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Sofia Coppola’s Challenge: To Convey the Feeling of Live Dance
Coppola and Justin Peck talk about how they approached making a film for New York City Ballet’s digital spring gala. More
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Edinburgh Festivals Will Go Ahead, in Person and Online
The Edinburgh International Festival, canceled last year, said it would proceed in August thanks to three specially built pavilions.Three pavilions will be built to host events for the Edinburgh International Festival this summer.Edinburgh International FestivalLONDON — The Edinburgh International Festival, a showcase of international dance, music and theater, will go ahead in front of audiences this August, the festival’s organizers said on Tuesday.The festival, which normally floods the city with tourists, was canceled last year because of the coronavirus pandemic. But events will be staged Aug. 7-29 in three pavilions across Edinburgh, Fergus Linehan, the festival’s director, said in a telephone interview.The pavilions will be specially built to maximize air flow and allow social distancing, he added.The festival’s program will be released in June, Linehan said; the organizers are still waiting for a decision from the Scottish government about how many people will be allowed to attend. But the ongoing pandemic and the limits it has placed on international travel mean it will have a different flavor from normal.“In terms of the people onstage, we’re not going to be flying in a big dance company from the U.S., or an opera company from Paris,” Linehan said. “But there are individual artists coming.”The festival, which began in 1947 with the aim of uniting people through culture after World War II, is known for large-scale performances, especially of big classical and operatic works. The 2019 festival, for instance, featured the Orchestre de Paris performing epic pieces by Beethoven and Berlioz, as well as several presentations by the Komische Oper Berlin. That will also change this year. “We can’t have that many musicians onstage, and we can’t have those big choral bits,” Linehan said, but he insisted smaller works would be just as exciting and innovative.Many performances will be streamed free for international audiences, he added.Coronavirus cases have fallen rapidly in Scotland this spring thanks to an extended lockdown and a strong vaccination program. On Monday, there were only 199 new cases reported among a population of around 5 million, and no deaths within 28 days of a positive test, according to Scottish Government figures.But many restrictions are still in place, including on cultural life. Museums cannot reopen until Apr. 26. Other cultural activities cannot restart until May 17 at the earliest, and even then, only with small audiences.The Edinburgh International Festival is one of a host of arts events that normally take place in the city each summer. The festival’s organizers insist the others will occur in some form, too.A spokeswoman for the scrappy Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which normally features thousands of small theater and comedy shows, said in an email that organizers were working toward an event to run Aug. 6-30. It was still unclear if the Fringe would be “digital, in person, or both,” she added.The Edinburgh International Book Festival will also proceed from Aug. 14 with in-person events “if circumstances permit,” a spokeswoman said in a telephone interview.The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, a popular series of parades involving bagpipe performances by armed forces from around the world, is also set to go on. It started selling tickets last October but has not provided any updates since. On Tuesday, its organizers did not respond to a request for comment.Linehan said he hoped the International Festival’s announcement would give confidence to other events to press ahead with plans. His festival won’t make any money, he said, but that didn’t matter. “This is a really momentous moment for us,” Linehan said, adding: “It’s really important we get back to live performance.” More
- in Music
Making Music Visible: Singing in Sign
On a recent afternoon in a brightly lit studio in Brooklyn, Mervin Primeaux-O’Bryant and Brandon Kazen-Maddox were filming a music video. They were recording a cover version of “Midnight Train to Georgia,” but the voices that filled the room were those of Gladys Knight and the Pips, who made the song a hit in the 1970s. And yet the two men in the studio were also singing — with their hands.Primeaux-O’Bryant is a deaf actor and dancer; Kazen-Maddox is a hearing dancer and choreographer who is, thanks to seven deaf family members, a native speaker of American Sign Language. Their version of “Midnight Train to Georgia” is part of a 10-song series of American Sign Language covers of seminal works by Black female artists that Kazen-Maddox is producing for Broadstream, an arts streaming platform.A look behind the scenes as Mervin Primeaux-O’Bryant and Brandon Kazen-Maddox collaborate on a signed performance of the classic song.Up Until Now CollectiveAround the world, music knits together communities as it tells foundational stories, teaches emotional intelligence and cements a sense of belonging. Many Americans know about signed singing from moments like the Super Bowl, when a sign language interpreter can be seen — if barely — performing the national anthem alongside a pop star.But as sign language music videos proliferate on YouTube, where they spark comments from deaf and hearing viewers, the richness of American Sign Language, or A.S.L., has gotten a broader stage.“Music is many different things to different people,” Alexandria Wailes, a deaf actress and dancer told me in a video interview, using an interpreter. Wailes performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the 2018 Super Bowl, and last year drew thousands of views on YouTube with her sign language contribution to “Sing Gently,” a choral work by Eric Whitacre.“I realize,” she added, “that when you do hear, not hearing may seem to separate us. But what is your relationship to music, to dance, to beauty? What do you see that I may learn from? These are conversations people need to get accustomed to having.”Mervin Primeaux-O’Bryant, who collaborated with Brandon Kazen-Maddox on “Midnight Train to Georgia.”Justin Kaneps for The New York TimesA good A.S.L. performance prioritizes dynamics, phrasing and flow. The parameters of sign language — hand shape, movement, location, palm orientation and facial expression — can be combined with elements of visual vernacular, a body of codified gestures, allowing a skilled A.S.L. speaker to engage in the kind of sound painting that composers use to enrich a text.At the recent video shoot, Gladys Knight’s voice boomed out of a large speaker while a much smaller one was tucked inside Primeaux-O’Bryant’s clothes, so that he could “tangibly feel the music,” he said in an interview, with Kazen-Maddox interpreting. Out of sight of the camera, an interpreter stood ready to translate any instructions from the crew, all hearing, while a laptop displayed the song lyrics.In the song, the backup singers — here personified by Kazen-Maddox — encourage Knight as she rallies herself to join her lover, who has returned home to Georgia. In the original recording the Pips repeat the phrase “all aboard.” But as Kazen-Maddox signed it, those words grew into signs evoking the movement of the train and its gears. A playful tug at an invisible whistle corresponded to the woo-woo of the band’s horns. Primeaux-O’Bryant signed the lead vocals with movements that gently extended the words, just as in the song: on the drawn-out “oh” of “not so long ago-oh-oh,” his hands fluttered into his lap. The two men also incorporated signs from Black A.S.L.“The hands have their own emotions,” Primeaux-O’Bryant said. “They have their own mind.”“The hands have their own emotions,” said Primeaux-O’Bryant, far right. “They have their own mind.”Justin Kaneps for The New York TimesDeaf singers prepare for their interpretations by experiencing a song through any means available to them. Many people speak about their heightened receptivity to the vibrations of sound, which they experience through their body. As a dancer trained in ballet, Primeaux-O’Bryant said he was particularly attuned to the vibrations of a piano as transmitted through a wooden floor.Primeaux-O’Bryant was a student at the Model Secondary School for the Deaf in Washington in the early 1990s when a teacher asked him to sign a Michael Jackson song during Black History Month. His first reaction was to refuse.But the teacher “pulled it out” of him, he said, and he was thrust into the limelight in front of a large audience. Then, Primeaux-O’Bryant said, “the lights came on and my cue happened and I just exploded and signed the work and it felt good.” Afterward the audience erupted in applause: “I fell in love with performing onstage.”Both men spoke of the impact ballet training had on their signing.Justin Kaneps for The New York TimesSigning choirs have long been common around the world. But the pandemic has fostered new visibility for signing and music, aided in part by the video-focused technology that all musicians have relied on to make art together. As part of the “Global Ode to Joy” celebration of the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth last year, the artist Dalia Ihab Younis wrote a new text for the final chorus of the Ninth Symphony which, performed by an Egyptian a cappella choir, taught elementary signs in Arabic Sign Language.Last spring, the pandemic forced an abrupt stop to live singing as choirs were particularly thought to be potential spreaders of the coronavirus. In response, the Netherlands Radio Choir and Radio Philharmonic Orchestra reached out to the Dutch Signing Choir to collaborate on a signed elegy, “My heart sings on,” in which the keening voice of a musical saw blended with the lyrical gestures of Ewa Harmsen, who is deaf. She was joined by members of the Radio Choir, who had learned some signs for the occasion.“It has more meaning when I sing with my hands,” Harmsen said in a video interview, speaking and signing in Dutch with an interpreter present. “I also love to sing with my voice, but it’s not that pretty. My children say to me, ‘Don’t sing, mother! Not with your voice.’”The challenges of signing music multiply when it comes to polyphonic works like the Passion oratorios of Bach, with their complex tapestries of orchestral and vocal counterpoint and declamatory recitatives. Early in April, Sing and Sign, an ensemble founded in Leipzig, Germany, by the soprano Susanne Haupt, uploaded a new production of part of the “St. John Passion” that is the first fruit of an ongoing undertaking.Haupt worked with deaf people and a choreographer to develop a performance that would render not only the sung words of the oratorio, but also the character of the music. For example, the gurgling 16th notes that run through the strings are expressed with the sign for “flowing.”“We didn’t want to just translate text,” Haupt said. “We wanted to make music visible.”Just who should be entrusted with that process of making music visible can be a contentious question. Speaking between takes at the shoot in Brooklyn, Primeaux-O’Bryant said that some music videos created by hearing A.S.L. speakers lack expressivity and render little more than the words and basic rhythm.“Sometimes interpreters don’t show the emotions that are tied to the music,” he said. “And deaf people are like, ‘What is that?’”Kazen-Maddox signing “relationship.”Justin Kaneps for The New York TimesPrimeaux-O’Bryant signing “gone” or “left” or “took off,” as in a person leaving.Justin Kaneps for The New York TimesBoth men spoke of the impact ballet training had on the quality of their signing. Kazen-Maddox said that when he took daily ballet classes in his 20s, his signing became more graceful.“There is a port de bras, which you only learn from ballet, which I was really engraving into my body,” he said. “And I watched my sign language, which had been with me my whole life, become more compatible with music.”Wailes, too, traces her musicality to her training in dance. “I am a little more attuned with the overall sensitivity to spatial awareness in my body,” she said. And, she added, “not everyone is a good singer, right? So I think you’d have to make that analogy for signers as well.” More
- in Music
Performing Arts Make a Cautious Return in New York
More than a year after the pandemic abruptly shuttered theaters and concert halls across the city, limited audiences were welcomed back inside.The days are getting longer. The sun is out. The number of vaccinated New Yorkers continues to grow every day.And now, more than a year after the coronavirus pandemic suddenly brought down the curtain at theaters and concert halls across the city, darkening Broadway and comedy clubs alike, the performing arts are beginning to bounce back.Like budding flowers awakening just in time for spring, music, dance, theater and comedy began a cautious return this past week as venues were allowed reopen with limited capacity — in most cases, for the first time since March 2020.Many did.Audiences came back, too. With face coverings and health questionnaires, they returned to an Off Broadway theater in Union Square, streamed into the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village and took in live music at the Shed. Broadway was lit up again with the dancer Savion Glover and the actor Nathan Lane performing inside the St. James Theater; the Green Room 42 hosted cabaret; Jerry Seinfeld did stand-up in Chelsea. And more events, including a concert by New York Philharmonic musicians that will inaugurate Lincoln Center’s outdoor programming, are coming soon.At the Shed, people who came for a concert by Kelsey Lu avoided the lobby and entered from doors leading directly into the McCourt space.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesBut the pandemic remains unwieldy in New York, and across the country. New York City is still a coronavirus hot spot, with new cases holding stubbornly at around 25,000 a week. Alongside a rush to vaccinate, variants persist. And at least one set of performances have already been postponed because of positive tests.All of which leaves arts institutions seeking to strike a delicate balance between persistent public health concerns and the desire to serve wearied New Yorkers eager for a sense of normalcy.Reporters from The New York Times visited some of the first indoor performances, and spoke with the pioneering audience members and staff who took them in. Here is what they saw.March 31Dance at the GuggenheimThe group Masterz at Work Dance Family performed in the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda, for an audience spread out along the museum’s spiraling ramp.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesIsaac Alexander, 25, was walking to the Guggenheim Museum on a drizzly Wednesday evening with headphones in, dancing to the beat of Byrell the Great’s “Vogue Workout Pt. 5” and casually voguing as he passed apartment buildings on the Upper East Side.He was on his way to support a friend in Masterz at Work Dance Family, a performance group led by Courtney ToPanga Washington, a trans-femme choreographer from the ballroom scene. Once Alexander reached the museum, he was directed into the Guggenheim’s rotunda and shown a spot to stand along its spiral ramp. Like other audience members he was masked, and was asked to leave immediately after the show as a safety measure.“You can take any venue, put a stage in it, invite people, and you can make it a ball,” said Alexander, an artist who dances in the ballroom scene himself.The dancers quarantined together for two weeks to prepare the performance, which was presented by the Works & Process series.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesThe show — a fusion of street dance, ballroom, and hip-hop — was allowed in the rotunda after the state had inspected it and given the Works & Process series a special dispensation to hold socially distanced performances there. The cast of nine, along with Washington, had spent two weeks in a quarantine bubble together in upstate New York, their housing, meals and coronavirus testing paid for while they rehearsed.With a pounding beat in the background, the dancers moved through intricate formations, some waiting on the outskirts as solos and duets took the spotlight. There was popping and locking, pirouetting, somersaulting, duck walking (a low, bouncing walk) and cat walking (a stylized walk with popped hips and dropped shoulders) in exacting synchronicity.Looking down from his perch, Alexander cheered the dancers on through the 30-minute work. He said that he had not seen a show since January 2020, before the pandemic shutdown. As an artist who gets ideas from watching his peers, he felt joy at the sight of a live performance.“Now that we’re opening back up, I feel my wings coming back,” he said. “The inspiration is coming back.” JULIA JACOBSApril 2A Sound Show Off BroadwayAt the Daryl Roth Theater, seats were arranged in socially distant pairs for an immersive audio adaptation of the novel “Blindness.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt was the middle of the afternoon on a Friday, an unusual time for a show but nonetheless the opening of “Blindness,” at the Daryl Roth Theater. Only about 60 people were allowed to attend. Bundled in the parkas, they lined up on the sidewalk along East 15th Street, standing on green dots.Mayor Bill de Blasio arrived, adding an element of pomp to what was otherwise an Off Broadway sound show. Staff members at the theater donned emerald green jackets and matching green face coverings — “Green for go!” one employee said — that hid the smiles their eyes betrayed. For about 10 minutes, the scene near Union Square felt like a cross between a political campaign event and a Hollywood premiere.“This is a really powerful moment,” de Blasio said on the steps of the Daryl Roth’s entrance. “Theater returns to New York City. The curtain goes back up, and something amazing happens.”He and the producer Daryl Roth, the theater’s namesake, greeted patrons waiting to be let inside. A few thanked the mayor for helping ensure that the performing arts return. Some asked for a selfie; others exchanged wrist and elbow bumps. There were theatergoers celebrating birthdays, people eager to post on social media, and one artistic director from San Francisco who had come to do some research on safety for whenever his playhouse reopens.Mayor Bill de Blasio and the theater producer Daryl Roth, behind him in the black coat, greeted audience members as they waited to enter the show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs members of the audience entered the theater, they held up their wrists to a machine that checked their temperatures. An usher led them to their seats, which came in pods and were spread out under a maze of fluorescent tubes. Once everyone was settled in, a welcome message sounded from speakers; it was greeted with a cheer.The small crowd took out headphones, from sealed bags hanging on their chairs, and fitted them over their ears. One couple held hands. A man closed his eyes. And “Blindness,” an immersive audio adaptation of the dystopian novel by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist José Saramago, began.For the next 75 minutes, the audience members heard of a city plagued by an epidemic of blindness. For long periods, the people in their seats were plunged into total darkness; but toward the end of the show, there were glimmers of light.“It was bracingly familiar,” Dean Leslie, 58, said after the show. “One of the moments that really resonated with me is now — when I got back on the street.”“It’s poetic,” he added. “It’s is something we’ve all lived. This is something we’ve shared now.” MATT STEVENSApril 2Sets at the Comedy CellarAbout 50 people were allowed inside the Comedy Cellar for its show on Friday. Most of them were 20-somethings who had quickly snapped up tickets online.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“Make sure they’re practicing social distancing!” one security guard called to another as people descended into the Comedy Cellar’s dimly lit basement.About 50 audience members — a crowd of mostly 20-somethings who were savvy enough to snap up tickets online — settled around their tables for the club’s first live show in over a year.Outside, two 23-year-olds waited on the sidewalk hoping in through the waiting list; they had moved to New York City in the fall and had chosen to live together in the West Village because of the nearby music venues and comedy clubs, none of which they had been able to visit until Friday.John Touhey, 27, who was lucky enough to snag tickets for this first show, said that his reason for coming was simple: “Just to feel something again.”Down in the club, the show’s host, Jon Laster, hopped onstage with a triumphant yell, “Comedy Cellar, how you feelin’?” Some audience members had taken off their masks immediately when they reached their tables; others waited until their food and drinks arrived.The show, hosted by Jon Laster, had an inevitable theme: the pandemic.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe pandemic was an inevitable theme of the night: It had dominated the lives of everyone in the room for the past year. Laster quizzed the mostly white crowd on where they had escaped to during the pandemic months (Kansas City, Mo., Savannah, Ga., Atlanta). As he introduced each comic onto the stage, he unplugged his mic, allowing the performers to insert their clean microphones, whose spherical tops had disposable covers that looked like miniature shower caps.Only a third of the space’s capacity was allowed in, but the small crowd’s laughter filled the room. And the comedians talked to the audience members like they were old friends catching up after a year apart. Gary Vider joked about his new baby; Tom Thakkar recounted his drunken celebrations when President Biden won the election; Colin Quinn wondered why the subway still stank without crowds; and Jackie Fabulous told stories about living with her mother again for the first time in 20 years.Partway through her set, Fabulous paused and took a breath.“I feel the adrenaline,” she said. “It’s finally calming down.” JULIA JACOBSApril 2Music at the ShedAt Kelsey Lu’s concert at the Shed, even the performers were distanced onstage.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesToward the final third of a performance that had mixed ambient sound, classical cello, operatic vocals, pop music and more, Kelsey Lu emerged in a pink, floral costume and offered a proclamation: “Spring has sprung.”The crowd of about 150 inside the Shed’s airy McCourt space chuckled. And when Lu’s performance was over, audience members did something they have not been able to do indoors for more than a year: They gave a standing ovation.At the Shed, the audience of about 150 entered in timed waves.Dina Litovsky for The New York Times“You could feel it,” said Gil Perez, the Shed’s chief visitor experience officer. “The excitement, the fun, the energy of a live show — there’s nothing like it.”The McCourt, the Shed’s flexible indoor-outdoor venue, touts a cavernous size (17,000-square-feet) and a high-quality air filtration system. Attendees entered from doors that led directly into the space, and their temperatures were checked immediately. Digital programs were summoned on smartphones using a bar code on the arm of the seats, which were arranged in singles and pairs spaced roughly 12 feet from the stage, and six feet or more from one another.Staff checked in the audience with tablets. Ticket holders were required to show proof of vaccination or a negative Covid-19 test; they scrolled through their phones to bring it up. Once cleared, they stepped into a timed-entry line: one for 7:40 p.m., and another for 10 minutes later.“I’m an essential worker,” Roxxann Dobbs, a 37-year-old letter carrier, said as she waited to be let in. “I’ve been working this entire time, so it’s nice to be able to go out and have fun.”Ian Plowman, her husband, added: “I feel like we’re on the edge of the next time in New York, the next period.”Before and after the show, people caught the glances of old friends and stopped by their seats to chat. One woman congratulated another on getting a coronavirus vaccine. A person leaned over to a friend and remarked: “This is so nice!”Alex Poots, the Shed’s artistic director and chief executive, said he got “quite emotional” as the evening came to a close and he thought about Lu’s description of a spring awakening.“Very beautiful,” he said. “I missed this so much.” MATT STEVENSAs a safety measure, microphones at the Comedy Cellar were covered in what looked like little shower caps.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times More
- in Music
Members of the Paris Opera Take Their Talents to a Different Stage
The singers, dancers and musicians played on, serenading their phones, pirouetting in masks and performing, faceless, on the radio.PARIS — For the past year, opera lovers worldwide have had little choice but to revisit favorite productions and performances via their screens at home, but the singers, musicians and dancers at the Paris Opera have continued, all while making their peace with pandemic life. Three members of the company described their experiences.The Chorus MasterFor José Luis Basso, chorus master at the Paris Opera since 2014, not even France’s penchant for strikes had prepared him for the government-ordered lockdown imposed here on March 17 last year.“From one day to the next, we found ourselves stuck at home,” he recalled in a telephone conversation. “It was dramatic. A singer needs to practice and vocalize every day, and that’s not so easy in a city like Paris where you have neighbors and building rules. So out of a certain despair, they did these little videos as a way of expressing their anguish about being without work.”For the most ambitious video, Mr. Basso, who rehearses and sometimes directs the group, brought together 52 of the chorus’s 110 members to record individual videos of “Nessun dorma” from Puccini’s “Turandot.” The performances were spliced together, renamed “To Say Thank You” and dedicated to health and other frontline workers. Then, in September, following a temporary reduction of infections in France, the chorus was called back to the company’s two theaters, the Palais Garnier and the Opéra Bastille.“At first there was real fear, almost hysteria, about passing on the virus,” Mr. Basso said, “but people are more relaxed now. No operas were programmed in the fall, so we began preparing for the new productions of ‘Aïda’ and ‘Faust,’ which involved a lot of work since the chorus plays a big role in both operas.”Despite a second wave of infections, which began in the fall and continues, “Aïda” and “Faust” have now been staged and streamed, with all but the lead singers wearing masks. “At first we didn’t know what masks to use,” Mr. Basso said, “but eventually we opted for two — one for walking around the theater and another for singing that allows projection of the voice and understanding of words.”Yet, with some medical experts saying that we must learn to live with Covid, even when “normal” opera performances resume, masks onstage and in the orchestra pit may not be disappearing soon. “I’ve asked myself,” said Mr. Basso, 55, who in June returns to the San Carlo opera house in Naples, Italy, to become chorus master, “in the future will our choral work have to be like this?”l’Opéra de ParisValentine Colasante, a prima ballerina at the Paris Opera Ballet, performing a passage from Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” in her kitchen. The dance became part of a video to thank frontline workers.l’Opéra de ParisThe BallerinaValentine Colasante, 32, a prima ballerina at the Paris Opera Ballet, was greatly relieved when lessons from her usual teachers resumed, albeit online, as soon as the lockdown began. “This enabled us to keep up our routines,” she explained in a telephone interview, “with morning classes for coaching, dancing, muscle strengthening, and in the afternoon more specific exercises. This also meant we were in good physical condition when we could resume work.”That came in September when the ballet corps returned to its home at the Palais Garnier, although it is still not allowed to perform before a full house. Rather, as with opera productions, performances of “La Bayadère” in December, the annual gala in January and “Le Parc” this month were recorded for rebroadcast. “One is very aware that there’s no one there,” Ms. Colasante said, “But you try to adapt like everyone else who’s having to work online.”Covid precautions have also required wearing masks for rehearsals and for the gala’s “Ballet Parade.” “It’s the only solution we have if we want to keep on training,” she said. “When some very intense effort is called for, we can remove the mask, but we keep them on most of the time. It’s restricting, but it means we can return to the Palais Garnier to train. We are artists and we have to be ready when things return to normal.”Like members of the Paris Opera chorus and orchestra, the ballet company found its own way of saying “merci” to health and other frontline workers. In this case, some 60 dancers were invited to improvise at home — in kitchens, halls or gardens — to a passage from Prokofiev’s ballet “Romeo and Juliet.” Using smartphones, they recorded themselves or, as in Ms. Colasante’s case, were recorded by a partner. The movie director Cédric Klapisch then edited their moves into a charming four-minute, 39-second video.“Everyone was very enthusiastic about doing this as a sincere homage to health workers,” said Ms. Colasante, who appears briefly in a red dressing gown. “I think we all wanted to convey our emotions, to share what we were living through, to tell a story with our bodies. And I have my own four minutes as a permanent record for myself.”Members of the Paris Opera orchestra performing “After the Storm.” The final video that was created included images of nurses, doctors, hospital wards and ambulances. l’Opéra national de ParisThe MusicianWith last March’s lockdown coming soon after a lengthy strike at the Paris Opera, “we were already spending too much time at home,” Nicolas Chatenet recalled. Still, resigned to a new stoppage of perhaps three months, as the opera’s first solo trumpeter he decided to make good use of the time “to do what I couldn’t do when I was in the orchestra.”So when orchestra members decided that they, too, would make a video dedicated to health workers, he was eager to participate. “We wanted to do something that would convey musically and emotionally how we at home were feeling about those who were working,” Mr. Chatenet, 35, explained.The question of what to play was resolved when the orchestra welcomed a short piece called “Storm” that Mr. Chatenet had composed in 2014 for a brass ensemble. After a colleague orchestrated and trimmed the score, there came the challenge of recording 71 instrumentalists live on smartphones.“I thought we’d have to help the sound, but we were astonished that it sounded really good,” he said. Images of nurses, doctors, hospital wards and ambulances were then spliced into the final video called “After the Storm.”In the summer, restrictions on movements were relaxed, and Mr. Chatenet joined the opera orchestra for a live Bach concert in September and two concerts of Richard Strauss and Schönberg in October before a limited audience and under the baton of the company’s outgoing music director, Philippe Jordan.The orchestra’s main scheduled event for the 2020-21 season, however, was Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. When a planned stage production directed by Calixto Bieito was canceled by Covid, the cycle was broadcast on the radio, again conducted by Mr. Jordan. Mr. Chatenet’s bad luck was to catch the virus at the music conservatory where he teaches, and he was forced into isolation just when his trumpet should have been sounding the “Ride of the Valkyries.”His chance to rejoin his orchestra came last month with “Aïda.” “It was strange to be together again,” he said, “to recapture the feeling that we had when we played together every week.” But even though Mr. Chatenet never stopped practicing, the break brought an unexpected plus. “We have a 7-month-old baby,” he said, “so it’s given me a lot of time to get to know her. I was pretty lucky about that.” More
- in Theater
New York Theaters Are Dark, but These Windows Light Up With Art
The Irish Repertory Theater is streaming poetry readings, and Playwrights Horizons and St. Ann’s Warehouse are showcasing art dealing with race and injustice.Like many cultural organizations, the Irish Repertory Theater in Manhattan has streamed pandemic programming on its website.But a few days ago, the theater added a new sort of broadcast to its repertoire, setting up two 60-inch screens in windows that face the sidewalk, installing speakers high up on the building facade and airing a collection of films that show people reading poems in Ireland, London and New York.On a recent morning, Ciaran O’Reilly, the Rep’s producing director, stood by the theater on West 22nd Street, gazing at the screens as they displayed Joseph Aldous, an actor in Britain, reading “An Advancement of Learning,” a narrative poem by Seamus Heaney describing a brief standoff with a rat along a river bank.“These are not dark windows,” O’Reilly said. “They are lit up with poetry, with music, with the words of actors who are performing.”In the past year, theaters and other performing arts institutions in New York have turned to creative means to bring works to the public, sometimes also injecting a bit of life into otherwise shuttered facades. Those arrangements continue, even as the State of New York has announced that arts venues can reopen in April at one-third capacity and some outdoor performances, like Shakespeare in the Park, are scheduled to resume.The panes of glass, though, have provided a safe space. Late last year, for instance, the artists Christopher Williams, Holly Bass and Raja Feather Kelly performed at different times in the lobby or in a smaller vestibule-like part of the building in Chelsea occupied by New York Live Arts. All were visible through glass to those outside.Three more performances by Kelly of “Hysteria,” in which he assumes the role of a pink-hued extraterrestrial and explores what Live Arts’ website calls “pop culture and its displacement of queer Black subjectivity,” are scheduled for April 8-10.The Mexican-American artist Ken Gonzales-Day’s photographs of sculptures are on display at Playwrights Horizons.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnother street-level performance took place behind glass last December in Downtown Brooklyn, where the Brooklyn Ballet staged nine 20-minute shows of select dances from its “Nutcracker.”The ballet turned its studio into what its artistic director, Lynn Parkerson, called a “jewel box” theater; chose dances that kept masked ballerinas socially distanced; and used barricades on the sidewalk to limit audiences.“It was a way to bring some people back to something they love that they enjoyed that they might be forgetting about,” Parkerson said in an interview. “It did feel like a real performance.”She said that live performances were planned for April and would include ballet members in “Pas de Deux,” set to Jean-Philippe Rameau’s “Gavotte et Six Doubles,” with live music by the pianist Simone Dinnerstein.Pop-up concerts have been arranged by the Kaufman Music Center on the Upper West Side, in a storefront — the address is not given but is described on the center’s website as “not hard to find” — north of Columbus Circle.Those performances, running through late April, are announced at the storefront the same day, to limit crowd sizes and encourage social distancing. Participants have included the violinist Gil Shaham, the mezzo-soprano Chrystal E. Williams, the Gabrielle Stravelli Trio and JACK Quartet.St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn is displaying Julian Alexander and Khadijat Oseni’s “Supremacy Project,” public art that addresses the nature of injustice in American society.The word “supremacy” is superimposed on a photograph of police officers in riot gear, and there are images by Michael T. Boyd of Sandra Bland, Elijah McClain and Emmett Till.And at Playwrights Horizons in Midtown, the Mexican-American artist Ken Gonzales-Day is placing photographs of sculptures of human figures in display cases, encouraging viewers to reckon with definitions of beauty and race. Those displays are part of rotating public art series organized by the artist, activist, and writer Avram Finkelstein and the set and costume designer David Zinn.The aim, Finkelstein said in January when the series was announced, was to display work that “makes constructive use of dormant facades to create a transient street museum” and to “remind the city of its buoyancy and originality.”O’Reilly, at the Irish Rep, said the theater heard last year from Amy Holmes, the executive director of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, who thought the theater might provide a good venue to air some of the short films the organization had commissioned to make poetry part of an immersive experience.The series being shown at the theater, called “Poetic Reflections: Words Upon the Window Pane,” comprises 21 short pieces by the Irish filmmaker Matthew Thompson.“These are not dark windows,” said Ciaran O’Reilly of the Irish Repertory Theater. “They are lit up with poetry, with music, with the words of actors who are performing.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThey show contemporary poets reading their own works as well as poets and actors reading works by others, including William Butler Yeats and J.M. Synge, and were produced in collaboration with Poetry Ireland in Dublin, Druid Theater in Galway, the 92nd Street Y in New York and Poet in the City in London.“I think there is something special about encountering the arts in an unexpected way in the city, especially an art form like poetry,” Holmes said.The readers in the films include people who were born in Ireland, immigrants to Ireland, people who live in Britain and a few from the United States, like Denice Frohman, who was born and raised in New York City.Frohman was on the theater’s screens on Tuesday night, reading lines like “the beaches are gated & no one knows the names of the dead” from her poem “Puertopia,” when Erin Madorsky and Dorian Baker stopped to listen.Baker said he saw the films playing in the window as symbolizing a “revitalization of poetic energy.”Madorsky had regularly attended theatrical performances before the pandemic but now missed that connection, she said, and was gratified to happen upon a dramatic reading while walking home.She added that the sound of the verses being read stood in contrast to what she called the city’s “standard” backdrop of blaring horns, sirens and rumbling garbage trucks.“I think it’s wonderful,” she said. “There’s something so soothing about her voice, it just pulled me in.” More
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Elliott Carter’s Early Flops Reveal a Budding Musical Master
A composer of famously thorny music had two failed forays into ballet, given fresh reconsideration on a new album.The composer Elliott Carter, looking back on his early ballet “Pocahontas,” wrote that it was “full of suggestions of things that were to remain important to me, as well as others which were later rejected or completely transformed.”“Rejected” is putting it lightly. The approachable “Pocahontas” — one of Carter’s first scores, from the late 1930s — bears almost no resemblance to the thorny and unpredictable works that would come to define his long career, which continued until shortly before his death in 2012, at 103.Carter, a composer who always seemed more interested in the future than the past, was no champion of “Pocahontas,” which despite its likability quickly fell into obscurity — never a repertory staple and never recorded. That is, until now, with the release of a new album by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project that also includes “The Minotaur” (1947), Carter’s only other ballet.The recording offers an opportunity to reconsider what on the surface were early failures. “Pocahontas,” written for Lincoln Kirstein’s touring Ballet Caravan, was panned by the New York Times dance critic John Martin for a score that was “so thick it is hard to see the stage through it.” “The Minotaur” was meant to be choreographed by George Balanchine, for the company that would become New York City Ballet. But instead the job fell to John Taras, and — as David Schiff, the composer and former Carter student, observes in the album’s liner notes — the mythological work was overshadowed by Balanchine’s similarly minded collaborations with Igor Stravinsky, which became classics.After “The Minotaur,” Carter was on the cusp of both a crisis and a breakthrough with his First String Quartet (1950-51). “I had felt that it was my professional and social responsibility to write interesting, direct, easily understood music,” he wrote. “With this quartet, however, I decided to focus on what had always been one of my musical interests, that of ‘advanced’ music, and to follow out, with a minimal concern for their reception, my own musical thoughts along these lines.”Carter didn’t care to dwell on his early period, but if there’s an ensemble up to the task of making a fresh case for “Pocahontas” and “The Minotaur,” it’s the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, which in the past decade has released nearly 100 recordings of both premieres — including Andrew Norman’s “Play” — and overlooked gems. (It’s something like classical music’s equivalent of New York Review Books.)“Pocahontas,” composed in the late 1930s, was one of Carter’s first scores and showed an early master of orchestral writing.George Platt Lynes“In both of these ballets, the sophisticated use of harmony and rhythm foreshadows the stuff to come,” Gil Rose, the group’s artistic director and conductor, said in a recent interview. “He’s obviously a brilliant composer.”Rose took a break from editing an album of John Adams’s two chamber symphonies to discuss the ballets — their importance within Carter’s output and what they share with his later masterworks. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.What are the hallmarks of Carter’s early sound?His music had not become as stark. “The Minotaur” isn’t so much padded with a sonic cushion, but “Pocahontas” is. He could really write a lush orchestration, and with a big string section. In that way its inspiration is more a Romantic ballet than a 20th-century ballet. So it’s more like Prokofiev than anything else — nothing like the Neo-Classical stuff that does take him by storm down the road. “The Minotaur” is more like that. There’s a big pas de deux in it that could have come out of any middle-period Stravinsky ballet.What does looking at these ballets together reveal about Carter’s progression as a composer?His sound gets more angular. That’s probably also because a lot of Stravinsky’s middle-period works start to get known in the United States. Rhythmically, it gets less flexible — more repeated patterns and spiky rhythms. And harmonically, it’s more dissonant. The orchestration has this brashness, and a lot of clashes and disjunct that shows itself already in “Pocahontas.” It is interesting though: If you play “Pocahontas” for someone and say, “Name that composer,” it would take a lot of people who know a lot about music to get through a lot of composers to get to Carter.I would say the time is easy to place, but definitely not the composer.If you hear the Piano Sonata (1945) and the “Holiday Overture” (1944), they’re of the same ilk. He sort of didn’t advocate for his early music very much. But I think it’s important to know where he came from. If you pair this with his late music, it’s a hell of a journey. And this is how it started.Can you point to anything that survives the turn Carter takes after the First String Quartet?It’s a little hard to compare “Pocahontas” with a piece like the String Quartet. But I would look at the Pavane at the end, the way he starts to lay harmonies on top of each other. It’s clear at this moment he’s not writing “Billy the Kid,” or any other kind of Copland Americana, even though it has an Americana subject. He doesn’t stick a folk tune in, or nod to Native American music. He writes in a sense like Prokofiev: He writes the music that he wants to write.At the same time, it’s not at all juvenilia. You know it’s a piece that was done by a gifted and skilled composer. The writing is quite sophisticated. Even talented orchestrators make mistakes in their early pieces, but you get into a movement like “Princess Pocahontas and Her Ladies” — that’s really subtle writing. Most young composers on their first orchestra piece couldn’t pull that off. When we think of Carter, we don’t think of orchestration as one of his main strengths. But with this piece it clearly is.It reminds me of early Joyce, straightforward yet showing a total mastery of prose.That’s a great example. Because nobody understands any of James Joyce at the end. You have to read every sentence like 16 times, but it’s still worth it. The early things that have a more direct communication line to the accepted musical syntax of the time can still be interesting. The quality of his mind and music is apparent even in a form that’s digestible by the normal concert-going audience. And just because it’s digestible doesn’t mean it’s not musical, or not interesting. In fact, it’s sometimes harder to write music that functions on both planes. Those are the pieces that I really love. More
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Lincoln Center Will Head Outside Its Closed Theaters to Perform
#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeWatch: ‘WandaVision’Travel: More SustainablyFreeze: Homemade TreatsCheck Out: Podcasters’ Favorite PodcastsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyLincoln Center Will Head Outside Its Closed Theaters to PerformOfficials announced plans to create 10 outdoor spaces for pandemic-era performances and rehearsals, and to work with blood drives and food banks.With its theaters closed by the pandemic, Lincoln Center plans to create create 10 outdoor performance and rehearsal spaces this spring. Here is an artist’s rendering of one.Credit…Ceylan A. Sahin Eker, via Lincoln CenterPublished More
