Zachary Woolfe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m not going to be here,” he said.

This article originally appeared in

Philip Glass Is Too Busy to Care About Legacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LONDON — Julia Bullock had a cold.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Festival Brings the Musical World Back to School

(Music Review)

LONDON — "I like it very much,” Verdi wrote of “La Forza del Destino” a few months before his opera was to open. “I don’t know if the public will feel the same, but it is certainly something quite out of the ordinary.”

The public, it turns out, often hasn’t felt the same. Even today, “Forza” struggles for affection more than practically any of Verdi’s mature works. It’s unwieldy and weird, with creaky plot twists and jarring shifts of mood.

Yet when it is taken seriously, staged intelligently, cast carefully, and conducted with energy and polish, it can indeed be something quite out of the ordinary. And at the Royal Opera here, in a production that opened Thursday, it is fully extraordinary.

The central draw is the starry, comet-rare pairing of the soprano Anna Netrebko, 47, and the tenor Jonas Kaufmann, 49, the major singers of their generation. They have come together in a staged opera only once before: “La Traviata” here in London, 11 years ago.

Since then, both have dived into darker, heavier roles, occasionally overlapping in repertoire but never on the same stage. Until now. And it feels like the meeting of two veterans at the top of their game, their chemistry comfortable and their combined effect galvanizing.

Netrebko, in particular, gives one of the performances of her career. Singing Leonora for the first time, her voice is startlingly voluptuous and generous in the middle and lower registers. It’s down there where this pitifully persecuted character — violently separated from her lover, who in turn has aroused the eternal ire of her brother by accidentally killing their father — really lives.

Her Leonora sounds death-hounded from the start, while also vibrating with the immense fervor — from love, from faith — that drives her forward. Netrebko sings with both relish and precision, having clearly internalized the bel canto lessons of earlier Verdi — like the other Leonora, in “Il Trovatore” — but now with an earthier flavor.

Compared with her other recent parts, it is a more spontaneous creation than Netrebko’s serene Aida or her stilted Tosca, with the grandeur and sorrow of her Adriana Lecouvreur and a febrility that recalls her Lady Macbeth.

Netrebko’s stage presence has grown more confident in recent years, and, paradoxically, more modest: She’s less busy in her acting, and more meaningful. The singer who might have once boiled over in exaggerated frenzy in “Pace, pace, mio dio” is now as focused in that climactic aria as the slow burn of a candle’s wick.

In her duets with Kaufmann, his voice’s duskiness unsettles into stormy passion. His sound shadowy and haunted, with tears at its core, he is adept at playing outsiders like Don Alvaro, but occasionally he can seem muted on stage, merely grumpy. While the exciting bit of strain and hint of wear in his tone can conjure thoughts of Mario del Monaco, Kaufmann doesn’t go for del Monaco-type Italianate recklessness; sometimes he seems too obviously to be pacing himself.

But he gets Alvaro’s wounded dignity and wariness, and he feeds off other singers, whether Netrebko or the robust baritone Ludovic Tézier. As Leonora’s brother, Tézier shows both Don Carlo’s implacability and the utter exhaustion of a life spent in single-minded pursuit of vengeance. He sings “Urna fatale” with the sustained patience and intensity that define the character.

Antonio Pappano, the Royal Opera’s music director, isn’t one to force vigor out of extremes of fast and slow, loud and soft. Nothing in the score rushes, and nothing lags: You’re simply aware of the action moving forward at a pace that feels natural — propelled but never harassed.

There are details that shine: I’m thinking, for one, of the shivery frost of strings as Padre Guardiano leads Leonora to the cross in the second act. But listening to Pappano and his committed orchestra is less about piecing together the moments than appreciating the flow. And to have that effect of a unified vision in “Forza,” notorious for its disjointedness, is an achievement, indeed.

The company could have sold out this run with its luxurious stars alone, but it recognized that this work, as much as any in opera, needs to be solid throughout its cast. Ferruccio Furlanetto is a booming, sensitive Padre Guardiano, a moral anchor in a world of restlessness and rootlessness. Alessandro Corbelli is a piquant Fra Melitone, and smaller parts are gifts from two still-vital old hands, Robert Lloyd and Roberta Alexander.

Veronica Simeoni is an agile voice and presence as Preziosilla, the eerie energizing spirit of the opera’s battle encampment scenes. Christof Loy, the director of this more or less modern-dress production, which first played in 2017 in Amsterdam, renders her a kind of demon in a society driven half-mad by war.

The comic and tragic are in this staging cut from the same abrasive cloth, with crowd scenes that quickly turn threatening and characters who lurk moodily on the edges. Carnival-like sequences take on genuine mania and menace.

Loy’s work here is sensible and intelligent; he treats “Forza” not as caricature but as fodder for clear, specific drama. He appreciates opera’s extroversion, its heightening of reality, but never abandons subtlety. It’s an ultimately straightforward approach that gives the work’s delirious strangeness its due while insisting “Forza” can be appreciated earnestly.

The production is not exactly staged on a single set, but there is nevertheless the sense, as there should be, that these characters have never managed really to escape the room in which their troubles began. The killing of Leonora and Carlo’s father also periodically returns as fragments of a black-and-white film projected on the wall, its style reminiscent of Italian neorealist cinema.

That genre’s vividness, honesty and compassion also come to life in Netrebko’s crushing yet rapturous performance.

Anna Netrebko and Jonas Kaufmann sing together on Sunday and again on April 2 and April 5; with cast changes, performances continue through April 22 at the Royal Opera House, London; roh.org.uk.

The performance on April 2 will be broadcast live in movie theaters around the world.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/arts/music/review-netrebko-kaufmann-forza-verdi-london-opera.html" id="19c09d6b-346f-3138-a739-6eb1499eb285">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Pick)

Review: Netrebko and Kaufmann Is as Good as Opera Gets

NEW YORK — For those who heard mezzo-soprano Anita Rachvelishvili’s volcanic, turned-up-to-11 Princesse de Bouillon in “Adriana Lecouvreur” at the Metropolitan Opera a couple of months ago, the start of her Dalila may come as a bit of a shock.

In Saint-Saëns’ “Samson et Dalila,” which returned to the Met on Wednesday for five performances after opening the season with a different cast in September, Rachvelishvili begins with a veritable whisper.

Her voice a sheet of gauze, individual notes fine and faint as threads, she sometimes seems to be barely singing at all in the aria “Printemps qui commence.” Her seduction — at first, that is — is about making us, like Samson, lean in closer, rather than roaring out a stereotypical smolder. She brings down the first act curtain with coy quiet.

But her commanding first notes just after intermission show that that pale, girlish priestess was just a ruse. Rachvelishvili’s voice expands as her Dalila does: to a full-throated, lava-blooded lover unsure of whether she believes her own lies in the second act, then to an agonized, regretful woman in the third.

Elina Garanca, who played the role on opening night, was cool and immaculately elegant. Rachvelishvili is earthier, in voice and presence, and more exhilarating. Her Dalila is an unsettled, unsettling creation, changeable and realistically varied — a character closer to Carmen than I’d previously thought, voiced with ominous languor and sudden fearlessness.

She had the unusual distinction of ensnaring two tenors Wednesday. Aleksandrs Antonenko began the performance as Samson, but labored and coughed his way through the first act. Before the second, an announcement was made that he was struggling with a cold and would be replaced by Gregory Kunde.

Kunde is hardly an unknown. Singing now for 40 years, he is a noted leading man in Europe, in heroic roles like Radamès (“Aida”) and Calaf (“Turandot”). Once a bel canto specialist, he’s the rare tenor with both Rossini’s and Verdi’s very different versions of “Otello” in his repertory.

But at 65 — that’s no typo — he hadn’t sung at the Met since 2007, and rarely before that. There’s always reason to fear a rushed return to its daunting stage, but Kunde had a beautiful success as Samson, singing with clear, strong, focused tone and acting with moving reserve.

In cleaner, more robust voice than many tenors a generation younger (even on their healthy days), he rose by the end to genuine nobility, passionate without strain. His love scene with Rachvelishvili was quietly combustible, an achievement considering they had no opportunity to rehearse together. (The Met said Thursday that Kunde would take over Antonenko’s remaining three performances, too; as scheduled, Kristian Benedikt will sing Samson on March 28.)

For low voices, this revival benefits from playing alongside the rollout of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Met. Tomasz Konieczny (an acclaimed Alberich) and Günther Groissböck (Fasolt and Hunding) moonlight memorably with small yet meaty parts in “Samson,” Konieczny as Abimélech and Groissböck as the Old Hebrew. Along with conductor Mark Elder, Laurent Naouri is the holdover from opening night, and he still sings the High Priest with restrained relish.

Darko Tresnjak’s production has its garish charms; I like gold-tasseled costumes and shiny crowns as much as the next guy, and the massive god statue of the finale is impressive. But the staging feels static and antsy, rather than majestic or truly energetic. For all the nearly-nude gyrations of this Bacchanale, its intensity doesn’t build to boiling.

And if you’re going to go the old-Hollywood-spectacle route, as Tresnjak does, you can’t get away with the pitiful anticlimax of his finale, which dispatches the Temple of Dagon with a little bright light and smoke. After lurid lighting and miles of shiny fabric, I want to see a temple fall down!

Through March 28 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; 212-362-6000, metopera.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/arts/music/review-samson-dalila-met-opera-rachvelishvili.html" id="56cde14c-dc26-3d2f-a849-5f52625a06de">The New York Times</a>.

Review: A Surprise Tenor Jolts the Met Opera's 'Samson'

NEW YORK — “O terra, addio,” the doomed lovers sing at the end of Verdi’s “Aida,” bidding the earth adieu. Now, after 31 years and 251 performances, the time has come for the Metropolitan Opera’s sprawling, sturdy, utterly traditional, utterly delightful “Aida” production to join them in farewell.

The well-worn, well-loved show will play just twice more, on March 4 and 7 (numbers 252 and 253). Then its weathered hieroglyphics, its applause-garnering live horses, its looming walls of craggy stone-esque plaster and its gold-sprayed props will all be sealed in storage, as securely as Aida and Radamès in their tomb at the opera’s end.

Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, confirmed in an interview that when “Aida” returns, it will be to open the 2020-21 season in a new production directed by Michael Mayer and designed by Christine Jones, the pair that updated the Met’s “Rigoletto” to 1960s Las Vegas. Yannick Nézet-Séguin will conduct a starry cast: Anna Netrebko, Anita Rachvelishvili, Piotr Beczala and Ludovic Tézier.

“It will be as epic and grand as the current production,” Gelb said, “in a completely different way.” (It will also eliminate one of the current staging’s two intermissions.)

Perhaps it’s not fashionable for a critic, especially one with a taste for the progressive in opera, to cop to loving the Met’s “Aida,” which was originally mounted in 1988 in majestic Franco Zeffirelli-ish style by Sonja Frisell, who got the gig after Zeffirelli’s own concept proved impossibly expensive, even for the go-go ‘80s.

I love the shadow-strewn scene on which the curtain rises during the soft final bars of the prelude. I love how Amneris’ attendants hilariously pretend to play the harp in the second act, and how one of them does a wonderfully unnecessary show of presenting perfumes for her to sample. I love how opera can sometimes be about what’s unnecessary, about what’s extravagant, fun, sensorily stimulating.

I love when the stage slowly lowers to reveal the sun-baked Triumphal Scene. I love how the extras circle back into the parade again and again in different costumes, trying to convince us that this really is a cast of thousands. I love the flickering torchlight emanating from the chamber where the priests judge Radamès.

Will the new production be better? Maybe. It will almost certainly be less hulking. But the departing, bulky, stage-filling simulacrum of ancient Egypt deserves an elegy for showing up, season after season, and finding the balance on which 19th-century grand opera relies: between awesome spectacle and intimate drama.

It’s being put to bed honorably, with a cast that sings well and commits itself to the drama. Soprano Sondra Radvanovsky is for once an Aida who seems like the princess she is, proud and forthright. Radvanovsky has calmed a voice that used to have starker edges, though her tone is still chalky.

With his haunting, echoey baritone, Quinn Kelsey is an unusually sinister Amonasro. As Radamès, tenor Jorge de León is blunt but sincere and charming — much like the production. And while commanding bass Soloman Howard is always a pleasure as the King, will the Met ever give him another role?

The best surprise is mezzo-soprano Olesya Petrova, who, after a handful of minor roles with the company, delivers a thrilling Amneris. Her voice has less plummy power than Rachvelishvili’s, but it penetrates, without ever losing its gentleness of texture. And she deploys it with delicacy and feeling through the full range of the character’s moods. Rarely have I seen an Amneris so plausibly lovelorn, so earnestly pained.

When this production had its premiere on Dec. 8, 1988, the Radamès was Plácido Domingo. In a memorable bit of poetic symmetry, he returns for these final performances, this time on the podium, helping the great ocean liner sail one last time.

‘Aida’: March 4 and 7 at the Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center; 212-362-6000, metopera.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/arts/music/review-aida-met-opera-verdi.html" id="d763c4c2-e5bb-3eca-af7d-785297d7c756">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic's Notebook)

After 31 Years, Farewell to the Met Opera's Grand, Gaudy 'Aida'

“Chetham’s is set up for extremely gifted instrumentalists,” Rattle said in an interview. “And they had no idea what to do about a young conductor.”

So Rattle, then the hotshot 30-something leader of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, took Harding under his wing. Harding eventually became an assistant in Birmingham and even lodged with the Rattles, who would feed him ham sandwiches, which were more or less all he ate at the time.

“He doesn’t look very old now, but at age 16 or 17 he really looked 11,” Rattle said, describing Harding’s first time in front of the ensemble, rehearsing Hans Werner Henze’s daunting Seventh Symphony. “I think the orchestra thought I was playing an April Fools’ game on them. And when this 11-year-old look-alike conducted the whole movement flawlessly, including wordlessly correcting some mistakes, the orchestra was completely flabbergasted.”

The decades since have been, in many ways, good to Harding, now 43, who will lead the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam at Carnegie Hall on Thursday and Friday. He is principal conductor of the respected Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and has served stints as principal guest of the London Symphony Orchestra and principal conductor of the Orchestre de Paris, from which he departed last year with a letter of notably graceful candor.

Harding is a regular on the podiums of Europe’s leading orchestras, including in Vienna and Berlin. He took over the Concertgebouw’s American tour after the firing of its chief conductor, Daniele Gatti, amid sexual misconduct accusations; the prestigious assignment placed him in the midst of the much-watched competition to replace Gatti.

“It’s a big badge of approval that they’re having him do this tour,” said Alan Gilbert, a friend who, until 2017, led the New York Philharmonic, adding, “He’s a brilliant musician, and really, really knows what he’s doing, in an enormous range of repertoire.”

But America has proved a tougher nut to crack. “I haven’t found in the U.S. — I haven’t found my place, so to speak,” Harding said in a phone interview.

When he was starting his career early in the 2000s, he did a circuit of major ensembles here: Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta. The results were mixed, to say the least. While some concerts were solid, there were frustrations between him and the musicians — mutual incomprehension, some stormy scenes.

“I came and did the rounds when I was a really young conductor,” said Harding. “And my experiences in Europe were quite protected. I knew people quite well. I think I just wasn’t ready for how some of the big U.S. orchestras worked, and how they would relate to me.”

“I look back on some of the great orchestras here,” he added. “For example, Chicago. I can see exactly why that didn’t quite click.”

He described the problem by recalling composer and conductor André Previn, who watched Harding rehearse Strauss at Tanglewood one summer. “I have no idea what you’re doing,” Previn told Harding. “Why are you talking so much?”

Especially when Harding was younger — and looked younger still — this flood of explanation and analysis came across as the cockiness of an immature know-it-all.

“I love to talk,” he said. “I love to share with an orchestra why I want something to be a certain way. Does a conductor play an orchestra like a piano, manipulating without saying a word? For me, I was taught that’s almost disrespectful. So I come and just talk, talk, talk, and that’s just not how it works here.”

Harding, for his part, believes he has matured in recent years. “I think that I’ve been learning — these are things that take a lifetime to learn — how to enjoy what’s different about each situation,” he said. “Instead of ‘I wish this were like this.'”

A few years ago, wanting to work on technique and communication, he hired Mark Stringer, a onetime protégé of Leonard Bernstein, as a coach. And he has been dipping his toe back in the United States, although the jury is still out. He made his debut with the San Francisco Symphony last year in a program of Beethoven and Strauss; it got so-so notices.

“Harding seemed to have something specific and urgent to say about each individual measure,” Joshua Kosman wrote in his review in the San Francisco Chronicle, “which made for a lot of trees and not much forest.”

Harding was supposed to return to San Francisco later this month but canceled on Feb. 8, citing an injury.

He is scheduled to return to the New York Philharmonic next season, for the first time since 2011. Deborah Borda, who presented Harding at the Los Angeles Philharmonic (where he canceled, also citing an injury, in October) and is now president and chief executive in New York, said: “Young conductors, when they make these lightning rounds of the major orchestras — New York, Boston, Chicago, Philly, L.A. — it’s almost unfair, to put that much pressure on them at that time. And sometimes what you need is a little break — not to learn repertoire, but to practice. And then they come back.”

Decades after making him ham sandwiches, Rattle is still in Harding’s corner. “These last five years have been, I think, a complete other thing to Daniel,” he said, adding: “I’ve seen a quantum leap in what he can do. He was always full of music, but he can now really make it work. With any of the greatest orchestras in the world.”

Additional Information:

Thursday and Friday at Carnegie Hall; 212-247-7800, carnegiehall.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/arts/music/daniel-harding-concertgebouw-carnegie-hall.html" id="2c454620-ccf6-3a44-a033-21a208b3aa78">The New York Times</a>.

Can a Star Conductor Finally Make It Work in America?

Thirty years ago, conductor Simon Rattle received a letter. It was from a teacher at Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester, England, telling Rattle about an extraordinarily talented teenage maestro there named Daniel Harding.

The Linda of “Improvement” — which was written in the 1980s and is being given a soulfully austere revival at the Kitchen in Chelsea through Feb. 16 — doesn’t get to vent her feelings quite so extravagantly. For one thing, she’s left by Don, her husband, at a distinctly unoperatic locale: a highway turnoff.

For another, her voice rarely rises much beyond the soft singsong-y speech that’s characteristic of Ashley’s mature works. Her most sweeping solo is a kind of monologue; she mulls in a quiet flood of gently rhythmic talk how she has “driven my husband from me by my complacency and my indifference.”

But even if Linda’s story never overtly expands far beyond the everyday — a coffee, a late-night rendezvous in a deli, a letter from her son she reads aloud — our 90 minutes with her and the people she comes across take on a lulling, mesmerizing grandeur as episodes and years pass.

This is in large part because Gelsey Bell, the production’s Linda, has a silky yet focused voice that securely handles Ashley’s rush of wryly absurdist text. Her big, moist eyes shift from fear and sadness to a kind of consolation, weariness and resignation — from innocence to experience.

This trajectory isn’t merely personal. “For the sake of argument,” the narrator (a recording of Ashley, who died in 2014) tells us near the beginning, “Don is Spain in 1492 and Linda is the Jews.”

The various places and people in their path, moreover, represent figures and themes in the history of the Jewish people in the centuries since the Spanish expulsion. An airline ticket counter representative with a lot of questions is meant to evoke the Inquisition; the big city to which Linda eventually moves is, in the allegory, assimilation.

If this seems like too much and too weird to take in on a first listen, it is. There’s little overt drama: The six performers sit at six small tables on platforms, recite-singing into microphones. (The change of scenes is evocatively captured in the saturated sky of a distant mountain range in the background of David Moodey’s set.) Many listeners will just perceive the alluringly enigmatic stories being told: Taken together, they’re a sun-baked, ominous American gothic that’s like a quieter version of Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon or Nathanael West.

But even an initial brush with “Improvement” is an experience of hypnotic vocal virtuosity — the cast makes its way through an enormous quantity of words with choral synchronicity and stunning clarity — and emotional weight, rueful humor and a pleasant sense of bathing in idiosyncratic charm. Although we come to know Linda only in impressions and episodes, she comes sympathetically to life.

“Improvement” was originally conceived as a recording. Tom Hamilton’s electronic background score — a cool, smoothly droning landscape marked by little pops, bits of flute, faint taps of steel drum and the occasional shimmer — was for a long time inextricable from the vocal tracks. So when the piece was done live, the performers essentially had to duet with their own recorded selves.

For this new staging — developed by Ashley’s widow and longtime collaborator, Mimi Johnson, in conjunction with its cast (Bell, Brian McCorkle, Paul Pinto, Aliza Simons, Dave Ruder and Amirtha Kidambi) — the electronics have been created anew, and the performers freed.

But Ashley always makes you think about being free — “if there is any meaning to that word,” as Linda says. His interpreters work under precise constraints, not least the steady pulse of 72 beats per minute that defined his essential works, including much of the tetralogy “Now Eleanor’s Idea,” of which “Improvement” is the first part.

But within those restrictions, there is a universe of choices as to diction, emphasis, mood and volume to be explored in Ashley’s style, which is controlled yet capacious. There’s ample room for the adjustment and, perhaps, yes, improvement that is Linda’s story, and ours.

NEW YORK — Robert Ashley’s “Improvement (Don Leaves Linda)” isn’t the first opera to have its heroine pathetically forsaken in an American desert. Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut” starts its final act in one, with the title character “alone, lost, abandoned,” as she cries in a majestic outpouring of an aria.

Zachary Woolfe

Articles written by the author

Philip Glass Is Too Busy to Care About Legacy

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

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

A Festival Brings the Musical World Back to School

Review: Netrebko and Kaufmann Is as Good as Opera Gets

Review: A Surprise Tenor Jolts the Met Opera's 'Samson'

After 31 Years, Farewell to the Met Opera's Grand, Gaudy 'Aida'

Can a Star Conductor Finally Make It Work in America?

An American Gothic Opera Speaks Softly and Hypnotically

Can the Diva Who Once Ruled the Met Make a Comeback?

Review: A Double Bill at the Met Opera, Bleakly Gray as Winter

Cataclysmic Suffering Sprawls Through the Prototype Festival

A Young Singer Takes the Opera World by Storm

Details matter in Riccardo Muti's precise 'Aida'

America's most astonishing choir hates sounding pretty

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

Review: After 27 years, Meredith Monk's 'Atlas' returns to earth

4 musicians chart 100 years in the life of a runaway slave

The story behind a slave's tale told with music

How the Shed can live up to its hype: Focus on the artists