music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      Max Harwood Steps Up in 'Everybody's Talking About Jamie'

      by

      Two years ago, Max Harwood made a video in his bedroom.A second-year student at a musical theater school in London, he introduced himself and said where he was from. He talked about how, as a child, he would don a bouffant wig and perform Rizzo’s songs from “Grease,” making his grandmother laugh so hard that she nearly wet herself.That minute-long video was Harwood’s first audition for the movie “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” an adaptation of the sparkly West End musical about a teenager in the north of England with dreams of being a drag queen. Seeking new talent, the producers held an open call, which yielded thousands of tapes. Jonathan Butterell, the film’s director, watched nearly all of them, and Harwood’s stood out immediately.“He had this kind of magic about him,” Butterell recalled. “He is fabulous without being arrogant.” He called Harwood back six more times, for dance calls, for recording sessions, for chemistry reads, for drag challenges. The magic didn’t fade.So now Harwood — who had no professional credits, couldn’t get into a first-class drama school and had been told that he should aim for ensemble parts — is filling some very high-heeled shoes. His ice-blonde crop and princeling looks occupy nearly every frame of “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” which premieres on Amazon Prime Video on Friday.“I’ve had a process with this film where I’ve stepped into my queerness and my comfortability,” Harwood, 23, said on a recent evening while lolling on a sofa at the Crosby Street Hotel in New York. “This is who I am.”“I’ve had a process with this film where I’ve stepped into my queerness and my comfortability,” Harwood said.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesHarwood had arrived in the city the previous day, driving in from the Hamptons on a whistle-stop press tour for the film. The tour had taken him across America — which, mid-pandemic, mostly meant airports and hotels. He has louche, generous features, the outsize eyes of a startled deer and an unforced warmth. He wore a spotted T-shirt. And if his Converse sneakers lacked the pizazz of the glittery heels that Jamie covets, they did have platform soles. He carries himself like the dancer he trained to be, which makes him seem taller than 5 feet 10 inches.He grew up in Basingstoke, a town in south central England without a professional theater company. He knew he wanted to act, even if the drama schools that he applied to didn’t see it the same way. But his local theater society gave him a scholarship for a one-year course at the Guildford School of Acting. The teachers there weren’t entirely encouraging.“I was told that if I wanted to do musical theater, because of how I looked, I would be typically cast in the ensemble, and I needed to get my dancing up,” Harwood said. What exactly was wrong with his looks? “I’m not, like, the strapping leading man.”A scene from the film, an adaptation of the stage musical about an English teenager with dreams of being a drag performer.John Rogers/Amazon StudiosHe was directed to the Urdang Academy, a musical theater training program in London. Although he enjoyed the classes, he struggled there. He wanted to stand out, and the work of an ensemble member, who has to look and dance just like everybody else, never suited him. He wasn’t supposed to audition during the program, but he had seen “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” onstage, and had loved the sight of a story centered around a young gay man that didn’t depend on trauma.“He didn’t die at the end,” Harwood said. “He wasn’t comic relief. He didn’t come in for two scenes to be the gay best friend. And that was really nice.”So, when a friend told him about the open call for the movie, he put himself on tape. During the months of auditions that followed, he kept up with his schoolwork and his part-time job as a supervisor at a sneaker store. He never really thought that Butterell and the producers would cast him, but when he was called back for a day that involved a full drag makeup test, he let himself dream.Butterell had conceived the musical after watching the BBC documentary “Jamie: Drag Queen at 16,” which followed Jamie Campbell, an English teenager who wanted to wear a dress to prom. “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” opened in Sheffield, in the north of England, and quickly transferred to the West End in London. In The New York Times, the critic Ben Brantley called that production a “determinedly inspirational show.”In adapting the musical for the screen, Butterell and the other creators, the writer Tom MacRae and the composer Dan Gillespie Sells, didn’t want a strapping leading man to play Jamie. “Because what’s radical about Jamie is the fact that you’ve got an authentically effeminate male hero,” Gillespie Sells said in a phone interview. “That’s something you don’t see very often.”The creators saw it in Harwood. When Butterell told him that he had the part, Harwood screamed, swore and asked if he could call his mother.“Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” isn’t a coming out story; Jamie is out already. Instead it’s a tale of stepping confidently into your identity, in appropriately glamorous footwear. Jamie’s story isn’t really Harwood’s. Though Harwood liked playing dress-up, he never felt compelled to perform drag. But then again, maybe it’s everyone’s story: Doesn’t everyone want to be seen for who they really are?The dancing came easily to Harwood, and so did the songs, which are mostly pop- and R&B-inflected. Gillespie Sells praised his voice: “It was exactly that thing, that very pure, young male, perfect pop voice that was so good for Jamie because Jamie is pop personified. Everything about him is bright and hopeful.”Harwood didn’t always feel hopeful. Butterell, however, never doubted him. Neither did his colleagues, including Richard E. Grant, who gives a moving performance as Jamie’s drag mother. “He looks very young, sings and dances to the manner born, is emotionally open and giving, instantly likable, and of course, has talent by the bucket load,” Grant wrote of Harwood in an email.“I’m really happy to be a voice for my community,” Harwood said. “But there are so many more stories to be told.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesBut there were moments — such as a scene between Jamie and his best friend, Pritti (Lauren Patel) — when Harwood worried whether he could deliver the right performance. He felt frightened. He felt vulnerable. Butterell took him aside and told him to breathe. Maybe in these moments Jamie felt vulnerable, too, Butterell suggested.The day they shot Jamie’s drag performance was even more anxiety-inducing, but Jamie Campbell, the musical’s inspiration, happened to be on set that day. “And I said to Jamie, ‘I’m so scared, I’m so scared,’” Harwood recalled. “And he was like: ‘You’re in exactly the right place. And if you weren’t in that place, you would not be human.’”So Harwood’s anxiety became Jamie’s anxiety, which layers the musical’s sequins and chiffon with a febrile authenticity. If the film is about Jamie coming into his own, it’s also about Harwood doing the same. “Max went on a similar journey to what Jamie’s going through,” Butterell said. “Max went looking for who he was in this. Where Max and Jamie meet is in this duality of sheer joy and the fear that you have to step through to maintain that joy.”Starring in a movie musical as your first professional gig is one more joy. But even a decade ago, young queer actors might have fretted about being birthed into the industry in a role like Jamie, because it could lead to a typecast future. That doesn’t bother Harwood. He believes in Jamie’s story, which he describes as “a little beacon of light and hope and joy.”Sprawled on that couch in New York, he said that story, however universal, is only one story — and queer youth deserve more. “I’m really happy to be a voice for my community,” he said. “But there are so many more stories to be told.” More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      Andrew Garfield Can’t Remember Who He Was Before ‘Tick, Tick … Boom!’

      by

      In the movie musical, Garfield plays the creator of “Rent,” who died unexpectedly at 35. Making the film helped Garfield process a death in his own life.Jon (Andrew Garfield) is throwing a party, though there’s hardly a reason to celebrate. He’s riven with anxiety, his cramped apartment is overpacked with people, and he’s just spent money he doesn’t have, a down payment on success that will not come within his lifetime. But still, with a wide grin, Jon toasts his friends, leaps on his couch and sings, “This is the life!”Jon is Jonathan Larson, the composer and playwright who died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm at age 35 in 1996 just before his new musical, “Rent,” would become a global smash. The new film “Tick, Tick … Boom!” portrays Larson struggling to find success in his late 20s, as he frets about whether he should pack it in and choose a more conventional path than scripting musical theater.Larson originally created “Tick, Tick … Boom!” as a solo show, “Boho Days,” starring himself in 1990; after his death, it was reworked by the playwright David Auburn into a three-person production that the “Hamilton” creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, saw in 2001, when he was still a senior in college.“Here’s this posthumous musical from the guy who made me want to write musicals in the first place,” said Miranda, who’s now made his feature directorial debut with the film.Miranda saw Garfield in the 2018 Broadway production of “Angels in America” and thought he was “transcendent” in that show. “I just left thinking, ‘Oh, that guy can do anything,’” the director recalled. “I didn’t know if he could sing, but I just felt like he could do anything. So I cast him in my head probably a year before I talked to him about it.”Miranda put Garfield through his paces, sending him to a vocal coach and ensuring that the actor would be able to play enough piano so the camera could pan from his fingers to his face throughout the film. But those are just the technical aspects of a performance that is impressively possessed: Garfield plays the passionate, frustrated Larson with enough zealous verve to power all the lights on Broadway.Garfield as Jonathan Larson in a scene from “Tick, Tick … Boom.”Macall Polay/NetflixIt’s all part of a very busy fall for the 38-year-old actor, who recently appeared in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” as the disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker and, it’s rumored, will suit up alongside Tom Holland and Tobey Maguire in “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” out in December. (Of that supersecret superhero team-up, Garfield can divulge nothing.) Still, it’s clear that “Tick, Tick … Boom!” meant much more to him than he initially expected.“It’s a strange thing when there’s someone like Jon that you didn’t have any relationship to before, and then suddenly now there’s this mysterious forever connection that I am never, ever going to let go,” Garfield told me on a recent video call from Calgary, Canada, where he’s shooting “Under the Banner of Heaven,” a limited series. “I just feel so lucky that Jon was revealed to me, because now I don’t remember who I was before I knew who Jon was.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.How did “Tick, Tick … Boom!” originally come to you?One of my best friends in New York is Gregg Miele, and he’s the great body worker and massage person of New York City — he works on all the dancers and actors and singers on Broadway and beyond. Lin was on his table one morning and asked, “Can Andrew Garfield sing?” And Gregg, being the friend that he is, just started lying, basically, and said, “Yes, he is the greatest singer I’ve ever heard.” Then he called me and said, “Hey, go and get some singing lessons because Lin’s going to ask you to do something.”Lin and I had lunch, and he told me briefly about “Tick, Tick” and Jon. I’m not a musical theater guy in my history — it’s not something that I’ve been introduced to until the last few years, really. So Lin left me with a copy of the music and lyrics, and he wrote at the front of it, “This won’t make sense now, but it will. Siempre, Lin.”Garfield hadn’t done much singing when he was cast in “Tick, Tick … Boom” opposite musical theater veterans. “I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to die.’”Alana Paterson for The New York TimesYou’ve performed in plays like “Angels in America” and “Death of a Salesman” on Broadway, but in this film, Lin surrounded you with a lot of musical-theater ringers, and even some of the smallest roles and cameos are filled by major players from that world. That had to have been a daunting space to step into.I remember a very specific moment where we were in music rehearsal. Alex Lacamoire was at the piano walking us through the songs — he’s Lin’s musical arranger and producer — and I was with [“Tick, Tick” co-stars] Robin de Jesus and Vanessa Hudgens and Josh Henry and Alex Shipp. You can imagine how I’m feeling! They’re all just pros, they know exactly what they’re doing, they’re making notes. I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m going to die.”Then it comes time for me to get into the song and I’m just trying to get through it. I remember Alex Lacamoire going, “Woo, Andrew!” And then everyone behind him, like Josh and Vanessa and Alex and Robin, were like, “Yeah baby, that’s it baby! You got it, baby!” I go beet red and five minutes pass, and I’m just like, “Hey guys, sorry.” I start crying, and I say, “I don’t know if I’ve ever been this happy in my entire life, to be surrounded by the most supportive liars I have ever known.”Garfield working with his director, Lin-Manuel Miranda, who cast him after seeing the actor in “Angeles in America.” Miranda recalled, “I didn’t know if he could sing, but I just felt like he could do anything.”Macall Polay/NetflixJonathan spends the movie anxious about this ticking that only he can hear. How did you interpret that?There was a line in the original one-man show “Boho Days”: “Sometimes, I feel like my heart is going to explode.” It was too on-the-nose for people after he passed away, and they had to cut it, but he spends the story trying to figure out what this ticking is: “Is it turning 30? Is it that I haven’t succeeded? Is it some unconscious idea of my girlfriend’s biological clock combined with the pressure of my career? Or is it all of my friends who are losing their lives at a very young age because of the AIDS epidemic?”It could even be a musical metronome. The way you play Jonathan, as this theatrical person who feels so deeply and urgently, it’s almost like he needs to break into song because normal life just doesn’t cut it.Everything is up at an 11. Even when he’s making love, it’s at 11! Somehow he knows that this is all going to end, that this is all so ephemeral, and I think he was acutely, painfully aware that he wasn’t going to get all of his song sung. And I think he was also agonizingly aware that he wasn’t going to get the reflection and recognition that he knew he was supposed to have while he was still breathing.On the last day of shooting, what I understood is that Jon had it figured out. He knew that this is a short ride and a sacred one, and he had a lot of keys and secrets to how to live with ourselves and with each other and how to make meaning out of being here. Once he accepted that, he could be fully a part of the world, and then he could write “Rent.” I don’t think there’s an accident in that. That very visceral knowing of loss and of death, that’s what gives everything so much meaning. And without that awareness, we will succumb to meaninglessness.So what kind of meaning did this story give to you?Every frame, every moment, every breath of this film is an attempted honoring of Jon. And, on a more personal level, it’s an honoring of my mom. She is someone who showed me where I was supposed to go in my life. She set me on a path. We lost her just before Covid, just before we started shooting, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. So, for me, I was able to continue her song on the ocean and the wave of Jonathan’s songs. It was an attempt to honor him in his unfinished song, and her in her unfinished song, and have them meet.I think that’s part of the reason I didn’t want this movie to end, because I got to put my grief into art, into this creative act. The privilege of my life has been being there for my mother, being the person that gave her permission when she was ready. We had a very amazing connection, and now an audience will know her spirit in an unconscious way through Jon, which I just find so magical and beautiful.“I’ve lost people before, but one’s mother is a different thing,” Garfield said, adding, “Nothing can prepare you for that kind of cataclysm.”Alana Paterson for The New York TimesStill, that’s a lot to deal with while you were shooting this movie. It can’t have been easy.I was hesitant whether I was going to share that, but I feel like it’s a universal experience. In the best-case scenario, we lose our parents and not the other way around, so I feel very lucky that I got to be with her while she was passing, and I got to read her favorite poems to her and take care of her and my dad and my brother. I’ve lost people before, but one’s mother is a different thing. It’s the person that gives you life no longer being here. Nothing can prepare you for that kind of cataclysm. For me, everything has changed: Where there was once a stream, there’s now a mountain; where there was once a volcano, there’s now a field. It’s a strange head trip.You put parts of yourself in other people, almost like they’re the stewards of who you are. And when you lose those people, suddenly you become their steward.As you say, it’s like my mother now lives in me in a way that maybe is even stronger than ever when she was incarnate. I feel her essence. For me, it only comes when one can accept the loss, and it’s so hard for us to do that in our culture because we’re not given the framework or the tools to. We’re told to be in delusion and denial of this universally binding thing that we’re all going to go through at some point, and it’s fascinating to me that this grand adventure of death is not honored.Actually, the only thing that gives any of this meaning is if we walk with death in the far corner of our left eye. That’s the only way that we are aware of being alive in this moment. I think that was the legacy that Jon leaves and the legacy that my mom leaves for me personally, is just to be here. Because you’re not going to be here for long.It reminds me of what was written on your script before all of this happened: “You don’t understand now, but you will.”“You don’t understand now, but you will.” I’m still reeling from the download of understanding what Jon’s life was about, what my mother’s life was about, what all of this is about. Oh God, how lucky to explore that in one’s work! More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Sri Lanka Baila Star Sunil Perera is Dead at 68

      by

      The frontman of his family’s popular band combined the country’s unique, Latin-influenced sound with politically biting lyrics.COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — In the end, it was only appropriate that Sunil Perera, who had entertained generations of Sri Lankans on the radio and on the dance floor with his distinctive, Latin-fused tunes, would go out singing.On his deathbed at a hospital in the capital city of Colombo, Mr. Perera had asked for a guitar, which he wasn’t provided. So he turned to what couldn’t be denied.“The doctor told me that the day before he died, he was singing and entertaining everyone there,” said Piyal Perera, Sunil’s brother and bandmate.Mr. Perera died on Monday at the Nawaloka hospital in Colombo, his brother said. He was 68. While the cause of death was not clear, Mr. Perera had been recovering from Covid-19 when he was rushed into intensive care, Piyal Perera said.Few have made such a large impact on Sri Lanka’s cultural and entertainment scene as Mr. Perera did for half a century. Often dressed in bright colors and a bowler’s hat, he produced hit song after hit song through the Gypsies, the family band, which was preparing to celebrate its golden jubilee this year.The Gypsies specialized in baila, a jolly and rhythmic genre sung mostly in Sinhalese but influenced by the Portuguese, who colonized much of the island in the 16th and 17th centuries.Over the decades he used his lyrics and his voice to amplify concerns about Sri Lanka’s shrinking democratic space. The country, still recovering from years of civil war, has been beset by government pressure against journalists, activists and minority groups. Mr. Perera frequently lambasted a decaying political elite that has become bogged down in bickering and that, he believed, was dashing the nation’s hopes.“He was both popular and a protester,” said Lakshman Joseph-de Saram, a film composer from Sri Lanka. “We rarely have a Bob Dylan and a Michael Jackson in one package.”Mr. Saram added, “He was our baila king.”Tributes poured in after his death, including from politicians Mr. Perera had openly criticized. He directed his anger at the country’s ruling Rajapaksa family and at the opposition that repeatedly disappointed him with the chaos in its ranks.President Gotabaya Rajapaksa called his passing “a great loss.” Sajith Premadasa, leader of the opposition, said Mr. Perera had “pioneered a modern day revolution in the musical history of Sri Lanka.”He was born Uswatta Liyanage Ivor Sylvester Sunil Perera in 1952 to a Roman Catholic family and grew up in the Colombo suburb of Moratuwa. He was one of 10 children of Anton Perera, a former soldier, and Doreen Perera, a homemaker.The elder Mr. Perara built the Gypsies largely around his children. Sunil was a teenager when he joined the band before becoming its lead singer. Sunil described his father as a disciplinarian who had wanted him to complete his higher education but who supported his choice when he left his studies to focus on guitar and voice training. In 2017, the Gypsies recorded a family tribute to the founder.Sunil Perera’s opinionated lyrics and public stances set him apart from other high-profile musicians in Sri Lanka. In his songs he dealt with corruption and politicians soured after their election losses. One song depicted aliens landing in Sri Lanka and turning down an invitation to stay.“It’s 72 years since we got independence,” he said in one interview. “We are in debt to the whole world. Is it the fault of the people? Whose fault is it? I don’t blame one group. I blame the entire set of politicians who ruled us.”He was open about his personal life, discussing what he saw as hypocritical attitudes about sex in Sri Lanka’s conservative society. But his language often got him in trouble, particularly when he described women as “baby machines” in a discussion about how large Sri Lankan families were in his father’s generation.His friends and family acknowledged that Mr. Perera could be divisive, but they said his outspokenness had come from his firm belief that Sri Lanka could overcome the ethnic and religious divides that have led to conflict for decades. His brother, Piyal, said Mr. Perara had declared that what would make him happiest would be if all four of his children married into four different communities.“His head was not swollen with the fame — he was simple,” said Mariazelle Goonetilleke, a fellow musician and friend. “He was not afraid to tell the truth, always spoke his mind. There were people who didn’t like that.”Mr. Perera came down with Covid-19 last month and was hospitalized for 25 days before being discharged, only to be readmitted, this time in intensive care, just days later.He is survived by his wife, Geetha Kulatunga; two daughters, Rehana and Manisha; and two sons, Sajith and Gayan.In a video message after he was initially discharged from the hospital, Mr. Perera looked weak but determined as he thanked the hospital staff and his fans and well wishers. Dressed in a white shirt and a gray hat, his usual colors were missing.“We are thankful to God for giving us such a crowd,” he said. “We will definitely get that blessing again. When we get that time, let’s meet again, like old times.” More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      7 Events in New York Honoring 9/11

      by

      On Saturday, performances and memorials around the city and online will mark the 20th anniversary of the attacks. Here’s how to find them.Twenty years after four coordinated terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda killed 2,977 people — 2,753 of them at ground zero in New York City — the nation and the city remember. They remember through dance, music, museums, TV specials and light beamed into the sky.And especially now, after a war in Afghanistan, the ways we remember move beyond commemoration. They start to connect the dots between the attacks themselves and the larger historical era that followed, and continues to unfold.History echoes and reverberates in Lower Manhattan, where businesses have shuttered once more, this time because of the pandemic. There, from the rooftop of the Battery Parking Garage, two 48-foot squares of light will recreate the ghostly images of the twin towers this Saturday night.Here’s a selection of events — both in-person and virtual — for New Yorkers to remember and reflect this year. Check websites for Covid-19 protocols.Verdi’s Requiem in MemoriamThe Metropolitan Opera plays Verdi’s Requiem in commemoration often. The last time it was performed there, the piece was in honor of the beloved Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky.Before that, the music was presented as a memorial to Luciano Pavarotti (2008), President Kennedy (1964) and Verdi himself (1901). Now, in its first indoor performance for an audience since March 2020, the Met Opera will perform the Requiem on Sept. 11 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the attacks.Five hundred free tickets will be made available to the families of victims, and the remaining tickets will be $25. The event will also be broadcast live on PBS, hosted by the ballet star Misty Copeland from the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in Manhattan. From $25; metopera.org.‘Remembering 9/11’ at New York’s Oldest MuseumImages from “Here is New York,” a photographic archive of ground zero, at the New-York Historical Society. Hiroko Masuike for The New York TimesIn the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the New-York Historical Society collected materials — pieces of debris, parts of memorials — as rescues and memorials unfolded. And so began the History Responds initiative, which has since continued to document major events like the Black Lives Matter protests and the Climate Strike.Now, 20 years later, two ongoing exhibits — “Remembering 9/11” and “Objects Tell Stories: 9/11” — at the museum on Central Park West are showcasing that history. On Saturday, images from the photographic archive “Here is New York,” which documented ground zero in the moment, will be projected on digital displays in the Smith Gallery. $22 for an adult ticket; nyhistory.org.A National TV SpecialIn 2001, the rubble of the World Trade Center South Tower buried Will Jimeno — a Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police officer — for 13 hours. He survived, as did his partner, John McLoughlin.Their experiences will comprise part of “Shine A Light,” a one-hour national television special airing on CNN at 7 p.m. on Saturday. The nonprofit 9/11 Day, co-founded by David Paine, announced that the special will be hosted by Jake Tapper and feature performances by H.E.R., Brad Paisley and Common.“We hope to demonstrate that even in the face of great tragedy, good things can arise,” Paine said in a statement. “That’s an essential and powerful reminder for all of us now, 20 years later, as we continue to deal with other tragic events.” 911day.org.‘Table of Silence’Daniel Bernard Roumain, center on violin, performing “Table of Silence” at Lincoln Center last year.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesEvery Sept. 11 morning since the 10th anniversary of the attacks, Buglisi Dance Theatre has presented its “Table of Silence” — a free “public performance ritual for peace” — at Lincoln Center. The pandemic hasn’t changed that: Last year, 28 dancers draped in white fabric reached their outstretched arms toward the sky.Although that event marked the first large-scale performance at Lincoln Center since March 2020, it was closed to the public, available only as a livestream. This year, however, the 8 a.m. performance will feature both live and virtual elements. Limited standing capacity will be available on Josie Robertson Plaza, on a first-come, first-served basis. Free; tableofsilence.org.‘Memory Ground’Inside Green-Wood Cemetery, the top of Battle Hill — the highest point in Brooklyn and the setting of the largest Revolutionary battle — affords sweeping views of Lower Manhattan, including the World Trade Center. The musical performance “Memory Ground” will take place there on Saturday. The Mississippi-born and New York City-based composer Buck McDaniel will present original compositions. (Previously, his work “Detroit Cycles” premiered with the radio program The Moth.)Saxophonist Noa Even — whose solo commissioning project, “Atomic,” has toured across the country — will perform, as will the New York City-based string ensemble Desdemona. Each performance is 45 minutes, and will run at noon, 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. $10 recommended donation; green-wood.com.The Crossing’s ‘Returning’The Crossing, a new-music choir, will perform in Philadelphia on Saturday.  Jessica Kourkounis for The New York TimesLatvian composer Eriks Esenvalds’s song “Earth Teach Me Quiet” begins with the line “Earth teach me quiet — as the grasses are still with light.”The Crossing, a new-music choir, will perform pieces by Esenvalds, Ayanna Woods, Michael Gilbertson and James Primosch on Saturday at 7 p.m. at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia.While the event, “Returning” may not explicitly address the terrorist attacks, its themes — isolation, grief, confusion, hope and returning — are more than fitting. This “coming home to song” marks the opening of the Crossing’s back-to-live-performance season, in the spirit of return and renewal. $35 for general admission; thecrossing.ticketleap.com.A ‘Tribute in Light’ Across the CityAt sunset on Saturday, 88 7,000-watt light bulbs will reach four miles into the sky from the roof of the Battery Parking Garage, mirroring the shapes of the twin towers.This Tribute in Light, organized by the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, was first presented six months after the attack. Each year after that, the ghostly echoes of the towers have lighted up Lower Manhattan from dusk until dawn on the evening of Sept. 11.Buildings throughout the city, including the Empire State Building, One World Trade Center, the Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center Plaza and the New-York Historical Society will join in the memorial by lighting up their facades and rooftops in sky blue. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Fire Music’ Review: An Impassioned Case for Free Jazz

      by

      The beautiful souls that created free jazz — including Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry and Carla Bley — light up this new documentary from Tom Surgal.One default reaction to the musical form called “free jazz” — Ornette Coleman’s phrase for this improvised, experimental style of jazz — has long been that it’s “not music.” This concise but cogent documentary directed by Tom Surgal is crammed with exhilarating sounds, moving reminiscences and stimulating arguments that it is not just music, but vital music.Gary Giddins, a critic who’s equally at home explicating Bing Crosby as Cecil Taylor, points out at the film’s beginning that someone playing the blues on a porch can make their phrases 12 bars or 14 bars or whatever at will. In group playing, certain agreements have to be met.One basis of free jazz is to approach ensemble playing without conventional agreements. Hence, Coleman’s practically leaderless double quartet approach on the 1961 “Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation” album. Much consideration is also given here to Coleman’s break with bebop in insisting one could improvise without chords. His playing sounded out of tune to traditional jazz musicians not yet conversant with microtones.This sounds a little dry, but the movie is anything but. Among other highlights are incredibly well-curated archival footage and contemporary interviews that allow the viewer to briefly commune with some beautiful souls, including Coleman, Sam Rivers, John Coltrane, Rashied Ali, Don Cherry, Carla Bley. “Whatever he did was the right thing to do,” Bley, now 85, says of Cherry, who died in 1995.Most of these players are Black, and their innovations in the ’60s had trouble gaining traction in the United States. So they flocked to Paris, and the movie is scrupulous in chronicling how the European movement “free improvisation” grew into something allied with, but distinct from, what the U.S. founders created.As a fan of improvisational music myself, the 88 minutes of this movie constituted a too-short heaven on earth. I’d binge on an expanded series, honestly.Fire MusicNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Phil Schaap, Grammy-Winning Jazz D.J. and Historian, Dies at 70

      by

      His radio programs, most notably on Columbia University’s WKCR, were full of minutiae he had accumulated during a lifetime immersed in the genre.Phil Schaap, who explored the intricacy and history of jazz in radio programs that he hosted, Grammy-winning liner notes that he wrote, music series that he programmed and classes that he taught, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 70.His partner of 17 years, Susan Shaffer, said the cause was cancer, which he had had for four years.Mr. Schaap was host of an assortment of jazz radio programs over the years, but he was perhaps best known as a fixture on WKCR-FM, the student-run radio station of Columbia University, where his delightfully (some would say infuriatingly) obsessive daily program about the saxophonist Charlie Parker, “Bird Flight,” was an anchor of the morning schedule for decades.On that show, he would parse Parker recordings and minutiae endlessly. In a 2008 article about Mr. Schaap in The New Yorker, David Remnick described one such discourse in detail, relating Mr. Schaap’s aside about the Parker track “Okiedoke,” which veered into a tangent about the pronunciation and meaning of the title and its possible relation to Hopalong Cassidy movies.“Perhaps it was at this point,” Mr. Remnick wrote, “that listeners all over the metropolitan area, what few remained, either shut off their radios, grew weirdly fascinated, or called an ambulance on Schaap’s behalf.”But if jazz was an obsession for Mr. Schaap, it was one built on knowledge. Since childhood he had absorbed everything there was to know about Parker and countless other jazz players, singers, records and subgenres. He won three Grammys for album liner notes — for a Charlie Parker boxed set, not surprisingly (“Bird: The Complete Charlie Parker on Verve,” 1989), but also for “The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve, 1945-1959” (1993) and “Miles Davis & Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings” (1996).He did more than write and talk about jazz; he also knew his way around a studio and was especially adept at unearthing and remastering the works of jazz greats of the past. He shared the best historical album Grammy as a producer on the Holiday and Davis-Evans recordings, as well as on “Louis Armstrong: The Complete Hot Five & Hot Seven Recordings” (2000).Mr. Schaap surrounded by jazz albums at WKCR, which also houses his collection of jazz interviews.Ruby Washington/The New York TimesOver the years he imparted his vast knowledge of jazz to countless students, teaching courses at Columbia, Princeton, the Manhattan School of Music, the Juilliard School, Rutgers University, Jazz at Lincoln Center and elsewhere.“They say I’m a history teacher,” he said in a video interview for the National Endowment for the Arts, which this year named him a Jazz Master, the country’s highest official honor for a living jazz figure, but he viewed his role differently.“I teach listening,” he said.He had what one newspaper article called “a flypaper memory” for jazz history, so much so that musicians would sometimes rely on him to fill in their own spotty memories about play dates and such.“He knows more about us than we know about ourselves,” the great drummer Max Roach told The New York Times in 2001.Mr. Remnick put it simply in the New Yorker article.“In the capital of jazz,” he wrote, “he is its most passionate and voluble fan.”Philip Van Noorden Schaap was born on April 8, 1951, in Queens.His mother, Marjorie Wood Schaap, was a librarian and a classically trained pianist, and his father, Walter, was a jazz scholar and vice president of a company that made educational filmstrips.Phil grew up in the Hollis section of Queens, which had become a magnet for jazz musicians. The trumpeter Roy Eldridge lived nearby. He would see the saxophonist Budd Johnson every day at the bus stop.“Everywhere you turned, it seemed, there was a giant walking down the street,” Mr. Schaap told Newsday in 1995.By 6 he was collecting records. Jo Jones, who had been the drummer for Count Basie’s big band for many years, would sometimes babysit for him; they’d play records, and Mr. Jones would elaborate on what they were hearing.Seeing the 1959 movie “The Gene Krupa Story,” about the famed jazz drummer, fueled his interest even more, and by the time he was at Jamaica High School in Queens he was talking jazz to classmates constantly.“As much as they gave me a hard time and isolated me as a weirdo,” he told Newsday, “they knew what I was talking about. My peers may have laughed at me, but they knew who Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong were.”Mr. Schaap became a D.J. at WKCR in 1970 as a freshman at Columbia, where he was a history major. He set out on a lifelong mission to keep jazz’s past alive.“One thing I wanted to impart,” he told the radio program “Jazz Night in America” this year, “was that the music hadn’t started with John Coltrane.”Mr. Schaap in 2012. “He knows more about us,” the great jazz drummer Max Roach once said, “than we know about ourselves.”Angel Franco/The New York TimesHe graduated from Columbia in 1974, but he was still broadcasting on WKCR half a century later. He started “Bird Flight” in 1981 and — as the “Jazz Night in America” host, the bassist Christian McBride, noted during the recent episode devoted to Mr. Schaap — he kept the show going for some 40 years, longer than Parker, who died at 34, was alive. He also hosted an assortment of other jazz programs at WKCR and other stations over the years, including WNYC in New York and WBGO in Newark, N.J.In 1973 he started programming jazz at the West End, a bar near Columbia, and he continued to do so into the 1990s. He particularly liked to bring in older musicians from the swing era, providing them — as he put it in a 2017 interview with The West Side Spirit — “with a nice last chapter of their lives.”In the “Jazz Night in America” interview, he said the West End series was among his proudest accomplishments.“A lot of them were not even performing anymore,” he said of the saxophonist Earle Warren, the trombonist Dicky Wells and the many other musicians he put onstage there.“They were my friends,” he added. “They were my teachers. They were geniuses.”Mr. Schaap, who lived in Queens and Manhattan, also did a bit of managing — including of the Countsmen, a group whose members included Mr. Wells and Mr. Warren — and curated Jazz at Lincoln Center for a time.As an educator, broadcaster and archivist, he could zero in on details that would escape a casual listener. He’d compare Armstrong and Holiday recordings to show how Armstrong had influenced Holiday’s vocal style. He’d demand that students be able to hear the difference between a solo by Armstrong and one by the cornetist Bix Beiderbecke.Mr. Schaap’s marriage to Ellen LaFurn in 1997 was brief. Ms. Shaffer survives him.His National Endowment for the Arts honor this year was the A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship for Jazz Advocacy, presented to “an individual who has made major contributions to the appreciation, knowledge and advancement of the American jazz art form.”In a 1984 interview with The Times, Mr. Schaap spoke of his motivation for his radio shows and other efforts to spread the gospel of jazz.“I was a public-school music student for 12 years and never heard the name Duke Ellington,” he said. “Now I can correct such wrongs. I can be a Johnny Appleseed through the transmitter.” More

    • 150 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      A Pandemic, Then a Hurricane, Brings New Orleans Musicians ‘to Their Knees’

      by

      When Hurricane Ida swept through New Orleans late last month, it took a piece of history with it. The Karnofsky Tailor Shop and Residence, a decrepit red brick building that had served as a kind of second home for Louis Armstrong during his boyhood in the early 1900s, was reduced to rubble.At the Little Gem Saloon next door, where some of the first jazz gigs were played, a three-story-tall mural paying homage to the pioneering cornetist Buddy Bolden was also ruined.Most of the city’s active music venues fared far better, suffering minor roof and water damage. But the storm was only the latest in a series of blows to the people and places that make up the jazz scene, in a city that stakes its identity on live music.“We’ve been without work for over 18 months now,” Big Sam Williams, a trombonist and bandleader, said in a phone interview from his home in the Gentilly neighborhood. “It’s a struggle and we’re just barely making it.”Doug Trager, who manages the Maple Leaf Bar in the Carrollton neighborhood, said that after 446 days of shutdown because of Covid-19, “we were just getting going” again before Ida hit. Now that the storm has created another setback, he said, “we’ll just try to keep waiting it out.”The Little Gem Saloon days after the storm.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesLittle Gem Saloon and the Karnofsky Shop sit on the same block.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesIt has now been a year and a half since the pandemic first prompted a citywide moratorium on indoor performances. On Aug. 16, the city imposed a mandate requiring all patrons at bars and clubs to be vaccinated or recently tested for Covid-19, seeming to open the door to a new phase of reopening.But as the Delta variant surged, the city’s two major jazz festivals, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and French Quarter Fest, both already pushed back from their usual springtime schedule, were called off. That meant that, for the second year in a row, musicians would have to do without the most active period of their work year, when hordes of tourists arrive for the festivals and spillover gigs at clubs often provide enough work for area performers to pay the rent for months.A week and a half after the storm, many in the city’s live-music business say they will not be resting easy, even after things come back online.In interviews, local advocates said that zoning laws had long made small venue operators’ lives difficult, and that neighborhood clubs have run into needless red tape during the pandemic as the city has sometimes enforced strict permitting regulations around outdoor entertainment.“They’re counting on the continued presence of the culture bearers and the musicians, and they’re mistaken this time,” said Ashlye Keaton, a co-founder of the Ella Project, which provides legal assistance to and agitates on behalf of New Orleans artists. “The storm, coupled with Covid, has brought musicians to their knees.”While some venues have survived since March 2020 with substantial help from federal grants, including the $16 billion Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program, other small and vulnerable clubs, particularly those nestled in the city’s working-class neighborhoods, often lacked the capacity or the wherewithal to apply. Many have held on largely thanks to fund-raisers and whatever performances they can safely pull off without raising the hackles of regulators and neighbors.In a statement, a spokeswoman for Mayor LaToya Cantrell said the city will continue to enforce permitting for outdoor live entertainment events on a temporary basis, pointing out that the mayor had lifted its usual cap on those permits during the pandemic.“The Department of Safety & Permits fully supports and is actively working with partners in the City Council to enact legislation which balances the desire for outdoor entertainment, supports local artists and venues as well as preserves the quality of life for the neighbors and residents of each community,” the statement says.Preservation Hall, the 60-year-old landmark in the well-protected French Quarter, appeared to have sustained minimal damage in Hurricane Ida.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesTipitina’s, a concert hall uptown, will require some repairs to its roof.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesMany of the city’s active venues were spared serious damage in the storm.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesPreservation Hall, the 60-year-old landmark in the well-protected French Quarter, appeared to have sustained minimal damage in Hurricane Ida, and is slated to reopen once power is restored. Tipitina’s, a concert hall uptown, located closer to the water, will require some repairs to its roof.The New Orleans Jazz Market, a stately performance center in Central City, appears to have held up well, but it was forced to significantly postpone its programming nonetheless — just days after what was supposed to have been a triumphant reopening for its fall 2021 season.“This is very reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina, and what we went through during that time, and I know a lot of New Orleans musicians are displaced,” said the drummer Adonis Rose, the artistic director of the Jazz Market and leader of its resident big band, the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra. He called the storm a “tragedy, when we were just starting to see some glimmer of hope.”The New Orleans Jazz Market held up well, but it was forced to significantly postpone its programming after the hurricane.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesKermit Ruffins, a trumpeter who runs Kermit’s Tremé Mother-in-Law Lounge, turned his club into a community gathering space during the pandemic.L. Kasimu Harris for The New York TimesKermit Ruffins, a renowned trumpeter who runs Kermit’s Tremé Mother-in-Law Lounge, said in an interview on Monday that the electricity had just come back on at the popular neighborhood club, and he planned to get the place ready to rock.During the pandemic, Ruffins’s club served as a gathering spot and a kind of improvised community cafeteria. He moved concerts outside to the club’s patio, and cooked free meals of red beans and rice for residents of the surrounding Tremé neighborhood, and for musicians who were out of work.“I figured if I cooked for myself, I’d cook for the neighborhood,” Ruffins said.Howie Kaplan, the proprietor of the Howlin’ Wolf, a venue in downtown New Orleans, also began providing meals and other services to musicians in the early days of the pandemic. The program was subsumed into the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic earlier this year; he restarted it at the Howlin’ Wolf last month, in response to Hurricane Ida.“We’ve got a James Beard Award-winning chef on the grill right now, making these fantastic steaks that came from who knows where,” Kaplan said in a phone interview, adding that restaurants had come to donate food that they wouldn’t be able to prepare because of the power outage.Shortly after Hurricane Ida passed over the city, Jordan Hirsch — the editor of the online resource A Closer Walk, which provides detailed information on New Orleans’s heritage sites — set out to determine how the city’s most vulnerable music landmarks had held up.The program providing meals returned to the Howlin’ Wolf after Hurricane Ida.Jillian Marie PhotographyWhen he got to the Karnofsky shop, on South Rampart Street downtown, he saw that the building had become wreckage and the Bolden mural nearby had crumbled. But other equally old jazz landmarks along the block, the former Eagle Saloon and the Iroquois Theater, had miraculously pulled through. All four structures are on the national historic register; it’s safe to say that no single block in the United States today houses more early jazz history.A Cleveland-based developer, GBX Group, recently bought out most of the addresses on the street, and plans to rebuild it into a center of commerce that will also trumpet its role in jazz history. After the storm, GBX hired workers to collect the Karnofsky shop’s bricks, said its C.E.O., Drew Sparacia, hoping to at least partially rebuild the structure using the original materials.But Hirsch asked why the city had not done more to demand that the owners of these historic places, which to the outside observer appear to be mostly abandoned, keep them protected from the elements.“Tropical storms and hurricanes were sort of a constant threat for those buildings,” Hirsch said. “People have been sounding that alarm for 30 years.”Some other sites that made it through Hurricane Ida remain deeply endangered, according to preservationists. John McCusker, a jazz historian and photojournalist who has worked to preserve historic buildings in the city, said that Bolden’s former home in Central City and the old Dew Drop Inn — a midcentury music venue, hotel and community hub — were both in states of relative disrepair.McCusker lamented that the sites’ landlords hadn’t been compelled to restore and preserve the buildings.“We have this wealth of these buildings connected to the birth of this music, and the mechanisms of government have just proven maladroit at protecting them with the same vigor that they would enforce an inappropriate shutter in the French Quarter,” he said. More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      10 Hours Gives Us (Almost) All of Schumann’s Songs

      by

      Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber, peerless in lieder, have released an 11-disc set of Robert Schumann’s songs, many overlooked.Back in 1988, it was hearing the lieder of Robert Schumann that convinced Christian Gerhaher, then a philosophy student in Munich, to ask a pianist he knew from school, Gerold Huber, whether they might start playing some songs together.Three decades later, Gerhaher and Huber have long since become the greatest partnership in singing, and they come full circle this month with the release of an 11-disc box set of Schumann on Sony. As its cover announces, it contains “All the Songs.”“Gerold and I have worked on singing Schumann for 33 years,” Gerhaher, 52, said in an interview. “He composed nearly 300 songs, but what is astonishing is that every song is amazing, a revelation of possibilities, of thoughts, of beauty. There is maybe only one song I don’t like so much.” (It’s “Der Handschuh.”)Schumann has had an uncertain presence in the art song repertoire. While cycles like “Dichterliebe” are touchstones, much of his output remains overlooked. Gerhaher can cite only two prior attempts at anything comparable to a complete set, neither of them as cohesive as his new release.The baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, among the leading lieder advocates of the 20th century, taped about half the songs in the 1970s. Graham Johnson, an accompanist with encyclopedic tastes, compiled a very full set on Hyperion from 1996 to 2009. But he split the songs among different vocalists.That makes Gerhaher the first singer to finish a complete survey of his own (albeit with the help of colleagues in works written for the female voice or for groups). Huber is at the piano throughout, and the goal is finally to give Schumann his due as a connoisseur of lyrics — according to Gerhaher, “one of the best-read composers that there has ever been.”Gerhaher believes that Schumann took a far more literary approach to songs than, say, Schubert — an approach that was intended “to make these poems even more complicated than they are.” He did this not just in introducing tensions between text and music (and vocalist and pianist), but also by writing almost exclusively in cycles, combining disparate poems into coherent sets.That has always been obvious with cycles like the Eichendorff “Liederkreis” (Op. 39), or the “Kerner Lieder” (Op. 35). But it is true, too, Gerhaher said, of less monumental groupings with innocuous titles like “Three Songs” (Op. 83) or “Six Songs” (Op. 107) — their texts (sometimes by the same poet, sometimes drawn from different ones) freighted with deeper, often darker meaning when set together.Gerhaher is the first singer to finish a complete survey of his own (albeit with the help of colleagues in works written for the female voice or for groups).Daniel Etter for The New York Times“He doesn’t want to finish thinking about a poem,” Gerhaher said. “By putting them into music and then combining them into cycles, he stretches the semantic nature of a poem, in order to create something very different and new. This is what I love.”Schumann composed his songs in two spells. The first period, from 1840, has been seen as the epitome of Romanticism. The second has been heard skeptically, if at all, but Gerhaher has increasingly found it the richer. Schumann wrote these songs from 1849 to 1852, not long before he jumped into the Rhine in 1854 and died in a psychiatric asylum two years later. Like most of his later works, the late songs have been lesser to some ears, as antiquated prejudices about mental health have led to misunderstandings of their experimental tone.Gerhaher dissents, citing the Violin Concerto and the “Ghost Variations” as further evidence that this view is wrong. “Saying that the late Schumann was a sick Schumann, mentally and spiritually weak, is an assumption which is dangerous,” he said. “The assumption that we understand something as being weak is always combined with the assumption that we understand something else very well. Both are wrong, I think.”With that in mind, Gerhaher chose five late songs to introduce his new recording. Here are edited excerpts from his comments.‘Schneeglöckchen’ (Op. 96, No. 2)In Op. 96, you have five songs. Two and four are very disturbing, about human sorrow. The third, in the middle, is an August von Platen poem that explains that words can’t convey what they try to convey. These three describe humanity’s horrible situation: being thrown into the world and not even being able to talk to each other properly.There is another “Schneeglöckchen” (“Snowdrops”) in the “Liederalbum für die Jügend” (Op. 79), where it means something nice, because it’s a sign of the end of winter. But the anonymous poem Schumann sets here in Op. 96 is harder to understand. A voice comes to a snowdrop and says, you have to leave, a storm is coming. But why? It’s the end of winter; the flower has nothing to fear. The voice answers that the snowdrop’s “Liverei” — its uniform — is white, with a green trim.Why does it talk about a uniform? I looked through some uniform books, and found a similar one for a cavalry called the Scheither Corps, part of the Hanover regiment in the Seven Years’ War. There was a battle at Moys, near Görlitz, where the corps was defeated by Austria. There was one snowdrop rider left hurt, who couldn’t get home. And in the poem the voice says you have to go home. This is so disturbing, even if I can’t prove the connection.‘Himmel und Erde’ (Op. 96, No. 5)This last song, “Heaven and Earth,” is a resolution for the Op. 96 cycle. The first song is Goethe’s “Nachtlied”; it starts with the two nouns “Gipfel” (“hills”) and “Wipfel” (“treetops”). This last one, by Wilfried von der Neun, starts with the reverse, with “Wipfel” then “Gipfel.” You are confronted with these opposites, then you are confronted with heaven, and you see that these oppositions are not important anymore; they come together. It reminds me of the medieval German philosopher Nicholas von Kues, who wrote about the “coincidentia oppositorum” — the falling together of opposites.‘An den Mond’ (Op. 95, No. 2)At first you can’t understand this cycle at all. You see number one, “Die Tochter Jephtas” (“Jephthah’s Daughter”), and number three, “Dem Helden” (“To the Hero”). All three are Byron texts. What does it mean?In 1847, Fanny Mendelssohn died, and Felix Mendelssohn shortly after, and Schumann wrote some Byron into his book of poems. The first song is a memorial to Fanny. Jephthah’s daughter was this warrior without a name; she fought for her father, the king, but she didn’t get a name. This was Fanny’s fate: She was a composer, but she didn’t make a name as one. “To the Hero” is about Felix’s role in these years, especially to Schumann: the splendid hero of music.In the middle is “To the Moon.” It says, look, moon, you are kind of a star, but you are a cold star, because you reflect warm light from the sun — you are only a memory, sad, cold, hard memory. This is how Schumann combined the deaths of his two friends.‘Die Blume der Ergebung’ (Op. 83, No. 2)This cycle so abstract. You have three songs, and they represent three ways to set a poem. The first song, “Resignation,” is the most advanced and through-composed; the second is a varied strophic song; the third, “Der Einsiedler” (“The Hermit”), is a perfect strophic song. In “The Flower of Resignation,” you have five strophes, and in the middle of the third strophe, you see this word “Liebesschalen” (literally “love bowls”). This is the center of the middle strophe of these three songs, the creation of a third person by a couple. It can’t be an ongoing error that Schumann had this maniacal tendency to conceive of combinations.“Requiem” (Op. 90, No. 7)Op. 90 is maybe my favorite cycle overall. There is a downward spiral. It’s very dark, about accepting the vanity of the world and the sadness of being alone. We start with a framing song again, the song of a blacksmith who is helping Faust on his travels, naïvely unaware that Faust is seducing his wife. In the middle you have two song couples, which are examples of losing faith in life. The fourth is a wonderful song about love vanishing and death taking over.Then Schumann added this “Requiem” as a requiem for the poet, Nikolaus Lenau, whom he thought was dead but in fact only died around the day of the first performance of these songs. You have these illusions of eternity, of never-ending life. It’s so full of feeling, a coming-together of spirituality and sensuality. More