New Leader for Atlanta Symphony

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Robert Spano, the orchestra's music director, said that the incoming executive director, Jennifer Barlament, "will be a tremendous leader for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.” Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, which has been led by an interim president since its last one resigned last year in the midst of a two-month lockout during a heated labor dispute, announced Thursday that it had selected a new leader: Jennifer Barlament, currently the general manager of the Cleveland Orchestra.

Ms. Barlament, who is to begin the post in January, will hold the title of executive director. But the orchestra said that she would be succeeding Terry Neal, who took over the administration last year after the president and chief executive officer, Stanley Romanstein, resigned, calling himself an impediment to a labor agreement.

The orchestra ended its lockout after reaching a deal last November that gave its musicians small raises but required them to pay more for their health insurance, and allowed the orchestra to leave positions vacant longer.

Ms. Barlament, who holds a bachelor’s degree in music from Emory University in Atlanta and a master’s degree in clarinet performance from the Eastman School of Music, said in a statement that she was honored to be chosen to lead the Atlanta Symphony and to work with its music director, Robert Spano. “It is especially poignant for me to come home to Georgia to serve a city and an orchestra that I love, working with Robert Spano, one of the great original thinkers in American classical music,” she said.

Mr. Spano, who was outspoken in support of the musicians during the lockout, said in a statement that he was “very pleased with the outcome.” He added, “Jennifer and her track record are very impressive and I believe she will be a tremendous leader for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.”

It was not the only sign of healing on Thursday from an orchestra recovering from a labor battle and a lockout: the Minnesota Orchestra, which locked out its musicians for 16 months, ending in February 2014, announced that it had balanced its $30.6 million budget for the 2014-15 season, thanks to expense savings and strong fund-raising.

Tim Zavadil, a clarinetist with the Minnesota Orchestra, said in a statement that “the musicians are absolutely thrilled with the news of this year’s balanced operating result, and we are incredibly grateful to our board, staff, supporters and community for this achievement.”

Collegiate Turn for Philharmonic’s Brass

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Do not expect plumed caps. The outlook for high steps, flag-waving and chiropractor-defying back bends is unclear. But next month Alan Gilbert, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, will lead the orchestra’s brass section along with the mighty Michigan Marching Band at the homecoming football game against Northwestern.

The Philharmonic’s participation in the Oct. 10 halftime show — which is expected to feature more than a thousand musicians and excerpts from “Carmen,” “Swan Lake” and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 — is one of the more striking features of the orchestra’s first residency in Ann Arbor as it begins a new five-year relationship with the University Musical Society of the University of Michigan.

The rest of the orchestra’s trip to Michigan, from Oct. 8 to 11, will feature more conventional fare: three Philharmonic performances, teaching led by members of the orchestra and lectures by both Mr. Gilbert and the Philharmonic’s president, Matthew VanBesien.

Family Protests White Poet’s Use of Chinese Pen Name

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Controversy erupted in the poetry world earlier this week when it was discovered that a poem included in the annual “Best American Poetry” anthology was written by a white poet, Michael Derrick Hudson, who had submitted it to a journal under the Chinese pseudonym Yi-Fen Chou.

Now it turns out that pseudonym may have come from a real person.

The family of a woman named Yi-Fen Chou, who attended the same high school in Fort Wayne, Ind., as Mr. Hudson, has stepped forward, demanding that he immediately stop using it.

“I’m just aghast,”  Ellen Y. Chou, the sister of Yi-Fen Chou, said in an interview. Mr. Hudson’s use of the name, she added, showed a “lack of honesty” and “careless disregard for Chinese people and for Asians.”

Mr. Hudson, in a biographical note included in the anthology, explained that he had begun using the pseudonym “as a strategy for ‘placing’ poems,” noting that the poem included in “Best American Poetry” had been rejected by journals 40 times under his own name but only nine times under the name Yi-Fen Chou. The volume’s editor, Sherman Alexie, explained in an essay published online this week that he had discovered the poem in the journal Prairie Schooner, and had only learned Mr. Hudson’s real identity after notifying him that the poem had been chosen for the anthology.

Ellen Chou, a communications official with the United States Department of Defense in Washington, D.C., told the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, which first reported the Chou family’s complaint,  that the family had emigrated from Taiwan in 1977 and settled in Fort Wayne, where Yi-Fen  attended Wayne High School for two years. Mr. Hudson, who works as an indexer in the genealogy department of the Allen County Public Library, had previously told the newspaper that he graduated from the school in 1982. (Mr. Hudson could not immediately be reached for comment.)

Ellen Chou said that Yi-Fen Chou, a nuclear engineer in Chicago who goes by a married name, did not want to be identified or interviewed. The family, she said, wanted Mr. Hudson to immediately stop using the name, which had a “unique spelling” and had been given to her sister by their paternal grandfather.

Ms. Chou questioned Mr. Hudson’s seeming assumption that Asian-Americans have an advantage.  “He seems to think we have it easy, but we don’t,” she said. “We all worked very hard to achieve our own success. I’m just appalled by his actions.”

New Seamus Heaney Translation to be Published Next Year

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In the months before he died, the poet Seamus Heaney worked on a project that had occupied him since the 1980s: a translation of the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid, in which the hero Aeneas travels to the underworld to find his dead father.

The resulting work will finally be published next year, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States and by Faber & Faber in Britain.

Jonathan Galassi, the president and publisher of Farrar, said that the translation is “a major extension” of Mr. Heaney’s work and “a moving poem in its own right.”

Mr. Heaney worked on translations throughout his career, including a translation of “Beowulf” and “Sweeney Astray,” a medieval Irish work. He had been fascinated by the Aeneid since he studied it in school as a boy, but the description of the underworld in the epic Latin poem Aeneid took on special significance to him after the death of his father in 1986. He began working on a translation of Book VI, and returned to the project over the decades.

“There’s one Virgilian journey that has indeed been a constant presence, and that is Aeneas’s venture into the underworld,” he said in “Stepping Stones,” his 2008 book of interviews with Dennis O’Driscoll. “The motifs in Book VI have been in my head for years – the golden bough, Charon’s barge, the quest to meet the shade of the father.”

His daughter, Catherine Heaney, said in a statement released by Farrar that the family had debated whether or not to publish it, but ultimately decided it was a fitting tribute.

“The decision to publish it was one our family took after long and careful consideration,” she said. “However, given its theme of Aeneas’s search for his father in the afterlife, it would be hard to think of a more poignant way for us to mark the end of our father’s own poetic journey.”

British Panel Urges Tate to Return Looted Constable Painting, Again

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PARIS — For the second time in a year and a half, a British government panel is pressing the Tate Gallery in London to return an oil landscape by John Constable to the heirs of a Jewish aristocrat whose art works were looted by the Germans during World War II from his homes and bank vault in Hungary.

The museum formally authorized the return of the 1824 work, “Beaching a Boat, Brighton,” in May 2014 at the urging of the Spoliation Advisory Panel. But it reversed the decision a week later after officials from the Hungarian Museum of Fine Arts presented the London museum with a 1946 export license for the painting.

Since then the Tate’s researchers and a lawyer for the heirs have been pondering the significance of the document.  In Budapest, they interviewed a retired Hungarian museum official in her 90s who signed the export document, which did not include the name of the original owner.

The small landscape — with an estimated value of about a million euros — belonged to Baron Ferenc Hatvany. He was a Christian convert of Jewish origins, whose sizable art collection was pillaged while he hid in the Hungarian countryside during the war. When he resurfaced he discovered the works had vanished, including the Constable painting, which he bought in 1908 at a Paris auction.

The eight member spoliation panel — created by the British government to mediate looting claims on art works in public institutions — said in its latest recommendation, issued on Thursday,  that the key question was whether the baron recovered the looted painting after the war and then sold it. “No link has been established between Baron Hatvany and the two persons named as applying for the export license,” the panel said in its report, which concluded that there was nothing new in the document to block the return of the painting to the heirs.

The Tate issued a brief statement on Thursday saying that its board members would consider returning it at their next meeting later this month, but gave no indication of whether they would follow this latest recommendation.

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Mitsuko Uchida Among Winners of Praeamium Imperiale Awards

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The pianist Mitsuko Uchida and the ballerina Sylvie Guillem are among the winners of this year’s prestigious Praemium Imperiale international arts awards, the Japan Art Association, which presents the awards, announced Thursday.

This year’s winners also include Tadanori Yokoo, a graphic designer and artist; Wolfgang Laib, a sculptor; and Dominique Perrault, an architect. The prizes — which come with approximately $122,000 — will be presented at a ceremony in Tokyo on Oct. 21.

The Praemium Imperiale, which honors achievements in painting, sculpture, architecture, music and theater or film, has previously been awarded to a wide array of cultural figures, including Ingmar Bergman, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Athol Fugard, Frank Gehry, Jean-Luc Godard, David Hockney, Willem de Kooning, Akira Kurosawa and Ravi Shankar.

The winners are chosen by the Japan Art Association from a group of artists nominated by advisers from the United States, Britain, France, German, Italy and Japan.

Alessandra Ferri to Return as Juliet for One Performance

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One of the great ballerinas of her generation, Alessandra Ferri, who retired from American Ballet Theater in 2007, will return to the Metropolitan Opera House stage for one performance next season with the company, in the role of Juliet in Kenneth MacMillan’s “Romeo and Juliet.” Her scheduled performance, on June 23, will be almost nine years to the day since she bade farewell to Ballet Theater, where she had been a principal dancer for 22 years.

Juliet has been a part closely associated with the Italian-born Ms. Ferri throughout her long and storied career; she first danced it in 1984 with Britain’s Royal Ballet, which she joined and remained with for five years after training at the Royal Ballet School. In 1985, Mikhail Baryshnikov, then the director of Ballet Theater, invited her to join the company, and throughout her long career “Romeo and Juliet” remained a signature ballet.

In a telephone interview from Hamburg, where she is working with the choreographer John Neumeier on a ballet about the Italian actress Eleonora Duse, Ms. Ferri, 52, said that she had not planned to continue performing after retirement. “One project led to another,” she said.

In 2013, she choreographed and performed in “The Piano Upstairs,” a dance-theater work by John Weidman. That same year, she took on the dance role of Lea in Martha Clarke’s production of “Chéri,” a story by the French writer Colette about an older woman who separates from a younger lover, played by the Ballet Theater principal Herman Cornejo. In May this year, she starred as the protagonist of Wayne McGregor’s new full-length “Woolf Works” for the Royal Ballet.

Ms. Ferri said that the suggestion of returning to perform Juliet had come a few months ago from Kevin McKenzie, Ballet Theater’s artistic director. Initially surprised and hesitant, she said she decided that it would be “interesting and exciting” to revisit the role, and to dance it with Mr. Cornejo, with whom she had never performed the ballet.

“It has been a very fresh, stimulating partnership for me,” she said. “And I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to revisit this role, this young girl, with so much inside me that has changed, and such a new understanding of life.”

Stephen Colbert’s First ‘Late Show’ Almost Didn’t Make It on Air

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George Clooney was Mr. Colbert's first celebrity interview on the show. Jeffrey R. Staab/CBS

Updated, 2:38 p.m. |

On Tuesday night, as Stephen Colbert and his team at “The Late Show” were editing an overstuffed debut, a crucial portion of the program very nearly missed making it to air for 11:35 p.m. — namely, the entire episode.

Mr. Colbert disclosed these semi-humorous, semi-horrifying details on Wednesday in the opening monologue of his second episode as host of this CBS late-night series.

Tuesday’s “Late Show” taping ran about two hours and concluded at around 8 p.m. Some parts of the episode, including portions of interviews with guests George Clooney and Jeb Bush, had to be cut and were later posted online.

Mr. Colbert said in his monologue: “It took us a while to cut the show down to time. And then when we tried to send it to the network, so they could show it to you on air, the computers kept crashing.”

He continued, “At 11:20 — and again, this actually happened — no one in the building could give me a guarantee for certain that the show was going to go on the air last night.”

“So,” Mr. Colbert said with audible sarcasm, “you can imagine how exciting that was for all of us.”

Mr. Colbert said he contemplated the possibility that his first episode might not be broadcast at all.

“And as I felt the oxygen begin to drain to from my brain,” he said, “and all my organs shutting down, I thought, ‘If we actually make it to air, this will be a pretty good story.’”

He continued, “And if we don’t, it’ll still be a very interesting story at the theater camp I will be running in Idaho.”

Press representatives for Mr. Colbert and for CBS declined to comment further on Thursday.

Bard Training Orchestra Announces First Season

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Bard College’s new training orchestra, called The Orchestra Now, announced Wednesday that it was welcoming its first 37 musicians this month and that it would perform concerts this season at Bard, Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and elsewhere.

The orchestra, conceived by Leon Botstein, the president of Bard and the music director of the American Symphony Orchestra, as something like a medical residency for postgraduate musicians, also plans to give several free concerts during the season in the Bronx, the East Village, Brooklyn and Queens.

Highlights of its inaugural season include a three-concert series at the Met museum exploring the connections between orchestral works and pieces of art in the museum’s collection, and a Jan. 29 Carnegie Hall concert pairing Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 with works written by one of his friends, Anton Reicha; one of his students, Ferdinand Ries; and one of his favorite composers, Cherubini. Another Carnegie concert, on May 13, is to explore works left unfinished.

Students will be enrolled in a three-year master’s program that comes with free tuition, a $24,000 annual stipend and health benefits. They will work with conductors including Mr. Botstein, James Bagwell, JoAnn Falletta, Marcelo Lehninger and Gerard Schwarz.

Classical Playlist: Brahms, Vivaldi and Tallis

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The tenor Ian Bostridge. Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

Brahms: The Complete Songs, Vol. 6
Ian Bostridge, tenor; Graham Johnson, piano
(Hyperion)
In his complete lieder surveys for the Hyperion label, one of Graham Johnson’s great talents has been matching songs to singer, building recital recordings that work on their own and also suit the demands of the whole. Ian Bostridge’s reflective, often pained way with words would not suit all of Brahms’s songs, but, despite occasional strain, this is one of the tenor’s finest releases. Take the Opus 85 landscapes, the Heine settings “Sommerabend” and “Mondenschein,” which shimmer with detail, or the last of the Opus 32 “Lieder und Gesänge,” “Wie bist du, meine Königin” — a master class of descriptive subtlety from singer and pianist alike. (David Allen)

Vivaldi: ‘The Four Seasons’ and Concertos for Bassoon and Violin ‘in tromba marina’
La Serenissima; Peter Whelan, bassoon; Adrian Chandler, director and violin
(Avie)
Another disc with Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”? With the market awash with recordings of this well-worn collection of violin concertos, it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to release – and perhaps even review – yet another one. But cut Adrian Chandler some slack: as violinist-leader of the period-instrument orchestra La Serenissima and one of our leading Vivaldi experts, he has recorded dozens of this composer’s lesser-known concertos first, and his stylish and fresh reading of the “Seasons” is only the bait on an album that includes gorgeous renditions of some of Vivaldi’s bassoon concertos. Even more intriguing, Mr. Chandler offers what is billed as the world premiere recordings of concertos for violin “in tromba marina.” This three-stringed violin (with strings made of metal, not gut) was designed to approximate the sound of a trumpet in all-female ensembles back when it was considered unseemly for a woman to play brass instruments. Its odd raspy sound lends an exotic touch to this fine recording. (Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim)

Tallis: ‘Ave, Dei Patris Filia’
The Cardinall’s Musick; Andrew Carwood, director
(Hyperion)
It was the fate of the Tudor-era composer Thomas Tallis to be remembered chiefly for a single audacious creation, the 40-part motet “Spem in Alium,” not often performed for obvious logistical reasons. But generations of devoted choristers have served much of his music well on recordings, not least the Tallis Scholars. In recent years Andrew Carwood and the Cardinall’s Musick have moved to the fore, and here they add a fifth disc to their acclaimed Hyperion edition of Tallis’s sacred works. Named for one of his earliest pieces, the album offers a version of the “Dorian” Short Service, hymns and responsories: beauty everywhere, and a few startling harmonic turns. Loveliest and most gratifying are the English psalm settings, which in their homespun simplicity could not be farther removed from the learned complexities of “Spem in Alium.” (James R. Oestreich)

SPOTIFY PLAYLIST

Tracks from the recordings discussed this week. (Spotify users can also find it here.)