Michael Cooper

For decades, the “Chicago brass” has been prized for its majesty, virtuosity and sheer power. From its modern-day origins under Rafael Kubelik and Fritz Reiner to the brawny blasts of the Georg Solti era to the subtler approaches taken by Daniel Barenboim and now Riccardo Muti, brass has long been central to the ensemble’s sound.

“The Chicago brass: This was a way of referring to the Chicago Symphony even when I was a young student in the conservatory in Milano,” said Muti, 78, who is in his 10th season as music director.

Barenboim, Chicago’s conductor from 1991 to 2006, said: “When you become music director of a great orchestra, you have to be able to recognize what belongs to the orchestra: what is characteristic — what is the stomach of the orchestra — and what is the influence of other conductors. And the Chicago brass was part of that stomach, of that unique way of playing.”

So when the orchestra came to Carnegie Hall this weekend with young blood in two key positions — Esteban Batallán, 35, is its new principal trumpet and David Cooper, also 35, its new principal French horn — the pressure was on to show that Chicago’s brass is still, to mix metallurgical metaphors, the gold standard.

Both newcomers grew up listening to, and trying to emulate, the Chicago sound. Now, they are joining colleagues steeped in the orchestra’s traditions: Jay Friedman, 80, has been principal trombone since 1965, and Gene Pokorny, 66, principal tuba since 1989.

Whether the Chicago brass would be recognizable in a blind test is open to debate — many of the regional styles that once differentiated orchestras have been sanded over in this age of jet-setting maestros and more peripatetic players — but it is still considered one of the jewels of the orchestral world.

After a rehearsal Friday, several brass players gathered backstage at Carnegie to listen to some classic recordings.

“That’s what’s made the Chicago Symphony brass unique: that sound jumping out of the horn,” Friedman said as he listened to Rafael Kubelik’s recording of Smetana’s “Ma Vlast,” made in 1952. The recording features two of the architects of the Chicago sound: Arnold Jacobs, its principal tuba from 1944 to ’88, and Adolph (“Bud”) Herseth, its principal trumpet from 1948 to 2001.

Both men overcame physical impediments to dominate their fields. Jacobs’ lung capacity was sharply reduced by various ailments, so he developed breathing techniques that he passed on to generations of players. (“We want as little tension in the body as we can get, so the torso becomes a resonating chamber,” Friedman said, summing up the Jacobs technique.)

And Herseth, a virtuoso who effectively led the brass section for more than half a century, was in a car accident in 1952 in which he broke teeth and damaged his lip — potentially disastrous for a trumpet player. “He didn’t know if he was ever going to play again,” Friedman said.

Pokorny called the two men “the bookends” of the section, which was joined by Friedman in 1962, then by Dale Clevenger as principal horn in 1966, a position he held until 2013. The old sound is still alive in the orchestra — and not only stylistically.

Batallán plays on Herseth’s old trumpet, and Pokorny plays on Jacobs’ tuba. And the whole horn section plays the same make — Lewis horns, constructed by a Chicago craftsman — which helps their sound blend.

“That’s what we’re talking about right there,” Friedman said, after listening to three pulse-quickening brass chords in Fritz Reiner’s 1956 recording of Strauss’ “Symphonia Domestica.” “Other orchestras might ease into those chords. It would be great for that style — but that’s just not our style.”

The first time Cooper heard Georg Solti’s 1971 recording of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, he said, was on an iPod while snowboarding.

“I was just bombing down the mountain, and I was like, yeah!” said Cooper, who noted that, in addition to its thrilling power, it also captures the delicate, varied phrasing of Clevenger’s horn playing. “I’ve never been more pumped. Just so much energy behind it.”

Solti was famous for pushing for a big brass sound — sometimes too big.

“When Solti came, at first he could not get the brass section to play loud enough for him,” Friedman recalled. “Even on a Schubert symphony.” Pokorny recalled a violist in the orchestra, Max Raimi, joking that some Solti recordings “reduced the string section to tape hiss.”

But after critics began to complain, Solti dialed it back, in what Friedman called “the great diminuendo.” Near the end of Solti’s tenure, he said, a recording of Verdi choruses was stopped when the recording engineer had a novel complaint: He couldn’t hear the brass.

“You can hear all the attacks,” Batallán said, referring to the decisive way each note is struck in Leonard Bernstein’s 1988 recording of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony. “It’s a pure sound, with a clear attack.”

Pokorny said that when he started in Chicago, one of his first conductors was a guest, Leonard Slatkin, for whom he had played in the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. “I went to him,” Pokorny said, “because he knew the Chicago sound, and he knew the St. Louis sound, and I said, ‘What do I have to do to my St. Louis sound to match here?’ And he said that what you really have to do is put a lot of front-end on the note.”

“It’s more attack, and less follow-through,” added Pokorny. “It’s probably a product of the hall” — Orchestra Hall in Chicago — “more than anything else, because the hall is pretty dead. And he proved to be right.”

“There’s lots of energy — and you can still hear the chorus,” Daniel Gingrich, who joined the horn section in 1975 and served as acting principal horn for the past six years, said of Muti’s 2010 recording of the Verdi Requiem.

“They are still number one in the world, in my opinion,” Muti said of the orchestra’s brass, “but also able to meld together with the rest of the orchestra. Not to be only dominant, but in a better balance.”

This desire to keep the brasses in balance is now well known. “I’m very sensitive to the hand going up,” Pokorny said.

riedman quickly chimed in: “Which he rarely does, I have to say. He loves the brass section. Rarely does he give us the hand — only when he absolutely has to.”

This article originally appeared in

The Chicago Symphony's Brass Is World-Famous. Hear It Blast.

What distinguishes one top-rank orchestra from another? For the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, it’s long been the brass.

A mid-September breeze swept over the lawn, where a free outdoor screening of “The Black Panther” on a giant new video wall had drawn an audience of hundreds the previous night. In the nearby Moonshot Studio, middle schoolers were making zoetropes inspired by the children’s book author and pigeon portraitist Mo Willems. Olmeca, a hip-hop artist, was getting a small crowd to clap to his beat in Studio K, just past studios J and F, while, in a nearby lecture hall, Rosdely Ciprian, a 14-year-old actress in the play “What the Constitution Means to Me,” spoke with an interviewer who had some thoughts on that subject: Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

The expansion — called the Reach, a complex of versatile studios, classrooms and a cafe — is the most concrete (in this case, titanium white concrete) example yet of how Deborah F. Rutter has put her mark on the Kennedy Center since becoming its president five years ago.

Building it was not easy: Rutter had to raise more than $250 million in private money for construction-related costs and programming, double the initial estimate. And the project was delayed after its original plan to build a floating performance space on the Potomac River was scuttled amid environmental concerns and the objections of boaters. But Rutter got it done, succeeding while the nation’s largest performing arts complex, Lincoln Center, was cycling through short-term leaders and delaying its own big capital project.

Rutter, 63, said she viewed the expansion as part of her overall efforts to increase access to the Kennedy Center.

“Most important is this concept of feeling welcome,” she said. “When you walk into the Kennedy Center, it’s kind of like walking into any concert hall: The space is big and grand. There’s value to being inspired and knocked out by the grandeur. But there’s also something really important about feeling welcome, that this is really for you.”

The expansion, designed by Steven Holl Architects, offers a softening counterpoint to the Kennedy Center’s austere main building, which is so huge that the Washington Monument could be laid on its side in its main foyer with room to spare. It adds smaller spaces for rehearsals and performances; classrooms; outdoor areas; and a footbridge over the traffic of Rock Creek Parkway, linking the isolated arts complex to a trail along the Potomac.

If its ultimate uses seem inchoate, the Reach fits in neatly with the “build first, plan later” ethos of several new cultural buildings, including the Shed in New York.

But it gives Rutter more options as she works to shape the Kennedy Center and navigate what it means to be the National Cultural Center — as it was designated in the original legislation that created it — in Trump-era Washington.

It was perhaps unsurprising that Rutter, a respected veteran of the orchestra world, would win praise for helping turn around the underperforming National Symphony Orchestra by hiring the dynamic conductor Gianandrea Noseda as its music director. But she has also branched out, making the Kennedy Center a destination for stand-up comedy and expanding its hip-hop offerings under the aegis of Q-Tip, of A Tribe Called Quest, the center’s first artistic director of hip-hop culture.

At times the Kennedy Center feels more like a regional arts center than a national one, presenting theater tours and visiting dance companies. But it also runs Washington National Opera and the National Symphony Orchestra (whereas at Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic are independent organizations) and produces some theater work. It is best known nationally for its televised Kennedy Center Honors; unlike past presidents, President Donald Trump has chosen to stay away from the performances after some honorees criticized him.

Rutter said she did not believe the center’s art should be “overtly political” because it is officially a living memorial to President John F. Kennedy. (As a memorial, it gets roughly $40 million a year in federal aid to maintain its buildings and grounds; the rest of its budget, which ranges from $210 million to $230 million a year, comes from ticket sales, earned revenues and donations.)

But it sometimes comes close. Shortly before Trump’s inauguration, Washington National Opera presented the premiere of “The Dictator’s Wife,” an opera about authoritarianism; the composer, Mohammed Fairouz, spoke about its associations with the Trumps. And the Reach is exhibiting President George W. Bush’s portraits of people who served in the military.

It was David M. Rubinstein, chairman of the Kennedy Center’s board, who pushed to update the center. He was inspired by the renovation of Lincoln Center, where he was a major donor, which was completed in 2012. He decided not to go to Congress for money; more than a decade ago, a far more ambitious $650 million rebuilding project collapsed after legislators balked at federal aid.

Rubenstein made the lead gift of $50 million; the rest was donated by other philanthropists, some of whom are seeking good will in Washington, including Boeing Co. and the governments of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. And he was instrumental in bringing Rutter to the center to succeed Michael M. Kaiser as president.

“It turned out that she had two jobs,” said Rubenstein, a co-founder of the Carlyle Group, the investment firm. “One was to run the Kennedy Center, and the other was to get this addition off the ground.”

Rutter quickly put her knowledge of orchestras to work. She pressed the National Symphony Orchestra to move fast to hire Noseda — so fast, The Washington Post reported, that a board member resigned in protest. “I really was on the point of going somewhere else” when she acted, Noseda said in a telephone interview.

New Yorkers will get to hear the orchestra under his direction this month at David Geffen Hall, in a concert presentation of the second act from Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.”

A free, 16-day festival inaugurated the Reach in September, bringing in roughly 100,000 new people for the Kennedy Center’s databases. As it was nearing its end, Rutter was walking around the original building’s dated lobbies.

“It’s the next project,” she said, looking around. “Updating all this.”

She's Putting Her Mark on the Kennedy Center

WASHINGTON — The Kennedy Center’s first expansion in its nearly half-century history had just opened, and its new spaces were being put through their paces for the first time.

But a fairy-tale China was waiting in the wings. A truck had pulled off Amsterdam Avenue into a loading dock at the back of the Met’s stage, its 40-foot container filled with the ornate golden roof of the imperial throne room for “Turandot,” an over-the-top extravaganza which would start at 12:30 the next afternoon.

Then there were pieces of the Belle Époque sets of “Manon” crammed into the wings for Saturday evening’s performance. And, fittingly enough, several stories beneath the Met’s stage, bits of the underworld were being stored, waiting for “Orfeo ed Euridice” on Sunday afternoon.

The Met has always been a miracle, keeping a number of operas in rotation at any given time. But this season, things got even more logistically complex when the company began the first regular Sunday matinees in its history, seeking to reverse its recent box office struggles by performing when modern audiences find it convenient. The new schedule means that the Met sometimes mounts four different productions in the 48 hours between Friday and Sunday evening — a truly herculean task that the company performs on a scale that is unusual, if not unique, in the world.

“I would say we’re alone in this mad pursuit,” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said on a recent Friday afternoon, as the marathon was about to begin.

Four casts got in and out of 718 costumes over the weekend, with the help of 37 dressers. They wore 201 wigs that had each been prepared — and in some cases rewashed, curled and reset — by hair and makeup artists. A stage crew of 178 was needed each day to build, move and strike the mammoth sets, which are so huge that the Met measures their volume by the number of 40-foot truck containers it takes to store them: “Madama Butterfly” is 14 truckloads; “Turandot,” a whopping 26; “Manon,” 13; and “Orfeo ed Euridice,” 12.

Finding space backstage is like playing one of those sliding tile games. “It often feels like we’re playing that game,” said David Feheley, the Met’s technical director. “But we don’t have the empty square.”

The weekend would feature star turns, passionate love scenes, and no fewer than five deaths (suicide, beheading, suicide, fallen woman-itis, and a doubly fatal combination of snake bite and a husband looking back during a rescue from the Underworld). Here is a look at a very crowded 48 hours in the life of the nation’s largest performing arts organization.

3 p.m. Friday: Clearing Away ‘La Bohème’

“Ready?” a stagehand asked. “Ready!” a hard-hatted crew of nearly a dozen replied in unison, and they began pushing away the Café Momus, the centerpiece of the second act of Franco Zeffirelli’s hyper-realistic production of Puccini’s “La Bohème.” Before the weekend’s four-opera marathon could begin, the crew had to strike and store “Bohème,” one of the Met’s biggest productions, which had been rehearsed onstage during the day on Friday.

Duct tape and carpet tacks were ripped up, and the team lifted an enormous floor cloth painted with cobblestones and folded it faster than most people can manage a fitted sheet.

They were making way for more Puccini: the evening performance of “Madama Butterfly.” One of the most striking parts of the sleek “Butterfly” set — a mirrored ceiling that gives the audience a second perspective on the action — was hanging 100 feet above the stage, in the area known as the flies.

“It takes a week to get it looking as pristine as it does,” Feheley said as he walked a narrow passage at the top of the flies, explaining why the mirror was stored over 100 feet above the wear-and-tear of the stage.

4:07 p.m. Friday: Teeing Up the Props

“I hampered it all up,” Anthony Diana, who handles small props, said as he walked through the toy-store-like room backstage where he had gathered four operas’ worth of props, placing them onto shelves and into rolling canvas carts.

The Bunraku-style puppet that represents Madama Butterfly’s toddler son lay prone in its case. The severed head of the Prince of Persia, a suitor of Princess Turandot who is decapitated for flunking her riddles, lay in a cart. Next to it, a “Manon” cart held rifles, a bird cage and, for the scene in which the luxury-loving Manon gets her earnest lover to gamble, a champagne bottle and a box of bank notes.

A small guitar sat on a shelf near the doorway: the lyre of Orpheus.

8:05 p.m. Friday: The Marathon Begins

The house chandeliers rose, the lights dimmed, the orchestra tuned, the black drop curtain went up, and “Madama Butterfly” got underway. The naturalism of Zeffirelli’s “Bohème” was gone, replaced by the sleek, modern look of Anthony Minghella’s staging of “Butterfly.” Its vivid red lighting and mirrored ceiling was cited as an inspiration by Rian Johnson, who directed “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.”

11:14 p.m. Friday: First Blood

The first death of the weekend: Betrayed and heartbroken, Butterfly, played by the soprano Hui He, blindfolded her son — the puppet from Diana’s store room — then took out the knife her father had used to commit suicide and killed herself.

11:36 p.m. Friday: Trucking Out ‘Butterfly’

A truck horn sounded and the metal shutters covering the loading dock behind the stage clanked upward. To make room for “Turandot” tomorrow, the Met had to truck out several containers filled with pieces of the set of “Butterfly,” which is not due back onstage until Nov. 2.

12:35 p.m. Saturday: Up Next: ‘Turandot’

When the Met’s signature gold curtain rose 13 hours later, the sleek modernism of “Butterfly” was gone, and the opulent chinoiserie of “Turandot” was in its place — an old-school Zeffirelli production with the cinematic sweep of a Cecil B. DeMille epic.

2:10 p.m. Saturday: The Set Is a Star, Too

A scene change in the middle of Act II revealed the dazzling imperial throne room, which throws off something like a zillion lumens. The audience applauded, as always.

2:35 p.m. Saturday: ‘It’s Like Tetris’

It was the second intermission of the afternoon, and Susan Gomez-Pizzo, a wardrobe supervisor, was backstage, fastening a cape onto the plush-voiced soprano Eleonora Buratto, who plays Liù, a slave girl who is faithful unto death.

After pinning on Buratto’s cape, Gomez-Pizzo ducked into her domain just off the main dressing area, where stacks of shoe boxes are labeled by prima donna and opera (“L. Oropesa ‘Manon’ Sc. 31,” “Ms. Goerke ‘Turandot’ Act III”). In the middle of the room, an electric fan dried some of the previous night’s “Butterfly” undergarments, which had been laundered that morning.

Then she returned to the stars’ dressing area, where racks of frilly “Manon” costumes lined the halls outside the dressing rooms, ready to be moved in as soon as the matinee ended.

“It’s like Tetris,” Gomez-Pizzo said.

8:02 p.m. Saturday: Another 15-Year-Old Heroine

A crimson curtain rose and “Manon,” a potboiler starring the bright-voiced soprano Lisette Oropesa, got underway. When the opera begins, Manon is a girl — like Butterfly, she is only 15 — on her way to a convent. But she falls in love with the Chevalier des Grieux (sung by the fiery tenor Michael Fabiano) and they run off to Paris.

8:15 p.m. Saturday: A Busy Chorister’s Solo

“Où sont mes oiseaux et ma cage?” Liz Brooks Wentworth, a mezzo-soprano in the Met’s chorus, sang in a rare solo early in the first act of “Manon,” asking for her birds and her cage as her coach arrives in Amiens, France. (The birds show up dead: Opera is tragic, even for pets.)

After playing the bird-bereaved traveler, she returned in the third act as a fashionable young woman in white and then, after a quick change that must be done in minutes, as a worshiper at the Church of St. Sulpice, dressed in black. She was back onstage in the fourth act, now in pink, for the gambling scene, which ends with the arrest of the ill-fated lovers.

Brooks Wentworth’s whole weekend was packed. She was a guest at Butterfly’s wedding on Friday evening and a peasant in “Turandot” on Saturday afternoon.

And she was back Sunday afternoon for “Orfeo.”

3:13 p.m. Sunday: To Hell and Back

A blue curtain rose on the season premiere of “Orfeo.” Critics sat in the Orchestra level. Board members sat in their boxes.

Three tiers of seating were on the stage, with choristers playing spirits of the dead looking down on the action in Mark Morris’ production. They were dressed in Isaac Mizrahi costumes that suggest they are ghosts of the great and famous: Abraham Lincoln, Henry VIII, Jimi Hendrix. (Brooks Wentworth was the spirit of a tuxedo-clad, top-hatted Marlene Dietrich.)

4:45 p.m. Sunday: Curtains

“Orfeo,” without an intermission, came to a close after a swift 90 minutes with a happy ending and a vibrant dance choreographed by Morris. Backstage, Brooks Wentworth changed out of her tux in minutes and got ready to meet some friends across the street for a drink. (It’s not only audience members who enjoy getting out early from matinees.)

She was still lively after her four-opera marathon. “You have energy for the performance,” she said. “And then I’m sure I’ll be crashing in about an hour or so.”

Onstage, the stage crew known as the night gang was already striking “Orfeo.” They would soon build another set for Monday, when the Met was scheduled to rehearse yet another opera: Philip Glass’ “Akhnaten.”

The Met's Herculean Task: 4 Operas in 48 Hours

NEW YORK — It was Friday afternoon, five hours before curtain, and a stylized Japan was taking shape on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. A crew was untangling ropes of cherry blossoms to form the backdrop of Madama Butterfly’s house in Nagasaki.

“There was an overwhelming response from the community: I’m sure it took everybody in management by surprise,” John Schaefer, the program’s host, said in a telephone interview. “It took me by surprise.”

“There were people writing not just impassioned emails, but really thoughtful emails,” he said, “making points about what public radio should be.”

The station had announced Oct. 10 that it planned to end “New Sounds” — which was often the first place to hear future Pulitzer Prize-winning composers, avant-garde rockers and music from different parts of the world — by the end of the year, along with most of its remaining music programming, as part of a shift to more news and talk.

The protests were immediate. “Why would they do that?” the avant-garde musician Laurie Anderson, who was the program’s first guest in 1982, said in an interview when the news broke. Julia Wolfe, a Pulitzer-winning composer, spoke of the vital role the program played in new music circles: “It was huge, because we were just kids, and we did this crazy thing, and there it was, on the radio.” The composer Gabriel Kahane set that quotation of hers to music, and posted it on Twitter.

Some listeners took to social media to say they were dropping their WNYC memberships. Others protested last week at a WNYC community advisory board meeting. And many WNYC staff members spoke out against its cancellation — including at a tense staff meeting last Friday with Goli Sheikholeslami, who began work as the station’s new president and chief executive officer this month. (In her email inviting the staff to the meeting to share their thoughts, Sheikholeslami wrote that she was “not yet here when the decision was made” to end the program.)

On Monday, Sheikholeslami announced that the program had been saved: It would continue to be broadcast seven nights a week, and to be available online at newsounds.org. Several other threatened features, including Gig Alerts, were preserved as well.

“I appreciate your candor, your thoughtfulness, and your commitment to our mission here at New York Public Radio,” Sheikholeslami wrote in an email to her staff. “I’ve also read the heartfelt responses from our listeners and the larger New York City cultural community who have come to rely on John Schaefer and ‘New Sounds’ for musical discovery, creative inspiration, and access to a community of music lovers they can’t find anywhere else.”

Asked whether any foundations had threatened to pull their support from the station because of the cancellation, Jennifer Houlihan Roussel, a spokeswoman for WNYC, said in an email that the decision to reinstate it had not been financially motivated. “Funders and members were among those who were disappointed with the decision,” she wrote, “and the feedback we received from many constituents led us to the decision we announced this morning.”

Anderson said in an email that she was delighted by the reversal, and that she hoped it would help the station’s coming pledge drive. “Both the cancellation and the reversal,” she wrote, “reminded me of how vital these shows are in the middle of the vast sea of commercial and straight up pop music.”

And Schaefer — who had asked Anderson, his first guest, to be his last — said that he still looked forward to having her back on the show.

“It’s not going to be the interview that we feared it would be,” he said. “She does have a fine new recording that I’ve wanted to discuss.”

A Musical Revolt Succeeds: WNYC, in a Reversal, Keeps 'New Sounds'

NEW YORK — There has been a reprieve: After an outcry from artists, composers, listeners and staffers, WNYC-FM announced Monday that it had reversed its plans to cancel “New Sounds,” the influential, eclectic new-music program that has expanded the city’s tastes for 37 years.

The top ticket costs $495 at the Metropolitan Opera, $295 at Carnegie Hall and $165 at the New York Philharmonic. And while their average prices are much lower — and each offers inexpensive, sometimes free outreach programs — fans and newcomers can feel priced out of performances that often seem more like luxury goods than staples.

All of which makes Peoples’ Symphony Concerts a holdout — one of the best deals in New York, a city not exactly known for bargains.

The organization, which offers performances by some of the best artists in the world for as little as $8.33 a concert, will open its 120th season Saturday evening with the Juilliard String Quartet playing Mozart, Britten and Brahms in the auditorium of Washington Irving High School in Manhattan.

“We’re primarily able to do it due to the generosity of the musicians, who come and play for a fraction of their normal fees,” said Frank Salomon, 83, who has managed the series for nearly half a century. “The artists believe in the mission. And many say it’s one of their favorite audiences anywhere in the world.”

Founded during New York’s earlier Gilded Age by Franz X. Arens, a conductor with a vision of making the finest music available to students, workers and immigrants, the series has continued to offer Rolex-quality performances at Timex prices.

By using less opulent venues (Washington Irving’s auditorium has good acoustics, but hard wooden seats), forgoing advertising, and attracting philanthropy and well-timed bequests, Peoples’ Symphony has been able to present an impressive roster of artists over the years, including Joshua Bell, Yefim Bronfman, the Emerson String Quartet, the Guarneri Quartet, Leonidas Kavakos, Gidon Kremer, Lang Lang and Radu Lupu.

Everything is expensive in New York these days: rent, groceries, restaurants, taxis, movies, pop concerts, ballgames. But rising costs pose a special threat to classical music, raising barriers at a fragile moment when the field must fight to keep existing fans and lure new ones.

Michael M. Kaiser, the former president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, said that after years of bumping up ticket prices to offset spiraling costs, many presenters were hitting a point of diminishing returns: Some people are deciding they cannot afford live performances and are opting instead for home entertainment alternatives.

“This is a problem in the field,” said Kaiser, who is now the chairman of the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland.

Peoples’ Symphony Concerts have been aimed, from the start, at the 99% — giving regular New Yorkers a chance to enjoy the best the city has to offer.

This season is no exception. The great lieder singer Mark Padmore has performed Schubert’s anguished “Winterreise” song cycle at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and has made more than one celebrated recording of it. This May he will sing it at Town Hall with the jazz pianist Ethan Iverson as the finale of a six-concert Peoples’ Symphony series that can be bought for $80 (or $13.33 a concert) or $52 ($8.66 a concert). Other artists in the series include the pianist Benjamin Grosvenor and the violinist Augustin Hadelich, who appeared this month with the New York Philharmonic.

The top price for a single ticket? $24.

Salomon, who is also an artist manager and a senior administrator at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, said that he had been chasing Padmore since hearing his astonishing performance as the Evangelist in Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” with the Berlin Philharmonic at the Park Avenue Armory in 2014.

“He just blew me away, and I started lobbying to try to get him,” Salomon said, recalling stalking Padmore in 2016, when the tenor received the vocalist of the year award from Musical America. “And after five years of bugging him, we finally got him.”

Padmore said that he had been intrigued by the organization’s goal of making music affordable.

“I was really delighted to hear about it,” Padmore said, noting that he also serves as the artistic director of the St. Endellion summer festival in Britain, where artists donate their services to keep costs down. “I think what they do with these concerts is completely admirable.”

From the start, the concerts have drawn discerning audiences. A 1902 review in The New York Times of a program at Cooper Union, the series’ first home, said that the audience’s “attention and manifest understanding are such as to put pretentious up-town audiences to shame.”

The organization still draws engaged, knowledgeable crowds to hear its chamber music and recitals. The pianist Garrick Ohlsson, who has performed several times, said he had found the subscribers “a passionate and well-informed audience — and beautifully behaved.”

In addition to the Town Hall series, Peoples’ Symphony has two six-concert series at Washington Irving, which has general admission seating, and subscriptions cost $50 (or $8.33 a concert). Salomon said many subscribers arrive early to make sure they can get the best seats, or sit with large groups of friends or relatives. The slightly more expensive Town Hall series has assigned seats. To attract younger listeners, subscribers to any series can now bring up to two children for free, and $25 student passes allow access to all 18 concerts, which would let completists hear them for just $1.39 apiece.

And all those prices include processing fees.

The city’s big presenters — which increasingly rely on philanthropy, not ticket prices, to meet their expenses — are aware of the dangers of making tickets too costly, and offer a variety of alternatives for bargain hunters.

The Met, whose average ticket price is $141, offers $25 rush tickets for every performance; standing room tickets that start at $25; and discounts for students and those under 40. The Philharmonic, whose average ticket price is $70, offers $18 student and senior rush tickets to select concerts; free tickets to some Friday evening concerts for people between 13 and 26; and will give a special $5 Phil the Hall concert in April.

Carnegie, whose average ticket price was $78 last season, offers free concerts around the city and free family days; $10 rush tickets; $20 tickets to people 40 and under who join its Notables program; and limited $10 student tickets. And Lincoln Center, whose average ticket price for the Mostly Mozart Festival was $70.33 this summer and is lower at its White Light Festival and Great Performers series, offers free events as part of each series.

But there are no expensive seats at Peoples’ Symphony Concerts, giving it a decidedly egalitarian cast.

Salomon noted that this will be his 48th season managing the organization, and that his predecessor, Joseph Mann, managed it for 59 years. “Together we’ve run it for 106 of its 120 years,” he said. “This is probably a Guinness World Record.”

Priced Out of Classical Music? Try Concerts for $8.33

NEW YORK — It is no secret that classical music faces strong headwinds, but one challenge has been reaching gale-force proportions in recent years: high ticket prices.

Domingo’s withdrawal on the eve of the performance — opening night is Wednesday — came as a growing number of people who work at the Met expressed concern about his upcoming performances. Other U.S. cultural institutions, including the Philadelphia Orchestra and San Francisco Opera, had already canceled Domingo’s upcoming appearances, citing the need to provide a safe workplace.

The backstage unease at the Met boiled over in recent days, including at a heated, sometimes emotional meeting that Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, held with orchestra and chorus members after the “Macbeth” dress rehearsal Saturday afternoon. Some of those at the meeting questioned what Domingo’s return said about the Met’s commitment to protecting women and rooting out sexual harassment.

Three days later, Domingo said in a statement to The New York Times that he was dropping out of “Macbeth” — which was to have been his first U.S. performance since the sexual harassment allegations were reported last month. It sounded unlikely that he would ever be back to perform with the company.

“I am happy that, at the age of 78, I was able to sing the wonderful title role in the dress rehearsal of ‘Macbeth,’ which I consider my last performance on the Met stage,” he said. “I am grateful to God and the public for what they have allowed me to accomplish here at the Metropolitan Opera.”

The Domingo case roiled the Met, which is still recovering from the firing of its former music director, James Levine, last year amid accusations of sexual misconduct. In the #MeToo era, it also raised questions about how institutions deal with accusations of sexual harassment or abuse, even those that emerge outside their walls.

Zeljko Lucic, a baritone scheduled to appear as Macbeth later in the run, is to take over for Domingo.

Opera Superstar Leaves the Met Under a Sexual Harassment Cloud

NEW YORK — In an eleventh-hour reversal, superstar singer Plácido Domingo withdrew Tuesday from the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Verdi’s “Macbeth” and indicated he would not return to the Met amid rising tensions over the company’s response to allegations that he had sexually harassed multiple women.

The starry opening drew Hollywood royalty, including Katharine Hepburn and Joan Crawford. After the ovations died down, the A-listers headed to a glamorous after-party, where George Gershwin played excerpts from his score on the piano.

By the next morning, though, the questions would begin. Those questions — about genre, about representation, about appropriation — have followed “Porgy” through more than eight decades of convoluted, sometimes troubling history, and remain salient as the Metropolitan Opera opens its season Sept. 23 with a new production, its first performances of the work since 1990.

Is “Porgy,” which features some of the best-loved songs by one of America’s greatest songwriters (“Summertime,” “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” “I Loves You, Porgy”), as well as mighty choruses and bold orchestrations, an opera or a musical? It returned to Broadway in 2012 in a stripped-down form. But since 1976, when Houston Grand Opera brought it back to the opera house, it has often been claimed — you can almost hear the capital letters — as the Great American Opera.

More urgently, is “Porgy” a sensitive portrayal of the lives and struggles of a segregated African American community in Charleston, South Carolina? (Maya Angelou, who as a young dancer performed in a touring production that brought it to the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1955, later praised it as “great art” and “a human truth.”)

Or does it perpetuate degrading stereotypes about black people, told in wince-inducing dialect? (Harry Belafonte turned down an offer to star in the film version because he found it “racially demeaning.”)

Is it a triumph of melting-pot American art, teaming up George and Ira Gershwin (the sons of Russian Jewish immigrants) with DuBose Heyward (the scion of a prominent white South Carolina family) and his Ohio-born wife, Dorothy, to tell a uniquely African American story? Or is it cultural appropriation? The fact that the most-performed opera about the African American experience is the work of an all-white team has not been lost on black composers who have struggled to get their music heard.

And has the Gershwins’ insistence that “Porgy” be performed only by black artists — originally aimed at keeping it from being done in blackface — helped generations of black singers by giving them the opportunity to perform on some of the world’s great stages? Or has it pigeonholed some of them, limiting the roles they are offered?

Or is the answer to all these questions yes?

The Met is engaging with the work’s complex history as it prepares to stage its new production, directed by James Robinson and conducted by David Robertson. It has assembled a strong cast, led by bass-baritone Eric Owens and soprano Angel Blue, and designed a staging that aims to rescue Catfish Row and its inhabitants from the realm of stereotype. It is holding talks around the city about the work and turning the lens on its own checkered racial past with an exhibition at the opera house.

George Gershwin called “Porgy and Bess” a “folk opera,” which placed him in a long line of composers who drew inspiration from folk themes, real or imagined. In an essay he wrote for The New York Times in 1935, he wrote that to keep the work musically unified, he had decided to write “my own spirituals and folk songs.”

And he discussed aspects critics later decried as stereotypes, writing that “because ‘Porgy and Bess’ deals with Negro life in America it brings to the operatic form elements that have never before appeared in opera and I have adapted my method to utilize the drama, the humor, the superstition, the religious fervor, the dancing and the irrepressible high spirits of the race.”

Hall Johnson, a black composer, arranger and choir director whose musical “Run, Little Chillun!” had been a success on Broadway in 1933, wrote that Gershwin was “as free to write about Negroes in his own way as any other composer to write about anything else” in a 1936 essay in Opportunity, a journal published by the Urban League.

But he added that the resulting work was “not a Negro opera by Gershwin, but Gershwin’s idea of what a Negro opera should be.” (Decades later, reviewing the film, James Baldwin echoed that critique, writing that while he liked “Porgy and Bess,” it remained “a white man’s vision of Negro life.”)

The Gershwins were determined to avoid performances of “Porgy” in blackface, an offensive relic of minstrelsy that was still common then onstage and onscreen. Al Jolson, who had worn blackface in 1927 in the breakthrough sound film “The Jazz Singer,” had also wanted to mount a musical based on the story and hoped to play Porgy.

“Porgy and Bess” provided work for generations of classically trained African American singers at a time when discrimination barred them from the Met and other leading stages. When the work’s first tour reached the segregated National Theater in Washington, its African American stars took a stand and threatened not to perform — forcing the theater to integrate, at least temporarily. “Porgy” helped many singers of color launch their careers, including Leontyne Price, who played Bess right out of Juilliard.

It became a symbol of American culture around the world. When the piece had its European premiere in Copenhagen during World War II, staging a work by a Jewish composer about black Americans was seen as an act of provocation aimed at the occupying Nazis. The inescapable contradictions of a Cold War-era tour of Leningrad and Moscow in the mid-1950s were chronicled wryly by Truman Capote.

But the controversies did not abate. When Otto Preminger’s film version was released in 1959, during the civil rights era, playwright Lorraine Hansberry debated him on Chicago television, declaring that stereotypes “constitute bad art” and noting that African Americans had suffered “great wounds from great intentions.” But the music of “Porgy and Bess” only grew in popularity, as generations of jazz pioneers, including Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Miles Davis, put their own stamps on the songs.

The requirement to cast black performers remains in effect for dramatic performances of “Porgy and Bess” around the world, Sargent Aborn, the chief executive officer of Tams-Witmark, which licenses it, wrote in an email.

It is an unusual stipulation in an age where casting is increasingly colorblind. “Porgy” is the one opera the Met’s own chorus does not sing: The company hired a chorus of black singers for its new production. When the Hungarian State Opera staged “Porgy and Bess” with a white cast this year, against the wishes of the Gershwin brothers’ estates, it asked its singers to sign declarations that African American origins and spirit formed part of their identity, a Hungarian news site reported.

Some black singers are wary of “Porgy,” both out of discomfort with the piece and concerns that they could get typecast and kept from exploring other repertoire.

Davóne Tines, a bass-baritone who starred recently in “The Black Clown” — a new musical adaptation of Langston Hughes’ searching 1931 poem exploring race and representation — said in an interview that it made him uneasy that the only black opera in the canon, and still one of the main opportunities for many black singers, requires them to “don costumes of rags” and “embody flat stereotypes.”

“Just as we have moved from aggression to microaggression, from analog to digital, and from low-fidelity to high-definition,” he said in an interview, “so, too, must we move from broad brush strokes and put a finer point on the pen that delineates black experience.”

Some have tried to reinvent the piece. The first production that Golda Schultz, the South African soprano who will sing Clara at the Met, ever saw was a famous one by the Cape Town Opera that moved the setting to a South African township.

“Setting it up in a township, everyone understood this notion of a struggling community, a tight-knit community, because townships are like that,” Schultz said during a recent rehearsal break at the Met. “My dad grew up in a township, and you knew your neighbors, you knew people’s business — because the walls on a shack are really thin, corrugated iron.”

Director Diane Paulus and playwright Suzan-Lori Parks made substantial changes for their 2012 Broadway production, cutting some of the dialect, rewriting scenes and trying to give more back story, and agency, to Bess. Some objected: Composer Stephen Sondheim cried foul about their plans, calling the work’s characters “as vivid as any ever created for the musical theater.”

The Met is asking audiences to take a new perspective even before they enter the opera house. Artist Kerry James Marshall, acclaimed for huge paintings that are fantasias of black life and history, has created an arresting “Porgy and Bess” banner that hangs outside.

It upends the traditional image of Porgy, a disabled beggar, and the woman he loves, Bess, who has suffered from abuse and addiction. Marshall’s Porgy — drawn in a muscular social realist, almost comic-book-superhero style — stands braced for action, wielding his crutch like a weapon and carrying Bess, on his shoulders.

“Most of the images you see of ‘Porgy and Bess,’ particularly the way Porgy is represented, he’s always on his knees, or down on the floor,” Marshall said in a telephone interview, adding that he had always been struck by the character’s strength in trying to protect Bess: “That’s where I started: I wanted to give Porgy at least one moment of heroic presence.”

The company is mounting an exhibition, “Black Voices at the Met,” that delves into its history with race both before and after 1955, the year contralto Marian Anderson became the first African American artist to perform a principal role there. And it is releasing a new CD — “Black Voices Rise: African American Artists at the Met, 1955-1985” — celebrating Anderson and some of the stars who followed in her footsteps, including Leontyne Price, Jessye Norman, Kathleen Battle, Robert McFerrin and George Shirley.

Robinson, the director of the new production, said he envisioned its Catfish Row as a working-class community of entrepreneurial, aspirational people.

“We have to treat these people with great dignity and take them seriously,” he said. “When they become caricatures, it just seems to ring false.”

Owens, the bass-baritone singing Porgy, said that he viewed the work as “one part of an African American experience.” He may define the role of Porgy these days, but it does not define him. A star who has performed in operas by Wagner, Mozart, John Adams and Kaija Saariaho at the Met and will sing Wotan in Lyric Opera of Chicago’s “Ring” cycle in the spring, Owens said that when he started singing Porgy a decade ago, he made a conscious decision never to make his debut at an opera house with it.

“It just put people on notice that I’m an artist who does many things,” he said in an interview in his dressing room.

The new production shows how much deeper the Met’s roster of black singers is now than it was when the company first staged “Porgy and Bess,” in 1985. That production was led by a pair of Met stars, Simon Estes and Grace Bumbry, in the title roles — but the Met had to bring in newcomers in order to cast black singers in many of the other roles. This year, by contrast, almost all of the singers in the main featured roles have already sung at the Met, including Denyce Graves (a distinguished Carmen) and rising younger singers including Schultz, Ryan Speedo Green and Latonia Moore.

At a rehearsal this month, shortly after Hurricane Dorian had devastated parts of the Bahamas and as it was heading toward the Carolinas, the “Porgy and Bess” cast was on the Met’s stage rehearsing the scene in which a deadly hurricane strikes Charleston.

The power of Gershwin’s terrifying and inventive music came through, even when played by just a rehearsal pianist in the pit. The chorus sang its anguished prayers with passion and precision. Yet some of the dialect (“hab mercy!”) still sounded jarring.

The moment suggested perhaps the only answer to the many questions that have surrounded “Porgy and Bess” for almost a century. The work, on that day, seemed to be taking its place in an operatic canon full of contradictory, discomfiting, occasionally offensive works that time and again nevertheless demonstrate their relevance and power.

The Complex History and Uneasy Present of 'Porgy and Bess'

It was one of those mythic New York nights: the Broadway premiere of the Gershwins’ “Porgy and Bess” in 1935.

The orchestra’s management had wanted to cut the musicians’ paid weeks of work to 40, from the current 52. The musicians argued that such a cut in paid weeks would demote them from the ranks of year-round ensembles and make it harder to attract and retain top talent.

So are they still a full-time orchestra, or a part-time one? It depends on how you count.

Under the new agreement, management said, musicians would be paid for 40 weeks of work this coming season — and for another 10 weeks next summer through what the orchestra called “bonus compensation” that was made possible by a group of donors.

That means the players will be paid for 50 weeks this season. It is less than the customary 52 weeks, but that is because the first two weeks of the season were lost to the labor dispute.

The agreement will allow the orchestra to start its delayed season Friday. But it leaves some of the big questions about the orchestra’s future unresolved, since it runs only through next September — and it is unclear whether the bonus pay that will keep the musicians’ compensation stable this year will be available again.

Under the new agreement — which raises weekly salaries by 2.4% — the minimum base pay of Baltimore’s musicians will be just over $81,438 this season for 50 weeks, down from $82,794 for 52 weeks under the old contract.

And the orchestra is creating a “vision committee,” with musicians participating, to plan its next steps.

“Important work lies ahead,” Peter Kjome, the orchestra’s president, said in a statement. Brian Prechtl, the co-chairman of the players’ committee, said that the musicians “look forward to working side by side with leadership to chart a course for a promising future and to once again fill this room with the glorious sounds of music.”

That music will return Friday with the orchestra’s music director, Marin Alsop, leading the Overture to Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino,” Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4, Daniel Bernard Roumain’s Voodoo Violin Concerto, with the composer as soloist.

The Baltimore Symphony Brings Back Its Musicians

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, which locked out its musicians over the summer while seeking substantial budget reductions, ratified a one-year agreement Monday that will cut the number of official weeks of work for the musicians this year, but will make up the difference with bonus pay.

PERM, Russia — It was after midnight when the maestro — wearing a black motorcycle jacket, skinny jeans and boots — strode into a cavernous old factory in this industrial city 700 miles east of Moscow. He made his way through the crowd as something between an avant-garde happening and a classical-music rave unfolded.

“Come,” the conductor, Teodor Currentzis, who will make his American debut in November leading Verdi’s Requiem at the Shed in New York, told a reporter. “I want to show you something amazing.”

Soon the room exploded with propulsive percussion works by Iannis Xenakis. When the drums grew quiet, Currentzis — who had conducted Mahler’s sprawling Ninth Symphony the night before and had spent all day rehearsing Mozart’s opera “Idomeneo” — followed the crowd out into the moonlight to an even older part of the plant with creaky wooden floors, where a puzzling blend of modern dance; a stage buried in laundry; long Russian monologues; and a Dr. Seuss-like wind instrument stretched into the wee hours.

It was a night that embodied the status of Currentzis, 47, as the rebel maestro of classical music. Tall, lanky and boyish, with pierced ears and dark hair, he looks more CBGB than Carnegie Hall. He has been described as a punk, a goth, an anarchist and a guru — all of which have elements of truth, but fail to convey the blend of talent, charisma and energy that has swept him from the periphery of the music world to its most prestigious stages.

He began that journey out in Siberia, as music director of the Novosibirsk State Opera. Disenchanted with the music establishment, he formed his own orchestra and chorus there, which he called MusicAeterna and which became known for electrically charged performances. He forged such tight bonds with its players that many followed him here when he was appointed the artistic director of the Perm State Opera in 2011.

He has an almost messianic side: A brash claim in a 2005 interview that “I will save classical music” ruffled some feathers. His emo earnestness — “You can cry alone in front of your turntable to this music. You can close your eyes and scream at the top of your lungs to this music,” he wrote in liner notes for a Rameau recording — rubs some people the wrong way. His general flamboyance still arouses suspicions in some quarters that he might be a charlatan.

Michael Cooper

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