Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Mbongeni Ngema, Playwright Best Known for ‘Sarafina!,’ Dies at 68

      by

      Before the fall of apartheid, his plays, which also included “Woza Albert!” and “Asinamali,” challenged the South African government’s racial policies.Mbongeni Ngema, a South African playwright, lyricist and director whose stage works, including the Tony-nominated musical “Sarafina!,” challenged and mocked his homeland’s longtime policy of racial apartheid, died on Wednesday in a hospital in Mbizana, South Africa, after a car accident. He was 68.Mr. Ngema was a passenger in a car that was struck head on when he was returning from a funeral in Lusikisiki, in Eastern Cape Province, according to a family statement cited in the South African news media.“His masterfully creative narration of our liberation struggle honored the humanity of oppressed South Africans and exposed the inhumanity of an oppressive regime,” President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa said in a post on X after Mr. Ngema’s death.In the decade before the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990 and the dismantling of apartheid in the early ’90s, the South African system of institutionalized racism was an overwhelming concern to Mr. Ngema. During that decade he cocreated the play “Woza Albert!,” wrote and directed the play “Asinamali!” and wrote the script and collaborated on the music for “Sarafina!”“Sarafina!” evolved out of a conversation he had in the 1980s with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, a prominent anti-apartheid activist who was then married to Mandela.“I was sitting with Mama Winnie Mandela, and I started thinking, ‘This country is in flames,’” he told the South African television show “The Insider SA” in 2022. “So I asked a question. I said, ‘Mama, what do you think is finally going to happen to this country?’“Mama looked at me, and she said, ‘I wish I had a big blanket to cover the faces of the little ones so they do not see that bitter end.’”Mr. Ngema soon began to envision young people, running and singing “Freedom Is Coming Tomorrow,” a song that he would write for “Sarafina!,” a musical that follows Black high school students in the township of Soweto in 1976 during the uprising against the government’s imposition of Afrikaans, rather than Zulu, as the official language in schools.Mr. Ngema wrote the book and collaborated with the trumpeter and composer Hugh Masekela on the score.Mr. Ngema, left, with former President Nelson Mandela in 2002.Lewis Moon/Agence France-Presse“Sarafina!” opened in Johannesburg in 1987. It moved that fall to the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center and then, in early 1988, to Broadway, at the Cort Theater, where it played 597 performances.In his review of the production at the Newhouse, Frank Rich of The New York Times wrote that Mr. Ngema had “brought forth a musical that transmutes the oppression of Black townships into liberating singing and dancing that nearly raises the theater’s roof.”The score, he added, “evokes the cacophony of life in a Black society both oppressed and defiant, at once sentenced to hard labor and ignited by dreams of social justice.”“Sarafina!” received five Tony nominations, including three for Mr. Ngema: for best direction of a musical (won by Harold Prince for “The Phantom of the Opera”), best original score (won by Stephen Sondheim for “Into the Woods”) and best choreography, which he shared with Ndaba Mhlongo (won by Michael Smuin for “Anything Goes”).“Sarafina!” was also nominated for best musical and best featured actress in a musical.It was adapted as a film in 1992, starring Leleti Khumalo, who had starred in the South African and Broadway productions, with Whoopi Goldberg as an inspirational teacher and the singer-songwriter Miriam Makeba as Sarafina’s mother.Mbongeni Ngema (pronounced mmm-bon-GEN-i nnn-GAY-ma) was born on June 1, 1955, in Verulam, a town north of Durban.According to his official biography for the film “Sarafina!,” he was separated from his parents at 11, then lived for a time with extended family in Zululand and later on his own in the poor neighborhoods around Durban. From age 12, he taught himself to play guitar.“When I grew up all I wanted to be was a musician, and I was influenced greatly by the Beatles,” he said on “The Insider SA.”Working in a fertilizer factory in the mid-1970s, a fellow worker asked him to play guitar to accompany a play he had written.“And then I fell in love with the part of the lead character in the play,” he told the magazine Africa Report in 1987. “When he was onstage, I would mimic him backstage — making the other musicians laugh.” One night, when the actor did not show up, he played the role.Mr. Ngema and the playwright began to collaborate, which led Mr. Ngema to start directing and writing his own small pieces. In 1979, he began working in Johannesburg with Gibson Kente, a playwright and composer, to understand the magic in his productions. After two years, he left and began working with the performer Percy Mtwa.He, Mr. Mtwa and Barney Simon created “Woza Albert!,” a satire that imagines the impact of the second coming of a Christ-like figure, Morena, who arrives in South Africa on a jumbo jet from Jerusalem, through the lives of ordinary people, vigorously played over the course of 80 minutes by Mr. Ngema and Mr. Mtwa.The white government tries to exploit Morena, then labels him a Communist and locks him up on Robben Island, where Mandela and other political prisoners were incarcerated.The play opened in South Africa in 1981 and was staged over the next three years in Europe, Off Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theater and around the United States.In The Washington Post, the critic David Richards wrote in 1984 that “Woza Albert!” “tackles such harsh realities as injustice, poverty and apartheid in South Africa, but does so with far more spirit, humor and, yes, hope, than the subject generally inspires.” He added that “with only their wonderful, wide-eyed talent,” Mr. Mtwa and Mr. Ngema “can summon up a landscape, a society, a history.”The trumpeter Hugh Masekela, third from right, with members of the cast of “Sarafina!” during a rehearsal at Lincoln Center in 1987. Mr. Masekela and Mr. Ngema collaborated on the score for the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Ngema then wrote and directed “Asinamali!” (1983), in which five Black men in a single South African prison cell describe — through acting, dancing, singing and mime — why they were incarcerated and how they were victimized by racist laws, unemployment and police violence.The play’s name (which means “We have no money”) comes from the rallying cry of rent strikers in 1983 in the Lamontville township.Mr. Ngema said that “Asinamali!” was alarming enough to authorities in Duncan Village, in the Eastern Cape, that they arrested the audience for attending a performance.“They said it was an illegal political gathering,” Mr. Ngema said in an interview in 2017 on a South African podcast.He called “Asinamali!” a celebration of resistance.“It shows that no matter how bad things get, victory is inevitable,” he told The Times in 1986 during rehearsals before the play opened in Harlem at the New Heritage Repertory Theater. “The spirit of the people shall prevail.”Later that year, “Asinamali!” was part of a South African theater festival at Lincoln Center.Information on Mr. Ngema’s survivors was not immediately available. His marriage to Ms. Khumalo, the star of “Sarafina!,” ended in divorce. Mr. Ngema, who wrote several other plays, was involved in a controversy in 1996 when his sequel to “Sarafina!,” “Sarafina 2” — commissioned by the South African Health Department to raise awareness about the AIDS epidemic — led to a government corruption investigation over accusations that its cost was an excessive “unauthorized expenditure” and that its message was inadequate.He defended the show’s price tag, saying it was necessary to bring Broadway-quality shows to Black townships.“People have said it’s a waste of government money,” Mr. Ngema told The Associated Press in 1996. “It think that’s a stupid criticism.” More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      New York City Ballet and Its Orchestra Reach Contract Deal

      by

      The agreement, which includes an increase in compensation of about 22 percent over three years, ends months of tense negotiations.After months of wrangling, New York City Ballet and the union representing its musicians announced on Tuesday they had reached a deal for a new contract.The three-year contract, which is expected to be ratified by members of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, includes an increase in compensation of about 22 percent over three years, a central demand of the musicians, who had argued that they were underpaid because of salary cuts made during the pandemic.City Ballet and the musicians’ union praised the agreement, which came just after the company began its holiday run of “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker,” typically the most lucrative production of the season.“The marriage of music and dance is a hallmark of N.Y.C.B.,” the company and the orchestra said in a joint statement. “We are thrilled that this agreement has been finalized and we look forward to a successful season featuring our wonderful musicians and dancers who are among the greatest performers in the world.”The contract was the first that City Ballet and the orchestra have negotiated since the coronavirus pandemic, which forced the cancellation of hundreds of performances and the loss of about $55 million in ticket sales. City Ballet, like other cultural institutions, reduced the salaries of dancers and musicians as it worked to weather the crisis.Under the deal, the company will restore a salary cut of about 9 percent made during the pandemic, as well as offer a raise of 13 percent over three years.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

    • 150 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Big Apple Circus Review: A Show That Bends Over Backward for You

      by

      The extraordinary within the everyday: A holiday season rite returns with aerialists, trapeze acts, funny clowns (really!) and cotton candy too.If confetti supplies have plummeted, if a spangle shortage now afflicts Manhattan, blame a tent at the southwestern corner of Lincoln Center. Yes, the Big Apple Circus has returned and for a little over a month New York will glimmer more brightly.In recent years, a return has been less certain. In 2016, after operating as a nonprofit for nearly 40 years, the original outfit shut down and filed for bankruptcy. An affiliate of a corporate restructuring firm bought it in 2017, then switched out its management and character several times. In 2021, it was sold again, to a corporation that counts the famed aerialist Nik Wallenda as a minority owner, and became a bit more death-defying.The German troupe Circus Theater Roncalli has given up using live animals but in one routine three performers pretended to be trained polar bears.Ye Fan for The New York TimesThis season, Big Apple has imported the German troupe Circus Theater Roncalli, which is mostly a cause for rejoicing. Roncalli stands as a skillful and endearing example of the form, a company steeped in circus classics, yet capable in most if not all ways, of moving with the times.It is sad that New York can no longer support a circus of its own and that Big Apple has become an intellectual property asset rather than a group enmeshed in the life of the city. But there’s nothing like an aerial balance act — or two, as is the case in “Circus Theater Roncalli: Journey to the Rainbow” — to make audiences forget all of that. Besides, this is New York. Who is from here anyway? Call it sequin diplomacy.Last weekend the mood in the tent was giddy and rapturous, with the younger spectators revved up on cotton candy and the older ones excited perhaps by the sight of at least four prestige TV stars sitting near the ring. A clown meandered amid the rows as an orchestra played frisky versions of classical and popular songs.Iryna Galenchyk’s aerial act with her partner is a wonder of strength and grace.Ye Fan for The New York TimesThe Roncalli company is steeped in circus classics, with acts like the Kirichenko acrobatic group.Ye Fan for The New York TimesThe show proper opens with Noel Aguilar’s fizzy juggling act, which began with batons and continued with Ping-Pong balls. (Ever caught a kernel of popcorn in your mouth? Imagine that, but in time to the music.) The finale involved straw hats, thrown like Frisbees. Aguilar dropped the odd baton and missed the occasional hat, which made the routine more impressive, because it showed what it took to excel.He ceded the stage to Andrey Romanovsky’s rubber leg contortionist act, in which Romanovsky skipped rope while bent over backward. He was replaced by a tightrope walker (the tightropes were, thankfully, near to the ground) and then by an acrobatics act in which the performers were dressed like members of Marie Antoinette’s court. They gave way to Iryna Galenchyk and Vladyslav Drobinko, whose romantic paired aerial act is a wonder of strength and grace. Throughout there were appearances by four clowns, all of whom were legitimately funny, a circus rarity. One, Paquin Jr., had great success with a routine that may have sacrificed a Cabbage Patch doll.The gift of the circus, wherever it’s from, our critic writes, is that it gives a glimpse of the extraordinary within the everyday.Ye Fan for The New York TimesRoncalli has given up using live animals (a sensible and respectable choice for any circus, though I do miss the Big Apple’s former dog and cat acts). But the second half began with a puzzling routine in which three performers in fur suits pretended to be trained polar bears. This was followed by a bicycle act and a sequence in which three gold-painted performers balanced atop one another, like statues come to life. No less singular, if much more hectic, was Emma Phillips’s foot juggling routine, in which she made an end table and a couple of antimacassars revolve atop her toes. A steampunk bubble routine delighted the children; a trapeze act, featuring Christoph Gobet and Julian Kaiser balancing, impossibly, foot to foot, made their mothers gasp.This is the gift of the circus, wherever it’s from: a glimpse of the extraordinary within the everyday, a vision of what time, tenacity and a heedless approach to muscle strain can achieve. And cotton candy, too? What glitter. What joy.Big Apple CircusThrough Jan. 1 at Damrosch Park, Lincoln Center, Manhattan; bigapplecircus.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Henry Timms Wants to Tear Down Walls at Lincoln Center

      by

      For evidence that all is not business as usual at Lincoln Center these days, look no further than its stately travertine campus, which, for much of the summer, was dominated by a giant glittering disco ball, pink and purple flowers painted on the sidewalk and a flock of 200 flamingo lawn ornaments.“There are some who will reasonably eye-roll at this,” said Henry Timms, the center’s president and chief executive, standing on the plaza recently. “I get it. But it sends a message that we are here to have some fun.”“We can afford,” he said, “to loosen up a little.”Since taking the helm in 2019, Timms has been on a mission to remake Lincoln Center. Having helped finally push through the long-delayed $550 million renovation of David Geffen Hall, he is working to forge closer ties with the city and to bring more diversity to the center’s staff, board and audiences.Now he wants to tear down the barriers that literally wall the campus off from Amsterdam Avenue, with its neighboring housing projects, schools and new developments. But as Lincoln Center rethinks its programming — this summer’s festival included hip-hop, K-pop and an LGBTQ mariachi group — it has drawn some criticism for presenting less classical music and international theater.For the summer, Lincoln Center hung up a disco ball on the plaza.Evelyn Freja for The New York TimesThis summer’s festival — which included more popular programming than in the past and choose-what-you-pay tickets for some events — attracted more than 380,000 people, officials said, many of whom were new to the campus. Among them was Sandy Mendez, a saleswoman who lives in Washington Heights, and saw her first Lincoln Center performance, a comedy show, after coming across an advertisement at a community center. She took photos in front of the disco ball with her husband and two children.“It feels like a dance club here,” said Mendez, 42, “not a performing arts center.”It is the kind of observation that both Timms’s admirers and his detractors might make.Running Lincoln Center is not easy. The center acts as landlord to the independent arts organizations on its campus, including the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet and the New York Philharmonic, but has little power over them, since each has its own leadership, board and budget.Linc. Inc., as it’s known, also presents its own work, which has sometimes led to tensions with constituents. Reynold Levy, its president for more than a decade, called his memoir “They Told Me Not to Take That Job.” After he left, in 2013, Lincoln Center cycled through four leadership teams in five years before appointing Timms in 2019.The British-born Timms, 46, who previously led the 92nd Street Y, helped create #GivingTuesday and co-wrote “New Power,” a book exploring bottom-up leadership, including movements like #MeToo and social networks like Facebook. Now he is trying to apply some of those participatory principles at Lincoln Center. He said his efforts were not “some new trendy idea” but a response to the fact that the center has for too long been disconnected from the community.“We very much came with an agenda, which was we were going to tell a different kind of story about Lincoln Center,” Timms said, “to fundamentally shift the institution in terms of who leads it, who represents it, who’s on our staff, who’s on our stages, who’s in our audiences.”Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi, the new restaurant at Geffen Hall, has been a hit with critics and is drawing crowds.Nico Schinco for The New York Times“We have a long way to go as an organization — nobody at Lincoln Center is taking a bow,” he added in an interview at Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi, the new restaurant at Geffen Hall that critics have named one of the best in the city. “But relative to where we were, I feel like we’ve made good progress.”Nevertheless, the reduction in programming, and the shift away from classical music and theater to other genres, has raised questions. Joseph W. Polisi, a former president of the Juilliard School who has written a history of Lincoln Center, said that Timms’s vision was a “sea change” for the center that could come at a cost.“It leaves a gap in music programming in New York City that is not being filled — it can’t be filled,” he said. “All the artistic leaders I know are fully in support of more program diversity at Lincoln Center. Now the question is, how far does the pendulum swing?”The critic Alex Ross recently wrote in The New Yorker that the new approach seemed “fundamentally out of step with Lincoln Center and its public, both extant and potential.”The conductor Jonathon Heyward will lead a reimagined version of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.Lawrence Sumulong/Lincoln CenterBut Timms pushes back on such criticism, partly by pointing out that “we have just spent four years through a pandemic, and half a billion dollars, creating a concert hall to house the New York Philharmonic” and noting that the center had hired Jonathon Heyward, who recently became the first Black music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, to lead a reimagined version of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.“Lincoln Center was founded as Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; it was not founded as Lincoln Center for the Classical Arts,” Timms said. “You go back to the beginning and there’s a reason Mahalia Jackson was playing here. And it’s not because we’re only supposed to be about the opera and the ballet.”Summers at Lincoln Center look different now. The old Lincoln Center Festival was scrapped a few years before Timms arrived, and with it the large-scale, ambitious productions it brought each summer from around the world, including Noh theater and Kabuki theater from Japan, Indonesian dance and Chinese opera. Lincoln Center’s programming is now overseen by Shanta Thake, its chief artistic officer, who was formerly an associate artistic director at the Public Theater. She and Timms have replaced the Mostly Mozart Festival, which had focused on classical music and recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, with the more eclectic Summer for the City festival.Portia and the American Composers Orchestra at “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle,” which Lincoln Center staged in Damrosch Park as part of its Summer for the City festival.Lawrence Sumulong/Lincoln Center“How do we build on this promise of being a performing arts center for all New Yorkers?” Thake asked. “How do we not rest on our laurels but push for what a performing arts center needs to be right now? Everybody’s willing to have hard conversations.”The coming fall and winter season will feature an array of classical offerings, including a new production of Henry Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen” and a performance of Philip Glass’s piano études. There will also be more experimental fare in line with the center’s new vision, including a reimagining of “The Sound of Music” through a “utopian, Afrofuturistic lens,” featuring gospel, funk, soul and Afrobeat music.Timms has also prioritized diversity backstage: of the 109 current members of the executive and senior management teams, about 60 percent are women and nearly 40 percent are people of color. In addition, the center recently started a two-year fellowship program to develop a diverse pipeline of potential board members for the resident organizations; three have been placed as trustees and three more have elections pending.Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, who serves on Lincoln Center’s board, praised Timms as a “once-in-a-generation leader” who “genuinely understands that diversity correlates with excellence.”A summer dance party on the Lincoln Center plaza.Mohamed Sadek for The New York TimesThe ballet dancer Misty Copeland, who joined Lincoln Center’s board under Timms, commended his spearheading of the Amsterdam Avenue project, a long-neglected plan to make right Lincoln Center’s initial razing of the low-income San Juan Hill neighborhood where the performing arts complex was built.“He does not shy away from a history that may not look clean and sparkly,” Copeland said. “I don’t think I could imagine 10 years ago that this is where Lincoln Center would be.”Timms, whose mother was an illustrator from the United States and whose father was a British archaeologist, grew up in Exeter, England, where his family often attended regional theaters.“Our childhood was full of ideas and the arts,” he said. “We had access and experience and ownership. You felt like you were a part of something.”He graduated from Durham University in England and landed a job overseeing programming at the 92nd Street Y in 2008, where he helped start #GivingTuesday, a day of philanthropy after Black Friday and Cyber Monday that became a global success. In 2014, he was named the Y’s executive director.Steven R. Swartz, the new chairman of Lincoln Center, said Timms had won over the center’s board with his energy and ideas, quickly recognizing the organization’s main problems, including tensions with the constituents. “He just so quickly diagnosed what needed to be done,” Swartz said.And after years of false starts and bitter feuds, Timms built a good working relationship with the leaders of the Philharmonic — he and Deborah Borda, who was the orchestra’s president and chief executive, sometimes resolved disputes over coffee or martinis — and finally renovated Geffen Hall. By accelerating construction during the pandemic shutdown, they were able to open the reimagined hall ahead of schedule.“He was intent on moving past the history of animosity that existed between Lincoln Center and the New York Philharmonic,” said Borda, who stepped down at the end of June. “He put a premium on working together. He was essentially the right man at the right time at the right place.”Katherine G. Farley, who stepped down as Lincoln Center’s chairwoman in June, said Timms “has led the transformation of a traditional institution” and that he is “quick and eager to experiment.””Not everything works out,” she added. “When it doesn’t work, he’s quick to shut it down and try something else.”Like other arts institutions, Lincoln Center is still trying to recover from the pandemic shutdown, when the performing arts came to a halt for more than 18 months. The organization is spending less on programming than it did when Timms began his tenure: about $14 million in the fiscal year that ended in June 2022, down from $23 million in 2019, a decrease of about 40 percent that officials attributed in part to the fact that Geffen Hall remained closed for construction through the fiscal year of 2022.But fund-raising remains relatively strong, and the endowment has risen to about $268 million, compared to $258 million in 2019. Moody’s recently affirmed its A3 rating on the center’s $356 million of debt but revised its outlook to stable from negative, noting the completion of Geffen Hall and the center’s efforts to cut expenses and attract new audiences.And relations have eased with the constituent organizations — who historically competed with Lincoln Center for audiences, donors and attention.David Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, reopened last year after a long-delayed renovation.Hilary Swift for The New York Times“He’s been very clear that it’s the job of Lincoln Center to honor and pay attention to and try to help all the constituents that make up Lincoln Center,” said Andre Bishop, the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater. Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, said Timms had signaled to the constituents early in his tenure that the days of infighting were over. “Here was somebody who understood and really seemed to be listening,” he said. And Damian Woetzel, the president of Juilliard, said Timms had proven “tradition is not at war with innovation.”On a recent day, a team of Lincoln Center staff members inside Geffen Hall was conducting research to prepare for the Amsterdam Avenue project, asking visitors where they spent time on campus and what they would like to do more of: attend cultural events? meet friends? play games? exercise? A poster explained the history of the San Juan Hill neighborhood and said: “Help us make our campus more welcoming!”In a few hours, Timms would join a salsa band on the outdoor dance floor in a pair of coral-colored Nike Air Max sneakers.“Changing with the world isn’t just the right thing to do morally,” he said. “It’s the right thing to do strategically. And if leaders in a position like ours don’t lead this change, what on earth are you doing?” More

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Haptic Suits Let You Feel Music Through Your Skin

      by

      Jay Alan Zimmerman, a deaf composer and musician, was used to positioning himself near the speakers at clubs, straining to feel the vibrations of songs he could not hear.So when he was invited to test a new technology, a backpack, known as a haptic suit, designed for him to experience music as vibrations on his skin — a kick drum to the ankles, a snare drum to the spine — he was excited.“With captioning and sign language interpretation, your brain is forced to be in more than one place at a time,” Mr. Zimmerman, who began losing his hearing in his early 20s, said in a recent video interview.“With a haptic system,” he continued, “it can go directly to your body at the exact same moment, and there’s real potential for you to actually feel music in your body.”The type of haptic suit Mr. Zimmerman first tested, now nearly a decade ago, has recently become more accessible to the public. The devices were available at events this summer at Lincoln Center in New York City — including at a recent silent disco night, an event in which people dance while listening to music via wireless headphones — as well as at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, in March, a Greta Van Fleet concert in Las Vegas and a performance at Opera Philadelphia.The devices, which translate music into vibrations that are transmitted to different points on the suit, are designed to be worn by both hearing individuals and those who are deaf or have hearing loss. Developed by the Philadelphia-based company Music: Not Impossible, the device consists of two ankle bands, two wrist bands and a backpack that fastens with double straps over the rib cage. Wearing one of them feels a little like a full-body bear hug from a massage chair.Haptic suits, which are also used in virtual reality and video games, have been around for several decades. But the Music: Not Impossible suits are unique because the devices turn individual notes of music into specific vibrations. Other companies are also producing haptic products designed to capture the sonic experiences of various events. Examples include the crack of a baseball bat at a sporting event transmitted through vibrating seats, or more everyday experiences like the sound of a dog barking translated through a pattern of buzzes on a wearable bracelet.“There’s a revolution in haptic technology going on right now,” said Mark D. Fletcher, a researcher at the University of Southampton in Britain, who studies the use of haptics for supporting people who are deaf or have hearing loss.The development of the suits has benefited from recent advancements in microprocessors, wireless technology, batteries and artificial intelligence, he said, all key components in the emerging market of wearable haptic devices.The device consists of two ankle bands, two wristbands and a backpack that fastens with double straps over the rib cage.Mick Ebeling, the founder of the Los Angeles-based Not Impossible Labs, was first inspired to experiment with haptic suits in 2014 when he saw a video of an event featuring a deaf D.J., with bass-heavy music pulsing through speakers facing the floor and people dancing barefoot. Mr. Ebeling wanted to find a better way for deaf people to experience music.Daniel Belquer, a composer who has a master’s degree in theater, soon came on board to find a way to transmit the experience of music straight into the brain. That mission, Mr. Belquer said, soon expanded to a goal of creating a tactile experience of music that was available for everyone, including people without hearing loss.Mr. Belquer joined the project because he was interested in helping the deaf community, but also because he was intrigued as a composer. He had written a master’s thesis on listening and was already producing sound with vibrating objects in his own shows.Mr. Belquer worked with engineers at Avnet, an electronics company, to produce a more nuanced haptic feedback system for use with musical experiences, which creates a sensation of touch through vibrations and wireless transmission without lag time. But the first prototypes were heavy and not sensitive enough to really translate the music.“As a composer, artistic expression is important, not just the tech side,” he said.He solicited feedback from members of the deaf community, including Mandy Harvey, a deaf singer and songwriter; as well as Mr. Zimmerman, the composer; and the sign language interpreter Amber Galloway.Mr. Zimmerman said that the first version of the device he tested was “not satisfying.”“Imagine having seven or eight different cellphones strapped to various parts of your body, attached to wires,” he said. “And then they all just start going off randomly.”Mr. Belquer worked to perfect the technology, he said, until up to 24 instruments or vocal elements in a song could each be translated to a different point on the suit.By 2018, he had created the first version of the current model, which offers three levels of intensity that can be set individually, as well as a fully customizable fit.Amanda Landers, a 36-year-old sign language instructor at Syosset High School on Long Island who has progressive hearing loss that began around the time she was in high school, said she thinks the suits are a radical way to create access for people who are deaf or hard of hearing.She first wore one of the vests last year, during a private demonstration with Mr. Belquer and Flavia Naslausky, the head of business development and strategy at Music: Not Impossible, after coming across the Not Impossible Labs website while researching emerging technologies for people with hearing loss to show her students.The company played her snippets from the film “Interstellar,” whose composer, Hans Zimmer, was nominated for an Academy Award for best original score. The biggest surprise, Ms. Landers said, was the intensity of the sensations.“When the song was getting lower, not only did the different parts of you vibrate; it actually got softer and more in-depth,” she said in a recent video interview. “And when it was louder, my whole body was shaking. Just the level of precision they put into it was astounding.”Lincoln Center made the Music: Not Impossible haptic suits available at two of its silent disco nights this summer. Attendees also listened to music via wireless headphones.The technology, which has been tested at a range of up to three-quarters of a mile from a stage, works for both throbbing bass tracks and classical pieces (it was mostly dance-pop and electronic music in the mix at a silent disco on a recent Saturday night at Lincoln Center).“What they’re doing is so important,” Ms. Landers said of Music: Not Impossible’s vision of creating a shared musical experience for all concertgoers. “People often look at inclusivity as something that’s like, ‘Oh, that’s so complicated,’ and then they don’t do it, but it’s not that hard.”Music: Not Impossible currently provides the suits to organizations as part of a full-package deal, which includes up to 90 suits; a team of on-site staff members who will assist people with getting them on, answer questions and troubleshoot the technology; as well as a team of “vibro D.J.s” trained to customize the vibration transmission locations for each song in a set.Prices start at a few thousand dollars for a “basic experience,” Mr. Belquer said, which includes a couple of suits and a vibro D.J., and can reach six figures for experiences that absorb a significant part of the company’s 90-suit inventory in the United States.(Lincoln Center, which has made the suits available at a few events each summer since 2021, had 75 suits at two silent disco nights and a Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra concert this summer, up from the 50 it offered per event last year.)“The only requirement that we make on that front is that the deaf and hard-of-hearing never get charged for our experience,” Mr. Belquer said.Attendees at Lincoln Center’s silent disco nights swayed to dance-pop tracks. But the unaffordability for most consumers is one reason that haptic suits, while promising, are currently an impractical option for most individuals who are deaf or have hearing loss.Dickie Hearts, a 25-year-old actor and artist in New York who was born Deaf and counts himself a regular among the city’s club scene, had the chance to try an earlier version of the Music: Not Impossible suits at a concert in Los Angeles around eight years ago. (Deaf is capitalized by some people in references to a distinct cultural identity.)While he appreciates the intention behind them, he said, he prefers having live American Sign Language interpretation alongside captions that convey the lyrics.“Feeling the vibration has never been an issue for me,” he said in a recent video call, conducted with the assistance of an ASL interpreter. “I want to know what the words are. I don’t want to have to reach out to my hearing friend and be like, ‘Oh, what song are they playing?’”Another concern, he said, is that the packs could make Deaf people targets for bullies. At the event where he tested them in Los Angeles, he said, only Deaf people were using them, which made him feel singled out.But, he added, if hearing individuals in the audience were wearing the suits as well, as at Lincoln Center’s silent disco nights, he would be interested in being part of that.Mr. Belquer said that Music: Not Impossible hoped to create a product everyone could use.That vision came to life at the Lincoln Center silent disco. As dusk fell, about 75 people, wearing either red, green or blue flashing headphones had a chance to experience the suits. They bopped and swayed to pulsing dance-pop tracks sometimes alone, carving their own circle of rhythm, and sometimes in groups.“It’s like raindrops on my shoulders,” said Regina Valdez, 55, who lives in Harlem.“Wow, it’s vibrating,” said Lucas Garcia, 6, who appeared surprised as he looked down at his vest. His parents, Chris Garcia and Aida Alvarez, who were also wearing vests, danced nearby.It was — as designed — impossible to tell who was deaf and who was hearing.But Mr. Zimmerman, who first tested the suits, said he was still hoping for a few more tweaks.“I would like to have it be so good that a beautiful note on violin would make me cry,” he said. “And a funny blast of a trombone would make me laugh.”Katie Van Syckle More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      A Farewell to Mostly Mozart, and to Its Music Director

      by

      Louis Langrée led a week of concerts to conclude his two-decade tenure with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.After 21 years, Louis Langrée’s tenure as music director of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra has ended. As a farewell, he conducted two programs across four evenings last week, and the music he made was uplifting, staggeringly beautiful and, finally, triumphant.The ensemble used to be associated with a festival of the same name, but that was quietly shuttered after the 2019 season. Next year, the players will have a new name and a new music director. But the sound of the orchestra — which draws its musicians from the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, Orchestra of St. Luke’s and several other groups — as it is known today was built by Langrée.“What I have learned and shared has made life more beautiful,” Langrée told the audience on Friday, during an evening that became an extended goodbye, with breaks for recollections, reflections and even musical demonstrations à la Leonard Bernstein (whom he cited as an influence). Langrée struck up the band as he explained the deceptive simplicity of Mozart’s melodic writing or the off-kilter minuet of the 40th Symphony. But he caught himself: “It’s a concert, not a lecture,” he said with a chuckle.His first program of the week, on Tuesday, was a motley assortment of pieces by Lully, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Kodaly and Valerie Coleman, taking the orchestra’s tasting-platter approach to an extreme. Coleman’s “Fanfare for Uncommon Times,” written without strings or woodwinds, was a study in layered, graduated brass timbres. The orchestra dug into the saturated colors and whiz-bang energy of Kodaly’s “Dances of Galanta” and brought a bountiful tone to a Mozart overture and selections from Lully’s “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.”The 27-year-old violinist Randall Goosby, making his Mostly Mozart debut, was luminous in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto — his tone luscious, elegant and sweet without being syrupy. His unforced ease and alluringly relaxed vibrato gave his legato suppleness, and his trill was an act of gracefulness instead of athleticism. When the orchestra re-entered with the first movement’s main theme, it felt like a catharsis of the joy Goosby had cultivated.Compared with the stylistic whiplash of Tuesday, Friday was magnificently lucid: a jubilant tour through Mozart’s final three symphonies. Langrée referred to the pieces as the “holy trinity” of Mozart’s symphonic output, all written in the summer of 1788. The program’s sense of occasion, its feeling of culmination, turned Langrée wistful; he thanked the ushers, stage crews and security personnel and expressed pride in the Mostly Mozart players, most of whom he hired himself. “This place will stay magical for me,” he said.At the final program, Langrée was presented with a bouquet of roses that he then gave out to each member of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.Lawrence Sumulong/Lincoln CenterLangrée is a Mozartean of vibrancy, potency and efficiency. Mozart is about harmoniousness — requiring an orchestra to balance color, style and execution in a reflection of the music’s essential consonance — but Langrée treats that quality as a starting point. Then he finds expressive freedom, something like romance, but attacks it incisively. The music bursts with feeling as it flies by in tidy fashion.The works came in chronological order, starting with the Symphony No. 39, in which the players unleashed sonorous drama in the Adagio-Allegro and wholly conceived melodic statements in the Andante con Moto (which featured Christopher Pell’s dreamy clarinet). Langrée didn’t shortchange the minuet’s clipped phrases, and the concluding Allegro had a windswept quality.He brought expansiveness to these late symphonies without distending them and let them breathe without slowing them down. In the 40th, Langrée crafted a fast, finely wrought opening filled with slender sound that kept anxiety and release in constant tension. The Allegro Assai, full of life, had dash as well as elegant form.After intermission on Friday, Langrée got candid. He pushed back against the way “Lincoln Center wants to present less classical because it’s elitist,” adding that the center can and should embrace hip-hop and R&B without abandoning Mostly Mozart fare. He pleaded with the audience to return next year to support the musicians, even if Mozart’s name is being “erased from the orchestra.”Langrée located the greatness of the “Jupiter” Symphony in its compassion rather than its grandeur. He cushioned the assertive opening and deftly scaled back to something human — a sly smile, a sense of generosity. The winds peeked through with their peculiar colors, and the fugato finale churned briskly.There will invariably be lapses in music whose finery never allows players to hide. Occasionally, the violins turned gray, or the horns lost their gleam. The endless runs of the Andante Cantabile in the “Jupiter” had an admirable singing quality most, if not all, of the time.On Saturday, for Langrée’s last concert with the orchestra, the audience greeted him with a standing ovation when he entered, and applauded him and the players for nearly 20 minutes at the end.The previous night, Langrée had talked — and sung — through the five parts that make up the “Jupiter” fugue before leading the orchestra in an even more effervescent encore of it. At each of the final two concerts, he was presented with a bouquet of red roses and gave out stems to each of the players. He tossed one to the audience, then kept one for himself. More

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Review: At Mostly Mozart, the Sense of an Ending

      by

      Louis Langrée, in his last season with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, conducted a classic Langrée program: Mozart and a premiere by Amir ElSaffar.Change is coming for the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra and for its longtime music director, Louis Langrée — this month is the beginning of the end of his tenure with the orchestra. When the ensemble appears at Lincoln Center next year it will be with a freshly conceived name, and with the conductor Jonathon Heyward at the helm. (Heyward also leads the orchestra in concerts on Aug. 4 and 5.)So there is a sense of finality hovering over this summer’s offerings, which began last weekend with a free outdoor concert in Damrosch Park. On Tuesday night, Langrée and his players resumed their more typical places in the recently refurbished David Geffen Hall — renovations that kept the festival orchestra out of that theater last year.In remarks before the concert, Langrée warmly recalled his two-decade relationship with the orchestra and with New York audiences. The program was classic Langrée: a substantial world premiere from Amir ElSaffar, a prominent jazz trumpeter and composer, nestled next to the Mass in C minor by Mozart, who, Langrée noted, sometimes looked eastward (as in the “Turkish March” movement of Piano Sonata No. 11).ElSaffar also spoke, telling the audience how his “Dhikra” (“Remembrance”) — inspired by the 20th anniversary of the second U.S. invasion of Iraq — incorporated Western classical instruments from the festival orchestra’s ranks, alongside the players in his Two Rivers ensemble. (Among other instruments, that group features oud, a steel-string lute and an Iraqi hammered dulcimer, as well as ElSaffar’s trumpet, which channels the melodic style of Iraq’s maqam tradition.)The composer Amir ElSaffar, performing in “Dhikra,” his world premiere, on Tuesday.Lawrence SumulongAll cogent and stylistically broad minded as a précis. But “Dhikra” is not on the same exalted level as ElSaffar’s past work for larger groups, particularly as heard on the album “Not Two” (2017). While “Dhikra” contained some passages of wondrous blended sonority, the amplification of ElSaffar’s musicians had the unfortunate effect of making the Mostly Mozart players inaudible, and for long stretches.It began promisingly enough, with Two Rivers players positioned on the stage near Langrée, and with 10 festival orchestra musicians — the only ones participating in this piece — strewn among the audience, one level up from the orchestra. (The conductor often faced the audience, in order to conduct his far-flung orchestral partners.)A convening salvo from ElSaffar’s trumpet — mellow yet mournful — seemed to inspire droning notes in the strings that gradually flowered into plucked passages that ricocheted across the hall. And when fervid motifs for oboe, clarinet, bassoon and French horn — all positioned at the back of the house — mingled with gentle notes from the Two Rivers bassist onstage, there was a glorious sense of collective blooming.But this was not to last. The orchestral players soon left their stations in the audience, gradually reappearing onstage. And it was there that the amplified nature of Two Rivers tended to swamp ElSaffar’s writing for his Mostly Mozart collaborators. (It was sad to see the violinist Ruggero Allifranchini sawing away with abandon, at a climactic moment, and not be able to hear his contributions over the Two Rivers rhythm section.)Some of this might be improved with slight tweaks to the levels on the Geffen Hall mixer. But some of the balance problems may be baked into the piece as written; 10 musicians is not a significant enough portion of an orchestra to graft onto a group as potent as Two Rivers.After intermission, audiences got to feel the full force of the festival orchestra in Mozart’s Mass in C minor. Also on hand were a quartet of vocal soloists — including the soprano Erin Morley — and a double chorus (well drilled by the director Malcolm J. Merriweather).Following his own edition of Mozart’s unfinished score, Langrée managed to inject an airy, delicate sense of bounce into the gravity of the Kyrie. Taken too sternly, the Mass sounds overindebted to Bach. Taken too lightly, you skate around the profundity of the work. Langrée found the right balance throughout. And he had a star turn from Morley, when it came to a showstopping “Et Incarnatus Est” aria, in the Credo.Change, for this festival and for classical music on the whole, is inevitable. But this Mass was a reminder of the wonders that should be carefully shepherded going forward. After Langrée departs, it will be important for the leaders of this orchestra — whatever it’s called — to continue to balance interpretations of this high order and taking big swings with artists on the level of ElSaffar.Mostly MozartProgram repeats Wednesday night at David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center, lincolncenter.org. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      A Reporter’s Unexpected Love Affair With ‘Notre Dame de Paris’

      by

      One reporter is hooked on the French spectacle that mixes acrobatics with a rock opera score.It seemed as if nothing would ever displace “The Phantom of the Opera” as my most-viewed musical.And then, “Notre Dame de Paris” happened.The 1998 French musical, which is based on Victor Hugo’s epic 19th-century novel (as is the 1996 Disney animated adaptation), made its New York premiere last summer at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center.I saw it twice then and, when it returned this summer, two more times; a fifth viewing is planned for Sunday’s closing performance in New York. And I’m not done: While in Paris this fall, I’ll see it twice at its original theater, the Palais des Congrès, for its 25th anniversary.As an avid theatergoer, I rarely go to the same production twice. (A recent exception was the Broadway revival of “A Doll’s House,” starring Jessica Chastain in a bewitching, minimalist march to self-discovery.)And after initially seeing “Notre Dame de Paris,” a second viewing didn’t seem essential. The musical, which is sung in French with English supertitles, follows the beautiful Esmeralda and the three men who vie to win her love: the kind hunchback Quasimodo; the twisted archdeacon Frollo; and the egotistic soldier Phoebus.The production has a plentiful serving of ear candy-esque power ballads sprinkled among its more than 50 (!) songs, but parts of it were also cheesy. A song debating the merits of the printing press at the top of Act II after a cliffhanger Act I ending? (I guess they had to leave at least one trademark Hugo tangent in there!) Frollo falling to one knee because he’s so overwhelmed by his desire for Esmeralda? The poet-narrator Gringoire’s Donny Osmond “Joseph” hair and psychedelic pants?Of course, those elements were meant to be campy. And now, they’re only part of my affection for the show.But it’s the show’s particular brand of rock opera sorcery that wormed its way into my heart and took hold.Blame “Belle.”Let me explain: About two-thirds of the way through the first act, there comes a song for the three men in love with Esmeralda that is the earworm equivalent of “The Music of the Night” in “The Phantom of the Opera.” “Belle” (the French word for “beautiful”) became the biggest-selling single of 1998 in France.A YouTube video of the song from the original production — featuring Daniel Lavoie as Frollo (Lavoie, now 74, is reprising the role in New York), along with Garou as Quasimodo and Patrick Fiori as Phoebus — played on a loop for a week in my apartment.Seeing the show for a second time last summer was a revelation: Already familiar with the plot, I didn’t need to read the supertitles as much and could actually watch the actors, especially the mesmerizing acrobats. (What does the guy who spins on his head for 20 seconds have to do to get a chance with Esmeralda?)The show, I have since learned, has a cadre of superfans who have seen it six, 10, even 20 times. And they travel. (One treat for New York audiences: an orchestra. “Notre Dame” is usually performed with recorded music.)So what is its hold on people?The Canadian director Gilles Maheu, who oversaw the original Paris run and several tours since, including the current one, credits the show’s timeless themes and music with its longevity.“I wanted to do the show outside of current fashion,” Maheu said of the musical, which maintains its original staging, in a recent video interview from his home in Frelighsburg, Quebec.“The traditional story line of three different people loving the same woman is one I think people recognize easily,” he added. “The songs are beautiful, and not only ‘Belle.’”Holly Thomas, 26, a guest service representative for a Broadway ticketing company and a stage manager, first saw the show in New York last summer — and is on track to have seen it 11 times here by the time it closes Sunday.“It deals with issues that we’re constantly dealing with as a general society — racism, misogyny, the corruption of power,” she said.Michael Lewis, 52, an I.T. consultant based in Boston, attended one of the original performances in Paris 25 years ago, and has also seen the musical in London and New York. In addition to its timelessness, he said, “the theme of migrants seeking asylum has resonance today,” he said, “especially given what just happened with the Pakistani immigrants on the way to Greece.”Here in New York, which is experiencing its own migrant crisis, the show’s overtures for shelter and asylum have had similar poignancy.My boss at The New York Times recently saw the show with his daughters — and the next day I received a message from him: “I must have watched this video of ‘Belle’ on YouTube at least a dozen times today,” he wrote.“Is this how it starts?” More