, while Mr. Warlikowski staged the original play by Shakespeare in Avignon, France in 2000 (he had first learned the drama as an apprentice of the late director Peter Brook in Paris).The director Krzysztof Warlikowski, who staged the original play by Shakespeare in 2000 in Avignon, France. “For me, the essential thing that clinches the drama is of course the apparition of the specter,” he said.Louisa Marie Summer for The New York TimesThis operatic version of “Hamlet” takes an unexpected turn before the curtain falls: The protagonist survives and is crowned king. The liberties taken by Thomas’s librettists, Michel Carré and Jules Barbier, met with criticism after the premiere; a Covent Garden version of the opera first mounted in 1869 restores the work’s original, more tragic ending.For Mr. Warlikowski, Thomas’s protagonist shares a great deal in common with the mythological figure of Orestes. “He also rebels against hypocrisy and the ills of this world,” he explained on a video call.The director will also hone in on the scenes in which the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears. “For me, the essential thing that clinches the drama is of course the apparition of the specter,” he said.Mr. Tézier noted that Thomas deployed some of his most dramatically effective music for the ghost by knowing how to pare down the orchestra. The baritone drew a parallel to another Shakespearean opera, Verdi’s “Macbeth,” and the title character’s hallucination of a dagger.“Thomas creates an atmosphere that is favorable to the text and the emotion of the moment,” he said by phone.The composer was exploring orchestral colors with new instruments by the musician and inventor Adolphe Sax at the same time as the composer Hector Berlioz, who held Thomas in great esteem. For example, the second-act banquet scene in which Hamlet accuses Claudius of murdering his father features a solo for alto saxophone. Thomas also wrote for bass saxhorn and six-keyed trombones.An ardent defender of French music against Germanic influence (specifically that of Wagner), Thomas in 1877 stated that every country “should stay faithful to its style and maintain its distinct character,” rather than submit “to the caprices of the time.” In a sign of his patriotism, he volunteered for the National Guard during the Franco-Prussian War before assuming the directorship of the Paris Conservatory in 1871.His “Hamlet” has been noted for its specifically French qualities. In addition to mitigating tragedy by allowing the protagonist to survive and avenge the death of his father, romantic intrigue and sensuous instrumentation often set the tone.Ludovic Tézier has a long history with Thomas’s “Hamlet,” having made debuts in Toulouse, France, and Turin, Italy in the title role. He noted that the work “allows the audience to spend a night in the opera in a state of suspense and meditation.”Jeff Pachoud/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesParis was at the time the center of classical musical life, not just in Europe but worldwide. “Hamlet” premiered at Salle Le Peletier, the same theater that mounted such works as Giacomo Meyerbeer’s “Robert le Diable” and Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” before Palais Garnier opened in 1875.The baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure, who was at the height of his fame, was captured in portrait as Hamlet by none other than Manet. The role of Ophélie, whose fourth-act mad scene helped ensure the work’s popularity, has also been an important role for sopranos from Christina Nilsson to Mary Garden (the new production stars Lisette Oropesa and, starting in April, Brenda Rae).But by 1891, Wagner’s “music of the future” became something of a game changer. “Lohengrin,” “Die Walküre” and “Tannhäuser” remained in repertoire at the Paris Opera through 1910, while of Meyerbeer’s four major operas, only “Les Huguenots” persisted.Mr. Warlikowski expressed his wish to champion “Hamlet” by “provoking questions and creating a spiritual journey through this timeless story.”Mr. Tézier emphasized that the work was not “second-rate.”“It most of all allows the audience to spend a night in the opera in a state of suspense and meditation,” he said.He compared the infrequent programming of such neglected classics to the unpredictable sightings of the Loch Ness monster: “There is no real explanation. But with each appearance of the monster, you have to see it because it’s a rarity. From the beginning to the end, something really happens in the music.” More

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      The Shed Changes Leadership Structure

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      In the face of financial challenges, the arts institution is making adjustments: Alex Poots, its founding artistic director and chief executive, will now just focus on being artistic director.Having come into the world just a year before the coronavirus pandemic started, the Shed — an architecturally ambitious $475 million arts center in Hudson Yards — has weathered a bumpy beginning. In addition to sold-out performances (such as the recent play about Robert Moses starring Ralph Fiennes), the institution has had its share of financial struggles (28 of its 107 full-time workers were laid off in July 2020).Now, the Shed is making perhaps its biggest adjustment yet, announcing that Alex Poots, the founding artistic director and chief executive, will no longer be chief executive — but will continue to focus on the creative side of the institution as its artistic director.The change is effective immediately; Maryann Jordan, the Shed’s current president and chief operating officer, will handle day-to-day management in the interim.“It has become more and more clear to me that, to really take us on to the next chapter, I need to dedicate my entire time to the artistic direction of this organization,” Poots said in a telephone interview, adding that the change was his decision. “I see it as a positive step forward.”“I’m not going to say it’s not been a struggle, but we’ve gotten through it every time we’ve been confronted with challenges,” he added. “We’re very robust to have built the first arts center since Lincoln Center on an entirely new model with a completely new team.”More on the Coronavirus PandemicNew Subvariant: A new Omicron subvariant, known as XBB.1.5, is surging in the northeastern United States. Scientists say it remains rare in much of the world, but they expect it to spread quickly and globally.Travel: The European Union advised its 27 member nations to require negative Covid-19 tests for travelers boarding flights from China to the region, amid a surge in coronavirus cases in the country.Misinformation: As Covid cases and deaths rise in parts of the United States, misleading claims continue to spread, exasperating overburdened doctors and evading content moderators.Free at-Home Tests: With cases on the rise, the Biden administration restarted a program that has provided hundreds of millions of tests through the Postal Service.Jonathan M. Tisch, who in April succeeded the Shed’s founding chairman, Daniel L. Doctoroff, and who — with his wife, Lizzie — in 2019 donated $27.5 million toward the building’s construction, insisted this was not a demotion for Poots. “Alex has done a remarkable job over the past eight years of establishing the Shed as one of New York City’s — and probably the country’s — premiere cultural institutions,” Tisch said in an interview. “But it’s a tough job to be artistic director and C.E.O. at the same time. In conversations, Alex expressed interest in stepping back from being top executive to allowing his focus to center on ensuring our success.”Cultural institutions across the country have struggled mightily throughout the pandemic, primarily because of the lost revenue from closures and canceled performances. The Shed had the added hurdle of being just a year old, without the opportunity to build a loyal audience or donor base. In the wake of the pandemic, the Shed reduced its annual operating budget to $26.5 million from $46 million in 2020; its full-time staff is now 88.Last month, Poots sent an email to staff members saying that “in an uncertain economic environment,” the Shed would consolidate some of its artistic operations.“To align our program developments and resources, we are exploring ways of merging program areas into an interdisciplinary department that works within and between art forms in unified ways,” Poots said in the email, obtained by The New York Times. “After much deliberation, this new model includes the discontinuation of the visual arts Chief Curator position.”That curator position was held by Andria Hickey, who last February left Pace Gallery to join the Shed. She will be staying on, as curator at large.Having one chief curator “makes less sense now,” Poots said in the interview, “because we need expertise across a very wide range of disciplines.”The Shed has also had to adjust to the stepping back of Doctoroff, because of illness. Doctoroff led its successful fund-raising efforts and shepherded the institution into existence after he served as a deputy mayor under Michael R. Bloomberg, who himself supported the Shed.Other successes include the Fiennes play written by David Hare, “Straight Line Crazy”; the comedian Cecily Strong’s New York stage debut; and an ambitious three-part exhibition by the Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno. In addition, the Shed was among the first arts institutions to reopen after New York’s pandemic shutdown. And the institution managed to raise the remainder of its building costs — $135 million — during the coronavirus crisis, Doctoroff said in an interview.“We’re still learning,” Doctoroff said. “We’ve started to understand the model. I’m encouraged, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t normal start-up bumps and bruises. I think we will be incredibly successful over time.” More

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      in Movies

      One Indelible Scene: the Master Class in Ambiguity in ‘Tár’

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      When Lydia Tár arrives at the Juilliard School to teach a master class in conducting, we know her about as well as the students do. Like them, we are aware — about 20 minutes into the film that bears her name — of her fame and exalted status. They, of course, live in a fictional world in which her celebrity is established, to the extent that their own professional aspirations are shaped by her example. But now they have a chance to encounter her in person. It doesn’t go well.The Juilliard episode is the fourth extended scene in “Tár.” Like the ones that come before, it presents Lydia, a prominent conductor and composer, in a more-or-less public setting. In due time, we’ll peer in on her private life and ponder its relevance to her work and reputation, but for now we know her as a poised paragon of artistic accomplishment. We’ve watched her converse onstage with the writer Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker Festival, flirt with a fan at a reception and spar over lunch with a colleague who is also an important philanthropic patron. In between these lingered-over moments are snippets of cellphone video with anonymous text commentary. The source and meaning of these words and images are unclear, but they produce a tremor of paranoia. We’re not the only ones watching Lydia.Later, a deceptively edited video of the master class will go viral, contributing to the collapse of Lydia’s career as her abusive and dishonest behavior comes to light. The scene itself, among those who have seen “Tár,” has achieved a similar notoriety. It’s become one of the most talked-about parts of the film. The main conflict — an argument between Lydia and an earnest, anxious student named Max, played by Zethphan Smith-Gneist — seems to crystallize the movie’s interest in a familiar kind of clash, one that invites clichés about cancel culture, identity politics and white privilege.But like everything else in “Tár,” this episode of generational and ideological strife is more complicated than it might seem. And also simpler. Lydia, a one-time protégé of Leonard Bernstein, insists on the power of music to produce states of feeling and modes of experience that can’t easily be reduced to anything else. Todd Field, the director of “Tár,” has similar intuitions about film. He and Cate Blanchett, who as Lydia occupies nearly every frame of this 158-minute film, reverse the usual patterns of text and subtext. It’s not that there’s more to “Tár” than meets the eye and ear, with extra meanings hidden beneath the surface. Everything is right there on the screen and the soundtrack, arranged to confound and complicate your expectations.Lydia’s too. She strolls onto the classroom stage as eight young musicians, conducted by Max, are laying down what Lydia will call the “bed of strings” of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Ro.” Commanding the students’ attention effortlessly, Lydia is comfortable in her own charisma, confident in her opinions and intellect — to the point of hubris, but we don’t know that yet.The first thing she does is establish her dominance, preparing for Max’s thorough humiliation. He’s nervous, smiling, eager to oblige as she asks him why he chose Juilliard and then suggests that it might have been for the “brand.” Her tone is jocular, but her aggression is unmistakable. She ridicules his choice of music — we’ll come back to that — and pleads with him to consider exploring older, more canonical figures. Like Johann Sebastian Bach, for example.That name turns out to be a provocation. Max, who defines himself as a “BIPOC, pangender person,” says that Bach’s reputation for misogyny and his cisgender white male identity make it hard for him to appreciate the composer’s music. At this moment, the script edges toward an easy satire of the young. There are Gen Xers and baby boomers who have encountered — or at least heard stories about — members of succeeding generations who refuse to read the novels of Edith Wharton, see the films of Woody Allen or worship at the altar of Pablo Picasso. Their critique of the canon is often caricatured and misunderstood, and Max may embody the shibboleths of his elders as much as he does the attitude of his peers. His objection to Bach, in any case, serves as bait for the audience and for Lydia.She seizes on it as a teaching moment, and her response is itself a mini-course in the dos and don’ts of contemporary pedagogy. At times, she is bullying and sarcastic, haranguing the class about the fallacies of identity and failing or refusing to read the sensitivities in the room. But she also tries, in good faith, to reach the students where they are. Rather than revert to an argument from authority, browbeating Max with the eternal fact of Bach’s greatness, she invites him to sit next to her at the piano while she demonstrates the complexity and power of his music. In Bach, she says, the question — illustrated by a rising, unresolved musical phrase that replicates the intonation of an asking voice — is always more interesting than the answer.This is true of art in general. The puzzles, paradoxes and mysteries are what keep it alive. A lot of cultural criticism — by which I mean not only the considered responses of professionals but the immediate reactions of viewers — tacks in the opposite direction. We are eager to find an answer, assign a meaning, take a side. This scene seems to be urging us to do just that, to share Lydia’s irritation with Max, so shallow in his certainty and so ill-equipped to defend his position.We might also, in the moment and especially when we look back on it, squirm at Lydia’s self-satisfaction. She treats the master class as an occasion to perform her own brilliance, a temptation that can be fatal to the actual work of teaching, which finally rests on the canceling of ego. The vanity Lydia displays here, which is undeniably seductive, will contribute to her eventual undoing, and we may feel a premonition of that as we watch her pacing and preening, unaware of the puzzlement and indifference in the eyes of her spectators.Really, though, the scene — like the movie — is much weirder than that. It may seem that Field and Blanchett are collaborating in a topical tale of crime and punishment, which the debate about the relevance of Bach’s behavior to his canonical status recapitulates in miniature. Later, we will find Lydia arguing the other side of the question. At lunch in a Berlin restaurant, she reminds a retired maestro that the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once threw a woman down a flight of stairs. Her much older male colleague wonders what that has to do with Schopenhauer’s thought. The argument, as at Juilliard, reaches an impasse.As will any similar argument about Lydia herself, who is a formidably talented artist and also a narcissistic, amoral monster. But neither her greatness nor her awfulness is what is most interesting about her. Shortly after “Tár” opened, The Cut published an amusing, much-mocked article by Brooke LaMantia, who claimed to have watched the movie under the impression that Lydia Tár was a real person. Anthony Lane began his review in The New Yorker with the tongue-in-cheek implication that she just might be. More recently, Dan Kois wrote an essay in Slate suggesting that the last part of the film — the part that chronicles Lydia’s professional and personal undoing — takes place in her head, which is to say in a reality distinct from the literal, social world in which the rest of the movie is set.I don’t really buy that, any more than I believe that anyone really thought there was a real Lydia Tár, but Kois, Lane and LaMantia get at the essential uncanniness of “Tár,” which seems to call into question the nature of reality itself.And that brings us back to the unseen person whose presence is felt in that tense session: Anna Thorvaldsdottir, an actual living Icelandic composer who may have acquired new fame as Lydia Tár’s nemesis. The trashing of Thorvaldsdottir occupies much of the scene. Lydia sneers at her “au courant” trendiness, her “hot” good looks, a score notation that “sounds like René Redzepi’s recipe for reindeer.” A conductor performing her music is like a salesman “selling a car without an engine.” At one point Max meekly notes that Thorvaldsdottir conducted an earlier master class in the same course, and it seems possible that poor Max is an innocent victim in a high-powered music-world beef.Maybe it’s also the case that Lydia is a proxy in a similar war. Maybe Field can’t stand Anna Thorvaldsdottir, or maybe Hildur Gudnadottir, the Icelandic composer who scored “Tar,” feels that way. Iceland is a small country; contemporary classical music is a small world.I won’t speculate further, except to note that Thorvaldsdottir might function as what devotees of a different kind of movie like to call an Easter egg. Adam Gopnik is another, as are Leonard Bernstein and the Juilliard School itself. They appear as tokens, clues, nudges at the viewer who might not be paying the right kind of attention. They all belong to the world outside “Tár” — our world — and their presence inside the movie is more than merely allusive.Lydia Tár exists as if on a folded-over page in that world, where the correct answer to the perennially misunderstood question about the distinction between art and life is written in invisible ink. She’s as real as it gets. More

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      These Young Musicians Made an Album. Now It’s Nominated for a Grammy.

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      The debut album of the New York Youth Symphony, featuring some players who were in middle school, is up against recordings by some of the world’s top orchestras.When the Grammy nominations for best orchestral performance were announced last month, several of the usual suspects made the cut. There was the august Berlin Philharmonic, for an album conducted by the composer John Williams, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of its maestro, Gustavo Dudamel.But a newcomer also got a nod: the debut album of the New York Youth Symphony, a prestigious musical program for musicians between the ages of 12 and 22.The news that the ensemble’s album had earned a Grammy nomination astonished some of its young players.“I jumped in the air and I screamed, like I have never screamed before,” said Isabella Marquez, 18, who played violin on the album and watched a livestream of the Grammy nominations announcement in the kitchen of her Manhattan apartment with her mother and grandmother.“I never thought that I would be on an album, much less a Grammy-nominated album,” said Marquez.Clockwise from top left: Kennedy Plains, 22, a bassoonist, Joshua Choi, 18, a clarinetist and Iris Sung, 17, a violinist, who all played on the album, and Dmytro Tishyn, a 16-year-old bassoonist from Ukraine who played with the ensemble last month at a concert at Carnegie Hall.The recording might never have happened had it not been for the pandemic. When live performance was halted in 2020, and a Carnegie Hall concert was canceled, the ensemble decided to try to make an album instead.After the police murder of George Floyd and the social justice protests that spread throughout the nation that summer, the orchestra decided to rehearse and record works by Black composers, and selected pieces by Florence Price, Jessie Montgomery and Valerie Coleman. “We need to promote music that deals with these issues,” the orchestra’s music director, Michael Repper, said in an interview.The album, which is untitled, came together after six weeks of remote instruction followed by in person socially distant rehearsals and four days of recording sessions in which the musicians recorded the sections of the orchestra separately — all without a single Covid-19 infection, Repper noted. It was produced by Judith Sherman, a 13-time Grammy winner, who is nominated as classical producer of the year.Many of the young players were proud to have simply recorded an album during the pandemic. They were stunned when it was recognized by the Grammys, amid such illustrious competition — orchestras many of them have long revered.Joshua Choi, an 18-year-old principal clarinetist in the youth program, said he listened to the Berlin Philharmonic’s principal clarinetist, Andreas Ottensamer, whenever he needed motivation.After learning of the Grammy nomination, he couldn’t find the words to tell his parents, and stared in shock at his roommate, who plays oboe in the youth symphony, Choi said.“That’s pretty mind blowing,” Choi said. “I still can’t process that.”Michael Repper, the orchestra’s music director, during a rehearsal at Carnegie Hall.Todd Midler for The New York TimesIris Sung, the orchestra’s 17-year-old concertmaster, said she was in class at Tenafly High School in New Jersey when the nomination was announced. After her mother broke the news on her way home from school, she shared the nomination on Instagram, and as her phone flooded with congratulatory messages she thought back to recording it “in such a strange time.”“Just knowing that all that had paid off, I think was just something so special to me,” Sung said.The album features music by Price, including “Ethiopia’s Shadow in America” and her Piano Concerto in One Movement, featuring the pianist Michelle Cann; “Umoja: Anthem of Unity” by Coleman; and “Soul Force,” by Montgomery.Montgomery, 40, a composer whose works have been performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and the Minnesota Orchestra, and who is now the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s composer in residence, played violin with the New York Youth Symphony as a teenager.“It was the first time I had ever played youth symphonies, really, and it was a really important moment in my education,” Montgomery said. “That was my gateway into orchestral music.”For this recording, she held a video call with the young players, where she answered their questions on articulation and dynamics.When she was young, Montgomery said, orchestras rarely played music by Black composers. She said it was comforting to see that change.When the orchestra was unable to play one of its regular concerts at Carnegie Hall during the pandemic, it decided to make a recording. Todd Midler for The New York Times“Young people in the world right now are coming up in music at a time where Black art is centralized, and I think that is a very positive thing from the perspective of a young person,” Montgomery said.Kennedy Plains, a 22-year-old bassoonist and former member of the Youth Symphony, said that she was glad that ensembles were playing music by a more diverse roster of composers, and that she had appreciated the chance to work with Montgomery on a video call.“I hadn’t really got to play works by a lot of composers of color before,” Plains said, who learned to play the bassoon in middle school.Jessica Jeon, 14, a violinist, said that after learning of Price through the youth program, she gave a presentation about her to her seventh grade civil and human rights class.Price, who became the first Black woman to have her music played by a major American orchestra in 1933 when the Chicago Symphony performed her Symphony in E Minor, has been enjoying a renaissance in recent years, along with other composers of color.“They didn’t have the chance to become super well known such as Mozart or Beethoven because of their race or their gender or their sexuality,” said Jeon, who was 12 when the album was recorded. “Because of that, I felt inspired to try to introduce more people to them.”When the youth symphony returned to Carnegie Hall last month, it played with Dmytro Tishyn, a 16-year-old bassoonist from Ukraine who had fled after the Russian invasion.Repper, who will pass his music director role to Andrew Jinhong Kim in the 2023-2024 season, said that he hopes the album inspires more orchestras to play and record music by Black composers.“Orchestras don’t deserve any extra credit at this point for performing works by Black composers,” he said. “They don’t deserve any extra credit for performing works by women. It’s something that should have been done for decades.”The Grammy Awards will be presented on Feb. 5 in Los Angeles. More

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      The Artists We Lost in 2022, in Their Words

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      Music innovators who sang of coal country and “Great Balls of Fire.” An actress who made a signature role out of a devilish baker who meets a fiery end. The trailblazing heart of “In the Heat of the Night.”The creative people who died this year include many whose lives helped shape our own — through the art they made, and through the words they said. Here is a tribute to just some of them, in their own voices.Sidney Poitier.Sam Falk/The New York Times“Life offered no auditions for the many roles I had to play.”— Sidney Poitier, actor, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)“People in the past have done what we’re trying to do infinitely better. That’s why, for one’s own sanity, to keep one’s own sense of proportion, one must regularly go back to them.”— Peter Brook, director, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)Ronnie Spector.Art Zelin/Getty Images“Every song is a little piece of my life.”— Ronnie Spector, singer, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Yuriko.Jack Mitchell/Getty Images“Dance is living. Dance is, for me, it’s survival.”— Yuriko, dancer, born 1920 (Read the obituary.)Kirstie Alley.Vinnie Zuffante/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images“The question is, how do you create with what you have?”— Kirstie Alley, actress, born 1951 (Read the obituary.)Carmen Herrera.Todd Heisler/The New York Times“Every painting has been a fight between the painting and me. I tend to win. But you know how many paintings I threw in the garbage?”— Carmen Herrera, artist, born 1915 (Read the obituary.)“I decided that in every scene, you’re naked. If you’re dressed in a parka, what’s the difference if you’re dressed in nothing at all, if you’re exploring yourself?”— William Hurt, actor, born 1950 (Read the obituary.)Takeoff.Rich Fury/Getty Images For Global Citizen“You gotta have fun with a song, make somebody laugh. You gotta have character. A hard punchline can make you laugh, but you gotta know how to say it.”— Takeoff, rapper, born 1994 (Read the obituary.)“I love watching people get hit in the crotch. But only if they get back up.”— Bob Saget, comedian and actor, born 1956 (Read the obituary.)Olivia Newton-John.Las Vegas News Bureau/EPA, via Shutterstock“I do like to be alone at times, just to breathe.”— Olivia Newton-John, singer, born 1948 (Read the obituary.)“Movies are like clouds that sit over reality: If I do cinema well, I can uncover what is beneath, my friends, my allies, what I am, where I come from.”— Jean-Luc Godard, director, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Sam Gilliam.Anthony Barboza/Getty Images“The expressive act of making a mark and hanging it in space is always political.”— Sam Gilliam, artist, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“Everyone says that I was a role model. But I never thought of it when I was doing the music and when I was performing. I just wanted to make good music.”— Betty Davis, singer-songwriter, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)Nichelle Nichols.Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images“The next Einstein might have a Black face — and she’s female.”— Nichelle Nichols, actress, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)“If I could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, it would be with Albert Einstein at Panzanella.”— Judy Tenuta, comedian, born 1949 (Read the obituary.)“In time, writers learn that good fiction editors care as much about the story as the writer does, or almost, anyway. And you really often end up, the three of you — the writer, and the editor, and the story — working on this obdurate, beautiful thing, this brand-new creation.”— Roger Angell, writer and editor, born 1920 (Read the obituary.)Jennifer Bartlett.Susan Wood/Getty Images“I spent 30 years trying to convince people and myself that I was smart, that I was a good painter, that I was this or that. It’s not going to happen. The only person that it should happen for is me. This is what I was meant to do.”— Jennifer Bartlett, artist, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)Christine McVie.P. Floyd/Daily Express, via Hulton Archive and Getty Images“I didn’t aspire to be on the stage playing piano, let alone singing, because I never thought I had much of a voice. But my option was window-dresser or jump off the cliff and try this. So I jumped off the cliff.”— Christine McVie, musician and songwriter, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“Sometimes you have to put yourself on the edge. You go to the precipice and lean over it.”— Maria Ewing, opera singer, born 1950 (Read the obituary.)Taylor Hawkins.John Atashian/Getty Images“There’s so much in what I do that is beyond hard work — there’s luck and timing and just being in the right place at the right time with the right hairdo.”— Taylor Hawkins, drummer, born 1972 (Read the obituary.)“I was primarily an actress and not a pretty face.”— Angela Lansbury, actress, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)“I always try to improve upon what I’ve done. If something’s not working, I’ll change it to make it better. I’m an artist and a performer above all, and I don’t limit myself.”— Elza Soares, singer, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Leslie Jordan.Fred Prouser/Reuters“I’m always working, always. I got to keep the ship afloat.”— Leslie Jordan, actor, born 1955 (Read the obituary.)“The reward of the work has always been the work itself.”— David McCullough, historian and author, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“To me, sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who’d had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear.”— Barbara Ehrenreich, author, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)James Caan.Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Passion is such an important thing to have in life because it ends so soon, and my passion was to grow up with my son.”— James Caan, actor, born 1940 (Read the obituary.)Tina Ramirez.Michael Falco for The New York Times“Words are unnecessary when movement and feeling and expression can say it all.”— Tina Ramirez, dancer and founder of Ballet Hispánico, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Claes Oldenburg.Tony Evans/Getty Images“I haven’t done anything on the subject of flies. It’s the sort of thing that could interest me. Anything could interest me, actually.”— Claes Oldenburg, artist, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)“A skull is a beautiful thing.”— Lee Bontecou, artist, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)“I like to write strong characters who are no better or worse than anybody else on earth.”— Charles Fuller, playwright, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Ray Liotta.Aaron Rapoport/Corbis, via Getty Images“One review said I played a sleazy, heartless, cold person who you don’t really care about. Great! I love it; that’s what I played.”— Ray Liotta, actor, born around 1954 (Read the obituary.)Jerry Lee Lewis.Thomas S. England/Getty Images“There’s a difference between a phenomenon and a stylist. I’m a stylist, Elvis was the phenomenon, and don’t you forget it.”— Jerry Lee Lewis, musician, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)“All of us have something built into our ears that comes from the place where we grow up and where we were as children.”— George Crumb, composer, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Anne Heche. SGranitz/WireImage, via Getty Images“People wonder why I am so forthcoming with the truths that have happened in my life, and it’s because the lies that I have been surrounded with and the denial that I was raised in, for better or worse, bore a child of truth and love.”— Anne Heche, actress, born 1969 (Read the obituary.)Louie Anderson.Gary Null/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images“That’s my goal every night: Hopefully at some point in my act, you have forgotten whatever trouble you had when you came in.”— Louie Anderson, comedian and actor, born 1953 (Read the obituary.)“Adult human beings live with the certainty of grief, which deepens us and opens us to other people, who have been there, too.”— Peter Straub, author, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Ned Rorem.Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times“I believe in the importance of the unimportant — in the quotidian pathos.”— Ned Rorem, composer, born 1923 (Read the obituary.)Gilbert Gottfried.Fred Hermansky/NBC, via Getty Images“I don’t always mean to offend. I only sometimes mean to offend.”— Gilbert Gottfried, comedian, born 1955 (Read the obituary.)“Merce Cunningham is quoted somewhere as saying he wanted a company that danced the way he danced. I kept doing the same thing. And I began to wonder why I was insisting that they be as limited as I am.”— David Gordon, choreographer, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)Hilary Mantel.Ellie Smith for The New York Times“The universe is not limited by what I can imagine.”— Hilary Mantel, author, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)“Getting the right people with a shared vision is three-quarters of the battle.”— Anne Parsons, arts administrator, born 1957 (Read the obituary.)Paula Rego.Rita Barros/Getty Images“My paintings are stories, but they are not narratives, in that they have no past and future.”— Paula Rego, artist, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Javier Marías.Quim Llenas/Getty Images“When you are addressing your fellow citizens, you have to give some hope sometimes, even if you want to say that everything is terrible, that we are governed by a bunch of gangsters. In a novel, you can be much more pessimistic. You are more savage, you are wilder, you are freer, you think truer, you think better.”— Javier Marías, author, born 1951 (Read the obituary.)“Art is not blameless. Art can inflict harm.”— Richard Taruskin, musicologist, born 1945 (Read the obituary.)“I am a worker who labors with songs, doing in my own way what I know best, like any other Cuban worker. I am faithful to my reality, to my revolution and the way in which I have been brought up.”— Pablo Milanés, musician, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Peter Bogdanovich.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Success is very hard. Nobody prepares you for it. You think you’re infallible. You pretend you know more than you do.”— Peter Bogdanovich, director, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Loretta Lynn.CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images“I think the highest point of my career was in the late ’70s. I had No. 1 songs, a best-selling book and a movie made about my life. But I think it was also the lowest point for me as well. Life gets away from you so fast when you move fast.”— Loretta Lynn, singer-songwriter, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)Thich Nhat Hanh.Golding/Fairfax Media, via Getty Images“Many of us have been running all our lives. Practice stopping.”— Thich Nhat Hanh, monk and author, born 1926 (Read the obituary.)Photographs at top via CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images; Anthony Barboza/Getty Images; Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images; Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images. More

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      On Gay Street, Another Piece of NYC’s History Is Coming Down

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      Like other vulnerable landmarks across the city, the house at 14 Gay Street — which helped inspire the musical “Wonderful Town” — is being demolished.One Monday in late November, preservationists, politicians, neighbors and looky-loos gathered at dusk on Manhattan’s tiny Gay Street, a slim crescent in the heart of Greenwich Village, to protest the demolition of a nearly 200-year-old house there. The place in question, 14 Gay Street, is one of a clutch of six winsome but precarious early 19th-century buildings on Gay and Christopher Streets that were owned for decades by Celeste Martin, a singular character devoted to her properties and to the often eccentric cast of tenants she nurtured.Ms. Martin died in late 2018, at 94, with no will and no close relatives, so the city took over her holdings, selling 14 Gay Street and its siblings for about $9 million to a buyer who flipped them last April to Lionel Nazarian, a 37-year-old developer, for about $12 million. Since then, Mr. Nazarian has done foundation work that has destabilized 14 Gay Street and imperiled its neighbors, so the city has ordered its demolition, a slow, laborious process that began just before Thanksgiving.Chillingly, this scenario is one that is playing out all over the city, said Andrew Berman, the executive director of Village Preservation and the organizer of the November protest: As developers have been buying up vulnerable landmark properties, they are either allowing them to deteriorate or doing work that compromises public safety. In the last year, he said, more than a dozen such buildings have come down.Celeste Martin, who died in 2018 at 94, owned six historic properties on Gay and Christopher Streets, including 14 Gay Street. A singular character, she doted on her properties and her often eccentric tenants.Harry ZernikeMr. Berman blames the lack of oversight and coordination by city agencies. “As a result,” he said, “our neighborhoods are paying the price, our city’s history and heritage are paying the price, and the irreplaceable historic landmarks that distinguish New York from everywhere else are being lost.”The city, along with the Landmarks Preservation Commission, said in a statement it had approved plans for the work on Gay Street and that Mr. Nazarian’s construction crew did not follow their instructions. Preservationists like Mr. Berman and local politicians like Deborah Glick have cried foul, declaring that the city and the commission should have been overseeing the work and described Mr. Nazarian as a bad actor. In 2017, he was accused of creating hazardous conditions and tenant harassment in a property he owns in the East Village. Mr. Berman wondered if his actions were deliberate, to insure he wouldn’t have to restore his new holdings, but be allowed to tear them down and start fresh. For his part, Mr. Nazarian said the construction workers made a terrible mistake, adding that he loves historic architecture and just wants to preserve the buildings.The doughty but fragile antique buildings that Ms. Martin left behind “are part of this incredible surviving collection of very early houses,” said Andrew S. Dolkart, a professor of historic preservation at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. “Dozens were built in the 1820s, but not many are left — certainly not in groups on a small, intimate street. They are really precious.”The building at 14 Gay Street dates to 1827; its siblings, a year later. “They were originally built for the mercantile class,” Mr. Dolkart said. “They weren’t built for the wealthy. They aren’t pristine museum pieces: You can see they had lived, and been lived in, over time.”That’s significant, because the early 19th century was the last period “that modest people, shop owners and small business owners, could afford to live in a single-family home in a built-up section of Manhattan,” he continued. “You can still see a number of these houses peppering the Village.”By the end of the century, many had evolved into boardinghouses and multifamily dwellings. By then, Gay Street was an integrated block, with a large Black community and a melting pot of immigrants from Ireland, Denmark, France, Italy, Germany and Belgium.Demolition recently began at 14 Gay Street. The city has ordered that the work be done by hand and the material saved for use in a reconstruction overseen by the city and the Landmarks Preservation Commission.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesAll six buildings are landmarked — Gay Street is in the Village’s historic district — but No. 14 is especially noteworthy as a literary artifact, the onetime home of Ruth McKenney, who memorialized her dodgy subterranean apartment there in “My Sister Eileen,” a collection of stories about her adventures as a young writer in the city that was published in 1938 and inspired the fizzy early 1950s musical “Wonderful Town,” with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Leonard Bernstein. (For years, a longtime tenant of the apartment, David Ryan, was awakened by tourists belting the refrain of the musical’s signature number, “Why, oh why, oh why-oh/Why did I ever leave Ohio?” and peering through the bars of his bedroom window. When the play was revived on Broadway in 2003, he suffered acutely.)Ms. Martin’s father, Edmond, who was French, bought the six buildings that now belong to Mr. Nazarian in the 1920s, along with several other properties in the Village, including a fanciful pink Moorish-looking townhouse on Waverly Place, where Ms. Martin grew up. While his father wanted him to join the family’s sail-making business, Edmond fancied himself a real estate mogul and an artist. With the help of his wife, Ramee, he turned the Gay and Christopher Street buildings into a complex of furnished studio apartments, decorated by Ramee and outfitted with slipcovers and curtains sewn by their nanny.In her short story “Mr. Spitzer and the Fungus,” Ms. McKenney renders Edmond as a pompous landlord with artistic pretensions — his character was called Mr. Appopolous in the musical — and her $45 a month basement flat, where she lived with her sister, Eileen, as a dimly lit dump sprouting with mold, including a particularly aggressive fungus that draped from the ceiling. “Every night we cut it down with Eileen’s manicure scissors,” she wrote, “and every morning it was long enough to braid. Eileen thought there was something shameful about the fungus, and she always carefully cut it down before we had a party.”The building in 2003, the year “Wonderful Town” was revived on Broadway.Harry ZernikeEdmond was said to have been miffed by his portrayal in Ms. McKenney’s work; he felt his artistic talents weren’t appropriately recognized. He was not a bad painter, said Matt McGhee, who for decades sold exquisite Christmas ornaments out of his fairyland boutique at 18 Christopher and lived in a one-bedroom next door.Notably, though, Edmond was a racist, cited by the city for refusing to rent to Black people. At one point, he hung a sign in his office at 16 Gay Street declaring this policy. In 1959, The Daily News reported, he filed a suit against the city, claiming that its anti-discrimination housing law interfered with his “aesthetic freedom.” Needless to say, he did not prevail.When he died in 1985, Ms. Martin inherited his properties, but not his bigotry. However, she was never the most assiduous steward of the houses.As Jeanne Kelly, the former director of fossil preparations at the American Museum of Natural History and a Gay Street neighbor for two decades, put it, they were held together with spit and a prayer, and the haphazard ministrations of a retinue of helpers that at one point included a super who was blind and a physics teacher with a number of aliases.But Ms. Martin was generous to her tenants, offering to waive rent if they were in extremis and delivering Christmas gifts of pink Champagne and sweets. (One year, Mr. McGhee said, the gifts included stuffed animals; he received a dog.)She doted on many of the tenants, but Mr. Ryan, who moved into the McKenney apartment in the early 1970s and decorated it with distinctive, decaying élan, English country style, was a favorite. When “Wonderful Town” was in revival on Broadway in December of 2003, they saw the musical together. A few weeks later, on Christmas Eve, Mr. Ryan died in a fire that consumed his apartment, and Ms. Martin never quite recovered.Instead of renovating the apartment, neighbors said, she left it to rot and to the rats. “It was the beginning of her decline,” Ms. Kelly said.David Ryan was the last tenant of the basement apartment that Ruth McKenney rendered as a dimly lit dump in her short stories.Harry ZernikeMr. Ryan decorated the apartment with distinctive, decaying élan…Harry Zernike….in an English country style that involved layers of Persian carpets, velvet- and chintz-upholstered furniture, classical statuary, candelabras and prints in gilded frames.Harry ZernikeSince 1976, Denise Marsa, a singer-songwriter, has lived in her tidy studio around the corner, in the building Ms. Martin once owned at 18 Christopher Street. (She can still remember the original rent: $174.24.). She tried to help Ms. Martin in her final years, urging her to make a will, but her landlord “lived in a fairy tale,” she said.Today, Ms. Marsa, 68, is the last residential tenant in the building, her cheerful apartment, with its kitchen tucked into a closet, an object lesson in small-space living and the promise of studio life as a launching pad. She, too, has rendered her home in song, as Comden and Green once did, in a number featured in “The Pass,” her one-woman show about making it in the big city, which she performed at United Solo, a theater festival in Manhattan, in the fall of 2021. (The storefronts below her are full; John Derian, the purveyor of his own brand of charming decay, took over the spot occupied by Mr. McGhee four years ago.)Back at the rally organized by Mr. Berman, the mood was festive, despite everything. The growl of a bulldozer interrupted the protesters. Its driver, a private contractor, said he was there to do work under the road in front of 14 Gay Street. When questioned, he said he did not know who had hired him, and beat a retreat. Across the street, Joan Goldberg, a broker with Brown Harris Stevens, was holding a quasi-open house at 13 Gay Street, a modest Greek Revival built around 1840 and owned by Margaret Kunstler, the widow of the civil rights lawyer William Kunstler, who died in 1995 and was known for representing some controversial clients. (The house is on the market for $6.9 million.)“It was a wonderful street to live on,” Ms. Kunstler said. “We had big Halloweens. Sometimes we would shut down the street for birthday parties. The house was open; there were constant comings and goings.”Ruth McKenney memorialized her dodgy subterranean apartment 14 Gay Street in “My Sister Eileen,” a collection of stories about her adventures as a young writer in the city that was published in 1938 and inspired the fizzy early 1950s musical “Wonderful Town,” with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Leonard Bernstein.These days, from the top floor of Ms. Kunstler’s house, you can see into the dark cavity that is all that’s left of where Ruth and Eileen McKenney once lived: two gaping window frames braced by wooden beams.Representatives from the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the city said that the city will be taking action against Mr. Nazarian for what they say was illegal work done there. Furthermore, the city is requiring that the demolition of 14 Gay Street be done by hand and its material saved for use in a reconstruction that the city and the Landmarks Preservation Commission will oversee.“I never intended to just let them rot,” Mr. Nazarian said of the buildings.Asked to estimate what it might cost to restore them, he said, “More than I thought.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. More

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      In the Village, Another Piece of the City’s History Is Coming Down

      by

      Like other vulnerable landmarks across the city, the house at 14 Gay Street — which helped inspire the musical “Wonderful Town” — is being demolished.One Monday in late November, preservationists, politicians, neighbors and looky-loos gathered at dusk on Manhattan’s tiny Gay Street, a slim crescent in the heart of Greenwich Village, to protest the demolition of a nearly 200-year-old house there. The place in question, 14 Gay Street, is one of a clutch of six winsome but precarious early 19th-century buildings on Gay and Christopher Streets that were owned for decades by Celeste Martin, a singular character devoted to her properties and to the often eccentric cast of tenants she nurtured.Ms. Martin died in late 2018, at 94, with no will and no close relatives, so the city took over her holdings, selling 14 Gay Street and its siblings for about $9 million to a buyer who flipped them last April to Lionel Nazarian, a 37-year-old developer, for about $12 million. Since then, Mr. Nazarian has done foundation work that has destabilized 14 Gay Street and imperiled its neighbors, so the city has ordered its demolition, a slow, laborious process that began just before Thanksgiving.Chillingly, this scenario is one that is playing out all over the city, said Andrew Berman, the executive director of Village Preservation and the organizer of the November protest: As developers have been buying up vulnerable landmark properties, they are either allowing them to deteriorate or doing work that compromises public safety. In the last year, he said, more than a dozen such buildings have come down.Celeste Martin, who died in 2018 at 94, owned six historic properties on Gay and Christopher Streets, including 14 Gay Street. A singular character, she doted on her properties and her often eccentric tenants.Harry ZernikeMr. Berman blames the lack of oversight and coordination by city agencies. “As a result,” he said, “our neighborhoods are paying the price, our city’s history and heritage are paying the price, and the irreplaceable historic landmarks that distinguish New York from everywhere else are being lost.”The city, along with the Landmarks Preservation Commission, said in statement it had approved plans for the work on Gay Street and that Mr. Nazarian’s construction crew did not follow their instructions. Preservationists like Mr. Berman and local politicians like Deborah Glick have cried foul, declaring that the city and the commission should have been overseeing the work and described Mr. Nazarian as a bad actor. In 2017, he was accused of creating hazardous conditions and tenant harassment in a property he owns in the East Village. Mr. Berman wondered if his actions were deliberate, to insure he wouldn’t have to restore his new holdings, but be allowed to tear them down and start fresh. For his part, Mr. Nazarian said the construction workers made a terrible mistake, adding that he loves historic architecture and just wants to preserve the buildings.The doughty but fragile antique buildings that Ms. Martin left behind “are part of this incredible surviving collection of very early houses,” said Andrew S. Dolkart, a professor of historic preservation at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. “Dozens were built in the 1820s, but not many are left — certainly not in groups on a small, intimate street. They are really precious.”The building at 14 Gay Street dates to 1827; its siblings, a year later. “They were originally built for the mercantile class,” Mr. Dolkart said. “They weren’t built for the wealthy. They aren’t pristine museum pieces: You can see they had lived, and been lived in, over time.”That’s significant, because the early 19th century was the last period “that modest people, shop owners and small business owners, could afford to live in a single-family home in a built-up section of Manhattan,” he continued. “You can still see a number of these houses peppering the Village.”By the end of the century, many had evolved into boardinghouses and multifamily dwellings. By then, Gay Street was an integrated block, with a large Black community and a melting pot of immigrants from Ireland, Denmark, France, Italy, Germany and Belgium.Demolition recently began at 14 Gay Street. The city has ordered that the work be done by hand and the material saved for use in a reconstruction overseen by the city and the Landmarks Preservation Commission.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesAll six buildings are landmarked — Gay Street is in the Village’s historic district — but No. 14 is especially noteworthy as a literary artifact, the onetime home of Ruth McKenney, who memorialized her dodgy subterranean apartment there in “My Sister Eileen,” a collection of stories about her adventures as a young writer in the city that was published in 1938 and inspired the fizzy early 1950s musical “Wonderful Town,” with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Leonard Bernstein. (For years, a longtime tenant of the apartment, David Ryan, was awakened by tourists belting the refrain of the musical’s signature number, “Why, oh why, oh why-oh/Why did I ever leave Ohio?” and peering through the bars of his bedroom window. When the play was revived on Broadway in 2003, he suffered acutely.)Ms. Martin’s father, Edmond, who was French, bought the six buildings that now belong to Mr. Nazarian in the 1920s, along with several other properties in the Village, including a fanciful pink Moorish-looking townhouse on Waverly Place, where Ms. Martin grew up. While his father wanted him to join the family’s sail-making business, Edmond fancied himself a real estate mogul and an artist. With the help of his wife, Ramee, he turned the Gay and Christopher Street buildings into a complex of furnished studio apartments, decorated by Ramee and outfitted with slipcovers and curtains sewn by their nanny.In her short story “Mr. Spitzer and the Fungus,” Ms. McKenney renders Edmond as a pompous landlord with artistic pretensions — his character was called Mr. Appopolous in the musical — and her $45 a month basement flat, where she lived with her sister, Eileen, as a dimly lit dump sprouting with mold, including a particularly aggressive fungus that draped from the ceiling. “Every night we cut it down with Eileen’s manicure scissors,” she wrote, “and every morning it was long enough to braid. Eileen thought there was something shameful about the fungus, and she always carefully cut it down before we had a party.”The building in 2003, the year “Wonderful Town” was revived on Broadway.Harry ZernikeEdmond was said to have been miffed by his portrayal in Ms. McKenney’s work; he felt his artistic talents weren’t appropriately recognized. He was not a bad painter, said Matt McGhee, who for decades sold exquisite Christmas ornaments out of his fairyland boutique at 18 Christopher and lived in a one-bedroom next door.Notably, though, Edmond was a racist, cited by the city for refusing to rent to Black people. At one point, he hung a sign in his office at 16 Gay Street declaring this policy. In 1959, The Daily News reported, he filed a suit against the city, claiming that its anti-discrimination housing law interfered with his “aesthetic freedom.” Needless to say, he did not prevail.When he died in 1985, Ms. Martin inherited his properties, but not his bigotry. However, she was never the most assiduous steward of the houses.As Jeanne Kelly, the former director of fossil preparations at the American Museum of Natural History and a Gay Street neighbor for two decades, put it, they were held together with spit and a prayer, and the haphazard ministrations of a retinue of helpers that at one point included a super who was blind and a physics teacher with a number of aliases.But Ms. Martin was generous to her tenants, offering to waive rent if they were in extremis and delivering Christmas gifts of pink Champagne and sweets. (One year, Mr. McGhee said, the gifts included stuffed animals; he received a dog.)She doted on many of the tenants, but Mr. Ryan, who moved into the McKenney apartment in the early 1970s and decorated it with distinctive, decaying élan, English country style, was a favorite. When “Wonderful Town” was in revival on Broadway in December of 2003, they saw the musical together. A few weeks later, on Christmas Eve, Mr. Ryan died in a fire that consumed his apartment, and Ms. Martin never quite recovered.Instead of renovating the apartment, neighbors said, she left it to rot and to the rats. “It was the beginning of her decline,” Ms. Kelly said.David Ryan was the last tenant of the basement apartment that Ruth McKenney rendered as a dimly lit dump in her short stories.Harry ZernikeMr. Ryan decorated the apartment with distinctive, decaying élan…Harry Zernike….in an English country style that involved layers of Persian carpets, velvet- and chintz-upholstered furniture, classical statuary, candelabras and prints in gilded frames.Harry ZernikeSince 1976, Denise Marsa, a singer-songwriter, has lived in her tidy studio around the corner, in the building Ms. Martin once owned at 18 Christopher Street. (She can still remember the original rent: $174.24.). She tried to help Ms. Martin in her final years, urging her to make a will, but her landlord “lived in a fairy tale,” she said.Today, Ms. Marsa, 68, is the last residential tenant in the building, her cheerful apartment, with its kitchen tucked into a closet, an object lesson in small-space living and the promise of studio life as a launching pad. She, too, has rendered her home in song, as Comden and Green once did, in a number featured in “The Pass,” her one-woman show about making it in the big city, which she performed at United Solo, a theater festival in Manhattan, in the fall of 2021. (The storefronts below her are full; John Derian, the purveyor of his own brand of charming decay, took over the spot occupied by Mr. McGhee four years ago.)Back at the rally organized by Mr. Berman, the mood was festive, despite everything. The growl of a bulldozer interrupted the protesters. Its driver, a private contractor, said he was there to do work under the road in front of 14 Gay Street. When questioned, he said he did not know who had hired him, and beat a retreat. Across the street, Joan Goldberg, a broker with Brown Harris Stevens, was holding a quasi-open house at 13 Gay Street, a modest Greek Revival built around 1840 and owned by Margaret Kunstler, the widow of the civil rights lawyer William Kunstler, who died in 1995 and was known for representing some controversial clients. (The house is on the market for $6.9 million.)“It was a wonderful street to live on,” Ms. Kunstler said. “We had big Halloweens. Sometimes we would shut down the street for birthday parties. The house was open; there were constant comings and goings.”Ruth McKenney memorialized her dodgy subterranean apartment 14 Gay Street in “My Sister Eileen,” a collection of stories about her adventures as a young writer in the city that was published in 1938 and inspired the fizzy early 1950s musical “Wonderful Town,” with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Leonard Bernstein.These days, from the top floor of Ms. Kunstler’s house, you can see into the dark cavity that is all that’s left of where Ruth and Eileen McKenney once lived: two gaping window frames braced by wooden beams.Representatives from the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the city said that the city will be taking action against Mr. Nazarian for what they say was illegal work done there. Furthermore, the city is requiring that the demolition of 14 Gay Street be done by hand and its material saved for use in a reconstruction that the city and the Landmarks Preservation Commission will oversee.“I never intended to just let them rot,” Mr. Nazarian said of the buildings.Asked to estimate what it might cost to restore them, he said, “More than I thought.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. More