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    A Pianist Who’s Not Afraid to Improvise on Mozart

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    Robert Levin has long argued that Mozart would have made up new material while performing, and he follows the master in a series of dazzling recordings.Robert Levin playing an excerpt of Mozart, whose complete works for keyboard and orchestra he has recently finished releasing on disc.Cadenzas are a concerto soloist’s time to shine: the moments when the rest of the orchestra dramatically drops out and a single musician gets the chance to command the stage.For about half of Mozart’s piano concertos, cadenzas he wrote have been preserved, and those are what you usually hear in concerts and on recordings. Other composers later filled in the gaps with cadenzas that have also become traditional. Some performers write their own.But 250 years ago, when Mozart was a star pianist, he wouldn’t have performed prewritten cadenzas — even ones he had composed.“When Mozart wrote his concertos, they were a vehicle for his skills,” the pianist and scholar Robert Levin said by telephone from Salzburg, Austria — Mozart’s hometown — where he teaches at the Mozarteum University. “He was respected as a composer and lionized as a performer, but it was as an improviser that he was on top of the heap.”Levin, 76, has long argued that Mozart, as a player, made up new cadenzas and ornaments in the moment. And he has sought to revive that spirit of improvisation in a landmark cycle of the concertos on period instruments, a 13-album project begun more than 30 years ago with the Academy of Ancient Music, led by Christopher Hogwood.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jessye Norman Rejected These Recordings. Should They Be Released?

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      The maestro was in a foul mood. And the singer was unhappy. The Berlin Wall had fallen almost a decade earlier, but Leipzig, in the former East Germany, still left something to be desired when it came to an opera star’s material needs.The conductor Kurt Masur and the soprano Jessye Norman — whose album collaboration on Strauss’s “Four Last Songs” was already a classic — had joined the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra to start recording Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.” But things had quickly soured.“She and Masur quarreled,” recalled Costa Pilavachi, then an executive at Philips Classics, the label making the recording. “It was a very, very difficult couple of weeks.”With costs spiraling and spirits low, the label eventually abandoned its plan for a complete “Tristan” and focused on excerpts featuring Isolde, a character Norman had never put on record beyond the famous “Liebestod.” But even this curtailed effort was never released.Until now. Those “Tristan” excerpts are perhaps the most eagerly anticipated part of “Jessye Norman: The Unreleased Masters,” coming from Decca — part of Universal Music Group, which acquired Philips years ago — on March 24.Jessye Norman singing from “Tristan und Isolde”Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra; Kurt Masur, conductor (Decca)The collection consists of three albums recorded with different orchestras and conductors over a period of nine years. One thing they have in common: Norman, one of the most beloved singers of our time, did not approve their release before her death, at 74, in 2019.“When she passed on, I raised with Decca: Isn’t it time to revisit these?” said Cyrus Meher-Homji, an executive at Universal in Australia. The label approached Norman’s estate, which gave its blessing.James Norman, her brother, said in a statement to The New York Times, “There’s no way of knowing whether Jessye would ever have approved the releases per her very high standards, as the subject was not one we ever discussed.”But, he added, they had frequently discussed her philanthropic interests, “and we see the releases as a way to help the estate to advance those interests.”More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Fosse Dancers: The thrill of “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’,” a revival of the 1978 musical is, aptly, its dancers. All are principals. No two are alike, not even a tiny bit. And that’s the way Fosse wanted it.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.However worthy the beneficiary, though, should labels and estates sanction the release of material that artists rejected?Sometimes, the label answers with a clear no: Maria Callas’s final studio recording, for example, was judged artistically inferior and canned. And sometimes, an unsanctioned album comes out during an artist’s lifetime. In the early 1980s, Deutsche Grammophon put out a “Tristan” against the wishes of the notoriously recording-shy conductor Carlos Kleiber, leading to the severing of his relationship with the label.After Kleiber died, his estate remained adamant that other material languishing in the vault should stay there. The family of Sergiu Celibidache, another conductor who frowned on recording, took the opposite position, allowing the release of many albums after his death.This question is more familiar in the literary world. Most of us are thankful that Max Brod didn’t burn Franz Kafka’s unpublished works at the author’s request. But in 2006, when a volume of uncollected material by the poet Elizabeth Bishop was published, the scholar Helen Vendler wrote that Bishop would have greeted it “with a horrified ‘No.’”Martha de Francisco, a record producer who worked with Norman (though not on the projects included in the new set), said, “We’re really all the time thinking of what is the artist’s integrity.”But the nature of that integrity is often far from straightforward. Artists’ wishes can be ambiguous or ambivalent. And some observers believe that the value to posterity of certain material can in some cases supersede even clear wishes. As far as the criteria, though, most admit that it’s more or less “I know it when I hear it.”For Norman, approving recordings was a painstaking and protracted process, even when the answer ended up being yes. “She was extraordinarily professional, and an extraordinarily severe critic of her own work,” said Anthony Freud, then one of her producers and now the general director of Lyric Opera of Chicago.That would seem to give weight to her “no.” But those who spoke with her over the years about these unreleased projects suggest that she wasn’t always resolute about them, and that her reasons for not giving her approval were vague or fixable.“She was a great artist, and she had the right to decide what the public would hear and what the public wouldn’t hear in terms of her commercial output,” Pilavachi said. “She definitely did soften: She was less militant when I spoke to her, maybe 10 years ago, for the last time. She was much more willing to discuss some of this.”The earliest of the three projects is a collaboration with one of her champions, the conductor James Levine, drawn from live performances with the Berlin Philharmonic. The repertory includes the “Four Last Songs” — seven years after her sublime 1982 rendition with Masur — and, from 1992, Wagner’s “Wesendonck Lieder.”“She was thrilled with the ‘Wesendoncks,’” Pilavachi said. “But she wasn’t happy with one note in one song in the ‘Four Last Songs.’ She wanted us to redo that with Levine and the Berlin Philharmonic, and it just never happened. I had extensive conversations with her throughout the ’90s about it.”There was talk of using the Masur recording to patch the note she indicated. (While memories of her complaint are now blurry, it might have been in the first song, “Frühling,” though nothing in any of the four with Levine stands out as blatantly off.) But the original tapes of the older album turned out to have been recycled. The label couldn’t see its way to releasing the Wagner songs alone, so the whole project stayed in storage.These “Four Last Songs” are sleeker than the luscious version she set down with Masur, while Norman’s voice, even if it had lost some easy opulence, was still majestic and flexible. The “Wesendoncks,” which she had already recorded twice, are excellent: brooding, urgent and lush, the orchestra glistening.Norman came up with the idea for the next project, which brought together three queenly characters: Haydn’s “Scena di Berenice,” Berlioz’s “La Mort de Cléopâtre” and Britten’s “Phaedra,” all recorded with Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in February 1994.Pilavachi said Norman had vague misgivings about the Berlioz; Meher-Homji said her complaint in that work was less about her performance than the sound.“By the late 2000s, she approved some of the material,” Meher-Homji said. “She approved the Britten, and she approved the Haydn, but she didn’t like the mix on the Berlioz. And I could understand why. The sound was really hollow; she wanted it tightened up. The orchestra sounded like it was playing in a bathtub.”The mix was adjusted for the new release, and sounds properly balanced, with the Bostonians glittering. Her singing in the Berlioz is slightly more pressed and less plush than it had been with Daniel Barenboim a decade earlier, but she is still fully in command. The Haydn is magisterial but tender; the Britten, blistering and articulate.There is a case to be made that Norman’s objections to these two recordings were minor, and that the performances are worthy of standing alongside her prime work. But that still leaves the “Tristan” — which poses the thorniest questions.In a way, it is the most precious of the set, setting down a role that Norman never sang in full, one for which her capacious but thrusting voice was, in theory, beautifully suited. Its afterlife has also been the messiest of the three albums: The documentation related to the recording is scant and faded, as are the memories of those who worked on it.The similarity between the surnames of Kurt Masur and the tenor Thomas Moser initially caused confusion about who had sung Tristan. More bizarre, when Decca announced the new set last fall, it led with the blazing news that through overdubbing Norman had recorded both Isolde and the supporting role of Brangäne. It took two and a half months for the label to correct itself: Brangäne was actually the mezzo-soprano Hanna Schwarz.Norman, left, performing with Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.Lutz KleinhansMeher-Homji said that at some point after the sessions had ended in April 1998, Cord Garben, the recording’s producer, flew to England to play the edit for Norman. “She listened and said nothing,” Meher-Homji said. “There were plans to continue, and she decided she didn’t want to.”Pilavachi believes the troubled recording process had irretrievably colored her view of it. “She didn’t have any objections to her own singing,” he said. “I think she didn’t want to listen to all the tapes, having had such a lousy experience in Leipzig. I don’t think she had ever listened to it properly so that she could say yes or no.”Dominic Fyfe, Decca’s label director, said: “Obviously this was done quite late in her career. We’re perfectly well aware there may be people who react and say this should not have been released. There may be some controversy around it. But I think on balance, collectively, we all felt that the strengths of the recording outweigh many of the weaknesses.”It’s true: There are strengths and weaknesses to the “Tristan” excerpts. Norman’s voice is richly vehement and full of mystery. Her sensibility is lively, even if Masur’s conducting tends to be limp. Her diction is pungent; the tone has her familiar echoey depth — far plummier than Schwarz’s Brangäne — if fewer sumptuous colors. Some longer phrases are heavy lifting; the high notes are not all comfortable; and some of the intonation wavers in softer passages of Isolde’s Narrative and Curse. The album gives great pleasure, but, more than the other two, one can understand Norman doubting it.When Pilavachi would see her in New York, he would ask her about these projects. “She became less negative about them as time went on,” he said. “But when I went back to London and I would follow up, I wouldn’t hear back. Or I’d send her the masters again, but I don’t know if she ever listened to them. With time she lost interest in them.”The liner notes for the new set thoroughly describe the equivocal position the recordings hold in Norman’s body of work. “It’s important that people appreciate that she had misgivings,” Fyfe said.But that context will not be available on streaming platforms. There, these albums will appear as indistinguishable from music that Norman did approve.“In a digital world,” Fyfe said, “it’s slightly out of our hands.”James Norman said in his statement, “We did agonize some about approving the release of something about which Jessye had some concerns.” But whatever the ethical quandaries, it is certainly the legal right of Norman’s estate and her label to approve the release of this new set. Now it is up to listeners — and to history — to judge.“Common sense is right to prevail,” said Freud, her onetime producer. “I’m not trying to second guess why an artist might have a problem with a recording. But there are clearly recordings that are of a quality that deserves to be heard, and there are other recordings that aren’t. I suppose logically, to me, the answer needs to lie in the quality of the result somehow. Is it good?” More

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      Bob Moore, an Architect of the Nashville Sound, Dies at 88

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      He played bass on thousands of popular recordings, helping to create the uncluttered style that came to characterize the country music of the 1950s and ’60s.NASHVILLE — Bob Moore, an architect of the Nashville Sound of the 1950s and ’60s who played bass on thousands of popular recordings, including Elvis Presley’s “Return to Sender” and Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” died on Sept. 22 at a hospital here. He was 88.His death was confirmed by his wife, Kittra Bernstein Moore, who did not cite a cause.As a mainstay of the loose aggregation of first-call Nashville session professionals known as the A-Team, Mr. Moore played on many of the landmark country hits of his day, among them Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man,” Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and George Jones’s “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”All were No. 1 country singles, and each typified the intuitive, uncluttered style of playing that came to characterize the less-is-more Nashville Sound.Mr. Moore, who mainly played the upright bass, also contributed the swaggering opening figure to Roger Miller’s “King of the Road” as well as the indomitable bass line on Jeannie C. Riley’s skewering of hypocrisy, “Harper Valley P.T.A.” Both records were No. 1 country singles and major crossover hits, with Ms. Riley’s reaching the top of the pop chart in 1968.Over 40 years Mr. Moore elevated the bass in country music from a subordinate timekeeper to an instrument capable of considerable tonal and emotional reach. By turns restrained and robust, his imaginative phrasing revealed a gift for seizing the dramatic moment within a recording or arrangement.“No matter how good a musician you are technically, what really matters boils down to your taste in playing,” he once said. “A lot of guys can play a hundred notes a second; some can play one note, and it makes a lot better record.”Mr. Moore’s forceful, empathetic playing extended well beyond the precincts of country music to encompass the likes of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer” and Brook Benton’s “Rainy Night in Georgia,” among other pop and soul hits, as well as several notable rockabilly records.As session leader at Monument Records, where he worked in the late 1950s, Mr. Moore created arrangements for recordings by Roy Orbison and others, including “Only the Lonely,” a Top 10 pop single for Mr. Orbison in 1960. The record stalled at No. 2 and might have gone on to occupy the top spot on the chart were it not for Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry.” Mr. Moore played bass on that one, too.He had a Top 10 pop record of his own: the Mariachi-flavored instrumental “Mexico” (1961), credited to Bob Moore and His Orchestra. (The song was composed by Boudleaux Bryant, who, with his wife, Felice, also wrote hits for Mr. Orbison and the Everly Brothers.)In 1960 Mr. Moore and some of his fellow A-Teamers received an invitation to appear at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island. After a series of violent incidents in Newport, some set off by an angry crowd of concertgoers who had been shut out of sold-out shows, the festival ended prematurely and Mr. Moore was unable to perform, so he and a group billed as the Nashville All-Stars, which included the vibraphonist Gary Burton, recorded an album of instrumentals called “After the Riot at Newport.”“Anyone who has heard me play bass knows my soul,” Mr. Moore said, looking back on his career in a 2002 interview with the website Art of Slap Bass. “I am studied, solid, thorough, steadfast, bold and dependable.”In 2007, Mr. Moore and his fellow A-Team members were inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame in Nashville.His son R. Stevie Moore is also a musician, having played a pioneering role in the lo-fi, or do-it-yourself, movement popularized by indie-rock artists like Pavement and Beck.“Anyone who has heard me play bass knows my soul,” Mr. Moore once said. “I am studied, solid, thorough, steadfast, bold and dependable.”Bill ForsheeBobby Loyce Moore was born on Nov. 30, 1932, in Nashville and raised by his maternal grandmother, Minnie Anderson Johnson, a widow.When he was 9, Bobby set up a shoeshine station outside the Ryman Auditorium, then home to the Grand Ole Opry. One of his regular customers was Jack Drake, the bass player for Ernest Tubb and his Texas Troubadours; Mr. Drake became an early mentor.Bobby appeared in local bands before going on tour at age 15 as a guitarist and stand-up bassist for the minstrels Jamup and Honey. Along with the future A-Team guitarists Hank Garland and Grady Martin, he spent time in the bands of the Opry stars Paul Howard and Little Jimmy Dickens before working with the singers Red Foley and Marty Robbins.Mr. Moore’s big break came in the early 1950s, when the Nashville bandleader Owen Bradley offered him steady employment with his dance orchestra. Even more auspicious, Mr. Bradley promised Mr. Moore, then weary of touring, steady work on the recording sessions he would soon be supervising as the newly established head of the local office of Decca Records.Over the next three decades Mr. Moore would appear on hits by Decca luminaries like Kitty Wells and Conway Twitty as well as others, like Jim Reeves and Earl Scruggs, who recorded for other labels. He appeared on virtually all of Patsy Cline’s 1960s recordings for Decca, including her hit “Crazy” in 1961, and much of Presley’s RCA output of the early to mid-’60s, including “Return to Sender,” released in 1962.As a new generation of session musicians began supplanting the original A-Team in the early ’80s, Mr. Moore pursued other projects, including a stint with Jerry Lee Lewis’s band. A hand injury forced his premature retirement from performing later that decade.In addition to his wife and his son Stevie, Mr. Moore is survived by a daughter, Linda Faye Moore, who is also a performing musician; two other sons, Gary and Harry; and two granddaughters.In the early 1950s, when Mr. Bradley offered him a career as a studio musician, Mr. Moore discovered a life-changing musical fellowship as a member of the A-Team.“We were like brothers,” he said in his Art of Slap Bass interview. “We had great musical chemistry and communication.” He continued: “We loved creating our music together. We were able to assert our personalities and express our feelings through our music in such an effective way that the public came to recognize our individual styles.” More

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      For a Major Debut, a Young Violinist Gets Personal

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      Randall Goosby’s first album, “Roots,” is a survey of music by Black composers that includes several premiere recordings.In another life, Randall Goosby would have been a pianist.When offered the opportunity to learn an instrument as a child, he chose the violin but was told he was too small for it. So he started on piano instead. He struggled, and his mother, who had nudged him and his siblings toward lessons in the first place, could see that his self-esteem was beginning to wane.Then they decided to give the violin another try, and something clicked.“I would come home from school, and whereas my brother and sister wanted to play, I would throw open the violin case,” Goosby, now 24, recalled in a recent interview. “I was pretty much playing violin all the time.”He breezed through the first several books of the Suzuki method at a pace that would make an average violin student feel inept. All signs pointed to something more promising than a simple love for a new instrument.Goosby took to violin naturally as a child, breezing through the books of the Suzuki method and happily playing, he said, “all the time.”Elias Williams for The New York TimesAt 13, Goosby became the youngest winner of the Sphinx Competition’s junior division, then was invited to appear in a Young People’s Concert with the New York Philharmonic. It wouldn’t be long before he was a protégé of the legendary violinist Itzhak Perlman. And now, not even done with his education at the Juilliard School, Goosby is making his major label debut with the album “Roots,” released Friday on Decca.The album, Perlman said in an interview, demonstrates that Goosby “knows who he is, and he wants to make sure everybody does as well.”It’s not the usual debut. Where many young musicians might make their mark with a war horse concerto by Mendelssohn, Bruch or Beethoven, Goosby instead assembled a sweeping recital program of works by Black composers — including a premiere written by the bassist Xavier Dubois Foley and first recordings of Florence Price discoveries — as well as by Dvorak and Gershwin, two white composers whose music on the album reveals an indebtedness to their Black peers.“A debut recording has to express the signature of the artist, and that’s exactly what this is, from someone who is a perfect advocate as a performer, but also a perfect advocate as a communicator of what this music means,” said Dominic Fyfe, the director of Decca. “It’s always exciting to see young artists which are right at the beginning of the runway.”GOOSBY’S MOTHER, Jiji Goosby, a Korean woman who grew up in Japan passionately loving music and dance, was the linchpin of Randall’s early violin education. When he outgrew his first teacher, she bribed him to take a lesson with Routa Kroumovitch-Gomez, promising that if he gave it a try, she would take him out for sushi afterward.He took his mother up on the offer and stayed with Kroumovitch-Gomez as a student for three years. From here he had his first taste, he said, of serious violin instruction. More teachers would follow, including Philippe Quint, whom Goosby and his mother would fly to New York to see once a month for six hours of intensive study.Not merely a chaperone, Jiji sat in the lessons as well, taking notes. She also took a waitressing job at a Japanese restaurant to help cover the costs of their trips to New York; Goosby’s father, Ralph, was often traveling for his job in marketing. There were nights when the children were at home with no parents, eating a microwave dinner or pizza.“I really understood even then how much of a sacrifice it was for my whole family,” Goosby said. “My family is my core, and it was a time when we could have seen a little more of each other.”A turning point came when Goosby, following his Sphinx triumph, joined the Perlman Music Program and met his mentor.“I had idolized Mr. Perlman, and of course I had my preconceived notion of what he’d be like,” Goosby said. “But he was one of the most down to earth, relatable, comforting presences for me.”For his debut album, Goosby wanted to tell a story “that meant something to me personally,” he said.Elias Williams for The New York TimesIn an interview, Perlman recalled being struck by Goosby’s sound. “The important thing for me, in any musician, is sound,” he said. “And his is beautiful. It immediately hits the listener.”Perlman shares teaching duties with Catherine Cho, who over the past decade has also become a close mentor of Goosby’s; their lessons, veering into life in general, can take on the feel of therapy sessions. When she first heard him play, she said, “the level of his talent was clear.”“You can tell so much by the way someone puts their violin up,” Cho added. “The way he approaches the instrument is very personal. Then when he puts his up and plays a note — you can hear that spark, that he has something to say and he passionately wants to say it. That’s talent.”So Cho and Perlman took on Goosby as a student, with the goal, Cho said, of “nurturing his gift and not messing it up.”Successfully not messing it up is more complicated than regular lessons. Beyond technique, Goosby was figuring out work-life balance. He avoided the label “prodigy,” which had been attached to him after the Sphinx competition, referring to it only as “the P-word.” And from his father, he learned the importance of making time for his friends and hobbies, like basketball.There is still, he thinks, work to do on his sound — an elusive, nearly magical ingredient in music that begins to truly differentiate students when they get to a place like Juilliard, where he is pursuing an Artist Diploma. It was the focus of a recent lesson with Cho, their first together in person after months of Zoom sessions.The two spoke mostly with poetic language. After he played a showy passage from Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s trio of showpieces “Blue/s Forms,” she asked whether he felt fire or coolness, and he responded, “There are so many notes, it comes across as fiery, but on the inside, I think I’m feeling cool.” Then she asked where the energy was coming from, and, after a thoughtful pause, he said, “the lower belly, core area.” The questioning immediately showed in Goosby’s playing, which had audibly greater clarity and focus.IN A WAY, Goosby could not have made his debut with a big concerto; “Roots” was made last year, when gathering with an orchestra was all but impossible. But even without the pandemic restrictions, he said, he was more interested in telling a story — about the way the artists on his program influenced one another “in a trickle-down effect through time.”“For me, the easiest way to tell the story would be through something that meant something to me personally,” he said. “I could have recorded all three Brahms sonatas. That story’s been told countless times, and there are people who want to hear that story told a certain way.”The program is constellatory rather than chronological, beginning in the present with Foley’s foot-tapping earworm “Shelter Island” and continuing with “Blue/s Forms.” Then come the great violinist Jascha Heifetz’s arrangements of songs from Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” — along with Dvorak, suggested by the label to offer listeners something familiar — and William Grant Still’s Suite for Violin and Piano; premiere recordings of three warmly melodic and eclectic pieces by Price; an arrangement of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Deep River”; and Dvorak’s American-inspired Sonatina in G for Violin and Piano. (Zhu Wang is the pianist throughout.)Some of the works, by virtue of being adapted from songs, bring out the alluring lyricism of Goosby’s playing, which has a tinge of golden-age tenderness and expressive portamento. In the coming season, audiences around the world will hear that voice applied to concertos by Brahms, Bruch, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Beethoven and Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges — another long overlooked Black composer.Goosby signed a multi-album deal with Decca, and it’s likely his next recording will be a concerto program. “We’ve talked about ideas of Mozart and Chevalier de Saint-Georges and Coleridge-Taylor and late Romanticism,” he said.“One thing I do know,” he added, “is that it has to have a story.” More