Seth Colter Walls

These are Glass’ most famous operas, by far. But over the next 35 years, this peerlessly productive composer went on to write about 30 more, depending on how you count. Among them are other portraits of notable men of history, including Galileo Galilei and Walt Disney. Glass has also adapted films by Jean Cocteau and stories by Franz Kafka.

His sound, with its flowing arpeggios and churning rhythms, has remained easily identifiable through the decades. Yet Glass’ best works for the stage — including the eight below, written between 1987 and 2014 — have managed to color that trademark style in fresh hues. Each has been recorded on his Orange Mountain Music label, whose CD editions also include librettos.

— ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1987)

Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic tale of friendship and mistaken burial is a natural fit for Glass’ music of roiling portent. But this nimble opera signaled a new interest in dramatic thrust, which had been intentionally absent from long, reflective works like “Einstein,” “Satyagraha” and “Akhnaten.” In this recent release of a stylish performance by Wolf Trap Opera and the Inscape Chamber Orchestra, the two acts speed by in 83 minutes. Yet that’s enough time for the opera to luxuriate in its spooky source material.

— ‘The Voyage’ (1992)

The Met commissioned an opera about Christopher Columbus in honor of the 500th anniversary of his landing in America; Glass delivered one — technically. He pointedly avoided dramatizing Columbus’ encounters with Native Americans and mostly confined the explorer to the second of this opera’s three acts.

The rest is given over to a surging sci-fi rumination on the idea of exploration, writ large. A scientist in a wheelchair (inspired by Stephen Hawking) embodies intellectual courage; interplanetary travelers crash-land their spaceship on an ancient Earth and wonder whether they should have studied law instead. This sprawling concept inspired some of Glass’ most feverish orchestral writing up to that point — and the performance of conductor Dennis Russell Davies, a preeminent Glass champion, with the Bruckner Orchester Linz finds delirium in the heat.

— ‘Orphée’ (1993)

The first in another trilogy, this one based on Cocteau films, offered Glass a chance to lighten up. Cocteau’s surrealism, by turns sprightly and lightly self-pitying, generates high spirits in the opera, as when jaunty music enlivens the scene of cafe-life bohemia that opens this adaptation of the Orpheus myth. But conductor Anne Manson and the Portland Opera musicians make sure that Glass’ talent for love music also comes through — as it does in “Akhnaten.”

— ‘Galileo Galilei’ (2001)

Around the turn of the 21st century, some of Glass’ operas had a grimly overdetermined feel. “In the Penal Colony” and “Waiting for the Barbarians” can be safely categorized as only for completists; “Appomattox,” premiered in 2007 and later revised, has streaks of inspiration but can drag. But this latter-day Glass portrait opera, a throwback to those early great-men works, has an affecting sense of purpose. Beginning with the sentencing portion of Galileo’s trial, it moves in reverse chronology, showing the scientist’s attempts to make his work palatable, through dialogues and metaphors that Glass outfits with flashes of humanist optimism.

— ‘Kepler’ (2009)

Another portrait of a 17th-century scientist, this piece is more diffuse than “Galileo,” perhaps better classed as an oratorio. (An available DVD of the premiere staging in Linz, Austria, does not help craft a strong narrative through line.) But the instrumental writing shows Glass moving farther afield from the music of his early operas and symphonies and embracing a broader harmonic palette. And in scenes like “Physica Coelestis,” in which Kepler works alongside an ensemble of vocalists to craft a “celestial physics,” Glass makes a vision of scientifically informed spirituality seem within humanity’s grasp.

— ‘The Perfect American’ (2011)

This fictionalized (and unflaggingly unflattering) account of Walt Disney’s life and career is adapted from a wry novel by Peter Stephan Jungk. There are surging choral scenes and stretches of captivating orchestral writing. But the dramatic pacing is uneven — making this another Glass opera that one might prefer to listen to rather than see. Yet one startling 10-minute sequence, in which Disney debates an animatronic Abraham Lincoln about the civil rights movement, is among the highlights of Glass’ output.

— ‘Spuren der Verirrten’ (‘The Lost’) (2012)

The dystopian and absurdist aspects of this libretto — adapted by Rainer Mennicken from a play by Nobel laureate Peter Handke — inspired one of Glass’ most vivid and peculiar late-period scores. As a stream of isolated, confused or despotic presences mill about the stage — introduced by a character called the Spectator — Glass reaches for nervy effects, as when a pair of winds join drums and electric bass during the climax of a mad dance that takes place near an eyeless Oedipal character. (The DVD release really helps with this opera.)

— ‘The Trial’ (2014)

Here’s where Glass makes the most of his affection for Kafka. There’s a thumping sense of parodic parading as Josef K. is shuttled between institutions by fellow citizens who are, like him, being terrorized by random accelerations in the law’s attack. It’s a purposely blunt work, a radio-play version of Glass’ operatic style, smartly suited to the fable-like nature of the underlying tale. The brasses of the Music Theater Wales ensemble show off their polish in a recording conducted by Michael Rafferty.

This article originally appeared in

Philip Glass Operas That Color His Style With Fresh Hues

Philip Glass began his operatic career in the 1970s and ’80s with a trilogy focused on great visionaries of history: “Einstein on the Beach”; “Satyagraha,” a meditation on Gandhi’s early activism; and “Akhnaten,” about the Egyptian pharaoh who pioneered monotheism, which runs through Dec. 7 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. (It will be broadcast to movie theaters worldwide Saturday.)

NEW YORK — Wherever Jordi Savall wishes to travel, an audience will follow. This early-music master’s fervent community of admirers is the result of both the consistently gorgeous playing of Hespèrion XXI — the ensemble he conducts and plays in — and Savall’s ceaseless pursuit of unfamiliar repertoire, often presented as evening-length events that draw inspiration from diverse cultures.

He has used this programming ingenuity to conceive of an original portrait of Joan of Arc. Or, on the album “The Routes of Slavery” (a project assisted by UNESCO), he crafted a memorial to communities targeted by historical plunder. Behind all this conceptual work is a belief in music’s healing power for contemporary audiences.

Such well-intended programs are a natural fit with Lincoln Center’s spiritually minded White Light Festival, which presented Savall’s “Francis Xavier’s Journey to the East” to a nearly full Alice Tully Hall on Thursday night. By tracing a 16th-century missionary’s travels, and by sketching the larger context of the times in which he lived, Savall shared his interest in musical traditions from Europe, Africa and Asia.

The evening’s first half was a master-class display of everything that makes Savall and his retinue of players so indispensable. (On Thursday, he joined on the treble viol.) The glorious ensemble sound of Hespèrion XXI featured period-instrument textures rendered with a delicacy and clarity sufficient to make a listener truly feel like a time traveler, exploring the Renaissance without any hint of distance.

Savall’s eclecticism also rose to the surface — most powerfully in a suite of guest appearances by Prabhu Edouard on tablas (Indian drums) and Daud Khan Sadozai on the sarod (a South Asian string instrument). Taking a handoff from Hespèrion XXI and the vocalists of La Capella Reial de Catalunya, the pair produced a stirring (and perhaps too brief) raga version of the hymn “O gloriosa Domina.”

Edouard and Hespèrion’s David Mayoral formed a different duo with a sumptuous blend of percussion patterns and textures. This, in turn, led to a performance by the combined ensembles — with the sarod’s metallic twang offering a captivating contrast to the timbres of Hespèrion’s harp and viols — that drew ecstatic applause.

There was less of a sense of spontaneous delight in the concert’s second half, inspired by St. Xavier’s travels to Japan and China. The contributions by various guest soloists in these portions were also stellar — though these players were isolated from the Hespèrion musicians for long stretches. Perhaps that was a necessary move in the context of this concert, particularly given the history of Christianity’s legacy in Japan.

But all high-concept heroics aside, leaving Hespèrion XXI players so often silent for the closing hour of their own concert creates some problems with momentum. Yet at this stage of a varied and luminous career, each new risk taken by Savall — and each moment that he and his ensemble are playing — can still feel like a cultural experience worth the journey.

Review: The White Light Festival Opens With a Journey to the East

(Critic’s Pick)

TROY, N.Y. — Natasha Barrett’s introduction to classical music was not unduly peculiar. She can still recall her father’s collection of vintage vinyl, her love for Debussy albums.

She also remembers wanting to be a composer from an early age. But she didn’t live long in the past. As synthesizers became more common through the 1980s, a teenage Barrett began playing them. She also experimented with multitrack recordings.

“I just thought this was fun, because I could make funny sounds,” she said before a concert of her works last week at Empac, the experimental media and performing arts center here at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “I didn’t think of this as being music. And I hadn’t really heard any contemporary music at this stage.”

When she reached City University of London, she found a music department that had embraced more than the standard repertoire. Her degree there, she said, “combined conventional music study with music technology, psychoacoustics.”

“And it was presented in a way that was very musical,” she added. “It allowed you to understand this and embrace it as an artistic subject, and not just as a technological subject.”

Thanks in part to that early training, Barrett is now one of the leading composers in the emerging field of 3D audio: using high-density loudspeaker arrays (think movie-theater surround sound on steroids) and cutting-edge recording and mixing procedures to create works full of ingenuity and drama.

The technology behind some of her methods might be a challenge to picture, but the sonic results contain easy pleasures — as with the range of timbres and steady build of intensity in “Sagittarius A*” for violin, multichannel electroacoustic sound and live electronics.

A few of Barrett’s electronic pieces without live performers, including one recorded from inside a balloon, were presented at Empac’s first spatial-audio seminar in 2017. At last week’s edition of the seminar, there was a concert of her so-called ambisonic pieces Friday. The night before, she screened “Pockets of Space,” a short 3D film made with the digital artists Marc Downie and Paul Kaiser.

As the often abstract visuals of “Pockets of Space” transform from febrile, subatomic squiggles to more recognizable depictions of a tree, so, too, does Barrett’s score evolve — with initial, dry tendrils of percussive sound steadily giving way to more resonant passages, suggestive of prepared piano.

Originally commissioned by Ircam, the French electronic-music institute, “Pockets of Space” also exists in a virtual-reality version. After strapping on Oculus goggles and headphones, a viewer can choose where to gaze inside the digital environment.

At one point, during my second trip through the VR edition, I tilted my head to allow an approaching cloud of red dots to pass over my face. As I did, a slow-rolling pattern of Barrett’s tones — sounding like a great many packing bubbles being popped in sensuous slow motion — seemed to approach and wash over my head, too. This synchronization of perspective, across audio and visuals, was made possible by the fact that both elements of the film were being rendered anew by a computer in real time, based on the tilt of the goggles on my head.

“I’m really concerned with the idea of tangibility,” Barrett said during our conversation, shortly after I removed the goggles. “Sound is invisible, but we can do things that make you want to reach out and touch it.”

One of her tools is binaural recording, which uses multiple microphones inside a dummy head that is designed to be generically reflective of human auditory processes. It places the listener, Barrett said, “more ‘into’ the space of the sound,” instead of being merely sandwiched between left and right channels.

Given differences between actual heads, a binaural recording won’t sound the same — or produce the same spatial effects — for different listeners. And it pales in comparison to hearing the spatial separation of high-order ambisonics, like at Empac. But they give a feel for the sense of immersion those speaker arrays can offer.

In a dramatic, windswept section of a piece like “Involuntary Expression,” Barrett’s binaural version for headphones sounded, to my ears, as if it kept pulling my head between minute gradations of sonic balance; the stereo edition, by comparison, sounded like a series of more discrete, back-and-forth handoffs between the halves of my headphones.

Neither recording offered quite the same experience as hearing Barrett’s work played over a 71-channel system at Empac. But for such “acousmatic” pieces, she said she was hopeful that technological advances would steadily creep into our living spaces, as consumer technology embraces ambisonics.

Likening it to the jump from mono recording to stereo, she said that “adding the full dimensionality of the sound is that last phase of making it beautiful, making it real.”

“It’s all about being there, and about getting closer to our perceptual limitation,” she added. “And space is a very important part of that.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/arts/music/natasha-barrett-3d-audio-empac.html" id="9312a003-3ceb-3caa-a060-777a83869b36">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic's Notebook)

Tickling the Ear With Sounds That Are Almost Tangible

But it goes only through Saturday afternoon.

If that seems a criminally short run for “Lady in the Dark,” a “musical play” with book by Moss Hart, lyrics by Ira Gershwin and some of Weill’s best Broadway-period music, the blame doesn’t fall to the MasterVoices chorus, which is presenting the work, or its artistic director Ted Sperling, who conducts and directs sharply.

Instead, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scheduling may well reflect the difficulties of putting on “Lady in the Dark,” which combines elements of operetta, swinging mid-20th-century Americana, dramatic theater and the sweet sentimentality of Golden Age Broadway.

That genre alchemy, which can turn out more of a genre muddle, isn’t the only reason this show was last seen in New York in 1994. The gender politics of the underlying story also present a hurdle. At its 1941 premiere, the psychoanalytic-theme plot — in which Liza Elliott, a fashion magazine editor, goes to pieces over a romantic quandary, requiring the services of Dr. Brooks — came off as daring. (Most of the music occurs as Liza either recounts or experiences dream states.)

Today, the limitations of Dr. Brooks’ patriarchal views on femininity are more plainly obvious. One possible fix: Cast a woman in this speaking role. MasterVoices has followed this advice, with Amy Irving as a sympathetic, occasionally wry Dr. Brooks. (The text has also been lightly adapted by Christopher Hart and Kim Kowalke.)

But a performance of “Lady in the Dark” rises or falls with its Liza — and Victoria Clark is consistently engaging. While she initially seems a touch too tentative, even her more tremulous moments manage to carry a sense of dramatic purpose. When Liza’s subconscious is merely playing at high-society confidence during the first dream sequence’s hit number, “One Life to Live,” she used some vibrato affectations to underline the posh pretension.

Later, with Liza approaching a greater sense of self-awareness, Clark nailed a brassier tone during a vivacious rendition of “The Saga of Jenny.” Following David Pittu’s sassy, nimble blitz through the tongue-twisting “Tschaikowsky,” this sequence created a sense of strutting delirium that made clear why the show was a hit in the first place. Members of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s had the music sounding idiomatically Weill: suave-then-tart, swinging lightly but not weakly. The MasterVoices chorus was admirably crisp.

The reputation of “Lady in the Dark” is that it’s overlong — and it can feel baggy. But the undeniable strangeness of the way it hangs together also has an unusual appeal. And hearing Weill’s original orchestration is a major draw in a thoughtful production.

Some good news, though this “Lady” run is unconscionably brief: Those on a Weill high can look forward to a production of his “Street Scene,” with a text by Langston Hughes and Elmer Rice, at Mannes Opera next weekend.

Production Notes:

Through Saturday, New York City Center, Manhattan; 212-581-1212, nycitycenter.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/arts/music/weill-lady-in-the-dark-mastervoices-review.html" id="d6eeb4bb-d411-37e1-a770-ed031b195371">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — There’s a Kurt Weill musical playing at New York City Center. It’s well-cast and smartly produced (if clearly on a budget). There is some playful choreography and attractive costuming. It sounds great, particularly the pit musicians, who are using a recent critical edition of Weill’s score.

'Lady in the Dark' Is Kurt Weill on the Couch

But he didn’t destroy everything. Entrusting one youthful score — completed in 1944, when Boulez was 19, and never performed publicly in his lifetime — to the Paul Sacher Foundation in Switzerland, this champion of modernism, who died in 2016, left open the possibility that his early traces might be discovered.

After reviewing that score, “Prélude, Toccata et Scherzo,” Dutch pianist Ralph van Raat persuaded Boulez’s heirs and the Sacher Foundation to allow a belated premiere at the Philharmonie de Paris last September. That first performance went well enough that more dates were scheduled.

When I heard van Raat play the roughly 20-minute piece at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall in October, I began a phone and email dialogue with him about his approach to the work, in advance of his commercial recording for the Naxos label, planned for 2020. Here are edited excerpts from those conversations.

Q: Did looking at the score for the first time give you the sense of uncovering a “secret Boulez”?

A: I was of course very surprised when I saw it, the Romantic aspect. But at the same time it might explain or even prove how basically, to me, the First and Second Sonatas [from a few years later] feel like highly Romantic works.

They contain “rational” elements — of course, everybody always talks about the rational part of them. But at the same time, the big intervals, I see them as very expressive. Even if he writes “to completely destroy all beauty of sounds.” It is highly romantic to think that. I mean, it’s a little aggressive! But it’s also romantic. It’s a lot of emotions. I think the “Prélude, Toccata et Scherzo” kind of proves that he had it within his personality. This hyper-emotional or, let’s say, passionate aspect.

Q: You spoke at Carnegie about the first movement as bearing the influence of Bartok. And then you hear some Messiaen in the middle of the movement?

A: Messiaen used irregular kinds of rhythms. He would subtract or add a few beats to make it more interesting. That’s what Boulez also does in the middle section. Which is, I think, highly interesting. Because Boulez is generally known as a composer who has a great rational aspect to his compositions. To some people it’s a kind of coldness — or maybe objectivity is better.

But some of the telling indications that Boulez uses in the first movement are “très expressif” (“very expressive”), “doucement triste” (“mildly sad”), and “comme une plainte qui s’exaspère” (“like a lament that intensifies”). And that’s fantastic! It’s really almost expressionist. After that intensity is heightened, the beginning comes back with great pomp — everything is doubled. It’s almost traditional virtuosity, which Liszt also has, and Rachmaninoff. Big use of all the registers of the piano at the same time, as full as you can make it. Very orchestral. Weirder notes, but the feel is definitely romantic.

Q: What do you hear in the second movement?

A: I think the second movement already looks forward to the later Boulez. It’s harder to grasp in a way, because it seems rather improvisatory, because of the structure. You have a couple single-note passages that you have to play fast, with alternating hands. And all the time these toccata sections are alternated with internal fugal sections. Just kind of traditional fugues, like Bach did, but in a 12-tone system.

Toward the end he gets this very complex spider web of motives that are part of both the toccata and the fugue. And all these motives are stacked on top of each other, and it sounds completely random. At that moment, when as a listener you kind of lose it, he restarts some of these important themes in octaves, so you have some pointers. And you feel: “Oh, now I get it. They were just lost in all these complex atonal textures.”

Q: And then in the third movement?

A: What I find attractive is that it has these aggressive Boulez gestures already. Very pointy and spiky. That element is there, more than in any other movement. But it’s actually very groovy, the intervals that he uses: a lot of major and minor seventh chords. And stacked fourths on top of one another. They remind me of much contemporary jazz. Probably Boulez would not agree with that. But I like it very much.

Q: Given that you are playing and recording a piece he never published, what is your own sense of a performer’s liberty to disagree with Boulez after his death?

A: He didn’t want to publish it, it’s true. But he did keep it, for some reason. Maybe at least to study at some point. So when I asked the people — the Boulez heirs and the people at the Sacher Foundation — if I could play it, they said: “Well, yeah, but basically for study reasons. So you can perform it once, just for people to be able to hear it.”

Then they wanted another performance, and they agreed to a third performance. Because they heard it, and they did agree that it’s actually quite a good piece, and very informative.

You see in these three movements that he’s searching. He’s finding his way. Later, it’s all crystallized more. But this piece, I like it very much as a listener and as a player. It’s already difficult enough to understand Boulez. I love his works. But I do first want to admit that it’s hard stuff. And I very much like that in this piece we hear the same kind of principles he would use later, but in a clearer way.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/19/arts/music/pierre-boulez-piano.html" id="7e550fb0-ee45-31a1-a610-cc9a54e71886">The New York Times</a>.

A Teenage Pierre Boulez, Heard for the First Time

The firebrand composer and conductor Pierre Boulez once wrote that it is essential that a creative artist “hides his first attempts and destroys his traces.” By withdrawing from circulation several works from his apprentice years, Boulez showed he was willing to follow his own advice.

NEW YORK — If you’re the kind of New Yorker prone to wondering what it would have been like to go to a CBGB that wasn’t located inside the Newark airport, you might also wonder if you arrived in the city too late.

Fair enough. But the old bohemian, culturally rich downtown Manhattan spirit still has a few embers burning throughout the city. And at least one of these, Roulette, is actually more powerful now than at the time of its birth in 1978.

Forty years after opening, Roulette is now nestled inside a YWCA complex at the corner of Third and Atlantic avenues in another downtown: Brooklyn’s. Instead of the 74 seats its co-founder — and current director — Jim Staley provided when he first organized concerts in his Tribeca loft, Roulette now has a theater that can accommodate 400. It’s not only the widest ranging music presenter in the city but also the most comfortable and welcoming.

“As long as it’s something that’s of a creative and experimental nature, they’re interested in it,” Henry Threadgill, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and saxophonist, said in an interview. “They’ve always been interested in it.”

A potent trombonist as well as an administrator, Staley is modest in describing the roots of one of New York’s most important avant-garde music spaces. “It started out as a collective,” he said in an interview at Roulette. “And then I sort of initiated a series.”

That first regular series in Manhattan, which began in 1980, took place in Staley’s place on West Broadway. “We were just trying this out,” he recalled. “All these people came, and watched John Cage and Merce Cunningham come through the door, pay their five bucks.” It didn’t take long for noted composers, like Fluxus artist Philip Corner, to start pitching concerts to him. When the neighborhood changed, Staley started looking for another home in lower Manhattan. Late in the 2000s, Roulette leased a spot on Greene Street, until the financial crash sent the building owner’s assets into chaos.

In 2011, it came to Brooklyn, where it is host to a jovial mixture of styles. In recent seasons, Roulette has presented work by a trio including YoshimiO, the sometime drummer of the avant-rock group Boredoms; a sterling evening of two-piano works by Philip Glass; and a semi-staged presentation of a four-act opera by composer and saxophonist Anthony Braxton. It is also the rental hall of choice for some of the city’s most vital music programmers, like avant-jazz Vision Festival and Thomas Buckner’s Interpretations series.

At a recent Interpretations concert, composer and pianist Anthony Davis, author of grand operas like “X — The Life and Times of Malcolm X” and “Amistad,” announced he would perform some material from his next opera, “The Central Park Five,” set to premiere at Long Beach Opera in June. Davis’ operatic writing was once performed at Lincoln Center by New York City Opera; now, if you want to hear this work in the city, you’ll likely end up at Roulette.

Even if you can’t make it in person, you can tune in online; clips of select recent shows run on Roulette TV, while vintage audio recordings have been popping up on the venue’s SoundCloud page. Excerpts from performances by María Grand, Jennifer Choi and Amirtha Kidambi are particularly good on Roulette TV, and the SoundCloud page offers work by the likes of Leroy Jenkins and Pauline Oliveros. A launch party for an even more in-depth archive is scheduled for Feb. 12.

The organization also supports up-and-coming artists with residencies and commissions. In the months before pianist and composer Kelly Moran made her debut on the Warp label, with the album “Ultraviolet,” you could hear her working out the balance of live pianism and electronics at Roulette, thanks to one of its emerging artist grants.

Describing the award as “way more monetary support than I’m used to,” Moran said in an interview that she was “shellshocked” to receive it: “It was kind of a surreal moment, because I had all these ideas for projects I wanted to do related to my record, and now I had the means to do them.”

Roulette is generous to audiences, too. To my mind, its balcony remains far and away the city’s loveliest, most relaxing location from which to take in music. I knew Threadgill liked it, too, based simply on the number of times I have spotted him there. “It’s just so comfortable,” he said during our interview. “I got addicted to sitting upstairs.”

Strangers tend to talk to each other during intermission, more than at other spaces devoted to experimental music. Artists often circulate before and after performances. And that beer you bought in the lobby? You can bring it into the hall.

“It’s always been the nature of these kind of places that allowed for that,” Staley said, when I asked how Roulette fostered that welcoming spirit. But once again, he sounded a little too modest. Certainly plenty of spaces pay lip service to the idea of openness, but wind up feeling cliquish.

“Some of the places I know, there’s a feeling of: When the thing’s over, get out,” Staley finally allowed. After a short beat, he added: “It’s not necessarily the vibe here.”

Roulette itself isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon. In 2010, it signed a 20-year lease with the YWCA, with a 10-year extension option. The spring 2019 calendar includes a vocal ensemble performing works by Braxton, music by composer Erin Gee, and a night of duets by pianists Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn.

Prices are affordable: just slightly higher than the average New York movie ticket. (A subscription also knocks $5 off the price of most concerts.) If this range of offerings can’t entice you to check out one of the city’s most inviting experimental spaces — well, you can’t blame that on gentrification over in Manhattan.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/arts/music/roulette-brooklyn.html" id="4735a7a7-b864-325a-ad9d-9f9180ff44c2">The New York Times</a>.

A Space Devoted to Experimental Music Turns 40

(Critic’s Notebook)

NEW YORK — At the end of August, John Zorn’s record label, Tzadik, released “Encomia,” 43 minutes of mostly solo-piano music by Zorn, performed by Stephen Gosling. (He’s joined on one track by violinist Chris Otto.)

So when Gosling came to the Miller Theater at Columbia University on Tuesday, for the first of the theater’s free early-evening “pop-up” concerts this season, you might have expected him to touch on at least one piece from “Encomia” — if only to promote the new release a bit.

He did not. Mostly because Zorn writes so quickly. Gosling was at the Miller to give the premiere of an even newer work for piano, “18 Studies From the Later Sketchbooks of J.M.W. Turner (1841-1845).”

The hourlong work made good on the Miller’s advertising, which promised “études, preludes, color studies, seascapes, moonscapes and nocturnes” inspired by the English artist. It also offered a sense of Zorn adapting some tried and true methods for a pianist who can embrace the full span of his style — from hard-core dissonances to disarmingly gentle melodies.

Gosling’s feeling and facility for Zorn’s music was consistently impressive. In the first study, his hand-over-hand playing across all the piano’s registers brought a lulling quality to the music’s gentle dynamics. But he also found just the right punch for the percussive interjections that Zorn inserts into this not-quite-minimalist procession, keeping a quality of steely edge.

Several of the nervier studies featured rambunctious, whipsaw conclusions to melodic statements — often ending in one of the elaborate chords Zorn favors. And the 10th study had a madman-machinist design worthy of the player-piano canons of Conlon Nancarrow.

But there were also other moods. The relatively calm sensibility of The Gnostic Trio — one of Zorn’s many, many other projects — made an appearance in the fourth and 14th studies. (That is, assuming I counted correctly: In keeping with the laid-back air of the Miller’s pop-up concerts, no programs, or titles for individual studies, were provided.)

Gosling is far from new to Zorn, having appeared on the composer’s records for over a decade. But the speed with which Zorn has been writing works with this pianist in mind is worthy of notice. (This includes a recent piece for Gosling and soprano Barbara Hannigan, heard at this summer’s Ojai Music Festival and coming to the Park Avenue Armory in October.)

The only danger is that it may all be coming too quickly for listeners to digest. After Tuesday’s concert, I returned to a piece on “Encomia” called “Nijinsky.” It’s an often stormy composition that also includes a minute of pristine serenity, tucked into its middle. The album it appears on is just a few weeks old, but at Zorn’s rate of productivity, it will soon be classic repertory.

Review: A Pianist Is the Muse for a Flood of Zorn

(Critic's Pick)

It’s the same thing that Beer, 33, has done hundreds of times at the Met over the past few years, but with objects from its collection — vases, pots and sculptures, some of them thousands of years old — rather than the building itself.

He carefully tested these objects in search of the so-called “natural pitches” already present within them because of their geometric properties. The interior of a painted earthenware vase by Joan Miró, for example, resonates as a low F.

“I was able to listen first,” Beer said, “and then, very gently, to sing to one side, without my breath going near.” By tuning his voice to the resonance of the individual objects — as he did with the Met Breuer’s stairwell — he was able to confirm the pitch each one was best able to “sing.”

He ended up with an ensemble of 32 objects, which together form “Vessel Orchestra,” currently on view — and audible — through Aug. 11, the first sound-based installation to be commissioned by the museum. Linked, by microphones, to a nearby keyboard that’s designed to trigger each individual object (and, therefore, frequency), the array, when properly amplified, is capable of producing the 32 sequential pitches of a well-tempered keyboard.

In other words, thanks to Beer’s intervention, musicians can “play” the whole setup, like a traditional piano.

Don’t fear for the Met’s possessions; they are not actually struck or directly manipulated. The microphones are carefully suspended above each object, dropping down into openings and crevices without coming into direct contact with the artworks. When a key on the keyboard is pressed, it turns on the microphone in the corresponding vessel, producing what Beer calls “the live feedback loop of the object.” Then the collection of tones played at any given time is amplified over speakers.

During most of the museum’s visiting hours, “Vessel Orchestra” plays a 20-minute piece composed by Beer on loop; the notes he has chosen, and his methods of pianistic attack, are already programmed into the keyboard. The resulting tones coming from the objects are amplified, live, as you listen: While it may be a disembodied performance, it isn’t canned or prerecorded. (The effect is something like that of a player piano.)

This piece features nimbly flowing moments in which the microphones elicit delicate passagework, as well as drones dominated by clashing dissonances or hypnotic, sustained chords. On some afternoons, you might catch Beer or one of his colleagues giving a pop-up performance at the keyboard. And on Friday evenings, there are formal concerts, in which other musicians are invited to make use of the installation.

“My starting point was to interrogate both myself and my collaborators about the earliest fragments of music that they have in their minds,” Beer said. “It’s almost inevitably from a mother or father or a grandmother.”

His own memory is of the Scottish version of “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” which factors into the composition that plays on loop at the Met.

Last Friday evening, Lebanese indie-rock group Mashrou’ Leila gave a 40-minute show in the installation alongside writer Rabih Alameddine. They responded to Beer’s memory prompt by starting out with a sample of the popular tune “Ya Garat Al Wadi,” as performed by Lebanese singer Nour El Houda in the 1960s.

The performance began with the vocal sample, presented without alteration. Gradually, the members began to use Auto-Tune on El Houda’s voice, in between versions of the group’s own songs. These songs were in turn arranged to work alongside Beer’s orchestra — with keyboardist Firas Abou Fakher often employing the low G that emits from the Met’s ceramic 7th-century B.C. human-form vessel, excavated from Iran.

“One of the things that I personally loved most about Oliver’s approach is the idea that these objects — with all their troubled history, and all the bizarre stories that they tell — are, in one way or another, harmonized,” Abou Fakher said after the performance.

“People look at these things in museums for hundreds and hundreds of years,” he added. “Their stories have kind of ended when they are put on a shelf. And then what Oliver did was bring them back into this discussion. What is history? What is archiving? How can we use it, how can we keep it as an active part of our process? Not as things that are just put up on a pedestal, not to be touched.”

Next up as guest artists is a series of adventurous, multiply talented musicians including Matana Roberts and Darius Jones (July 19); Nico Muhly (Aug. 2); and John Zorn (Aug. 9). Their styles are distinct enough that the concerts may well have the “Vessel Orchestra” sounding like wholly distinct ensembles.

That broad artistic applicability suits Beer’s practice. He said that because he works in sculpture as well as sound — and video, too — people often think they have seen a group show after encountering a survey of his pieces. Here at the Met, he has leaned into that ambiguity, offering what amounts to a group show of musical approaches, turning the Met’s collection into an instrument of impressive flexibility.

Oliver Beer: Vessel Orchestra Through Aug. 11 at the Met Breuer, 945 Madison Avenue, Manhattan; 212-731-1675, metmuseum.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/arts/music/met-museum-oliver-beer-vessel-orchestra.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

He Turned the Met Museum's Collection Into an Orchestra

(Critic's Notebook): NEW YORK — Walking up the stairs of the Met Breuer last week, British artist Oliver Beer pressed his face into a corner and began singing a slow succession of descending pitches. When he landed on a B flat, the walls suddenly vibrated with sympathetic resonance.

He turned the Met museum's collection into an orchestra

<h1>He worried about the marketplace consequences of blockbusters blotting out substance, not unlike today’s film reviewers warily watching the latest Avengers movie.</h1>

“Only sick music makes money today,” he wrote. “Our big theaters subsist on Wagner.”

Yet opera does live on bigness, which means that it has lived on cycles. And with his “Ring” tetralogy, Wagner threw down a gauntlet. Since then, thinking in multi-opera arcs, and seeing an operatic project in multiple works, has been core to the modern conception of the art form: Think Puccini’s “Il Trittico” or Philip Glass’ trio of great-men “portrait” operas, “Einstein on the Beach,” “Satyagraha” and “Akhnaten.” The trilogy that Robert Ashley wrote beginning with “Atalanta” even ends within a separate tetralogy, “Now Eleanor’s Idea” — nesting dolls of cycles.

I thought a lot about grandeur and depth over the past few weeks, as I took in Wagner’s “Ring” at the Metropolitan Opera then caught a glimpse of another, even more gargantuan cycle — Karlheinz Stockhausen’s seven-opera “Licht” — as staged by Pierre Audi in three days of excerpts at the Holland Festival. It was a move from Wagner’s traditional, if sprawling narrative structure to something far more ambiguous.

The mainstream thumbnail biography for Stockhausen holds that he started out with vision and ended up with mere grandiosity, making abstruse works for the tight circle of collaborators who surrounded him. But after 15 hours of “Aus Licht” last weekend — about half the cycle — that reductive portrait was finally, fully shattered for me.

The first opera in the original cycle, “Donnerstag aus Licht,” actually begins with strong narrative drive. It’s seemingly autobiographical, with the wisdom-seeking character of Michael a stand-in for Stockhausen. Character (like creator) suffers through childhood trauma in World War II-era Germany, gains postwar admission to a conservatory and embarks on a worldwide career in music.

The next two operas focus on the cycle’s other primary figures — Lucifer, the independent-minded fallen angel, and Eve, a maternal figure and instructor in love. Over the subsequent operas, these characters fight and collaborate, by turns. By “Sonntag aus Licht,” the final opera, Lucifer is virtually absent, and the union of Michael and Eve has a multicultural tinge — with tributes to concepts of love and communion voiced in a wealth of languages.

And yet this happy, even utopian, conclusion doesn’t resolve troubling elements from the other operas — the race-based children’s war in “Freitag aus Licht,” for example. Those troubles merely seem to evaporate, without being forgotten.

The specter of violence is still there. And if quasi-divine characters like Michael and Eve can’t break the cycle of carnage — as Brünnhilde does at the end of Wagner’s “Ring” — what hope does humanity have? A break from logic starts to look like the only escape available in the middle of the 20th century, with Romantic notions of deliverance thoroughly discredited. So what can fill the void? Stockhausen’s music.

In an interview, Kathinka Pasveer, one of Stockhausen’s partners and collaborators, and the musical director of “Aus Licht,” said that for him, “more and more, the music became the most important thing.”

“‘Donnerstag’ was his first opera, so perhaps he also had the feeling he should write an opera with a story,” she said. “And then you feel as of ‘Samstag,’ already there is no real story. You have to find your clues yourself. You have to find your thread: ‘What does it mean?’”

Even some more textually inclined composers of opera cycles have toyed with abstraction. In “Now Eleanor’s Idea,” the title opera from Ashley’s cycle-within-a-cycle, a bank teller central to the intrigue in a previous opera starts a new career as a newscaster; the second act is her broadcast on lowrider car culture. Even if you know that each opera of the tetralogy is intended as an allegory “for an individual’s self-realization within the context of a major religion found in the United States,” you have to do a little interpretive work to keep your own understanding afloat.

That comfort with conceptual mystery as an organizing element has also had a strong influence on American composer-saxophonist Anthony Braxton and his “Trillium” series of operas. When I interviewed Braxton earlier this year, he referred to Stockhausen as a hero, while also expressing his affection for Wagner. (By contrast, Pasveer said that the music of Wagner made Stockhausen “sick” — and that they once had to leave a performance of “Die Walküre,” after only 20 minutes.)

Braxton has said, of the “Trillium” series, still in progress, that while each act has an “apparent story,” “nothing is as it appears.” So while the apparent story of an act in a “Trillium” opera might be about, for example, vacationers discovering a lamp with a genie, the subtext could have to do with the reduced cultural capacities for imagination. (The vacationers pester the genie for catalogs to order from, instead of coming up with their own original wishes.) While “Trillium” is more politically earthbound than “Licht” — even when it travels into space — the listener is similarly charged with the responsibility to make connections, to create an individual meditation.

Like Stockhausen, Braxton also thinks about his music in modular terms. A vocal part from “Trillium” might turn up as fodder for one of Braxton’s improvising trios, or in performances of his other pieces for voice.

And in Amsterdam, there was a compelling window onto Stockhausen’s method of building up his music dramas through compositional layering. An electronic work for voices, “Invisible Choirs,” was occasionally audible during the first act of “Donnerstag.” After the night’s live performance was over, “Invisible Choirs” was played again, this time blasted over the venue’s surround sound system, as a stand-alone composition.

When the work’s mass of voices pulsed across the auditorium, a sense of Stockhausen’s stated interest in the fate of humankind — not just his own story — was made excitingly concrete. This abstract but moving sense of depth came from a closer examination of the opera’s music, as opposed to whether it was telling a traditional tale.

By moving away from the overarching narrative flow of the “Ring,” these more recent cycles may be reflecting the fact that the epic scope that was once opera’s trademark has been overtaken by the Marvel Cinematic Universe and “Game of Thrones.”

But even if opera cycles have grown more enigmatic, mad creative ambition still reigns in them. Stockhausen may have taken leave from writing a straightforward tale as he worked on “Licht,” but he didn’t fall off a creative cliff. He was actually soaring.

AMSTERDAM — When Friedrich Nietzsche turned his pen on his onetime friend, Richard Wagner, his overarching critique was that grandeur shouldn’t be mistaken for depth.

Opera lives in cycles

By programming two full nights of Bartok at Carnegie Hall, the touring Budapest Festival Orchestra and its music director, Ivan Fischer, were signaling their passion for a Hungarian modernist whose works they have memorably recorded.

The question was whether some of Bartok’s celebrated touchstones — the Concerto for Orchestra, the “Miraculous Mandarin” suite and a concert performance of the one-act opera “Bluebeard’s Castle” — would stand noticeably apart from the comparative rarities on each bill.

On Friday, that sometimes seemed to be the case, to the rarities’ advantage. The “Mandarin” had its requisite, slashing severity, though occasionally a bit too much (as when the heroically riffing trombones ran riot over the other sections). By the end of the concert, there was an ideal sense of balance, during the Concerto for Orchestra. Here the strings were allowed more space to delight in complex blends of textures, made of strands both sinewy and silken.

Yet what stood out most was an informational (though not didactic) tour through several of the composer’s works for student singers and orchestral players. In brief remarks from the stage, Fischer observed that Bartok was a dedicated educator.

So, too, was Fischer. By allowing Cantemus Choir — a girls’ ensemble from the Zoltan Kodaly Primary School — significant time on the Carnegie stage, the conductor helped emphasize Bartok’s ability to merge charming, youthful motifs with the occasional dollop of more complex harmony. (This was particularly true of the selections with orchestral accompaniment.) Fischer cracked a joke about his cohorts pretending to be a “student orchestra,” though there was nothing apprentice about their engagement. Nor any sense that the players’ talents were being wasted on this thoughtfully constructed music.

Saturday’s concert had a similarly instructive angle, this time focused on Bartok’s appetite for folk music. In that night’s commentary, Fischer described the composer’s ethnomusicological practice of recording authentic performances of local songs, then invited a trio from the orchestra to the front of the stage. The bassist, violist and violinist first played a series of traditional Romanian dances “as Bartok may have heard them” (in Fischer’s formulation).

When one of the jubilant traditional melodies was taken up by the full orchestra, signaling the beginning of Bartok’s “Romanian Folk Dances,” the crowd cut short its enthusiastic applause for the trio to pay attention to the brief but potent Bartokian adaptation for orchestra. (A similar spell was cast, later on, when the same trio accompanied contemporary Hungarian vocalist Marta Sebestyen, in a series of pieces that preceded the orchestra’s tour through Bartok’s “Hungarian Peasant Songs.”)

The “Bluebeard’s Castle” that followed might have felt anticlimactic, after those revels. But the performance was, for me, the highlight of the weekend. This take breathed fresh life into a work that, in recent years, has perhaps been familiar to New York audiences through Mariusz Trelinski’s Metropolitan Opera production.

In its high-tech yet one-note grimness, the Met’s presentation can feel like a slog. This concert performance was more dramatically varied — with mezzo-soprano Ildiko Komlosi’s Judith seeming possessed of some persuasive (if fatally misguided) romantic hopes. And the orchestral playing was as exciting here as at any point during Budapest’s Carnegie stand. Fischer steered toward each new horror with an ingenuity capable of conjuring all the narrative’s gothic scenery — no strobing, blood-red light shows necessary.

Budapest Festival Orchestra performed on Friday and Saturday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan.

This article originally appeared in <a id="95512e66-e7d9-4928-8d43-9a3360defaac" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/07/arts/music/budapest-orchestra-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic's Pick): NEW YORK — The aesthetic commitment being offered was never in doubt.

An ideal balance of Bartok

<h1>NEW YORK — It would be understandable for an artist to appear merely dutiful, at some point, during a 23-year creative project requiring annual check-ins. So how does flutist Claire Chase sound, circa the sixth edition of “Density 2036,” her long-term initiative to commission and premiere a new raft of repertoire for her instrument?</h1>

On the evidence of her concert Friday night at the Kitchen, she is not feeling bogged down yet. Nor does she seem likely to court ennui in the immediate future. That’s partly the result of some good taste in programming, as this year’s set included imaginative works from marquee composers like Olga Neuwirth and Pamela Z.

Neuwirth’s “Magic Flu-idity,” for flute and typewriter, was a distillation of a flute concerto (which Chase has played with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra). But this reduction did not feel like an afterthought. The frequently hard-riffing interplay between the flutist and typist — at the Kitchen, it was percussionist Nathan Davis — proved lively across each of the work’s three sections. The suppleness of the typewriter’s clicks, as heard in the hall, served as a reminder of the work of sound designer Levy Lorenzo, whose subtly effective approach to amplification helped the evening cohere.

A balance of pretaped elements and live acoustic playing was crucial in Z’s “Louder, Warmer, Denser,” a work that samples and loops Chase’s own voice. By splicing some of the flutist’s conversational asides and spontaneous laughter alongside some more planned-sounding recitations, the composer managed to highlight the songful quality that animates this artist’s speech in casual settings. The live part for various flutes — including bass and contrabass varieties — occasionally imitated those prefashioned motifs, while at other junctures it seemed to trigger new twists in the work’s progression.

“Roots of Interior,” by Phyllis Chen, was another composition that interacted with Chase as something other than just a flutist. In the program note the composer cited as an inspiration the act of listening to two heartbeats “beating in counterpoint,” during pregnancy. The most involving part of the piece for Chase involved the flutist soaring over some shifting yet complementary heartbeat patterns. A finale that involved the player partnering with herself — made possible by a digital stethoscope attached to her — was a theatrical and touching idea, though for me it was not as sonically arresting as the rest of the composition.

By contrast, Sarah Hennies’ “Reservoir 2: Intrusion” initially seemed to sideline Chase, the better to focus on the composer’s instructions for eight vocalists from the Constellation Chor. In the early minutes, it seemed as if all the flutist would be asked to do was drone a solitary note — softly — as the singers drifted across the stage (and across a wider variety of hummed tones).

The flute’s stasis was not permanent. And while it was hard to pinpoint the exact moment at which Chase’s part began to move, by the end, the effect of a slow but steady descent was keenly felt — as was the gradual deepening of a connection between Chase and the other performers, thanks to some mirroring of pulses and exhalation effects. The composition also worked as something of a breather, on this program, in advance of a comparatively stormy piece by Tyshawn Sorey, who joined Chase as a percussionist for a performance of “Bertha’s Lair.” (The work was originally heard in an earlier edition of “Density 2036,” and was revised before this performance.)

Performing well alongside Sorey — one of the most masterful player-composers of this era, in any idiom — requires a deep repository of strategies. Chase brought a substantial warehouse of tools to this meeting, venturing some whispery timbres while the percussionist was gently manipulating a small gong. At other points, Chase projected a rounded warmth during longer, tricky lines that collided with passages of greater percussive tumult. Toward the end of the performance, I had the feeling that I would happily listen to this duo configuration for a full set.

The evening concluded with a performance of Edgard Varèse’s “Density 21.5,” the 20th-century classic that has motivated Chase’s 21st-century pursuit of new repertoire. That brief work’s stark cries of heraldry served as a moving, climactic end to a show that was paced to entertain.

In progressing without breaks for applause over 75 minutes, this concert’s movement from one piece to the next was, at times, too smooth. Brief tape-music compositions by Bahar Royaee and Lorenzo (who also contributed an LED artwork titled “Light Flute” to the staging) were presented casually — essentially serving as interstitial music, while Chase darted between platforms inside the Kitchen’s space. Though as far as downsides go, this occasional sense of being too charged-up is the right kind of problem for an organizer to have during a multidecade initiative as demanding as this one.

Performed Friday and Saturday at the Kitchen in Manhattan.

This article originally appeared in <a id="8f4016b1-7b0a-466c-aa0c-56d7e6147afd" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/03/arts/music/review-tclaire-chases-project.html">The New York Times</a>.

Review: The bloom is still on Claire Chase's monumental project

On the evidence of her concert Friday night at the Kitchen, she is not feeling bogged down yet. Nor does she seem likely to court ennui in the immediate future.

<h1>Diehl has played with Cécile McLorin Salvant and Wynton Marsalis. His own recordings as a bandleader have revealed him to be not only a stylish improviser, but also a composer worth watching.</h1>

In recent years, he has revived the practice of interpreting Gershwin’s concert music through an improvisatory filter. His imaginative yet idiomatic turn in the Concerto in F with the New York Philharmonic at their opening-night gala in 2016 contained the hardest-swinging note I’ve ever heard inside David Geffen Hall. (It was an interpolated low D that Diehl tossed off with casually elegant force toward the end of the first movement.)

This weekend, Diehl plays “Rhapsody in Blue” (on Saturday) and the less familiar “Second Rhapsody” (on Sunday) with the Los Angeles Philharmonic as part of the brief but potent series “William Grant Still and the Harlem Renaissance.”

“The challenge is creating this balance between the improvisation and the written score,” Diehl said of his approach to “Rhapsody in Blue.”

Gershwin, in a way, is the exception this weekend: The rest of the Philharmonic’s programming puts the spotlight on black composers. William Grant Still’s symphonies serve as anchors of the programs, the First on Saturday and the Fourth on Sunday.

Symphonic arrangements of works by Duke Ellington also appear all weekend, and a new piece — Adolphus Hailstork’s “Still Holding On” — will have its premiere Sunday. (It’s one of the 50-plus commissions the orchestra has made as part of its centennial season.)

An earlier orchestral miniature by Hailstork, “Celebration,” was captured in the 1970s for Columbia Records’s Black Composers Series, a set which was recently remastered and reissued. That recording was the conductor Thomas Wilkins’ introduction to Hailstork’s music.

“I’ve always found him to be a great craftsman,” said Wilkins, who will conduct the Los Angeles concerts. “You hear his upbringing in his music; you hear his culture in his music. But it’s not on the sleeve.”

“It’s quite tonal,” he added, “but it’s not without chromaticism. And some of the time, because he’s sort of hinting at a blues lick or a jazz gesture, we find notes that are bent or twisted. Or a jazz harmony all of a sudden.” (Two other pieces by Hailstork will be performed by the Harlem Chamber Players on Feb. 28 at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.)

Wilkins said he and the Philharmonic wanted to acknowledge Still’s earlier and better-known First Symphony — subtitled “The Afro-American Symphony” — but also push audiences toward less familiar parts of the composer’s body of work.

“He’s unapologetic about being a black person,” Wilkins said. “In the last movement of the First Symphony, he begins with this plaintive song in the entire orchestra, that eventually finds its way to the cello section only — which I think is the instrument which sounds most like the human voice. There is this ‘Lord have mercy’ kind of sound in that music. And then, of course, the allegro takes over. It’s ‘we have no choice but to go forward.’ That’s what that music does.”

In the Fourth Symphony, Wilkins identifies “that same longing, that same aspirational sound world. But this symphony ends not allegro, but profoundly — it’s like a pronouncement at the end. It’s grand, and the gestures are large and bold. And not lickety-split fast. It is its own kind of affirmation: ‘Yes, this is who I am.'”

At the Juilliard School, pianist Aaron Diehl studied both classical and jazz traditions. And in the years since, he’s chosen to follow each of those paths — and sometimes both, simultaneously.

Seth Colter Walls

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