Joshua Barone

Here’s another one: He’s a rising star — both as a concert pianist, with a new album and a Carnegie Hall debut this fall, and as a composer, attracting commissions from the likes of the New York Philharmonic. He is also part of the first generation of artists to have been raised on the internet, which has informed his music and relationships, and offered a playground for his omnivorous taste and curiosity.

If the online world can seem at times overwhelming and scattered, so does Tao’s schedule: oscillating between the establishment and avant-garde; writing new pieces in between gigs; and using what little time he has left over for collaborations with like-minded contemporaries.

“I try to recognize how lucky I am,” said Tao, who has been playing professionally since an age when most children haven’t even begun to learn algebra. “I am pursuing all this partially because I have a modicum of security. For me that’s also what gives me a strong sense of responsibility that I pursue a more personal path. And I want to share it.”

He will share some of it Nov. 20, when he makes his debut at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, in a program that includes contemporary music alongside classics by Bach, Rachmaninoff and Schumann.

“I love putting together a program,” he said. “I get to think like a composer while also performing like a pianist. In this, I’m playing with applause breaks more intentionally and experimenting with juxtapositions. Like when I put Bach and Elliott Carter together, I’m not suturing the gap between them, but maybe one can hear both a little differently.”

Tao talks a lot; his friend Charmaine Lee, a vocalist and improviser, described him as being “in perpetual interview mode.” He seems to always be scrutinizing, not only the world around him, but also his own ideas as they’re formed. Days after discussing the Carnegie program, he sent a long text message adding to his thoughts about the recital format and the audience’s role in it, how their listening — “to the totality of the concert space, the hiss of the ventilation system, the breath or lack thereof of an audience, phones and crinkles and the like” — can be “the site of music-making.”

It’s easy, given Tao’s rigorous attention to his programs and their possible readings, to take his latest album, “American Rage,” as a political statement about the present. But, he’s quick to point out, the selections began as a 2015 recital. “It’s not just a post-Trump thing,” he said, waving his hands as if to stop a moving train.

Tao, who had gone into the studio to record three Mozart sonatas, also laid down the tracks that became “American Rage”; he doesn’t know what will come of that planned Mozart album. What he ended up with is a program whose concerns are more historical than ripped-from-the-headlines. It opens and closes with pieces by Frederic Rzewski, the master of furiously political music, inspired by past examples of labor unrest; in between are Copland’s Piano Sonata and Julia Wolfe’s “Compassion.”

Tao’s playing shines in extremity, through the muscular chords of the Wolfe piece — her raw response to the Sept. 11 attacks — and the bitterness of the Rzewski selections. These works also bring out new darkness in Copland’s sonata, which Tao said he views as a work “of rage and reflection and resignation.”

“Which Side Are You On?” — a Rzewski piece based on a 1931 protest song — features an extended improvisation, which has become integral to Tao’s performance practice over the past few years. It’s a far cry from the standard repertory with which he began his career.

Tao grew up in the Midwest and Manhattan, with a climate scientist for a mother and a telecommunications engineer for a father. Having begun to play professionally by the age of 11, he got a manager when he was 12 and toured with showpieces like Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” and Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto.

“I think I’ve been in denial a little bit about how unusual my life is,” said Tao, who was also a violin prodigy. “It probably messed with me in ways that I’ve only begun to understand.”

One of his earliest jobs was as a standby for a North American tour by the cancellation-prone piano legend Martha Argerich. Tao was 13, dreading how an audience might react to learning that he was their soloist instead of Argerich. (Luckily, that never happened.) During these first years, Tao spent most of his time with his parents when many children would want to do the opposite; only now, he said, have they admitted how scared they were for him.

Through a mixture of self-motivation and guidance from teachers, Tao was introduced to the work of living composers: Steve Reich, John Adams, the Bang on a Can crowd. And the internet expanded his musical taste beyond classical music; as a teenager, he was active on Tumblr and 4chan, and spent countless hours on YouTube.

These websites, he said, were “an enormous help, super useful for someone living in a bunch of beige boxes and taking a lot of planes.” He was coming into his own as an artist during a time when lo-fi, DIY music flourished on blogs and Bandcamp. He found that noise music tapped into his appetite for extremity; the dark subgenre of witch house became so ingrained in his bones that, he said, “it will never leave.”

“Knowledge systems seemed so calcified and hierarchical in the conservatory system,” Tao recalled. “With computer music, you didn’t have to play an instrument. I appreciated the low pressure of this music-making.”

He would post playful experiments, a lot of them made with GarageBand, to the music board of 4chan and other sites — always anonymously. Sometimes, though, his work would go viral and he would be outed; among his greatest hits is a haunting mashup of Britney Spears’ “Everytime” and the “Twin Peaks” theme song.

Nowadays Tao is online less than he used to be. Like many people his age, he still falls into long bouts on YouTube and Instagram, but for the most part, he said, “I actually am out living a life, not cobbling a sense of self together anymore.”

The internet, however, still permeates his music. His friend Jay Campbell, the JACK Quartet’s cellist and a member of the Junction Trio with Tao and violinist Stefan Jackiw, recalled Tao’s Nightcap performance with the New York Philharmonic last year.

Following the premiere of “Everything Must Go,” his Bruckner curtain raiser for the full orchestra, he gave an intimate concert that included improvisations with Lee and tap dancer Caleb Teicher. At one point, Campbell recalled, Tao played a Bruckner chorale that, put through the software Ableton, sounded like “a chorus of anime characters.”

“For me, that’s so distinctly internet-y,” Campbell said. “But because he understands practice and context and how to build narrative, it becomes touching.”

That may also be because Tao is obsessed with his music reflecting the particular humans playing it. It’s an idea that he has been exploring lately in chamber music and improvisation, but it doesn’t necessarily scale to the orchestral playing, in which premieres are given little rehearsal time and intimate sounds struggle to be heard. Indeed, the symphonic form raises a whole set of other questions for Tao: “How much do I pretend I can control all these forces, and can I embrace how much I can’t?”

Where he can exert the most control is in smaller collaborations with friends, who tend to be prodigies in their own fields. Teicher is roughly Tao’s age but has already found widespread success in the tap world. Together, they received an evening-length commission from the Guggenheim Museum: the wistful “More Forever,” which premiered earlier this year.

And Tao’s work with Lee, whose vocabulary of sounds recalls the internet culture of ASMR, has been transformative. Through her, he said, “I got to think of improvisation as a mode of social interaction, which really changed everything about my music-making.” Their most recent appearance together was at the Resonant Bodies Festival in Brooklyn this summer; Lee said they plan to record an album soon.

“I feel artistically young, because I’m at the beginning of so many things,” Tao said. “I am figuring stuff out, but with faith that whatever I do is me.”

This is what Tao’s friends admire about him, even if his dense and varied schedule means they don’t see him for months at a time. “He’s constantly pushing himself into new, unfamiliar territories,” Campbell said. “You don’t see that with a lot of soloists. You see them and think, ‘What century are we in?’ Then you see Conrad.”

This article originally appeared in

Conrad Tao Was Never Just Another Prodigy

NEW YORK — Conrad Tao tends to slip into celestial metaphors. During a recent interview, this musician — a veteran at just 25 — referred to his ideas about concert programming as “constellatory.” When he thought he was rambling, he cut himself off and apologized for “galaxy-braining.”

The stakes are even higher in his operas, especially the so-called Portrait Trilogy of “Einstein on the Beach,” “Satyagraha” and “Akhnaten” — which, 35 years after its premiere, is arriving at the Metropolitan Opera this month. These are long, meditative and largely plotless works that test the endurance and excellence of soloists and chorus singers, as well as the conductor and orchestra.

“It brings you back to the most fundamental things about your technique,” said countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, who has starred in the title role of “Akhnaten” in all four iterations of the production since its premiere at the English National Opera three years ago. “And if your house is not in order, you’re not going to get through it.”

At the helm of the Met’s production is Phelim McDermott, who staged a mesmerizing “Satyagraha” there in 2008 and has received virtually unanimous praise for this “Akhnaten.” Here’s how he and his colleagues have prepared the opera for the Met.

Look for where to relax

If the opera’s many moving parts slip out of alignment, Karen Kamensek — the production’s conductor, and a Glass veteran who refers to his music as “my mother’s milk” — has a simple movement to bring them back together: a karate chop.

It’s a necessary tool with this score, which is more difficult than it looks. The music does, Costanzo said, give performers a lot of freedom, “because you have to make it come alive.” But it also resists ornamentation; misfires most commonly happen when people try to add to what’s already on the page.

Kamensek’s karate chop, though, is a reset button — one that everyone hopes to never see. “The more invisible she is, the better,” Costanzo said with a laugh.

Glass’ music is removed from many conventions of Western music, so Kamensek has worked with the orchestra to break from tendencies such as lurching toward the downbeat. “This music is strongest when you let the structures speak for themselves,” she said. “A lot of it is about finding where we can relax. When there’s nothing to do, do nothing.”

Don’t be too literal

The “portrait” operas could never be read as rigorous biography; Glass treats each of his subjects poetically, abstracting them for grander meditations. McDermott’s approach as a director is similar, grazing historical accuracy but never adhering to it.

He described his aesthetic for “Akhnaten” — with costumes by Kevin Pollard and scenic design by Tom Pye — as “a weird fever dream” of ancient Egypt and the Victorians who excavated and fetishized it. “I didn’t want ‘Aida,’ something gold and glitzy,” he said.

Instead, the production is much scrappier, as if assembled from a thrift store shopping spree. The royal robe worn by Costanzo is adorned with the faces of dolls. If you look closely, you may notice that some of the costumes are made from wet suits.

Now juggle, too

The singers in McDermott’s staging are almost never still. But their motion is extremely slow, so he spent his first rehearsals with the cast teaching them movement qualities — a method borrowed from Michael Chekhov — that he said keep them from “looking like robots.”

This ensures that everyone onstage has something to do at all times. And, Costanzo said, if a movement quality “is all you’re focused on, it gives you plenty of mental space to focus on the music.”

A dozen jugglers — led by the production’s choreographer, Sean Gandini — provide a fleet counterpoint to the singers. “The performers may be doing a slow rhythm,” McDermott said, “but the juggling can reflect the internal psychological rhythms.”

The challenge has been to make it not mere window dressing, but more like a layer of the music. “I could make movement to Philip Glass all day, it’s so juggleable,” Gandini said. “So it’s been a question of trimming and trying to take the tricksiness out of it.”

He has even gotten the chorus to take part, as if it weren’t difficult enough to just sing the music. But, Gandini said, they’re so used to multitasking that it didn’t take long for them to master the skill.

Bare it all

Early in the production’s development, McDermott asked Costanzo whether he would be willing to shave his head. “I’m not a real method person,” Costanzo recalled, “but I thought OK, it’s just hair: What do I have to lose?”

Then McDermott had another question: Would he consider entering naked?

Not interested in sensation for its own sake, Costanzo asked why and was told that it could form a connection with the audience — seeing this vulnerable, teenage boy taking the throne in a transformation from total nudity to layers of robes and gold.

He said yes to what may be the most outwardly daring quality of the role. Costanzo has densely furry arms, a full head of hair and the permanent shadow of a beard. It all disappears with each staging of the opera.

There can be no tension when naked onstage, he said. “But if you stare the audience in the eye and release every muscle in your body, they can’t look away,” Costanzo continued. “And in that moment there’s a kind of reverence that can last for the entire show.”

On a recent Sunday at Haven Spa in Manhattan, he spent a couple of hours having every corner of his body stripped of hair. It’s just one of many ways he has given himself over to what has become his signature role.

“There’s definitely no phoning it in,” he said. “I have to fully commit to it on every level.” That has meant no drinking, a full night’s sleep, a restrictive diet (no sugar or carbohydrates, mostly), rigorous exercise and a lot of turning down invitations.

“You become a different person,” he said. “You contain the rest of your life so that the explosions can happen onstage.”

Body Wax and Karate Chops: How to Stage a Philip Glass Opera

NEW YORK — Everything about Philip Glass’ music seems to exist in extremes. As a listener, you either love it or you don’t. As a performer, you’re either flawless or a failure. Concerts can be transporting, near-religious experiences — or just an endless slog.

Journalists will often ask about politics, since Louis — a wunderkind of French literature who at 27 has already risen to the status of public intellectual — is seen as a firebrand of the left and a voice for the yellow vests movement. Or they’ll want to know about his life, which he has documented with fierce and unflinching honesty in three novels about sexuality, class and cruelty.

“People are always more interested in the biographical stuff,” he said, adding with a laugh, “but I’m constantly writing about my life!”

Hence his happiness at a change of subject. This conversation, with yet another journalist, would be focused on theater: one of his first and most enduring loves, even the wellspring of his creative life.

His books have become magnets for stage adaptations — two of which, “History of Violence” and “The End of Eddy,” are traveling to New York this month. The productions, in an unheard-of collaboration between St. Ann’s Warehouse and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, have been planned for nearly simultaneous openings: “History of Violence” at St. Ann’s Nov. 13 through Dec. 1, and “The End of Eddy” at BAM from Nov. 14 to Nov. 21. (Both presenters will also host a talk with the novelist at BAM Fisher on Nov. 11.)

Louis doesn’t exactly know why so many directors have wanted to adapt his work, but he has one theory: “There is probably something theatrical in my writing,” he said, “because it’s part of me.”

After all, he is gay, and every gay person, Louis thinks, is a born actor. As the child of a working-class family — his name was Eddy Bellegueule back then — in a northern French town of less than 1,500 people, he would drink beer, talk about soccer or make fun of girls. Every day, he said, was a performance, “to protect myself from homophobia and masculine violence.”

His first escape from this life — documented with rage and unsparing detail in “The End of Eddy,” a coming-of-age roman à clef published when Louis was 21 — was being admitted to a theater program at a school in the nearby, but much larger, city of Amiens. Acting, he found, came easily, and he felt that the applause he received began to drown out the vicious slurs that had followed him throughout childhood.

Theater also made him read. The same toxic mannerisms of his masculine performance at home — a brazenly poor diet and a refusal to compensate with proper dental hygiene — had also kept him away from books. “Reading, for my father, was considered a way of losing your time,” Louis recalled, “and effeminate.”

But dramatic literature offered an entry point, especially to canonical French classics by Molière and Racine. Every school year also included field trips to productions at the local theaters. One was Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” — whose subtitle alone, “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” is enough to make a closeted boy nervous around his classmates. Louis lasted one hour before walking out.

“I stood up, and I said, ‘I don’t want to see this faggot thing,’” he recalled. “This play was confronting me with things that I had been trying to hide for so many years. It was too violent for me to see.”

He was called homophobic afterward; he welcomed the label with pride. “It made me less gay,” he said, “but I was full of shame. It’s one of my biggest regrets.”

If there’s a silver lining to that day, it’s that Louis also realized the power of theater not only to entertain, but also agitate. “The fact that I was uncomfortable was very emancipatory,” he said. “I wouldn’t be the same person today if I had not felt uncomfortable.”

Discomfort, indeed, has become his weapon of choice; like Bertolt Brecht reincarnate, Louis and his writing are often in combat with the bourgeois audience that has embraced and elevated him. And, knowing they’re at the stage adaptations of his books, he said, “I want to confront people with things that they precisely don’t want to see.”

Louis has been especially sensitive to class since moving to Paris in 2011 — a complicated, and irreversible, life change. He was admitted to a prestigious school in what is often treated as the only city that matters in France, far from the factory life and welfare reliance of his childhood.

“I learned to be gay in Paris,” he said. Through his mentor Didier Eribon, whom he had met in Amiens, he was introduced to a true community. He came to love opera. He read the books of James Baldwin and the poems of Allen Ginsberg, and saw the films of Gus Van Sant. He changed his name to Édouard Louis (inspired by Jean-Luc Lagarce’s play “It’s Only the End of the World.”)

“There was a whole history, and I was suddenly fascinated by it,” Louis said. “There were all these people who fought to make my body possible.”

But Paris is also where, in 2012, he was raped at gunpoint inside his apartment — which became the subject of his harrowing second novel, “History of Violence.” The autofictional book, which like “The End of Eddy” courted both praise and controversy, is an indictment of a justice system unfit for either a gay man like him or his attacker (Reda, who is Kabyle from Algeria); it also wrestles with the nature of truth and storytelling, with a plot relayed as memory, overheard conversation and, at times, the imagined biographies of others.

Among the novel’s fans was director Thomas Ostermeier — whom Louis met through Eribon and who had adapted Eribon’s “Returning to Reims” for the Schaubühne in Berlin. (That production also traveled to St. Ann’s.)

“History of Violence,” Ostermeier said, is “very theatrical” in its confluence of different voices and perspectives. He, dramaturg Florian Borchmeyer and Louis worked on a version for the Schaubühne — the one that will run at St. Ann’s — in 2018. The New York Times listed it among Europe’s best theater that year; a published script is on the way in France.

“There is this classic love story between Édouard and Reda, but that turns into a tense true crime story,” Ostermeier said. “But what is the right story, and whose story is it? They are competing in a kind of battle for the opinion of the spectator.”

“The End of Eddy” is much more linear and unambiguous. And so the adaptation by Pamela Carter — directed by Stewart Laing originally for Untitled Projects and the Unicorn Theater for young audiences in Britain — imposes more theatricality on the story, with two actors playing Eddy and four onstage screens with video and meta-narrative text.

“We’re theater-makers, and we’re not interested in reproducing the book on the stage,” Carter said, adding that she was attracted to how relatable the story was and how “very lovely it was that he found his way out by way of theater.”

That hopefulness is something she wanted young audiences in Britain to take away from the production; BAM has arranged to bring in a similar crowd by hosting a free matinee for high school students.

Dramatic writing has been increasingly woven into Louis’ oeuvre. While laboring on a new novel, he has also been at work on a play for the students of a theater school he is teaching at in Lausanne, Switzerland.

In September, he published a deferential translation of Anne Carson’s “Antigonick” — a project that began almost as a whim but also as a corrective to her virtual nonexistence in France — for L’Arche. It will be followed by another, of her “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy,” which he saw at the Shed during a visit to New York last spring. (Reaction to the play was overwhelmingly negative, but Louis said he adored its “undoing of genre.”)

His latest book, “Who Killed My Father,” began as a script for director Stanislas Nordey at the Théâtre National de Strasbourg. The result was a poetic stream of consciousness about masculinity, ambivalent love and the failures of France to help a man trapped and physically ruined by his working-class life. “The history of your body,” he writes as an address to his father, “stands as an accusation against political history.”

Since its publication, “Who Killed My Father” has found its way back to a dramatic form through multiple adaptations, with more to come: One, by Tony Award winner Ivo van Hove, is planned for his Internationaal Theater Amsterdam next spring. Ostermeier is mulling another made with and starring Louis, though it is more of an “underground” project at the moment, he said, the theatrical equivalent of a jam session.

It can be a little bizarre for Louis to see all these versions of his life, and himself, onstage. His reaction depends on the show. “I can’t see ‘History of Violence’ very often,” he said, “because of the difficulty in seeing this violence that I endured performed again.”

But, in a way, Louis also sees something positive in that — a sense of purpose. “It means I’m talking about things that are difficult to address publicly,” he said. “Autobiography starts when you say: What is impossible to talk about, too private, too difficult? Then people will recognize themselves in what you’re writing.”

Édouard Louis was relieved to be talking about something else.

What a Wunderkind Has Wrought

Perhaps that’s the point. As part of the Museum of Modern Art’s expansion and curatorial reboot — designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler, and opening to the public Oct. 21 — the Studio will serve as a dedicated space for performances, screenings, residencies and more.

Sleekly modular, the room — seamlessly integrated with its neighboring fourth-floor galleries, yet set off with black end-grain wood flooring and the dark walls of a black-box theater — can be adapted for an expansive variety of uses. In the future, it will host a commission by choreographer Adam Linder and artist Shahryar Nashat; Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver’s film-based installation “Cinematic Illumination”; and a residency with multidisciplinary MacArthur fellow Okwui Okpokwasili.

For now, the Studio is where visitors can seek or stumble upon David Tudor’s “Rainforest V (variation 1)” (1973-2015), realized by Composers Inside Electronics Inc. Seen from the room’s entrance, the immersive sound installation fills the space with everyday objects — feel free to stick your head in the metal barrel — suspended and equipped with sonic transducers, and set against a backdrop of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking 53rd Street. If you walk up to those windows and look back toward the galleries, you’ll see “Rainforest” juxtaposed with views of artworks from the fourth and fifth floors, as if the museum were inviting a conversation among all of them.

“Rainforest” will be accompanied by performances planned for Oct. 24 through Dec. 15. But the installation will be available to visitors outside the hours of live programming, which is the goal for nearly every Studio project going forward. “We want to open this up and make it more publicly available,” Stuart Comer, MoMA’s chief curator of media and performance, said in a recent interview. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Q: Why Tudor for the first Studio exhibition?

A: Tudor was a central member of the circle at Black Mountain College. On a floor where you’ve been introduced to connections among people like Merce Cunningham, John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, it seemed like a critical moment to reintroduce a figure that has not had as much attention. It signals a very cross-discipline and collective way of working.

When this was commissioned for Cunningham’s “RainForest,” Warhol first showed his Mylar balloons. You get a sense of what a watershed moment it was. And another side is that Tudor was really a visionary in the use of computer technology and electronics. He really anticipated the use of technology in producing art.

Q: What was the idea behind putting this room among the galleries and making it flexible?

A: This was a very exciting conversation between the curatorial side and the architects. They really heard what our aspirations and ambitions were and helped us to achieve them. There have been performance spaces at other museums — the Tate, the Whitney — but these are still slightly divorced from the collection. We want to place the collection at the heart of the programming.

I think a lot of flex spaces tend to be overcomplicated. We tried to keep this straightforward. One of the primary goals was, of course, good acoustics. The atrium is a good space for performance, but the acoustics are challenging. Here, we can seal or keep open the space so it can be quickly shifted from public to much more private. Even the glass wall was engineered so you could not hear a siren on 53rd Street. The walls can also modulate to change the acoustics. And it’s all done in a way that can also accommodate technology as it evolves; we’ve tried to avoid anything that was too fixed.

Q: It seems like, as a curator, you suddenly have a lot more possibilities, and a lot more to do.

A: I’m definitely busier. [Laughs] But happily so.

Rainforest V (variation 1)

Through Jan. 5 at the Museum of Modern Art, at 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan; moma.org.

An Immersive Sound Installation at MoMA Introduces the Studio

NEW YORK — It’s an ambiguous name, open to interpretation and possibility: the Studio.

Instead, the camera’s focus turns downward, to a scrappy Citroën van driven by a merry band of anarchists. There’s Venus, their leader, at the wheel, looking crazed and sultry in a sparkling black unitard. With her are a raggedy clown, a drum-playing dwarf and a drag queen named Le Gateau Chocolat.

This is “Tannhäuser,” I swear. It’s just that in Kratzer’s rollicking production — intelligent and surprisingly wrenching, though not quite fully formed — the Venusberg is not the libretto’s mythical pleasure realm so much as a lifestyle of young, brash artistry. That pathetic clown, it turns out, is Tannhäuser, joining Venus and company to litter the German countryside with signs saying: “FREELY WILLING. FREELY DOING. FREELY ENJOYING.”

Those words are Wagner’s, from his bad-boy days as a revolutionary in Dresden, where “Tannhäuser” had its premiere in 1845. He revised the opera in 1861 for a production in Paris, incorporating the groundbreaking musical language he used in “Tristan und Isolde” and patching some of the plot’s leaks. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better; Wagner had aspirations to continue revising it for the rest of his life.

Today, you’re likely to come across the Paris version, or some hybrid. But here, Kratzer has opted for the original Dresden score — because, he said in a program book interview, it’s truer to Wagner’s revolutionary spirit.

Regardless of how persuasive that argument may be, there was little case for it in the orchestra pit, where Valery Gergiev was making his Bayreuth debut. Throughout the evening, his interpretation of the music was unreliably thoughtful, and at times lackadaisical. The overture began promisingly, sedate and serene — with the Pilgrim’s Chorus theme, which returns near the end in the brasses, played over quiet, downward chromatic scales in the strings. But instead of a light, buzzing sound from the violins, he drew something heavier, jabbing and overly present.

The baked-in filmic qualities of the overture provided a fitting soundtrack for the movie that is the foundation of Kratzer’s production. (Manuel Braun is the video director.) Venus’ Citroën arrives at a Burger King, where her gang scams the restaurant out of a free meal. When they leave, they are cut off by a police officer on foot. Out of desperation, Venus runs him over and kills him — a sobering end to all the fun, and the beginning of Tannhäuser’s doubts about her way of life.

As the film ends and the curtain rises, we see the Citroën pulled over at a roadside food stand with the Disneyland look of a faded fairy-tale cottage. Here, Tannhäuser (the mighty tenor Stephen Gould, with ever-increasing despair) sings his ode to Venus but eventually begins to beg for escape. She can be awfully persuasive, though, especially as performed by the charismatic Elena Zhidkova. (A late replacement for Ekaterina Gubanova, she showed no signs of insufficient rehearsal time.)

So Tannhäuser gets back in the van, until he can’t take it anymore and throws himself out the door and onto the highway. A cyclist — in the role traditionally presented as a shepherd boy but here never clearly defined — rouses him and says to listen as pilgrims pass through on their way to Rome.

That city, and the pope within it, are treated metaphorically, changing with each act. In this case, “Rome” is the Bayreuth Festival Theater, revealed in miniature atop a hill toward the back of the stage. The “pilgrims” are a mirror image of the audience: making their way to Wagner’s theater in tuxedos, gowns and formal lederhosen, fanning themselves with program books. (Outside Thursday, the temperature was nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit.)

The theater, in a somewhat confusing turn, is also a stand-in for the Wartburg; its minnesingers — Tannhäuser’s fellow knight-troubadours — approach him wearing the lanyards you might see off-duty singers wearing around the festival grounds. Tannhäuser, it turns out, is a cast member of “Tannhäuser,” returning at last to his colleagues.

This sets up a play-within-a-play premise for Act 2, a “Tannhäuser” by way of “Kiss Me, Kate.” The lower half of the stage is a traditional set for the opera’s singing contest; the upper half is a screen showing film of life backstage, adding both comedy (a lot of it) and moments of psychological clarity. We see, for example, that Elisabeth — Tannhäuser’s saintly love, sung by the soprano Lise Davidsen in an astonishingly mature Bayreuth debut at just 32 — is faithful, but not a simple archetype. She is far more complicated, her devotion to Tannhäuser almost pathological and her behavior self-destructive.

When she returns in Act 3 — years after Tannhäuser leaves to seek redemption in “Rome,” now meaning jail because he took the fall for the officer’s death at Burger King — Davidsen’s Elisabeth is in a downward spiral. She finds the dwarf, Oskar (Manni Laudenbach), who is living out of the decrepit Citroën, and joins him in waiting for Tannhäuser to return alongside other newly released prisoners.

He doesn’t, and her prayer that follows, which has heavenly purity on a recent Decca recording, is here more forlorn, with a dark turn to a shocking sex scene with the knight Wolfram (Markus Eiche, who sculpted a tender “Song to the Evening Star”). She forces him to dress like Tannhäuser the clown, then appears to die, though it’s not clear how or when.

That’s because Kratzer’s production begins to muddle in the third act, not always aligning with the libretto as he aspires to illustrate the divergent paths artists’ lives can follow. Oskar is homeless; Le Gateau Chocolat, we learn from a luxury billboard, sells out; Venus never changes; and Tannhäuser, back from jail, has nothing to return to. He dies — maybe — holding Elisabeth’s body and imagining the road trip they would have shared, smiling and riding into the sunset, if only he hadn’t met Venus.

Some confusion aside, Kratzer’s reading of the opera is both novel and clever. I left the theater thinking of Wahnfried, Wagner’s house in the center of Bayreuth, where an exhibition is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Wagner, the composer’s grandson, who is credited with establishing the “Bayreuth Workshop” model of the festival today. The idea is that our interpretations of Wagner are ever-evolving; that’s why directors are hired for several years, to tweak their productions with each revival.

Even for Wagner, “Tannhäuser” was always a work in process; for Kratzer, returning over the next few years, it will be, too, with the potential to keep refining and improving. The festival, for its part, can help by hiring a new conductor.

Through Aug. 25 at the Bayreuth Festival, Germany; bayreuther-festspiele.de.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/arts/music/tannhauser-bayreuth-review.html" id="28ffc67c-7387-3013-ab13-7397509137c0">The New York Times</a>.

A New 'Tannhäuser' Brings Burger King to Bayreuth

BAYREUTH, Germany — The Wartburg castle, so central to Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” that it’s part of the opera’s full title, makes an appearance only briefly in Tobias Kratzer’s new production, which opened the Bayreuth Festival here Thursday. At the beginning of the overture, a video projected onstage shows the medieval fortress in sweeping drone footage fit for a tourism commercial. Then it’s gone.

After all, the dystopian story abounds with references to Boston and neighboring Cambridge, and suggests a Harvard University — Lavietes, its basketball arena, included — repurposed for the militaristic theocracy of Gilead.

Boston Lyric Opera is running with that possibility. For its new production of the Danish composer Poul Ruders’ unsettling and complex 2000 adaptation of the novel, the company opted for something site-specific. The gym was available, and for the first time the opera will be staged in the city where it takes place.

This is a happy coincidence for Boston Lyric Opera, which has been nomadic while it searches for a permanent home. (The company ended its relationship with its longtime space, the Citi Performing Arts Center Shubert Theater, in 2015.) But that doesn’t mean staging an opera in a basketball arena is without its challenges.

The acoustics, to start, can be a nightmare. And converting the basketball court involves effectively building a theater from the ground up. Then there’s the Ruders opera itself: a dense and difficult score with one of the most taxing mezzo-soprano roles in the repertory. (She spends nearly all of the work’s 2 1/2-hour running time onstage.)

“There’s no comparison,” Jennifer Johnson Cano, the mezzo singing the title role of Offred, said after a recent rehearsal. “This is more challenging than Verdi and Wagner. I’ve done Elvira and Carmen. This beats all of them.”

But despite the opera’s demands — in addition to its leading role’s endurance test, the work also calls for a large orchestra and cast — it is having a resurgence, thanks in large part to the popularity of Hulu’s television adaptation of the novel, the #MeToo movement and the ever more urgent conversation around climate change.

“Any producer wants to have a thermometer on the zeitgeist,” said Esther Nelson, Boston Lyric Opera’s artistic director, who, as it happens, made a small appearance in the 1990 film adaptation. “This is the time to do ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’”

Nelson and the company are ahead of the curve but will soon be joined by others. Ruders — whose new opera, “The Thirteenth Child,” will be given its premiere at Santa Fe (New Mexico) Opera this summer — said that productions were in development in Copenhagen and San Francisco.

“This is certainly a happy thing for a composer,” he added, acknowledging that “The Handmaid’s Tale” has received an unusual number of productions for a contemporary opera, including an acclaimed American premiere in Minneapolis 15 years ago.

He began work on it in the mid-1990s with the blessing of Atwood, who, he recalled, agreed to the adaptation as long as she didn’t have to be involved with it. (She will be in Boston on Saturday to talk about the opera with Ruders at WBUR CitySpace.) His librettist was the British actor and writer Paul Bentley, later known for playing the High Septon on “Game of Thrones;” they collaborated by phone and fax.

The opera, miraculously, loses little of the novel’s plot and themes. The book moves fluidly among three time periods: before Gilead; Offred’s training as a handmaid; and her present. So does the opera, with the casual abandon of a film script — rare for an art form typically limited to a handful of set changes, not more than three dozen.

And while the libretto’s language can be frenetic and wordy, its structure is calculated in symmetries between the two acts. The music of the past is carefree and bright; “Amazing Grace” becomes a motif of irony and hypocrisy; the vocal range of Offred, pointedly a mezzo-soprano and not a soprano to emphasize that she is a slave and not a heroine, is narrow and introverted, allowed to soar only in her most private moments.

Working with David Angus, Boston Lyric Opera’s music director and the conductor of this “Handmaid’s Tale,” Ruders has created a new edition of the score that slightly reduces the orchestration and makes it more manageable for smaller companies.

The libretto, however, remains as difficult to stage as ever. Veteran director Anne Bogart, who casually dropped references to filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder and writer Italo Calvino while explaining her approach to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” is treating the opera as something like a memory play.

She said she envisioned her staging as the experience of wearing virtual reality goggles: The set changes depending on Offred’s perspective, which is, as Johnson Cano said, “a continuous stream.” Anything not currently on Offred’s mind or in her line of sight simply disappears. That means a lot of set pieces are on wheels, coming and going from a backstage that essentially doesn’t exist.

But a large staff has worked to make the arena as much like a theater as possible. Some things are surprisingly easy: The locker rooms don’t require much to become dressing rooms. And, as every team has a coach in need of an office, so, too, does an orchestra have a maestro.

Carl Rosenberg, an acoustician, has been working on the space, aiming to strike a balance between reflective and absorptive surfaces. But everything he does is ultimately speculative: The results won’t be known until the room has an audience.

What he most wants to avoid, he said, is a dead sound for the voices. If no one can hear Offred, there’s no opera. As Bogart said, “The Handmaid’s Tale” occupies a big world, but it’s really the journey of just one person.

“It’s the human heartbeat at the center of this,” she said, “that makes you care.”

‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ runs Sunday through May 12 at the Lavietes Pavilion, Boston; blo.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/arts/music/handmaids-tale-boston-lyric-opera.html" id="11e43a5a-10f2-3568-abb9-06d0a16dfbb3">The New York Times</a>.

A Dystopian Story Enters Familiar Territory

BOSTON — When Margaret Atwood began her novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” with the line “We slept in what once been the gymnasium,” she may well have been referring to the Lavietes Pavilion here.

That is also what makes it a bit overwhelming.

Over the course of its inaugural season, the Shed — the low-lying, eye-catching, $475 million arts center amid the towers of Hudson Yards — will present concerts by Björk, a history of African American music and exhibitions featuring the works of emerging New York City artists. It will pair Gerhard Richter with Steve Reich, Ben Whishaw with Renée Fleming, kung fu with the songs of Sia.

Here, we offer a guide to navigating the Shed, which officially opens Friday: what’s on each floor, where to pause for a meal or a drink, and even how to get inside the building in the first place.

— The Basics

ENTRANCES: Take your pick. The main entrance, on the south side of the building at West 30th Street, leads to the Shed’s lobby, restaurant and shop. It’s situated directly underneath the High Line. There is another entrance on the north side, facing the Hudson Yards Plaza.

COAT CHECK: The north entrance will take you directly here.

SUBWAY: The closest line is the 7; the entrance is just north of the Shed, between 33rd and 34th streets, on the Hudson Yards plaza.

ESCALATORS: These run along the south side of the building. Stairs and elevators are also available.

— The Shed

LOBBY: Here you’ll find ticket sales for the Shed’s programming, along with a shop (by McNally Jackson) and Cedric’s at the Shed, a restaurant and bar by star chef Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group. Cedric’s will be open to the public throughout the day.

LEVEL 2 GALLERY: Saturday through June 2, this capacious space will host “Reich Richter Pärt,” an installation that pairs the visual art of Gerhard Richter with live musical performances of original scores by Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt. The Richter-Pärt collaboration is an import from the Manchester International Festival; but Reich’s contribution, a musical analogue of Richter’s “Patterns” series, is a premiere.

THE McCOURT: When the Shed’s signature shell is extended over the plaza, the building adds a cavernous space ideal for big concerts. (This is where Björk will perform in May.) And that’s exactly how the Shed officially opens Friday: with the five-concert series “Soundtrack of America,” an exploration of the influence of African-American music on contemporary culture. It was conceived by Steve McQueen, will spotlight up-and-coming musicians and runs through April 14.

THE PLAZA: If the shell is nested over the building, however, the plaza is in the open air, and open to the public. Here the Shed has a permanent installation, Lawrence Weiner’s text-based work “IN FRONT OF ITSELF.”

LEVEL 4 GALLERY: Opening here Saturday, and on view through May 30, is an exhibition of new and recent work by artist Trisha Donnelly.

KENNETH C. GRIFFIN THEATER: Inaugurating this 500-seat space is “Norma Jean Baker of Troy,” which runs from Saturday through May 19. The genre-blurring work, by poet Anne Carson, is a monologue for Ben Whishaw, with sung interludes by superstar soprano Renée Fleming.

— Elsewhere at Hudson Yards

THE SHOPS: Beyond this retail space’s razzle-dazzle are dining options from reliably talented chefs like Thomas Keller (TAK Room), David Chang (Kawi), Costas Spiliadis (Estiatorio Milos) and José Andrés (Mercado Little Spain). The Snark Park offers changing exhibitions, and more art is to be found inside Neiman Marcus (including a wall of photographs by Bill Cunningham).

THE VESSEL: Thomas Heatherwick’s Instagram magnet requires tickets for timed entry. (They can be booked online.) It has been compared to a shawarma and a trash can; what will it look like to you?

EDGE: The observation deck at 30 Hudson Yards — a spear-shaped cantilevered balcony that sticks out 65 feet from the skyscraper — is opening soon.

THE HIGH LINE: Before Hudson Yards there was the High Line, designed in part by Elizabeth Diller, the same architect behind the Shed. Visitors can come and go from the elevated park, whose northernmost stretch surrounds Hudson Yards, near the Shed’s main entrance at 30th Street.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/arts/the-shed-is-finally-open-heres-what-you-need-to-know.html" id="f290b491-8498-3674-a313-b96ae01f29d3">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Part of what makes this weekend’s official opening of the Shed so momentous is the sheer breadth of its programming.

A Guide to the Shed

SUBWAY: The closet line is the 7; the entrance is just north of the Shed, between 33rd and 34th streets, on the Hudson Yards plaza.

On Wednesday, Christo announced that he had received permission from the French government and the country’s Center for National Monuments to wrap the Arc de Triomphe, one of the most famous landmarks in Paris, next year from April 6 through 19.

“Jeanne-Claude was so close to me all my life,” Christo, 83, said in a telephone interview. “Of course there is some irony and sadness that she is not here. But I am eager to go ahead with my life and do my work.”

The project, “L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped (Project for Paris, Place de l’Étoile-Charles de Gaulle),” will involve covering the arch with a silvery blue recyclable polypropylene fabric — nearly 270,000 square feet of it — held together with about 23,000 feet of red rope.

It will coincide with an exhibition at the Pompidou Center, planned for March 18 through June 15, that looks back on Jeanne-Claude and Christo’s early years in Paris. Born on the same day in 1935, they met there in 1958, when Christo moved to the city after his studies in Bulgaria. They lived and worked in Paris until 1964, then settled in New York.

The Pompidou exhibition will also include drawings, documentation and more related to another of their famous works, “The Pont-Neuf Wrapped, Project for Paris, 1975-85.”

France’s approval of the Arc de Triomphe project came relatively swiftly. Christo said that, although he had created studies to wrap the monument when he lived near it, planning began in earnest only within the past year. Compare that bureaucratic timing with the Reichstag wrapping, which was under development for about 20 years, or “The Gates” in Central Park, which were conceived in 1979 but not erected until 2005.

Christo pushed for wrapping the Arc de Triomphe, he said, because he was “eager to do something beyond the exhibition.”

Although the Center for National Monuments helped with the project, it will not receive public money. Christo said the wrapping would be financed through the sale of his preparatory studies, drawings, collages and models for it.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/arts/design/christos-next-project-wrapping-the-arc-de-triomphe.html" id="aa57b199-d27d-3c48-acdf-5a4ef0800b91">The New York Times</a>.

With his wife and artistic partner, Jeanne-Claude, the artist Christo has wrapped the Reichstag in Berlin and monuments in Milan — even a coast in Australia. Now, for the first time since her death in 2009, he is returning to their signature style.

Christo's Next Project: Wrapping the Arc de Triomphe

It’s an easy mistake: Adams’ opera, with a libretto by Peter Sellars, playfully nods to “La Fanciulla del West,” or “The Girl of the Golden West.” And, like Puccini’s treacly western, it takes place in the heart of the California Gold Rush.

But the similarities end there. “Girls” is an outright rejection of the romantic West of Puccini, of the hubris of Manifest Destiny, of all the rosy myths you’ve heard about the Golden State. It is revisionist — or, rather, corrective — American history, a tale of men turning feral as they swarmed California like an invasive species.

In many ways, it is also an opera about the present. “Girls,” which had its premiere at San Francisco Opera a year after President Donald Trump was elected, depicts California circa 1850 as a true melting pot: not just forty-niners, but also Mexican aristocracy, Native Americans, former slaves and immigrants from China and South America. And when white men’s fortunes took a turn for the worse, you can guess who bore the brunt.

Miners down on their luck force themselves on women, lynch for sport and spend one long, frightening Fourth of July hunting as many people of color as possible. These horrors aren’t imagined; Sellars assembled the libretto from historical texts, including journals, poems and folk song lyrics of the time. For anyone worried about today, this opera seems to say, don’t be surprised: America has always been this way.

If only “Girls of the Golden West” lived up to its meaning to the American moment, or to the promise of its eminent creators. Its premiere, in 2017, received mixed reviews. I was torn, attracted to the score and singers — especially soprano Julia Bullock and mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges, two “Girls” of the title — but unable to get over a libretto that was sleepy, dramatically awkward and overly long.

Clearly aware of the opera’s problems, Adams spent last summer revising the score before it traveled to the Dutch National Opera with the same production, cast and conductor, Grant Gershon, this week. (A third stop is planned for a future season of the Dallas Opera.)

The first act got much-needed trims, and a new ending that links it to the opening of Act II. (Previously, the two acts felt as independent as a double bill.) Adams also cut the “Spider Dance,” an amusing diversion that should have an afterlife as a short orchestral work, like “The Chairman Dances” from his “Nixon in China.”

In San Francisco, Act I ended quietly, almost unexpectedly. Now, a tense finale heightens the opera’s politics. The miners celebrate the hanging of a Native American while minorities huddle indoors for safety. It’s a powerful image: Of the opera’s seven principal singers, five are people of color. Yet the white men are the only ones with weapons.

But don’t expect any more improvements to the libretto. It remains the opera’s glaring fault, a confusing assemblage of found text that keeps characters from truly interacting as dialogues become little more than simultaneous monologues. Sellars used a similar approach in his and Adams’ 2005 opera “Doctor Atomic”; it wasn’t entirely successful in that work, either, but it benefited from a streamlined story you won’t find in “Girls” until Act II.

Sellars’ solution, with a slightly altered staging in this revival, is to put more bodies onstage, to have characters spend less time addressing the audience and more time interacting with one another. But by turning to naturalism, he undercuts his original, still-present concept of a California history pageant à la Brecht — especially because the Brechtian set design, by David Gropman, is nearly unchanged. Backstage workings are clearly visible; period costumes are juxtaposed with red Solo cups inside a bar with the appearance of a roadside dive somewhere in the Sierra Nevadas.

Close listeners may also hear some Brecht in Adams’ score, played with exactitude and enthusiasm by the Rotterdam Philharmonic. It has the propulsive momentum that runs through most of his music, and playful touches of Americana like galloping rhythms and expansive fifths. But, with an accordion and a delightful taste of the lowbrow, Adams also suggests Weill and Brecht’s “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,” a similar opera about money, rowdiness and savagery.

Adams has written some of the most sophisticated and stirring choral music in modern opera; here, he most often saves it for new settings of old folk songs that take a chilling turn from boisterous to sinister. The Dutch National Opera chorus, which sang with unfortunate imprecision all night, may still be settling into these passages. (It’s not promising, though, that it was also limp and lazy in acting out Sellars’ staging and John Heginbotham’s choreography.)

But elsewhere, this score brings out some of the most inspired performances you’ll find among its cast of young stars. Tenor Paul Appleby, smooth and tender in fare like Mozart, has immersed himself in the role of Joe Cannon with a Missouri twang and desperate fury. (Genuinely tender is another tenor, Elliot Madore, as Ramón.) Ryan McKinney’s bass-baritone is terrifyingly masculine, and Hye Jung Lee, as the sympathetic prostitute Ah Sing, has an enchantingly delicate soprano voice capable of shocking power.

The most bitter music of the evening is reserved for bass-baritone Davóne Tines, as the doomed former slave Ned Peters. With a penetrating bite, he delivers the setting of text from Frederick Douglass’ “What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July?”: “The Fourth of July is yours not mine,” Tines sings before being walked offstage with a gun to his back. Bridges’ Josefa, a Mexican woman who receives a death sentence from a kangaroo court, is fiercely dignified, and entrancing in the lullaby “Ven esta noche amado, querido.”

And it’s difficult to imagine anyone else in the role of Dame Shirley, an eloquent observer of Gold Rush life, other than Bullock, who sings — deftly somber, ardent, joyous — as if each note were written only for her. She even makes the opera’s long running time bearable with a sublime epilogue: her voice heavenly as she describes “the wonderful and never-enough-to-be-talked-about sky of California,” and Adams’ music eerily lustrous, like a precious metal worth killing for.

‘Girls of the Golden West’ runs through March 17 at the Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam; operaballet.nl.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/arts/music/girls-of-the-golden-west-review-amsterdam.html" id="dd06ac42-ba71-33dc-a55a-906d52a0fa3d">The New York Times</a>.

AMSTERDAM — “Oh, this is a new opera?” a friend said as we made our way to the Dutch National Opera here for the European premiere of John Adams’ “Girls of the Golden West” on Thursday night. “I thought it was Puccini.”

Joshua Barone

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