Heyward, Jonathon (Conductor)

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares199 Views

    Lincoln Center’s Rebranded Orchestra Settles Into Its Debut Season

    by

    Compared with previous seasons, recent concerts by the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center were refreshingly casual, but also more mixed.With a new name and a new music director, Lincoln Center’s summer orchestra is getting a fresh start this season. On the evidence of three concerts over the past week and a half, though, the newly minted Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center is turning its focus to an element that has always been there: the players themselves.Last year was the final summer of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, which for 21 years had been led by the beloved Louis Langrée. The renamed ensemble’s music director, Jonathon Heyward, was a companionable host recently at the first concert of its season, which allowed audience members to vote on the pieces they’d like to hear. Between movements, Heyward called on a few players at their music stands to talk about their love of the composers. Some remarks seemed well-rehearsed, others extemporaneous. But all of them were sweet.There has been some worry about the organization’s legacy — that change represents a repudiation of the orchestra’s repertoire and mission. At his final concerts, Langrée himself pleaded with the audience to return and support the players.This year, the onstage conversations felt calculated to build a rapport between the players and the audience. Attendees were also invited to mingle with the musicians in the lobby of David Geffen Hall after each concert. All that talking had an interesting outcome: It left me more invested in individual musicians when they eventually played.Kazem Abdullah led a program that included Brahms’s Violin Concerto, with Benjamin Beilman as the soloist.Lawrence Sumulong/Lincoln CenterAs in years past, each program was performed twice on consecutive nights. Avoiding heavy material, the concerts felt like a linen suit designed for comfort, ease and a touch of class on balmy days. There’s still substance, but it comes in the pleasing form of Mozart, Mendelssohn and Schumann (a Heyward favorite), rather than the portentous, densely textured works of Mahler and Strauss.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

    More stories

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      An 18th-Century Phenom Arrives at Lincoln Center

      by

      The Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center will play Marianna Martines’s Symphony in C, a milestone for a composer whose music mostly fell silent after her death.The composer Marianna Martines grew up in Vienna when the city was teeming with towering figures in classical music. Haydn was her neighbor and teacher. Mozart sought her out as a duet partner.Born in 1744, Martines began her remarkable career at just 16. At 38, she became the first female composer programmed by the Society of Musicians, whose elite concert series also gave Beethoven his Viennese performance debut. But after her death, in 1812, Martines’s music mostly fell silent, a fate shared by so many female composers of her era.This week, though, the Summer for the City festival at Lincoln Center will perform Martines’s Symphony in C major (1770), a work composed decades before it was common for women to write orchestral music. The performances are a significant step in the reclamation of her music.“It was an easy decision to present this fantastic piece,” said Jonathon Heyward, the music director of the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center. “The whole piece is filled with wonderful interplay within the strings and the wind parts.” The first movement, he added, “is light and spirited.”The pianist Sandra Mogensen found similar qualities in Martines’s piano music, calling it “sparkly, wonderful and vibrant.” She and her colleague Erica Sipes have played through all of Martines’s available keyboard works as part of Piano Music She Wrote, an online project they founded in 2020 to encourage performances of public domain piano music by women. Martines’s Piano Sonata in A major (1765) was one of the first pieces Sipes recorded. “It pulled me in,” she said. “Every movement has something different to say.”This past spring, Elizabeth Schauer, director of choral activities at the University of Arizona, led what was likely the first performance since Martines’s death of her Mass No. 3 (1761). When she wrote it, “she was only 17,” Schauer said. “My students and I found it astonishing and beautiful.” Schauer used a new score reconstructed by her student James Higgs from manuscripts. For Higgs, Martines’s style reflects her teachers and supporters in Vienna, who were Italian.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

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Hannah Kendall Writes Music With a Vocabulary of Her Own

      by

      This composer’s latest work, for Lincoln Center, is in conversation with Robert Schumann’s music and mental health struggles.“Violent congestion, inexpressible terror, failure of breath, momentary unconsciousness — these overtake me in quick succession, though I am better than I was,” the composer Robert Schumann wrote in a letter to his mother in 1833. He was 23, and the recent deaths of his older brother and sister-in-law surely cast a pall on his state of mind. “If you had any notion of the lethargy into which melancholia has brought me,” he continued, “you would forgive my not writing.”Hannah Kendall, a prominent young British composer based in New York, was struck by that passage a little more than a year ago, while reading Schumann’s letters, which provide glimpses of a decades-long struggle with mental illness, diagnosed during his life as exhaustion, and posthumously as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.“It felt as though there was a very direct, personal connection to his state at the time, which I found particularly fascinating as a composer,” Kendall, 40, said in a recent interview at Lincoln Center — where her new work, “He stretches out the north over the void and hangs the earth on nothing,” will premiere on Aug. 9. The Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center will play Kendall’s piece on a program that also includes Schumann’s Second Symphony.What it takes to be an artist today, Kendall explained, is a regular topic of discussion among her circle of friends and peers. “Our well-being, mental and physical, is something that crops up on a daily basis,” she said. Some composers, like Julia Adolphe, Nico Muhly and Aaron Helgeson, have begun to air mental-health concerns and struggles in public, in blog posts and on podcasts.Kendall was urged to read Schumann’s letters by a longtime friend, the conductor Jonathon Heyward, the music director of the Festival Orchestra, who admittedly had an ulterior motive. For his first summer with the ensemble, he had her commissioned to write a piece for a concert that would also feature Schumann. He envisioned Kendall responding to not only Schumann’s music, but also issues of mental health and this moment when performing arts organizations are still struggling to lure back audiences lost during the pandemic.The coming program, which also includes two works by Bach, is surrounded by contextual offerings. “Ghost Variations,” an augmented-reality installation piece in the lobby at David Geffen Hall, explores how Schumann found solace in Bach’s music. And a preconcert discussion will address the question “Can music express mental health?”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

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Lincoln Center’s Audiences Deserve Music Worthy of Them

      by

      When listeners were given the power to program an orchestral concert, the results were surprising.I love the classical music canon, and I hate it.To be precise, I hate the way we assume audiences will invariably choose it over what’s new and unusual. If you listen to marketing departments, there may be grudging tolerance for some fresh sounds at the start of a concert, but basically, people want the standards — more than ever, as their ticket-buying behavior over the past few years suggests they are only more enamored of chestnuts like “The Planets” and Beethoven’s Ninth.So it was a small but sweet triumph over this narrative when, on Saturday at David Geffen Hall, an audience did exactly the opposite. Finally, the familiar and the less so were put to a fair fight — and who do you think won?The battlefield was Symphony of Choice, a kind of preview performance at the start of the three-week, 13-concert season of the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center. That’s the slightly awkward name of what was once the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, before the center’s warm-weather offerings were consolidated as Summer for the City two years ago.Streamlining previously competing series and festivals has made the schedule clearer. But it has also meant the disappearance of ambitious classical programming in favor of the sort of smaller-scale, pop-culture-oriented events that Shanta Thake, Lincoln Center’s chief artistic officer since 2021, produced when she ran Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater.Amid the silent discos, mindfulness sessions and comedy nights, you get the sense that classical music is now viewed with faint irritation, as a stodgy and expensive waste of resources. People already know Lincoln Center for operas and symphonies during the regular season, the thinking goes, so the center’s audience isn’t going to be expanded in the summer through more of that — especially if those symphonies aren’t packageable as “experiences.”Which is why Symphony of Choice gave me pause when I first heard about it. The goal was for the Festival Orchestra, newly under the direction of the young conductor Jonathon Heyward, to offer a taste of its programs over the next few weeks. The gimmick was a crowdsourced popularity contest.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

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      The ‘Converse Conductor’ Fighting Elitism in Classical Music

      by

      The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra had just finished performing Respighi’s “Pines of Rome” on a recent evening when the ensemble’s new music director, Jonathon Heyward, returned to the stage at Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.Rugs and chairs had been brought out to evoke a living room, for an intimate, late-night conversation with the audience about music and life. Wearing Converse sneakers and sipping from a glass of Scotch, Heyward, 31, discussed Respighi, his first season as music director and becoming a father. (His daughter, Ottilie, was born in May.) It was the kind of casual gathering that Heyward, who takes the helm of the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center this month, has championed as he works to expand the audience for classical music.“This art form is for everyone,” he said in an interview later. “We want everyone to feel welcome here.”Heyward’s efforts to break down barriers in the concert hall have earned him a nickname: the Converse conductor. He is part of a generation of young maestros, including Teddy Abrams in Kentucky and Anthony Parnther in California, who are trying to shed classical music’s elitist image. These rising stars are also hoping to help their orchestras get beyond the disruption of the pandemic by embracing a diverse array of artists and genres, and bringing more music into the community.Those ideas were on display on a recent night in Baltimore, when about 3,000 people gathered at Fort McHenry, a national monument, to hear Heyward lead a concert that paid tribute to construction workers killed in the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. The Baltimore Symphony performed somber works like Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, and Florence Price’s “The Deserted Garden,” as well as pieces by local artists, including the hip-hop performer Anthony Parker, who goes by the stage name Wordsmith.Heyward, the son of a Black father and a white mother — and the first person of color to lead the Baltimore Symphony in its 108-year history — says that orchestras have an obligation to reflect their communities.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

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Why Don’t More American Maestros Lead American Orchestras?

      by

      When Leonard Bernstein was named music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1958, his appointment was hailed as a breakthrough for orchestra conductors from the United States.For decades, American maestros had been cast aside in classical music, seen as inferior to Europeans. But Bernstein’s rise, recently glamorized in the Oscar-nominated “Maestro,” showed that conductors from the United States could compete with their finest counterparts across the Atlantic.Commentators predicted a golden age for American conductors at the top American orchestras. Some followed in Bernstein’s footsteps — including protégés of his — and as recently as 2008, there were American music directors leading orchestras in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis and Washington, D.C.Today, the only one of those ensembles still led by an American is the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Four of the 25 largest ensembles in the United States have an American at the podium, and at the nation’s biggest, most prestigious orchestras, American music directors are entirely absent.“It means that we’ve got a lot of work to do,” said Jonathon Heyward, who grew up in South Carolina and began serving as the Baltimore Symphony’s music director last fall. “We have to continuously think about ways to better relate to an American community.” (Heyward is one of those four American maestros at the largest ensembles today, along with Michael Stern in Kansas City, Giancarlo Guerrero in Nashville and Carl St.Clair at the Pacific Symphony in California.)Classical music has long been a global industry. The Berlin Philharmonic is led by a Russian-born maestro, Kirill Petrenko; the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Germany, by a British-born conductor, Simon Rattle. Just as maestros from overseas have assumed top conducting posts in the United States, American artists have gone to Europe, Asia and elsewhere to lead renowned ensembles. Alan Gilbert, the former music director of the New York Philharmonic, now has orchestras in Germany and Sweden.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

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Goodbye Mostly Mozart, Hello Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center

      by

      The renamed ensemble will present a mix of new and old in its first season under the conductor Jonathon Heyward.Last summer, Lincoln Center bid farewell to the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, a fixture of the city’s cultural scene since 1973, saying it was time to reimagine the ensemble for a modern and more inclusive age.On Monday, the center offered a preview of its plans. While the ensemble will remain the same in size and membership, it now has a new name, a new music director and a program aimed at drawing more diverse audiences to classical music.The Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center, as the ensemble is now called, will convene in July for its first season under the rising conductor Jonathon Heyward, as part of the center’s Summer for the City festival.Heyward said in an interview that he wanted to maintain the orchestra’s innovative spirit.“It’s not that I am at all reinventing the wheel,” he said. “We’re just continuing in a way that is very much in line with a previous legacy of the orchestra.”The lineup for this summer includes a world premiere by the composer Hannah Kendall; the North American premiere of Huang Ruo’s “City of Floating Sounds”; and classics by Beethoven, Haydn and, yes, even a little Mozart.There will also be offerings aimed at drawing new people to Lincoln Center, including a “Symphony of Choice” concert in which audience members will be allowed to construct the program by voting, as well as an augmented-reality exhibition about mental health and Schumann, who suffered from depression.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

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Mostly Mozart Festival Has Diverse Crowds, New Programming

      by

      At recent Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra performances, visibly diverse crowds took in programming new to the ensemble.For the past 10 months, the back side of David Geffen Hall has greeted passers-by with Nina Chanel Abney’s installation “San Juan Heal.” Its bold, color-blocked illustrations pay tribute to the largely Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood that was torn down to make way for Lincoln Center in the mid-20th century.“San Juan Heal” was a way of acknowledging this performing-arts campus’s original sin. When it was announced, Henry Timms, the center’s president and chief executive, said, “We’ve been very intentional about thinking about different voices, different audiences, more people seeing themselves at Lincoln Center.”But as the months passed, I began to wonder: Are there more people of color on the building than inside it? If the installation is both a nod to the past and a hope for the future, then what is Lincoln Center doing to get there?The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, which has taken up residence at Geffen Hall for two and a half weeks as part of Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City programming, has a lot of ideas on that front. With so few concerts, it has little time to capture audience interest, but it also has more room to be conceptually agile.Near the end of July, the ensemble’s concerts began with a premiere by the Iraqi American composer Amir ElSaffar, featuring his Two Rivers ensemble, and continued with programs — led by Thomas Wilkins, Gemma New and Jonathon Heyward — that featured contemporary works about identity and equity while otherwise sticking to the orchestra’s unofficial remit of familiar, easy-on-the-ears repertoire. The performances ranged from workaday to exhilarating.Wilkins, in opening remarks, spoke of composers who feel “comfortable in their skin” as a kind of artistic self-actualization, and he and Heyward gave a platform to Black composers: Adolphus Hailstork, Xavier Foley, Jessie Montgomery and Fela Sowande.At Wilkins’s concert, Foley’s “For Justice and Peace” — written for double bass (Foley), violin (the concertmaster Ruggero Allifranchini) and string ensemble — spurred into action with flashy passagework after an elegiac opening. In Sowande’s African Suite (1944), the musicians tossed genial Nigerian melodies to one another with infectious spirit. But it was in the finale, Hailstork’s Symphony No. 1, that Wilkins inspired excellence in them and conjured a heady mix of timbres like thrashing beams of light and glistening surges of sound.Heyward opened his program with Montgomery’s “Records of a Vanishing City,” a tone poem that swirled with the music — most conspicuously, Miles Davis — that she heard growing up on the Lower East Side. Amid the piece’s slippery, chimerical atmosphere, a solo clarinet, played by Jon Manasse, emerged with sweetly mellow innocence, like a child’s voice in an urban variation of Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.” As it happened, a vivacious account of Barber’s Violin Concerto followed.Heyward, front and center, was among recent conductors of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, including Thomas Wilkins and Gemma New.Lawrence SumulongLast year’s Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra concerts featured a diverse lineup of composers too, but the choices — William Grant Still, Joseph Boulogne and Florence Price — have sometimes crowded out contemporary composers. The recent programs, though, reflect an evolution in a more substantive direction toward true inclusivity.Heyward, in his first concert with the orchestra since being named its next music director, displayed a natural rapport with the audience, an appealing podium manner and a crisp way with downbeats. Stiff at first in the Montgomery, he gradually relaxed into more organic gestures in the Barber and Schumann’s “Rhenish” Symphony.At the moment, though, there is a gulf between Heyward’s intentions and his output. He spoke of “absolute joy” before the Schumann, then delivered something more like breathy contentment. Earthiness teetered on earthbound in the symphony’s exultant depictions of the Rhineland.Despite this orchestra’s name, Mozart made just one appearance in the three recent programs, when New conducted his “Prague” Symphony, a sterling example of his mature style, woven together with unmistakable snatches of the operatic masterpieces he wrote around the same time, “Le Nozze di Figaro” and “Don Giovanni.”New cultivated a fine core of color and volume and shifted from it in gradations, though she didn’t necessarily mine the Andante’s introspection or the Presto’s drama. She also led Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Sarah Gibson’s “warp & weft,” a mysterious, openhearted, at times astringent tribute to the feminist art movement of the 1970s that fought to elevate so-called women’s work from craft to fine art.The soloists on these three evenings brought personal flair, if not the last word in technique, to their showpieces. Foley’s adroit, sly, softly powerful style in Bottesini’s Double Bass Concerto No. 2 drew listeners to the edge of their seats despite a stylistically questionable habit of bending notes. Stewart Goodyear took off like gangbusters in the Mendelssohn piano concerto — fast, efficient, driving — and put aside elegance for hair-raising thrills. In Barber’s rapturous Violin Concerto, Simone Lamsma smoothed over the tension brought by triplet rhythms in the first movement’s long, sumptuous melody; her tendency to play on the sharp edge of the pitch gave her tone an uncanny brilliance that kept it from nestling into the warm orchestral textures.Shanta Thake, Lincoln Center’s artistic leader, came onstage before each concert to welcome the audience and lead it in what she called a “ritual.” Last year, this call-and-response exchange felt like a way to speak healing into existence after the pandemic. This year, the audience’s disengagement from the exercise deepened with each concert.Arguably, Wilkins and Heyward are the ones creating community by enlarging the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra’s repertoire. And if the delighted reactions of the large, diverse crowds — who supplied enthusiastic applause and even scattered standing ovations between pieces — are any indication, it’s working. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Lincoln Center Names Conductor for Reimagined Mostly Mozart

      by

      Jonathon Heyward will succeed Louis Langrée as music director of the center’s revered summer ensemble.Jonathon Heyward, the rising young conductor who this fall will become the first Black music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, has been tapped to lead Lincoln Center’s summer ensemble, a reimagined version of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, the center announced on Wednesday.Heyward, 30, will start a three-year contract with Lincoln Center next year. His appointment is part of the center’s changes to the revered Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, by giving it a new name, embracing a wider variety of genres and bringing more racial, ethnic and gender diversity to the stage.“If a 10-year-old boy from Charleston can fall in love with this music, then anyone can,” Heyward said in an interview. “It has everything to do with accessibility and presentation.”Heyward succeeds the orchestra’s longtime music director, Louis Langrée, whose contract expires this year. During Langrée’s 21-year tenure, he has helped rejuvenate the ensemble and cement its reputation as an acclaimed interpreter of the music of Mozart and the Classical repertoire.“The orchestra musicians and I have developed a unique bond that I will treasure forever,” Langrée said in a statement. “I wish Jonathon as many joys as those I experienced during this extraordinary journey.”Under Henry Timms, Lincoln Center’s president and chief executive, the organization has worked to appeal to a younger, more diverse crowd. Its efforts have led to some complaints from audience members, who say the center is not doing enough to promote classical music — which was once a fixture of the season and festivals there, but has been reduced significantly.Since the pandemic, the future of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, established in 1973, has been uncertain. The festival whose name it bears — once one of Lincoln Center’s premier summertime events — no longer exists. In its place is “Summer for the City,” featuring a wider variety of genres, including pop music, social dance and comedy.Shanta Thake, Lincoln Center’s chief artistic officer, said that the rethinking of Mostly Mozart was aimed at “opening this up and really saying that this is music that belongs to everyone.”“It’s a necessary evolution,” she said. “This is an orchestra that I think has a big place in the hearts and minds of New York City, and we want to keep it that way.”The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra will get a new name when Heyward takes the podium next year. Thake said that its longtime moniker felt “a little myopic right now.”“We’d love to just open up that conversation and have this orchestra be something more than just one composer, or mostly anything,” she said.The center and the orchestra are negotiating a new contract — the previous agreement expired in February — and discussing issues including auditions, the process for hiring substitutes, diversifying the ranks of the ensemble and promoting community engagement.Heyward, who made his Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra debut last year and will return this summer, said that he would work to broaden the ensemble’s repertoire, including by programming more works by contemporary composers. He mentioned Hannah Kendall, a friend, as an example of an artist he was eager to explore.“We have to continue the lineage and the storytelling of today in order to really grow the art form,” he said.Heyward said he would also seek to preserve the ensemble’s heritage. “I just don’t see that just completely disappearing overnight,” he said. “It won’t, simply.”“I don’t plan on just throwing out the Beethoven symphonies, the Schumann symphonies or Mozart,” he added. “That’s not the approach to take, and that’s not what I believe in.” More