WQXR

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares149 Views

    4 Objects That Explain the History of Carnegie Hall

    by

    A new podcast explores an array of items from the 133-year-old hall’s archive, like Ella Fitzgerald’s glasses and an opening-night ticket.Ella Fitzgerald’s glasses. Benny Goodman’s clarinet. A ticket from opening night in 1891. These items have long been a part of Carnegie Hall’s archive. But now they are getting a moment to shine on the new podcast “If This Hall Could Talk.”In eight episodes, the podcast — produced by Carnegie and the classical radio station WQXR — explores “the legendary and sometimes quirky history of the hall,” according to the show’s introduction. The Broadway performer Jessica Vosk is the host of the series, and archivists from the hall offer commentary.“Time moves so quickly,” said Gino Francesconi, Carnegie’s founding archivist, who is featured on the podcast. “These are little anchors to remind people who we are, what extraordinary things have happened here and what continues to happen.”The hall did not devote much effort to preserving its 133-year history until Francesconi was hired in 1986. The collection now includes more than 300,000 items related to more than 50,000 performances and events. The vast majority of pieces were donated, but archivists have also acquired some objects on eBay and other platforms. (One of the pricier acquisitions: a flier for Bob Dylan’s 1961 debut at Carnegie that the hall bought from a man in Sweden for $6,000.)“If This Hall Could Talk,” whose first season concludes next month, also explores social and political aspects of Carnegie’s history, including a 1910 convention on women’s suffrage there and a starry 1961 concert that paid tribute to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.A wide variety of artists offer their reflections on the hall’s history in the podcast, including the jazz singer Samara Joy, the pianist Emanuel Ax, the bass-baritone Davóne Tines and the clarinetist, saxophonist and composer Paquito D’Rivera.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

    More stories

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Robert Sherman, WQXR Host of Classical and Folk Music Shows, Dies at 90

      by

      For more than five decades, he brought together emerging classical and folk performers as well as established stars for interviews and live performances.Robert Sherman interviewing the flutist Marina Piccinini at the studios of WQXR-FM in 1991. He had been on the radio in New York since 1969.Steve J. ShermanRobert Sherman, a charming, easygoing radio personality who hosted three long-running shows over more than a half-century on the New York classical music station WQXR-FM, died on Tuesday at his home in Ossining, N.Y., in Westchester County. He was 90.His son Steve said the cause was a stroke, the fourth Mr. Sherman had had since 2021.Mr. Sherman had been working behind the scenes at WQXR for more than a decade before he began hosting “Woody’s Children,” a weekly folk music program, in 1969. A year later, he began “The Listening Room,” a daily program on which both established and emerging musicians were interviewed and played live music for 23 years. His guests included Jessye Norman, Itzhak Perlman, Robert Merrill and Leopold Stokowski.And in 1978, he started “Young Artists Showcase,” a weekly show that offered a prestigious platform for up-and-coming musicians to perform. That program is still on the air.“Bob, in many ways, embodied everything WQXR tried to be,” Ed Yim, the station’s chief content officer, said in a phone interview. “He was a guiding spirit. He supported young artists and approached classical music as being for everyone. He’s someone we all turned to when we wanted to know the history of something, or why we did things a certain way.”Mr. Sherman, whose mother was the concert pianist and teacher Nadia Reisenberg, wanted to conduct interviews that took flight as friendly conversations, rather than limiting his guests to answering prepared questions.In 1974, for example, he was speaking off the air to the contralto Marian Anderson during a news break on “The Listening Room” when, he later recalled, she said it had been many years since she heard one of the recordings he had just played. Back on the air, he asked her if she listened much to her own music.“When there’s listening time for our records, very often we make the choice to take the other things,” she said. But, she added after discussing some of her musical preferences, “music, in any case, gives one a great sense of quiet, and that is the kind I like rather than that which is discordant.”Mr. Sherman interviewing Leonard Bernstein in 1984. He wanted the interviews he conducted to take flight as friendly conversations.Steve J. ShermanThe pianist Emanuel Ax was on “The Listening Room” several times in his 20s, before he became famous. He recalled how welcoming Mr. Sherman had been.“For someone so young, it was a big deal,” he said by phone, adding that he took easily to being on the radio. “The thing he let me do, which I flipped for, is he used to let me read some of the ads on the show. Each time I’d come on, he let me say, ‘And now, Emanuel Ax is going to read the following ad.’”Mr. Ax was among the performers at a concert celebrating Mr. Sherman’s 90th birthday last year, which Mr. Sherman himself hosted, as were the violinists Chee-Yun Kim, Joshua Bell and Ani Kavafian and the Emerson String Quartet. Ms. Kim, who also spoke, discussed her first appearance on “Young Artists Showcase,” when she was a teenager.“I never spoke on a radio station ever, not even in Korea,” she said. “And I said to you, ‘I am so nervous, but it’s a live show — what if I make a mistake?’ And you told me, do you remember what you told me, you said: ‘Just talk to the microphone as you’re talking to me and people happen to listen in. That’s it. It’s just us two.’ And I was like, OK.”Robert Sherman was born on July 23, 1932, in Manhattan. His parents were immigrants: His father, Isaac, who ran an import-export business and other companies, was from Ukraine. His mother, Ms. Reisenberg, was Lithuanian.She taught Robert to play piano — with limited success.“I had a certain talent for it and lacked the discipline to do anything,” Mr. Sherman said in an interview in 2019 for the Avery Fisher Artist Program oral history project. “Mother always told me, ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t tell anybody you study with me, because you’re not typical of my class.’”He joked that he chose to attend the academically rigorous Stuyvesant High School, where he figured he would be the best pianist, rather than a performing arts school, where he assumed he would be the worst.After graduating from New York University with a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1952, he earned a master’s degree in music from Teachers College, Columbia University. He then entered the Army, where he played piano in a band that toured in U.S.O. shows.He joined WQXR — which until 2009 was owned by The New York Times — in the mid-1950s as a clerk and typist. He gradually moved up to director of recorded music and then music director; by 1969, he was program director. He also wrote scripts for a show called “Folk Music of the World,” but he wanted to create a different type of program that was more connected to the contemporary surge in folk music’s popularity.His proposal was approved, but the station interviewed other potential hosts, including Pete Seeger, before choosing Mr. Sherman. The show was called “Woody’s Children,” after a reference by Mr. Seeger, on the first episode, to the singer-songwriters who followed Woody Guthrie. WQXR canceled the program in 1999, saying it no longer fit the station’s format. But it was picked up by the Fordham University station WFUV, where it ran until earlier this year.Mr. Sherman’s guests on “Woody’s Children” over the years included Judy Collins, Odetta, Tom Paxton and Peter, Paul and Mary.“After nearly 55 years on the radio dial,” Rich McLaughlin, WFUV’s program director, said in a statement after Mr. Sherman’s death, “‘Woody’ is as much Sherman as he is Guthrie.”Mr. Sherman hosted the 1,800th installment of “Young Artists Showcase” in 2012.Steve J. ShermanMr. Sherman hosted “The Listening Room” until WQXR canceled it in 1993. “Young Artists Showcase,” which he hosted for 45 years, has continued with guest hosts.Mr. Sherman also wrote music criticism for The New York Times; hosted “Vibrations,” a short-lived music show on the New York public television station WNET, in 1972; and collaborated with Victor Borge, the comic piano virtuoso, on two books, “My Favorite Intermissions: Lives of the Musical Greats and Other Facts You Never Knew You Were Missing” (1971) and a sequel, “My Favorite Comedies in Music” (1980).With his brother, Alexander (who died in 2013), Mr. Sherman compiled a book about their mother, “Nadia Reisenberg: A Musician’s Scrapbook” (1986), which used interviews, letters, photographs and newspaper clippings to tell her story.“I really didn’t want to do the typical artist’s biography, which is that she played here, she played there, and everybody loved her,” Mr. Sherman told The Standard-Star of New Rochelle, N.Y. “I wanted to make it more personal and at the same time more documentary.”In addition to his son Steve, a performing arts photographer, Mr. Sherman is survived by his partner, Jill Bloom; another son, Peter; and four grandchildren. His marriage to Ruth Gershuni ended in divorce; his marriage to Veronica Bravo ended with her death in 2012.At Mr. Sherman’s 90th-birthday concert, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma remembered being invited to the WQXR studio at the Times building for an interview when he was 15. He was so anxious, he said, that he steeled himself by drinking several gin and tonics in a nearby bar. (He had an ID from the Juilliard School that said he was 23.)“I bumped into you the next day,” he recalled to Mr. Sherman, “and you said, ‘Yo-Yo, I just want you to know I spent all last night splicing’ — this was in the days of tape — ‘this interview from completely unintelligible sentences, and I turned it into something that made even a tiny bit of sense.’” More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      ‘Aria Code’ Explores the Meaning Behind the Music

      by

      The podcast hopes to extend the appeal of opera, “an art form that comes with a fair bit of baggage,” to a larger audience.For many fans, the highlight of any opera is a standout aria, like “O mio babbino caro” from Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi” or “Vesti la giubba” from Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci.”But there’s more to these works than one intense tune, and many listeners are turning to opera-themed podcasts to better understand the layers of this emotion-filled art form.One such podcast among many is “Aria Code,” a collaboration by the classical music radio station WQXR and the Metropolitan Opera in New York and hosted by Rhiannon Giddens. A singer, composer and musician originally from North Carolina, Ms. Giddens studied opera at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and helped found the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a string band in which she sang and played fiddle and banjo.Rhiannon Giddens, a singer, musician and composer, said she jumped at the chance to host “Aria Code,” in part because of “the sheer universality of opera.”Karen Cox for The New York Times“Aria Code” uses the tagline “The magic of opera revealed, one song at a time” and humorous episode titles like “Once More Into the Breeches: Joyce DiDonato Sings Strauss” and “Breaking Mad: Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor.”The series has expanded its audience in this, its third season: Downloads of the podcast have increased more than 20 percent from season 2, according to its co-creator and lead producer, Merrin Lazyan.The podcast has also helped the Met reach its audience while the opera house was shut down for nearly 18 months by the Covid-19 pandemic. (The opera officially reopens on Monday, although it played host to an audience on Sept. 11 for a live performance of Verdi’s Requiem.)Gillian Brierley, assistant general manager of marketing and communications at the Met, said by email that the podcast was one way the Met was “reaching out not only to opera lovers but also to new audiences, bringing to life the range of emotions in opera through vivid storytelling and interviews as well as treasured recordings from our audio archives.”The seed of the idea for “Aria Code” came from Ms. Lazyan, who studied classical voice performance at the Royal College of Music in London. At WQXR in 2017, she suggested a segment in which a Met artist would explain the “Queen of the Night” aria from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” scored using the Met’s archival recordings. But colleagues saw wider potential, proposing a series “that could potentially open up an art form that comes with a fair bit of baggage to a wider audience,” she wrote in an email.Merrin Lazyan, the show’s co-creator and lead producer, planted the seed for the podcast with an idea in 2017.Rick StockwellAs the format evolved, Ms. Lazyan said, a team from WQXR and WNYC Studios (the podcast division of New York Public Radio) hit upon including multiple guests and people from outside the opera world to make the topics more relevant to modern lives. (Episodes conclude with a recorded Met performance of the selected aria.)“We realized that the best version of this show would be one that delights existing opera fans, but is also accessible to an audience that’s new to opera, or perhaps even skeptical of it,” she said. “We didn’t want to water it down, but we did want to break through the barriers.”In choosing an aria for an episode, Ms. Lazyan works closely with the Met. “Prepandemic,” she said, “all of the selected arias and artists were featured in the Met’s current onstage season, and we did our best to align episode releases with their production schedule. This year, we chose arias from both their canceled and upcoming seasons.”To keep “Aria Code” interesting, producers aim for a mix of well-known operas and what Ms. Lazyan called more obscure gems, along with a variety of voice types and even languages.“When it comes to the other guests on the show — the musicologists and dramaturges, the scientists and doctors, the athletes and writers and more — I choose them,” she said, sometimes with input from Ms. Giddens and others.Finding the right host was also key, she said, calling Ms. Giddens a “dream host for so many reasons.”“It was important to us to find someone who understands and appreciates this music, but is not necessarily an opera insider,” Ms. Lazyan said, but a guide for “lifelong opera lovers, people who are curious but have only dipped a toe in, and people who thought it was all a bunch of senseless caterwauling.”Ms. Giddens’s “focus in her own music is on excavating the past and telling bold truths about our present,” Ms. Lazyan said, “which is exactly what ‘Aria Code’ aims to do as well.”Ms. Giddens in the studio at WQXR, which produces “Aria Code” with the Metropolitan Opera.Max Fine/WQXRMs. Giddens said she jumped at the chance to host in part because of “the sheer universality of opera — these deeply emotive stories reflect the best and the worst of human nature, done with mind-bending talent and artistic collaboration.”She added that she has always been interested in equal access to the arts. “If given the chance,” she said, “people who hate the idea of opera could actually love it, if exposed to it in the right way.”That’s not always easy. “Helping listeners connect to the emotion within opera can be a challenge offstage,” Ms. Lazyan conceded.“For some arias, the sheer athleticism of opera performance is front and center,” she said. “Singing is such a personal and internal process, and it can be difficult to verbalize the nuanced inner workings of an artist’s technical and interpretive approach.“But hearing a singer describe how hitting the high note at the end of an exuberant coloratura passage feels like being up in the heavens among the stars, and simultaneously hearing that final high note ring out like a bell as the singer is talking about it, makes this process immediate and thrilling for listeners.”Other arias “welcome a much more personal and intimate kind of storytelling,” Ms. Lazyan said. “For those, I seek out guests with a personal experience that parallels the events or the emotional heart of the music.”For “Madama Butterfly,” the psychotherapist Kyoko Katayama “told the story of her mother, whose love affair with an American G.I. who abandoned her, pregnant, in Japan was an uncanny parallel to the abandonment and betrayal of Cio-Cio San in the opera,” Ms. Lazyan said.“Throughout the episode, you hear Kyoko’s story in parallel with the ‘Butterfly’ story. You hear how deeply personal it is, and that really opens the door to a different way of feeling the power of this music.”While the music and its composer can be the main draw, what about the librettists who fashioned the words?“Aria Code” certainly doesn’t ignore them, but the opera director Keturah Stickann, based in Knoxville, Tenn., puts them squarely in the spotlight in another podcast, “Words First: Talking Text in Opera.” She highlights librettists, she said by email, “because I feel like they sort of disappear when talking about a work. I like to make sure we say their names.” More