United States

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Music

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

      by

      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

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      As Venues Reopen, Will Streamed Theater Still Have a Place?

      by

      The shutdown allowed increased access and artistic experimentation. But how much sticks is an open, and contested, question.If you were marshaling evidence that streaming theater can pay off, look no further than the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, which sold 35,000 tickets and grossed over $3 million during the pandemic from magic shows and other performances that could be watched at home.As quickly as you could say “Pick a card, any card,” that’s changed, reports Matt Shakman, the company’s artistic director. “The ticket desire started to drop precipitously as the country was opening up,” he said recently of the digital initiative. “It was absolutely born of a moment that I hope we don’t find ourselves back in. So I don’t know how relatable it is as we move forward.”Sean Patrick Flahaven, the chief theatricals executive for Concord, which licenses plays for production, has observed a similar shift.“In the last few months, the requests for either virtual or digital performances from streaming have really dropped off dramatically,” he said. “They’re still happening, but it’s maybe 10 percent of the requests that we get.”But theater is not beating a full retreat to the Before Days. And those who believe that streaming increased geographic and economic access to an art form often seen as exclusive and remote vociferously contend that it shouldn’t. Spirited arguments have erupted over the relationship between theater and screens — down to an ongoing debate about what to call the new hybrid forms, if not theater.In fact, the live theater shutdown underscores that streaming itself is not as monolithic as it once was.A live show conceived for the digital realm is very different from, say, a fully staged performance filmed in an empty theater. Definitions shift: Through Aug. 31, for example, the streaming platform Broadway On Demand is presenting a festival of shorts that “highlight the combination of theater and film — i.e., theatrical content, films based on scripts, or content filmed in a theater.”And then there are the means of distribution, and the fees and stipulations that go with them: The Music Theater International licensing agency distinguishes between livestream, scheduled content and on-demand when granting the right to put on a show.At first, the actor and playwright John Cariani wanted to allow only livestreaming for his plays, which include the popular “Almost, Maine,” because, as he said in an email, “livestreamed events keep the live element of theater intact.”Then he realized that might be tricky in parts of the country with spotty broadband coverage. “I changed my position and asked people who wanted to do my plays to make every effort to livestream,” he said, “but to record and stream at a later date and time if that was the better option.”Reflecting this diversity, many companies are trying different approaches. While the Geffen is putting on an in-person season, it’s not entirely retreating from the online realm and is working with the digital maven Jared Mezzocchi, with whom it created the show “Someone Else’s House,” on a site-specific project involving NASA.Several companies in the United States and in Britain are unrolling hybrid seasons that integrate digital and in-person shows. One reason is sadly pragmatic: “If things start to get worse and the Delta variant starts to become more prevalent and the numbers start going up, I think people are going to have to use streaming,” said John Prignano, the chief operating officer and director of education and development at Music Theater International.But many theaters also want to incorporate online strategies into a new way of working.“Would we want to just be a streaming theater?” asked Martin Miller, executive director of TheaterSquared in Fayetteville, Ark. “No. But it did start to feel additive to us when we started having performances in person again this April, because we were still having people streaming the shows. So it was no longer a question about what was lost but what was gained.”The company certainly earned national recognition when such online productions as “Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy” were reviewed by outlets all over the country, including The New York Times.From left: Belén Moyano, Jennifer Ledesma, Michelle Jasso and Sara Ornelas in the TheaterSquared production of “American Mariachi,” which audiences can see online or at the theater’s Arkansas home.Philip ThomasTheaterSquared’s current offering, José Cruz González’s “American Mariachi,” is available both in person and online, and the company expects to do the same for its premiere of the Linda Bloodworth-Thomason play “Designing Women” in September. Theaterworks Hartford and Baltimore Center Stage are following suit for their coming seasons.Broadway performances are still off the streaming table, but in New York, the prestigious Second Stage Theater is introducing a pilot program in which select performances of this fall’s Off Broadway production of Rajiv Joseph’s “Letters of Suresh” can be streamed by subscribers who can’t attend the show in person.Hybrid plans are in place at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater and at the family-friendly New Victory Theater, which is building up its successful online New Victory Arts Breaks, a series of free interactive artistic activities for kids that was picked up by PBS’s Camp TV.“In a given year, we see 100,000 people live; in a year where we’re remote, we’re going to have served a million people,” said Russell Granet, president and chief executive of the theater’s parent organization, New 42. The New Victory is planning to make all of the new season’s shows available on-demand for $25.“Our business model is forever changed in a good way as a result of this past year,” Granet added.Also pursuing a dual model are such major British institutions as the Young Vic, Shakespeare’s Globe and the Chichester Festival Theater, which announced six performances for which audiences around the world could watch its current production of “South Pacific.”The Chichester Festival is making several performances of its production of “South Pacific” available on-demand.Johan PerssonDaniel Evans, Chichester’s artistic director, mentioned another reason for capturing productions, even if they don’t end up livestreamed: “We want to build up our library in case there comes a point where we are able to have our own platform, so we have a bank of work ready to share,” he said, mentioning the National Theater’s hugely popular At Home program.Having a stash of digital shows can be very handy, as Lincoln Center Theater demonstrated when it started streaming newly edited captures of some of its Off Broadway hits like “The Wolves.”This reflects the fact that whereas productions used to have a clear-cut beginning and end — opening, closing and then gone forever — they can now move through various stages. For Marc Kirschner, co-founder of the Marquee TV platform, the relationship between in-person, livestreaming and on-demand will be similar to that of movies’ old trajectory, when they went from theaters to premium cable to broadcast.“The live-ticket purchase is the ultimate purchase,” Kirschner said. “Eventually we’re going to start seeing a ticketed premiere window, and then move those programs whenever possible or whenever worthwhile into our subscription service.”Similarly, the long-held belief that filming a show cannibalizes its potential live audience seems to have been put to rest, with hit productions now becoming available onscreen while they are still running.The musical “Come From Away” was filmed in May at its regular home, the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, and premieres Sept. 10 on Apple TV+. Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s “Pass Over” is on Broadway, even though Spike Lee’s capture of the 2017 Steppenwolf Theater production has been streaming on Amazon for the past couple of years.Digital theater’s greatest asset remains access — the one word which came up in every conversation on the subject of streaming.“Historically there are building-based companies that exclude audiences, and digital theater is a space where many are finding more hospitable and affordable ways of interacting with art,” the playwright Caridad Svich, who has embraced new technologies, wrote in an email.Jennifer Wang and Mariam Albishah in Caridad Svich’s “The Book of Magdalene.” In her review, Laura Collins-Hughes said the “spare and immediate” drama, shot at Main Street Theater in Houston, felt “every inch a play.”via Main Street TheaterExpanded access also applies to theatermakers, for whom online can mean lower overheads. Ultimately, whether online theater endures ultimately depends on the X factor: creativity. There, too, signs are encouraging: We have come such a long way since those Spring 2020 days of glitchy Zoom readings that just a year later, the digital production “Circle Jerk” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama.“As a playwright, I find live cinema, digital-only and hybrid digital performance to be a thrilling space for exploration and innovation,” Svich said. “There is also a new generation of theatermakers on TikTok, YouTube and other platforms perfectly at ease with the fluidity of digitally native performances that are challenging the field with their inventiveness and skill.”Now we just need to figure out what to call all this new stuff. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Asian Composers Reflect on Careers in Western Classical Music

      by

      For all their shared experiences, each of these five artists has a unique story of struggles and triumphs.Asian composers who write in Western classical musical forms, like symphonies and operas, tend to have a few things in common. Many learned European styles from an early age, and finished their studies at conservatories there or in the United States. And many later found themselves relegated to programming ghettos like Lunar New Year concerts. (One recent study found that works by Asian composers make up only about 2 percent of American orchestral performances planned for the coming season.)At times, the music of Asian composers has been misunderstood or exoticized; they have been subjected to simple errors such as, in the case of Huang Ruo, who was born in China, repeated misspellings of his name.For all their shared experiences, each of these artists has a unique story. Here, five of them provide a small sampling of the lessons, struggles and triumphs of composers who were born in Asia and made a career for themselves in Western classical music. These are edited excerpts from interviews with them.Tan DunMusic is my language. To me “West” and “East” are just ways of talking — or like ways of cooking. I’m a chef, and sometimes I find my recipe is like my orchestrations. It would be so boring if you asked me to cook in one style. Eastern and Western, then, have for me become a unique recipe in which one plus one equals one.I am in a very special zone historically. I’m 63, and part of the first generation of Eastern composers after the Cultural Revolution to deal with Western forms. But it’s just like rosemary, butter and vegetables. You can cook this way, that way — and that’s why the same orchestras sound so different, from Debussy to Stravinsky to myself.I’m lucky. When I came to the United States as a student, my teachers and classmates gave me enormous encouragement to discover myself. And I learned so much from John Cage. After this, it felt so easy to compose. And when people approach me for commissions, I re-approach them about what I’m thinking about. I remember when Kurt Masur asked me to write something for the New York Philharmonic — the Water Concerto for Water Percussion and Orchestra — I said, “Can I write something for water?” He said, “As long as you don’t flood our orchestra.”Yes, we often are misunderstood. It’s like when you cook beautiful black bean with chili sauce and chocolate. They may say, “Hey, this is a little strange.” But you explain why, and that can be very interesting. Thank God I love to talk. And there has been progress for us. I am the first Eastern composer to be the dean of a Western conservatory, at Bard. That’s like a Chinese chef becoming the chef of an Italian restaurant. That’s the future: a different way of approaching color, boundary-less, a unity of the soul.Du Yun”If I’m a spokesperson,” Du Yun said, “it’s for my own voice.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesOne thing about composers like Tan Dun: They came out of the Cultural Revolution, after a door had closed for so many years. So there was so much focus on what China was doing, a lot of curiosity — curiosity rather than active racism. Our generation — I’m 44 — is so different.We learn Western music with such rigorous systems. And we do not close our ears to different traditions or styles; that attitude determines early on that you don’t have that kind of boundary, or ownership. But you still hear those conversation topics about “East meets West.” It’s so tiring. East has been meeting West for thousands of years; if we’re always still just meeting, that’s a problem.Programming Chinese composers around Lunar New Year is in general very problematic. Do we need to celebrate the culture? Yes. Do we need to celebrate the tradition? Absolutely. But it can be part of the main subscription series, or a yearlong series. Then you can really tell stories, not just group people by a country.My name does not give me ownership of Chinese culture. There are so many things I don’t know. There are so many burdens and fights — as the woman, the woman of color, the Chinese woman — that I decided to fight nothing and just create my own stuff. I told myself that if I had a great body of work, that would speak to what a Chinese woman can do.I never wanted to be pigeonholed, to be a reduced representation. I wanted to always open that Pandora’s box of messiness — and I encourage others to celebrate messiness, the unclean narrative of your life. Every immigrant has her own path; your work should absolutely be reflective of that. So if I’m a spokesperson, it’s for my own voice. And through that particular voice, I hope there is something that resonates.Bright ShengWhen someone asks Bright Sheng whether he’s a Chinese or American composer, he responds, “100 percent both.”Nora Tam/South China Morning Post, via Getty ImagesWhen I left China, it was a time of economic and, in a different way, cultural reform. I’m glad I came to the United States, but I do have a little bit of guilt. I probably could have done more there. But my agenda was to try to learn Western music and become the best pianist, conductor and composer I could be. I was fortunate to meet Leonard Bernstein, and I was under his wing for five years. Now, at 65, when someone asks me if I consider myself a Chinese or American composer, I say, in the most humble way, “100 percent both.” I’m well-versed in both cultures.There has been racism and misunderstanding, but that is inevitable. Would that be different if there were Asian people running orchestras? Yes, of course. My response has just been to try to write the best music I can. I wrote an opera for San Francisco Opera — “Dream of the Red Chamber,” which they’re reviving. It’s a very popular Chinese story, and when I worked on it with David Henry Hwang, we asked ourselves: “Is this for a Western audience or Eastern audience?” We decided first and foremost it should just be good, and it had to be touching. Good music transcends.For example, a piece of mine, “H’un (Lacerations),” premiered at the 92nd Street Y in New York. It is subtitled “In Memoriam 1966-1976” — about the Cultural Revolution — and it is very harsh and dramatic, with no melody. My mother was there, and she said it brought back a lot of painful memories. I was also sitting next to this very old Jewish woman, and after I took a bow onstage, she leaned over and said, “If you changed the title to ‘Auschwitz,’ this would be just as appropriate.” That was the highest compliment.Unsuk Chin“I believe in multiple identities and think that without curiosity,” Unsuk Chin said, “any style or any musical culture atrophies and risks becoming a museum.”Julie Glassberg for The New York TimesThe Korea of my childhood and adolescence was a very different place from what it is today. In the 1960s, it was an impoverished developing country, devastated by colonialism and by the Korean War, and until the late 1980s, there was a military dictatorship in place. In order to develop as a composer, one had to go abroad, as there didn’t exist an infrastructure for new music. Now 60, and having lived for 35 years in Europe, it remains important for me to contribute to the contemporary music scene in Asia.When I moved to Germany, there was a tendency to put composers in certain boxes, with all the aesthetic turf wars back then. Since I was neither interested in joining any camp or fashionable avant-garde or other trends, fulfilling exotic expectations, or assumptions of how a woman should or should not compose, I had to start a career in other countries while still living in Germany. Prejudices such as viewing an Asian composer or performing musician only through “sociological” lenses are still relatively common in various countries, but times are changing. Of course, there exist prejudices and complacency in the whole world, including in Asia. Perhaps the only remedy to this apparently, and sadly, all-too-human impulse is try to retain a sense of wonder and attempt to find distance to oneself.I have worked in different countries for decades, and have felt a need to stay curious about different musical cultures, traditions and genres. I believe in multiple identities and think that without curiosity, any musical style or culture atrophies and risks becoming a museum: Art has always thrived when there has been cross-fertilization.At the same time, one should be wary of the danger of exoticism and superficial cultural appropriation. I think that a contemporary composer needs to study different cultures, traditions and genres, but make use of those influences in a selective, historically conscious and self-critical manner.Huang RuoHuang Ruo said that if he spoke English with an accent, he composed with one, too.Rathkopf PhotographyWhen people heard I came from China, they would often say, “Does your music sound like Tan Dun?” I don’t think they meant any harm, but it shows a certain ignorance. I tried to explain that China is a big country, and we all speak with our own voice.I started as an instrumental composer, and a lot of those works got programmed at Asian-themed or Lunar New Year concerts. I didn’t notice at first, but you begin to see patterns. I don’t feel my work has any less quality than my other colleagues who are not minority composers, but for conductors, programmers and artistic directors, it doesn’t seem to come to their mind that you can naturally program an Asian composer’s work next to Beethoven or Tchaikovsky.That’s one of the reasons I turned to opera. I thought, there must be no opera company having a themed season devoted to Asian composers. So finally, I got to be programmed next to “Fidelio” and “Madama Butterfly.” That was my revenge. Also, I’ve wanted to write on subjects that reflect Asian or Asian American topics, to really share these stories. In this case it is actually me making the choice.Someone once told me I speak English with an accent. I said, “Otherwise, how would you know that’s me speaking?” I feel the same way as a composer. I want to have my own originality, to speak with my own accent — with my love of Western musical styles, but also this heritage I carry of Chinese culture.Without coming to the United States, I would be a different composer. If I went to Europe instead, I would also be very different. But I feel I made the right decision, and at 44 I fully embrace who I am today, and where I am as well. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      17 New York Arts Organizations Are Among Those Receiving $30 Million

      by

      The Queens Museum, Harlem Stage and 44 other groups were chosen to receive aid from Bloomberg Philanthropies for digital innovation.The Queens Museum is among 46 cultural nonprofit organizations selected for a new $30 million program by Bloomberg Philanthropies that is intended to support improving technology at the groups and helping them stabilize and thrive in the wake of the pandemic. A Bloomberg Tech Fellow is being appointed at each organization, the philanthropies announced Tuesday.Heryte Tequame, assistant director of communications and digital projects at the museum, was chosen as its fellow in what is known as the Digital Accelerator program and will be in charge of developing a digital project of her choice. In an interview she said that in 2020, the museum “realized where we needed to expand our capacity and invest more.”“I think now we’re really taking the time to see what we can do that has longevity,” Tequame said. “And not just being responsive, but really being proactive and having a real future-facing strategy.”The organizations don’t know exactly how much of the $30 million each will receive yet, but Tequame said she wants to use at least some of it on the museum’s permanent collection.Another recipient, Harlem Stage, selected Deirdre May, senior director of digital content and marketing, as its tech fellow.That performing arts center — which largely focuses on artists of color — aims to use the assistance in part to increase accessibility, Patricia Cruz, its chief executive and artistic director, said in an interview. “People who cannot leave their homes, for example, would be able to see some of the finest artistic performances that could be made,” Cruz said, because “that’s the core of what we do.”The 46 organizations selected for the program include nonprofits in the United States and Britain. Among them are 26 in the United States, and 17 of those are in New York City, including the Apollo Theater, the Ghetto Film School and the Tenement Museum. The chief executive of Bloomberg Philanthropies, Patricia E. Harris, said in a statement that when the pandemic hit, cultural organizations had to get creative to keep their (virtual) doors open.“Now we’re excited to launch the Accelerator program to help more arts organizations sustain innovations and investments,” Harris said, “and strengthen tech and management practices that are key to their long-term success.”As Cruz from Harlem Stage put it, “We’re ready to be accelerated.” More

    • 163 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      She Was Deeply Moved by Refugees’ Stories. So She Told Them in Song.

      by

      “Song to a Refugee,” an inadvertent concept album from the singer and songwriter Diana Jones, strives to center the voices of migrant women.Diana Jones is known as a singer-songwriter of uncommon empathy, an astute observer of the human condition whose heart goes out to those who suffer and are oppressed.Since her 1997 debut, Jones has crafted indelible narratives from the point of view of, among others, a battered woman who contemplates turning a gun on her abuser and of a coal miner trapped underground while writing what would prove to be his last letter to his wife.Released overseas last year, her latest project, “Song to a Refugee” (due Friday), lends compassion to the struggles of immigrants fleeing terror and persecution in their homelands.Produced with David Mansfield, whose uncluttered Neo-Appalachian arrangements deepen the pathos of her lyrics and vocals, Jones’s record is an inadvertent concept album. It evolved rapidly, after a bout of writer’s block, during a flurry of songwriting triggered by the horrors she witnessed in news stories from the United States border with Mexico and beyond.“I was trying to make sense of what was happening, first of all for myself,” Jones, 55, explained. She was speaking by phone from her home in Manhattan’s West Village, describing her response to daily accounts of the treatment of immigrants, most of them people of color.“At the same time, I felt this responsibility to report on what was happening,” she added. “I wanted to boil things down to one small voice because the more personal something is, the harder it is to look away.”Jones, who was adopted at birth and raised on Long Island, N.Y., comes by her empathy naturally. “I was always searching for something, a face or a home, anything to connect with,” she said of her early pursuit of her family of origin. “I was also without a home when I was 15 years old. I never lost sight of what it means to have food to eat and a roof over my head. I have gratitude for physical safety every day.”Her latest project received unexpected early encouragement from someone with a very different background: the actress Emma Thompson. The two women met, coincidentally, in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, where they struck up a conversation about their mutual commitment to human rights. Shortly afterward, Jones wrote “I Wait for You,” a song about a mother from Sudan who seeks asylum in England, hoping to be reunited with her children eventually.“I wanted to boil things down to one small voice because the more personal something is, the harder it is to look away,” Jones said.Erinn Springer for The New York TimesThompson had served on the board of the Helen Bamber Foundation, a British organization originally established to care for Holocaust survivors that now serves victims of human trafficking and other atrocities.“It’s the people to whom we owe nothing, as Helen Bamber said, whose treatment reveals our humanity, our spirit, the quality of our social fabric,” Thompson wrote in an email. “I have an adopted son, a refugee from Rwanda, and what is most important to say about him is that his joining the family made us all immeasurably richer in every way.”The folk singer and activist Peggy Seeger, who appears on the album, said the power of Jones’s album is in its ability to paint vivid portraits. “It’s so easy to discount, when you see so many refugees, the individual story — and these are individual stories,” she said of the 13 songs on the album. “Diana’s record is a relentless hammering home of how we ignore a huge body of people who are living through the results of human cruelty and insanity.”Backed by Mansfield on mandolin and fiddle, the song “Where We Are” is narrated by the older of two brothers who were taken from their parents and detained at the border of the United States and Mexico: “My brother is a baby, he doesn’t understand at all/Freedom, there’s freedom outside the chain-link wall.”“We Believe You,” the album’s centerpiece, was inspired by congressional testimony from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, detailing the dehumanizing conditions she observed at the border.I believe your eyes are tired of cryingand all the reasons you said you came here forI believe you lost your mother and your fatherand there ain’t no sleeping on a concrete floorJones intones this lament in an unadorned alto, her words cradled by the tender filigrees of Richard Thompson’s electric guitar. Steve Earle, Thompson and Seeger take turns singing the stanzas that follow, only to return to bear witness alongside Jones on the song’s final verse and chorus.As Jones explained, “It’s important that we have people in our lives who believe us, especially for traumatized people — people who, in this case, are being demonized or ‘othered’ for wanting a safe haven and, eventually, a home.”Written from the underside of history, “Song to a Refugee” finds Jones steadfastly siding with the oppressed, much in the spirit of Woody Guthrie’s “Dust Bowl Ballads.” One of the most powerful things about the record is how, on tracks like “I Wait for You” and “Mama Hold Your Baby,” the voices of migrant women are centered. Talking about her protagonist in the song “Ask a Woman,” Jones asks, “What must it be like for a mother to have to pick up her baby and start walking to another border, through deserts and with no safety at all?”“Being a refugee,” Thompson wrote, “simply underlines and exacerbates the areas where all women are already challenged — not being heard, not being educated, not being paid, not having power.”Jones wrote and recorded the material for “Song to a Refugee” when President Donald Trump was in office. But the nightmarish realities the album evokes speak as poignantly today.“This is such a big problem that it has to be dealt with in small ways,” Seeger said, referring to the global migration crisis. “But the small ways are not small. This is not a small album.” More

    • 88 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Apocalypse ’45’ Review: Graphic Images of Wartime

      by

      Candid testimonies from World War II veterans accompanies vivid archival footage in this immersive documentary that showcases the myths we tell ourselves about war.At one point in “Apocalypse ’45,” the camera gazes over Tokyo from an American military bomber as the plane ejects a cluster of cylinders. For several beats, the bombs disappear into the air. Then we see the explosions: tiny bursts of orange far below.Startling images appear throughout “Apocalypse ’45,” a transfixing documentary that depicts the final months of World War II in rare detail. The film (streaming on Discovery+) combines vivid archival footage from war reporters with the accounts of an array of veterans. Its project is to immerse us in the horrors of warfare, and to convey the ways its witnesses cope with war’s psychic toll.The images, taken from digitally-restored film reels that sat in the National Archives for decades, are disturbingly graphic. A Japanese woman steps off a cliff in the Mariana Islands to avoid being taken hostage. Soldiers on Iwo Jima shoot flamethrowers into caves. Planes piloted by kamikaze plunge into ships near Okinawa. The director Erik Nelson adds realistic wartime sound effects to the silent footage, achieving an unsettling verisimilitude.But the veterans, whose candid testimonies are interwoven in voice over, are the movie’s shrewdest addition. Notably, Nelson declines to distinguish among the men, and instead patchworks their deep, breathy voices into sonic wallpaper. Without faces or names, their remarks cannot be individually condemned or celebrated. Rather, they blend into a collective, showcasing how people seek out myths — about war’s inevitability, Japanese conformity, or American might — to find reason where there may be none.When it comes to representing non-American experiences, the documentary is less equipped. Nelson calls on only one Japanese interviewee, a survivor of Hiroshima. His voice opens the documentary, and reappears later on to describe the atom bomb attack. The survivor’s perspective is vital, but offered alone, its inclusion feels perfunctory. “Apocalypse ’45” knows that war is hell for everyone. But it’s difficult to escape the sense that, in this film’s view of history, America is top of mind.Apocalypse ’45Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. Watch on Discovery+. More

    • 163 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      The Making of ‘High on the Hog,’ Bringing Black Food History to TV

      by

      The new Netflix series tapped years of scholarship and the life experience of its creators to chart how African Americans have shaped the country’s cuisine.There is a breathtaking moment near the end of the first episode of “High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America,” a new four-part Netflix documentary based on the 2011 book by the scholar Jessica B. Harris. More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      The Conductor Who Whipped American Orchestras Into Shape

      by

      Toting a loaded gun on the podium, Artur Rodzinski turned ensembles into technical marvels in the 1930s and ’40s.“For those who grew to musical maturity with the concert life of the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, his name may still have an aura,” Halina Rodzinski wrote in her memoirs, almost two decades after the death of her spouse, the Polish conductor Artur Rodzinski.“For those who are younger,” she went on to lament, “my husband is a dry reference in a musical encyclopedia or a name on a record cover in the cut-rate rack of a discount store.”That was in 1976. And the decades since have not been kind to Rodzinski, leaving him remembered, if at all, for embodying “all that a real maestro was supposed to be,” a critic once wrote: “preening, arbitrary, dictatorial, unpredictable, driven by ambition.”Possessing an “enormous vocabulary of Polish profanity” that he unloaded on musicians, as Time magazine reported, Rodzinski was also rumored to conduct with a revolver in his pocket. True, Halina confirmed in her book — and it was loaded.Rodzinski conducting at Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic’s home during his tenure in the 1940s.Bettmann/CorbisBut there was a time when Rodzinski was among the most lauded conductors in the land. He may have been “no poet of the baton,” as the critic Virgil Thomson put it in October 1943, when Rodzinski became music director of the New York Philharmonic. But he was “a first-class orchestral craftsman” and a “master trainer,” Thomson wrote later that season.Arguably no man had more of a hand in turning American orchestras into the technical marvels they became in the mid-20th century — whether through those he led himself, or through the example he set. He jolted up the standards of some of the great ensembles of the radio age: the Philadelphia Orchestra (as an assistant from 1925 to ’29), the Los Angeles Philharmonic (as music director from 1929 to ’33), the Cleveland Orchestra (1933 to ’43), the NBC Symphony (which he created in 1937), the New York Philharmonic-Symphony, as it was then known (1943 to ’47) and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, for a single, tempestuous season after that.Flashier conductors would take those bands further: Leopold Stokowski, Rodzinski’s boss and booster, in Philadelphia; Otto Klemperer in Los Angeles; Arturo Toscanini, Rodzinski’s mentor, with the NBC; George Szell in Cleveland; Rafael Kubelik in Chicago. Their achievements were built on Rodzinski’s foundation, but their fame and commercial success far eclipsed his.Perhaps Rodzinski’s recordings might change our sense of him. With a rush of recent archival finds, for the first time since the LP era there is plenty to go on. Pristine Classical released a series of superb remasterings of Rodzinski’s studio work with the NBC, Cleveland and Chicago orchestras, as well as a few broadcast tapings from his New York period.Weightier still is a 16-disc box from Sony, which for the most part recovers 78s made with the New York Philharmonic from 1944 to ’46, filling a hole in the orchestra’s discography and offering a companion to Sony’s box, issued two years ago, of the Philharmonic recordings of John Barbirolli, Rodzinski’s widely derided predecessor.Wagner’s “Die Walküre” (New York Philharmonic, 1945)Sony ClassicalCompendiums such as these can bolster reputations, as long-silent work reaches fresh ears, or confirm legends born long ago. Sometimes, though, these box sets simply confirm the verdicts of history. And that, alas, is the case with Rodzinski.Here was a conductor capable of extraordinary feats of clarity and balancing, able to bring the lushest Romanticism to heel, whether in a sparkling Rachmaninoff Second Symphony, or in brisk, enthralling scenes from Wagner’s operas, including parts of “Die Walküre” with the soprano Helen Traubel.Perhaps surprisingly for such a turbulent character, objectivity was Rodzinski’s interpretive aim. He told Time for a cover story, just before his firing from the New York Philharmonic, that he hoped that “the music goes from the orchestra to the audience without going through myself.” (The very different Stokowski, he said with contempt, “plays music sexually.”)But if that literalism helped Rodzinski to train his orchestras in pinpoint precision, and brought out the best in intractable works like Sibelius’s Fourth, it could also bore — lacking the tension and vehemence of his idol and model, Toscanini.The New York Times critic Olin Downes admired Rodzinski’s technique, but he wrote in 1943 that he feared “a reticence approaching overrefinement.” Even Thomson — whose acclaim for Rodzinski surely had nothing to do with the conductor inviting Thomson, who was also a composer, to lead the Philharmonic in his “Symphony on a Hymn Tune” in 1945 — had to admit that guest conductors like Charles Munch made more of the orchestra Rodzinski had built.Perhaps surprisingly for such a turbulent character, objectivity was Rodzinski’s interpretive aim.Genevieve Naylor/Corbis, via Getty ImagesRodzinski was born on New Year’s Day 1892, in Split, and grew up in present-day Lviv, a city long fought over that was part of the Hapsburg monarchy and, later, Poland. While studying law in Vienna, he trained at the Academy of Music and, after suffering shrapnel wounds on the Eastern front in World War I, found a job as a cabaret pianist back in Lviv — relief from days spent inspecting meat shops. He made his debut leading Verdi’s “Ernani,” then moved to Warsaw. Stokowski heard him conduct Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” there, and offered to take him to Philadelphia.Filling in for Stokowski at Carnegie Hall in 1926, Rodzinski was already able to hold an orchestra “firmly in his grip,” Downes noted. Los Angeles and Cleveland followed — the latter a place where Rodzinski could add operas to the symphonic repertoire, not least the American premiere of Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” in 1935, a coup he scored against Stokowski’s Philadelphia.Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” (Cleveland Orchestra, 1940)Pristine ClassicalWhen Toscanini resigned from the New York Philharmonic in 1936, Rodzinski was asked to conduct eight weeks of the following season, and was widely seen as a plausible heir to the maestro’s throne. He became Toscanini’s favored candidate after the Italian conductor heard him at the Salzburg Festival.But the Philharmonic took a gamble on the less experienced Barbirolli that December, before Rodzinski had a chance to prove himself, which he did with an “Elektra” of “historic intensity,” Downes wrote, the following March. Furious, Toscanini instructed NBC to have Rodzinski drill the orchestra it was hiring for the Italian’s sensational return to New York.After the Philharmonic corrected its error (at least as Rodzinski saw it) at the end of 1942, Rodzinski had the unanimous support of the critics; their venom was infinite for Barbirolli, whose highly subjective aesthetic appalled writers who had been entranced by Toscanini’s lean, driven style.“The orchestra needs overhauling in every way,” Downes insisted. Time reported that guest conductors referred to its “undisciplined and arrogant members as ‘the Dead End Kids.’” When Rodzinski had 14 musicians fired months before his arrival, including the concertmaster, it was taken as evidence of a seriousness that Barbirolli was perceived to have lacked.After Rodzinski’s first concert in October 1943, performing Barbirolli’s beloved Elgar in a conscious attempt to demonstrate how it ought to go, Thomson wrote, brutally, that it was “pleasant” to hear the Philharmonic play “all together.” By April, he was drolly reporting that the strings “now play in tune.”Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony (New York Philharmonic, 1945)Sony ClassicalGranted this kind of shade, Rodzinski could do little but shine. He focused on music of the previous hundred years and rarely went back beyond Schumann and Berlioz to Beethoven, Mozart or Haydn. In the Sony box, his Brahms symphonies push on without quite becoming overwhelming; his Tchaikovsky Sixth is rather cool — “too conventional, too objective and too civilized,” as Downes put it in a review of its corresponding concert.Contemporary music did play a significant role in the Rodzinski era, taking a spot on most of his programs. Trying to duke it out with Serge Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony Orchestra, Rodzinski competed to premiere the works of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, whose Fifth Symphony he was the first to release on record. Hiring Leonard Bernstein as his assistant conductor in New York, Rodzinski also supported American composers like William Schuman and William Grant Still. Morton Gould’s “Spirituals,” Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait” and Darius Milhaud’s “Suite Française,” all composed during World War II, receive convincing recordings in the Sony box.Morton Gould’s “Jubilee,” from “Spirituals” (New York Philharmonic, 1946)Sony ClassicalStill, for Rodzinski the Philharmonic ultimately became the conductors’ graveyard it had long been reputed to be — far more so than for Barbirolli, who went on to greater things with the Hallé in Britain. Despite uniform praise for the excellence Rodzinski enforced, his position was never secure.Contract negotiations with the Philharmonic’s manager, the powerful agent Arthur Judson, dragged on so interminably that Rodzinski’s lawyer, the future C.I.A. director Allen Dulles, gave up. The conductor was left to discuss terms on his own, as he grew more anxious about his lack of control over guest conductors — his rival Stokowski among them — and what they performed.The Chicago Symphony, rebuilding after Désiré Defauw’s brief postlude to the 37-year tenure of Frederick Stock, sniffed an opportunity, and offered a post around Christmas 1946. With that offer in hand, Rodzinski dressed the Philharmonic’s board down with an hourlong speech about his problems with Judson on Feb. 3, before leaking his resignation to the press that night. The board fired him the next afternoon, amid mutual recriminations.“New York,” Rodzinski vowed to a reporter, “will go down.”Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” (Chicago Symphony, 1947)Pristine ClassicalHe lasted just months back in the Midwest. Critics there gave by-now-familiar praise to the rise in the quality of playing, and there were operatic successes, but Rodzinski again came up against entrenched interests, racking up deficits and finding far less willingness to make changes of personnel. Chicago’s board fired him in January 1948.There would be no more prominent posts for Rodzinski, the perfectionist who set the standards for the post-World War II era. He would make more recordings in the 1950s, mostly with the Royal Philharmonic on the Westminster label, but his health declined, and he would never again appear with the New York Philharmonic. He died in 1958. More