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Review: ‘The Comet/Poppea’ Merges Opera’s Past and Present
A Monteverdi masterpiece and a new work by George Lewis are played simultaneously in an American Modern Opera Company production at Lincoln Center.When you enter the David H. Koch Theater for “The Comet/Poppea,” you are directed not into the auditorium but through some passageways and onto the stage. It’s a rare perspective to be facing a hall full of empty seats, with the delightful, rebellious undercurrent of being where you’re not supposed to be.Being where you’re not supposed to be is one of the few threads tying together the two operas that are played more or less simultaneously over the following 90 minutes. Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” (1643) charts the improbable climb of Nero’s mistress to the throne of the Roman Empire. George Lewis’s “The Comet” (2024), set about a century ago, imagines a Black man who finds himself in a once segregated, now abandoned space after an apocalyptic event.The idea of intermingling these very different works came from the director Yuval Sharon, who is always cooking up half-mad ideas like this, and the American Modern Opera Company, or AMOC, a collective exploring its capacious vision of the art form over the next month during a residency at Lincoln Center.The audience for “The Comet/Poppea,” which opened on Wednesday and runs through Saturday, sits in two sections facing each other across the stage. Between them is a large circular platform that has been divided in two. One side is the realistic, amber-lit restaurant of “The Comet”; the other, where “Poppea” plays, is a heavenly vision of a pristinely white Roman bath, the walls encrusted with white plaster flowers.This turntable is constantly rotating, in an effort to convey a sense of “a visual and aural spiral,” as Sharon writes in a program note. But while “The Comet/Poppea” tries to conjure a cyclone, whipping together past and present, Black and white, high class and low, naturalism and stylization, it ends up feeling more like a trudge.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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In ‘Lash,’ Rebecca Saunders’s First Opera, Sex Flirts With Death
Rebecca Saunders has collaborated with the artist Ed Atkins to create “Lash,” a work that hovers around themes of illness and intimacy.Toward the end of “Lash,” a new opera by Rebecca Saunders, a vocal quartet of invites the listener to “come to bed and die.”Saunders, 57, is a masterly composer whose recent music is becoming more passionate, expressive and lyrical than ever. An artist whose works are regularly performed throughout Europe, she has won many prizes, including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at last year’s Venice Music Biennale. Her subtle music has an unmistakable momentum.The text of the opera is by Ed Atkins, an artist and writer who often uses hyper-realistic C.G.I. video to unsettling effect. A critically acclaimed, career-spanning exhibition of his work is currently on show at Tate Britain in London, and his “Old Food,” which featured sandwiches filled with uncannily modified bodies, was shown at the 2019 Venice Art Biennale. Like his video work, Atkins’s prose is obsessed with the strangeness of sex and death.On Friday, “Lash” will premiere at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. It is Saunders’s first opera and Atkins’s first libretto. Though Saunders wrote a piece based on words by Atkins, “Us Dead Talk Love,” in 2021, “Lash” is the first time the artists have shaped a piece together from the beginning.That relationship allowed Saunders to finally take on an opera. “I didn’t want to give a piece to somebody and just let go,” Saunders said. “I wanted to find the author and the directors and the house who would enable us to work on a collaborative project.”“Lash” features four female performers — the singers Noa Frenkel, Sarah Maria Sun and Anna Prohaska, and the actor Katja Kolm — who represent separate strands of a single consciousness.Marcus LieberenzWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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Dan Storper, Founder of Putumayo World Music Label, Dies at 74
His record label, Putumayo, gathered sounds from around the globe and pushed them into the mainstream, selling 35 million compilation CDs worldwide.Dan Storper, a retailer who founded the Putumayo World Music record label, which gathered sounds from every corner of the globe, helping to propel the world music boom of the 1990s and beyond with compilation CDs that sold in the millions, died on May 22 at his home in New Orleans. He was 74.The cause was pancreatic cancer, his son, William, said.Mr. Storper’s label began as an offshoot of Putumayo, a now-closed retail chain that he started in New York in 1975, selling handicrafts and clothing from around the world. He founded the label with a friend, Michael Kraus, in 1993, and it became a showcase for genres that had received little mainstream recognition, especially in the United States, such as zouk, from Guadeloupe in the Caribbean; soukous, from Congo; and son cubano, from Cuba.With distinctive folk-art album covers by the British artist Nicola Heindl, the label developed a strong brand identity, luring neophyte buyers who broadly understood what they were getting with a Putumayo release, even if they knew nothing about the music itself.“The whole concept was to bring the music to a community of people that weren’t specifically world music freaks, but were interested in music and culture and travel,” Jacob Edgar, Putumayo’s longtime ethnomusicologist, said in an interview. “It was really almost more of a lifestyle brand at its height, and that was really revolutionary at the time.”Unlike traditional labels, Putumayo largely focused not on individual artists or acts, but on collections of multiple artists, often organized around a single region, country or theme.Putumaya World MusicOthers came to agree. “Before Putumayo came along, world music was dry field recordings,” Chris Fleming, of the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, said in an interview with The New York Times in 2003. “Putumayo single-handedly revolutionized the whole genre.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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5 Highlights From the Pianist Alfred Brendel’s Sprawling Career
Brendel, who died on Tuesday at 94, concentrated on a small number of canonical composers, mainly Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert.The classical music industry valorizes sweeping range, favoring artists whose programs cross centuries. But the magisterial pianist Alfred Brendel, who died on Tuesday at 94, was of the old school, focusing his long career on a small number of canonical composers from the same era: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert.He nurtured their works with almost spiritual diligence, performing and reperforming, recording and rerecording. Scholarly and eccentric, acute in essays as well as in concert, Brendel rose from obscurity in Austria to become a best-selling, hall-filling star. His extended period under the radar perhaps contributed to his confidence in his idiosyncrasies: both his rumpled onstage manner and his fearless deployment of a sound that could be cool, even hard.That sound was part of Brendel’s resolutely lucid approach to music. Avoiding the impression of milking scores for excess emotion, he gained a reputation for intellectual, analytical performances. Some found his playing a little dry, but others heard a kind of transcendently austere authority.Here are a few highlights from his enormous discography. Click on the links to listen on YouTube.Haydn, Sonata in E minorBrendel championed Haydn’s and Schubert’s sonatas at a time when not everyone placed those pieces at the center of the pantheon. You can hear some of his flintiness of tone in this Haydn Presto, the feeling that he’s poking at the notes. But the livelier passages alternate with slightly, alluringly softened ones, for an effect of unexpected complexity in fairly straightforward music. His fast playing never seems dashed off; he is always palpably thinking. And his diamond-sharp pointedness in the opening of the sonata’s Adagio second movement eventually travels toward mysterious tenderness.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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The Question for the Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Jurors: What Qualifies as Coercion?
When the jurors deliberate Sean Combs’s fate in the coming weeks, they will confront a vast trove of evidence from two women who say his treatment of them for years swung between tender affection and sexual subjugation.At the core of the panel’s review will be the question of whether the women — both put forward by prosecutors as sex-trafficking victims — were willing participants in sex marathons with male escorts that lie at the center of the federal case against Mr. Combs.The women have testified for days that while they were in romantic relationships with Mr. Combs, they complied with his requests for voyeuristic, drug-fueled sex nights because they feared the retaliation of a man who wielded immense power over them.Casandra Ventura said she was repeatedly beaten and feared he would make sex tapes of her public as he had threatened. “Jane,” who testified under a pseudonym, said she was repeatedly pressured to have sex with hired men — once after vomiting, another time on her birthday. She said she worried that, given his pattern of behavior, she would seriously displease him if she stopped, leading him to stop paying the $10,000-a-month rent on the home where she lives with her child.“It was many, many blurred lines of love and affection mixed with emotional pressure to perform these things that my lover really desired,” Jane said of her relationship on the stand last week, “and so I wanted to fulfill my duties as a good girlfriend.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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Bruce Springsteen on ‘Tracks II,’ His Box of Seven ‘Lost Albums’
“The past always weighs heavy on me,” Bruce Springsteen said on an April afternoon, sitting in the anteroom attached to Thrill Hill, his home studio in New Jersey, where he can make music at any time. “Our pasts have a lot to do with shaping who we are now and the things we’re pursuing. So that is a theme that constantly recurs to me, and I’m always rewriting it, trying to get it right.”Next Friday, Springsteen will unveil a huge, almost entirely unknown trove of songs from his past on “Tracks II: The Lost Albums.” They reveal musical paths — mostly pensive, occasionally rowdy — that he briefly explored but chose to set aside. Unlike his 1998 collection “Tracks,” a set of demos, alternate versions and unreleased songs dating back to the 1970s, “Tracks II,” with 83 songs, 74 of them previously unreleased in any form, is organized as seven distinct albums.Springsteen grew up in the era of vinyl LPs, not playlists that can be shuffled. For him an album is “a cohesive group of songs, basically, that end up being greater than the sum of their parts,” he said. “They resonate off of one another, creating altered meanings and meanings in reflection with the other songs.”A record, he added, “is exactly what it says it is. It is a record of who you are and where you were at that moment in your life. These were actual albums that were of a piece, of a moment, of a genre — that fell together, often while working on other albums.”As he’s been preparing this extensive look back, the 75-year-old musician, well aware of his longtime role as a symbol of America, has also been confronting the political present.The seven unreleased LPs of “Tracks II: The Lost Albums” sat in Springsteen’s vault until now because he sensed the timing was not right.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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The Best Classical Music of 2025, So Far
Our critics picked nine performances that included star turns, new opera productions and the unveiling of a concert hall at the Frick Collection.‘Salome’Those looking for the full, lurid grandeur of Strauss’s “Salome” could find it this spring in a new production at the Metropolitan Opera. But in February, the scrappy company Heartbeat Opera pre-empted the Met with a thrillingly pared-down version, putting the audience just feet from the action and reducing a huge orchestra to two percussionists and an octet of clarinetists who played a total of 28 instruments, including a handful of saxophones. Presented in the intimate surroundings of the Space at Irondale in Brooklyn, with the performers exposed between two blocks of seating, the queasy-making story unfolded with raw clarity. ZACHARY WOOLFERead our review of Heartbeat Opera’s “Salome.”Takacs QuartetAmong the glories of the renovated Frick Collection, which reopened in April, is a new space for chamber performance, replacing the museum’s much-venerated music room. The roughly 220-seat, curved Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, subterranean but airy, with crackling acoustics, was put through its paces in a burst of six excellent concerts, featuring a variety of ensemble sizes, instruments and repertory, from Tudor to today. Most indelible was the veteran Takacs Quartet, coruscating in works by Beethoven and Janacek. And, in Brahms’s Piano Quintet, the group’s electric music-making was abetted by Jeremy Denk on a late-19th-century Steinway. WOOLFERead our overview of concerts at the Frick’s new concert hall.Yunchan LimYunchan Lim performing Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations” at Carnegie Hall.Chris LeeWhen Yunchan Lim said, right after winning the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2022 with a barnburner Rachmaninoff concerto, that he wanted to play Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, the reaction was largely amused disbelief. Not every teenage virtuoso turns so quickly to performing Bach’s 75-minute labyrinth, which requires preternatural reserve and concentration more than technical fireworks. But in April at Carnegie Hall, Lim, now 21, showed that his true gift is for restrained poetry, as he rose from studious, polite opening minutes to eventually offer a “Goldbergs” of heightened, nearly Romantic intensity and contrasts. It was an exhilarating journey. WOOLFERead our review of Lim’s “Goldbergs.”Sondra RadvanovskyWhat makes a great Tosca? To get a sense, watch the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, who returned to the Metropolitan Opera in January with what amounted to a master class. She embodies Puccini’s breakneck tragedy at its finest, with a fearlessness that is both musical and dramatic: an openness to vulnerability, even fragility, that can inspire sympathy but, with a formidably strong core, whip into the fury of fight-or-flight desperation. I won’t soon forget the penetrating softness of her “Vissi d’arte” or the chilling sotto voce with which, standing above Scarpia’s corpse, she growled, “And before him all of Rome trembled.” JOSHUA BARONERead our review of Radvanovsky in “Tosca.”‘Akhnaten’Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” has been performed on major opera stages in the past decade with something of a monopoly: the same production, by Phelim McDermott, starring the same countertenor, Anthony Roth Costanzo. But at the Komische Oper in Berlin this spring, the director Barrie Kosky unveiled a refreshingly different vision for the work: pure abstraction and a minimalism that, in climaxes of opulence, mirrors the deceptive richness of Glass’s score. The company’s chorus, in near-constant movement, was heroic, and John Holliday’s sound as Akhnaten was gorgeously expressive and, in an ideal reflection of the role, as human as it was heavenly. BARONEWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
