Zachary Woolfe

On a recent Monday evening, Philip Glass sat at a piano placed between the painting and a few dozen potential donors to the Days and Nights Festival, his annual works-in-progress showcase south of Palo Alto. Glass, the master of musical minimalism, is known for the precision of his endlessly undulating arpeggios. When he plays his own pieces, though, they tend to blur and smear, like Mitchell’s brush strokes. Rhythms that in other hands are almost clinical in their regularity begin to smudge, the music newly volatile and feeling.

“This is called ‘Opening,’ ” he told the audience, by way of introducing a piece from his 1981 collection “Glassworks.”

“It’s sometimes called ‘Closing,’ if we do it at the end,” he added, a little sheepishly — to laughter that was perhaps inspired by Glass’ notorious willingness to repurpose his music.

There is another Glass opening upon us that is also a closing — of a circle in this composer’s 50-year career. His classic trilogy of the 1970s and ’80s has finally been surveyed at the Metropolitan Opera, his country’s preeminent opera house. “Einstein on the Beach,” Glass’ epochal epic, came to the Met in 1976, though it was a rental, and not produced by the company. A deliriously received Met production of “Satyagraha” opened in 2008, and his “Akhnaten” runs there through Dec. 7.

“I feel surprise,” he said a few weeks after the museum event, when asked whether he felt pride or even vindication at the belated milestone. “Really, truly surprise. I have a whole string of operas after that, some more successful, some less. I’ve certainly written a lot of them. I haven’t looked back that much. I’ve just kept going.”

At 82, Glass does remarkably little dwelling on the past. In fact, he is in the process of curtailing his busy touring schedule, so that he can focus on what is already a prodigious rate of composition — a level of productivity that has made him, depending on whom you ask, either the wonder or the punch line of modern music.

But the short-term result of announcing that you’re no longer concertizing is that everyone wants to book you — so Glass is, for the moment, traveling nearly as much as ever.

“I think people are saying, ‘Oh, 82: Better get that in,’” said Richard Guérin, who as director of Glass’ record label, Orange Mountain Music, helps oversee the dissemination — and therefore the future — of the torrent of Glassism.

“It’s like a rocket, a creative rocket hurling out of control,” he said. “It’s this never-ending cyclone of creativity. We’re not trying to shape it; we’re trying to wrangle it.”

At Lincoln Center, the symbol of the musical establishment by which Glass was long snubbed, he is well represented this fall: In addition to the “Akhnaten” production, his new “King Lear Overture” opened the season at the New York Philharmonic, which had not played a note of his music on a subscription program until 2017. (He contributed a string quartet score for the Broadway production of Shakespeare’s “King Lear” earlier this year.)

But when it comes to talk of his legacy, and whether these prominent performances mean anything in terms of his acceptance into the canon, however that is defined, he demurs.

“I’m pragmatic,” Glass said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen in 10 years. We don’t even get to know what’s going to happen after someone dies. We need to wait until everyone who knew them is dead, too.”

If that’s true, it won’t be until nearly 2100 when a full measure of Glass’ footprint will be possible. But some weighing can start now. The most instantly recognizable voice in contemporary music, he opened a new chapter in operatic history, pushing the bounds of duration and abstraction. At a time when the most lauded composers disdained overproduction, Glass wrote unashamedly for everyone and everything — and all stubbornly in the distinctive style he created, establishing a model for serious artists moving from the opera house to the concert hall to the film studio, garnering both Met commissions and Academy Award nominations.

But if the question is whether, a century from now, his operas will get new productions, his symphonies will circulate more frequently, or pianists will take on his études, Glass couldn’t care less.

“I won’t be around for all that,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”

Glass was born, almost literally, into music: His father owned a record store in Baltimore, where the composer-to-be absorbed Beethoven, Schubert, Bartok, Shostakovich and Stravinsky — and, perhaps, an intrinsic connection between art and commerce. Over a few years in Paris, Nadia Boulanger was his composition teacher as he was exposed to the jittery-fly modernism of Boulez and Stockhausen. He didn’t hate them, but he didn’t want to compose like them, either.

His travels to India in the late 1960s were formative, leading him toward experimentation with vast fields of time built from small, slowly transforming cells of material, and when he returned, he was entranced by the repetitive, deceptively simple works of Steve Reich, a few months his elder. Played by the newly formed, loudly amplified Philip Glass Ensemble, works like “Music in Similar Motion” (1969), “Music With Changing Parts” (1970) and “Music in Twelve Parts” (1971-74) were neon-bright expanses of both flooding repetition and glacial change.

Those pieces culminated in “Einstein on the Beach,” a dreamlike meditation on scientific discovery, human relations and nuclear apocalypse that progressed in enigmatic episodes, austerely designed and directed by Robert Wilson and with swirling choreography by Lucinda Childs, the dancers representing atomic particles in ceaseless motion.

“When ‘Einstein’ opened,” Glass said, “we had never performed it straight through without stopping. We didn’t know how long it was. It turned out to be 5 1/2 hours.”

Glass became a maestro of excruciatingly delayed gratification. “I have no idea what Philip was thinking when he wrote ‘Satyagraha,’” Guérin said of that 1980 opera, a highly stylized but (compared with “Einstein”) more traditionally plotted story about Gandhi’s early ventures into nonviolent protest in South Africa. “The third act is 45 minutes long, and has just two harmonies. But when it explodes into pure Phrygian scale in the final aria, it’s, like, oh, this totally makes sense.”

When it came to “Satyagraha” and “Akhnaten” (1983), Glass said, “many people were waiting for the son of ‘Einstein.’ They liked that experience of that throbbing, relentless ensemble playing that we did. Of course I wasn’t going to do that. Why would I do that? I had just done it. So I did something completely different, and it was much too lyrical for some people.”

The bronzed character of the “Akhnaten” score emerged through necessity. The company in Stuttgart, Germany, that commissioned the work was renovating its theater, so the performances took place in a space with a much smaller pit.

“So I said,” Glass recalled, “and it was a crazy thing to say, ‘Get rid of the first and second violins.’ And then we were fine. It wasn’t a masterpiece of orchestration. I just didn’t have any room.”

With the violas now taking the place of the violins, the sound shifted down an octave, its burnished sheen given body with brasses and punctuated by sometimes raucous percussion. As for the title character, the Egyptian pharaoh who is said to have pioneered monotheism — and to have had all traces of him erased for that blasphemy — Glass put him onstage from almost the beginning, but tantalizingly delayed his first musical entrance.

“How do I introduce him to the audience so that the first time they hear him, they understand he is a completely radical, unforgivable event in the Egyptians’ history, and they have to destroy him?” Glass recalled asking himself. “I’ll make him a countertenor, to sound not unnatural, but radical. Radical can be natural. He just was who he was.”

Glass, too, stayed what he was, though his style grew lusher, toggling between brooding melancholy and triumphal achievement for an overall impression of persevered-through struggle. His energetic rhythms made him a favorite of dance troupes; his scores for films like “The Truman Show” (1998), “The Hours” (2002) and “Notes on a Scandal” (2006) made him omnipresent.

“The world had caught up with his music,” Guérin said. “The Philip Glass sound became digestible to mass audiences. If you had told the people in New York that the composer of ‘Music in Twelve Parts’ would be able to maintain his musical language and score major Hollywood pictures, they wouldn’t have believed you. But he got to be himself.”

He — and a host of imitators — spawned a thousand TV advertisements. (Guérin said that Glass refuses to spend more than two hours on such projects.)

“I’ve done football commercials; I’ve done everything,” Glass said. “Commercial and noncommercial: My attitude has been that they’re both the same. Why is it better to get a check every week from a university than to get royalties? Of course I’m a sellout. What else would I be?”

His eventual reputation may well, in the end, be founded on his early works for his ensemble — their intensity an unlikely, still-bracing mixture of gaudy and spartan, bare yet glowing — and the early operas.

Nearly 30 operas followed the initial trilogy, depending on how you count. It’s a horde, naturally with ups and downs; the highlights — like the somber “Kepler” (2009) and the sardonic “The Perfect American” (2013), a vivisection of the Walt Disney legend — balance soggier efforts like “Appomattox” (2007). This year’s Days and Nights Festival, last month, brought the premiere of a darkly comic, slyly poignant short opera — for just three singers, keyboard and harp — to the text of an absurdist play by María Irene Fornés.

Glass’ solo piano music shows perhaps the most staying power, popping up on recitals and recordings. His first piano sonata, written for Maki Namekawa, premiered in July. “We have talked about it being in the tradition of Joseph Haydn’s monumental E-flat Major sonata,” Namekawa wrote in an email, “written late in his life, after he had abandoned the symphony.”

But Glass has hardly abandoned the symphony — with 12 and counting, starting in the early 1990s, including three based on David Bowie albums. Orchestras have been the most recalcitrant in embracing his music: Major ensembles have depressingly little room for living composers in general, and beyond conductor Dennis Russell Davies, who commissioned many of his large-scale works, Glass has lacked influential music-director champions.

And with some reason: While the Eighth unfolds with doleful sweetness, his other symphonies can be chuggingly listless. The “King Lear Overture” was a scattered 10 minutes.

Glass’ famous name and recognizable style, though, may eventually lead to more converts, as the New York Philharmonic’s late embrace demonstrates. He has an unmistakable personal brand, in a culture that values that ever more dearly. And he has retained ownership of almost all his intellectual property, putting no middlemen between him and the potential profits.

“I was writing pieces ahead of their time, in the sense that audiences and boards of directors and conductors weren’t ready,” Glass said. “But it’s changing. I can tell from the ASCAP and BMI” — the major music licensing agencies — “I can tell from what happens, you can just — pardon me, but you can just look at the money.”

Guérin and the rest of Glass’ team are focused on putting out as much of the music on record as possible, sending it into the cultural bloodstream. They are also trying to subtly influence its reception and programming. (If an orchestra is playing Beethoven’s Third Symphony — the “Eroica” — they might suggest pairing it with Glass’ Fourth, subtitled “Heroes,” after Bowie.)

The team gets more frustrated than the boss about the holdouts. “I get angry that these orchestras are stuck,” Guérin said. “But Philip says: ‘You can’t get upset about this stuff. You don’t defeat your enemies, you just wait until they die.’”

But surely a composer must care, or at least wonder, about the fate of his works? Even just a little?

“I’m not going to be here,” he said.

This article originally appeared in

Philip Glass Is Too Busy to Care About Legacy

PALO ALTO, Calif. — A Joan Mitchell painting looms at the top of the grand staircase at the Anderson Collection, Stanford University’s modern art museum here. It’s a sweaty, emotive work, bright colors moodily smeared across a huge canvas.

The 33-year-old soprano had woken up the morning of her performance here with a scratchy throat. OK, she thought, it happens. But over the course of that recent Tuesday, her fever rose; the chills began.

While Advil calmed them as evening approached, by the end of the London premiere of “Zauberland” — the intense, more-or-less-one-woman show that she will bring to Lincoln Center on Tuesday and Wednesday — congestion was dogging her. At her curtain call, after 80 minutes without leaving the stage, it was obvious to the audience at the Royal Opera House’s intimate Linbury Theater that she could barely hold back tears.

“My teacher in college said to me that when there’s a problem at a performance, you should imagine someone offstage saying, ‘No, you can’t go on,’ and you push them out of the way,” Bullock recalled a few days later. “There are very few things that are going to prevent me from going onstage.”

For someone who has admired Bullock as one of the singular artists of her generation — a singer of enveloping tone, startlingly mature presence and unusually sophisticated insight into culture, society and history — the effect of her illness was revealing.

Revealing both in terms of what it took away and what it left. You missed the velvet in her voice, the richness, the autumnal halo around her sound. But what remained — what was even heightened — was her clarity with text, her taut strength, her burning commitment. She seemed poised, in the paradoxical senses of the word: serene, yet ready to leap.

Bullock has arrived at the precipice of an important but unconventional career. She has barely sung with major opera companies, and when she has, it’s been in contemporary works by John Adams or Kaija Saariaho and offbeat repertoire like Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” and Purcell’s “The Indian Queen.”

Instead of singing Mozart or Verdi, she has made a precocious effect on the concert stage and as a curator, serving as artist-in-residence last season at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — where she delved deeply into the African American experience, past and present — and this season in the same role with the San Francisco Symphony, where she will have a continuing partnership. Her still-evolving, evening-length work devoted to Josephine Baker, a collaboration with composer Tyshawn Sorey, is both a paean to a pioneering black performer and a haunting meditation on exoticism, objectification and mourning.

“This is who we’ve been waiting for,” said director Peter Sellars, a frequent colleague. “You see someone who’s not just a vehicle, but an agent of change. She’s actually moving the whole art form into a new relevance, both by completely rehabilitating existing repertoire and by commissioning a set of things that need to exist. We’re hearing the voice of a new generation.”

Born, like Baker, in St. Louis, Bullock grew up dancing as much as singing. “People always told me,” she said, “that I had a great voice — and a wonderful presence.”

When it came time for her to choose a conservatory, another talented young woman from the area was going to the Eastman School of Music, in Rochester, New York, so Bullock decided that was where you went when you sang well. The faculty there reacted warmly to her audition, and she felt supported.

She also struggled in college, going to rehab at 20 to address several addictions. And in the years after that, when she was completely sober, she became, she recalled, perhaps unhealthily dependent on singing, treating it as if it were the only thing that could save her. Her master’s program at Bard College — overseen by Dawn Upshaw, herself a soprano who charted a maverick course in contemporary music — was more grounded, guiding Bullock toward the in-depth study of poetic song texts.

But then came the career-obsessed hothouse of the Juilliard School, where she quickly became a much-hyped star in the preprofessional artist diploma program. Appearing in the title role of Massenet’s Cinderella opera, “Cendrillon,” in 2014, she found herself overwhelmed by the character, who loses a parent — Bullock’s father died when she was 9 — and is subjected to ridicule and abuse.

She began to struggle with a psychosomatic ailment that caused her to gag while singing — even sometimes while speaking. She suffered from depression and anxiety; she would weep uncontrollably before performances. These issues have trailed her for years, only beginning to resolve after intensive therapy, including the much-debated post-traumatic stress disorder treatment technique called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR.

“As wretched as this gagging has been, not knowing if anything will come out,” she said, “it’s a liberation that seems to continually be happening. The stuff I’m performing, and the stuff in my life, it needs to be very much linked.”

Artistic expression and personal pain have also been connected in her Josephine Baker project. Its choreographic elements — stylized versions of the sensual banana dances and Charlestons that were sensations for Baker — exposed the sensitivity Bullock had long felt about presenting herself in what she considered stereotypically black attitudes. “It has always been, or was, a fear of mine to be considered animalistic in any way onstage,” she said.

The dancing, which took Baker’s sly, sexy originals and turned them ominous and apelike, offered Bullock a catharsis that has affected her approach to her work overall. “I don’t need to be presenting myself as some kind of upright presence at all times,” she said. “I don’t have to have this facade of glamour and grace.”

In January she performed the Baker evening, now called “Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine,” on the grand staircase leading up from the Great Hall of the Met Museum, stalking the steps under harsh floodlights. Her approach to her Met residency reflected her mother’s instruction when she was just starting out: “Make sure your work is making a difference for the betterment of the world.”

The teeming series at the Met also included settings of the words of black artists from the South and fresh versions of traditional slave songs; “El Niño,” John Adams’ multicultural exploration of the Nativity story; a program connecting Langston Hughes’ New York to the city’s present; and Hans Werner Henze’s oratorio about a runaway slave.

“It was the fullest realization of what a Met residency could look like,” said Limor Tomer, general manager of the Met’s live performance program. “In terms of the number of projects we did, the diversity of projects, topics, audiences, levels of engagement.”

“Zauberland,” like the Met programs, finds in older art a lens with which to view contemporary events, however ambiguously. Directed by Katie Mitchell, the piece opens up Schumann’s song cycle “Dichterliebe” and inserts additional songs, with music by Bernard Foccroulle and texts by Martin Crimp; Cédric Tiberghien is the sensitive pianist throughout.

The fractured narrative may suggest the plight of a Middle Eastern refugee fleeing to Europe; it may express the wandering thoughts of a concert singer who’s been following the news a bit too closely; it may all be a dream. Despite bursts of activity, “Zauberland” has its blurry longueurs. But Bullock is magnetic as a figure of confused passivity, a woman manhandled by the forces of history.

“Knowing that it would be for her, I knew it could be minimal,” Foccroulle said of his music in an interview. “I didn’t have to overwrite, being able to trust her dramatic presence.”

Now, the main question before Bullock is how she will deploy that memorable presence. As she told a group of students at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama here, “I’m in a phase in my life when I can pick my projects.”

Tiberghien said he was hoping to explore with her modern corners of the art song repertory, such as Olivier Greif’s “Chants de l’Âme” and Messiaen’s “Harawi.” Those who love opera might fantasy-cast her in repertory standards, and Mitchell is working with her on a production of Handel’s “Theodora” for a coming season at the Royal Opera. But, as Foccroulle said, “it would be a pity if she was just an operatic soprano.”

Tomer, at the Met, said, “I hope she will be one of these artists who has the freedom to choose.” Sellars commented, “Her path is going to be our path.”

For her part, Bullock said she was both drawn to and recoiled from the kind of projects that have made her reputation: those that have brought her mind and body to uncomfortable places, that have carried the burden of often dark histories and asked us, her audience, to encounter and acknowledge them together.

“I so don’t want to use the performing arts as a therapy for myself,” she said, “because that’s not how I feel it. But at the same time, I cannot deny that when I look at the great work that has been written, these individuals were pouring themselves, all of themselves, into their work. And I want to embrace that.”

'This Is Who We've Been Waiting For': A Diva on the Precipice

LONDON — Julia Bullock had a cold.

The cause was a heart attack, his manager, Katherine Olsen, said.

Giordani appeared more than 240 times with the Met in 27 roles, including in two company premieres, five new productions and the opening nights of two seasons.

When he opened the 2006-07 season, the first of Peter Gelb’s tenure as general manager, in Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” Anthony Tommasini wrote in The New York Times that Giordani sang “with full-bodied Italianate passion; warm, rich tone; and clarion top notes.”

“Clarion” and “passion” were adjectives often used to describe Giordani at the height of his powers, in the early 2000s. He “sang like a god” in a 2002 concert performance of Cilea’s “Adriana Lecouvreur” at Carnegie Hall with Opera Orchestra of New York, Anne Midgette wrote in The Times. It was, she added, “a rock-solid performance at an ideal pitch of fortissimo passion.”

Marcello Guagliardo was born on Jan. 25, 1963, in Augusta, a small town on the eastern coast of Sicily. He was the youngest of four sons of Santina, who was a housewife, and Michele, who had been a prison guard but by then owned a gas station. (Soon after starting his international career, Giordani adjusted his name to be simpler to pronounce and spell.)

When he finished school, Giordani worked in a bank, but quickly grew bored. His father encouraged his interest in music.

“He loved opera,” Giordani told The Times in 2007. “He heard me singing all the time when I was a kid. Maybe he always dreamed that one of his sons would be an artist.”

Tall, handsome and fervent — “Now there’s a tenor,” star singer Neil Shicoff once marveled to Olsen — Giordani had a success in Spoleto, Italy, with Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” in 1986.

His debut at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan came two years later, in Puccini’s “La Bohème,” as he began to sing throughout Europe. He made his American debut in 1988, singing Nadir in “Les Pêcheurs de Perles” with the Portland Opera in Oregon.

He met Wilma Ahrens that year, when she was working for the presenter at an engagement in Lucerne, Switzerland; they married two years later. She survives him, as do their two sons, Michele and Gerard Andre, and his three brothers.

“I learned my profession onstage,” Giordani told The Times. “I didn’t have a musical background. I had no conservatory training. I don’t play an instrument.”

That lack of firm technical grounding soon began to haunt him, and by the early 1990s, he was having vocal problems. “The tenor voice should be like sunshine,” Giordani told The Los Angeles Times in 1998. “My voice was sounding old already, too dark.”

Giordani began a new training regimen, under the guidance of the prominent teacher William Schuman, that saved his natural talent.

“The first thing he did was open my body and let me trust my voice again,” Giordani recalled a decade later. “In the past, my voice was my enemy. But for 10 years, it’s been my best friend.”

Giordani remained committed to fostering healthy voices and careers; in the early 2010s, he established the Marcello Giordani Foundation to nurture young singers.

He made his first appearance with the Met in the summer of 1993, in Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore,” as part of the company’s series of concert operas in city parks. The big tenor aria, “Una furtiva lagrima,” was, Alex Ross wrote in The Times, “a stirring display of direct emotion.”

His debut at the Met’s Lincoln Center home came two years later, in “La Bohème.” He quickly established himself in the ardent lover leads in touchstones of the repertory, mostly Italian works by Verdi and Puccini, but also as Lensky in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” the title character in Berlioz’s “La Damnation de Faust,” Énée in that composer’s “Les Troyens,” Des Grieux in Massenet’s “Manon,” Don José in “Carmen” and, aptly, the Italian Singer who makes a fervent cameo in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier.”

In Opera News magazine, David J. Baker praised Giordani’s “controlled, sensitive and robust singing” in the Met premiere of Berlioz’s “Benvenuto Cellini” in 2003. But while Marion Lignana Rosenberg, writing in the same magazine a year earlier, described his “ringing, brilliant” high notes in the company premiere of Bellini’s “Il Pirata,” she added that “there is a hardness to his tone that is ill-suited to Bellini’s long, supple cantilena.”

In 2008, he was the tenor soloist in a Met performance of Verdi’s Requiem dedicated to the memory of Luciano Pavarotti, and, in December 2010, he starred in Puccini’s “La Fanciulla del West” on the 100th anniversary of the work’s world premiere at the Met, in a role sung in 1910 by Enrico Caruso.

He sang in Verdi’s “Simon Boccanegra” at the Royal Opera House in London in 1997 under Georg Solti, in what turned out to be Solti’s final operatic performances before his death later that year. In 2003, Giordani appeared in the Paris Opera’s first production since 1863 of the original French version of Verdi’s “Les Vêpres Siciliennes.”

But for all his successes in opera houses, his most glorious nights may well have been his Carnegie Hall performances with Opera Orchestra of New York and its founder and conductor, Eve Queler. With that company, he sang works including “Adriana Lecouvreur,” Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda,” Meyerbeer’s “Les Huguenots” and “L’Africaine,” and Rossini’s “William Tell,” in 2005 — with which Giordani stopped the show near midnight with the cabaletta “Amis, amis, secondez ma vengeance.” When the cheers wouldn’t stop, he sang the aria again.

“I’ve never seen a crowd react that way,” Schuman, his teacher, said. “A true riot broke out. It was like someone scored the winning touchdown at the Super Bowl. He was capable of incredible things.”

Marcello Giordani, Tenor Who 'Sang Like a God,' Dies at 56

Marcello Giordani, a heartfelt, stalwart and, at his best, inspired tenor who was a fixture at the Metropolitan Opera and other major houses around the world, died Saturday at his home in Augusta, Sicily. He was 56.

NEW YORK — There is a back-to-school feeling at the Resonant Bodies Festival, the immersion in new vocal music that arrives each year just after Labor Day. This week, singers, composers and musicians thronged the lobby and aisles of Roulette, in Brooklyn, chatting about where they performed over the summer and what’s coming up this fall.

The event has earnest, easygoing charm: Concerts inevitably start late; the intermissions go on forever; Lucy Dhegrae, the founder and director, gives casually unscripted speeches; this year, a duo skittered around the theater during pauses, breaking into impromptu close harmonies. Even the performances, however skilled, give the sense of works in process, of explorations shared in a spirit of generosity and intimacy.

The formula is simple: three nights, three performers per night, 30 minutes per set. (It used to be 45 minutes; this is a good change.) Artists can fill that half-hour however they choose. There was more range than usual this week, even for an event that prides itself on variety.

This year boasted two bona fide opera stars: the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, on Tuesday, and the mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, on Thursday. Well, a mezzo-soprano in her day job; here Blythe appeared as her drag alter ego, the over-the-top, bearded tenor Blythely Oratonio, belting — beautifully — mash-ups of Italian arias and pop hits. (Think a Baroque-ified “Jessie’s Girl.”) Costanzo sang six pieces, five of them written for his sensuously floating, moonstone voice.

That they fit in so naturally with the other performances speaks to the broad ears of the festival and its audience, even if those other sets were more overtly experimental. But even here there were divergent approaches.

Charmaine Lee (on Tuesday) and Erin Gee (on Thursday) shared a wordless vocabulary of pops, whistles, croaks, exhalations, squiggles of sound. But while Lee’s music — part of it conjured alongside Conrad Tao, on piano and electronics — had a loud, violent, expressionistic charge, Gee’s was whispery and precise, both solo and with musicians of the Argento New Music Project, in examples of her ongoing “Mouthpieces” series.

On Wednesday, Kate Soper’s voice was sent ricocheting through the theater by Sam Pluta’s explosive electronic manipulations; the text, as usual with Soper, was a dense work of ancient philosophy, given a lively yet earnest spin. She then moved to the piano for “The Fragments of Parmenides,” moving back and forth between speaking and singing as she played with the conventions of singer-songwriter cabaret.

In the only fully solo set, Anaïs Maviel accompanied herself on the kamale ngoni harp on Wednesday, plucking a steadily flowing background that her mellow voice sinuously wove around. At the end of an elegant improvised set on Thursday with pianist Vijay Iyer and bassist Shahzad Ismaily, who both doubled on electronics, Arooj Aftab sang a soft but reverb-soaked chant over a spacey, pulsing low drone. (“Neo-Sufi,” she aptly describes herself.)

Accompanied on Wednesday by a band combining string lushness and rock amplitude, Ted Hearne’s voice surged from baritonal belt to airy falsetto in a series of settings of Dorothea Lasky poems that emphasizes their brooding emotiveness more than their wry humor. For a drier dissection of a poetic text, Tuesday brought Jane Sheldon and her adaptation of Alice Oswald’s “Dunt: a poem for a dried up river.” A riveting study in breath, it was heavy on rhythmic exhalations as an ensemble quietly, droningly evoked a summer night: the low blow of a conch shell, soft bell-like ringing, gentle sliding sounds.

Sheldon crawled over a strip of wet clay as she sang, then remained onstage after the house lights had gone up for intermission. With a bashful smile, she said that Roulette wouldn’t want her to walk off with her feet so dirty.

“But it’s over,” she said, to the audience’s laughter. In its unpretentiousness, the moment captured Resonant Bodies.

A Festival Brings the Musical World Back to School

(Music Review)

<h1>CHICAGO — While Verdi’s “Aida” ends with a delicate duet for its lovers, who have been sealed alive together in a tomb, they don’t have the opera’s final word. That goes to the princess Amneris, who begs softly for peace, and a chorus of priests and priestesses.</h1>

What are they saying in the somber closing bars? I bet you’ve never heard the words. At most performances of “Aida,” the chorus intones on a vague, barely audible “ah.”

But with Riccardo Muti, our most scrupulous modern Verdian, leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in a concert performance of the opera Friday evening, the sound was barely a gauze, and yet the rhythm was exact, each phoneme crystal clear and relished: “Immenso Fthà,” a prayer.

The moment took on new mystery and wonder, and the import of the opera’s conclusion — a timeless religious sphere quietly swallows up the transient concerns of governments and romances — was suddenly fresh.

There were passages like this, as if hearing the opera with new ears, throughout Muti’s “Aida”: pinprick violin arpeggios evoking the flow of the Nile in the opening of the third act; tiny grace notes that add ineffable spirit to the short second-act ballet in Amneris’ chambers.

At the beginning of this Triumphal Scene, a dotted rhythm, properly crisp, conjured the light step of horses. And as Amneris pledged revenge against the man who won’t love her, a passing trill in the trumpets — usually buried in the orchestral textures — was a memorably angry flare.

It’s unsurprising that the performance was full of little revelations like these. Muti made his career in Italian opera, and this is the fourth Verdi work he has done in his decadelong tenure in Chicago, after a harrowing “Otello” (2011), a darkly surging “Macbeth” (2013) and a stylishly witty “Falstaff” (2016). “Aida” would have been the most crushing artistic loss had the orchestra musicians’ strike not been resolved, after nearly seven weeks, at the end of April.

Muti’s position is that Verdi has been abused by modern musicians. His rhythms have been fudged; his operas have become occasions for vulgar high-note battles rather than displays of refinement, subtle vocalism and meticulous wedding of text and music. Mozart and Wagner, Muti argues, would never be subjected to the disrespect — the cuts, the smudgings — still commonplace in Verdi performance.

He’s not wrong; Teutonic condescension to southern European culture has long loomed large. For his part, Muti has responded with Verdi interpretations that are pledges of allegiance to each marking in the music, each 16th rest (never to be confused with an eighth rest, so help him God).

The performance Friday sometimes had the feel of a time capsule being prepared. In a hundred years, this “Aida” could be opened and you could re-create the score, note by note, as if taking dictation from Verdi himself.

As an orchestral showcase, it was always impressive — the tempos judicious; the sound unfailingly balanced; the winds, in particular, beautifully blended. Muti has appointed three players in the past few years whose interplay was a model of sensitivity: Stefan Ragnar Hoskuldsson, principal flute of the Met Orchestra before coming to Chicago; Keith Buncke, principal bassoon; and William Welter, new this season as principal oboe, and remarkably full and liquid in tone and line.

The playing of this “Aida” was in many ways exemplary. And yet, like Muti’s performance of the opera at the Salzburg Festival two years ago — with the Vienna Philharmonic an even more extravagantly virtuosic and sensual partner — it was often cool to the touch. It was a practically flawless reading of the score, but it was never moving. The drama barely crackled. Even the most forceful moments felt rounded off, smoothed out, ultimately muted.

I found myself, as I never have before, wanting more heft from the brass players, notorious for playing too loud but often superbly elegant Friday. I wish that at the end of the Judgment Scene, when their howls mark the opera’s climax, Muti had really unleashed them. Controlled wildness isn’t the same as vulgarity.

That’s one lesson about opera that should be remembered. Another is that intelligence and respect for the score are integral, but only get you so far. Without vocal richness and power, “Aida” means little; the work’s structure must of course be correct, but great singing fills it with life.

So it is no coincidence that this “Aida,” the least thrilling of the four Verdi operas Muti has conducted here, features the spottiest cast of the four.

The soprano Krassimira Stoyanova, her voice pale and fragile Friday, has long collaborated with Muti. (She was a wrenching Desdemona in his “Otello” here.) But the question of whether she was ill, or the bloom is more permanently out of her voice, is less important than the reminder she offered that vocal glamour and power are not incidental to the details of articulation.

Those details were observed fastidiously by everyone onstage, including the bass Ildar Abdrazakov (as the chief priest Ramfis), the bass-baritone Eric Owens (the King) and the baritone Kiril Manolov (Amonasro). But there was not real vocal richness or personality among that trio of deep male voices; they struggled to match the orchestra for color and resonance. There was, moreover, a chilled feeling, as if everyone were so intent on executing Muti’s exacting vision to the split second that spontaneity had been banned.

It was only in the fourth-act duet between the tenor Francesco Meli, an ardent, sweet-voiced Radamès, and the mezzo-soprano Anita Rachvelishvili, a moody Amneris, that attentiveness to detail met tonal security and allure. The result was, finally, the kind of emotion that should be pervasive in “Aida” — the reason, after nearly 150 years, we keep on wanting to hear it.

Additional Information:

The program repeats Tuesday at Symphony Center, Chicago; cso.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/arts/music/aida-verdi-muti-chicago-review.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Details matter in Riccardo Muti's precise 'Aida'

The moment took on new mystery and wonder, and the import of the opera’s conclusion — a timeless religious sphere quietly swallows up the transient concerns of governments and romances — was suddenly fresh.

<h1>(Critic's Notebook): PHILADELPHIA — “I hate pretty. I can’t stand listening to pretty.”</h1>

It was funny to hear this coming from Donald Nally, the conductor of the Crossing, a choir devoted to new music that makes some of the prettiest sounds you’ll ever hear.

Just listen to the opening of their recording of Lansing McLoskey’s “Zealot Canticles”: hovering yet full tones, like the gentle tolling of a celestial bell. (It won the 2019 Grammy Award for best choral performance.)

Or the final section of their recording of Gavin Bryars’ “The Fifth Century,” in which silvery female voices float above dark, velvety male ones, like bands of color in a Rothko painting. (It won the same award in 2018.)

On a recent Friday, rehearsing “Aniara” — the Crossing’s first theatrical production, which opens Thursday for five performances at Christ Church Neighborhood House in Philadelphia and travels to the Netherlands next month for the group’s European debut — the mass of voices was mellow and airy but never faceless or cold, each voice maintaining its individuality in the cloud.

“What I love is the absolute precision of pitch and rhythm, but also a warmth,” said Caroline Shaw, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer who wrote the surging, radiant “To the Hands” for the Crossing and is at work on a major new commission for the group. “You can go to them with anything.”

Composers have done just that. Michael Gordon is gradually creating a work for them with filmmaker Bill Morrison that will be performed over 24 hours. In “Animals,” Ted Hearne pushed the group’s voices into yelps, howls and hisses for a harrowing reflection on President Donald Trump’s comments about immigrants in the country illegally: “These aren’t people. These are animals.”

That piece is emblematic of the ethos that has made the Crossing one of the country’s most exciting vocal ensembles: an embrace of the new, a social conscience and a fearless technique, brought together in a marriage that transcends mere prettiness. A Crossing program is often politically charged — taking on issues like homelessness, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster and corporate personhood — without being didactic. The group is uninterested in, ahem, preaching to the choir, preferring works that are suggestive and ambiguous.

“Artists are not in the position to know the answers,” Nally said. “What do artists think they’re doing, affirming our own morality? It’s worthless. I really believe that. I think we should be presenting the facts and the questions, in an art context.”

The 90-minute “Aniara,” based on a melancholy epic poem by Swedish Nobel laureate Harry Martinson, takes place on the last spaceflight off a ruined Earth — a symbolic microcosm of a society in crisis amid environmental destruction. The score is by Robert Maggio, with a libretto by Dan Henriksson, of the Finnish theater company Klockriketeatern.

Joining the Crossing are two actors and a small instrumental ensemble on a catwalk strip of stage in a stylized sci-fi landscape of shifting bars of light. (The performances on Friday evening and Saturday afternoon will be live streamed at crossingchoirlive.com.)

Under Nally’s wry, caring direction at an early staging rehearsal at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, the Crossing’s longtime home, the group fine-tuned intonation and diction, making sure “evil” was pronounced “e-vull,” not “e-vill.” The singers practiced martial arts-like movements and rubbed smooth stones together to make a soft roar, like the sound of a distant ocean.

“It should feel ritualistic, but in a broken way,” Nally said of the singing at one point — immaculate, yet unpretty.

As a young man, Nally dreamed of becoming a classical saxophonist. But by his freshman year of college, he had switched to voice, and was almost immediately conducting church choirs. In the mid-1990s, he was commissioned by Gian Carlo Menotti’s Spoleto Festival in Italy to form a festival choir, which became his laboratory for the development of a new sound.

“I had come up in this tradition of robust American singing, and that was never really in my ear,” he said. “It doesn’t work in contemporary music, because you can’t hear what the harmonies are. So I started to clean it out, and it started to make sense to me. I tried to find a way to make sounds that could hover, that didn’t have to move forward, that rejected 19th-century ideas about line and linearness.”

It was a sound with the calm purity of early-music performance but also the agility and flexibility demanded by new music. Above all, it was clear.

And it eventually gave rise to the Crossing, at first a casual reunion of singers who’d loved working with one another, which had its first performance in the fall of 2005. Swiftly deciding to focus on new music, the group barely advertised itself but eagerly threw live recordings online.

It built an audience in Philadelphia, and word soon began to spread among musicians and composers that a formidable force had arrived: An adventurous, fiercely talented choir was looking not just to sing but also to create a whole new repertoire.

Claire Chase, then the artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble, was looking for a singing group that could join in the premiere of James Dillon’s sprawling, thorny “Nine Rivers” when she heard an early Crossing recording.

“My jaw went on the floor,” Chase said. “It felt like a prayer had been answered.”

“Donald immediately wanted to do things,” she added. “He didn’t want to just talk about things. And, all of a sudden, all of this repertoire that we wanted to do, and couldn’t, was possible.”

Nally is, Chase said, “that unicorn artistic director, in that he’s as down to earth as he is visionary, and as driven as he is reflective and humble, and as curious as he is ambitious.”

The Crossing has commissioned dozens of works, with its ambitions growing with its stature. In 2016, the group unveiled “Seven Responses,” which asked composers to write 15-minute pieces inspired by the seven cantatas of Buxtehude’s 17th-century “Membra Jesu Nostri.” Chase’s ensemble and Quicksilver shared instrumental duties, a rare meeting of new- and early-music ensembles.

The Crossing’s annual budget has grown to over $1 million, and last year it hired a full-time executive director, Jonathan Bradley, as it plans to accelerate an already robust recording schedule. The group’s office is still in a closet at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill. But, Bradley said with a smile as he pointed to a high shelf, “it’s a closet with a Grammy.”

Nally has pursued projects on his own. In New York, he served as music director for David Lang’s “The Mile-Long Opera,” for a thousand voices on the High Line, and recently prepared the choruses for the New York Philharmonic’s premieres of Lang’s “prisoner of the state” and Julia Wolfe’s “Fire in my mouth.” Since 2012, he has taught at Northwestern University.

But his passion remains the Crossing. A core part of the group has been together since the beginning, and its artistry emerges from that long immersion in one another’s lives and voices.

“That’s where the sound comes from,” he said. “It comes from a group of people who know each other really well and pay attention.”

It’s a pristine sound. But there’s also urgency in it; a sense of searching; always a reason behind the gorgeousness.

“I like beautiful,” Nally said. “But I can smell beauty for the sake of beautiful from a mile away, and I run.”

Thursday through Sunday at Christ Church Neighborhood House, Philadelphia; aniara.crossingchoir.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/arts/music/crossing-choir-donald-nally.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

America's Most Astonishing Choir Hates Sounding Pretty

It was funny to hear this coming from Donald Nally, the conductor of the Crossing, a choir devoted to new music that makes some of the prettiest sounds you’ll ever hear.

America's most astonishing choir hates sounding pretty

<h1>0SAN PEDRO, Calif. — Opera lends stature to its characters. (Even to its villains.) It expands their scope; it ennobles them.</h1>

This can cause problems when the art form turns to recent history and its contentious figures. It was the main objection to the title character in John Adams’ “Nixon in China” and to the Palestinian terrorists depicted in his “The Death of Klinghoffer”: The kind of immortality opera grants was being extended to those who didn’t deserve it.

Well, no one could say that the quintet of protagonists of “The Central Park Five,” a jazz-infused new opera by Anthony Davis and Richard Wesley that was premiered on Saturday at the Warner Grand Theater here by Long Beach Opera, don’t deserve it. These are boys — and then men — who earned their nobility, their place on the opera stage.

Their wrenching journey, going back 30 years now, has long been known. But it has reached a broad new audience this month with Ava DuVernay’s Netflix miniseries “When They See Us,” an almost unbearably intense treatment of the story.

When a white woman was raped and brutally beaten in Central Park in 1989, five black teenagers were accused and convicted of the crime, based on confessions later found to have been coerced. It was not until 2002, when another man confessed and DNA evidence backed him up, that the judgments against the five were vacated; in 2014, New York City paid $41 million to settle a lawsuit brought by them.

It is a tale that unfortunately never gets old, and it has fresh resonance in the era of Black Lives Matter and renewed attention to issues of police misconduct, wrongful convictions and mass incarceration. What’s more, one of its crucial supporting characters has turned up again in the news, to say the least: Donald Trump, who crusaded against the Central Park Five as they stood accused and insisted on their guilt as recently as the 2016 presidential campaign.

So it’s no coincidence that this story is being told by artists today. What is a coincidence is that “The Central Park Five,” with a score by Davis and a libretto by Wesley, is opening within a month of “When They See Us.”

But this isn’t the first time that the operas of Davis, a noted jazz composer and performer, have been at the vanguard of more popular culture. His “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” anticipated Spike Lee’s blockbuster biopic. “Amistad” opened days before Steven Spielberg’s 1997 film of the same name. There was a sense in these works, particularly the seething “X,” of opera being newly used to give resonance — literally and figuratively — to real-life events.

While opera can’t compete with the screen for verisimilitude, it can provide “the opportunity to explore the emotional impact beyond the mere facts,” as Andreas Mitisek, the artistic and general director of Long Beach Opera, wrote in a news release for “The Central Park Five.” The art form can be particularly arresting when it teases out those subtleties in stories we’ve known primarily as black-and-white reportage — when it imagines Malcolm X or Richard Nixon’s private musings and sets them to music.

This is what Davis, among others, have shown that opera can do. But “The Central Park Five” doesn’t, or doesn’t always. Forthright and impassioned, it makes clear the crushing injustice of the situation, but provides little emotional nuance beyond that.

Part of the problem is its treatment of the title group: The opera has a Greek chorus as an unwieldy main character. Singing largely in unison or in counterpoint ensemble, the five (played by Derrell Acon, Cedric Berry, Orson Van Gay, Nathan Granner and Bernard Holcomb) never have the chance to come to life as individuals, either in music or words.

And the evocation of their life together as friends in Harlem is too weak to make us really miss it after all goes wrong. Mitisek’s simple, bland production — movable door frames and projected tabloid headlines — doesn’t help.

Opening with a saturated, scratchy chord that fractures into jitters, the score, conducted by Leslie Dunner, is most interesting in brief instrumental interludes. The scenes are generally painted with urbane, rhythmically punchy big-band-style jazz, beefed up with strings, under declamatory vocal lines. (Unlike in some contemporary operas, the text is delivered with consistent clarity.) But in the instrumental passages between those scenes, the musical flesh melts away to reveal scattered flecks of instrumentation and an electronic haze — a scraping, buzzing sonic landscape that swiftly evokes the ominousness of the story.

As in Davis’ earlier operas, solos are highlights: The mother of one of the five (the mezzo-soprano Lindsay Patterson) pours out her heart in a simmering, sad torch song. But even here, when the music is so alluring, there’s little sense of personality or the unexpected.

An unnamed district attorney (the mezzo Jessica Mamey), clearly meant to suggest the prosecutor Linda Fairstein, isn’t quite as much of a monster as she could be (or as the character of Fairstein is in “When They See Us”). But neither composer nor librettist really develops her character. A more stock villain is a multipurpose male character called the Masque (the baritone Zeffin Quinn Hollis), who shape-shifts from a bigoted reporter (“Harlem,” he sings, “a black and tan fantasy that attracts me and repels me all the same”) to a tourist to a police officer.

And, sung by a high tenor, the stereotype of operatic arrogance, Trump (Thomas Segen) is portrayed as a sour blowhard. His part in the story has been expanded beyond the historical record, to the point that he is seen acting as a kind of Svengali to the police and prosecutors working on the case. The second act opens with him sitting on a golden toilet, a moment that’s intended as satirical relief but comes off as overkill.

Surely we can never have enough reminders of the injustice done to these five young men. But Davis and Wesley’s blunt work doesn’t show off the depth and heightened feeling that opera could add to what we already know.

Through June 23 at the Warner Grand Theater, San Pedro, California; longbeachopera.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/16/arts/music/central-park-five-opera-review.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Review: 'The Central Park Five' Turns Injustice Into Opera

Well, no one could say that the quintet of protagonists of “The Central Park Five,” a jazz-infused new opera by Anthony Davis and Richard Wesley that was premiered on Saturday at the Warner Grand Theater here by Long Beach Opera, don’t deserve it.

Review: 'The Central Park Five' turns injustice into opera

<h1>LOS ANGELES — In some ways, Meredith Monk’s “Atlas,” which the Los Angeles Philharmonic is presenting in a lavishly glowing production through Friday, is as traditional as opera gets.</h1>

It has arias, duets, trios, choruses, instrumental interludes. It has dance sequences. It has spectacle — here at Walt Disney Concert Hall, an extraordinary sphere, 36 feet in diameter, seems to float over the stage — and a female protagonist facing adversity. It even has that rarity in contemporary music: earworm tunes, little cells of melody that stick with you for weeks.

At its premiere, at Houston Grand Opera in 1991, “Atlas,” the parable-like tale of a girl’s maturation into an explorer, brought into an old-school opera house for the first time the avant-garde style that Monk had by then been cultivating for three decades. Starting with luminous solos, she had detached her voice from text, but not from storytelling — instead conveying meaning through tone, speed, rhythm, volume, texture, vowels, wild shrieks, low coos, flowing babble, rapid-fire stutter.

Her endeavors got grander, eventually encompassing a hand-picked ensemble of singers and evening-length events that added choreography, film, sets, costumes, character and instrumentation. Progressing in marriages of poetic image and evocative sound, physical gestures mirroring vocal ones, these works were created through intimate collaboration and long processes of improvisation and rehearsal that evoked Buddhist spiritual practice, with Monk directing, designing and starring.

This made them indelible — and, often, unrepeatable. The group would move on to the next show, usually without having made full notated scores of the last. Even if Monk had sanctioned it, others couldn’t take on these sprawling, complicated, idiosyncratic pieces.

But as the years went on and Monk, now 76 and still very much creating, got no younger, the question began to be whispered: Could you do Meredith Monk without Meredith Monk? What, in other words, would happen to such personal work — largely made by and for her and her close circle — after she was gone?

The Philharmonic’s “Atlas,” the opera’s first production since the original in the early 1990s, is the beginning of an answer. Never before has Monk entrusted — that seems the most appropriate word — to other artists one of the theatrical works she masterminded.

And Yuval Sharon’s new staging, the culmination of this adventurous director’s three-year residency with the orchestra, is both a radical transformation of the piece and an essentially modest conservation of it.

Revived with the assistance of close Monk collaborators but not Monk herself, the bones, and much of the flesh, remain in an opera that’s somehow simultaneously bustling and meditative, calm at its core as action and music swirl. The main character, loosely based on the world traveler Alexandra David-Néel, leaves a cozily ordinary existence with her parents to see the world with a band of companions. Led by spirit guides, they encounter farmland, ice, forest and desert, trials of courage and premonitions of destruction, before entering an otherworldly realm that Monk calls The Ringing Place.

The scenes are poetic, almost entirely wordless, and sometimes surreal, but their narrative content is clear; they don’t pose abstract enigmas, like “Einstein on the Beach,” and Sharon has more or less stuck to them. He has hewed close to Monk’s original scenario and the original presentation — even the original appearance — of the characters. Danielle Agami’s fluid choreography evokes Monk’s graceful movement vocabulary.

The results are often properly sensitive, with mystical import, but, given the production’s looming, high-tech set, the action can also sometimes feel inadvertently quaint, a tad cautious. I thought, for example, that Sharon might reinterpret and modernize the fairy-tale beings that the explorers come across: Hungry Ghost, Ice Demons, Lonely Spirit, Ancient Man. What might a lonely spirit, for example, be in 2019 guise? But these were the same storybook figures they were in 1991.

A few tweaks have been made. Apocalypse is now imagined as an internet-era digital explosion, and the climate crisis is suggested by images of fire-trailing bodies and a temperature-tracking map superimposed on the sphere.

Zachary Woolfe

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