Zhang, Xian

Subterms

    Latest story

    100 Shares59 Views

    Review: Asmik Grigorian’s Met Opera Debut in ‘Butterfly’

    by

    Asmik Grigorian, a star singer abroad, made her Metropolitan Opera debut by lending lyricism, complexity and spontaneity to a classic role.In the most heartbreaking scene of Puccini’s opera “Madama Butterfly,” the title character waits. A teenage geisha married off to an American naval lieutenant, she remains devoted to him long after he abandons her. He will return, she believes — one fine day.When she sees his ship approaching the shores of Japan, she and her maid ecstatically prepare the home for him. They gather flowers and spread them at the door; Butterfly rouges her cheeks and puts on the wedding garments she wore the night she and the lieutenant fell in love. Then she, their son and the maid look out through a screen and wait. The boy falls asleep first, followed by the maid. But Butterfly stays awake all night, expecting a husband who never comes.Moments like this are perfect for the Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian, a fiercely intelligent and captivating singer who made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday. She comes to New York having already reached star status abroad, and it didn’t take long in “Butterfly” to see why.After Grigorian knelt to wait, she smiled at her son, played by an affecting bunraku puppet. Then she let out a deep exhale and perfected her posture before reaching out to hold the hand of her maid, Suzuki. As the scene went on, her eyes seemed on the verge of tears, but only on the verge. She appeared overwhelmed with either anticipation or disappointment, or both.Opera is known for its elevated expression, of which there is plenty in “Butterfly,” a tragedy from start to finish. But Grigorian is the type of singer who also behaves like a skilled, nuanced actress. She persuasively inhabits a character, imbuing performances of plush lyricism with empathy, sophistication and even a touch of spontaneity.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

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Turning 100, the New Jersey Symphony Sticks to Home

      by

      The orchestra could have rented Carnegie Hall for the celebration, but “our supporters are here, our audiences are here,” its chief executive said.When the New Jersey Symphony was planning this season’s centennial celebrations, which come to a close this weekend, a question kept coming up: Would the orchestra be going to Carnegie Hall?After all, appearing at Carnegie — even if that means renting the hall — is a mark of excellence and validation, an exclamation point on a tour or a special occasion. Like a 100th birthday.While the New Jersey Symphony has given many Carnegie performances over the years, most recently in 2012, it decided this was not the right time to return.“Sure, we can go to Carnegie,” Gabriel van Aalst, the orchestra’s chief executive, recently recalled thinking. “We could have hired it out; we could have done it. But I strongly felt that this major tentpole celebration should be us in our state. Our supporters are here, our audiences are here.”These were striking words from an institution long characterized by what — and where — it is not. The elephant in the concert hall is that New Jersey is squeezed, geographically, between two of the world’s greatest ensembles, the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra.Smaller than either of those giants, the New Jersey Symphony has lately punched above its weight in programming ambition — and, as the music world continues to rebuild from the pandemic, has prided itself on thinking locally rather than trying to compete with its famous neighbors. In Xian Zhang, its music director since 2016, the ensemble has an energetic, collaboration-minded leader well liked by the players.“I felt this orchestra was, for me, very easy to conduct,” said Zhang, who has been music director since 2016. “They read me easily.”Douglas Segars for The New York Times“Since I’ve gotten here, I’ve hired 10 positions,” Zhang said. “We only have 66 musicians total, so that’s a high number. And after the pandemic, when everybody came back, there’s been even more of a sense of unity and wanting to be together. It feels closer now, psychologically.”What was initially called the Montclair Art Association Orchestra made its debut on Nov. 27, 1922, boasting female members at a time when that was unusual. The inaugural program included Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1, which Joshua Bell will reprise in this weekend’s season finale.In its early years, the orchestra benefited from its closeness to New York, since many of its players were also part of the Philharmonic — and even now, the proximity can be valuable for attracting talent. (The star pianist Daniil Trifonov might not be such a perennial presence if he didn’t live just across the Hudson River in Battery Park City.)Under the decade-long directorship of the young conductor Samuel Antek, who died suddenly in 1958, community outreach — lowering ticket prices, appearing on the radio, hiring local choruses, creating children’s concerts — was a priority. Ten years later came the glamorous tenure of Henry Lewis, the first Black music director of a major orchestra, who presided over the kind of booming institutional growth that spread throughout the American orchestral world in the 1960s and ’70s.Henry Lewis, the first Black music director of a major orchestra, presided over a golden era of institutional growth. Bettmann/Getty ImagesThe ensemble has been known for charismatic podium leaders. Hugh Wolff’s programming was creative, and his performances polished. Under Zdenek Macal, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark opened in 1997, providing a home base for the orchestra, and Neeme Järvi, in charge from 2003 to 2009, led enthusiastically received concerts.When Zhang, born in China in 1973, made her first guest appearance, in 2010, her English was still a work in progress, recalled Eric Wyrick, the orchestra’s concertmaster.“She was very businesslike” at those initial rehearsals, he said. “Very straight up and down with her delivery. But then, at the performances, she just exploded. For a tiny person, she was just huge.”“I felt this orchestra was, for me, very easy to conduct,” Zhang said. “They read me easily.”With swooping yet clear gestures, she has guided the ensemble into repertory it hadn’t touched in a long time — like, earlier this year, Mahler’s Third Symphony — as well as major commissions from composers like Steve Mackey, many of them based in New Jersey.At a recent rehearsal for a concert that featured Randall Goosby as the soloist in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, she worked with the musicians on a new piece by Chen Yi, emphasizing buoyancy and the length of the musical line: “Everything needs to be lighter and have a lot of space.” (With the composer in the house, it was a rare moment in the music world — a rehearsal being guided entirely by women of Asian descent: Zhang, Chen and the ensemble’s assistant conductor, Tong Chen.)“They’re faster than a lot of orchestras to grasp different things,” Zhang said after the rehearsal — a necessity, since the group is constantly traveling among its five main performance spaces across the state.“Because we’re not a behemoth, we can be more responsive to community needs,” van Aalst said. “Traditionally orchestras either say, ‘Come to us, we’re wonderful,’ or they go out into communities and say, ‘Hey, listen to us.’ We were very intentional that we were going to go to communities and ask, ‘What do you need from us?’”Zdenek Macal with the orchestra at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, which became its home base.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesThis approach has meant bigger and richer Lunar New Year celebrations than at most American orchestras, and an intriguing performance of Indian music in May that aimed to engage with the state’s substantial South Asian community. The players’ contract has a strong chamber component, encouraging participation in educational activities.“We’re not going to compete with the New York Phil,” van Aalst said. “We’re not going to compete with Philadelphia. That’s not the point. We have been very intentional about framing the orchestra as ‘your New Jersey Symphony.’ We’re here for your community.”Zhang’s current contract extends through the 2027-28 season, at which point hers will be, at 12 years, the longest music directorship in the orchestra’s history. “She could have done this for eight years and gone and done other things,” van Aalst said. “But I think she loves being here; there’s a symbiosis.”There are also things to look forward to: new repertory, including more Mahler and a robust slate of commissions, as well as hopes to create a new building that the orchestra would own — unlike the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, which is its own entity — devoted to offices, rehearsals and education. In the even longer term, there are dreams for a summer venue for the region, along the lines of the Hollywood Bowl.While Zhang said she would love to lead the orchestra on tour, including internationally, there doesn’t seem to be much worry about proving the ensemble’s bona fides — particularly nearby.“I would rather commission two new pieces from New Jersey composers than spend the money to go to Carnegie Hall,” van Aalst said. “That’s actually driving the art form forward; that’s actually celebrating the orchestra.” More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      At Mostly Mozart Concerts, Casual Vibes and High Musical Values

      by

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

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Review: The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra Returns, With Gusto

      by

      The dynamic conductor Xian Zhang opened the symphony’s new season at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center on a balmy night in Newark.NEWARK, New Jersey — Since becoming the music director of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra in 2016, the dynamic conductor Xian Zhang has worked steadily to reflect diversity and inclusion through the institution’s programming, outreach initiatives and guest artists. This was crucial in a city where a majority of residents were Black and Latino; it also spoke to Zhang’s own experience as one of a small number of Asian female conductors leading major ensembles. These priorities were in evidence on Friday when, 557 days after its last full orchestra concert (because of the pandemic), the New Jersey Symphony opened its new season at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center on a balmy night in Newark.The program opened with the premiere of Michael Abels’s “Emerge.” Best known for his scores for the contemporary horror films “Get Out” and “Us,” Abels describes this eight-minute piece as suggesting a group of highly trained musicians getting back together after a long break, a scenario that speaks to the moment.It begins with an evocation of an orchestra tuning up. We hear the oboe playing a single pitch of A, which the other instruments pick up on. Soon the various players break off into short three-note melodic bits, quivering strings, fidgety rhythms and sustained sonorities that keep swelling and diminishing. During one episode the players seem almost to be in free-for-all, somewhat reminiscent of the way many orchestras warm up on the stage as the audience drifts in, creating a borderline-annoying mass of sounds. But the music here becomes as a restless aural collage pierced with flinty dissonance. Soon various players take off in bluesy solos, or engage in fleeting bits of counterpoint. Finally, the musicians team up in passages of mellow lyricism, skittish bursts, manic scales, all leading to a brassy, celebratory coda.Roumain fuses elements of hip-hop, jazz and classical contemporary styles in his work.Dan GrazianoNext up was the composer and violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain’s “Voodoo Violin Concerto,” a 25-minute work from 2002 that reflects his Haitian heritage but also fuses elements of hip-hop, jazz and classical contemporary styles. The solo part drives this work, and Roumain played commandingly on a violin that was amplified, including electronics with which he could eerily process certain sounds. In the first section, “Filter,” the violin jumps into orchestral atmospherics with perpetual-motion, repeated-note riffs. The instruments respond with pungent backup music for woodwinds, and jarring, jazzy full orchestra harmonies.There were extended episodes where Roumain improvised winding strands of frenzied yet lyrical lines over orchestra music that maintains a respectful distance. Though an unabashedly episodic work, with passages evoking call-and-response jazz styles and a bravura cadenza that tweaks the “Star-Spangled Banner,” the concerto still has compositional sweep that carries into “Prayer,” the mellow, elegiac second section, with the violin playing over a chorale-like piano music, and a funky, wailing “Tribe” finale.Though it’s hard to imagine that, as a music student at a traditional conservatory in Beijing, Zhang could have imagined performing a score alive with jazz, blues and improvisation, she led a confident and irrepressible account. Roumain, who has collaborated excitingly with Bill T. Jones, Savion Glover and other creators from outside classical music, this season begins an appointment as the orchestra’s Resident Artistic Catalyst, and the title says much about his ambitions in this role. After the concerto, he spoke to the audience about the responsibility we all have to love one another and be creative during what has been “a time of death and despair.”Zhang then led an elegant, rich-toned and spirited account of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. The slow movement was especially fine, taken at a true Allegretto pace, steady yet never forceful, restrained yet coursing with inner intensity. It was a long-awaited and rewarding return for an essential orchestra. More