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New York Times
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Why a Percussionist Was Playing a Siren
Good morning. It's Friday. We'll find out what happened when an experienced percussionist rehearsed with a siren at the New York Philharmonic. We'll also get details on a 30-day reprieve from the Trump administration on congestion pricing. Joseph Kelly's first rehearsal with the New York Philharmonic went well. He felt he was 'getting familiar' with the instrument he was playing in his spot behind the trombone section — an instrument he had not played before. In the second rehearsal, he said, 'I felt like my approach was coming together.' Then he broke the instrument. The instrument was an air raid siren. Kelly was one of 12 percussionists who had parts in 'Amériques,' a dissonant piece that the composer Edgard Varèse began writing in 1918, a couple of years after Varèse moved to Brooklyn from Paris. As the critic Harold C. Schonberg observed when the Philharmonic played it in 1975, 'it calls for unconventional instruments and makes unconventional sound.' It also calls for an unconventionally sized orchestra. The version of the piece that the Philharmonic played squeezed 122 musicians, 53 more than were needed for Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 last season. Only two of the 12 percussionists in the Varèse were full-time members of the orchestra. Kelly, who is the assistant principal timpanist and a section percussionist with the Toronto Symphony, and the other nine were hired as 'extra musicians' to fill out the unusually large percussion section in 'Amériques.' Varèse wrote parts for castanets, sleigh bells, whips and even a drumlike instrument called a lion's roar. 'I think that was him experiencing the city' when he was still a new New Yorker, Kelly said. The sound of sirens is 'so much a part of being in New York that you almost don't notice it' after a while, said Kelly, who graduated from the Manhattan School of Music and lived in Manhattan for seven years before moving to Chicago, Miami and then Toronto. The note in the Philharmonic program book said that some listeners had 'latched on to' the siren 'and decided that 'Amériques' depicted a bustling modern American city.' Varèse, though, called 'Amériques' 'a piece of absolute music, completely unrelated to the noises of modern life.' But was it? He also said that 'Amériques' was 'my own rather vivid reaction to life as I know it.' Unlike a violinist or a cellist who carries his own instrument wherever he plays, Kelly did not bring any sirens on the plane to New York. The Philharmonic has several, and when he tried them out, a military-green one caught his ear. 'I liked that one in particular because I was able to start and stop it very comfortably and control the dynamics more clearly' — all elements that mattered in 'Amériques' because Varèse wrote instructions in the score for 'when to rise and fall, how loud to play and when to cut off,' he said. The instrument had been modified to start and stop with a handle. During the second rehearsal, the pin that connected the gears to the handle broke. 'I stopped too suddenly,' Kelly said. The gears no longer whirled, and the siren no longer whirred. Kelly lugged the object backstage and, with the production crew, took it apart. 'It looked like we were performing surgery,' he said. 'It's at least from the '40s. This is from an age when things were built to be repaired — not like now, when something breaks and you throw it out and get a new one.' The broken pin was stuck, so someone carried the parts to the machine shop at the Metropolitan Opera, just across the plaza at Lincoln Center. But the pin could not be salvaged, and a replacement pin was nowhere to be found. So Kelly tried other sirens in the Philharmonic's collection. 'It's the New York Philharmonic,' he said. 'They had four other sirens.' He ended up using two red sirens, one hand-held and one mounted on a table. 'They cut through the orchestra more easily than the original one,' he said, and that 'served the music better.' Early showers and cloudy skies should give way to sunshine by noon. Expect gusty breezes up to 39 miles per hour and high temperatures in the low 50s. Both the wind and the temperatures will fall off overnight, with a low around 42. In effect until March 31 (Eid al-Fitr). The latest New York news Trump official delays congestion pricing deadline New York was defiant when the Trump administration demanded that congestion pricing end by today. Now Washington is willing to wait a month. The transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, extended the deadline by 30 days. But the reprieve came with a threat: 'Continued noncompliance will not be taken lightly,' he said in a social media post that was directed at Gov. Kathy Hochul. He called congestion pricing 'unlawful' and said that the federal government and President Trump were 'putting New York on notice.' 'Your refusal to end cordon pricing' — as congestion pricing is sometimes called — 'and your open disrespect towards the federal government is unacceptable,' he said. It was yet another twist in the fight between the administration and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that runs the program. A spokesman for Hochul said that Duffy's post 'doesn't change what Governor Hochul has been saying all along: The cameras are staying on.' The M.T.A. took the Trump administration to court last month, arguing that the administration could not reverse a program that had been approved. That approval came in the last two months of the Biden administration. Duffy's announcement about the extended deadline came two days after he sent a letter to the M.T.A. in which he threatened to withhold federal money from the authority if it did not respond to questions about crime on the subway, which he characterized as out of control. Crime on the subway has, in fact, been declining. Duffy's letter made no mention of congestion pricing, but some transportation specialists and legal experts suggested that the missive was a thinly veiled effort to gain leverage over the M.T.A. Trump has promised to end congestion pricing and could use a range of tactics to get his way, legal experts said. Most passenger cars are charged $9 during peak hours when they drive into the 'congestion relief zone,' which is anywhere in Manhattan south of 60th Street. The tolls are discounted by 75 percent overnight. Seeing Stars Dear Diary: It was 1985, and my husband and I were living on the Upper East Side. We planned a rare date night out and found a friend to babysit our 1-year-old daughter. We set out for a nearby theater where 'Cocoon,' with Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn among the stars, was playing. I was a fan of the couple, having seen them onstage at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis when I was growing up in Iowa. Unfortunately, when we got to the theater, we found that the next showing was sold out. Determined not to waste the evening, we walked a few blocks to another theater, where 'Prizzi's Honor,' with Kathleen Turner, Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston, was about to start. As we waited to buy tickets, I noticed an older couple standing a few feet ahead of us in line. I nudged my husband. 'Look,' I whispered. 'That couple: That's Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn!' — Jean Young Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here's today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Brandon Thorp, Stefano Montali and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@ Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
New York Times
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Dudamel Leads a Premiere by a Youthful Ravel. Not Bad for a Kid.
It's not every day that a critic gets to review a premiere by Ravel. He died almost a century ago, after all. And while some previously unknown works have come to light over the years, it happens considerably less than once in a blue moon. So my pen was out and alert on Thursday at the New York Philharmonic's delightful concert at David Geffen Hall, practically vibrating with the opportunity to be among the first to weigh in on a piece by the creator of some of music's most enduring and gorgeous classics. The work that the Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel, its incoming music director, were playing, part of a program celebrating Ravel's 150th birthday, was long assumed to be lost. Written around 1900, when Ravel was still a conservatory student stormily at odds with the musical establishment, the score for selections from a cantata called 'Sémiramis' turned up at an auction in 2000, when it entered the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. An entry in the diary of one of the composer's friends, the pianist Ricardo Viñes, indicates that it was played, probably as a class exercise, in 1902. ('It is very beautiful,' Viñes wrote.) There's no record of it being performed in public between then and Thursday. Grave and gloomy, bronzed by the low luster of a gong, the first section rises to the dramatic punch of an opera overture. The music then accelerates into a gaudy Orientalist dance that looks back to the Bacchanale from Saint-Saëns's 'Samson et Dalila' and the 'Polovtsian Dances' of Borodin, one of the Russian masters Ravel adored. This 'Prélude et Danse' is over in five minutes. (The third surviving section, for tenor and orchestra, will be premiered in Paris in December.) The piece is most intriguing as a preview of what was to come: For one thing, Ravel divides the string sections into multiple parts to increase the complexity of the textures, a technique he would use in later masterpieces like 'Daphnis et Chloé.' The Suite No. 2 from 'Daphnis' followed the little chunk of 'Sémiramis.' This was clever programming, but it came together just a few days ago. The star pianist Yuja Wang, the Philharmonic's artist in residence this season, was supposed to join the orchestra for both of Ravel's piano concertos, but dropped out because of a health issue. Dudamel and the orchestra traded out the concertos for two Ravel suites, 'Daphnis' and the exquisite 'Mother Goose.' The Ravel pieces were bookended by Varèse's industrial-size 'Amériques' and Gershwin's jazzy chestnut 'An American in Paris,' for what ended up being an excellent immersion in the first three decades of the 20th century. With well over 100 players, 'Amériques' begins plaintively, like Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring,' but gears up fast into the first of a long series of granitic explosions, with a siren periodically wailing. Powerful but not blaring, the Philharmonic conveyed the work's elemental force. On this program, you were more aware than usual of Varèse's subtlety and range of colors, as in the languid alto flute at the start that reached across the concert to connect with the great flute solo in 'Daphnis.' In the jeweled atmosphere of the quiet parts of 'Amériques,' like the steady beat in the harp and celesta as muted brasses wandered, there was a sensual suavity not so far from the fairy tale fragrance of 'Mother Goose.' The Philharmonic played both Ravel suites with just the right delicate freshness, and Dudamel's tempos felt natural: unpressured yet never sluggish. The different sections of the orchestra were balanced with poise, as in the oboe just peeking out from behind the silky violins in the second section of 'Mother Goose.' The final dance in 'Daphnis' had, in the context of this program, a ferocity that recalled Varèse. And 'An American in Paris,' which usually comes across as blithe, was quite different, its brassiness more relentless, its structure almost as arbitrary-feeling as that of 'Amériques.' As with any good musical pairing, the shift in perception went both ways: Varèse's urbanity suddenly seemed a little more cheerful, Gershwin's a little more brutal. Coherently programmed and terrifically played, the evening was a showcase for big sounds and repertory staples. If the brief 'Prélude et Danse' from 'Sémiramis' got a bit lost in the shuffle, it still offered a glimpse of a rising star. My report? Not bad for a kid.
