The New York Times’s classical music and opera critics see and hear much more than they review. Here is what has hooked them recently. Leave your own favorites in the comments.
‘Her Story’ at the Kennedy Center
There was a time in recent memory when a performance of Julia Wolfe’s “Her Story,” for women’s chamber choir and orchestra, would have passed without incident. Inspired in part by women’s suffrage, the oratorio-like piece draws upon the words of Abigail Adams and Sojourner Truth, for a refined yet blistering account of the misogyny that American women have endured.
Quoting a first lady and an abolitionist isn’t really controversial. At the time of the piece’s premiere, in 2022, orchestras were commissioning and reviving works by and about women and other underrepresented groups as a matter of course.
But when the National Symphony Orchestra, the Lorelei Ensemble and the conductor Marin Alsop performed “Her Story” at the Kennedy Center in Washington on March 1, the concert, scheduled long ago, came in the wake of sudden changes that saw the center’s president, Deborah Rutter, fired and President Trump installed as its chairman.
The semi-staged work has previously been programmed by the Nashville Symphony and Boston Symphony Orchestra. At the Kennedy Center, its 10 singers blended their voices seamlessly and raised them up with white-hot intensity. They covered their own mouths or gasped for breath between phrases as if battling a suppressive force. Chord clusters and minute dissonances had razor-sharp precision. The unanimity of timbre and expression was exquisite.
The National Symphony didn’t consistently match the singers’ vividness, with the prominent exception of the percussion section, which fired up a fantastic drumbeat after Adams’s warning to her husband, who would become the second president of the United States: “Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could.” OUSSAMA ZAHR
Wynton Marsalis
Fostering connections between jazz and classical performance is nothing new for Wynton Marsalis. Vintage broadcasts from his PBS series “Marsalis on Music” could hop from Prokofiev to Gershwin to Ives to Ellington.
So far this season, his concerts with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra have focused on American styles. (No Prokofiev yet.) But the programming is still making use of his approach. Works by composers associated with the jazz-classical hybrid movement known as Third Stream have been in evidence, as have unusual arrangements of core classics like Gershwin’s “Summertime.” Last month, when introducing a Shaker song by Joseph Brackett that is widely known as “Simple Gifts,” Marsalis also made note of the tune’s adoption by Copland in “Appalachian Spring.”
That night, there was a newly commissioned arrangement of “Simple Gifts,” by Jason Hainsworth, with two members of the saxophone section doubling on flute or clarinet. That managed to channel Copland. But before long, some advanced post-bop harmony kicked in, with the soprano saxophonist Abdias Armenteros even venturing a striated note that opened up a temporary portal to late-1960s experimentalism. By being so casually wide-ranging, the performance was a thrill. The entire concert, titled “Jazz Americana,” is available in full on the orchestra’s streaming channel, Jazz Live. SETH COLTER WALLS
Third Coast Percussion
When Zakir Hussain was a newborn, his father took him in his arms to recite a prayer over his son as was the tradition among Muslims in India. But instead of a blessing, his father whispered rhythms into his ear. Hussain grew up to become a tabla virtuoso like his father, mastering the North Indian classical tradition while also building bridges across musical genres. One of his last projects, before his death at 73 in December, was “Murmurs in Time,” a composition for tabla and percussion quartet commissioned by Third Coast Percussion, which he recorded with that ensemble.
“Murmurs in Time” received its New York premiere on Feb. 27 at Zankel Hall, in a brilliant and moving performance that paid tribute to Hussain and the humanistic values at the heart of his art. The eloquent tabla player Salar Nader, a student of Hussain’s, joined the Third Coast players. The work is in two movements, culminating in an intricate firework of cross-rhythms and iridescent sound colors. But it was the first movement, “Recitation,” that stayed with me, a tender and incantatory web of spoken rhythms that grounded the group’s technical virtuosity in elementary human communication. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM
Tributes during the Academy Awards on Sunday were a reminder that while the January wildfires in Los Angeles were in the news for just a moment, they continue to be on the minds of, and dramatically affect, the people around them.
Shortly before the fires began, the pianist Igor Levit was an honorary fellow at the Thomas Mann House in Pacific Palisades, Calif.; from a safe distance, he watched as the disaster spread and the historical home’s future became uncertain. Helpless, he did what any musician can in such moments: He offered a small encore, a moment for contemplation, as a coda for his Jan. 12 recital at Carnegie Hall.
This was after a superhuman program of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor, followed by Brahms’s Op. 10 Ballades and, most breathtakingly, Liszt’s solo transcription of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. (Last season, he took on the “Eroica”; what could be next?) After a couple of bows, he returned to the piano bench and performed the Bach chorale prelude “Nun Komm, der Heiden Heiland,” transcribed by Ferruccio Busoni.
Neither anguished nor angry, the music, and Levit’s delicate approach to it, instead expressed reflective serenity with forward-moving persistence: a prayer for today, with an eye toward tomorrow. JOSHUA BARONE
Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony
Covering the conductor Daniele Rustioni’s debut with the New York Philharmonic in early January reignited my longstanding obsession with a tiny spot in the orchestral repertoire: the piccolo solo in the Scherzo of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony.
It’s just a passing moment, but it embodies the mood of that movement, of joviality pushed almost to the point of mania. After the strings’ murmuring pizzicato beginning, the winds trade off lines that are almost tipsy at first, then more and more martial. The piccolo is brought in briefly, a reminiscence of a marching band’s fife, and then the party really gets started, at a tempo whose speed is determined, at least in part, by how sadistic the conductor is feeling that day.
The clarinet gets a turn at the brief, dashing dance, then the piccolo takes it on — not once, but twice — before the Scherzo recedes back into racing pizzicato. For players of this tiny instrument, there are few passages as treacherous. It’s a lot of notes; it’s very high; it’s very awkward for the fingers; it’s very fast. But when someone lands it, it captures the joy and danger, the sense of physical and emotional extremity, of Tchaikovsky performance at its best. ZACHARY WOOLFE
