Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim

The first time I saw the Met’s dotaku, I stopped dead in my tracks. The expectation of sound had been turned into a sacrificial act of silence. From inside two slits high up on the bell, I thought I saw the ghost of John Cage smiling out.

Cage’s “4’33’’” may be the most notorious act of silence to be offered as music. But it fits into a long lineage of efforts to endow silence with artistic meaning. In Japanese music, the term “ma” suggests the space in between sounds that a performer must master. Debussy wrote that the music is not in the notes, but in the spaces between them. In a similar vein, Miles Davis said, “It’s not the notes you play; it’s the notes you don’t play.”

As social beings, we are hard-wired to interpret breaks in the flow of human communication. We recognize the pregnant pause, the stunned silence, the expectant hush. A one-beat delay on an answer can reveal hesitation or hurt, or play us for laughs. A closer listen shows musical silence to be just as eloquent.

This is a rough guide to recognizing and reading music’s negative spaces.

1. Before Western composers came up with a way to notate them, the length of rests in music were often dictated by buildings. When groups of monks, facing each other in a reverberant chapel, intoned psalms in plainchant, they inserted a pause in the middle of a verse. The length of this “media distinctio” was partly determined by acoustics: It prevented the next line of text from getting entangled with the resonance trail of the last. But as musicologist Emma Hornby has pointed out, it also created a meditative space. It synchronized the community and underlined, as she writes, “the unity of the monastery breathing and singing together.”

2. When Monteverdi wrote the opera “Orfeo,” he wasn’t just retelling a myth. His opera also advertised the power of this new form of sung drama by writing music that was about music — and silence. In the prologue, the allegorical character La Musica addresses the audience and declares her dominion over not just human emotions, but also nature itself.

“While I alternate my songs, now happy, now sad,” she sings, “let no small bird stir among these trees, no noisy wave be heard on these riverbanks, and let each little breeze halt in its course.” To demonstrate her power, Monteverdi brings the music to a complete standstill. He trains the audience’s ears on sounds, which he then takes away so that attention turns in on itself, onto the very process of listening.

In a later opera, Monteverdi wrote an exquisite lullaby, “Oblivion soave,” in which the performers seem to nod off themselves, before coming to and completing the song. Much of early Baroque music would use rests in such a literal way. As sound painting, silence could come to depict sleep, death, featureless landscapes or — in tiny breaks written into a vocal line — an emotional speaker choking on sobs.

3. Reason was the order of the day in the Enlightenment, and with it the art of persuasion. In the 18th century, music theorists codified rests and silences according to the rules of rhetoric, and encouraged composers to take inspiration from oration and acting. In an article on musical phrasing, Rousseau drew the analogy with an actor onstage who “agitated, transported with a passion which does not suffer him to go through his speech, is interrupted, breaks off, makes a stop.” Listen to the Fantasie in C (Wq 61/6) by C.P.E. Bach and note how the abrupt stops and pauses seem to delineate different arguments and affects.

Avi Stein, an organist and harpsichordist, said in a phone interview that the irregular rests in 18th-century music also reflected its mercurial nature. The composers of the period “had a fascination with improvisation and an almost schizophrenic idea of the emotions,” he said. “Often they can seem to throw out an emotion and then place a rest, so that we are unsure if you will stay on with that character, or throw it out and respond with a totally different gesture.”

4. If 18th-century musicians could emulate great orators or actors with judicious placement of rests, they could just as easily play the clown. Haydn was a master at this.

Take the last movement of his “Joke” Quartet, which introduces an upbeat tune and repeats it. A lot. So often, in fact, that within two minutes it has lodged itself like an earworm in the listener’s brain. Then Haydn cuts in with made-you-wait pauses and false endings. It’s cute. It’s funny. It gets a little annoying. But he keeps at it long enough that the last blip of the theme — after seven full bars of nothing — becomes a wink of sublime silliness.

Violinist Clara Lyon, who has recorded Haydn’s “Joke” with the Spektral Quartet, said in a phone interview that the composer is here “tapping into something that’s at the root of really basic clowning. You are teaching the audience how the joke goes as you’re telling the joke.”

5. Beethoven is so often associated with images of him scowling that it’s worth remembering that he, too, was adept at the comic rest. He also mastered the mystical silence, dramatic silence, and silence-as-sound-painting.

But what Beethoven introduced most forcefully into Western music was the explosive silence. The technique is not unlike that behind comic rests: You carry your listeners along on a train of musical thought that leads them to think they know what’s coming. Then you pull out the rug from underneath.

In the first movement of his “Eroica” Symphony, that train of thought builds up aggressive momentum, culminating in a series of slashing dissonant chords that are repeated with relentless force. Then, on the first beat of the next bar, where the ear expects either more of the same or a resolution of the harmonic tension — a void. “The loudest silence in musical literature,” musicologists Grosvenor Cooper and Leonard Meyer call this moment.

The shock of a rest such as this one draws its power from a certain regular meter or pattern that has been set up beforehand. At an unconscious level, listeners begin to identify the pulse of the music with their own. When it drops away unexpectedly, the silence delivers a heart-stopping jolt.

6. For the remainder of the 19th century, composers increasingly played with what we might call liminal silence. This is often quiet and ultrathin orchestration at the outer edges of a composition, designed to blur the line between composed sounds and the ambient hum of the concert hall. The music, once it registers as such, seems to coalesce out of nothing. At the end of some pieces, it fades into thin air.

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony begins almost imperceptibly. Mahler’s First is another example of music that seems to emerge from an amniotic brew of quiet notes, suspended in time. Other romantic symphonies recede into silence, such as Tchaikovsky’s Sixth and Brahms’s Third.

7. Along with other emancipation movements, the 20th century witnessed the emancipation of musical silence. The proportions of sound to not-sound were renegotiated to the point where roles seemed reversed. In Webern’s atonal miniatures, islands of sound float in a sea of white. Composers could now get away with writing so much empty space into their works because listening habits had changed. Unlike the boisterous audiences of Haydn’s time, modern concertgoers came to a performance prepared to sit still, in semidarkness, wearing what George Bernard Shaw called their “in-churchiest” expressions. Now, when the sounds fell away in the midst of a work, there was a good chance the space would be filled with attentive silence.

8. Even so, the premiere of Cage’s “4’33’’,” in 1952 in Woodstock, New York, aroused tempers. Here was a “performance” with deliberate sound-making removed from the equation. The position of the performer at the piano created the expectation of music in a way that made those in attendance switch into musical listening mode. But their attention was stubbornly turned back on themselves, and on the ambient noises in the room.

Cage’s silent piece acts like a mirror, revealing what the listener brings into the hall — rustling bodies, digestive clicks, impatience and derision. That sense of the rest as a reflecting pond is also a feature in the music of Arvo Pärt. A piece like “Psalom” for strings takes musical phrases that sound like questions and lobs them into gaping black silences. Whether the long-drawn-out pauses in between feel sheltering or terrifying depends on each listener’s state of mind.

What unites music’s negative spaces — whether they are designed for comedy, drama or mysticism — is their power to propel the listener from the role of passive consumer to active participant. As in a limerick recited with the last word missing, the brain jumps in to complete the rhyme.

Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, who directs the music cognition lab at Princeton University, writes of “episodes of meta-listening” where composers bring listening habits to the surface “weaving this into the fabric of the aesthetic object.”

Perhaps that is why Debussy and Davis pointed to the moments of not-sound as the very essence of music: It is in those spaces that listening really listens to itself, and to the wider world.

This article originally appeared in

One of the most arresting objects on display in the musical instruments galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a 2,000-year-old bell from Japan that was built to be mute. Dotaku bells such as this one still puzzle historians, but we know they were made without clappers and buried in earth, probably as part of a ritual designed to bless crops.

Completing the Music With Silence

“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

Her death was confirmed by her son M. Christian Brown.

Mason’s concert career took her to churches and halls on five continents. In 1957, she was the first American woman to play an organ concerto at Westminster Abbey.

By then she had established herself as a performer of persuasive and vivid readings of new music, thanks in part to her 1951 recording of Arnold Schoenberg’s Variations on a Recitative (Op. 40). Mason, who had taken lessons with Schoenberg in 1949 in Los Angeles, became one of the most prominent advocates for this dense and spiky piece.

She commissioned more than 70 works from composers, including William Bolcom and Jean Langlais.

“She saw the organ repertoire as this continuum from the medieval period up to the present,” organist and composer Gregory Hamilton, a former student, said in a telephone interview. “I think she just loved everything.” Hamilton composed an evening-length work for flute, narrators and organ for her in 2003.

Mason performed cycles of the complete organ works of Johann Sebastian Bach three times and recorded the complete organ works of Johann Pachelbel. Her interpretations of early music were shaped in part by the old instruments she encountered in Europe. “The organ is the best teacher,” she would say.

Scott Hyslop, a former student, said Mason had revised her approach to Bach after studying baroque organs in East Germany in the early 1980s. “She came back from Europe with a whole different philosophy,” he said. “After close to 40 years of playing this music, she reworked all her fingerings and pedaling. She loved to learn herself.”

Mason undertook five such research trips with members of C.B. Fisk, an American organ manufacturer that had been hired to make an organ for the University of Michigan modeled on instruments by the 18th-century organ builder Gottfried Silbermann. The resulting organ, in the Blanche Anderson Moore Hall on the university’s campus in Ann Arbor, is named after Mason.

Bringing such an instrument to Ann Arbor gave her students opportunities for direct knowledge of historic organ-building principles.

Moreover, on a more practical level, she told the magazine The Diapason, in performing with the instrument “the bellows may be hand pumped and a recital could go on despite an electrical storm.”

Marilyn May Mason was born in Alva, Oklahoma, on June 29, 1925. Her mother, Myrtle (Else) Mason, was a pianist and church organist. While still a teenager, Marilyn assisted her mother at First Presbyterian Church in Alva.

Mason’s grandfather, Harry E. Mason, founded the Alva State Bank in 1901, and her father, Merritt Clark Mason, continued to run it.

After studying at Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas, and at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Mason transferred to the University of Michigan, where she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. She became an instructor there in 1947.

Although she went to New York to earn her doctorate in sacred music at Union Theological Seminary and spent time in Paris studying analysis and theory with the noted teacher Nadia Boulanger, she remained on the Michigan faculty for 67 years, longer than anyone in its history, the university said.

From Boulanger she borrowed a maxim she often repeated to her own students: “Every day we must try to do our very best.”

Hyslop, now the director of parish music at St. Lorenz Lutheran Church in Frankenmuth, Michigan, said of Mason: “She was very disciplined. She was very insistent that when you came in, you had fingerings figured out. She said fingerings are your strategy; it’s like a general going into battle.”

But in Mason’s organ studio, that rigor was wedded to warmth, humor and practical assistance in all aspects of the lives of her countless students. She found them scholarships and helped them find jobs as church organists so that they could begin to pay off tuition. She herself served a number of denominations over time, notably as organist at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor for 27 years.

Her first husband, Richard K. Brown, was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Michigan. They were married from 1948 until his death in 1991. She married William Steinhoff, a retired professor of English at the university, in 1993. He died in 2009.

Along with her son Christian, Mason is survived by another son, Edward, a photographer; and four grandchildren.

This article originally appeared in <a id="0e69f32c-5428-3508-a15f-f710b03eb395" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/obituaries/marilyn-mason-dead.html">The New York Times</a>.

Marilyn Mason, Globe-Trotting Organist and Teacher, Dies at 93

Marilyn Mason, a concert organist who championed living composers and shaped generations of organists over a record-breaking 67 years on the faculty at the University of Michigan, died on April 4 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. She was 93.

Marilyn Mason, globe-trotting organist and teacher, dies at 93

The cast wasn’t to blame. With the fiercely empathetic mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato as Sesto, a trouser role she has made her own, this revival made a strong case for the work’s rehabilitation on musical grounds.

But by recycling the airless Rococo-dress staging by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle from 1984, the Met perpetuates the prejudice against the work as dramatically irrelevant. His take is so short on ideas that it might be more honest to let the singers wear their own clothes and call it a concert production.

Mozart wrote “Clemenza” on commission in 1791 for the coronation of Leopold II as king of Bohemia. In the opera, a Roman emperor forgives his friend, who had been compelled by love to conspire against him. The 1734 libretto, by Pietro Metastasio, already felt sclerotic by Mozart’s theatrical standards; he tweaked it to create ensemble numbers amid the sequence of dry recitatives and pomp-and-firework arias that made up a traditional opera seria.

Even so, an Austrian nobleman who attended the premiere called it “most boring” in his diary. The new queen, Maria Luisa, struggled to stay awake. Reports that she called the opera “una porcheria tedesca” — German pigswill — may be apocryphal. Or perhaps she bristled at the work’s political message, which presented clemency and tolerance as a ruler’s supreme virtues just weeks after Marie Antoinette had been arrested midflight and forcibly returned to Paris amid jeering crowds. After all, the production Leopold and Maria Luisa watched in Prague was in contemporary dress.

On Saturday, the singers struggled to convey a unified dramatic concept amid 18th-century wigs and pastel Roman columns. Tenor Matthew Polenzani sang the title role of the ruler unhappy inside his power bubble with a plush, slightly woolly tone and plain-spoken phrasing. In one scene he confronts Sesto, who has confessed to the plot on his life without letting on that the vengeful Vitellia (the voluble soprano Elza van den Heever) manipulated him into it. Polenzani’s acting seemed to suggest a homoerotic bond between Tito and Sesto. That’s an intriguing idea, but would require a new staging designed around it; the opera shows Sesto being very much in love with Vitellia.

And when DiDonato portrays that passion, she does so wholeheartedly, with body and voice. In scenes with van den Heever, her sound was flickering, brilliant and complex, its warmth tempered with the touch of vinegar DiDonato injects when singing the part of a man.

In the dazzling aria “Parto, parto,” DiDonato vividly rendered the moment at which her character, buffeted by hope and despair, snaps into action and commits to the conspiracy plan. The subtle electric charge that went through the house at that moment was yet another reminder that she is one of the great singer-actors of our time.

Van den Heever’s acting is more rigidly histrionic, but with her flame-drawn singing, she brought a welcome over-the-topness to a work filled with conflicted-but-noble characters.

A source of pure joy and light was Ying Fang as Servilia, sung with a soprano of succulent sweetness. Her character is mostly a foil for Tito’s generosity: He wants to marry her but desists instantly when she tells him she is in love with another man, Annio. But something about Servilia’s quiet integrity and courage clearly endeared her to Mozart, because he wrote two of the opera’s loveliest arias for her.

As Annio — another trouser role — mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo conveyed youthful tension with a high-voltage, nervy tone. Bass-baritone Christian Van Horn was decorous and steely as Publio, the guardian of protocol.

In the pit, Lothar Koenigs drew brisk and streamlined playing from the Met Orchestra — which included 22 players who had soldiered through the five-hour matinee of Wagner’s “Die Walküre” earlier in the day. Their commitment to reviving the musical riches of “Clemenza” was inspiring. The Met should invest in a production to match it.

Through April 20 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org.

This article originally appeared in <a id="ad410dbb-d569-4198-b739-067b03062d42" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/31/arts/music/met-opera-clemenza-di-tito-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

Review: The Met makes a case for Mozart's least-loved opera

NEW YORK — “La Clemenza di Tito,” Mozart’s least-loved opera, returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday evening to an auditorium yawning with empty seats.

That’s the running time of “Das Rheingold,” the prelude peopled with gods, dwarves and giants fighting over the gold that will cast its curse over the story. Then, at the beginning of “Die Walküre,” which returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Monday night and will be screened in cinemas worldwide Saturday, we see a gesture that feels personal and true.

A stranger seeking refuge asks the lady of the house for a drink of water. As she gives it to him, their hands touch. He drinks, and the music surges: Something other than thirst needs quenching.

They are twins — Sieglinde, bittersweetly sung by the soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek, and Siegmund, the leonine tenor Stuart Skelton — separated in childhood. It is their combustible, transgressive love, sparked over that first sip of water, that plants the seeds for the end of a world built on rules, power and greed. Skelton and Westbroek were bright stars in a cast led by the blazing soprano Christine Goerke as Brünnhilde. The conductor Philippe Jordan presided over the orchestra, where he whipped up voluptuously sulfurous playing from the Met players.

Casting the “Ring” is a task almost as herculean as singing it, and the Met can feel smug about much of the talent it has assembled for this revival. In Goerke, the house has found a Brünnhilde who marries vocal vitality and emotional presence in each radiant note. She takes on the physically grueling task with ninja-like focus and suppleness.

But “Die Walküre” demands a production that magnifies the work’s psychological nuances and eminently human conflicts.

Robert Lepage’s high-tech staging tickles the palate of the Instagram age with an expensive gadget made out of rotating planks that configure themselves into sculptural backdrops and surfaces for video wizardry. As a set, this behemoth is stiff, clunky and dangerous. Whenever singers are made to scramble atop its wobbly planks — mindful, perhaps, of the stumble Deborah Voigt took as Brünnhilde in 2011 — their movements are stiff, clunky and self-conscious.

And when singers don’t arrive with a fully formed idea of their characters, or the vocal resources to fill them, the machine’s smooth planes coldly project their hesitancy into the auditorium. That happened on Monday in Greer Grimsley’s Wotan, who came across as detached and bitter.

For much of the opera, the god Wotan stews in a marinade of anger, shame and impotence, torn between the implacable laws that shore up his rule and his yearning for an act of free will — like the shocking sibling love of Siegmund and Sieglinde — that could tear down his own power construct. In a long monologue, he sings of his conflicting desires and of the gnawing curse placed on the ring. The orchestra acts like a CT scan of his brain: Reflecting his subconscious thoughts with telltale leitmotifs, the musical tags denoting emotions, events and people.

But at the most chilling moment, the music shuts off completely, leaving the singer to stare into a gaping black silence. That abyss is framed by Wotan twice crying “Das Ende!” (“The end!”), once with desperate power, the second time quietly. Grimsley’s outcry lacked nihilistic conviction, and his unsteady echoing answer felt neither cleansed nor changed.

By contrast, Goerke’s Brünnhilde, who has observed her father’s despair, responded with singing of fingertip delicacy, a precise and private sound that clearly marked the awakening of compassion as her character’s destiny. But Goerke was also capable of zinging fortes in her “Hojotoho!” war cries that Wagner sets to something like a proto-ambulance siren.

Jamie Barton’s portrayal of Fricka, Wotan’s wife, was also brilliantly purposeful and vocally commanding. Her flamboyant mezzo-soprano, with its inky depths and flickering hues, rendered the character as guardian of legal integrity. But, in the surprisingly tender tone in which she passes the responsibility on to Brünnhilde, she hinted at a deeper sense of not only the futility, but also the undesirability of being proved right.

Personifying that undesirability is Hunding, Sieglinde’s cuckold husband, who has every right to demand revenge no matter how unsympathetic he may be. The bass Günther Groissböck sang the role with crisp intention and lethal bite. He was a fine foil for the pair of incestuous lovers whose passion simmers and flickers even in his stern presence.

Westbroek’s singing mirrored the gradual abandonment of domestic and moral constraints, chiseled and dark-limned at first while still under her husband’s roof, then more florid, voluble and bright as Sieglinde gives in to passion. Skelton’s Siegmund was heedless from the start — perhaps too much so, as he pushed his beefy tenor to supernatural extremes in the shouts of “Wälse! Wälse!” with which he invokes ancestral protection.

His tenor sometimes sounded frayed in subsequent phrases. But it was the sort of come-hell-or-high-water commitment that Wagner’s brilliant and megalomaniacal creation demands.

Through May 7 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org.

This article originally appeared in <a id="47b8b766-ac56-413b-b2d9-4dc1c516887d" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/arts/music/met-opera-die-walkure-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

The Met's 'Walküre' Has a Cast Worth Bragging About

NEW YORK — A listener sitting through the whole of the “Ring” — Wagner’s four-opera epos about the birth and destruction of a civilization — has to wait 2 1/2 hours for the first relatable human interaction.

The Met's 'Walküre' has a cast worth bragging about

<h1>NEW YORK — Ghosts were always going to be part of star violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter’s recital at Carnegie Hall this week. The advertised program featured Mozart, as well as the spirit of that composer as it flickers through later French music. And the concert was also to include Sebastian Currier’s new “Ghost Trio,” which riffs on themes of influence and musical forebears.</h1>

But when Mutter and her longtime chamber music partner, pianist Lambert Orkis, took to the stage at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday, the specter most strongly felt was that of André Previn, the conductor, composer and musical polymath. Mutter and Previn were once married and remained close friends and artistic collaborators until his death Feb. 28.

And so, at the end of an evening of brilliant and often uncannily delicate music-making, Mutter played two Previn works as encores. She dedicated them to him — “wherever he is now,” she said with a spiraling gesture taking in the air around and above her.

Mutter has built her career on a rich, glossy tone and glamorous stage presence. She is one of the few violinists who can pull off solo recitals in Carnegie’s big hall. On this occasion, she used her magnetism to draw listeners into a world of sounds that included pallid, watery tones a mere whisper away from silence.

Most surprising, perhaps, she used these spectral colors in the opening work, Mozart’s Violin Sonata in E minor (K. 304), where the opening theme took on brittle weariness. In the second movement, she rendered one ostensibly sunny theme with such spidery lightness that the consolation it offered came across as a mere mirage.

In Debussy’s Violin Sonata, such disembodied sounds are written into the score by a composer who plays on fluctuations of heat and density. In this elegant and sensuous music, Mutter showed off her trademark rich tone and flamboyant expressiveness.

A second Mozart sonata, in B flat (K. 454), became a vehicle for spirited and flirtatious playing, as did the debonair and witty Violin Sonata of Poulenc. Both works trick the listener with wait-for-it endings. After more than 25 years playing together, Mutter and Orkis have their comic timing down pat.

Humor, alienation and hallucinatory echoes of past music come together in Currier’s “Ghost Trio.” In nine succinct movements, with titles like “Remote,” “Mysterious” and “Forceful,” this work weaves glancing — and distorted — references to piano trios by Beethoven, Mendelssohn and others into his own intricate, emotionally focused language. In duet with Mutter, Orkis’ playing is unfailingly attentive. Here his technical brilliance came to the forefront while Daniel Müller-Schott’s buttery cello added depth and contour.

Müller-Schott also joined for the first encore, a movement from Previn’s Piano Trio No. 1, which had its premiere (with Mutter and, on piano, Previn himself) 10 years ago at Carnegie. The movement, “Spirited,” maintains a sybaritic optimism even through emotional U-turns.

A touching rendition of “Song” from “Tango Song and Dance” (1997) followed. Written for Mutter, she played this effusively melodic music with a sweet, sometimes tremulous tone that felt unaffected and personal.

This article originally appeared in <a id="f90299c6-1c7c-46b1-a3a2-2483f31d27da" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/arts/music/review-anne-sophie-mutter-andre-previn-carnegie.html">The New York Times</a>.

Review: Anne-Sophie Mutter pays tribute to Previn at Carnegie Hall

Mutter has built her career on a rich, glossy tone and glamorous stage presence. She is one of the few violinists who can pull off solo recitals in Carnegie’s big hall.

<h1>NEW YORK — The Philharmonia Orchestra of London paid a visit to New York on Sunday and Monday with conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, and all I want to talk about is its sound.</h1>

But if I had to name the standout moment that’s stayed with me from their two concerts at David Geffen Hall, it would be a brief pause that was filled to bursting with tension.

It happened twice, actually, in the finale of a glittering performance on Sunday afternoon of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7, where the composer writes in a short silence before a fortissimo onslaught. Both times, the hall filled with a mighty unison inhalation, a collective gulp of oxygen and nerve as powerful as that of an Olympic swimmer coming up for air in the butterfly.

With good orchestras, you can sense the mental energy of 90-odd players bundled into one force. What I actually heard in those brief rests in the Bruckner were probably only the brass players reloading for the next big blow — but that breath was so dramatic as to seem to truly unify this massive ensemble.

The Philharmonia under Salonen is a wondrous creature to behold. Painfully good, from the perspective of New Yorkers who had hoped that he would take over the leadership of the New York Philharmonic from Alan Gilbert. Their disappointment was softened only by reports that Salonen simply wasn’t in the market, wanting more time to compose. Then came the news in December that he is to become the next music director of the San Francisco Symphony.

Salonen has worked with the Philharmonia Orchestra for over three decades. In that time, he has helped shape a sound that is stunningly muscular, smooth and cohesive. Those fortissimo salvos in the Bruckner had power but also a high-gloss polish — especially across the brass section, where individual colors were alloyed together, with just the gleaming trumpets sailing on top.

These players know how to form impromptu combinations when the music requires it, as when the cellos and horns made a hybrid of oaky mellowness in the first movement of the Bruckner. Salonen’s obsessive attention to sound also found expression in two unusual placements: the one designed for greater blend, the other for disruption.

In the Bruckner, the orchestra’s tuba player repositioned himself between movements. He joined the horns and Wagner tubas in the Adagio — their joint sound taking on a gnomish melancholy — before returning to his regular spot next to the trombones for the heavy lifting in the fortissimos of the final two movements. In Monday’s performance of Stravinsky’s “The Firebird,” a single trumpeter took up position in a balcony of the auditorium, startling listeners with notes of anarchic exuberance.

Both Bruckner’s symphony and “The Firebird” require a careful marshaling of forces so that the climactic moments late in the game really soar. The composers’ approaches couldn’t be more different: In his sprawling, methodical works, Bruckner seeks the sublime within the strict confines of protocol. Stravinsky breaks rules; he questions and quarrels, and yet finds a consensus that tips into transcendence. Salonen found the balance between discipline and freedom in both works.

That same balance informs Salonen’s own charismatic Cello Concerto, which here had an eloquent soloist in Truls Mork. Ever in pursuit of unusual sound constellations, Salonen shapes the final movement as a riveting contest of will between the solo cello and a percussionist stationed at a set of bongos and congas at the front of the orchestra. Besides the visual appeal — a blur of hands on skin and bow on string — the unlikely pairing makes you hear the rhythmic capability of the cello and the vocal quality of the drums.

The concerto’s first two movements are a fascinating study in density and translucence, with sounds morphing from silvery and wan to red-blooded and impassioned. Orchestral textures that start off as a hollow whistle gather force like a storm that buffets the solo cello. The conclusion, after the kinetic fireworks of cello and drums have burned themselves out, sends slivers of electronically processed cello harmonics ricocheting around the auditorium like the distant keening of gulls.

This article originally appeared in <a id="4e2cd1ae-722a-48af-8f6a-049f8a070817" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/arts/music/review-esa-pekka-salonen-philharmonia-orchestra.html">The New York Times</a>.

With this force, even silence is exhilarating

It happened twice, actually, in the finale of a glittering performance on Sunday afternoon of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7, where the composer writes in a short silence before a fortissimo onslaught.

<h1>NEW YORK — One way to test a relationship is to travel together. There’s nothing like a change of environment and the odd sudden surprise for revealing the structural flaws in a partnership, or knitting it closer together. When the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and conductor Daniel Harding took the stage at Carnegie Hall on Thursday and Friday the maestro and the musicians, touring together, may been wondering: Is this working for me?</h1>

The Concertgebouw is one of the great orchestras in the world, and used to being wooed by stars. (As if to make the point, Friday’s program included Strauss’ “Ein Heldenleben,” which the composer dedicated to the players of this Dutch orchestra in 1898.)

Since its chief conductor, Daniele Gatti, was fired last summer over allegations of sexual impropriety (he denied the accusations), the orchestra has been searching for a new leader. When it tapped Harding, 43, an English conductor now mostly butterflying from one prestigious guest gig to another, to lead its American tour, many wondered if this was a first step toward something more lasting.

Last week’s performances showed that while the partnership is still far from symbiotic, it can, at its best, make thrilling music. The jitters were mostly felt during Thursday’s program, which included Schubert’s “Manfred” overture, Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 and Brahms’ Fourth. On Friday things came together gloriously in Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto with pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, “Heldenleben,” and a new work by Guillaume Connesson.

With its well-worn staples, Thursday’s program looked safe on paper. But the orchestra injected it with a dose of unpredictability by inviting members of the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America to join its ranks.

This is part of an initiative the orchestra has developed at home and in European Union’ countries to give young musicians the experience of playing alongside first-rate professionals. It was a lovely gesture to extend on tour, even if it introduced the occasional unevenness into the Schumann.

The shakiness of the Mozart was harder to explain. The pops of dynamic contrast in the first movement came across as shrill rather than exuberant and the long arc of the andante’s melody seemed pieced together out of Lego blocks with the seams all too visible.

But Harding led an exciting reading of Brahms’ Symphony No. 4. The opening movement grows out of small motifs, in a way that can sound labored. Harding’s opening gesture was so expansive that the first sigh in the strings appeared to complete, or perhaps answer, a thought.

This was the opening to a burnished performance built on long narrative arcs and juicy color. Brahms’ music proved a perfect vehicle for this orchestra with its plush strings, warm and rounded brass sound and, especially, its impressive horn section. The concluding passacaglia brilliantly tied together the moments of archaic severity and private expression, with a memorable flute solo of deep, increasingly desperate, sadness.

“Eirene” is a 10-minute orchestral meditation on the Greek goddess of peace by Connesson, a stylistically omnivorous composer with a knack for scintillating textures. With its impressionistic opening giving way to sweeping melodies, the work has an appealing throwback glamour with touches of Mahlerian Weltschmerz and just a hint of jazzy swing.

It was a peaceful opening to a concert centered around celebrations of the heroic, including — in Strauss’ tone poem — a saber-rattling depiction of battle that the Concertgebouw players delivered with ferocious energy. But Harding and Aimard, the splendid soloist in the Beethoven concerto, also showed that a certain amount of restraint can lend deeper dignity to valor.

Their tempo in the first movement of the Emperor Concerto was sufficiently held back to lend the music a processional majesty. Dynamics were carefully balanced, with a glassy delicacy to the music-box passages and an almost tropical richness to the jubilant fanfares.

There was more dazzle to come in the Strauss, and plenty of moments in which individual players and sections took the spotlight. One of the orchestra’s concertmasters, Liviu Prunaru, showed off a magnificently full-bodied sound in his solos. Harding conducted elegantly, with intelligence and purpose.

Even so, I couldn’t help noticing that the musicians’ eyes were often elsewhere. String players often glance at each other, or keep their eyes focused on the concertmaster’s bow. Part of what makes this orchestra play so well is that its members approach the music like chamber musicians, which means that much of the time they don’t look at the conductor at all.

This article originally appeared in <a id="233ec79a-d9cc-48e3-a5d8-e6b9a66c7321" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/17/arts/music/review-concertgebouw-daniel-harding.html">The New York Times</a>.

Review: A road test for Concertgebouw and Daniel Harding

The Concertgebouw is one of the great orchestras in the world, and used to being wooed by stars.

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

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.

<h1>NEW YORK — Class tensions simmer in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” The philandering protagonist may make no distinction in the women he hunts, but with the men who help or hinder his efforts — his servant Leporello and the peasant Masetto, whose bride, Zerlina, seems so delectable — he wields aristocratic clout like a club.</h1>

Social mobility? Psh. Only someone as naive as Zerlina could fall for that.

For the cast, though, it’s a different story. With the exception of the noble but impotent Don Ottavio, a tenor part, the male roles all call for low voices that are potentially interchangeable. That’s how, last week at the Metropolitan Opera, Italian bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni came to make his role debut as Don Giovanni in the same drab 2011 production by Michael Grandage, in which he has previously sung Leporello. Years earlier, in Salzburg, Pisaroni was Masetto.

Meanwhile the Met’s current Leporello, Russian bass Ildar Abdrazakov, has starred here before as the Don. That made the serenade scene in Act II, in which master and servant swap clothes, deliciously meta. Or so I told myself Saturday, straining to find anything of interest in this leathery take on Mozart’s dark masterpiece.

Vocally, both men fit their roles well. Pisaroni sounded muscular and suave in the title role, though his Don Giovanni felt more like a frat boy than a shape-shifting object of fascination. Abdrazakov’s hearty gruffness suited his part, and his earthy comic acting was effective.

Watching the two singers trade places, I wondered whether Leporello was not the more desirable role. When he originated the role of Don Giovanni in 1787, Luigi Bassi (described by contemporaries as a “most beautiful but utterly stupid” singer) complained that the protagonist never gets a real aria. Leporello’s million-words-a-minute catalog aria, meanwhile, is a showstopper.

With German conductor Cornelius Meister at the helm, though, many of the rapid-fire numbers that carry the buffo weight in this tragicomedy rattled more than they hummed. The frequent coordination problems might have been a fluke, but Meister also imposed ill-advised tempos including a wet-blanket andante in “Là ci darem la mano” that all but suffocated this tender duet between Don Giovanni and Zerlina.

As Zerlina, Russian soprano Aida Garifullina made her house debut with an interestingly copper-hued, stiletto-sharp voice that didn’t quite fit this ingénue role. Another new face is Italian soprano Federica Lombardi who sang the part of Donna Elvira. With an acidic brightness in her top notes she held her own well in ensemble numbers, but in the aria “Ah! Chi mi dice mai” her low register lacked the necessary power to make the music’s stark fluctuations psychologically telling.

Power wasn’t an issue for soprano Rachel Willis-Sorensen as Donna Anna, but the glassy hardness of her tone may be an acquired taste. As her onstage partner, French tenor Stanislas de Barbeyrac was another Met newcomer. Endowed with an ample, vigorous voice and a knack for expansive legato lines, he may mature into a tenor to watch. On Saturday, he tended to overwhelm his arias with finicky changes in dynamics.

Rounding out the cast were bass Stefan Kocan, stentorian and plush as the Commendatore, and bass-baritone Brandon Cedel, suave and alert as Masetto. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he’s begun to size up the other roles in this opera.

Event Information:

Through April 18 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; 212-362-6000, metopera.org.

This article originally appeared in <a id="43dfccf0-fc47-4d0a-acbd-2d7e45ef93b9" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/03/arts/music/don-giovanni-review-met-opera.html">The New York Times</a>.

Review: A lifeless revival of 'Don Giovanni' at the Met

For the cast, though, it’s a different story. With the exception of the noble but impotent Don Ottavio, a tenor part, the male roles all call for low voices that are potentially interchangeable.

“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.

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.

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim

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