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.

On paper, John Zorn’s “Jumalattaret” — which has its New York premiere at the Park Avenue Armory on Oct. 15, with Hannigan joined by pianist Stephen Gosling — looks impossible: breathless vocalise; abrupt transitions from head-spinning complexity to folk-song simplicity; and, within the span of a single measure, whispering, squeaking and throat-singing like a winter storm.

It’s the kind of piece that leaves you asking, repeatedly, over the course of its 25 minutes: Can a voice even do this? The answer, for Hannigan, is yes. It took a lot of practice, a thwarted summer vacation, and a well-timed email to get there. But once she and Gosling gave the first performance of “Jumalattaret,” it was clear Zorn had created something special.

For all her new-music bona fides, Hannigan didn’t meet Zorn until several years ago, and didn’t perform his work until “Jumalattaret.” As a college student, though, she would get together with friends and listen to his albums.

George Benjamin’s opera “Written on Skin” brought soprano and composer together. Hannigan was in New York for the work’s stop at the Mostly Mozart Festival in 2015, and her boyfriend — actor and filmmaker Mathieu Amalric, who so far has completed two movies in a planned trilogy about Zorn — introduced them.

“I of course knew and admired her work — and was aware of her passion and dedication,” Zorn said in an email. “She is 1,000 percent music. We talked music, life, philosophy — and hit it off immediately.”

But Hannigan didn’t expect to sing any of his music. “I admired him, of course,” she said in a recent interview, “but I was also kind of scared of him.” The possibility of working together did eventually come up, and Zorn gave her the score of his song cycle “Jumalatarret,” which was composed in 2012 but hadn’t yet been performed.

“If John wrote something for me,” Hannigan said, “it would have been this.”

They just needed a pianist. Gosling was a Zorn veteran by that point: Zorn had written “Illuminations,” which experiments with improvisation within a notated work, for him, and more premieres had followed. In an interview, Gosling said he has long found himself drawn to “this little bit of the unknown” in Zorn’s work.

“It’s just knowing that I’m going to get something that’s really challenging,” he said. “I’m always going to get something that’s going to genre-hop and shift textures and shift time signatures. He always likes to push the boundaries.”

Rarely has Zorn pushed the boundaries as much as in “Jumalattaret.” The cycle — nine sections, as well as an opening invocation and a postlude — contains text from the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, with a score that draws from a variety of genres, moods and techniques, as well as, Zorn said, “the quality of ritual and extremes of experience.” A self-identified “admirer of the female warrior spirit,” he named each section after a Sami goddess.

The Kalevala text is whispered, not sung; the rest of the soprano part is almost entirely vocalise: wordless singing. And it takes almost no time to get difficult. Although the first movement begins with a lyrical — even hummable — vocal line, its time signature is out of alignment with that of the piano. (They end in the same place, but share no down beats at the beginning of each measure.)

In the sections that follow, the soprano is asked to wobble vibrato like bird song; dash through rhythmically complex runs that jump throughout the staff; laugh deeply, as if possessed; play percussion and clap; and navigate a page-long cadenza in which each measure is a minefield of intonation and technique. Yet between these passages is also astonishing beauty, even the sublime: rending melodies fit for lullabies, ethereal humming that hovers delicately, like a visiting spirit.

“Most of my work involves pushing the envelope of technical mastery,” Zorn said. “For me, challenges are opportunities. You must believe enough in what you are doing to put yourself in harm’s way — because only through discipline and extremes of experience is one able to transcend the trivial and mundane. As a sacred piece, ‘Jumalattaret’ needed very much to capture those feeling tones.”

Hannigan and Gosling began rehearsing the piece, with help from Zorn, in late 2017, with the intention of recording it as soon as possible. But it wasn’t coming together. The score doesn’t offer many opportunities for the singer get her pitch from the piano, so Hannigan needed to ingrain the part into her muscle memory. To master the breakneck speed, she began by learning the notes at a slow hum to avoid damaging her voice.

“You’ve got to tame the wild horse and get a saddle on it,” she said. “This piece took a lot for me to be able to do that.”

Among the most grueling sections were the ones in which Hannigan and Gosling were required to remain together despite very different virtuosic lines. “In the second movement,” Gosling said, “it’s quite a brief passage, but it’s polyrhythmic and it goes all over the keyboard. But then we have to suddenly realign. You have to be selectively deaf.”

They decided to postpone the recording. (A session still hasn’t happened, though Hannigan feels she is ready now.) Instead, they gave themselves nine months to prepare for what would end up being the piece’s premiere, at the Jazz em Agosto festival in Lisbon. In between, Hannigan joined her family for a summer vacation in Nova Scotia.

“Vacation” is a misnomer for Hannigan; she typically practices every morning. (She once spent a Christmas trip telling her family she needed a nap so she could have some time alone with the score for “Lulu.”) That summer in Canada, she worked on “Jumalattaret” until about 2 or 3 p.m. But even after that, she couldn’t relax.

“I couldn’t land it,” Hannigan said. “I was in a state of panic and anxiety. I knew I wasn’t ready.”

This had happened before with other pieces, but she could always rely on something to click, she said, for the music to wash over her like a wave. That moment, it seemed, refused to come with “Jumalattaret,” and the premiere was rapidly approaching.

In a deus ex machina stroke, she and Zorn received a message from Gosling: He had fractured his collarbone while on a vacation of his own, and he wasn’t sure he would be able to play in Lisbon. “None of the doctors said yes, none of them said no,” Gosling recalled. “They all said maybe.”

Hannigan saw this as a sign, and a welcome opportunity for more time. But then Gosling sent another message: He expected to recover before the concert.

Fearing the worst, Hannigan wrote to Zorn with a progress report whose subtext suggested a cry for help. He responded:

“One cannot transcend anything by staying on safe ground,” he wrote, “and it is in these intense moments that we can find deeper truths, bring mind and heart together — and begin to understand the soul and its workings in that courageous moment of letting go and going for it, the music will become alive in a special and heroic way — a way that is beyond just the notes on paper.”

Energized by that email, Hannigan returned to “Jumalattaret.” And something changed, both mentally and musically: It now worked. When a piece clicks, she said, “you feel the flow, can almost taste it coming.”

“There’s a point a day or two after that where you can start having a kind of consistency of flow,” she added. “It’s as if all the other chemicals start working a different way. The brain starts making other connections, the body starts making other connections. Everything starts to tingle.”

One phrase — five measures of eighth notes, followed by a note sustained for an entire measure — still bothered her because she couldn’t sing it in a single breath. But at the Lisbon performance, with Zorn watching from the front row, she landed it for the first time. And she landed it again when the piece traveled to the Ojai Music Festival in June, where “Jumalattaret” was greeted with cheers.

“It has changed everything,” Hannigan said. “It’s one of those pieces that was life-changing.”

Hannigan and Zorn naturally wondered what else they could collaborate on. Since Lisbon, they have improvised together (she was a guest at one of his “Hermetic Organ” concerts), and her Zorn program at the Armory will include her first performance of his “Pandora’s Box,” with the JACK Quartet. She started learning the piece in the spring, but it — surprise, surprise — hasn’t come easily.

“So that,” she said, “is what ruined this summer.”

Barbara Hannigan: Oct. 15-17 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org.

The Unsingable Music That Nearly Stumped a Diva

NEW YORK — The soprano Barbara Hannigan has given nearly 100 premieres, the majority of which were written specifically for her. She is also a master of some of the most challenging music in the repertory: Berg’s “Lulu,” Webern, Ligeti. So if she’s stumped by a new work, chances are it’s unsingable — or perhaps a masterpiece in the making.

But as this notoriously flamboyant performer slowly returns to the stage — after a left-hand injury in 2017 stalled his career for over a year — he also wants to make it known that his rehabilitation has been more than just a matter of tendons and ligaments.

“I used the time,” he told The New York Times this summer, “to rethink everything I do.”

It’s a sign that Lang, now in his late 30s, might be entering a more mature and thoughtful phase — a case he made with mixed success on Monday at the New York Philharmonic’s fall gala, his first post-recovery concerto appearance in the city.

The program, a Beethoven double bill, was a surprisingly conservative choice for an orchestra that has otherwise smartly eschewed celebrations of the 250th anniversary of that composer’s birth. This season features the start of Project 19, an initiative to commission 19 new works from women, in honor of the 19th Amendment’s centennial; why not give a preview of that?

For his New York re-entry, Lang chose Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 — not a far cry from the Mozart of his comeback concert at Tanglewood in 2018, and certainly less of a vehicle for his theatrical style than the Romantic war horses that made him famous. Indeed, the piece’s comparatively modest Classicism defies showiness, with demands that are more intellectual than athletic.

Which is why Lang’s hammy habits felt so out of place as they crept into a performance that otherwise had moments of exquisite restraint. During the fleet-footed first movement, he ended a gentle upward scale with a flick of the wrist; after another run, his hands took flight off the keyboard. His arms raised high, he had the look of a soloist conducting from the piano, sometimes in conflict with the stately, controlled orchestral accompaniment led by Jaap van Zweden.

These gestures often felt more like effects than insights — and occasionally entered the realm of dubious interpretation, artificially heightening the music’s vigor. Lang’s interventions were most apt in the second movement, which he played like a richly expressive aria. He has never been skilled at pedalwork; but here, in one of the movement’s final solos, his softened and sustained voicing lent a fuzziness to the melody, like the memory of a song from childhood.

As if to overstate his recovery, though, Lang blazed through the Rondo finale, deflating its buoyancy in a breathless dash. I wonder how much of the speed — fast enough, at times, to muddle the melody — was the doing of van Zweden, who showed no signs of slowing in the hellfire reading of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony that followed.

Van Zweden’s inexhaustible intensity — crisply delivered by the Philharmonic players, much more so than in their 2018 recording of the symphony with him — had an edge-of-your-seat excitement that dimmed with each movement. With the baseline already at boiling from the start, where else can you go? He did push even further, in the finale, but he ended up pitching his baton into the viola section.

Review: Lang Lang Returns, Rehabilitated and Almost Reformed

NEW YORK — Lang Lang, piano superstar and Billy Joel jam partner, is back on the gala circuit.

As if to offer a case study, the Cleveland Orchestra opened Carnegie Hall’s season on Thursday and Friday with two contrasting programs. In both, the players were virtually flawless under the reliably commanding baton of their music director, Franz Welser-Möst. Yet one concert never quite took flight, while the other soared in a showcase of the Clevelanders at their most magnificent.

Linking the two evenings was a sense of place: Vienna. It’s where Beethoven made his career, and in the 250 years since his birth — an anniversary Carnegie is observing by devoting roughly a fifth of its season to his already over-programmed works — the city is also where many other musical luminaries have done the same, including Strauss, Mahler and, for a time, Welser-Möst.

The first concert — which was often impressively dull and featured two pieces by, yes, Beethoven — started with fare by a less-famous contributor to Vienna’s rich music history: Otto Nicolai, who, before dying in his 30s, co-founded the Vienna Philharmonic and composed, in 1849, an operatic adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”

That opera’s fizzy and festive overture has an easy-listening friendliness befitting a season-opening gala. But, as played by the Clevelanders, with the discipline and clarity that make them one of the finest ensembles in the country (if not the world), the piece was more dignified than light. Welser-Möst carefully traced the progression from pastoral calm to rollicking merriment, and teased out the comedy in moments like boisterous lower strings answered by mischievous higher voices.

But although Welser-Möst lifted the Nicolai score, little could be done to help the two works that followed: Beethoven’s Romance for Violin and Orchestra in G, and his Triple Concerto in C. Neither is often performed; neither really deserves to be, either.

You would be hard-pressed to find fault with the Cleveland Orchestra’s performance. Not a note was dropped; not a single interpretive choice seemed misguided. All the same, it remained lukewarm, never even approaching a simmer, much less a boil. Not even the concert-closing suite from Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” — arranged by Robert Mandell with edits by Welser-Möst — could waltz the evening out of its slump.

In the Romance, violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter was as warmly expressive as always, with precise articulation that didn’t waver even in passages of precarious double-stops. But her earnestness was almost sadly out of place in music that wouldn’t be challenging for a young student. She was, however, the star of the sedate Triple Concerto, effortless and authoritative among her fellow soloists: Yefim Bronfman, making the most of an unremarkable piano part, and the veteran cellist Lynn Harrell, whose technique repeatedly slipped with crunching bow strokes, imprecise intonation and a tired legato.

Bronfman returned Friday for the second Cleveland Orchestra concert, which was far better for its focused programming: Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, preceded by Jörg Widmann’s 2014 piano concerto “Trauermarsch” (technically not a Viennese piece or composer, but inspired by the first movement of the Mahler).

The Widmann echoes the atmosphere of the funeral music that opens Mahler’s Fifth, but not necessarily its rhythms and melodies. Indeed, where the symphony offers an elegy, the concerto is pulled constantly downward as if by gravity. Bronfman played the breathless solo part, which was written for him, with unpretentious wisdom and mastery, like a noble march to the grave.

Mahler’s symphony was the capstone on a long crescendo that began with the modest Nicolai overture the evening before and swelled to a magisterial finale — a trajectory Welser-Möst followed within the Fifth’s five movements as well. He maintained the opening march’s solemn steadiness, which never sank into ponderousness and occasionally shocked with whooping brasses that flared and receded like fireworks.

Welser-Möst resisted histrionics in the stormy second movement; and while his insistence on control and restraint sometimes robbed the symphony of its power, it also achieved a remarkable transparency where many conductors would be content with translucence. Few orchestras could better render the score’s architecture so clear, the dense layers of sound so balanced. Which is not to say Welser-Möst’s reading was without character. In this movement, the hopeful, major-key passage that arrives unexpectedly near the end was hurried, if crazed, almost like a mad scene for plunging, again, to gloomy melodrama.

When that happy melody returned — at the close of the symphony, after the contented warmth of the Adagietto and the brazen triumph of the finale — Welser-Möst and the Clevelanders slowed it down with relish, as if there were no shame in such unbridled joy.

Cleveland Orchestra

Performed Oct. 3-4 at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan; carnegiehall.org.

Review: Carnegie Hall's Season Opens With Two Faces of Cleveland

NEW YORK — Programming matters: What an orchestra plays can be just as important as the quality of the playing. It can even be the difference between a concert that feels endless, and one you don’t want to ever end.

It was designed by Charles Garnier — you can find a gaudy monument to him outside — and built between 1861 and 1875. Until 1989, it housed both the Paris Opera and the Paris Opera Ballet, until nearly all the opera productions moved to the Garnier’s antithesis: the coldly modern, widely reviled Opéra Bastille.

But the Garnier has always been so much more than just an opera house. It’s essential to the identity of Paris, like the Notre-Dame or Arc de Triomphe. It has transcended further to the realm of pop culture, inspiring Gaston Leroux’s 1910 potboiler novel “The Phantom of the Opera” — and the 1980s Andrew Lloyd Webber megamusical, adding to the thriller an over-the-topness matched only by the opera house itself.

Step inside, though, and it’s immediately clear why the Garnier has cast a spell for so long. No space is left undecorated: the Grand Staircase seemingly stolen from a storybook, the Salon de la Lune’s and Salon du Soleil’s lamps reflected in facing mirrors to infinity. And the Grand Foyer’s baroque furnishings — ornate columns, multitiered chandeliers, a painted ceiling — are enough to make you faint or feel, for one night, like the star of your own fairy tale.

In the nearly 150 years since the Garnier opened, the building has been updated repeatedly, including electric lighting being installed in the 1880s. Lamps in costume storage add a touch of the modern to an otherwise thoroughly antique space, though now the backstage rooms are devoted mostly to ballet productions, such as the past season’s revival of Rudolf Nureyev’s “Swan Lake.”

Among the theater’s most famous fixtures are the chandelier and the painted ceiling that surrounds it — originally by Jules Eugène Lenepveu, then replaced in 1964 with a new, sprawling work by Marc Chagall depicting scenes from operas by Mozart, Wagner and more.

The theater is ornately grand, yet relatively intimate, with a seating capacity of less than 2,000 — roughly half that of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Its count of plush burgundy seats is at its peak in the final moments before every show, when the center aisle closes, filled in with more chairs that fold out to leave no space unused.

The ballets scored by Tchaikovsky get mixed treatment at the Garnier. In 2016, director Dmitry Tcherniakov reunited “The Nutcracker” with its original double-bill partner, the opera “Iolanta,” for an evening with a plot that runs through both works, set amid 20th-century Soviet life. At first glance, the Nureyev staging of “Swan Lake,” which premiered in 1984, looks far more traditional, with hallmarks of 19th-century classicism like white tutus and feathered headpieces. But Nureyev added a dark, distinctly modern Freudian dimension to one of ballet’s most famous tragedies.

For the Paris Opera’s 350th anniversary this year — and the 30th anniversary of its modern house on Place de la Bastille — the company commissioned a series of installations, “Saturnales,” by French artist Claude Lévêque. One of them, created with the Paris Opera’s workshop, is a pair of gilded tires that blend seamlessly with, and even add rhythm to, the Garnier’s Grand Staircase.

The most breathtaking subway exit in the world may be the one at Place de l’Opéra in Paris. Its final steps lead to a postcard-ready view of the sensational Palais Garnier, the love-it-or-hate-it theater with a baroque, Renaissance and all-around garish pastiche that overwhelms and enchants at every turn.

Behind the Curtain at the Paris Opera

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.”

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.

Joshua Barone

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