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Pablo Helguera

Got an idea for a classical cartoon or a reaction to this one? Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with sculpture, drawing, photography and performance. His new book is Helguera's Artunes. You can see more of his work atArtworld Salon and on his own site.

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Conductor Andris Nelsons, the newest music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Marco Borggreve/courtesy of the Boston Symphony Orchestra

Thursday morning, the Boston Symphony Orchestra announced that conductor Andris Nelsons is being appointed as its music director. The selection puts an end to the uncertainty that has cast a long shadow over the celebrated orchestra in recent years.

The BSO's former music director, James Levine, officially resigned his post in September 2011, but his tenure had already been plagued with ongoing health issues.

Classics in Concert

Yo-Yo Ma Headlines Tanglewood's 75th Anniversary Concert

The 34-year-old Latvian's name has consistently been on the short list of possible successors. And there have been big signals from the orchestra. Last summer, when the orchestra played a gala concert to celebrate the 75th anniversary of its summer home, Tanglewood, Nelsons led part of the celebration.

Despite a perhaps outdated reputation for cultural conservatism, the BSO noted that Nelsons is not the youngest conductor to take the orchestra's helm. However, you'd have to go back to the 19th century to find the ensemble's even younger leaders: Georg Henschel was 31 when he became the BSO's first music director, and Arthur Nikisch was just 33 when he took over in 1889.

A couple of months ago, our colleague Brian McCreath at Boston's WGBH noted that the BSO players' buy in would be an essential component to the next — and hopefully less uncertain — chapter in the institution's history. "Part of the reason Levine came to the BSO in the first place," McCreath wrote, "was the enthusiasm of the players for his work. And major orchestras like the BSO can be downright cranky when they're not on board with a conductor."

Nelsons will be returning to Boston in mid-October to conduct a weekend of Wagner, Brahms and Mozart with pianist Paul Lewis, and then again in March 2014 for one concert performance of Strauss' Salome. In the official BSO official press release announcing Nelsons' arrival, there is no mention of the length of his initial contract.

Born in Riga, Latvia in 1978, Nelsons began his professional career as a trumpeter in the Latvian National Opera Orchestra before studying conducting. He is married to a fellow Latvian artist, soprano Kristine Opolais, who made her own splashy debut at the Met this January in Puccini's La Rondine and with whom Nelsons has recorded. The two have a 17-month-old daughter; there's no word yet on whether or not the family plans to take up residence in Boston, though Nelsons, who was not present in the city for the orchestra's announcement, is quoted as saying, "It is with great joy that I truly look forward to joining this wonderful musical family and getting to know the beautiful city of Boston and the community that so clearly loves its great orchestra."

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Pablo Helguera

Got an idea for a classical cartoon? Leave it in the comments section.

Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with sculpture, drawing, photography and performance. You can see more of his work at Artworld Salon and on his own site.

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It's fun to stay at the ИМКА: Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring triggered an uproar at its world premiere in Paris a century ago. Now we're asking you to help celebrate the centennial by creating a dance of your own.

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Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring turned Paris upside down upon its world premiere in Paris May 29, 1913 — and we're asking you to help us celebrate this groundbreaking work's centennial.

This one piece paved a new artistic path not just for musicians but for all kinds of other artists as well. In his press release for the Rite world premiere, impresario Serge Diaghilev promised that Vaslav Nijinsky's choregraphy for the Ballet Russes would "provide a new thrill that will doubtless inspire heated discussion." Well, it did far more than that. It set off a dance revolution. A century later, it's your turn to interpret this music for the here and now.

We're inviting professionals and the public alike to take the last minute of Stravinsky's inimitable score — in an exceptional performance by conductor Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra — and create a new video to go along with this music.

Two things to keep in mind:

• Rule No. 1: You have to use the music above, and you have to leave the music alone, just as we've provided it. You can't sing over it, speak over it, play over it, create your own musical arrangement, or otherwise embellish the music in any way.
• Rule No. 2: Upload your finished video to YouTube between now and May 28 using the tag #ritenpr — and we'll select some of the best submissions to feature here on NPR Music. (You can also share a link with us in the comments section of this page or tweet us @nprclassical.)

The rest is up to you. Dance, improvise movement, make a one-minute animated short: It's up to you. Dream big. Show us your creativity. Be playful, serious, witty, exuberant, whatever you want. (Keep it clean, though! And human sacrifice is strongly discouraged.)

In the days ahead, we'll be featuring some submissions to help inspire you. In the meantime, take a look at what some choreographers have historically done with Rite — and have fun! We can't wait to see what you come up with.

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Mozart's Queen of the Night (portrayed here by soprano Diana Damrau), in his The Magic Flute, is one of opera's more intense mothers.

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We love mothers for all the Hallmark reasons: for their compassion and patience, not to mention giving birth. But some moms aren't exactly greeting card friendly — and none less so than those who live in the opera house.

This is opera, after all, so we expect the outrageous. But operatic moms seem to be disproportionately portrayed as murderers, harpies or generally women on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Your Normas, Medeas, Butterflies, Queens of the Night and Clytemnestras.

But dads are found in all kinds of touching musical moments. There's Wotan's moving farewell to his daughter Brünnhilde in Die Walküre, Boris' heart-rending scene with his little son in Boris Godunov and the two-hankie reunion of Boccanegra and his long lost daughter in Simon Boccanegra by Verdi, a composer with a rich catalog of poignant father figures.

But why the disparity? The answer must lie beyond the fact that all these composers are men. Perhaps men with a few hangups?

Unsure of a theory, I looked up Susan McClary, a music professor at Case Western Reserve University and author of Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality. She says mothers often get the short end of the stick, whether it's in fairy tales, Shakespeare or many other shared narratives.

"Within patriarchal societies, nubile women provide the pretexts for homosocial bonding," McClary says. "So long as women are valued for their beauty, they will fear becoming their mothers. And men, who grow up knowing the domestic authority of their mothers, dread them. So mothers become either invisible or monstrous. Opera is in good — or bad — company, depending on your point of view."

Got a theory of your own, or a favorite operatic mom we missed? Please let us know in the comments section. Meanwhile, listen to a few famous operatic mothers in high stress mode. They are strong characters for sure, but you wouldn't necessarily want to call them mom.

Pianist James Rhodes.

Dave Brown/courtesy of the artist

It frankly doesn't sound like much of a rallying cry, but in a recent essay for London's Guardian newspaper, British pianist James Rhodes is encouraging folks to "commit suicide by creativity." And what method of self-murder does he advocate? Playing classical music.

Even he admits that he went to the edge and probably beyond in chasing his own dream of being a professional musician:

" ... only when the pain of not doing it got greater than the imagined pain of doing it did I somehow find the balls to pursue what I really wanted and had been obsessed by since the age of seven — to be a concert pianist.

"Admittedly I went a little extreme — no income for five years, six hours a day of intense practice, monthly four-day long lessons with a brilliant and psychopathic teacher in Verona, a hunger for something that was so necessary it cost me my marriage, nine months in a mental hospital, most of my dignity and about 35 lbs. in weight."

What really surprised and impressed me was how often I saw Rhodes' piece pop up in my email inbox and on my Facebook feed, accompanied by comments like "Have you seen this?" and "Wow, I love what this guy is saying" — and coming mostly from friends outside the classical music world. Playing and writing about core classical music, he's found a way to connect with a bigger audience. It's worth noting that he was signed to Warner Bros. a few years ago, though it appears that he's since been dropped by the rock label. Along with recording now for the Signum label and maintaining an active touring schedule, he's gone on to make television documentaries for BBC 4 and Sky Arts. And he recently spoke at TEDxOxford, with a provocatively and admittedly intentionally (and ridiculously) misleadingly titled talk: "Pianos, Sharks and Nazis," which opens with his idiosyncratic performance of a Rachmaninov prelude.

Rhodes is an intriguing writer (though I could do without his gratuitous slam on Americans), and his whole demeanor underscores the idea that classical music is so off-the-radar in 2013 that it's even more underground-cool than, say, indie rock. But I wonder: Are such admissions just reinforcing the stereotype that in order to be a classical musician, you have to be a wild-haired, misunderstood eccentric living apart from real time and space? Rhodes namechecks Charles Bukowski, but isn't he also resurrecting the archetypally misunderstood and alienated Romantic hero for the 21st century?

I'm not so convinced that it's necessary to make people think that personal suffering is a necessary component to making art music (or serious music or awesome music or whatever you want to call it), but I really love what Rhodes has to say about the power of simply creating.

What if for a couple of hundred quid you could get an old upright on eBay delivered? And then you were told that with the right teacher and 40 minutes proper practice a day you could learn a piece you've always wanted to play within a few short weeks. Is that not worth exploring? What if rather than a book club you joined a writer's club? Where every week you had to (really had to) bring three pages of your novel, novella, screenplay and read them aloud?

What's your read on Rhodes? Take a few minutes to read his essay and tell us what you think in the comments, on Twitter @nprclassical and on our Facebook page at nprclassical.

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Pablo Helguera

Got an idea for a classical cartoon or a reaction to this one? Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with sculpture, drawing, photography and performance. His new book is Helguera's Artunes. You can see more of his work atArtworld Salon and on his own site.

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Conductor Valery Gergiev, who turns 60 today.

Marco Borggreve/courtesy of the artist

Today is Russian conductor Valery Gergiev's 60th birthday. Guess what he's received as presents? A national prize from his close friend Vladimir Putin — and a brand-new, government-funded theater in St. Petersburg to go with it.

The famously overbooked conductor is general director of the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg (where he is also celebrating his 25th anniversary this year), principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, honorary conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic (where he was previously music director) and artistic director of both the Stars of the White Nights Festival in St. Petersburg and the Moscow Easter Festival. He is also the former principal guest conductor of the Metropolitan Opera. (There's a reason a 2009 documentary film about him was titled You Cannot Start Without Me.)

Yesterday, the Russian president bestowed the Hero of Labor of the Russian Federation on Gergiev. It's a newly renamed prize — a revival of an award first created by Josef Stalin in 1927, formerly known as the "Hero of Socialist Labor" prize and discontinued in 1991 as an unwelcome Soviet artifact. The other 2013 winners, along with Gergiev? A neurosurgeon, a farm machinery operator, a coal miner and a lathe worker.

Today marks the opening of another grand theater at the Mariinsky — funded by the Russian government. Called "Mariinsky II" and designed by Toronto's Diamond Schmitt Architects, it's billed as a state-of-the-art opera house, joining the original theater in a campus now called the Mariinsky Cultural Complex. With about 2,000 seats in its main venue, Mariinsky II is a seven-story house with more than 550,000 square feet of backstage space. There's a gala concert this evening with performers ranging from Placido Domingo to Mariinsky principal ballerina Diana Vishneva. Tomorrow features a performance of Tchaikovsky's Iolanta; the following evening, the Mariinsky presents Balanchine's Jewels. All in all, it's a celebration of Russian arts in Russia's greatest cultural hub — and the patriotic gestures are certainly deliberate.

Gergiev is not just an unapologetic fan of Vladimir Putin; he's an active supporter. He memorably appeared in one of the Russian president's re-election campaign videos last spring, entitled "Why I'm Voting for Putin," noting that since Putin first came to power, "people reckon with the country. I don't know if it's fear? Respect? Reckoning." And in December 2011, according to an account of a Q&A session with Putin in London's Guardian newspaper, Gergiev compared Putin to both Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. ("This is all very pally," concluded the Guardian's Luke Harding.)

In a long New York Times Magazine profile four years ago, however, the conductor asserted that the mutual fandom he shares with Putin is in the service of Russian patriotism and Russia's cultural heritage. "It is not personal, this in return for that. They [the politicians] understand the importance of the Mariinsky," he told the Times.

Though Gergiev has certainly become a political player, his commitment to Russian culture and Russian art runs deep. Beginning in the early 1990s, he began reviving Russian works, and particularly operas, that either had been forgotten or had been sliced and diced during the Soviet era — works like Prokofiev's The Gambler, Rimsky-Korsakov's The Maid of Pskov and Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa. Gergiev recorded a slew of these unknown treasures for Philips, and it was through these recordings that many Westerners became acquainted with his music-making — and how he made stars of artists like soprano (and fellow Putin supporter) Anna Netrebko.

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Violinist Rachel Barton Pine says she had her infant daughter in mind when she decided to record an album of lullabies.

Andrew Eccles/Courtesy of the artist

In German, it's wiegenlied; in French, berceuse; in Norwegian, vuggevise. In any language, the universal effect of what we know as the lullaby is, of course, to coax a baby to sleep.

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Pauline Viardot-Garcia: Berceuse (Lullaby), No. 3 from Six Morceaux

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William Grant Still: Mother and Child, No. 2 from Suite for violin and piano

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Violinist Rachel Barton Pine had her own baby in mind when she decided to record a collection of lullabies. Her infant daughter appears on the cover of the new album Violin Lullabies — all folded up, fast asleep, so tiny she just about fits in her dad's hands.

"When I wanted to make sure that I was really capturing the right flavor, I just thought of my daughter in the recording studio," Barton Pine says. "And that sort of made me feel the music in the right way every time."

Barton Pine describes herself as a sheet music geek. From her collection, she created a shortlist of lullabies from composers including the biggies — Brahms, Schubert, Schumann — but also a number of surprises.

"There are some composers here who are known, but lesser known," she says. "And then, there are some composers who are absolutely, completely obscure. Like, who had ever heard of Antsev and Rebikov and Schwab?"

For the record, those are composers Mikhail Antsev, Vladimir Rebikov and Ludwig Schwab, who contribute three of the diverse batch of works — 25 in total — that Barton Pine interprets on the album.

"Some of them are about lulling the baby to sleep, some of them are about describing the baby who's sleeping, and some of them might even be describing a dream itself," Barton Pine says. "And that's also how I chose which mute to use — the little special things that sit on top of the bridge to give the tone quality of the violin an even more covered, more delicate and impressionistic sound."

Barton Pine says that even the family histories of the composers themselves influenced her performance. To hear more of her conversation with NPR's Melissa Block, click the audio link on this page.

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Cellist Janos Starker with one of his classes at Indiana University. He said he was "put on this earth to be a teacher."

Indiana University Jacobs School of Music

Renowned concert soloist and prolific, Grammy-winning cellist Janos Starker died Sunday. He was 88.

Starker's career began in his native Hungary, where he entered the Budapest Academy at age 7 and made his solo debut four years later. Starker dedicated his life to music, and left a legacy of teaching and performing.

Starker began playing cello in the early 1930s. Both of his brothers played the violin, so the thinking was that he should study something different. His teachers recognized his talent immediately.

"My teacher called and said, 'Would you like to play the Dvorak Concerto'?" Starker once recalled. "She went, 'This afternoon.' And I said, 'May I use the music?' She said, 'Sure.' And I played it, and that was supposedly one of the big dramatic successes of childhood prodigies." Starker would record the concerto several times later in his life.

Starker was born to Jewish parents; he and they survived a Nazi labor camp during WWII, but his two older brothers did not. In 1948, Starker came to the U.S., where he played with the Dallas Symphony and later the Metropolitan Opera and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. But in a 2011 interview, Starker said teaching was his calling.

"I've been caught confessing that basically I was born to be a teacher," he said. "People question the validity of it, because I played all those 3, 4, 5,000 concerts in my life. But the fact is, I think I was put on earth to be a teacher."

Starker joined the faculty of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University in 1958, and remained there for the rest of his life.

Music school dean Gwyn Richards says Starker had a reputation for being tough on his students.

"He was someone you didn't want to disappoint," Richards says. "You always wanted him to think well of what you were doing. There was always a blend of the technical and the musical, and you wanted to succeed on both fronts."

Former IU basketball coach Bobby Knight, himself known for the demands he placed on his players, once asked Starker to come speak to his team. Afterward, one of the players approached Starker and asked if he could tell the cellist a joke:

"Mr. Starker, there was a car accident, and three cellists died, and they all tried to get to heaven," the player said. "St. Peter asked the first one, 'Who did you study with?' 'Well, Rostropovich.' 'No, you have to go to hell,' St. Peter said. The next one replied, 'Leonard Rose.' The response? 'You have to go to hell.' And the third one comes. 'Who did you study with?' 'Starker.' St. Peter says, 'You may come in. You already went through hell.'"

After learning of Starker's death, world-renowned pianist Menahem Pressler spent the day Sunday in his studio making music. Both men survived the Nazis, both played in Dallas and Chicago, and both reconnected as faculty members at Indiana University.

"He knew the pieces well, and his standard was very, very high," Pressler said. "But he was a perfectionist, so during performance he was very concerned with perfection — and he was perfect."

Starker pursued a solo career while teaching, but his declining health took him off the concert stage in 2005. He continued to teach until this past winter, often inviting students to his house for a lesson. He often said teaching was what kept him alive.

"I had very little chance of surviving WWII," Starker once said. "And when I survived it, I said I should make it justifiable why I stayed alive."

Janos Starker's legacy can be heard not only in his own recordings, but also in the hundreds of students he inspired.

During the chaos and oppression of China's Cultural Revolution, one curious new theatrical genre was born — and it was the child of the Communist Party. Jiang Qing (a.ka. Madame Mao), a former stage and screen actress and the notorious wife of Mao Zedong, led the creation of yang ban xi: "model works" that were meant, in words attributed to Chairman Mao, to "serve the interests of the workers, peasants, and soldiers and [conforming] to proletarian ideology."

Through these operas and ballets, Jiang Qing aimed to wean artists and audiences alike from what she and the Party saw as the bourgeois themes and trappings of older Chinese art and replace them with a handful of revolutionary narratives, often set on battlefields. But the savvy Jiang Qing realized that the dogma would go far further if it were married to visual dazzle and sonic overload.

Under Jiang Qing's direction, eight initial works were produced — six operas and two ballets that married elements of Busby Berkeley-era Hollywood fantasy, classical Peking opera, Western ballet and Wagner's idea of gesamtkunstwerk with arias like "We Will Wipe Out the Reactionaries" and dance scenes titled "Hatred Blazes When Enemies Meet." And her big idea provided the repertoire for three thousand performing troupes across the country, as well as inspiration for a surreal scene in the John Adams opera Nixon in China.

Some of the most amazing artifacts of the yang ban xi are both kitschy and totally arresting stills produced by photographer Zhang Yaxin. Born in 1933, Zhang shot for the Xinhua News Agency before he was handpicked for the all-important task of disseminating Party philosophy through images. For eight years, he was closely supervised by Jiang Qing in his task of photographing the Communist Party's forays into revolution-worthy art.

The Chinese authorities readily understood the power of Zhang's images on their own terms. He was allowed to use one of only three Hasselblad cameras available, and while most Xinhua photographers were rationed three rolls of color film per year, Zhang was allowed to use as much as he liked. In turn, his stills from these productions were turned into posters, stamps, postcard books and craft pieces for further dissemination. And earlier this spring, a selection of Zhang's work was on exhibition at Toronto's Stephen Bulger Gallery, an exhibition we learned of via the Slate blog Behold.

As amazing as these hypersaturated images are on their own terms, many Chinese audiences in the 1960s and '70s experienced them in the context of their original stage extravaganzas and, later, in filmed versions as well. After seeing Zhang's work on Slate, we thought it would be fun to pair Zhang's pictures back up with some of the operas and ballets they originally accompanied.

Surprisingly, these operas are not Technicolor (if now dusty) relics of a bygone era, swept aside in the new China. As the BBC noted last year, the Central Ballet of China and other troupes take these works on international tours to this day.

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Pablo Helguera

Got an idea for a classical cartoon or a reaction to this one? Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with sculpture, drawing, photography and performance. His new book is Helguera's Artunes. You can see more of his work atArtworld Salon and on his own site.

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Ingolf Wunder pays tribute to 300 years of keyboard music on his new album 300.

Patrick Walter

The young Austrian pianist Ingolf Wunder shines in Mozart, Jorge Federico Osorio reintroduces an intoxicating Mexican concerto and Elisveta Blumina reveals the gentle side of Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov.

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Caroline Shaw, who composed the piece Partita for 8 Voices for her vocal group Roomful of Teeth, is the youngest-ever recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for music.

Dashon Burton/Courtesy of the artist

How do you write something like Partita for 8 Voices, the a cappella vocal piece that is this year's winner of the Pulitzer Prize for music?

"Very late at night," says the composer, Caroline Shaw, speaking with NPR's Scott Simon. "Sometimes it comes from having a sound in your head that you really want to hear, that you've never heard before, and struggling to make that sound happen in any way you can."

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Caroline Shaw, 30, Wins Pulitzer For Music

At 30, Shaw is the youngest-ever recipient of the music Pulitzer. Shaw says she considers herself a musician first — and, in fact, Partita for 8 Voices was written for the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, of which she is a member.

There's one moment in the piece that delivers on that name, where the sung music morphs into a mounting swell of cacophonous, indecipherable chatter.

"It's funny, my first thought was, 'Wow, that's what the Internet sounds like!' When you open your computer and everyone's talking at you suddenly," Shaw says. "But I was really wanting to hear the sound of jumbled talking, where you can't understand what's going on — and then, suddenly, one beautiful, simple chord."

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Pablo Helguera

Got an idea for a classical cartoon or a reaction to this one? Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with sculpture, drawing, photography and performance. His new book is Helguera's Artunes. You can see more of his work atArtworld Salon and on his own site.