Classical musicians, like their counterparts in the rest of the performing arts, have been trying to find a second life online during the pandemic shutdown. Pianists have streamed recitals from their homes; orchestras have used the Zoom app to create virtual ensembles; small groups have assembled in empty halls. Any discussion of this activity, encouraging as it is, must take into account that it unfolds against a backdrop of misery. The livelihood of thousands of musicians has been shattered overnight. People have been lost; grief runs deep. There should be no talk—I have seen some—of classical music “thriving” on the Internet. No one is thriving. No one is making money. No one is free from fear.
With that in mind, I’ve been glued to my computer in recent weeks, consuming live-streamed events around the world. As a critic, I am desperate to maintain contact with what musicians are doing, thinking, and feeling. The sound is often tinny, the stage patter awkward, the home décor distracting. One could instead sample archived professional-quality videos that opera houses, orchestras, and other organizations have placed online. For me, though, the live or freshly recorded happenings matter more. They document, with the oblique power that the arts possess, an extraordinary human phase in history. Their mere existence is bracing, and at times they achieve startling power.
One such moment arrived about forty minutes into the Metropolitan Opera’s “At-Home Gala,” a four-hour all-star program that took place on April 25th. After an affecting appearance by Renée Fleming, the screen filled with images of Met Orchestra players at home, holding their instruments. In the rectangle at the center was Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, conducting into the void. He led a prerecorded performance of the Intermezzo from “Cavalleria Rusticana”—some of the saddest, most wistful music ever written in a major key. Later, the orchestra was joined by members of the Met chorus for “Va, pensiero,” the great anthem from “Nabucco” in which exiled Israelites salute “my homeland, so lovely and so lost.”
Those two performances had a dizzying effect, not only because they sounded splendid—“Va, pensiero,” especially, exuded the warmth of a collective act—but because they were done in a spirit of generosity that the Met may not have earned. At the end of March, the entire staff of performing musicians was furloughed: since then, they have been receiving health benefits but no salary. The Met faces existential financial challenges, to be sure, yet so do most other cultural organizations, and few have taken such drastic measures. According to the singer Zach Finkelstein, who has been reporting on the crisis at his blog, Middleclass Artist, a number of singers felt blindsided by the curt announcement of force-majeure cancellations.
The gala included thirty-three live vocal performances, from locales across Europe and America. The opportunity to gaze inside singers’ homes stirred wry commentary on social media. René Pape’s James Bond-ish pad provoked nervous titters; Elza van den Heever’s towering bookshelves elicited admiration. A few singers won extra points for accompanying themselves at the piano. Günther Groissböck, after draining a stein of beer, sang and played “Wie schön ist doch die Musik,” from “Die Schweigsame Frau”; Erin Morley displayed dazzling musicianship in “Chacun le sait,” from “La Fille du Régiment.” Cohabiting singers had the chance to perform duets. Ailyn Pérez and Soloman Howard’s rendition of “A brani, a brani, o perfido,” from “Luisa Miller,” grew sufficiently sultry that a parental advisory seemed in order.
For the most part, the performances were more sweet than gripping, but a few would have been impressive under any circumstances. Lisette Oropesa gave an immaculate, glittering rendition of “En vain j’espère,” from “Robert le Diable”; Jamie Barton was grand and glowering in “O don fatale,” from “Don Carlo.” Afterward, Barton exclaimed, “Ooh, it’s fun to get to sing again!” She had, in fact, already returned to the stage, virtually, in “Coronadämmerung,” a staggering Wagner video masterfully edited by the bass-baritone Ryan McKinny. Barton and McKinny, accompanied on piano by Kathleen Kelly, sang and acted out an updated version of the Fricka-Wotan scene from “Das Rheingold,” incorporating FaceTime, impatient texts from Fasolt and Fafner, and a Zillow listing for Valhalla. It was at once absurd and compelling, like the best modern Wagner productions.
On May 3rd, the Bang on a Can composers’ collective, which has been holding annual new-music marathons since 1987, offered a six-hour online substitute. As with the Met gala, audio quality varied from the acceptable to the atrocious, and there were a few outright snafus: we saw Meredith Monk for several minutes before we heard her, live from her Tribeca apartment. The habitats of American composers and new-music specialists are generally less palatial than those of opera stars. The undoubted highlight was a glimpse of a legendary three-toed box turtle, named Neutron, which has been living with Monk since the late nineteen-seventies.
Every Bang on a Can marathon has its peaks and lulls, and this one was no exception. There were pieces long on ambience and short on ideas; there were sketches in need of an editor. I sat up in my desk chair for Anna Clyne’s “Rapture,” a jaggedly minimalistic work for clarinet and electronics; for Adam Cuthbért’s “Synthetic Flora,” an eerie dreamscape for trumpet and electronics; and for an angular meditation by the composer-guitarist Mary Halvorson. The master percussionist Steven Schick, performing in a temporary home studio that doubles as a laundry room, gave a riveting account of Vinko Globokar’s 1973 score “Toucher,” which requires the performer to recite lines from Brecht’s “Life of Galileo” while playing. Bang on a Can will present a second marathon on June 14th, with seven commissions on tap.
Aficionados of improvisation and the avant-garde can gravitate toward the Quarantine Concerts, a daily online production by the Experimental Sound Studio, in Chicago. The other night, the violist Melanie Dyer, the violinist Gwen Laster, and the bassist Ken Filiano performed a grittily expressive improvisation called “Love in the Form of Sacred Outrage.” Music lovers of all stripes can embrace the work of the composer-bassist Florent Ghys, who has attained viral fame with videos attributed to the Cats & Friends Choir. Ghys’s pandemic ritual is to scour YouTube for vocalizing cats, sheep, and cows; organize their utterances by pitch; and edit them into approximations of familiar pieces, including Satie’s “Gymnopédies,” Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater,” and Bach’s First Cello Suite. As with “Coronadämmerung,” silliness veers toward the sublime. Satie, for one, might have approved of being translated into meows and moos.
How long classical music will be marooned in the ether remains unclear. Chatter from larger organizations suggests that full-scale performances may not resume until sometime in 2021. The primary challenge of online music-making will be to persuade audiences to pay for it; in order for that to happen, events must rise above the feel-good, we’re-still-here level and achieve real substance, not to mention a comfortable grasp of the medium.
A sense of what’s possible comes from the Oslo Philharmonic, which has been producing rich-sounding, visually atmospheric live streams in a series it calls “Mellomspill,” or “Interlude.” In one memorable episode, the young Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen, in refulgent voice, sang songs of Alban Berg, in arrangements by the late Dutch conductor Reinbert de Leeuw. Afterward came Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll,” in its original version for thirteen players, as Cosima Wagner heard it on her birthday in 1869. This, too, is warm music tinged by sadness, and the wrenching loveliness of the playing had me in tears by the end. It seemed to emanate from some other world; that it came from the present felt like a flicker of hope. ♦
A Guide to the Coronavirus
- Twenty-four hours at the epicenter of the pandemic: nearly fifty New Yorker writers and photographers fanned out to document life in New York City on April 15th.
- Seattle leaders let scientists take the lead in responding to the coronavirus. New York leaders did not.
- Can survivors help cure the disease and rescue the economy?
- What the coronavirus has revealed about American medicine.
- Can we trace the spread of COVID-19 and protect privacy at the same time?
- The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine is widely available.
- How to practice social distancing, from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.
- The long crusade of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious-disease expert pinned between Donald Trump and the American people.
- What to read, watch, cook, and listen to under quarantine.
