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      Joanne Koch, Who Led Lincoln Center’s Film Society, Dies at 92

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      A lifelong film lover, she stood up to protesters, and to federal and church authorities, to bring challenging movies to the masses.Joanne Koch, the longtime head of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, who stared down picketers and, at times, government and church authorities to present controversial works by the likes of Godard, Scorsese and Oshima while presiding over the New York Film Festival, and who oversaw the creation of the center’s own temple for cineastes, the Walter Reade Theater, died on Aug. 16 at her apartment in Manhattan. She was 92.Her daughter, Andrea Godbout, said the cause was aortic stenosis.A lifelong defender of artistic freedom, the Brooklyn-born Ms. Koch (pronounced “coke”) served as the Film Society’s executive director over more than a quarter-century of change and growth, starting in 1977. (She was not related to David H. Koch, the oil magnate whose name adorns the ballet theater at Lincoln Center).In 1973, she helped create the film festival’s New Directors/New Films series, which showcases the work of emerging directors and has included the work of Spike Lee, Pedro Almodóvar and Wim Wenders. She also helped produce 19 of the society’s celebrity-studded gala tributes to film luminaries including Fred Astaire, Laurence Olivier and Audrey Hepburn, as well as spearheading the acquisition in 1974 of the influential critical journal Film Comment, where she served as publisher.As the society’s chief financial officer, she helped raise funds and coordinate the design for the Walter Reade Theater, which opened in the center’s Rose Building in 1991 as a sanctuary for independent and foreign films at a time when the VHS revolution was imperiling many repertory film houses.Ms. Koch, center, with Wendy Keys and Richard Peña of the Film Society of Lincoln Center in the Walter Reade Theater. Ms. Koch oversaw the creation of the theater, which opened in 1991.courtesy Film at Lincoln Center“Her passion was always to build new audiences for films and provide them superior venues for moviegoing,” said Wendy Keys, a board member and former executive producer of programming for Film at Lincoln Center, as the society is now known. “She wasn’t just a dollars-and-cents person. She was driven by her great love of film.”Her most visible role, however, was managing the prestigious New York Film Festival. At a time when competing film festivals in North America were exploding, she helped it maintain its international prominence — and its strictly curated format.“We would fight like cats and dogs over every film we showed,” Ms. Keys, a former member of the selection committee, said in a phone interview. “We always considered ourselves to be presenting each of our 25 films on a velvet cushion, as opposed to showing more than 350 films, which is what a lot of other festivals do.”Sometimes those decisions came at considerable risk. For example, Ms. Koch and the rest of the society found themselves in a face-off with federal authorities in 1976 when the festival scheduled the North American premiere of Nagisa Oshima’s “In The Realm of the Senses,” an unflinchingly graphic tale of sexual obsession set in Tokyo in 1936. (“‘Senses’ does not show anything that has not been available in hard-core porn houses around Manhattan,” Richard Eder of The New York Times wrote in 1977.)That notorious film created a buzz in New York cultural circles, Ms. Keys recalled, with notables like John Lennon and Yoko Ono scheduled to attend the premiere at Alice Tully Hall. But then federal customs and Treasury officials, after seeing the film at a press screening, threatened seizure and legal action if the film society showed it.The film was cleared in court, and Ms. Koch invited the original audience, which had been turned away, to a screening at the Museum of Modern Art a few months later. “She thought that nothing should be avoided, whether it was too violent or explicitly sexual or anti-religious,” Ms. Keys said. “That was very deep to her core. She was a provocateur.”The firestorm was far greater in 1985, when the festival scheduled a premiere of “Hail Mary,” a film by Jean-Luc Godard that imagined the Virgin Mary as a modern-day young woman who worked at a gas station. More than 5,000 protesters, some toting candles, turned out at the screening, according to an essay by the philosopher Stanley Cavell in the 1993 anthology “Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary: Women and the Sacred in Film.” The rector of a seminary in Connecticut warned, “When the bombs fall on Manhattan, one will especially fall on the cinema where this film is being shown.”Ms. Koch in an undated photo with her husband, Richard A. Koch, and the playwright David Mamet. Among her accomplishments at Lincoln Center was helping to create the New Directors/New Films series. courtesy Film at Lincoln Center“The film is not anti-Catholic,” Mr. Cavell quoted Ms. Koch as saying. “We don’t mean to offend — certainly that was not our intent — but we feel strongly that art has to be respected as art.”Picketers again swarmed Lincoln Center for the festival’s premiere of “The Last Temptation of Christ,” Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film portraying Jesus as a man caught in a struggle between the earthly and the divine.Joanne Rose Obermaier was born on Oct. 7, 1929, in Brooklyn, the only child of John Obermaier, an electrical engineer, and Blanche (Ashman) Obermaier, a professor of elementary education at New York University. As a teenager at Midwood High School, she “used to sneak into the Loew’s Kings movie theater on Flatbush Avenue through a side door for matinees,” Ms. Godbout, her daughter, said.She graduated from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vt., with a degree in political science, and in 1950 she took a job in the film department of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, eventually becoming a technical director working on film preservation.In 1949 she married Oscar A. Godbout, a journalist who covered Hollywood for The New York Times in the 1950s and later wrote about the outdoors as the newspaper’s “Wood, Field, and Stream” columnist. The couple divorced in 1967, and later that year she married Richard A. Koch, the director of administration for MoMA.Mr. Koch died in 2009. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by three stepsons, Stephen Jeremy and Chapin Koch, and two grandsons.In 1971, Ms. Koch took a job at the Lincoln Center Film Society, where she ran a program called “Movies in the Parks.” She ascended to the society’s top post six years later.Not all her battles there amounted to artistic crusades. In 1987 she found herself embroiled in a different sort of controversy when she and Alfred Stern, the society’s president, were reported to have led a campaign to oust Richard Roud, a respected cinephile and the longtime director of the festival, in a dispute that erupted after Ms. Koch overruled the festival’s selection committee to include two films by Federico Fellini.“I think Joanne wanted more power,” David Denby, then the film critic for New York magazine and a member of the selection committee, was quoted as saying in The Times. “It became obvious this summer when she started strong-arming the committee on the selections.”Ms. Koch told The Times that the move “had nothing to do with film selection,” but rather involved longstanding administrative differences.Even so, it was a difficult chapter. “It was horrible,” Ms. Koch recalled in a 1992 oral history. “I was put on the cover of The Village Voice as ‘The Terminator.’”But she was unrepentant. “It really did change the way I look at myself professionally,” she said. “Realistically, I’m not such a nice person all the time. You can’t be, in this kind of a job.” More

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      Review: A Ukrainian Orchestra Speaks With Quiet Intensity

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      Brahms’s Fourth Symphony doesn’t mean anything. Like much of the classical music repertory, it has no text, no plot. It elicits emotions, but not in a rigidly defined way. At a concert, your neighbor’s experience of it, her explanation of its impact, will almost certainly be different from yours.It’s also, like much of the repertory, chameleonic — a different piece if you’ve suffered a heartbreak or celebrated a joy. On Thursday, when the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra performed the symphony at Lincoln Center, the notes were the same as ever. But, played by dozens of Ukrainian musicians on a mild evening in Damrosch Park, the score took on an air of calm but implacable defiance, what Rimbaud once called “burning patience.” There was no hysteria to this Brahms, just resolute intensity.Though the performance, with its unified, focused passion, seemed like the work of a well-practiced ensemble, this orchestra convened for the first time only a month ago, as an effort to showcase Ukraine’s culture and what the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has called “artistic resistance” to the Russian invasion.It is the brainchild of the conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, who has Ukrainian roots, and her husband, Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. Wilson and Gelb rallied sponsors and the assistance of the Polish National Opera in Warsaw, which hosted rehearsals and the first show of a 12-city tour, which continues through Saturday in Washington.Anna Fedorova was the soloist in Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2, a nod to the Polish support for the Freedom Orchestra project.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesPlaying under Wilson’s baton, the musicians represent a range of Ukrainian ensembles, and some are members of orchestras elsewhere in Europe. The Ukrainian government made the crucial contribution of allowing male players to participate in the tour, even though men of military age are now barred from leaving the country.But make no mistake: The men and women of the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra are fighting. As the critic Jason Farago wrote last month in The New York Times, the risks to Ukrainian culture “are more than mere collateral damage” in this battle. This is, he added, a true culture war; Russia is seeking not just land but also the erasure of a country’s artistic output and history. Anyone who is resisting that is a soldier.“I don’t have a gun,” one of the orchestra’s musicians told The Times recently, “but I have my cello.”So it was natural that the evening had its moments of national pride. Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations, Sergiy Kyslytsya, took the stage to declare “Glory to Ukraine,” and Wilson echoed that sentiment — in Ukrainian — from the podium. A huge Ukrainian flag stretched behind the musicians; at the end, the soloists took a bow wrapped in flags, and still more were waved in the audience.The Ukrainian ambassador to the United Nations, Sergiy Kyslytsya, spoke before the performance.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesBut this wasn’t a performance given over to jingoism; it favored refinement. You got the impression that the best way to fight imperialism and authoritarianism — from the concert stage, at least — was with sophistication, craft, rigor, subtlety. For all its moments of high drama, the program was admirably even-keeled and soft-spoken, an embodiment of a cultured nation. Even the arrangement of the Ukrainian anthem at the end was impressionistic and elegant, the opposite of stentorian.There has never been a perfect outdoor orchestral performance; instruments made for warm indoor acoustics take on an edge, and overamplified strings swamp the woodwinds every time. This was not the best possible setting for the American premiere of the pre-eminent Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov’s Symphony No. 7 (2003), a poignant and canny single-movement work that begins in agony; dips (à la Shostakovich) knowingly into kitschy sweetness; and then slowly dissolves, ending with the eerie, toneless sound of breathing through brasses.The pianist Anna Fedorova was a sensitive, poetic soloist in Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2, a nod to the Polish support for the Freedom Orchestra project. The soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska — who replaced Anna Netrebko at the Met after Netrebko’s contracts were canceled in the wake of the Russian invasion — sang Leonore’s aria of rebellion from Beethoven’s “Fidelio.”Flags were also waved by members of the audience at Damrosch Park.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesBut most impressive was the Brahms symphony, not a piece easily thrown together by a pickup orchestra. (On Friday at Damrosch, as the closing night of Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City festival, the Brahms will be replaced by Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, and the “Fidelio” aria by Aida’s paean to her homeland, “O patria mia.”)Despite the outdoor acoustics, the sound was remarkably rich in the first movement; the second was eloquent; the third buoyant but still substantial, carried off with understated panache.The finale was less ferocious than you might have thought it would be, given the occasion, and was all the more moving for that restraint. Some have heard in the end of Brahms’s Fourth grimness and destruction, a kind of gorgeous annihilation. This was the opposite: a declaration of continued presence.It’s not quite true that the work is pure music, without any external connections; you just have to dig a bit. Brahms derived the theme of the finale from the final movement of a Bach cantata, the opening words of which could have been this concert’s — and this orchestra’s — credo: “My days of suffering, God will finally end in joy.”Ukrainian Freedom OrchestraThrough Friday at Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center, lincolncenter.org. More

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      At Mostly Mozart Concerts, Casual Vibes and High Musical Values

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      The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra offered a series of breezy but focused programs at Lincoln Center, filled with treats big and small.The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra bears the name of a festival that no longer exists, but over the last three weeks, it played 12 concerts that showed it still has a place in the new creative landscape at Lincoln Center.In April, Lincoln Center announced a newly streamlined festival for this year, “Summer for the City,” that subsumed (or really replaced) a sprawling collection of offerings, including the Mostly Mozart Festival and Midsummer Night Swing. Lincoln Center’s chief artistic officer, Shanta Thake, has said that the organization plays a civic role, so while the updated lineup still sprawls, its emphasis is squarely on community. Social dances, celebratory gatherings for Pride and Juneteenth and a tribute to the Brooklyn-born hip-hop star Notorious B.I.G. have filled the schedule, with many events at no cost.Classical music, a longtime centerpiece of Lincoln Center’s identity, was allotted roughly two and a half weeks of prime time in the middle of its three-month calendar.How does a genre that has wrestled with accusations of elitism fit with the populism of “Summer for the City”? The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra and its music director, Louis Langrée, wasted no time finding out, offering up breezy yet focused concerts that unfurled as effortlessly as a picnic blanket — welcoming, comforting and filled with treats big and small.I attended the first four programs before being sidelined by COVID-19, and the concerts I saw were a joyous success. They largely followed a template of spotlighting highly personable soloists and making a quiet point of incorporating works by Black composers after years of neglect.As a siren sounded in the distance while Conrad Tao performed at Damrosch Park, he paused and shot the audience a look as if to say, “I’ll wait.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThe series began with a free show at Damrosch Park that juxtaposed works by Black composers and their contemporaries. Joseph Boulogne’s rousing overture to “L’Amant Anonyme” flowed seamlessly into a briskly elegant account of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17. A glassy, small-scale piece by William Grant Still connected more tenuously to George Gershwin’s ecstatic “Rhapsody in Blue.”Taking a jubilant jaunt through Gershwin’s crowd-pleaser, the pianist Conrad Tao seemed to conduct his own symphony at the keyboard, plunking out a pitter-patter of notes, coloring in sunset shades and slamming his forearm delightedly on the keys. At one point, as a siren sounded in the distance, he paused and shot the audience a look as if to say, “I’ll wait.” The crowd loved it.Before the concert, Thake led the audience in a spoken ritual derived from the three themes of “Summer for the City” — remember, reclaim and rejoice — a reflection on the healing process that communities have undertaken during the pandemic.The orchestra played six programs in total, performing each twice, on consecutive days. The other five programs, all at Alice Tully Hall, had a choose-what-you-pay model, with a minimum price of $5. The concerts lasted 90 minutes or less without intermission.Concertgoers at the Damrosch Park concert on July 19.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesWhether it was the ticket prices, the inviting run times or the chance to escape the enervating heat, concertgoers seemed energized and unguardedly enthusiastic, often applauding between symphonic movements (though, instinctively, not after the slow ones). And why not, given the conductor Xian Zhang’s tight, decisive reading of Beethoven’s Fourth in the first Alice Tully Hall program? Summer seems a good time to shed some layers and some concert decorum.There’s something heartening about audiences in shorts and T-shirts leaping to their feet in a concert hall to cheer well-turned showpieces by Ravel, Barber and Jacques Ibert. It shakes loose the idea that casual vibes are incompatible with high musical values.The luminous Trinidadian soprano Jeanine De Bique sang a rendition of Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” so touching and minutely observed that I instinctively reached for my husband’s hand. De Bique’s voice, rich and grounded, seemed to bloom from somewhere deep inside her, taking on a slender, shimmery quality as it extended toward the top of her range.Other soloists included the saxophonist Steven Banks, who radiated mellow glamour in the long lines of a Glazunov concerto; the violinist Augustin Hadelich, who dug into the raw strangeness of Ravel’s “Tzigane” and drew out the warm midrange of his Guarneri violin in a relative rarity by Boulogne; and the violinist Joshua Bell, who played pieces by Florence Price and Henri Vieuxtemps in a concert I missed led by Jonathon Heyward, who will become the first Black music director of the Baltimore Symphony in 2023.The replacement of printed programs with QR codes felt like a budgetary constraint, a nonchalant trimming of concert amenities and a nod to our new, continuing pandemic normal. But it drew at least one loud complaint from an attendee.As if in reply, Langrée took the stage and offered entertaining explanatory remarks — a new tradition in the making — before his translucent account of Ravel’s “Mother Goose” Suite. The conductor Roderick Cox spoke movingly of his program a few nights later, though the distinctive atmosphere of Barber’s “Knoxville” and Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” Suite suffered from his unshaped orchestral climaxes.There were new frontiers, too: Nokuthula Ngwenyama wrote the beautifully direct “Primal Message” (2020), a more emotive version of the Arecibo message sent into space in 1974, and the ensemble’s musicians invited concertgoers to mingle with them in the lobby after each concert.If the series told a story — one of remembrance, reclamation and exultation — then it seemed appropriate to conclude with Mozart’s Requiem, a piece of vaulting yet intensely personal feeling, which I was sad to miss on Friday and Saturday.But there’s another story here: Langrée’s contract runs through the 2023 season, and the orchestra’s contract is up for negotiation in February. (Thake has already expressed a desire to engage it next season.)If these concerts felt like the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra’s audition to join Thake’s new Lincoln Center, then the ensemble did everything it could to secure its part. More

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      Theater at Geffen Hall to Be Named for Two Key Donors

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      The Wu Tsai Theater will honor a $50 million gift from Joseph Tsai, a founder of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, and Clara Wu Tsai, a philanthropist.In late 2020, as coronavirus infections surged and cultural institutions shuttered, the fate of the long-delayed renovation of David Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, was uncertain.Then came a $50 million gift from Joseph Tsai, a Taiwanese-born billionaire co-founder of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, and his wife, Clara Wu Tsai, a philanthropist. The donation moved the project forward, accelerating construction so the hall could reopen in October, a year and a half ahead of schedule.In a nod to role of the Tsai family, Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic announced on Wednesday that the main auditorium in the hall would be named the Wu Tsai Theater.“It really took courage,” Katherine Farley, the chairwoman of Lincoln Center’s board, said of the gift in an interview. “And that courage inspired other people, and it made a big, big difference.”The gift represents one of the Tsai family’s biggest ventures so far into the performing arts. Joseph Tsai, who trained as a lawyer and serves as vice chairman of Alibaba, is more frequently associated with athletics. He is the primary owner of the Brooklyn Nets and has played an important role in helping the N.B.A. expand in China. The couple has previously contributed to universities, hospitals and social justice projects, among other gifts.Clara Wu Tsai, who is also a member of Lincoln Center’s board, said in an interview that she and her husband were moved by the opportunity to create jobs for New Yorkers and help make the performing arts more accessible. Also being named for the Tsais: a concert series aimed at increasing racial and ethnic diversity in the arts and bringing together performers of different genres.“My dream is that we have a full hall of diverse audiences and that we get programming in there that really showcases the versatility and flexibility that the hall was created to offer,” she said.Geffen Hall’s $550 million renovation will bring both aesthetic and acoustic improvements, with wavy beech wood walls and seats that wrap around the stage. Other additions meant to draw people in include a 50-foot digital screen in the lobby that can broadcast concerts to the public and a studio looking out onto Broadway.The hall is set to reopen on Oct. 7, with a concert featuring Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” among other pieces, before an audience of emergency medical workers and construction workers who took part in the hall’s renovation. Two galas and an open house weekend will follow later in the month.Clara Wu Tsai said she was confident that audiences would turn out, despite lingering concerns about the coronavirus and changing habits around going to live performances.“Everybody’s waiting to hear what will be one of the best concert halls in the world,” she said. “The timing is going to be good.” More

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      Classical Music Has a Hazy Future in Lincoln Center’s Summers

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      The day had been hot and muggy. But a mild breeze was blowing at Lincoln Center by the time the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra took the stage in Damrosch Park on Tuesday evening.The pianist Conrad Tao played an elegantly unruffled Mozart concerto and a daydreamy “Rhapsody in Blue.” Apart from a sprinkling of small performances last summer, this orchestra hadn’t been assembled since 2019, but it sounded comfortable and spirited.In just three years, the group has become an anachronism. The festival whose name it bears — Lincoln Center’s premier summertime event before the pandemic — is no more. The center’s summer, once a messy assortment of competing series and festivals, has finally been streamlined under a single label: “Summer for the City.”Planned by Lincoln Center’s president, Henry Timms, and its artistic chief since last year, Shanta Thake, Summer for the City has hoisted a 10-foot disco ball over the plaza fountain and includes outdoor film screenings, spoken word, social dance, comedy shows and an ASL version of “Sweeney Todd.”Five of New York’s dance companies will come together next month for a few days of performances. And starting on Friday, the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra moves inside to Alice Tully Hall for five programs: 10 concerts over two weeks.Louis Langrée, the orchestra’s music director since 2002, led the performance on Tuesday.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesBut despite that packed little orchestral season, other musical experiences that once appeared under the Mostly Mozart rubric have vanished along with the name — including guest ensembles, intimate recitals, and the new music that flows out of the classical tradition and is embodied by the International Contemporary Ensemble, long in residence at the festival but absent this year.Up in the air is the ultimate fate of the Mostly Mozart orchestra, a high-quality, carefully built and expensive group whose music director, Louis Langrée, has been on its podium since 2002. Though Thake told the orchestra on Friday that it would be a part of the summer next year, things get hazier beyond that. And while her vision for the season is still developing, this first iteration seems to have intentionally moved away from swaths of music and performance that have been central to the center’s identity for decades.Which is not to say that Lincoln Center’s summers have been just one thing. As Joseph W. Polisi, a longtime president of the Juilliard School, describes in “Beacon to the World: A History of Lincoln Center,” recently published by Yale University Press, the initial thought was that the center’s own programming would happen primarily in the summertime, so as not to compete in fall and spring with the constituent organizations for which it serves as a landlord, like the Metropolitan Opera and New York Philharmonic.As the campus was being conceived, summer was imagined to be a good time for folk-ish operas and musicals, like “Oklahoma!” or Copland’s “The Tender Land,” or perhaps a film festival; it’s in the DNA for the center’s summer offerings to be ambitious but accessible, populist but serious.The pianist Conrad Tao was the soloist in several works on the program, including a Mozart concerto and “Rhapsody in Blue.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThe flutist Jasmine Choi played in William Grant Still’s “Out of the Silence.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThough Summer for the City is taking place largely outdoors, the novelty in those early years was being inside: Midsummer Serenades — A Mozart Festival, which started in 1966 and was renamed Mostly Mozart six years later, was the first festival in New York to take place in an air-conditioned hall.The campus’s Community/Street Theater Festival of the early 1970s morphed, a few years later, into Lincoln Center Out of Doors, a free, outdoor, eclectic mélange: Ballet Hispánico and bluegrass, string quartets and a doo-wop opera, and eventually a helping of social dance as Midsummer Night’s Swing.Mostly Mozart grew to be perceived as stodgy and listless in this company. When Jane Moss — like Thake, a hire from outside classical music — became the center’s artistic leader in the early 1990s, it was believed that part of her brief was to eliminate it. After the Lincoln Center Festival, which hosted ambitious international touring productions, was founded in the mid-90s, Mostly Mozart, which had once lasted up to nine weeks, dwindled from seven to four. A musicians’ strike in 2002 was another existential crisis.But instead of spiking Mostly Mozart, Moss took a firmer hand with the programming, hired Langrée as a partner, and broadened the offerings — eventually to something closer to Slightly Mozart. In 2017, amid budget and management crises, the Lincoln Center Festival folded and Mostly Mozart was set to expand by up to 50 percent to partly compensate. The festival orchestra entered the opera pit for the first time in 2019; there were dance theater productions and the lauded New York premiere of “The Black Clown”; Langrée’s contract was renewed through 2023.During the center’s pandemic silence in 2020, though, Moss decided to step down. And here we are: Mostly Mozart, instead of being expanded, has been eliminated.In a joint interview with Timms, Thake said that this year’s Summer for the City should not necessarily be seen as the model for all to come. “It’s definitely a unique moment,” she said. “We’re coming out of a two-year pandemic. This is our first full expression of what is possible.”Starting on Friday, the orchestra moves inside to Alice Tully Hall for five programs: 10 concerts over two weeks.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesReferring to the center’s Restart Stages initiative from 2021, she added: “There had been some proven success in experimentation. What you’re seeing this year is a continued explosion of form, and putting it all under one umbrella.”Summer for the City has the spunky feel of Joe’s Pub, the cabaret space that Thake ran, along with other Public Theater initiatives like Under the Radar and Public Works, before she was hired by Lincoln Center. It also feels like a throwback to the Community/Street Theater Festival and Out of Doors tradition from the early ’70s.That can yield wonderful programming, and much civic good. Growing up just outside the city, I found Midsummer Night’s Swing — with its tango-ing, salsa-ing crowd — exciting and glamorous, the definition of a New York summer night.But those offerings existed in an ecosystem in which classical music — broadly construed as far as style, period and form — was another pillar, not a fringe.Thake insisted in the interview that classical programming has found its way into Summer for the City in more varied, informal ways: as an accompaniment to blood drives and a mass wedding ceremony, and in the form of music-and-meditation sessions in the David Rubenstein Atrium.Timms added: “In terms of volume, probably, the amount of classical music being presented hasn’t changed much. The nature of it has changed, to some degree, though not fundamentally.”Uh-huh.The two leaders implied that the reconception of the summer is pulling the center more toward the role of host, welcoming as many people as it can onto campus, while the constituent organizations handle or at least share the presenting — especially in the classical sphere. The idea, for example, is that the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s small set of Summer Evenings concerts can basically take care of what was once Mostly Mozart’s cozy A Little Night Music series, as well as its other solo and chamber events.Other musical experiences that once appeared under the Mostly Mozart rubric have vanished along with the name — including guest ensembles, intimate recitals and new music.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThe danger, of course, is that in reducing redundancies and internal competition, the city simply ends up with less.It’s true that the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra’s compressed season — which began with a week of mentoring and performing alongside student musicians — promises to showcase talented young guest artists. On Aug. 5 and 6, Langrée leads Mozart’s Requiem, a few days before Jlin’s arrangement of that work is the score for Kyle Abraham’s recent dance “Requiem: Fire in the Air of the Earth” — the kind of artistic cross-pollination that should be the center’s stock in trade.Even more important, the orchestra’s Tully concerts are choose-what-you-pay, a ticketing philosophy that should be a model for the center’s whole year. A range of excellent music, painstakingly prepared and performed at the highest level for affordable prices: That is true populism.Instead, classical music, even in its ever-struggling nonprofit form, gets cast as the elitist hegemon for which scrappier alternatives must be found — certainly if much-vaunted “new audiences” are going to be attracted.But classical programming should not be considered a chore, or a bone thrown to a dwindling audience — a familiar one rather than “new.” No, serious performance is a jewel, of which Lincoln Center is one of the few remaining supreme presenters. Conrad Tao playing Mozart with a superb orchestra for free or cheap: That is the core of the center’s mission. Its job is to cultivate audiences for and increase access to that.Which is not to say that change is impossible. Is a resident orchestra with an appointed music director the only way to fulfill Lincoln Center’s mission? Perhaps not. But is there a way of programming such an orchestra so that it could be an integral part of a diverse, adventurous summer season? Yes. Could it be joined to opera, recitals, new music and guest ensembles in broadening what I think Timms and Thake are trying to do: to foster inexpensive interactions with great performance? Absolutely.“We’re still getting our feet under us,” Thake said. “And seeing again, how can we continue to be responsive? How can we move through this season and get a sense of what worked, what didn’t work, what’s next for all of us?” More

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      A Global Hit, ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ Finally Lands in New York

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      The splashy show, an example par excellence of what makes modern French musicals distinctive, begins a run at Lincoln Center.When Americans are asked to name French musicals, their go-to is “Les Misérables,” which opened in Paris in 1980 before an extensively retooled English version went on to conquer the world a few years later.That, or some of the films that Jacques Demy directed in the 1960s, like “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and “The Young Girls of Rochefort.”Usually not mentioned on our shores are the wildly popular homegrown stage musicals that appeared in France in the late 1990s. But now the most famous of them, “Notre Dame de Paris,” is having its New York premiere at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center on Wednesday, and will run there through July 24.One of its creators has issues with the terminology used to describe his work, though.“I don’t think of ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ as musical theater,” the composer Richard Cocciante said by video from Rome, where he was preparing for a concert tour in Italy. “For me it’s a people’s opera. That’s because it’s entirely sung-through. We don’t call the numbers arias, though: ‘Belle’ or ‘Le temps des cathédrales’ stand alone as songs,” he added, mentioning two of the show’s many sweeping ballads and its biggest hits.The show, a spectacle with a cast of 30, made its debut in Paris in 1998.Alessandro DobiciBased, like “Les Misérables,” on an epic 19th-century novel by Victor Hugo (which also inspired the Disney animated film “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” to name just one of many adaptations), “Notre Dame de Paris” successfully exploited a distinctively French approach to modern stage musicals.The lyricist Luc Plamondon already had a successful career writing for artists both in his native Quebec (a certain belter released an album of his songs, “Dion chante Plamondon,” in 1992) and in France, where he wrote the lyrics for the musical “Starmania” in the late 1970s. (That perennial favorite is returning to the Paris stage in November.)Looking for another long-form project two decades later, Plamondon thought that “Notre Dame de Paris” would be a fitting source and called up Cocciante, who happened to have a tape of odds-and-ends melodies laying around.“The first song began with him singing ‘Time … da-da-da,’” Plamondon, 80, hummed on the phone. He had been thinking of the scene in the 1956 film adaptation in which Anthony Quinn, as the hunchback, Quasimodo, begs Gina Lollobrigida’s Esmeralda, the object of all the men’s attentions, for water. “He’s chained to the wheel and he goes ‘Belle … belle …’” Plamondon continued, quoting the French word for beautiful. “That gave me the idea to replace ‘time’ with ‘belle’ in the song.”And they were off. “From then on it gushed out of both us,” Cocciante, 76, said. “We wrote ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ in a kind of trance.”Hélène Ségara as Esmeralda in the original 1998 production of “Notre Dame de Paris.”Stephane Cardinale/Sygma, via Getty ImagesIn the French answer to a backers’ audition, he played the score on the piano and sang all the parts for the producer Charles Talar, who signed on and booked a run at the Palais des Congrès in Paris for the fall of 1998.It was fitting for Talar to get that venue, which is not a traditional theater but a cavernous concert hall, because he came from the music industry: He wanted to release an album first, then build on it to sell the stage show. It’s an approach Andrew Lloyd Webber successfully used for “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Evita,” but overall it’s not common in the United States and Britain, where a show precedes its recording.“He assumed he could activate the networks he had built and use some of the same strategies he used to sell records,” Nicolas Talar said on Zoom, recalling his father’s game plan. (Charles Talar died in 2020.) “The idea was to familiarize audiences with the music before the show started. The specificity of French musicals is that we promote them the way we would promote a pop record. If one or two songs become popular, you’re the star of the moment, you get on television and people want to see you,” he added. “The only way to hear ‘Belle’ live was to see the musical.”That song, a trio for the three men in love with Esmeralda, was released in the spring of 1998, months before the show’s opening, and went on to become the biggest-selling single of the year in France.“There was this miracle — I don’t know how else to describe it — of ‘Belle,’” said Daniel Lavoie, 73, who played the archdeacon Frollo in the original production and is back in the cassock for the New York run. “It was almost 5 minutes, which was inconceivable on the radio at the time because they didn’t play anything longer than 3 minutes. I remember that at our first TV appearance we were asked to do the song again. We knew then we were onto something.”Another number, “Le temps des cathédrales,” was almost as popular — many Americans might have discovered it on the 2015 Josh Groban album “Stages” — cementing the status of “Notre Dame” as the It show that year. And unlike in the United States, where stage personalities don’t tend to make a dent on the Billboard Hot 100, it turned the cast members Garou, Patrick Fiori and Hélène Ségara into pop stars. (Lavoie already had an established career as a singer by then.)“Notre Dame” was so huge that other producers followed in Talar’s footsteps, most prominently Dove Attia, who was behind the popular “Les Dix Commandements” (2000), “Le Roi Soleil” (2005) and “Mozart, l’opéra rock” (2009). That last was among the few to actually, er, rock, which may partly help explain why those shows have not had much of an impact in English-speaking countries, where the tolerance for a high ratio of power ballads seems to be lower than in France, Russia or South Korea.A decisive move by the “Notre Dame” team was to have the cast sing live to recorded tracks, which are still used in productions worldwide, though the New York engagement will supplement them with a full orchestra. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Lavoie said in English, before reverting back to French. “‘Notre Dame de Paris’ was conceived as a show outside of time.”“Notre Dame” has been translated into eight languages and performed in 23 countries, though its producers now prefer presenting it in the original French, which is how its cast of 30 will perform it in New York (with English supertitles). Still, this and similar musicals have faced an uphill battle to win over reviewers at home.“Musical theater doesn’t get much critical support in France,” said Laurent Valière, the producer and host of the weekly program “42e Rue” on French public radio as well as the author of a book about musicals. “The press pans it — sometimes with good reason and sometimes not.” (Full disclosure: I have been a guest commentator on the show.)The French hit factory seems to have hit a snag in recent years as it strains to find successors to the blockbusters of the 2000s. There are oddities like the biomusical “Bernadette de Lourdes,” which is based on the true story of a young girl who claimed to see the Virgin Mary and plays in Lourdes, the town where it all happened. In a different vein is “Résiste,” a jukebox musical based on France Gall’s pop songbook that benefited from a live band playing the original arrangements and contributions from the rising choreographer Marion Motin.Still, “Notre Dame de Paris” endures. “Another distinctive trait is that no matter where it’s playing, it’s staged the same way,” said Nicolas Talar, who is now producing the show and copresenting it in New York. (He also has producing credits on Broadway’s “Funny Girl” and “Moulin Rouge! The Musical.”)“Sometimes we wonder if the show has become outdated, but the themes are evergreen and the music was intentionally arranged to sound timeless, so we keep postponing making changes,” he added. “So far audiences haven’t complained and the show is doing well, so we’re staying the course.” More

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      Digging Into Bob Dylan and Lou Reed’s Archives

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherLast month, the Bob Dylan Center opened in Tulsa, Okla., offering researchers unparalleled access to Dylan’s archives and peeling back the layers on his songwriting process, long the object of study and fascination. And this month, “Lou Reed: Caught Between the Twisted Stars” opened at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center — it’s the first exhibition drawn from Reed’s archive, which was acquired by the New York Public Library.Both of these seek to offer deeper understandings of these rock icons, but they also offer the opportunity for alternate narratives to emerge. Dylan and Reed always carefully tended to their own mythologies — now the behind-the-scenes tools are available for all to see.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the value of even the unlikeliest ephemera, the difference between public and private archives and the specific ways Dylan and Reed found methods to distance themselves from their pasts.Guest:Ben Sisario, The New York Times’s music business reporterConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Artists Are Putting Their Stamp on Lincoln Center

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      In a partnership with the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Public Art Fund, works by Nina Chanel Abney and Jacolby Satterwhite will help reintroduce Geffen Hall this fall.When David Geffen Hall reopens on the Lincoln Center campus this fall, two new artworks — by Nina Chanel Abney and by Jacolby Satterwhite — will be splayed across the 65th Street facade and a 50-foot media wall in the renovated lobby.These highly visible pieces, commissioned by the performing arts center in partnership with the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Public Art Fund, are positioned to help reintroduce the longtime home of the New York Philharmonic to the city and will inaugurate a rotating program of visual artists invited to put their stamp on Lincoln Center.“One of the overriding goals of the new David Geffen Hall has been to find ways to connect more meaningfully with outside — not just to open up but to reach out,” said Henry Timms, president and chief executive of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. “We’ve been very intentional about thinking about different voices, different audiences, more people seeing themselves at Lincoln Center. The Studio Museum was the perfect partner for that.”For the museum, which has been organizing temporary installations of public art since 2016 in Harlem while its 125th Street building is under construction, this collaboration was “a great opportunity to extend our engagement in site-specific commissioned artwork,” said Thelma Golden, the Studio Museum’s director and chief curator. It also allows the museum to complement the work at Lincoln Center “to broaden and deepen and expand their program and the ways in which they engage audiences.” Golden pulled in the Public Art Fund for the organization’s resources and expertise in implementing large-scale public projects.Together, the institutions developed the curatorial vision and identified the two prominent locations for the art — a 10,000-square-foot expanse on the north facade of the building and a new multiuse media wall running across the lobby. This space has been reconceived as a kind of living room, open to the public all day with beverages. Nonticketholders will be able to view the art on the media wall that will also broadcast the Philharmonic down to the lobby when it is playing upstairs. Abney, 39, known for her bold, large-scale paintings, and Satterwhite, 36, a multidisciplinary artist who combines digital media and painting, were selected from more than half a dozen artists of color invited to make site-specific proposals.A rendering of a multiuse media wall that will be at David Geffen Hall. Satterwhite’s commission will appear there, and concerts will be streamed, as well.via DBOX“That facade for so long was thought of as the blank back side of the building and is kind of hiding in plain sight,” said Nicholas Baume, artistic and executive director of the Public Art Fund. “It’s right there at that intersection of all these major streets and can express this concept that Lincoln Center wants to open itself up to the city and address some of that symbolic citadel-like podium elevation of the original ensemble of buildings.”In a dynamic constellation of colorful stylized figures, symbols and patterns to be printed on vinyl and applied across a grid of 35 windows on that north facade, Abney will pay homage to San Juan Hill, a largely Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood that was demolished to make way for the 14-acre federally aided Lincoln Center project, which broke ground in 1959.“I was interested to delve into the history and the amazing people who inhabited that neighborhood,” said Abney, who is working with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to study San Juan Hill, considered the birthplace of the Charleston and bebop, and home to musicians including the jazz pianist Thelonious Monk. “It’s acknowledgment and celebrating what was there.”In tandem, Lincoln Center has commissioned the composer Etienne Charles to explore the neighborhood’s legacy in a piece, “San Juan Hill,” to be performed by the Philharmonic in the new hall for free on Oct. 8.“This is part of a necessary engagement with our history,” Timms said. “This isn’t a one-off.”In a poetic, digitally animated landscape that will unfold across the 50-foot media wall in the lobby, Satterwhite plans to tell a story about the past, present and future of the New York Philharmonic. “The history of Lincoln Center is very male and white — that’s what it’s perceived as,” Satterwhite said. He is working with archivists there to mine footage of conductors and performers of different races and genders working more at the margins of the Philharmonic, to be woven fluidly into a kind of pastoral concert with 100 student musicians and dancers from Alvin Ailey, LaGuardia High School and others that Satterwhite is filming.“I want to reanimate the timeline that may traditionally be told, without any kind of hierarchy,” Satterwhite said. The pandemic, he feels, has offered an opportunity for “culture and society to reconfigure and reflect on itself. I want this piece to be very much about moving forward.” More