Gordon, Michael (1956- )

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    Best Classical Performances of 2024

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    Standouts included the soprano Lise Davidsen and the Berlin Philharmonic, a new opera by Missy Mazzoli and bits of old ones by Schubert.ZACHARY WOOLFEDeathless Classics and Unmissable New OperasThe joy of a music critic’s job is how wide the purview is. From revivals of centuries-old pieces to the premieres of brand-new works, the field I cover is an ecosystem that takes pride in both the past and the future. My favorite performances this year, in chronological order, spanned eras, but all were marriages of imaginative spontaneity and meticulous craft.Trinity Wall Street’s ‘Messiah’Even after the departure of Trinity’s visionary arts director, Julian Wachner, in 2022, this has remained the most urgent, vivid version of Handel’s classic oratorio that I know of — alternately bracing and joyous. (Ryan James Brandau conducted last December.) Much credit is due to the church’s vibrant period-instrument orchestra. And rather than hosting the usual quartet of aria soloists, this performance has almost 20 soloists emerge from the exceptional in-house choir, making it more a communal rite than a stale holiday pageant. (Read our review.)Yunchan LimYunchan Lim performed Chopin’s piano études at Carnegie Hall.Chris LeeChopin’s 24 études are only an hour of music, but that hour is one of the most storied and difficult in the piano repertoire. Yunchan Lim was just 19 when he ran this old-school gantlet at Carnegie Hall in February, yet he has a thoughtfulness and maturity that belie his years. At Carnegie, as on the recording he released in April, he was unfazed by the études’ staggering technical demands as he balanced note-by-note clarity with sensitive lyricism. (Read our reviews of the concert and the recording.)Lise DavidsenOne of the best singers of her generation, this Norwegian soprano has a huge, coolly powerful voice that sails easily through the long lines of Wagner and Strauss. Verdi tends to benefit from more vulnerability and velvety warmth, but Davidsen has become an artist you want to hear in everything. In February she lavished her generosity, finesse and visceral impact on the much-suffering Leonora in the Metropolitan Opera’s forcefully played new production of “La Forza del Destino,” stopping the show with her 11-o’clock number, “Pace, pace mio Dio.” (Read our review of “La Forza del Destino.”)Cleveland OrchestraIn May, Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” was cast with fresh, youthful voices and played with elegant transparency by one of the world’s great orchestras at Severance Hall. It was the 20th opera presentation of the conductor Franz Welser-Möst’s Cleveland tenure, which will end in 2027 after a quarter-century — astonishing longevity in today’s music world. The ensemble’s Carnegie Hall visit in January with Welser-Möst was also memorable, including lucid performances of Prokofiev’s second and fifth symphonies, which ingeniously sandwiched Webern’s experiment in that genre. (Read our reviews of “The Magic Flute” and the Carnegie concert.)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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      Amid Orchestral Waves, the Sound of Cultures Conversing

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      “Natural History,” performed in Cincinnati, is a collaboration between the composer Michael Gordon and the Native American ensemble Steiger Butte Drum.Eleven members of Steiger Butte Drum sat in a circle around a large elk-hide drum at the front of the stage of Cincinnati’s Music Hall last Thursday. Washes of sound from the orchestra behind them built and receded in grand waves.The group was the concerto soloist, of a kind, in “Natural History” by Michael Gordon, one of the Bang on a Can composers who infused Minimalism with rough, rebellious energy in the 1980s. A few times over the course of the 25-minute piece, Steiger Butte Drum, a traditional percussion and vocal ensemble of the Klamath Tribes of Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, broke out in a ceremonial song, the members beating the drum in fast, dramatic unison as they made a piercing, tangily pitch-bending, wordlessly wailing chant.They were joined by a full chorus, placed in the first balcony: the men on one side of the hall, the women on the other. Percussion in the upper balcony evoked woodland animals; brasses, also up there, let out joyful, squealing bits of fanfare that seemed to tumble down and join lines coming from the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra onstage — eventually rising to a powerful, churning finale, with all these sprawling forces, conducted by Teddy Abrams, going at once.Unsettled and unsettling, both celebratory and threatening, imposing and ultimately harmonious, this was the sound of a cultural conversation that is still, after centuries, in its nascent stages.Native American composers and performers are slowly gaining more visibility after having long been largely ignored by institutions associated with the Western classical tradition. Raven Chacon, a Diné composer and visual artist, won the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2022. In March, the New York Philharmonic premiered an orchestral version of the Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate’s “Pisachi.”And yet Native music, kaleidoscopically varied across the country and its many tribes and heritages, remains only rarely heard, and so only vaguely understood and appreciated, by non-Natives. This is hardly surprising, given the country’s more general neglect of a full, sustained reckoning with its history with — and its often stunningly cruel treatment of — Native Americans.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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      A Tour Through the Most Interesting Acoustics in New York

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      The composer Michael Gordon and members of Mantra Percussion tested the piece “Timber” in resonant spaces around the city. Here is what they learned.As three people struck wood with mallets under a viaduct in Queens during the morning rush hour one day in the fall, a man walked up and asked, “What do you call this music?” The players could have told him the title of the piece, Michael Gordon’s “Timber,” or given him some idea of the genre. But one, Caitlin Cawley, simply said, “Percussion.”Cawley and her colleagues from the ensemble Mantra Percussion were at the viaduct, which runs along Queens Boulevard and under the 7 train, to test the sound of its vaulted ceiling. It was part of a project to perform “Timber,” an hourlong work from 2009, in man-made sites with idiosyncratic acoustics around New York City.The result, called Resonant Spaces, begins on Sunday, with performances at three locations, followed by three more on April 21. In addition to the viaduct, they include Castle Clinton and Federal Hall in Lower Manhattan, and in Brooklyn, archways in Prospect Park and Dumbo, and a monument in Fort Greene Park. The free concerts will allow the public to hear New York the way percussionists do: as a limitless source of musical opportunity.“Timber” was originally written for the Dutch group Slagwerk Den Haag. Six percussionists struck amplified two-by-fours — a take on simantras, planks of wood shaped to create specific tones, which have a history of being used in the Eastern Orthodox Church.In the early performances of “Timber,” the simantras were made from pine, but Mantra Percussion has taken a different route. Michael McCurdy, a member, said that the score didn’t specify the wood. “When you are learning Xenakis, or anything,” he said, “when the composer says ‘wood block,’ the variety of sounds that can come from that instrument is vast.’”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