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      How Opera Houses Are Putting Puccini Into Contemporary Context

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      Opera houses in London and Boston have taken a critical look at “Madama Butterfly” to correct its clichés, caricatures and anachronisms.LONDON — Draped in a crisp white kimono and a translucent veil, Madama Butterfly kneels beside an American officer as they wed in a religious ceremony. The priest celebrates their nuptials while guests dressed in traditional Japanese robes look on.At first glance, there’s nothing conspicuously different about the Royal Opera House’s revival of its 2002 production of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.” Yet it’s the result of a year of consultations with academics, practitioners and professionals to strip away any hint of cliché or caricature.Concretely, this has meant removing “the extremely white makeup” that the performers previously wore. By the early 20th century, the period in which “Madama Butterfly” is set, “nobody was wearing white makeup on the street,” said Sonoko Kamimura, an expert in Japanese movement and design who was hired by the Royal Opera to update the production.Ms. Kamimura worked to get rid of other anachronistic elements, such as wigs, samurai-style coiffures and costumes.“I really like this opera, because the music is beautiful. But then I would also say it is stereotypical,” she said, adding that the Royal Opera House had found a way around the issue. “Rather than cancel the show,” she said, the house had organized “a dialogue” around it that she was “really glad to be a part of.”Some opera companies have opted to shelve or cancel “Madama Butterfly” because of its increasingly problematic portrayals, particularly to audiences of Asian heritage.Tristram Kenton / ROHSince its world premiere in 1904 at La Scala in Milan, “Madama Butterfly” has been a staple of theaters around the world. First performed at Covent Garden in 1905, it’s the ninth most programmed work at the Royal Opera House, having been performed more than 400 times.Its portrayal of a lovelorn 15-year-old geisha, who is impregnated and abandoned by an American lieutenant, has become increasingly problematic in the 21st century, particularly to audiences of Asian heritage. Institutions such as the Royal Opera House and Boston Lyric Opera are working hard to bring it up-to-date, in every sense of the word.“We’re all very conscious these days that opera and race have had a complicated relationship and history,” said Oliver Mears, the director of opera at the Royal Opera House. “There is always a risk, when a Western opera house is portraying a different culture, that it can make missteps, and that the level of authenticity is not quite as high as it could be.”Mr. Mears said that there was “certainly a huge amount of nervousness on the part of fellow opera companies in mounting this opera at all in the current moment,” and that many were canceling or shelving their “Madama Butterfly” productions “because it feels like it’s too dangerous to go there.”“We think that’s a huge shame, because ‘Madama Butterfly’ is a masterpiece,” he said. “We would much rather be in dialogue with these pieces rather than canceling them.”A similar revision has been taking place across the Atlantic at Boston Lyric Opera. The consultations there, known as the Butterfly Process, will lead to a production of the opera in the fall of 2023 on the Lyric stage.The Lyric was initially set to perform “Madama Butterfly” in the fall of 2020, but the pandemic delayed it for a year. In that time, “there were incidents of heightened racism and violence toward Asian communities across the country,” Bradley Vernatter, acting general and artistic director of the Lyric, said in an email. After conversations with artists and staff members, the production was postponed further, because it was “critical to re-examine the modern context before presenting the work,” Mr. Vernatter said.Licia Albanese made her Metropolitan Opera debut on February 1940 as Madama Butterfly. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, performances of that opera were banned in the U.S. until 1946, when World War II ended.AlamyHe noted that operas weren’t “static museum pieces,” and that shifts in society and politics affected audience reactions to operas. At the Metropolitan Opera in New York, for example, “Madama Butterfly” was performed almost every season between 1907 and 1941. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the work stayed off the Met stage until 1946.Mr. Vernatter explained that Puccini had never set foot in Japan when he saw David Belasco’s one-act play “Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan” and decided to write an operatic version. To research Japanese music, he attended a touring Kabuki show in Milan and asked the wife of the Japanese ambassador to Italy to sing him Japanese folk songs. Because of Puccini’s unfamiliarity with the culture, “the Japanese characters in his opera come off as caricatures,” Mr. Vernatter said.Revising operas to reflect contemporary times can have its own pitfalls. In the fall of 2019, the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto put on an updated performance of another Puccini opera, “Turandot,” about a Chinese princess who murders her suitors.One of the three main characters — whose names in the original libretto are Ping, Pang and Pong — was played by a Taiwanese American tenor whose daughter Katherine Hu later wrote an opinion article in The New York Times. To tone down the caricature, the director renamed the characters Jim, Bob and Bill.“But the characters continued to play into stereotypes of effeminate Asian men as they pranced around onstage, giggling at one another,” Ms. Hu wrote in the article. “Alterations like these have become part of a broader trend as opera clumsily reckons with its racist and sexist past.”“To survive, opera has to confront the depth of its racism and sexism point-blank, treating classic operas as historical artifacts instead of dynamic cultural productions,” she wrote. “Opera directors should approach the production of these classics as museum curators and professors — educating audiences about historical context and making stereotypes visible.”Both the Royal Opera House and Boston Lyric Opera chiefs said that was exactly what they wanted to do.“The goal here is for everyone to participate in an art form that hasn’t traditionally been inclusive, and to strengthen our communities and audiences through the music and stories we present,” Mr. Vernatter said. “I believe we can do it by engaging with and listening to people of many backgrounds and life experiences, and incorporating that into our work.” More

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      Ermonela Jaho, an Albanian Soprano, ‘Can Sing Your Music’

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      The Albanian soprano has won over audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Her latest role is Nedda in Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci” at the Royal Opera.Nedda, the leading female character of Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci,” must die rather than consummate true love. The soprano Ermonela Jaho, who makes her debut in the role at London’s Royal Opera House this month, has discovered that the character is more complex than she first thought.“She is strong enough to fight until death for her freedom,” Ms. Jaho said in a phone interview. “She never loses the light inside of her.”The Albanian soprano, 48, has won over audiences on both sides of the Atlantic with the depth and authenticity of her performances, especially in the realism of “verismo” works by Verdi and Puccini. Her portrayal of the character Violetta in “La Traviata” is a signature role which brought her into the international spotlight after she jumped in on short notice at the Royal Opera House in 2008. (She will return to the Verdi work at the Metropolitan Opera in January). The London stage also brought her role debut as Suor Angelica in Puccini’s “Il Trittico,” which she will sing at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu in December.Ms. Jaho was chosen to appear in the documentary “Fuoco Sacro,” now playing on the French-German television station Arte. Next April, she will return to the Royal Opera to sing the role of Liù in Puccini’s “Turandot,” which she recorded for the Warner Classics label under the baton of Antonio Pappano.And at the Royal Opera from Tuesday through July 20, audiences will have the chance to experience her in Damiano Michieletto’s double bill of “Pagliacci” and Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana,” first seen in 2015.Mr. Pappano, the Royal Opera’s longtime music director, pointed to a winning combination of empathy and strength in Ms. Jaho’s performances. “She is sensitive to every curve of every phrase and every situation the character finds herself in — also in heartbreaking situations,” he said in a phone interview. “But she’s also got this steely resolve, which she has to have in ‘Suor Angelica’ and, in particular, ‘Madame Butterfly.’”Ms. Jaho, who grew up in Albania, trained at academies in Mantua and Rome. Above, she performs the role of Suor Angelica in Puccini’s “Il Trittico.”Bill Cooper/ROH“She is capable,” he said, “with her voice and with her acting — which is so detailed and so nuanced — to make you cry. She’s very generous when she’s out there. She’s not saving for anything.”In “Pagliacci,” the soprano role demands tremendous flexibility and range. The story focuses on a theater troupe in 19th-century Calabria. The work creates a metadramatic tightrope when Nedda’s husband, Canio, takes vengeance for her infidelity both in a comedy onstage and with a villager.“This is absolutely essential verismo,” said the conductor. “Sometimes the part is almost spoken, and then it becomes thrusting and dramatic.”Ms. Jaho sees a challenge in conveying her character’s complexity within the two-act drama. “You have to play all these cards, all these emotions, and be read from the public in little time,” she said.The soprano began assimilating Italian culture at 17, when she was chosen by the soprano Katia Ricciarelli to study at her academy in Mantua, Italy. Ms. Jaho went on to enroll at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, where she studied with Valerio Paperi. She was also coached on the side by the bass Paolo Montarsolo.“I wanted to prove to everyone that even if I come from Albania, I can speak your language, I can sing your music,” said Ms. Jaho, who now lives in New York.Having grown up in a country that was behind the Iron Curtain, the soprano struggled in Italy with both culture shock and the distance from her family. She also had to work odd jobs, babysitting and taking care of older people. “But always I had in mind that if the dream is big, maybe the sacrifices and difficulties will be big as well,” she said.She inherited a gift for mindfulness from her father, who was a military officer and professor of philosophy: “Sometimes you feel hopeless, because life is not always beautiful. He told me that nothing is impossible. And you have to work hard.”Ms. Jaho considers it destiny that she went on to star in “La Traviata” after falling in love with that opera in her hometown of Tirana, the Albanian capital, at 14. It was her first experience with live opera, and she swore to her older brother that she would sing the character before she died.To date, she has sung the role of Violetta 301 times. She said that the role had become “richer with life experience” and that it remained “like a dream for my voice.”“Somehow, it pushes me to stay in shape,” she said.Last fall, she added the title character of Cilea’s “Adriana Lecouvreur” to her repertoire, with performances at the Vienna State Opera. She also sings French-language works such as Massenet’s “Thaïs.” But she does not aim to play roles for which she does not have a natural affinity.“It’s not because I don’t like challenges,” she said. “But sometimes you need to know which kind of battles you want to win.”Since 2012, she has given master classes to students both in her home country of Albania and in cities including London, Paris and Sydney, Australia. “The young generation today wants to take it so easy,” she observed. “They think it’s enough to put your face on social media — which we need as well — but only with a certain balance.”She emphasized that the Covid era had underscored the vulnerability of the profession: “We discovered that we are nothing — the opera houses were closed. It really has to be love from your guts.”Ms. Jaho expresses a childlike delight with Mr. Michieletto’s staging, which for her captures “all the details and flavors” of southern Italy. “You forget that you are the artist who’s singing the character,” she said. “You become the character because everything around you helps with that.”The director also weaves together the two short operas by having characters from “Pagliacci” appear onstage during “Cavalleria Rusticana” and vice versa. “Everything makes sense,” she said. “Their hate, their love. You don’t understand the difference in the end, even though they are different composers.”And much as Leoncavallo’s opera reveals the fluid boundaries between art and life, Ms. Jaho says she believes that a singer must be “real onstage” in order to serve the music. “If you don’t cry, love and smile as yourself,” she said, “you cannot give to the public.” More

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      Richard Taruskin, Vigorously Polemical Musicologist, Dies at 77

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      Author, critic, teacher and public intellectual, he was an unabashed flamethrower who challenged conventional thinking about classical music.Richard Taruskin, a commanding musicologist and public intellectual whose polemical scholarship and criticism upended conventional classical music history, died early Friday in Oakland, Calif. He was 77.His death, at a hospital, was caused by esophageal cancer, his wife, Cathy Roebuck Taruskin, said.An emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a specialist in Russian music, Mr. Taruskin was the author of a number of groundbreaking musicological studies, including the sweeping six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. He was also a contributor to The New York Times, where his trenchant, witty, and erudite writings represented a bygone era in which clashes over the meaning of classical music held mainstream import.“He was the most important living writer on classical music, either in academia or in journalism,” said Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, in a recent interview. “He knew everything, his ideas were potent, and he wrote with dashing style.”At a time when the classical canon was considered sacrosanct, Mr. Taruskin advanced the philosophy that it was a product of political forces. His bête noire was the widespread notion that Beethoven symphonies and Bach cantatas could be divorced from their historical contexts. He savagely critiqued this idea of “music itself,” which, he wrote, represented “a decontaminated space within which music can be composed, performed and listened to in a cultural and historical vacuum, that is, in perfect sterility.”Mr. Taruskin was the author of groundbreaking musicological studies, including the sweeping six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University PressHis words were anything but sterile: Mr. Taruskin courted controversy in nearly everything he wrote. In the late 1980s, he helped ignite the so-called “Shostakovich Wars” by critiquing the veracity of “Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov” (1979), which portrayed the composer as a secret dissident. (Mr. Volkov is a journalist, historian and musicologist.) Drawing on a careful debunking by the scholar Laurel Fay, Mr. Taruskin called the book’s positive reception “the greatest critical scandal I have ever witnessed.”In a contentious 2001 Times essay, Mr. Taruskin defended the Boston Symphony’s cancellation of a performance of excerpts from John Adams’s “The Death of Klinghoffer” after Sept. 11 that year, arguing that the opera romanticized terrorism and included antisemitic caricatures. Even in advocating for what some criticized as censorship, he underscored a central component of his worldview: that music was not neutral, and that the concert hall could not be separated from society.“Art is not blameless,” he wrote. “Art can inflict harm.” (His writings, too, could inflict harm; Adams retorted that the column was “an ugly personal attack, and an appeal to the worst kind of neoconservatism.”)Mr. Taruskin’s most consequential flamethrowing was his campaign against the movement for “historically authentic” performances of early music. In a series of essays anthologized in his 1995 book “Text and Act,” he argued that the use of period instruments and techniques was an outgrowth of contemporary tastes. He didn’t want conductors like Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Roger Norrington to stop performing; he just wanted them to drop the pretense of “authenticity.” And many did.“Being the true voice of one’s time is (as Shaw might have said) roughly 40,000 times as vital and important as being the assumed voice of history,” he wrote in The Times in 1990. “To be the expressive medium of one’s own age is — obviously, no? — a far worthier aim than historical verisimilitude. What is verisimilitude, after all, but correctness? And correctness is the paltriest of virtues. It is something to demand of students, not artists.”Mr. Taruskin had a no-holds-barred approach to intellectual combat, once comparing a fellow scholar’s advocacy for a Renaissance philosopher to Henry Kissinger’s defense of repression at Tiananmen Square. He faced accusations of constructing simplistic straw men, and lacking empathy for his historical subjects. Following a 1991 broadside by Mr. Taruskin contending that Sergei Prokofiev had composed Stalinist propaganda, one biographer complained of his “sneering antipathy.” Mr. Taruskin’s response? “I am sorry I did not flatter Prokofiev enough to please his admirers on his birthday, but he is dead. My concern is with the living.”But his feuds were often productive: They changed the conversation in the academy and the concert hall alike. Such hefty arguments, Mr. Taruskin believed, might help rescue classical music from its increasingly marginal status in American society.“I have always considered it important for musicologists to put their expertise at the service of ‘average consumers’ and alert them to the possibility that they are being hoodwinked, not only by commercial interests but by complaisant academics, biased critics, and pretentious performers,” he wrote in 1994.Mr. Ross said: “Whether you judged him right or wrong, he made you feel that the art form truly mattered on the wider cultural stage.” Mr. Taruskin’s polemics, he added, “ultimately served a constructive goal of taking classical music out of fantasyland and into the real world.”Richard Filler Taruskin was born on April 2, 1945, in New York City, in Queens, to Benjamin and Beatrice (Filler) Taruskin. The household of his youth was liberal, Jewish, feistily intellectual and musical: His father was a lawyer and amateur violinist, and his mother was a former piano teacher. He took up the cello at age 11 and, while attending the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & the Arts), voraciously consumed books on music history at the New York Public Library.At Columbia University, Mr. Taruskin studied music along with Russian, partly to reconnect with a branch of relatives in Moscow. He stayed for his Ph.D., with the music historian Paul Henry Lang as his mentor, as he researched early music and 19th-century Russian opera. He also began playing the viola da gamba in the New York freelance scene and, while subsequently teaching at Columbia, led the choral group Cappella Nova, which gave acclaimed performances of Renaissance repertoire. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1986.Mr. Taruskin conducting the choral group Cappella Nova in 1983. The group, which he led, was acclaimed for its performances of Renaissance repertoire.Keith Meyers/The New York TimesIn the 1970s, musicology was still largely focused on reviving obscure motets and analyzing Central European masterworks. Mr. Taruskin participated in the “New Musicology” movement, a generation of scholars that shook up the discipline by drawing on postmodern approaches, feminist and queer theory, and cultural studies.“Richard had a very keen sense of the political stakes of music history,” said the scholar Susan McClary, a pioneer of New Musicology, in an interview. “He also was an extraordinary musician. And so he was not going to sacrifice the music itself for context; these always went together for him.”While researching Russian composers for his doctorate — at a time when scholars largely dismissed them as peripheral figures — Mr. Taruskin realized how 19th-century politics had insidiously shaped the classical canon. It was no coincidence, he forcefully argued, that Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven were so well-regarded: Their popularity and acclaim represented the aftereffects of a long-unacknowledged, and deeply rooted, German nationalist ideology. His monographs on Russian opera and Musorgsky redefined the study of music in Eastern Europe, chipping away at longstanding myths.In 1984, Mr. Taruskin began writing for the short-lived Opus Magazine at the invitation of its editor, James R. Oestreich. After Mr. Oestreich moved to The New York Times, Mr. Taruskin contributed long-form essays to the paper’s Arts & Leisure section that poked at composers who were often treated as demigods; the section’s mailbag soon filled with irate readers. (He had no qualms about sending letters of his own, mailing curt postcards to prominent music critics to lambast their errors or logical fallacies.) His writings for The Times and The New Republic were later collected in the books “On Russian Music” and “The Danger of Music.”Mr. Taruskin attending an international conference in his honor at Princeton University in 2012. He was a larger-than-life figure at conferences of the American Musicological Society, and his presentations were blockbuster events. Jessica Kourkounis for The New York TimesTeaching a Stravinsky seminar at Columbia inspired the two-volume “Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions,” a seminal 1996 study that upended the cosmopolitan image that the composer and his acolytes had long cultivated. Mr. Taruskin drew attention to traditional Slavic melodies that Stravinsky had embedded within “The Rite of Spring,” and how the composer himself had deliberately obscured the folk roots of his revolutionary ballet.The Oxford History of Western Music, published in 2005, grew out of Mr. Taruskin’s undergraduate lectures at Berkeley and his dissatisfaction with textbooks that presented a parade of unassailable masterpieces. In more than 4,000 pages, he wove intricate analyses alongside rich contextualization, revealing musical history as a fraught terrain of argumentation, politics, and power.Critiques of the “Ox” abounded — that it betrayed its author’s personal grudges, that it unfairly treated modernists like Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez. But it remains a central, seemingly unsurpassable text. “This is the last time anyone’s going to tell this story,” Dr. McClary said. “And it was told in a way that was just as good as it ever possibly could have been.” (Her own criticism of the Ox is perhaps the most enduring: Mr. Taruskin’s survey almost entirely ignores Black musical traditions.)Garbed in a purple blazer, Mr. Taruskin was a larger-than-life figure at conferences of the American Musicological Society, where his presentations were blockbuster events. In recent years he refrained from giving papers in favor of attending talks by his many former pupils.He married Cathy Roebuck, a computer programmer at Berkeley, in 1984 and lived in El Cerrito, Calif. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his son, Paul Roebuck Taruskin; his daughter, Tessa Roebuck Taruskin; his sister, Miriam Lawrence; his brother, Raymond; and two grandchildren. Among Mr. Taruskin’s numerous awards was Japan’s prestigious Kyoto Prize, which he received in 2017. His most recent book was the 2020 compilation “Cursed Questions: On Music and Its Social Practices.” When he died, he was working to complete a book of essays that would serve as an intellectual biography.Despite his highhanded persona, Mr. Taruskin had a soft side known to colleagues and students. For years he sparred with the music theorist Pieter van den Toorn over the meaning of Stravinsky’s music — Mr. Taruskin arguing that it could not be separated from the politics of the 20th century, Mr. van den Toorn seeing such concerns as extrinsic to the scores.Nevertheless, Mr. Taruskin dedicated one of his books to Mr. van den Toorn. The inscription: “Public adversary, private pal.” More

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      Review: ‘The Mutes’ Gives Voice to Musical Outsiders

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      In Paris, a moving and wistful performance installation by Lina Lapelyte gathers untrained singers for reflections on regret and inability.PARIS — The first time I sang, it was by ear. I imagine that’s often the case. Toddlers join their favorite characters in Disney movies or echo their parents with mumbled renditions of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” When children begin to sing in school, they usually learn not from scores, but from lyrics memorized through repetition.Then things change. The melodies become notated. Some people develop into disciplined singers and instrumentalists; others abandon musical study altogether. What of that last category, those for whom singing is simply something to be enjoyed, regardless of whether they can carry a tune in the car or at karaoke?Those types of performances — the ones just for pleasure — are typically treated as unfit for the hallowed spaces of musical expression. But “The Mutes,” Lina Lapelyte’s moving, wistful and immersive installation at Lafayette Anticipations here, elevates that amateur naïveté to high art.“The Mutes,” organized by Elsa Coustou, takes place in an airy environment designed to subvert expectations at every turn, and unfolds on a roughly 50-minute loop for six hours a day, five days a week until July 24. The durational performance setup is reminiscent of “Sun & Sea,” Lapelyte’s much-traveled opera created with her fellow Lithuanian artists Vaiva Grainyte and Rugile Barzdziukaite, which won the top prize at the Venice Biennale in 2019.That work and the team’s “Have a Good Day!” (2013), a kaleidoscopic glimpse into the inner lives of cashiers, were expansive in scope. “Sun & Sea,” one of the most effective and indelible operas of this century, hides a sickening portrait of climate inaction in catchy, sedative melodies sung from an artificial beach — a set that could one day serve as a natural history exhibition of the Anthropocene’s leisure and laziness.Here, Lapelyte is working on her own, and by comparison “The Mutes” is much smaller. Yet the intimate scale is also more relatable, and more heartbreaking. With a libretto assembled from Sean Ashton’s novel “Living in a Land,” it expresses only the things its characters haven’t done. This is music of regret, of inability, music that can underscore the feeling that “we live in time not place.”The small ensemble of performers were auditioned with something like anti-musicality in mind; people who had been told explicitly that they were bad singers were the most ideal candidates. On Wednesday, they delivered the libretto’s English lines with heavy French accents and imprecise intonation. Some were more extroverted than others. One man forgot a line halfway through.Surrounding the performance is an installation of clustered nettles and sculptures that deal in subverted expectations.Marc Domage“I’ve never had mumps,” the first performer, walking through the installation, sings coolly. More never-have-I-evers follow: had a pen pal, learned a language, ate tapas, cried in the cinema, bought and sold at the right time, or at any time. “It is unlikely, is it not, that I shall ever be given the keys to the city,” an ensemble member declares into a microphone. Someone else offers, “It is unlikely, is it not, that I shall ever be invited back to my old school, to show what I have done with my life, what I have made of myself.”All these lines are given simple melodies, the kind you could learn easily by ear. More complicated are choral passages, especially antiphonal ones, a challenge for untrained performers but a compelling study in building harmony. These moments have the appearance of a community choir rehearsal — perhaps the most widespread form that music-making takes, if one that exists outside what is traditionally thought of as mainstream performance.The spirit of that deliberate contradiction — of a formal space given over to seemingly informal performance, and of perceived disorder giving way to balance — pervades the installation. Nettles, medicinally beneficial but disliked as prickly weeds, are clustered throughout an earthy landscape indoors. Slanted stones form a precarious ramp; so do sculptural shoes with uneven soles. But with complementary shapes, they together create a flat surface to stand on with stability.Visitors can explore the environment at will — though they can’t try on the shoes — before any performers enter, and continue to do so as the music unfolds. The singers move as if unaware of the audience members, who can follow any and all of them, and are responsible for staying out of the way.That opening line, about mumps, is joined by mentions of other diseases: measles, chickenpox, syphilis. And beneath vocal writing is a Minimalist score typical of Lapelyte, ostinatos executed with electronics and built from a rising two- or three-note motif, or a single tone at a steady beat. But where that formula had an almost somnolent effect in “Sun & Sea,” here it is complicated by added layers of improvisatory playing by Lapelyte and Angharad Davies on violin, along with John Butcher on saxophone, and Rhodri Davies on harp.Their instrumental contributions, prerecorded and played through speakers with meticulous spatial design, betray the emotions behind the straightforward singing. Jazzy riffs and percussive string techniques add an element of unsettled agitation and worry. Realizing, too late, that you’ve never “been canoeing” or “cultivated a vegetable garden” can be both sad and exasperating.But mostly these statements are sad, as life inevitably is, because of the people conveying them. Their sound unrefined and their performance effortful, these singers were compelling in a way professionals couldn’t be. Everything about them — their feelings, characteristics, appearances — was familiar. They reminded me of so many friends and relatives, and for that were more touching than, say, the protagonist of a Schubert song cycle or a Verdi tragedy.I wonder whether it was more difficult for them to sing together as adults than as children. When we’re young, we take up choral music uncritically, as if by instinct; later, a closer, more attentive kind of listening is required to achieve harmony. It’s as though, in learning everything else, we forget exactly the thing we should always remember.The MutesThrough July 24 at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; lafayetteanticipations.com. More

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      Martin C. Dreiwitz, Who Took Student Musicians on World Tours, Dies at 91

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      He combined his love for travel and music to turn the Long Island Youth Orchestra into a globe-trotting powerhouse.Martin C. Dreiwitz, who drew on his twin passions for travel and classical music to found the globe-trotting Long Island Youth Orchestra, conducting his student musicians before audiences as close as Great Neck and Brookville and as far away as Karachi and Kathmandu, died on June 20 at a hospital near his home in Oyster Bay, N.Y. He was 91.Steven Behr, the president of the orchestra’s board of directors, said the cause was a heart attack.The orchestra may have counted some 100 performers, but Mr. Dreiwitz (pronounced DRY-witz) was practically a one-man show: He raised the funds, he scouted for new members, he cajoled parents to bring snacks on rehearsal days, and he conducted every performance from its founding in 1962 to his retirement in 2012.He was also the orchestra’s travel agent. In addition to playing four concerts a year, mostly at a performance hall on the campus of Long Island University Post in Brookville, N.Y., the orchestra went on a summer tour, almost always abroad, with multiple stops and often on multiple continents. One trip, in 1977, took them to Greece, Kenya, the Seychelles, India, Sri Lanka and Israel, with every detail arranged by Mr. Dreiwitz.Though he trained as a classical clarinetist, Mr. Dreiwitz was, in fact, a travel agent by trade, and he used his skills and connections to plot intricate journeys that even a professional orchestra might shrink from. He took pride in being among the first Western orchestras to play in places like Pakistan and Nepal, performing sold-out shows with students who often had never before left Long Island.He treated his musicians like adults, and saw his mission as one less about pedagogy than about preparation for a professional music career. He eschewed the typical youth orchestra fare — Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” — in favor of deep cuts from Mozart and Rossini and avant-garde composers like Virgil Thomson (a personal friend, who sometimes used the orchestra to test-run his latest work).He also tended to steer clear of Broadway scores, though he did have a soft spot for the music of George Gershwin, especially “Porgy and Bess,” and often included selections from that opera on the orchestra’s summer tour.Mr. Dreiwitz saw travel as another form of preparation. It was, he insisted, important for budding violists and clarinetists to learn how to perform at their best in strange new venues, in strange new cities, in front of strange new audiences.But he also simply loved the challenge of planning, say, a five-week trip for 85 students across five countries in East Asia. In between raising money and running rehearsals, during the school year he would dash off on reconnaissance trips, scouting each site for an upcoming tour — arranging hotels (or just as often private homes), checking out venues, even taste-testing restaurants. When the students arrived, months later, everything would be perfect.The orchestra ran on a shoestring budget, especially early on, when Mr. Dreiwitz refused to charge tuition. Instead, funds came from family donations, annual candy sales and, quite often, his own pocket. Every spring he offered a $2,500 scholarship to be split among the three best high school seniors, as judged by an outside panel.The Long Island Youth Orchestra in 1974. Alumni have gone on to play in most of the country’s major symphonies, and they populate countless chamber groups and academic music departments.Lester Paverman for The New York TimesMr. Dreiwitz’s hard work paid off. The orchestra’s 4,000 (and counting) alumni have gone on to play in many of the country’s major companies, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and they populate countless chamber groups and academic music departments.Mr. Dreiwitz could be stern and exacting on the podium, but, many of his former musicians said, he ran the orchestra like a family, fostering a vibe of collegiality instead of competitiveness.“I don’t twist anyone’s arm to join,” he told The New York Times in 1964. “They’re giving up their own time because they love music and want an opportunity to play. I don’t think you can find a more enthusiastic group of musicians any place.”Martin Charles Dreiwitz was born in Weehawken, N.J, on June 15, 1931, and raised in Brooklyn. His father, Samuel Dreiwitz, worked in the fur industry, and his mother, Charlotte (Silver) Dreiwitz, was a homemaker.He is survived by his two sons, Tuan Dinh and Dung Dinh.A gifted musician even as a child, he played clarinet and graduated from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & the Arts), and he majored in music at the University of Chicago. Along the way he studied under woodwind luminaries like Simeon Bellison, the principal clarinetist for New York Philharmonic, and Anthony Gugliotti, who held the same post with the Philadelphia Orchestra.After graduating from college in 1953, he moved to Europe, where he traveled and studied to be a conductor, including a stint with Wilhelm Furtwängler in Vienna.He returned to the United States in the early 1960s and settled in suburban Long Island, hoping to find a job conducting. To make ends meet, he took a job as a travel agent and offered private clarinet lessons on the side.One day in 1962, one of his particularly talented students put down his instrument and frowned.“I’ve gotten this far,” Mr. Dreiwitz recalled the student saying, “and now I must wait years, until I get into a major orchestra, before I get some really good experience. Where do I go from here?”The seed was planted, and took root: Mr. Dreiwitz held auditions for what he initially called the North Shore Symphony Orchestra in September 1962. He started with just 52 musicians, and they held a concert the next spring. A few years later, he took them on their first trip, to Chicopee, Mass.It was stop and go in the early years, with Mr. Dreiwitz hitting up Nassau County music teachers to find promising players. But by the end of the 1960s, he no longer needed to. Eager students lined up outside his travel agency to audition, and every year he had a wait list. The orchestra went on its first overseas trip, to Europe, in 1971.He took emeritus status in 2012, handing the baton to Scott Dunn, a former student. He continued to come in to rehearsals at L.I.U. Post, though less and less often, and then not at all.But Mr. Dreiwitzhad one more hurrah. In 2018, hundreds of alumni returned for a concert in his honor, and he even mounted the podium, to conduct a selection from his beloved “Porgy and Bess.” More

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      Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot Goes on a Crypto-Party Crawl

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      At 21, she was a founding member of the Russian anti-government punk collective. At 22, she was imprisoned. A decade later, she’s still fighting, this time using cryptocurrency to help her subvert the system.“I’m a super-introvert,” said Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, one of the founding members of Pussy Riot, as the elevator zoomed to the Rainbow Room on the 65th floor of Rockefeller Center, where the NFT Now gala was in full swing on June 21. “But it’s a job. As an activist, you have to do it,” she said of the schmoozing. “You have to put your work out there.”The doors dinged and slid open. As Ms. Tolokonnikova, 32, strode toward the entrance, the cacophony of hundreds of voices grew louder. “But when I hear all this noise, my heart freezes a bit,” she said quietly, switching to Russian.She did not pause to collect herself. There was no time. Ms. Tolokonnikova, a musician, artist and activist who goes by Nadya, was in New York to mingle with the crypto crowd at a conference focused on NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. Her schedule was packed with discussions, parties, panels and several performances.Since being jailed for 21 months for performing a guerrilla-style piece called “Punk Prayer” — which protested the government’s cozy relationship with the church — at a cathedral in Moscow a decade ago, Ms. Tolokonnikova has not gotten any quieter about her feelings toward the Russian powers that be. She was released from prison in 2013, and the following year, she and Maria Alyokhina, another Pussy Riot member who served time in prison, founded Mediazona, an independent news outlet in Russia. In 2018, Ms. Tolokonnikova published a book, “Read & Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism.” Ms. Tolokonnikova calls her uniform “feminist superhero,” or “something between Spiderman and Catwoman and Sailor Moon.”Ye Fan for The New York TimesIn December, Russian authorities labeled her a “foreign agent,” a category used to suppress opposition figures. (As a result, she does not disclose where she lives.) After Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, Ms. Tolokonnikova led an effort to raise $7.1 million in cryptocurrency for medical aid in Ukraine. “Putin is a bloody dictator, a terrorist who must be stopped as soon as possible,” she said.In the years after she was released from prison, Ms. Tolokonnikova dealt with a severe depression and relied on art as a form of therapy. A classically trained pianist, she now makes music that zips across genres like pop, techno and punk. On Aug. 5, Pussy Riot will release its first mixtape, “Matriarchy Now!” Ms. Tolokonnikova is the lead musician on the album, with the Swedish singer Tove Lo as the executive producer. Collaborators include Salem Ilese, ILoveMakonnen and Big Freedia.Some of the other well-known Pussy Riot members, like Ms. Alyokhina, who recently escaped from Moscow by wearing a delivery-service uniform, are not on the mixtape. Ms. Alyokhina and others, but not Ms. Tolokonnikova, are performing as part of a multicity antiwar tour in Europe this summer. Ms. Tolokonnikova said Pussy Riot is a loose network with no hierarchy; there are no leaders, and anyone can become a member and use the name as part of their protest efforts.Ms. Tolokonnikova posed in front of a billboard whose text is the same as the title of Pussy Riot’s first mixtape.Ye Fan for The New York TimesOn this rainy Tuesday in June, however, Ms. Tolokonnikova’s presence in New York wasn’t primarily about music. In March, Ms. Tolokonnikova and several partners created UnicornDAO, a fund-raising and investment vehicle built on a blockchain whose goal is to commission and buy NFTs made by women, nonbinary people and members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community. She had come to New York to raise awareness.So far, UnicornDAO has purchased more than 1,000 works by artists like Sofia Crespo, Claire Silver and Olive Allen, and raised $4.5 million in funding. The musician Grimes, who is a member of the DAO (it stands for “decentralized autonomous organization”), donated an NFT of her work to the DAO’s permanent collection, and the singer Sia is an active member. After a quick lunch of seafood spaghetti and a few sips of an Aperol spritz at the Roxy Hotel, where she ran into the D.J. Steve Aoki, a friend, Ms. Tolokonnikova bounded over to Spring Studios nearby for brainstorming sessions hosted by ConsenSys, a blockchain software company. During the cocktail hour that followed, a group formed around Ms. Tolokonnikova, with people asking for her thoughts about NFTs and fund-raising, or simply expressing their admiration toward her. She lingered for about 45 minutes, then made a quick exit. On the way out, a fan requested a selfie. When people ask her for a photo, she said, “they always say, ‘I never do this.’” She paused, then smiled. “That’s what I said when I got a selfie with Bernie Sanders in Chicago,” she said. Next stop was the gala, where the dress code was “inspired.” Ms. Tolokonnikova showed up in a uniform of sorts: black fishnets, white platform shoes, a short skirt, a ruffled top and finger-less gloves. One guest after another sought Ms. Tolokonnikova’s attention at the N.F.T. Now gala, though she describes herself as “a super introvert.”Ye Fan for The New York TimesShe called that day’s outfit “feminist superhero.” The look’s origins stretch back to when Pussy Riot started in 2011, when Ms. Tolokonnikova was 21. “I was thinking that we would be something between Spider-Man and Catwoman and Sailor Moon, and maybe we would be the superheroes that will come and save everyone,” she said. At the gala, the mood was buoyant, seemingly unaffected by the crypto crash, which has led ordinary and amateur investors to lose large amounts of money and crypto companies to lay off employees.For about an hour, Ms. Tolokonnikova sipped on a glass of sparkling wine and chatted with guests, including Joe Lubin, a founder of the Ethereum blockchain; the musician Miguel; and Michael Winkelmann, a digital artist who goes by the name Beeple. Mr. Winkelmann famously sold an NFT of his artwork at Christie’s for $69 million last year and is a member of UnicornDAO.“She actually makes me feel lazy because every time I turn around she’s started another DAO or a charity that’s raised, like, $10 million,” Mr. Winkelmann, 41, said. “And it’s like, ‘What did you do?’ I drew a bunch of pictures of wieners or something.” Backstage at the Bowery Ballroom, Ms. Tolokonnikova chatted with Salem Ilese, one of the artists featured on Pussy Riot’s first mixtape, while John Caldwell, another founder of UnicornDAO, lingered in the background. Ye Fan for The New York TimesMs. Tolokonnikova said she gets along easily with “crypto bros.” “The world of finance is super-toxic and a total no for me,” she said. “Crypto is a bit different. There are bros. Many of them are nerds. I myself am a nerd. We’ve always spoken the same language.” Growing up in Norilsk, a city in Siberia, Ms. Tolokonnikova said she was the one who helped other students with their homework, in part because it meant they wouldn’t be mean to her. Eventually, she studied philosophy at Moscow State University.She said she realized the potential fund-raising capability of the crypto world when she sold an NFT for a four-part Pussy Riot video artwork series made in collaboration with several other artists for 178 Ether, or about $356,000 at the time. “This is life-changing money,” she said. It was distributed among everybody who worked on the project and a portion went to a shelter for domestic violence survivors in Russia, she said. (Today, after the crash, the dollar value of the Ether they earned is significantly less: about $196,000.)As an activist, she said she has always kept herself abreast of technological shifts like cryptocurrency, blockchain and NFTs because she thinks that these are new tools she could harness while the rules around their usage are still being understood and established.The final stop of the evening was Bowery Ballroom. When the car pulled up to the club, she dashed in and reappeared minutes later onstage, performing Ms. Ilese’s “Crypto Boy,” a tongue-in-cheek song about getting frustrated with a boy who is talking too much about crypto. At the end of a long day of networking, Ms. Tolokonnikova joined Ms. Ilese to perform Ms. Ilese’s song “Crypto Boy” at the Bowery Ballroom.Ye Fan for The New York TimesIn response to the Supreme Court’s leaked decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Ms. Tolokonnikova’s UnicornDAO created a crypto wallet that makes donating digital currencies to a reproductive rights fund safer, anonymous and easier. The fund UnicornDAO is supporting is funneling money to seven reproductive rights organizations, including Planned Parenthood and Fund Texas Choice. So far, the fund has received more than $87,000 in donations. Independently, Ms. Tolokonnikova teamed with Ms. Ilese to sell several NFTs of the song “Crypto Boy.” The money they raised, $170,000, went to the Center for Reproductive Rights. Ms. Tolokonnikova was not shocked by the Supreme Court’s ruling, but she was deeply disappointed. With “Punk Prayer” in 2012, “we loudly declared that the government and religion have no right to get involved in our decisions about our bodies,” she said. “Years later, the country that calls itself the leader of the free world is allowing a ban on abortion. It’s really, really sad.”“Of course, it’s just a drop in the ocean,” she said of her fund-raising efforts. “But I think that if we all make these drops and unite in one great ocean, then there will be a lot we could change and influence.” More

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      Overlooked No More: Klaus Nomi, Singer With an Otherworldly Persona

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      His sound and look influenced everyone from Anohni to Lady Gaga. He also sang backup vocals for David Bowie.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.A wide range of musical genres fueled New York’s nightclubs in the late 1970s and early ’80s, including new wave, no wave, punk and post punk. Klaus Nomi, who performed during that era, defied being categorized under any of them.“I wouldn’t give it a label,” Nomi said of his sound in a Belgian television interview. “Maybe the only label is my own label: It’s Nomi style.”His music combined opera, infectious melodies, disco beats, German-accented countertenor vocals and undeniable grandeur. He influenced everyone from the singer-songwriter Anohni to Lady Gaga; in 2009, when Morrissey was asked to select eight essential records for the BBC radio program “Desert Island Discs,” Nomi’s version of Schumann’s “Der Nussbaum” made the list.Nomi’s stage look was equally eclectic, and inseparable from his sound. The gender-fluid mix included dark, dramatically-applied lipstick as well as nail polish, the occasional women’s garment and often a giant structured tuxedo top that suggested Dada as much as sci-fi. His style influenced the fashion world as well, in collections by designers like Jean Paul Gaultier and Riccardo Tisci.Nomi’s look was indisputably nonbinary, and a bit otherworldly. “He still comes across as an outrageously expressive and strange figure,” Tim Lawrence, author of the 2016 book “Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983,” said in a phone interview.“There was something about his entire being, which seemed to be queer, around makeup and voice and music and dress,” Lawrence said.Nomi — or Klaus Sperber, the name he was born with — moved to New York City from his native Germany in the early 1970s. He fell in with a group of creative friends and in late 1978 joined many of them to perform at New Wave Vaudeville, a series of quirky variety shows. The bill included a stripper, a singing dog and a performance artist dressed as a sadistic nun.Nomi, in the background at center, at the Mudd Club in Manhattan in 1979, the year he met David Bowie there.Alan KleinbergAs the closing act, Nomi sang an aria from Camille Saint-Saëns’s “Samson et Dalila” while wearing a transparent raincoat over a shiny, fitted top and pants along with dramatic eye makeup and lipstick.“He really blew people’s minds,” Ann Magnuson, who directed the shows, said in an interview. “He had all these snarky punk rockers out there who were speechless.”With the performances came a new name, inspired by the name of a magazine focused on outer space, Omni.“Klaus said, ‘I can’t go out as Klaus Sperber,’” his friend Joey Arias, the singer and performance artist, recalled by phone. “‘That’s not a star’s name.’”Soon he was performing as Klaus Nomi at tastemaker Manhattan clubs like Max’s Kansas City and Hurrah, with a set list created with the help of Kristian Hoffman, a musician who served for a time as his musical director. The material included edgy originals and unconventional takes on well-known hits. Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” became an enraged dirge, for example; the chorus of “Lightnin’ Strikes” morphed into an aria. The thought was that pop songs would “catch the ear of an audience who isn’t ready for opera,” Hoffman said in an interview.As The New York Times put it in a review of one of his performances, Nomi’s music was “positively catchy, in a strange sort of way.”One night in late 1979, Nomi and Arias were at the Mudd Club, in TriBeCa, when they met David Bowie there. Nomi called him later — Bowie had asked him to, scribbling his phone number with a friend’s eyeliner — and Nomi and Arias were recruited to be Bowie’s backup singers for an appearance that December as the musical guest on “Saturday Night Live.”For the show’s three songs, they wore clinging women’s Thierry Mugler dresses, purchased at Henri Bendel. The look was extremely provocative at the time, especially on national television. Throughout, the TV cameras’ focus seemed to be as much on them as on Bowie.“It legitimized everything, because it had been sort of a private scene, and all of a sudden there it is, right in front of you on ‘Saturday Night Live,’” said Katy Kattelman, a designer who is known professionally as Katy K and who was a friend of Nomi’s.Soon after, Nomi signed a record deal with RCA France. His debut album, titled simply “Klaus Nomi,” was released in Europe in 1981; a second album, “A Simple Man,” came out the next year. The records sold well — “Klaus Nomi” earned gold-record status in France — and he performed abroad to packed venues.Nomi returned to New York toward the end of 1982, excited by the prospect of possible American tours and releases. But he arrived gaunt and exhausted — he had contracted AIDS. He died of complications of the illness on Aug. 6, 1983. He was 39.A scene from the 2004 documentary “The Nomi Song” showing Nomi getting ready for a performance.Palm PicturesNomi at Hurrah, one of many nightclubs he performed at in New York City.Harvey WangKlaus Sperber was born on Jan. 24, 1944, in Immenstadt, a town in what was then West Germany. He was raised by his mother, Bettina, who worked odd jobs. A fling with a soldier, whom Klaus never met, resulted in his birth. When he was a child, he and his mother moved to the city of Essen, about 400 miles away. Opera music was often playing in their house, and it set Klaus on his path.“The first time I heard an opera singer on the radio I said, ‘My God, I want to sing just like that,’” he said in interview footage that is included in the 2004 documentary “The Nomi Song.” As a teenager, he became equally fond of Elvis Presley.He moved to West Berlin and worked as an usher at Deutsche Oper, where he sometimes sang for colleagues after the audience had left. But he aspired to sing professionally, and, Arias said, “he felt like he was at a dead end.”“He wanted to come to New York because he felt like it would change his life,” Arias added.Nomi settled in Manhattan’s East Village. He worked for a while in the kitchen of the Upper East Side cafe and celebrity hangout Serendipity 3 and started a baking business with Kattelman called Tarts, Inc., supplying restaurants with desserts made in Nomi’s St. Marks Place apartment.Nomi was known to frequent after-hours clubs, like the Anvil and Mineshaft, where casual sex was commonplace. There were sexual encounters at home as well — Arias said he once arrived at Nomi’s apartment to find a naked Jean-Michel Basquiat toweling off.To get a green card, he married a woman, Melissa Moon, a U.S. citizen, in 1980.“I don’t think he was in any way being anything that wasn’t himself, which was pretty gay as far as I knew,” said the artist Kenny Scharf. “When you’re creating your persona, the sexuality part is obviously part of the persona. It was all part of his sense of style and him being an artist in every way.” More

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      ‘Down With the King’ Review: A Rapper in the Wilderness

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      In Diego Ongaro’s patient and subtle new film, Freddie Gibbs plays a hip-hop artist struggling with a career malaise.“Down With the King” is the first movie I’ve seen that confronts the Great Resignation, if not as a social phenomenon then at least as a mood. Money Merc, a hip-hop artist sensitively played by the real-life rapper Freddie Gibbs, struggles with a career crisis specific to his personality and profession that is also likely to resonate with anyone who has ever felt trapped, overwhelmed or just plain tired out by work.Merc has retreated to a lovely, secluded spot in rural New England, ostensibly to work on material for a contractually mandated new album. He clearly enjoys the solitude, the company of at least a few of the locals and some of the chores and routines of country life. He clears deadfall with a chain saw, helps a neighbor butcher a hog (and later, with less success, a steer) and gazes thoughtfully on the hillsides in their autumnal glory. But in the midst of the pastoral calm and natural beauty, you feel the pull of his melancholy, the weight of his malaise.Merc’s mother (Sharon Washington) named him Mercury, after the Roman god, and a kitschy plaster statue of the deity is part of the décor in Merc’s spacious Berkshires getaway. Mercury is a perpetually busy mythical figure, associated with commerce, speed and movement — everything his namesake wants to escape.The director, Diego Ongaro, a French filmmaker who lives and works in New England, doesn’t overdramatize Merc’s situation, or tether him to the machinery of a plot. Merc is a Black man in a very white place, a fact that the movie deals with bluntly, and also subtly. “Down With the King,” which shares its title with a Run-DMC comeback classic, isn’t a fish-out-of-water comedy or a culture-war melodrama. The story emerges slowly and organically, following the rhythm of days spent trying to get stuff done and to find ways to avoid doing it. Merc is visited by his mother, various friends and a manager (David Krumholtz) who pushes him to stay on track. There are money at stake and a reputation to uphold.More than that, Merc isn’t entirely alienated from a creative pursuit that has brought him fulfillment as well as success. His verbal and musical skills are still in evidence, as is the slow-burning charisma that keeps the fans engaged on social media. He’s expected — and expects himself — to use his rustication as a chance to recharge, and then to step right back onto the relentless escalator of his career.What’s the alternative? Merc falls into a romance with Michaele (Jamie Neumann), who works at a hardware store and hopes to resume her education after being knocked sideways by addiction. He develops a friendship with a local farmer — played by Bob Tarasuk, an actual Berkshires farmer who starred in Ongaro’s previous feature, “Bob and the Trees” — that bridges differences of age and background. These relationships are sweet and surprising, but the movie doesn’t overstate their transformative potential.The trait “Down With the King” exhibits most powerfully is patience, something in short supply in modern cinema or, for that matter, the modern world. Instead of pushing to resolve conflicts or simplify contradictions, it asks us to examine how we live by walking for a while in someone else’s shoes and feeling how they no longer fit.Down With the KingRated R. Rap lyrics, racial slurs and (legal) weed. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More