Kendall, Hannah (1984- )

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    Hannah Kendall Writes Music With a Vocabulary of Her Own

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    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

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      Goodbye Mostly Mozart, Hello Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center

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      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

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      Review: The Philharmonic Tries Out Another Temporary Home

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      After opening its season at Alice Tully Hall, the orchestra found more congenial surroundings at the Rose Theater.Maybe it was the surge of adrenaline that the New York Philharmonic felt at finally returning to live concerts at Lincoln Center after a year and a half. Maybe sizing down symphonic power for a temporary venue — Alice Tully Hall, with just over a third of the seats of the orchestra’s usual theater across the street — was a work in progress on opening night.Whatever the reason, the Philharmonic’s clenched, loud performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 last week left me jangled and headachy. From my seat close to the action — maybe that was part of the problem, too — the performance seemed in line with the worst impulses of Jaap van Zweden, the orchestra’s music director, who announced just before the season that he would leave his post in 2024.That bullied, blatant Beethoven swept up even a normally suave soloist, Daniil Trifonov, who huffed and pounded. It didn’t bode well for the remainder of this season, much of which will be held at Tully as the Philharmonic’s home, David Geffen Hall, undergoes renovations.Not so fast. On Thursday — the orchestra’s nerves perhaps settled, and now at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, another temporary home much smaller than Geffen, but airier in feel than Tully — a different Beethoven piano concerto, the Third, was superb.Yes, I know: Another week, another Beethoven concerto. But it’s slightly easier to forgive unimaginative programming when the performance is as spirited and full-bodied as it was with Yefim Bronfman as soloist.Beloved by this orchestra, particularly in this composer, Bronfman built imperceptibly through the first movement to organ-like grandeur in his cadenza. Then his tone receded into pearly dreaminess before ending in a shivery trill. His serene poise at the start of the Largo (later recalled in his encore, Chopin’s Nocturne No. 8 in D flat) was matched by silky strings. The Rondo finale had dash all around, but Bronfman never seemed to be putting phrases in italics or boldface; this was easygoing playing, in the best sense.The concerto followed Hannah Kendall’s “Kanashibari” (2013), which has a few ethereal moments before falling into a long stretch of John Adams-esque chugging strings and brassy fanfares, with the odd slap of wood. But the orchestra played it with focus and polish.Opening with a contemporary work of seven or eight minutes that’s swamped by the subsequent hour of Beethoven and Haydn, the program was in the classic mode of an ensemble that’s profoundly cautious yet wants to appear progressive.A slight complication is that while Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto is frequent fodder for the Philharmonic, Haydn’s Symphony No. 92 in G (“Oxford”) isn’t. It’s standard repertory, sure, but not for this orchestra, which until trying it out this summer hadn’t played it in almost 20 years.Van Zweden leading Haydn’s Symphony No. 92 in G (“Oxford”).Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesIt made you, as performances of his symphonies often do, want to hear them all the time. Particularly when they gleam like the “Oxford” did on Thursday, the phrases at the start sculpted but not overly managed. Perhaps, going for crispness, van Zweden occasionally erred on the side of curtness, and the final movement sometimes tipped into feeling more driven than witty. But the playing was largely rich and good-humored: balanced and gentle in the second movement, then graceful and patient, and with even a hint of mystery, in the third.Based on first impressions, it seems that, of the Philharmonic’s two main residences this season, the intimate yet spacious Rose Theater might give the orchestra and its sound more room to breathe.New York PhilharmonicProgram repeats Friday and Saturday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More