To many musicians’ ears, the word “stream” has an ugly ring: it suggests a utility that can be turned on and off with a faucet. In recent years, concert halls and theatres have found renewed appeal as places of refuge where listeners can escape the addictive injection of data—e-mails, texts, notifications, feeds, alerts—and focus on a single event made by fellow-humans. The near-total disappearance of live performance in the pandemic era has trapped us more than ever in front of screens, where distractions stretch out to the crack of doom. Streamed events lack the psychic imprint of the real, the aura of shared experience: the moment they are done, they tend to evaporate from memory, leaving only ghosts of feeling in their wake.
Nonetheless, with no alternative in view, performing-arts institutions have decamped to virtuality. They have done so not only to maintain contact with their audiences but, even more important, to keep their artists engaged. Many American orchestras are delivering some semblance of a fall season, even if dimensions are reduced and ambitions confined. Opera houses have been mostly inactive, in light of the nearly insuperable epidemiological challenges of assembling soloists, a chorus, and an orchestra in one space. Yuval Sharon’s drive-through “Götterdämmerung,” which Michigan Opera Theatre presented in October in Detroit, seems all the more staggering in retrospect: in any year, it would have been a formidable accomplishment, and in the midst of a pandemic it felt close to miraculous.
When, over the summer, orchestras began making known their fall plans, the operative word was “reimagined.” At least twenty orchestras, from Albany to St. Louis, announced reimagined seasons. Yet, because so many institutions were using identical language, it didn’t seem that anything particularly imaginative was going on. A certain herd mentality also surfaced in the programming. Even a welcome concentration on works by African-American composers, in recognition of Black Lives Matter protests, leaned too much on a few names, with wide swaths of Black music left unexplored.
One orchestra that avoided the “reimagined” label was the Detroit Symphony, which had two distinct advantages: its programming was already livelier and more contemporary than that of most American ensembles, and for some years it has been in the habit of streaming its concerts. In August, not long after Detroit emerged from lockdown, the orchestra began presenting outdoor chamber concerts. These were charmingly intimate, neighborly affairs, with musicians providing spoken introductions. Come fall, the ensemble moved back into Orchestra Hall, its longtime home, marshalling nearly thirty programs. Jader Bignamini, Detroit’s gifted new music director, established himself as an incisive leader. As with Michigan Opera Theatre’s “Götterdämmerung”—Detroit is dominating American musical life at the moment—several of the orchestra’s events would have warranted attention in any season.
In early November, the violinist Jennifer Koh came to Detroit to play in the world première of Tyshawn Sorey’s “For Marcos Balter,” which the composer has described as a “non-certo”—a concerto shorn of theatrical conflict and virtuoso features. Sorey, a remarkable and unclassifiable figure in contemporary American music, first established himself as an avant-garde-leaning jazz drummer and has more recently built up a compelling portfolio of works for classical ensembles. He has the cardinal virtue of being unpredictable: each new piece of his feels like a departure into fresh terrain.
Morton Feldman, the master of abstract quietude, also favored titles beginning with the preposition “for,” and “For Marcos Balter” opens in a very Feldman-like world, with shifting constellations of sustained tones, atmospheric dissonances, and wisps of quicker figuration (a sextuplet on the piano). That elemental texture persists through the first part of the work, and, as mysteriously gorgeous as it is, it risks becoming pastiche. But then new patterns emerge: sustained tones, block chords, murmurs of recessed melody. By the end, an increasingly charged, unstable mass of forces yields unexpected tension. The coda is magnificent and ominous: the timpani thwack out a slow-rising sequence of notes, almost like a chopped-and-screwed version of the opening piano gestures.
As it happens, the Seattle Symphony streamed another major new Sorey work a couple of weeks later: “For Roscoe Mitchell,” for cello and orchestra, with Seth Parker Woods as the soloist and David Robertson conducting. It, too, takes off from the Feldman model, with tendrils of tone wafting across opaque chordal clusters. Yet its narrative arc is dramatically different from that of “For Marcos Balter.” The cello fuses fragmentary motifs into long-breathed legato lines. Toward the end, violins and violas pick up those songful patterns, as if preparing to break through into some collective epiphany; but a crisis intervenes, in the form of grisly, dissonant quadruple-forte chords. The cello descends deep into its bass register, in wounded retreat. Both of Sorey’s imposing utterances come across as monuments to a tragic year.
However constricted the streaming ritual may be, it lets the curious listener range across the musical map in a way that would be impossible under ordinary circumstances. From my well-worn office chair, I was able to make a remote tour of a dozen or more American orchestras. Members of the Chicago Symphony turned in a rich-hued account of the Dvořák Sextet. Franz Welser-Möst led the Cleveland Orchestra in a pristine rendition of Alfred Schnittke’s brooding Piano Concerto, with Yefim Bronfman as the soloist. The Dallas Symphony, under Fabio Luisi, organized a meaty night of Verdi excerpts, with thrillingly full-throated singing by Angela Meade, Jamie Barton, and Bryan Hymel. And a fifty-eight-player contingent from the Boston Symphony, under Ken-David Masur, gave a forceful reading of Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony, thereby breaking months of melancholy silence in Symphony Hall, one of the nation’s finest acoustic spaces.
I especially relished the work of the Cincinnati Symphony, which is thriving under the stylish, polyglot direction of Louis Langrée. Cincinnati’s all-American season-opening concert included Jessie Montgomery’s 2014 piece for strings, “Banner,” which rings questioning variations on the national anthem; Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” brimming with gauzy nostalgia; and Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” an emblem of New Deal idealism. Angel Blue sang piercingly in the Barber, and Christopher Pell, the Cincinnati’s principal clarinettist, anchored an urgently glowing ensemble in the Copland. A month later, the violinist Augustin Hadelich tore into the glittering Second Violin Concerto of the eighteenth-century Afro-French composer Joseph Bologne, who received much attention this fall; the Detroit Symphony played his First Symphony, and the L.A. Opera revived his comic opera “The Anonymous Lover.”
The most elaborate production of the fall came from the San Francisco Symphony, which had to scrap most of its plans to celebrate its new music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen. Its online gala, on November 14th, encapsulated Salonen’s questing spirit nevertheless, with the conductor on hand to lead a movement from John Adams’s “Shaker Loops.” The major offering was the première of Nico Muhly’s “Throughline,” which makes a virtue of distancing and isolation. In an astounding feat of editing, the video of the performance integrates footage of players and ensembles in various locations, resulting not in an anonymous wall of Zoom boxes but in a seamless montage of closeup musical action. Muhly’s dexterously racing score allows individual musicians to shine, and also serves to introduce eight of the collaborative partners that Salonen has gathered around him in his new role: the flutist Claire Chase, the guitarist-composer Bryce Dessner, the bassist-composer Esperanza Spalding, the soprano Julia Bullock, the A.I. innovator Carol Reiley, the violinist Pekka Kuusisto, the pianist-composer Nicholas Britell, and Muhly himself. The “Throughline” video even has a silent part for Salonen: he is seen walking through the woods around his home in Finland.
The New York Philharmonic, the nation’s oldest orchestra, has been largely absent from the streaming marketplace. Health regulations have prevented it from organizing even modest-sized recording sessions, although an exception was made for a recent online gala, which included Bernstein’s “Candide” Overture and Elgar’s “Nimrod.” The orchestra did, however, make its presence felt in city squares and parks, in an initiative titled NY Phil Bandwagon. This was the brainchild of the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, who accompanied squads of players in more than eighty concerts across the five boroughs. In October, I caught an event on a pedestrian island at Broadway and Twenty-ninth Street. I’d never heard a program for countertenor and horn quartet, and may not hear one again. A few dozen spectators took in “Dripping Amber,” a new piece by Jessica Mays; horn-quartet pieces by Nikolai Tcherepnin and Alfred Diewitz; and a strangely effective arrangement of “Dido’s Lament.”
For the most part, only those who are actively searching out streaming concerts will find them. The Bandwagon, which featured Costanzo singing from a bright-red pickup truck, caught the attention of many people who don’t otherwise attend concerts. Although there was something dishearteningly marginal about the spectacle—most pedestrians paused only briefly before walking on—its very distance from the customary grandeur of classical presentations may do something to change popular perceptions of the institution. In any case, the series restored, if just for a moment, the psychic bond that a season of isolation has broken. ♦
