Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim

“She’s playing,” the Tradfather cut in, jabbing his fiddle bow in the air. “We’re not talking,” he added, inserting an expletive for good measure. Then he put bow to string and started on a jaunty hornpipe.

The fiddler’s real name is Tony DeMarco. In a former life, he was a commodities trader, but over the past 30 years he has become the central figure of the Irish traditional music scene in New York and one of its few members to pursue this art full time. Brooklyn-born, of mixed Italian and Irish descent, DeMarco is one of the foremost practitioners of Sligo fiddle playing, a regional style characterized by busy fingerwork, baroque ornamentation and frequent blue notes. Among fellow musicians, who revere his technique and fear his tongue, he is known as the Tradfather of the New York sessions scene.

Sessions are the lifeblood of Irish traditional music. Though they vary in size, quality and instrumental makeup, the format is fixed: a regular musical gathering in a bar, anchored by one or two musicians who are paid — sometimes only in drinks — to play. Friends join in by invitation; visiting musicians from out of town might show up, too, unpack their instruments and sit in.

In Ireland and throughout the world, sessions act as a training ground and a social network for practitioners of this centuries-old musical tradition. It’s this communal form of public performance, in a familiar atmosphere with drinks and stories mixed in, that keeps this tradition afloat and preserves its regional styles, along with tens of thousands of tunes.

“The session nourishes the community and it nourishes the art form by keeping a very large repertory alive,” Mick Moloney, a singer, banjo player and professor of music at New York University, said in a telephone interview.

There are many paths to technical mastery, including private lessons, group classes and YouTube tutorials. But at some point, Moloney said, you need to sit in with a group and learn “body to body.” There’s no other way to become fluent in the wordless communication among players: the subtle cues of the leader, the amiable loop of melodies played in unison, the spark that ignites a flashy solo.

In the diaspora, sessions are also a means of preserving Irish identity. Leah Rankin, a rare cellist in the trad scene who is a manager at Carnegie Hall by day, said they were an example of “how specific cultures maintain their identities within the cultural fusion and conflation of New York City.” Creating a space for these traditions to be practiced, she added, “means providing a place for the identity to be preserved — and sometimes for people to even find their identity in the first place.”

A classically trained cellist, Rankin performs on a carbon fiber cello in pubs because beer spills pose a risk to her wooden instrument. She became hooked on Irish fiddle music through the work of Martin Hayes, an Irish virtuoso steeped in the sweetly lithe tradition of East Clare fiddle playing. “He was my gateway drug,” she said.

Hayes is a member of the Gloaming, a supergroup that unites some of the biggest names in Irish music and plays to capacity crowds in concert halls around the world. But, as Hayes said in a phone interview, concerts cannot replace sessions.

“If they weren’t here, the world of Irish music would be very disconnected,” he said. “It’s one thing to go and see a concert, but it is very instructive to have a continuous investigation with the music on a weekly basis.”

When in New York, he sometimes joins in the session at the Dead Rabbit near Wall Street on Sundays, or plays alongside DeMarco at 11th St. Bar. Yes, he says, background noise and chatter can mean that some of the nuances of the music are lost in a pub. But, he added, “musicians also like the fact that it’s not a gig and they don’t have to deliver. And one of the key elements in the creation of any music is the ability to be relaxed.”

At first glance, a session looks laid-back, spontaneous and open. Yet there are hierarchies underpinning both the citywide scene and each individual session. Some are bloated with beginners, compromising musical standards. And establishing your own session is a process.

Daniel T. Neely, a banjo player and ethnomusicologist (his expertise: Jamaican mento music), who said he was “press-ganged” by Moloney into playing in an Irish group, has published a set of rules for newcomers regarding egos and etiquette. No. 8: “There is a good chance that an eyebrow raised in your direction is consequential.”

DeMarco is more blunt. He’s been known to kick people out of his session with a sharp comment and to hurl expletives in the direction of landlords who want to keep bar TVs tuned to the sports channels with the sound turned off.

“Sometimes the fact that I look like an Italian Mafia boss comes in handy,” he said with a satisfied grin during an interview near his home in Little Italy. But, on the whole, he finds the sessions landscape in good health.

“In the ’70s, we used to be happy if someone would throw a pitcher of beer on the table, and we’d sit there and play all night,” he said, noting that paid sessions were now more common. “And there’s a ton of them.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/arts/music/irish-traditional-sessions.html" id="374fd850-432b-3d67-ac6a-94ae4545efaa">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — The Tradfather was holding court at the 11th St. Bar in the East Village during a pause between jigs when his mood temporarily darkened. Amid the small cluster of regulars who flock to this live Irish music session on Sundays was a newcomer who, beer in hand, was flirting with one of the musicians.

Traditional Irish Sessions Are Thriving. Try Not to Spill the Beer

These images came to my mind Sunday in an unlikely setting: at Corpus Christi Church in Manhattan, during a choral concert by the ensemble Blue Heron that was part of the series Music Before 1800. That’s because this beguiling program of expressive and richly ornate polyphonic works from the English Renaissance constituted an encounter with survivors of a much older cultural cataclysm.

Under the title “The Lost Music of Canterbury,” Blue Heron presented works drawn from a collection of manuscripts called the Peterhouse Partbooks, named after the University of Cambridge college where they are kept. These offer the single most important window into English music of the 1530s and ‘40s. Like other forms of English culture nurtured by Catholic institutions, much of this music came to be lost in the upheaval that followed Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. Libraries were destroyed, and books, torn of their precious bindings, were sold off in bulk.

A blizzard of manuscript paper came to be used — as one contemporary, using an old term for privies, described it — “to serve theyr jakes, some to scoure candelstyckes, and some to rubbe their bootes.” The works performed by Blue Heron escaped such ignominies because a chorister from Magdalene College in Oxford copied them out for use in the newly reconstituted Canterbury Cathedral. They eventually made their way to the library of Peterhouse, where they survived yet another wave of destruction — that wrought by the Puritans in the 1640s.

Preserved inside the partbooks are pieces by well-known composers, like John Taverner. Some works are what scholars call unica — meaning they don’t exist in any other source. In some cases, they stem from the pen of a musician who left no other trace at all.

For instance, virtually nothing is known about Arthur Chamberlayne, the composer of a spirited setting of the “Hail Mary.” In Blue Heron’s fresh and full-bodied reading, single words — “Jesus” and “salve” (“hail”) — popped out like bright speech bubbles amid a thicket of arabesque counterpoint. As Scott Metcalfe, the ensemble’s director, said in remarks from the stage, that single antiphon constitutes the complete works of Chamberlayne.

But Blue Heron’s devotion to this repertory — the ensemble has recorded five albums of music from the Peterhouse Partbooks — is not justified only by its rarity. This is vivid and radiant music. That it can be heard again at all is because of the dogged commitment of Nick Sandon, a British musicologist who spent four decades reconstructing the scores. (The book containing the tenor voice of these five-part compositions is missing, as are a few pages of the treble’s.)

With two or three singers to a part and women stepping into the shoes of boy choristers, Blue Heron brings a zesty and sensual sound to these works of devotional music. Nicholas Ludford’s “Salve Regina” is a joyous tangle of long, florid lines with the occasional tangy dissonance illuminating a single word. Hugh Aston’s “O baptista vates Christi” is a rhythmically buoyant work full of forward-driving energy and elegant harmonies.

To Sandon, quoted in a program note, the partbooks have become “a reminder of the catastrophe that English music suffered in the late 1540s and early 1550s, when a very highly developed, confident and ambitious musical culture and the infrastructure that sustained it were brought to an end virtually overnight, and most of its works and much other evidence of its activity were deliberatively destroyed.”

Scholars will have to decide how much English music history needs to be adjusted to account for the wealth of discoveries embedded in these lone survivors. To a lay listener, the feeling that most resonates is one of vindication, tinged with melancholy.

Music Before 1800, with Blue Heron

Performed Sunday at Corpus Christi Church, Manhattan.

The next event in the Music Before 1800 series features Alkemie, on March 7, at the Kosciuszko Foundation, Manhattan; mb1800.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/11/arts/music/review-blue-heron-music-before-1800.html" id="fe5c8405-875e-37ce-a90c-a75b24569d4f">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — In the age of the camera, some acts of cultural destruction have been seared into our collective memory: the bonfires of books forbidden by Nazis, the smashing of Chinese treasures during the Cultural Revolution, the Taliban detonation of the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

Reviving Compositions Nearly Lost Forever

Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Susanna Reich.

Throughout her career, Reich fought to redress belittling portraits of Clara Schumann by earlier authors and to have her recognized as a significant composer, pianist and educator, as well as a central figure of German Romanticism.

The decades that followed the publication of her book, “Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman,” vindicated her efforts with an explosion of both public and scholarly interest. Doctoral dissertations, anthologies and histories of music by women proliferated. Scholarly editions of Clara Schumann’s music for piano appeared, fueling an increase in performances.

Reich’s death coincided with the beginning of a yearlong festival in Leipzig, Germany, for the bicentennial of Clara Schumann’s birth there. She died in 1896 and left behind compositions including songs, works for solo piano, chamber music and a piano concerto.

But when Reich first turned her attention to the subject in the 1970s, Clara Schumann was noted primarily for her relationships with men. These included her father, stern pedagogue Friedrich Wieck, who groomed her for pianistic stardom from an early age; her husband, with whom she had eight children before his death in a mental institution in 1856; and Brahms, with whom she came to be bound by a love that was deep but probably platonic.

In her book, Reich relegated the Brahms strand of the story to a single chapter. “It was a most significant chapter, to be sure,” she wrote in her introduction, “but it was not the consuming central relationship that so many people have suspected.”

Her take was a far cry from the “example of noble, pure and true womanhood” that the first biography, completed in 1908, made her out to be. A typical assessment of her status was found in John N. Burk’s “Clara Schumann: A Romantic Biography” (1940), which prized Robert’s work over Clara’s career as a touring virtuoso, even though she made much more money through her concertizing than he did with his compositions. For Burk, Robert was “an artist for eternity” while Clara was “a concert-giver for the moment.”

Musicologist Judith Tick said in a telephone interview that Clara Schumann “was seen primarily as a muse,” adding: “Her life was assumed to pivot between two poles, Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms. And Nancy’s book destroyed that, while tempering the sensationalist assumptions about Clara Schumann and Brahms.”

Nancy Bassen was born on July 3, 1924, in the Bronx to Hyman Bassen, a writer and labor activist, and Ida (Orland) Bassen. After Hyman’s death in 1931 the family moved to Ithaca, New York, where Nancy’s brother, Jonas, was a student at Cornell University.

Ida ran a boardinghouse for Jewish and black students who were not welcome in college dorms.

After the family moved back to New York City, Nancy attended the High School of Music and Art, where she played violin and viola. She obtained a bachelor’s degree in music at Queens College in 1945, the same year she married Haskell Aaron Reich, who later became a physicist.

Reich’s husband died in 1983. Her longtime companion, biochemist Maurice M. Rapport, died in 2011. In addition to her daughter, a children’s book author, her survivors include a son, Matthew, and three grandchildren.

In a telephone interview, Susanna Reich said her mother’s ambitions for an academic career had been cut short after she completed a master’s at Columbia University’s Teachers College in 1947. When she applied for a doctoral program at Columbia, her daughter said, “the interviewer asked her if she was married, and when she said yes, the interviewer told her to go home and take care of her husband.”

Finally, in 1972, when Reich was 47, she obtained her doctorate from New York University. Buoyed by the women’s movement and intrigued by a stash of letters she came across, she dove into the life of Clara Schumann. Her research often took her behind the Iron Curtain, since many collections of documents were kept in what was then East Germany.

“She had to register at every police station in every town she went to,” Tick, the musicologist, said.

The sources themselves called for psychological detective work. While Clara Schumann left copious letters and diaries, many of those from her childhood were supervised, or even written, by her father. As a married couple, Robert and Clara kept a joint diary. In her work Reich collaborated with a psychoanalyst, Anna Burton, in reconstructing the picture of a musician who was as conscious of her exceptional status as she was conflicted about it.

“It’s a very modern story,” Reich said in an interview with The New York Times in 1996. “Here was a girl growing up with a working mother who was taken care of by a maid, a child of divorced parents. She was left a widow at 36, but she was very independent and refused all loans. When Robert was sick, she went back to the concert stage to pay for his medical bills. She was a working woman. She worked with her hands.”

Reich taught at New York University and Queens and Manhattanville Colleges and was a visiting professor at Bard and Williams. She never won tenure, even though her book, revised in 2001 and translated into German, Japanese, Hebrew and other language, was well received.

Liane Curtis, a musicologist studying the English composer Rebecca Clarke and president of the Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy, said in a phone interview that it was Reich who gave her the idea that “having a woman as a subject was worth devoting a big portion of your life to.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/11/obituaries/nancy-b-reich-dead.html" id="41b87ca4-9e6f-3a13-ae29-2f7596cfe378">The New York Times</a>.

Nancy B. Reich, Scholarly Champion of Clara Schumann, Dies at 94

Nancy B. Reich, whose seminal 1985 biography of Clara Schumann established her as an important musical figure independent of her husband, composer Robert Schumann, and helped turn the musicological spotlight on female composers, died on Jan. 31 in Ossining, New York. She was 94.

Funerary music was at the heart of two very different programs at the New York Philharmonic this week. A glittering Lunar New Year gala on Wednesday, conducted by Kahchun Wong, included the American premiere of a violin concerto by Tan Dun called “Fire Ritual.” On Thursday, the orchestra’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, led a burnished reading of Brahms’ “A German Requiem.” Vastly unalike, both works are full of luminous color and reflect complex attitudes toward death.

Brahms wrote his “German Requiem” during a period in which he suffered the loss of his mother, and not long after the death of his friend Robert Schumann. Comfort, sadness and faith in an afterlife free of suffering are interwoven in this sprawling work for chorus, soloists and orchestra.

The opening chorus can’t quite seem to settle on a key or mood, and in the march of the second movement, the pulse is shared between the stern timpani and gentle harp. In the choir, too, the stentorian seriousness of the men singing a line from Peter, “For all flesh is as grass,” is answered by the women in a more pliable, folk-song-like style. If this music were a funerary wreath, it would be woven from meadow flowers rather than stiff chrysanthemums.

On Thursday, van Zweden was attentive to these nuances, drawing subtle and flexible playing from the orchestra. In the fugal passages, where the specter of Bach flickers through, he showed a patient eye for the overarching structure. In the excellent Concert Chorale of New York, meticulously prepared by James Bagwell, the men especially impressed with ringing, muscular fortes.

Baritone Matthias Goerne brought mystery and intensity to his solos, while soprano Ying Fang sang “Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit” (“You now have sadness”) with gleaming, youthful sound. When the choir first answered her, with lines evoking a mother’s consolation, its tone was so hushed that it sounded like a memory.

Much of Tan’s “Fire Ritual” is designed to bring forth things that are hidden. In a program note, he explained that this work is inspired by ancient Chinese rituals that pit two groups of musicians against each other. The solo violin — here played with fierce dramatic commitment by Bomsori Kim — takes on a shamanistic role. With this work, the composer was “trying to find those dead people and souls to wake them up with special sounds and gestures and colors.”

If conflicting emotions are interwoven in the Brahms, Tan isolates them and pits them in stark opposition. Tender, ornate violin solos alternate with brash orchestral outbursts full of clanging percussion and conciliatory passages. Some players are positioned in the auditorium, so that certain sounds — like an eerily realistic evocation of bird song — envelop the audience. The score includes unusual touches: musicians hum and hiss, the conductor intones a text, string players create wind by rhythmically fluttering a page of their music.

Tan’s concerto was a potentially risky piece to program. With just one performance, it also represented a substantial investment of time and resources on the part of the musicians, who donated their services to benefit the Philharmonic at the Lunar New Year gala. Crowd-pleasing pieces like Li Huanzhi’s jaunty “Spring Festival Overture,” Stravinsky’s “Firebird” Suite and a barn-burning rendition of Mozart’s Queen of the Night aria from “The Magic Flute,” with the Korean soprano So Young Park, worked their reliable magic on an enthusiastic audience.

This New York Philharmonic program continues through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center; 212-875-5672, nyphil.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/08/arts/music/new-york-philharmonic-tan-dun-brahms-review.html" id="78b421da-092c-30f9-a396-18cdef1d8758">The New York Times</a>.

Death, Two Ways, at the New York Philharmonic

NEW YORK — Of all the things that inspire music, one of the most paradoxically productive is death. Whether the sounds it brings forth are meant to console, to offer catharsis, or to build a bridge to the soul of the departed, common to all is a refusal to accept that definitive silence.

“From the beginning you chose your path, Western or Arab,” Chaker, 28, said recently at her apartment in Brooklyn. “I never questioned it.”

But questions arose later, as she traveled down the Western classical path, studying in Paris, London and at the prestigious Lucerne Festival Academy, and touring with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and Daniel Barenboim. “She was a particularly curious musician,” Barenboim said in an interview about Chaker, who would keep a full-orchestra study score at her feet during rehearsals. “That’s why I had this special affection for her.”

But, she said, “I always felt like I was leaving a piece of myself behind.”

In her final years in Beirut, Chaker had found an Iraqi violin teacher, Mohammed Abbas Hashim, who pushed her to improvise her own cadenzas to Mozart concertos and jam on traditional Arabic maqam scales as, she recalled, “a way to relax and let off some steam.” She sought out other masters of Arabic and Ottoman court music.

In January, Chaker released “Inner Rhyme,” a haunting yet quietly rigorous album that integrates the disparate parts of her identity as a composer, performer and improviser who tiptoes along cultural fault lines. A recent performance at the Stone in Manhattan showed off the hallmarks of this music, built on the maqam scales of Arabic music, with jazzy flights of improvisation and fleeting echoes of early Baroque ornamentation.

Pianist and composer Vijay Iyer witnessed the genesis of “Inner Rhyme” at a workshop he ran in Banff, Alberta. “We rigorously explored the microtones she worked with and tried to square them with a piano,” he said in a phone interview. “It created something that, to my ear, was unprecedented. It was like nothing I’d ever heard on this planet. It was coming out of traditions, but stepping into a real experimental sensibility.”

Iyer introduced Chaker to some of the stylistically polyglot musicians who joined her in this project. The ensemble’s name, Sarafand, is that of a Palestinian village that became a ghost town after the founding of the state of Israel.

Loss and exile are central themes, even if they are distilled into purely instrumental music. Chaker’s point of departure is poems written by Syrian, Iraqi and Palestinian writers whose political messages are sublimated in metaphors. She took their poetic meters and turned them into the rhythmic skeleton of her music.

“On the Trunk of an Olive Tree” is inspired by verses by Palestinian poet and former Israeli Knesset member Tawfik Ziad, which imagines him carving his history into bark. The violin line sits low in the instrument’s register, evoking a whisper, soft as a flute. Often there seems to be more breath than voice in these wordless poems, though other times Chaker draws full-bellied sounds, or sketches out silvery arpeggios while the bass or cello take center stage.

Her other compositions include works for traditional classical forces, like a ruminative violin concerto and a restless string trio, both inflected with maqam modes. In these pieces she draws on her experience as an orchestral musician in Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan.

“Anything he said to anyone in the room I wrote down,” she said. “The Divan was really my school for orchestration. It’s interesting to have this experience from the seat in an orchestra — from the birth of sound.”

Chaker said she hopes to counteract stereotypes of Arabic music as traditional and monolithic. “When you say ‘French music’ you think of the avant-garde,” she said. “You’re saying Messiaen or Debussy. It’s not the same with Arabic music. And I would like this to change. Because if a tradition is to survive, it has to come out of its box. To witness a contemporary life and a future, it has to be questioned.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/arts/music/layale-chaker-inner-rhyme.html" id="81ca4646-cd60-3458-a428-a0fd5ef8b8f5">The New York Times</a>.

A Violinist Questions the Musical Divide Between West and East

As a young violinist growing up in Beirut, Layale Chaker moved between two musical worlds. At the city’s conservatory, she studied Mozart and Ravel with teachers imported from Eastern Europe. She knew there were young people studying Arabic violin in the same school, but the programs were segregated. On her walk home, she was engulfed by the sounds of Lebanese music filtering out of car radios and stores.

NEW YORK — Think of the great patrons of music, and some resonant names come to mind: Nikolaus, Prince Esterhazy, for instance, who for three decades employed Joseph Haydn; or Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, who funded Italian baroque luminaries.

But cast around for their successors — the most important commissioners of living composers — and you encounter a string of initials: BBC, WDR, SWR.

The fertile generosity of these public broadcasters (the latter two are Westdeutscher Rundfunk and Südwestrundfunk, German regional radio entities with headquarters in Cologne and Stuttgart) is the subject of this year’s Focus Festival at the Juilliard School. It opened Friday with a stimulating concert by the New Juilliard Ensemble in the Peter Jay Sharp Theater in Manhattan.

Under the banner “On the Air! A Salute to 75 Years of International Radio Commissioning,” the festival presents five more programs, through Feb. 1, that reveal how much of a lifeline noncommercial radio has become to composers since the end of World War II.

Conductor Joel Sachs, who designed the festival and led Friday’s concert, said in a phone interview that a British composer had told him bluntly: “We’d all starve without the BBC.”

While the festival draws attention to the wealth of opportunities created by international broadcasters, it also points a finger at the glaring absence of similar initiatives in the United States.

“The problem with commercial radio is that it doesn’t want to do anything as esoteric as classical music,” Sachs said, “let alone commission contemporary music.”

Sachs said that in his research he had learned of a handful of new works commissioned by isolated U.S. broadcasters, including stations in Minnesota and Cincinnati. But these numbers paled next to the statistics he gathered of radio commissions from Europe and Canada in the postwar era.

The BBC supplied a list, possibly incomplete, of nearly 1,600 compositions. Radio France listed 2,300 titles. German regional broadcasters were each responsible for hundreds of works. Canadian composers have benefited from the robust support of the CBC, which commissioned some 1,200 pieces.

These broadcasters are cultural powerhouses, and not just on the airwaves. Most have their own ensembles, including symphony orchestras and choirs, and run festivals like the Witten Days for New Chamber Music, organized by the WDR, or the Donaueschingen Festival, a storied engine of avant-garde music that is now under the auspices of the SWR. Each summer the BBC Proms whip up public enthusiasm and draw huge crowds with televised concerts that include new commissions.

Some countries make a point of targeting their commissioning largesse toward their own composers. One example is Finnish Radio, which sees fostering new Finnish music as part of its mission.

That’s how a modernist gem like Jouni Kaipainen’s “Trois Morceaux de l’Aube” came into being. It received a superb performance Friday by cellist Sasha Scolnik-Brower and pianist Michalis Boliakis. A radio commission gave life to this darkly ruminative work, shot through with flashes of rhythmic exuberance, in 1981, when the composer was 25.

In Germany, where the postwar occupying powers designed a decentralized broadcasting landscape free of government control, the mission is broader.

In a phone interview, Harry Vogt, who has headed the new music program at the Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) for decades, said he sees it as his responsibility “to produce things, far from commercial considerations, that wouldn’t come into being on their own.” The balancing act there lies in staying accountable to the public through programs — “you don’t want to do things that interest nobody,” he said — while granting composers the creative freedom to develop their art away from the pressures of the market.

Vogt said his commissions also extend beyond the concert hall to sound installations in public and industrial spaces to reach new listeners. “There is always an educational component, too,” he said, “though you try to avoid it reeking of pedagogy.”

Friday’s concert proved that, in casting the net wide, the patronage of the broadcasters reels in works of varying quality. I was underwhelmed by Colin Matthews’ “A Voice to Wake,” with its vocal line that felt somehow both sibylline and mechanical. Korean-German composer Younghi Pagh-Paan’s “U-MUL (The Well),” commissioned by WDR, relied a little too heavily on watery sound painting.

On the other hand, listeners are indebted to Radio France for Akira Nishimura’s beguiling “Corps d’Arc-en-Ciel,” with its brilliant play on density and light. And, in this context, it was instructive to hear Salvatore Sciarrino’s “Archeologia del Telefono,” an instrumental work infused with his trademark fragility, in which brittle sounds hover on the edge of imperceptibility, carrying subtle charges of humor.

In concert, Sciarrino’s music fascinates in part because of the odd techniques used to draw sounds from the instrument. I couldn’t help but wonder how a radio listener would interpret the dry flutter produced by a violinist bowing what looked like a Post-it note tacked to her instrument. The esoteric sound world of such works requires an even more intense concentration on the part of the radio listener who, unlike the audience in the room, is literally all ears.

Additional Information:

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/27/arts/music/juilliard-focus-festival-review.html" id="11a212ee-51cc-35af-a6dc-97b138a24053">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Notebook)

In Focus Festival, Juilliard Salutes Public Broadcasters

For a coloratura soprano, the Fire Aria from Ravel’s “L’Enfant et les Sortilèges” — high runs and Queen of the Night histrionics — is a perfect showcase for technical wizardry and spunk. So it made sense for Sabine Devieilhe, a rising star in her native France who has won acclaim at the leading opera houses of Europe, to include it in her debut at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall on Thursday.

But Devieilhe’s impetuous and sparkling rendition of that showpiece was only the encore — an afterthought, really — for an evening of delicate, nuanced French art songs. It says something about the confidence of this 33-year-old artist that she felt no need to offer a grab bag highlighting her strengths. The program she assembled, songs by Debussy and his circle, was refined and cohesive. And it still held plenty of opportunities to show off her nimble singing and radiant tone.

Devieilhe also had a superb partner in pianist Mathieu Pordoy, whose artistry helped to make this an evening of first-rate chamber music. His finely contoured playing, especially in numbers by Debussy, stood out for its clarity and light pedal use. He revealed details in music that other pianists tend to dissolve in a reverberant haze.

Clarity was also the defining quality of Devieilhe’s performance, both in her lucid, evenly weighted tone and in her meticulous attention to language. Her program drew heavily on settings of quietly enigmatic texts, whether by Symbolist poets like Paul Verlaine or Sanskrit miniatures filtered through the lenses of Western translators.

Devieilhe embraced the emotional ambiguity of such works using tone color to bring out glints of surreal humor — as in Ravel’s “Sur l’herbe” — or draw a moody veil over an entire song, as in Albert Roussel’s “Le jardin mouillé.” (That song was one of two about rain: While Roussel rendered the irregular patter of drops rolling off leaves, Debussy’s “Il pleure dans mon coeur” captured the regular drum of precipitation on city streets and the rushing of water in gutters.)

In Poulenc’s “Fêtes galantes,” with its affectionate portrait of a busy street scene, Devieilhe found a gossipy, conversational tone close to that of a chanson singer. Debussy’s “Chevaux de bois,” about a carousel on a rural fairground, also drew forth chatty and bright singing.

But the most arresting moment, and a taste of Devieilhe’s virtuosity, came without words or accompaniment.

In 1912, composer Maurice Delage, a student of Ravel’s, traveled through India. While there, he wrote “Four Hindu Poems,” which elegantly reflect that country’s music. “Lahore” is based on a text by Heinrich Heine that imagines a snow-covered fir dreaming of a palm tree “grieving” in the heat. After the poem’s last line, the piano falls silent, and the soprano continues wordlessly in a trancelike sequence of arabesque lines, some sung through closed lips.

Devieilhe conjured an array of colors beginning with a nasal sound that turned into a warm hum before opening into cool brilliance. It was a stunning display of vocal control and proof — in the midst of an all-French recital — of Devieilhe’s polyglot artistry.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/arts/music/sabine-devieilhe-review-carnegie-hall.html" id="9ecea32b-7a84-3c64-ab71-dfb709375c00">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Pick)

A French Soprano's Brilliant Carnegie Debut

NEW YORK — In the 1935 film “Princesse Tam-Tam,” Josephine Baker’s title character is at a chic club when she forgets herself — and her lessons in acting white — at the sound of an African drum. As Baker enters into ecstatic communion with a feverish conga beat, the image cuts back and forth between the black drummer and the floppy-limbed, convulsing black dancer.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Wednesday, soprano Julia Bullock, the museum’s artist in residence, presented “Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine,” a tribute to the first black international superstar and a defining figure of the Jazz Age. Here, too, the diva shared center stage with an array of drums. But Bullock and her creative partner, percussionist-composer Tyshawn Sorey, offered a very different image from the exoticized object of European fantasies in “Princesse Tam-Tam.”

Their darkly captivating show offered a haunting investigation into the psychological shadows and public constructions that shaped the career of a woman who was “no more primal than Princess Grace,” as Bullock says in the piece, but for whom the most direct route to entertainment royalty and a chateau in the Périgord meant donning a banana skirt.

Bullock, who like Baker was born in St. Louis, wrote in the program notes that she, too, has sometimes felt the expectation to embrace exotic roles. She became fascinated with Baker’s story, which led from the black vaudeville circuit in Jim Crow America to stardom in Paris, a World War II role in the French Resistance and, back in the United States, public advocacy for the civil rights movement. In this work, which has been revised after previous versions unveiled at festivals in 2016, Bullock probes the cruelties and constraints that molded Baker and continue to afflict black artists.

The Met’s grand staircase is the stage for this new production, directed by Zack Winokur, Bullock’s colleague in the American Modern Opera Company. The setting is as architecturally imposing as it is quietly symbolic: a steep climb, designed to awe. At its top, the canon of Western art — including, as Bullock points out, Tiepolo’s “The Triumph of Marius,” a painting celebrating the enslavement of an African king.

But those representations faded into the darkness with the spotlight on Bullock and Sorey, seated at his keyboard and drums halfway up the steps. Musicians from the International Contemporary Ensemble were stationed at the bottom, almost blending with the audience.

Sorey is a master of fashioning chameleonic soundscapes that fluidly adopt shifting moods, colors and styles. His approach to the songs made famous by Baker is one of deconstruction and recomposition. Most numbers are slowed down and set to harmonies that morph from quiet lyricism to frayed dissonances, with Sorey’s subtle percussion work adding a nervous sheen.

When Baker sang it in 1933, “Si J'étais Blanche” (“If I Were White”) was jaunty, teasing and sly. Here it became eerie and bitter, with splintering flutter-tongued notes from the wind instruments over an ominous rumble offsetting Bullock’s inky, deep voice.

Poet Claudia Rankine created powerful spoken monologues that intersperse musical numbers, drawing on Baker’s own words. These sketch a portrait far removed from the droll, pliable sex object, touching on traumatic memories of racial violence and their lingering effects on Baker’s relationships. (She married four times, beginning in 1919 when she was 13.)

“All of me was already owned,” Bullock said in one monologue. This was followed by “C’est Lui,” a song that listeners in 1934 might have taken for little more than a coquettish confession by a girl irredeemably attracted to bad boys. Here, the wail of a saxophone cut through the space like a siren while Bullock’s voice turned chilly and hard.

But there were also times when Sorey created luscious, finely crafted songs that held echoes of Messiaen or Poulenc and made the most of Bullock’s richly textured voice.

In a tribute to Baker, an icon of the Charleston, some dance is expected. But when Bullock broke into movement — flashing almost-bare breasts and quoting some of the angular gestures made famous by Baker — she did so to the accompaniment of total silence, with only the sound of her increasingly labored breath amplified in space. Where Baker’s dancing communicated liberation and joy, Bullock’s felt caged and desperate.

“I ran,” she had said earlier, in a monologue on Baker’s escape from Jim Crow America, “though everyone called it dancing.”

Additional Notes:

‘Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine’

Repeats on Thursday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Manhattan; metmuseum.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/arts/music/julia-bullock-josephine-baker-met-museum-review.html" id="e6a521d9-3881-3d56-ae39-a5bc2e55fd4d">The New York Times</a>.

Review: A Haunting Tribute to Josephine Baker Arrives at the Met Museum

NEW YORK — Pianist Gerald Moore, one of the great accompanists of the 20th century, called his memoir “Am I Too Loud?”

It’s a question members of the New York Philharmonic should ask themselves on a regular basis. Gentlemen of the brass section: I’m talking to you. Conductors might want to pull up a chair, too.

The Philharmonic’s sound has taken on a hard edge, disrupting some of music’s most glorious moments. Tutti eruptions that felt crude rather than grand blighted the orchestra’s two most recent programs at David Geffen Hall. On Jan. 3, Paavo Jarvi led Dvorak’s Cello Concerto, a Sibelius tone poem and Ravel’s Suite No. 2 from “Daphnis et Chloé.” This weekend’s program, which opened Thursday under the direction of Jakub Hrusa, included Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 and Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade.”

In both programs there was much to like, even to be thrilled by. The strings could be a marvel of cohesion and warmth. Individual solos — of flutist Robert Langevin in the Ravel, or concertmaster Frank Huang in “Scheherazade” — were exquisitely nuanced. But dynamic peaks tended to ring out harshly aggressive, with a sound that was big without being full. Put delicately, fortissimos are not this orchestra’s forte.

In the Dvorak concerto, cellist Gautier Capuçon battled valiantly to assert himself against an ensemble that seemed intent on belittling him. His tone sounded tight and strained at first, but over the course of the first movement it began to glow; his playing became eloquently assured.

This is heroic music that builds pathos and excitement from the contrast of solo cello and large orchestra playing, yes, fortissimo. But while that Italian term translates as “loudest,” brawn should be matched by character. Dvorak marks these moments “grandioso.” They should be an exhilarating amplification of the cello-protagonist. Here, the ensemble obliterated him.

In the hard-driving “Danse Générale” that concludes Ravel’s suite, there were more sledgehammer moments in which volume swallowed up color and complexity. (A shame, since the light-dappled opening “Daybreak” movement held glimpses of the Philharmonic’s playing at its most beguiling.) And in the start of the Rimsky-Korsakov on Thursday — this movement marked “maestoso,” or majestically — the huge brass statements burst out with saber-rattling strength but little majesty.

The most satisfying part of that evening was the Prokofiev concerto with ebullient pianist Simon Trpceski, who gave a performance that encompassed cartoonish humor and hushed lyricism. Hrusa is a charismatic conductor with a particular knack, evident in “Scheherazade,” for minutely shaping a string melody so that an entire section appears to play with the same effortless freedom as a soloist. Hrusa also managed to husband the dynamic forces in the Rimsky-Korsakov so that the most voluminous louds came near the end. But there, once again, the sound lacked the necessary roundness and texture to support the decibel burn.

As the orchestra adapts to its new music director, Jaap van Zweden, who returns to the podium next week, its sound will surely evolve. The ability of a group of musicians to produce earth-shattering loudness with purely acoustic means is one of the joys of classical music and a selling point in an age in which volume is cheap and controlled by a dial. It’s worth getting these fortissimos right.

Program continues through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; 212-875-5656, nyphil.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/arts/music/new-york-philharmonic-jaarvi-hrusa.html" id="f7614eff-921f-3bb3-a4af-9bde490de415">The New York Times</a>.

Memo to the New York Philharmonic: Louder Isn't Better

GlobalFest, which took over the Copacabana nightclub near Times Square for the first time this year, is an annual showcase of music from all corners of the earth. This year 12 acts performed overlapping sets on three stages in what proved a joyful and often raucous celebration of diversity and culture’s uncanny knack for slipping through borders and stretching out roots underneath walls.

As such, the festival is an inherent act of defiance against any attempt to cement hierarchies.

At the same time, it complicates the notion of identity politics by demonstrating the composite nature of style. While the musicians’ art was always fueled by tradition, their distinct sounds were almost invariably shaped by the clash — or serendipitous kiss — of difference.

Sometimes it was the fusion of geographically far-flung styles that yielded new musical alloys. Indian ragas took on a flirtatious shimmer in the hands of Debashish Bhattacharya, who infused them with strains of Flamenco and Hawaiian music and performed them on a new breed of Indian slide guitar of his own devising. The result was a heady mix of languid Polynesian sounds caffeinated by the rhythmic fireworks of the tabla of Subhasis Bhattacharya, Debashish’s brother.

The members of 47Soul are drawn from the Palestinian diaspora, but the group’s musical roots reach even wider, encompassing Middle Eastern dabke drumming, fuzzy synth beats and reggae to eminently danceable effect. Politics are never far from the surface in lyrics that speak of dispossession and in the label — Shamstep — the band has given its music, which voices dreams of Arab unity across the Levant.

In fact, new labels were often needed to capture new hybrids: “Southern Gothic.” “Freak cabaret.” “Afropsychedelic.”

“Afrofuturist global bass” is how the members of Gato Preto describe their combustible blend of rap, funk and Senegalese drumming. The band is fronted by the explosively charismatic Gata Misteriosa, from Mozambique, who teamed up with Ghanaian-German producer Lee Bass and Moussa Diallo, an incandescent djembe master from Senegal. Their set had a steamy carnival energy, with the relentless drive of the machine-made pulse amplified by heart-quickening flurries of live drumming.

Pulses were also set racing by BCUC, a South African group that brings punk-rock energy and hypnotic rhythms to social activism, and by the Orquesta Akokán, a Cuban-American big band uniting dazzling talent and midcentury polish in simmering mambos.

A very different spell was cast by Amythyst Kiah — a self-described “Southern Gothic” singer of “alt-country blues” — who gave a standout performance in the evening’s only solo act. Her razor-sharp guitar picking alone guarantees her a place among blues masters, but it’s her deep-hued voice that can change on a dime from brushed steel to melted toffee that commands attention.

In performance she comes across as both uncompromising and generous. She introduced a song, the traditional “Darling Cora,” by pointing out its shared roots in English and West African folk. When she sang it, accompanying herself on banjo, the instrument’s dry warmth seemed to carry echoes of the African stringed kora.

Jeremy Dutcher, a Canadian member of the Wolastoq tribe, showed that artistic dialogue can be just as fruitful when conducted, not across cultures, but between generations. Dutcher, who won the coveted Polaris Music Prize last year, draws on wax cylinder recordings from the early 1900s of songs in Wolastoqiyik — a language that is now in danger of extinction.

His lyrical compositions layer the ghostly frayed voices of his ancestors with jazzy arpeggios on the piano, keening cellos lines and arching phrases sung in his own voice, which is powered by classical training and colored here and there by the tremor and guttural catch of traditional chant.

Classical strains also filtered into the elegant set by Magos Herrera, a Mexican vocalist with a feline, smoky voice, who teamed with the string quartet Brooklyn Rider and the percussionist Mathias Kunzli for her new album “Dreamers.” Her songs are drawn from across Latin America, united by delight in melody and storytelling, supported by the string quartet as it seamlessly morphs from rhythm section to silver-screen swooning.

And classical instruments appeared — and were sometimes abused — in what was perhaps the most extraordinary show of the evening. Dakh Daughters is born out of Kiev’s theater scene and features seven women who bring equal parts musical and theatrical chops to performances that are witty, subversive and brash.

Dressed in tutus and combat boots with their faces painted white, the Daughters stalked the stage like conquerors taking possession of an alien territory. Texts (in Ukrainian, English and French) were delivered in shouts, hisses and yelps, with the voices sometimes coming together in exquisitely vocalized folk harmonies.

Individually, the voices belonged to wildly disparate worlds including heavy metal, punk, and the glassy plangency of Balkan folk singing. They handled instruments like found objects: a violin propped against a hip, a cello tilted at a rakish angle. The bassist mostly drew sound from her instrument by spanking it; the drummer stomped the foot pedal of her bass drum as if it were vermin.

A signature song of the Daughters is “Rozy/Donbass,” referring to a region contested by Russia, once known to Ukrainians for its rose gardens. It begins with a mournful setting of lines by Shakespeare delivered almost mechanically, with shouts of “Donbass” flung out with raw aggression. Eventually the music takes on a ritualistic whirl until it screeches to a halt with just the word “rozy” — roses — intoned as if by zombies.

The song, like the Daughters’ performance, is darkly seductive and alienating at once — a powerful expression of the tensions endured by women in conflict zones, and a reminder that identity often means fighting on multiple battle lines.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/arts/globalfest-world-music-copacabana.html" id="9e8bdef2-64cc-3813-a69f-d1484d7398c2">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — They showed up in Mardi Gras headdresses, fedoras and tutus paired with combat boots. They drummed on darbukas, djembes and congas. And many of the performers at Sunday’s GlobalFest also brought grievances with them along with their costumes and instruments: against occupation, the erasure of indigenous voices, walls.

At GlobalFest, a World of Music, Costumes and Messages

PRINCETON, N.J. — For as long as I can remember, I have loved the silences of the concert hall almost as much as the sounds. The expectant hush that falls on an auditorium when the oboe’s A pierces through the hum of voices and the lights dim. The way a spellbound audience can wrap a protective silence around a pianissimo ending.

But on a recent afternoon in Richardson Auditorium at Princeton University here, silence became an equal partner to the music. I was in the hall for a series called Live Music Meditation. (The next event, on March 28, features violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja.) For the first 20 minutes, while listeners quietly filed in, I sat motionless with my eyes closed, noting the sounds of footsteps and the rustle of coats.

Gradually, the calm deepened, broken now and then by a male voice inviting us to focus on our breath, relax our shoulders, and clear our minds. From inside this stillness, the sound of a gong rang out like a bright explosion, followed by waves of amber overtones that seemed to dance with each other in space. Then more silence, long minutes of nothing to hear but the breathing of strangers. When the first notes of a clarinet threaded their way into my consciousness, they seemed to come from inside me.

For the next half-hour, as a piano joined the clarinet, music wound its way through me as sound turned pure sensation. Eventually the last note settled back into silence. Then one more time the gong, followed by that male voice, sounding a little sheepish: “Some people would find it appropriate to clap now.”

The applause, when it came, did seem out of place. And the performers, clarinetist Martin Frost and pianist Henrik Mawe, didn’t bow. In an onstage discussion after the unusual concert, they professed to being somewhat overwhelmed.

“We were so aware of you listening to us so intensely that we started to listen to ourselves even more intensely, too,” Mawe said.

An audience member told the musicians that, for him, “the most special thing was the silence before and after you played. There was anticipation without expectation.”

The series, which is free to the public, was conceived by Dasha Koltunyuk, a pianist and a longtime member of a meditation group led by Matthew Weiner, a dean in the office of religious life at the university. By combining guided meditation with live music, she hoped to create a space in which, she said in a statement, “our tendency toward passivity or judgment while hearing music disperses into a pure, perceptive and receptive state of intense, present listening.”

Composers have long played with silence. In the 20th century, they began to dissolve the border between scripted silence inside the music — the rests — and the ambient silence of a given acoustic space. Ligeti’s “Lux Aeterna” fades into seven bars of rest at the end. John Cage’s “4’33"” consists entirely of notated silence.

These days, more presenters are experimenting with ways to make the audience aware of its role in creating the silence out of which music grows. When artist Marina Abramovic presented pianist Igor Levit in Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations at the Park Avenue Armory in 2015, listeners were relieved of their cellphones and outfitted with noise-dampening headphones that helped them sink into deep quiet for 30 minutes before the first notes of Bach.

Concerts inside the Moab Music Festival’s red rock grotto in Utah begin with an invitation to take in the stillness of the natural setting. A two-minute “celebration of silence” is at the center of Chatter in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Gather NYC at SubCulture in Manhattan, both Sunday morning series combining classical music and storytelling. In a telephone interview, violinist and conductor David Felberg, who runs Chatter, said that most audience members close their eyes for that period.

“They’re either meditating or trying to listen to the sounds that exist naturally around them,” he said. “For us, it’s a bit of a palate-cleanser. It’s almost like you’re fresh and ready to listen to the music.”

Weiner, the Princeton dean, who led the guided meditation, said in an interview that he thinks of the quality created in the room not so much as silence but as sensitivity. In Buddhism, he said, that “doesn’t just mean verbal silence with your tongue. It means softening the constructions in your mind that get in the way of experiencing what’s in front of you.”

As a critic normally tasked with shaping those constructions into written words, I was keenly aware of that softening. And as a diligent but novice meditator, I caught a glimpse, through the music, of what it means to let thoughts bubble up without engaging with them — through applause or judgment.

Here was music not as a text to be read nor a recreational drug to be consumed for mood management, but as an audible process of coming-into-being and fading-away. And, for a short while, listening turned into a state of pure receptivity: beginner’s ear.

Live Music Meditation: March 28, with violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, at Richardson Auditorium, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey; princetonuniversityconcerts.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/arts/music/princeton-meditation-music.html" id="eea391e0-7da5-365e-a7f3-dbce8c3ce773">The New York Times</a>.

Out of Silence, the Music of Meditation

NEW YORK — Handel’s “Messiah” plays no part in the Christmas memories of my childhood in Brussels. In our German Lutheran home, Bach provided the soundtrack. The jubilant opening to his Christmas Oratorio, with its excited trumpets and timpani, rang in the exchange of presents.

It was as a high school exchange student in Pittsburgh that I first encountered Handel’s oratorio, at a “Messiah” singalong where your voice type, rather than your ticket, determined where you sat in the hall. I fell in love with the work’s endless variety of melody and mood, the earthshaking bass arias, the airy calm of the later soprano solos.

The pungent beauty of the Tudor text was a revelation to me right at the time that English was becoming my chosen first language. When I returned home, I built Handel’s oratorio into my holiday ritual, listening to my parents’ Neville Marriner recording while wrapping presents or decorating the tree.

I’ve since converted to Judaism, but the work’s themes of yearning for peace, empathy and redemption continue to touch me. This year, I embarked on a “Messiah” marathon, taking in five performances over two weeks. While my professional ear tried to figure out which was the best, I was also curious to hear how the piece changes from one setting to the next and how this music, written in 1741, fits into the fabric of our time.

I began at David Geffen Hall with the New York Philharmonic, joined by the Westminster Symphonic Choir, led by Jonathan Cohen. Next was the Choir of Trinity Wall Street with the Trinity Baroque Orchestra, conducted by Julian Wachner at St. Paul’s Chapel.

Two “Messiahs” at Carnegie Hall followed, both conducted by Kent Tritle: one with the Oratorio Society of New York, featuring a 200-member amateur choir, the other with the professional group Musica Sacra, accompanied on period instruments.

The final performance, at the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer on the Upper East Side, featured the 12-member vocal ensemble Tenet and the Sebastians playing on historical instruments — with no conductor.

Most Relevant

There’s a reason Trinity’s “Messiah” sits at the top of critics’ lists each year. Wachner’s take on the score is fresh and urgent, and members of the nimble professional choir step out to sing solos, creating a sense of the oratorio as town hall meeting. In this year’s intimate setting — George Washington prayed at St. Paul’s Chapel after his inauguration in 1789 — even modest voices shone, and certain phrases of the text were especially resonant, like “and the government shall be upon his shoulders.”

Best Choir

Handel puts a chorus through its paces in dazzling numbers like “For unto us a child is born,” full of fleet runs. The small professional ensembles belonging to Trinity and Tenet nailed these virtuosic passages, as they should, but the students of Westminster Choir College dazzled with singing that was precise and radiant, with the warmth that comes from a large ensemble.

Best Orchestra

In Handel, period-instrument ensembles are on their home turf. Trinity is reliably eloquent, but this conductorless group brought laserlike focus to the music and delivered a “Messiah” as chamber music, in which individual instruments became active participants in the drama.

Best Rage Aria

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim

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With this force, even silence is exhilarating