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    A Barrier-Breaking Conductor Will Lead the Seattle Symphony

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    Xian Zhang will be the first woman and person of color to lead the Seattle Symphony, and one of only two women leading a top-tier American orchestra.Xian Zhang, a renowned conductor who has helped bring the New Jersey Symphony to new heights over the past eight years, will be the Seattle Symphony’s next music director, the orchestra announced on Thursday.When she takes the podium in 2025, Zhang, 51, will be the first woman and the first person of color to lead the Seattle Symphony in its 121-year history, and one of only two women leading a top-tier American orchestra. (The other is Nathalie Stutzmann, the Atlanta Symphony’s music director since 2022.)Zhang, who was born in Dandong, China, and moved to the United States in 1998, said she would work to attract new audiences in Seattle, including more young professionals, families and people of color.“My goal is to have the symphony become even more of a musical icon and a magnet for the city,” she said. “We need to be more obvious and attractive.”Zhang, whose full name is pronounced she-YEN JONG, emerged as a favorite because of her “impeccable technique” and her warm relationship with the orchestra’s musicians and audiences, said Krishna Thiagarajan, the orchestra’s president and chief executive. She made her debut with the Seattle Symphony in 2008 and has been a regular in recent years, earning praise from critics and audience members.“There’s an electricity between her and the orchestra, and an electricity between her and the audience,” Thiagarajan said. “You can feel it in the hall.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Concert Halls Are Back. But Visa Backlogs Are Keeping Musicians Out.

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      Visa delays are causing tumult in the classical music industry, leading to a wave of cancellations just as live performances are finally returning.When the Seattle Symphony finally performed before a full audience last month for the first time in a year and half, something was missing: its music director, the Danish conductor Thomas Dausgaard, who could not get a visa to travel to the United States.The New York Philharmonic had to find a last-minute substitute this week for the esteemed Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, who could not get a visa, either. The Metropolitan Opera had to replace two Russian singers in its production of “Boris Godunov.” And the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, a British chamber orchestra that has been regularly visiting the United States since 1980, had to abandon a 10-city tour.As the easing of coronavirus restrictions has allowed live performance to return, many cultural organizations are struggling with another problem: their inability to get artists into the United States because of a long backlog of visa applications at American embassies and consulates. The delays have hampered many industries, but they are particularly upending classical music, which relies on stars from all over the world to make a circuit of leading concert halls and opera houses.Many artists have been caught in the middle, forced to dip into savings to make up for lost concert fees and scrambling to fill their schedules.“It’s like training for the Olympic Games for four years and then at the last minute learning you cannot compete,” said Arthur Jussen, a Dutch pianist whose engagements with the Boston Symphony Orchestra were canceled this month because of what the orchestra described as “unprecedented delays” in getting his visa, just weeks after a 14-concert tour in China, with his brother Lucas, fell through. “It is a bitter pill to swallow.”The classical touring industry was one of the first sectors hit by the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020, and now it may be one of the last to recover. Dozens of performances have been canceled in recent weeks in China, Australia, Japan and other countries with sweeping travel restrictions and quarantine rules. The pandemic has served to deepen concerns about the viability of global tours, which have long been considered an essential but expensive part of the classical music ecosystem.But some of the most acute problems are surfacing in the United States.While the Biden administration plans to lift a pandemic-era ban on travelers from 33 countries next month — allowing fully vaccinated visitors from the European Union, China, Iran, South Africa, Brazil, India and other countries — the backlog of visa applications remains a problem.Even in normal times, it can be difficult for visiting artists to obtain the visas they need to perform in the United States. Now they face even longer lines and staff shortages at American embassies and consulates around the world. The earliest available appointments for visa interviews in some cities are for next spring, months after some artists have scheduled performances.The government has allowed exceptions to the travel ban, which remains in effect until early November, for visitors who can prove their work is essential to the U.S. economy. But consulates have in recent weeks been flooded with such requests, adding to the pileup. And some fear the lifting of the travel ban could yield more visa requests — and more delays.Boston Symphony Orchestra with Lucas and Arthur Jussen in September 2019.Winslow TownsonThe State Department, in response to questions about the delays, said the pandemic had resulted in “profound reductions” in its ability to process visas. “As the global situation evolves, the department seeks ways to safely and efficiently process visa applications around the world,” the department said in a statement.In the United States, the visa woes are injecting uncertainty into a fall season that was already rife with challenges, including tepid ticket sales and the ongoing threat posed by the Delta variant.Arts groups are calling on the government to fast-track visas.“The overarching concern is that it would have a chilling effect on international cultural activity and everything it has to offer,” said Heather Noonan, vice president for advocacy at the League of American Orchestras. “When arts organizations can’t rely on the process to work, it makes it very expensive and somewhat risky.”The problems have dampened some of the reopening festivities. For months the Seattle Symphony had promoted the return of its music director, Mr. Dausgaard, who had been stuck abroad since March 2020, for its opening night gala. But he was forced to cancel at the last minute because of visa issues.Mr. Dausgaard, who is now on track to get his visa so he can travel next month, said that the restrictions had meant that he and the orchestra had missed opportunities to develop, including by performing new works together.“It is super painful to see ideas, not least those ideas connected to recordings or touring or something bigger than a single concert, go away,” he said. “The most painful part is the lack of contact with the musicians.”Even some of the industry’s biggest stars have been affected by the delays, including Lang Lang, the celebrated Chinese pianist, whose visa to enter the United States for concerts last month came through only at the last minute.In an interview, Mr. Lang said he hoped restrictions around the world would eventually be lifted so that touring could resume in force.“It is essential to show our audiences that concerts are back,” he said. “The world needs live music.”Outside the United States, the obstacles for touring artists are also formidable.China, once a bustling, lucrative market for touring, including for many American orchestras, has also remained closed to most foreigners, including performers.Wray Armstrong, who runs a music agency in Beijing, said many ensembles cannot afford the time and money spent on quarantines, even if they are able to get visas. “We just have to be patient until the rules change,” he said.China’s strict quarantine rules, which require isolation of up to three weeks for anyone entering the country, have had the effect of dissuading many Chinese artists from traveling. The composer and conductor Tan Dun has canceled nearly all appearances outside China since the start of the pandemic, delaying the premiere of several works, including “Requiem for Nature,” which he was to conduct in Amsterdam next month.Travel restrictions have added to pressures on many orchestras, which have traditionally depended on tours for branding and prestige. The pandemic has prompted many to cancel plans to travel overseas or to consider scaling back; some larger orchestras are considering sending smaller ensembles instead.Zubin Mehta, the renowned conductor, said it was important for American orchestras to maintain robust touring schedules so that they can develop and show off the strength of music in the United States internationally.“An orchestra always comes back from a major tour a better orchestra,” he said. “A great American orchestra playing in Berlin getting a standing ovation is a reflection on America.”For artists dealing with delays gaining entry to the United States, the experience has been trying.Stephen Stirling, principal horn for the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, said the ensemble’s fall tour would have helped him offset some of the thousands of dollars he has lost in fees when he was unable to perform during the pandemic.Mr. Stirling said it was jarring to be dealing with travel restrictions at a time when many cultural institutions are reopening across the world.“Most people’s business is picking up, but we’re still getting cancellations,” he said. “The sooner things can return to normal, the better. We’re desperate to tour again.” More

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      Tyshawn Sorey: The Busiest Composer of the Bleakest Year

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookTyshawn Sorey: The Busiest Composer of the Bleakest YearAn artist straddling jazz and classical styles had perhaps the most exciting fall in new music.Tyshawn Sorey, a composer and multi-instrumentalist, conducting his song sequence “Cycles of My Being” in a filmed presentation by Opera Philadelphia.Credit…Dominic M. MercierJan. 1, 2021“Everything Changes, Nothing Changes”: Tyshawn Sorey wrote the string quartet that bears that title in 2018. But the sentiment is so tailor-made for the past year that when the JACK Quartet announced it would stream a performance of the work in December, I briefly forgot and assumed it was a premiere, created for these tumultuous yet static times.I should have known better. Mr. Sorey already had enough on his plate without cooking up a new quartet. The final two months of 2020 alone brought the premieres of a pair of concerto-ish works, one for violin and one for cello, as well as a fresh iteration of “Autoschediasms,” his series of conducted ensemble improvisations, with Alarm Will Sound.Mr. Sorey leading a rehearsal for Alarm Will Sound’s virtual performance of “Autoschediasms,” one of his series of conducted ensemble improvisations.Credit…via Alarm Will SoundThat wasn’t all that happened for him since November. Mills College, where Mr. Sorey is composer in residence, streamed his solo piano set. Opera Philadelphia filmed a stark black-and-white version of his song sequence “Cycles of My Being,” about Black masculinity and racial hatred. JACK did “Everything Changes” for the Library of Congress, alongside the violin solo “For Conrad Tao.” Da Camera, of Houston, put online a 2016 performance of “Perle Noire,” a tribute to Josephine Baker that Mr. Sorey arranged with the soprano Julia Bullock. His most recent album, “Unfiltered,” was released early in March, days before lockdown.He was the composer of the year.That’s both coincidental — some of this burst of work was planned long ago — and not. Mr. Sorey has been on everyone’s radar at least since winning a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2017, but the shock to the performing arts since late winter brought him suddenly to the fore as an artist at the nexus of the music industry’s artistic and social concerns.Undefinable, he is appealing to almost everyone. He works at the blurry and productive boundary of improvised (“jazz”) and notated (“classical”) music, a composer who is also a performer. He is valuable to ensembles and institutions because of his versatility — he can do somber solos as well as large-scale vocal works. And he is Black, at a time when those ensembles and institutions are desperate to belatedly address the racial representation in their programming.From left: Mr. Sorey, the soprano Julia Bullock and the flutist Alice Teyssier in Da Camera’s presentation of “Perle Noire,” inspired by Josephine Baker’s life and work.Credit…Ben DoyleHe’s in such demand, and has had so much success, that the trolls have come for him, dragging him on Facebook for the over-the-topness of the biography on his website. (Admittedly, it is a bit adjective-heavy: “celebrated for his incomparable virtuosity, effortless mastery,” etc.)The style for which he has been best known since his 2007 album “That/Not,” his debut release as a bandleader, owes much to the composer Morton Feldman (1926-87): spare, spacious, glacially paced, often quiet yet often ominous, focusing the listener purely on the music’s unfolding. Mr. Sorey has called this vision that of an “imaginary landscape where pretty much nothing exists.”There is a direct line connecting “Permutations for Solo Piano,” a 43-minute study in serene resonance on that 2007 album, and the first of the two improvised solos in his recent Mills recital, filmed on an upright piano at his home. Even the far briefer second solo, more frenetic and bright, seems at the end to want to settle back into gloomy shadows.“Everything Changes, Nothing Changes,” a hovering, lightly dissonant 27-minute gauze, is in this vein, as is the new work for violin and orchestra, “For Marcos Balter,” premiered on Nov. 7 by Jennifer Koh and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Sorey insists in a program note that this is a “non-certo,” without a traditional concerto’s overt virtuosity, contrasting tempos or vivid interplay between soloist and ensemble.Xian Zhang conducting the violinist Jennifer Koh and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in Mr. Sorey’s “For Marcos Balter.”Credit…Sarah Smarch“For Marcos Balter” is even-keeled, steadily slow, a commune of players rather than a metaphorical give-and-take between an individual and society. Ms. Koh’s deliberate long tones, like cautious exhalations, are met with spectral effects on the marimba. Quiet piano chords amplify quiet string chords. At the end, a timpani roll is muted to sound almost gonglike, with Ms. Koh’s violin a coppery tremble above it.It is pristine and elegant, but I prefer Mr. Sorey’s new cello-and-orchestra piece, “For Roscoe Mitchell,” premiered on Nov. 19 by Seth Parker Woods and the Seattle Symphony. There is more tension here between discreet, uneasy minimalism and an impulse toward lushness, fullness — more tension between the soloist receding and speaking his mind.The piece is less pristine than “For Marcos Balter,” and more restless. The ensemble backdrop is crystalline, misty sighs, while the solo cello line expands into melancholy arias without words; sometimes the tone is passionate, dark-hued nocturne, sometimes ethereal lullaby. “For Roscoe Mitchell” feels like a composer challenging himself while expressing himself confidently — testing the balance of introversion and extroversion, privacy and exposure.The cellist Seth Parker Woods and the Seattle Symphony perform the premiere of “For Roscoe Mitchell.”Credit…James Holt/Seattle SymphonyBut it’s not right to make it seem like an outlier in this respect; Mr. Sorey’s music has never been solely Feldmanian stillness. In Alarm Will Sound’s inspiringly well executed virtual performance of “Autoschediasms,” Mr. Sorey conducted 17 players in five states over video chat, calm at his desk as he wrote symbols on cards and held them up to the camera, an obscure silent language that resulted in a low buzz of noise, varying in texture, and then, excitingly, a spacey, oozy section marked by keening bassoon tones.And he isn’t afraid of pushing into a kind of Neo-Romantic vibe. “Cycles of My Being,” featuring the tenor Lawrence Brownlee and texts by the poet Terrance Hayes, nods to the ardently declarative mid-20th-century American art songs of Samuel Barber and Lee Hoiby, just as “Perle Noire” features, near the end, a sweetly mournful instrumental hymn out of Copland.“Cycles,” which felt turgid when I heard it in a voice-and-piano version three years ago, bloomed in Opera Philadelphia’s presentation of the original instrumentation, which adds a couple of energizing strings and a wailing clarinet. And after a year of protests, what seemed in 2018 like stiffness — in both texts and music — now seems more implacable strength. (Opera Philadelphia presents yet another Sorey premiere, “Save the Boys,” with the countertenor John Holiday, on Feb. 12.)The cellist Khari Joyner playing in “Cycles of My Being.”Credit…Dominic M. MercierThe violinist Randall Goosby.Credit…Dominic M. Mercier“Perle Noire” still strikes me as the best of Sorey. Turning Josephine Baker’s lively numbers into unresolved meditations, here is both suave, jazzy swing and glacial expanse, an exploration of race and identity that is ultimately undecided — a mood of endless disappointment and endless wishing. (“My father, how long,” Ms. Bullock intones again and again near the end.)In works this strong, the extravagant praise for which some have ribbed Mr. Sorey on social media — that biography, for one, or the JACK Quartet lauding “the knife’s-edge precision of Sorey’s chess-master mind” — feels justified. And, anyway, isn’t it a relief to talk about a 40-year-old composer with the immoderate enthusiasm we generally reserve for the pillars of the classical canon?AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More