Western classical music is often thought of as placeless: a grammar of sound that belongs everywhere and nowhere, drifting free of soil, climate, history, on some variation of Henry Russell Cleveland’s axiom from 1835, that “Music begins where language ends.” There is, we tell ourselves, a Schumann for all seasons. Africa, by contrast, is so […]
Tag: Orchestra
Posted inEssay
They Toll For Thee
Bells call people to pray, to mourn, to marry. They pass them news of war, peace, fire, and flood. On a sweltering August afternoon in London, they summoned me to the Royal Albert Hall. That night’s performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 from The Hallé at the BBC Proms was partly special because it was […]
Posted inEssay
A Feast of Symbols
Lighting up mid-conversation, Murat Erginol sat at a coffee shop in the breezy, open-air halls of Atatürk Culture Center, Istanbul’s premier performing arts complex. Erginol, wispily bearded and quick to smile, is, among other accolades, first violinist of the Gedik Philharmonic Orchestra, one of Turkey’s many privately sponsored ensembles. Then rehearsing “The Four Seasons” by […]
Posted inReport
City of Beasts
When your home becomes a nightmare, what sound does it make? In composer Xavier Muzik’s “Strange Beasts,” it growls. It hisses. It groans. It goes topsy-turvy, unrecognizable. It vanishes. As Muzik told a San Francisco audience in February, at some point during the pandemic, his city, Los Angeles, became the stuff of nightmares. The 29-year-old […]
Posted inReport
Conductor Carlos Kalmar Sues the Deeply Divided Cleveland Institute of Music
After a Title IX investigation into his conduct became public last year, conductor Carlos Kalmar is suing the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he served as director of orchestral studies before “enter[ing] into a leave of absence” in September, for between $5 and $260 million in damages. The federal suit was filed in the Northern […]
Posted inReport
Matinee Idyll
Vladimir Horowitz stretches out on his sofa. Basking in the glow of a recent Carnegie Hall triumph, the virtuoso grants a rare interview. He has something important to say, a deeply held wish he’s rarely discussed. The conversation is nearly over before he brings it up. “The only thing which I change,” begins the maestro, […]
Posted inProfile
The Value of Normality
I The drive from Tbilisi airport to the Tsinandali Estate should take about two hours, but it’s a much swifter journey in the very early morning. We zoom serenely along the quiet highways, slowing only to swerve stray dogs who have wandered onto the road. Each swerve is a sudden lurch that jolts me out […]
Posted inReport
Relaxing in the Pressure Cooker
On YouTube, there’s a video of a 1973 concert with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and Bernard Haitink performing Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with soloist Artur Rubinstein. It’s an extraordinary concert to hear, between the young Haitink, the 86-year-old Rubinstein, and the orchestra’s signature sound (consistently described as “homogeneous and transparent at the same time”). The […]
Posted inStuff I’ve Been Hearing
Weary Deserts and Distant Sounds
If I had to name a favorite Strauss opera, “Daphne” would make a Cinderella-run to the center of my bracket. It doesn’t have the revolutionary spirit of “Salome,” nor the orgiastic horns of “Der Rosenkavalier.” It’s weird, but not in the way that “Die Frau ohne Schatten” is weird, and in terms of Strauss’s affinity […]
Posted inReport
“You’re Afraid to Ask Your Friends How They Are”
On November 26, the Youth Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine (YsOU) performed a concert titled “A Night for Ukraine” at the Konzerthaus in Berlin. Supported by the Goethe Institut and the YsOU’s German counterpart, the Federal Youth Orchestra of Germany, the event had patriotic trappings, with blue and yellow light projected on the back of the […]