Music

Since 1995, Helga Rabl-Stadler has ruled the Salzburg Festival, classical music’s premier annual event, as its president and public face.SALZBURG, Austria — It was intermission at the Salzburg Festival’s surreal and melancholy new production of “Don Giovanni,” and a small crowd of donors filled the office of Helga Rabl-Stadler, the festival’s president since 1995.Dropping the medical-grade FFP2 masks that have been required indoors at the 101-year-old festival, classical music’s premier annual event, the group sipped champagne and nibbled canapés. After some small talk, Rabl-Stadler gave a short speech about this summer’s program, a continuation of last year’s centennial — which was truncated by the pandemic but, through elaborate planning and force of will, not canceled entirely.“We couldn’t celebrate a hundred years,” she said, “by not doing everything.”As the applause died down, Reinold Geiger, the billionaire who runs the French beauty company L’Occitane en Provence, and whom Rabl-Stadler some time ago recruited to help underwrite the festival’s youth programs, spoke up to suggest a reason Salzburg had been one of the few major performing arts events that went forward during 2020.“Maybe,” he said with a smile, “it is because this festival has a president who is a bit unusual.”The Salzburg Festival returned to almost full strength this summer, including Romeo Castellucci’s surreal, melancholy staging of “Don Giovanni.”Monika Rittershaus/Salzburg FestivalComing from a prominent Austrian family, and with long experience in journalism, politics and business, Rabl-Stadler, 73, has indeed been unusually — perhaps uniquely — suited to the job of Salzburg’s de facto chief networker.This is her final summer after 26 years here, far longer than she or anyone else anticipated — and many would be happy for her to stay on. Her genial but no-nonsense presence has become a reassuring sign of stability, and the festival is bracing for a new leader at a delicate moment, as it faces the ongoing pandemic and looks toward a major renovation of its theaters that will cost hundreds of millions of euros.Salzburg is a massive operation, with a budget of roughly 65 million euros ($76.6 million) for about 200 opera, concert and drama performances in a six-week burst starting every July. Managing it in a triumvirate alongside an intendant (artistic director) and a finance director, the president serves as head fund-raiser, but also as a kind of all-purpose sounding board, tension diffuser, public face and global booster: “the principal host of the festival,” as Lukas Crepaz, the head of finance since 2017, put it.Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, left in red, as Klytämnestra and Ausrine Stundyte in the title role of “Elektra.”Bernd Uhlig/Salzburg Festival“She is incredibly loyal to every intendant,” said Markus Hinterhäuser, a longtime festival administrator who has been artistic director since 2017. “She supports me even if she might not always like what I’m doing. She is loyal; she is helpful; she is empathetic.”Rabl-Stadler and the venerable festival have grown synonymous. Last October, when she agreed to extend her contract for one final year, the governor of the region called her “the living embodiment of the Salzburg Festival.”The pandemic has been among her finest moments. Last summer, when few arts institutions were putting on full-scale productions, Salzburg pressed ahead with a curtailed but robust program, including Strauss’s mighty “Elektra” — with the full forces of the Vienna Philharmonic, the festival’s house band, crowded into the pit. Rabl-Stadler and her team lobbied politicians to make it all possible, rallied governmental and private funding sources to make up for ticket revenue lost because of capacity restrictions, and created an intricate safety plan.Then, this summer, Salzburg returned at nearly full strength. The festival brought back the two operas mounted last year, both set among a contemporary bourgeoisie much like the audience here. “Elektra” was conducted with cool elegance by Franz Welser-Möst and featured a laser-focused Vida Mikneviciute as Chrysothemis. A spare “Così Fan Tutte,” presented in a single, substantially cut act, was tenderly led by Joana Mallwitz and boasted, in Elsa Dreisig and Marianne Crebassa, commandingly sympathetic sister protagonists.Marianne Crebassa and Bogdan Volkov in a spare production of “Così Fan Tutte.”Monika Rittershaus/Salzburg FestivalBut Romeo Castellucci’s hotly anticipated staging of “Don Giovanni” was dreary, an unsatisfying mixture of naturalism with ambiguous symbols like basketballs and a meat slicer. Set in a permanent haze behind a scrim, the production, aided by clever casting and costuming, at least finally made Giovanni and his servant, Leporello, the uncanny doppelgängers they are in the libretto. Teodor Currentzis conducted his ensemble, MusicAeterna, with solemnity verging on somnolence. Handel’s “Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno,” set by the director Robert Carsen in the aftermath of a reality-TV model competition and conceived as a vehicle for Cecilia Bartoli, was unremarkably sung, if sensitively played by Les Musiciens du Prince-Monaco under Gianluca Capuano.But the concerts over a week in the middle of August were superb, including Evgeny Kissin’s pensive reading of Berg’s Piano Sonata, which felt the natural partner of the works by Gershwin and Chopin that joined it on the program. The violinist Isabelle Faust was the soloist in a sparkling “Mozart-Matinee” performance. A rapt audience packed the Kollegienkirche for Morton Feldman’s simmering monodrama “Neither.” MusicAeterna brought vibrancy to a Rameau program, if also a tendency to overdo gimmicks like foot-stomping and dramatic lighting shifts.In a staging inspired by reality TV, Handel’s “Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno” was a vehicle for Cecilia Bartoli.Monika Rittershaus/Salzburg FestivalThe Vienna Philharmonic, which appeared in almost everything, showed off its prodigious range over 12 hours on Aug. 15, including an afternoon “Così” and the evening premiere of a rare staging of Luigi Nono’s “Intolleranza 1960.” A coruscating parable of emigration, discrimination and violence, the work whips between ethereal choral chants and pummeling roars and shrieks, both instrumental and vocal. The director, Jan Lauwers, choreographed an endless danse macabre of bodies rushing around the stage, and Ingo Metzmacher conducted with nearly miraculous delicacy and precision.The Philharmonic had started its day at 11 that morning, playing Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis” under Riccardo Muti, a Salzburg fixture for 50 years who was conducting the work this summer for the first time. The performance was the glory of seven days at the festival: radiant, intense, dignified, grand. And there was Rabl-Stadler in her seat on the aisle, leaning forward to chat with friends before the lights dimmed, and perusing the program as she listened.She was born in Salzburg in 1948. Her father, Gerd Bacher, was an influential journalist and media executive who eventually became the head of ORF, the Austrian national broadcaster; her mother was a fashion businesswoman. Rabl-Stadler spent time as a newspaper columnist; working for her mother’s business; as a member of parliament for the conservative ÖVP, or Austrian People’s Party; and as head of Salzburg’s chamber of commerce before coming to the festival in 1995, anticipating she’d stay perhaps 10 years.“She was not always like she is now,” Hinterhäuser said. “She had difficulties at the beginning; real difficulties.”The director Jan Lauwers choreographed an endless danse macabre of bodies rushing around the stage in Luigi Nono’s “Intolleranza 1960.”Maarten Vanden Abeele/Salzburg FestivalFor decades the festival had been ruled — and set firmly in its ways — by the conductor Herbert von Karajan. When he died, in 1989, the brilliant, pugnacious Gerard Mortier was brought in as artistic leader; in his flair for modern provocations, he represented a break with the Karajan era.But for all his artistic coups, Mortier hogged the spotlight and thrived on tensions, alienating conductors, directors and the Vienna Philharmonic, and secretly seeking to sideline Rabl-Stadler. The move backfired, and when he left a few years later, in 2001, the tenure of his replacement, the far more introverted Peter Ruzicka, proved an opportunity for her to come into her own.Her savvy and determination revived a long-stagnant effort to renovate the smallest of the festival’s three opera houses — which she set on track to open in 2006, Mozart’s 250th birthday year, when the festival planned to present all 22 of his operas. The Haus für Mozart, as the theater was called, became informally known as the Haus für Helga.“When you ask me what I did for the festival,” she said, “I can say that without me there would not be a Haus für Mozart.”She proved agile at courting corporate sponsors, and instituted (and starred in) a globe-trotting road show in the off-season to broaden Salzburg’s appeal around the world. She helped heal the raw relations with the Philharmonic.Through the brief tenures of Jürgen Flimm and Alexander Pereira, she was asked to take on more and still more responsibilities — including, for seven years, the combined duties of the president and finance director. On top of all that, for the summers of 2015 and ’16 she filled in as an artistic leader alongside Sven-Eric Bechtolf, to fill the gap before Hinterhäuser’s arrival. She was bruisingly overworked. But with Hinterhäuser and Crepaz, real stability arrived at last — the kind that could survive even the pandemic.While she has left sponsorship deals in place to tide the next president over for a time, that new person will preside over the continuing effects of the coronavirus. Rabl-Stadler’s replacement will be selected by the festival’s board, which is drawn from different levels of Austrian politics.“It’s a political decision,” Hinterhäuser said. “And I’m a little concerned which direction they will go. It will be a very decisive decision for the future of the festival.”It is considered likely that the next president will be a woman, since Crepaz (whose contract lasts until 2027) and Hinterhäuser (until 2026) are both men. But beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess.“A president is not a sponsorship department,” Hinterhäuser said. “This person has to have real empathy for what the festival is, what we do, what we want to achieve. I really believe in a kind of cosmopolitan elegance; it’s the Salzburg Festival, but it’s open to more than 80 countries. And then you need a very remarkable political and economic network — and also the capacity not just to have this network, but to use it in an intelligent way.”The next president will be tasked with advancing a long-simmering renovation plan that is currently budgeted at about 300 million euros (about $350 million). If the person can bring that project over the finish line, it will be a Haus für Helga-style achievement.Next summer, the consummate Salzburger won’t be in town: Rabl-Stadler plans to rent a villa in Tuscany so as not to seem to loom over her successor. During an interview, her voice grew thick with emotion recalling what Riccardo Muti had told her a few minutes before, as he embraced her backstage.“Helga,” he said, “the festival will not be the same without you.” More

George Harrison’s 1970 triple album “All Things Must Pass” also returns to the Top 10 for the first time in 50 years thanks to a host of reissues.It may be a digital world, but when it comes to the weekly music charts, old-fashioned sales still make a big difference.This week, Billie Eilish’s latest album, “Happier Than Ever,” a big vinyl hit, holds at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, while George Harrison’s 1970 triple LP “All Things Must Pass” returns to the Top 10 for the first time in 50 years thanks to a cornucopia of reissues, including a $1,000 “uber” version with collectible gnome figurines.“Happier Than Ever” had the equivalent of 85,000 sales in the United States in its second week out, according MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. That is down 64 percent from its opening week, but enough to hold the top spot on this week’s chart. The album’s overall number incorporates 66 million streams and 36,000 copies sold as a complete package — 34,000 of which were on physical formats like vinyl and CD.Olivia Rodrigo’s “Sour” is No. 2 in its 12th week out, while Nas’s surprise “King’s Disease II” opens in third place with the equivalent of 56,000 sales, including 47 million streams. The Kid Laroi is No. 4 with “____ Love” and Doja Cat’s “Planet Her” is No. 5.“All Things Must Pass,” featuring the hit “My Sweet Lord,” was released in late 1970 and held at No. 1 for seven weeks in early 1971. This month an array of reissue versions was released, ranging from a plain two-CD set ($20) to the $1,000 eight-LP, five-CD/Blu-ray Uber Deluxe Edition ($1,000). Packaged in a wooden crate, that version contains two books, a bookmark fashioned from an oak tree on the grounds of Harrison’s mansion, and miniature reproductions of Harrison and the garden gnomes pictured on the original album cover.Those reissues helped “All Things Must Pass” reach No. 7 on the weekly chart, its first time in the Top 10 since March 1971. The album had the equivalent of 32,000 sales, including 28,000 sold as a complete package; songs from the set were also streamed nearly 4 million times. More

Time Spans, a wide-ranging immersion in contemporary work, balances good taste and risk-taking.The Time Spans festival has carved out a unique place for itself in New York’s musical life over the past decade — and not just because it occupies an otherwise barren stretch of the calendar in late August.This contemporary-music event, now a multiweek affair, is that perfect paradox: reliably varied. On successive evenings you might find electroacoustic experiments, meditative string quartets and barreling pieces for chamber orchestra.There is no stylistic tribalism on offer, just a sagacious balance of good taste and calculated risk-taking. That’s thanks in part to the curatorial hand of the festival’s executive and artistic director, Thomas Fichter, a veteran bassist.And it’s also because of the quality of the performers. Ensembles like the JACK Quartet and Alarm Will Sound may well be familiar to music lovers. But they’re rarely presented in such concentrated helpings. Each Time Spans show generally lasts about an hour, while managing to feel like a full meal.After the pandemic led to the cancellation of last year’s festival, Time Spans restarts live performances on Tuesday, and runs through Aug. 29. Presented by the Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trust, and held once again at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in Manhattan, it’s an early sign of concert life springing back to action in the city this fall.Here is a closer look at four of this edition’s presentations. (Details about the festival’s Covid-19 safety protocols are available at timespans.org.)‘Or we don’t need light’The cellist Mariel Roberts’s debut album, “Nonextraneous Sounds,” announced her as a talent to watch back in 2012. Since then, she has commissioned music by George Lewis and joined the Wet Ink Ensemble, a respected collection of composers and instrumentalists. Her first composition for the full group will be heard at the ensemble’s Time Spans slot on Friday, and draws its inspiration from a narrative embedded within “Seiobo There Below,” a novel by the Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai.“The story is about this man who’s going to the Acropolis,” she said in a recent interview, “and he’s trying to climb up on the Acropolis. But the light is so intense and unyielding that he can’t even see his surroundings. I thought that was an interesting concept in music, as well.”She added that the piece shares some traits with “Armament” — her recent, often ferocious solo album of her own works that closes with some earnest (if still aggressive) passages of lament.

Armament by Mariel RobertsBoth “Or we don’t need light” and “Armament” make use of electronics, she said, adding that among the two works, “there’s a relation in that I’m interested in exploring beautiful harmonies, but with really kind of gruff and intense textures layered on top of them, almost obscuring them a lot of the time.”‘La Arqueología del Neón’The composer Oscar Bettison’s gutsy, peripatetic “Livre des Sauvages” was a notable highlight of the 2018 Time Spans festival, when it was played by the Talea Ensemble. (It has since been recorded for the Wergo label by Ensemble Musikfabrik.)Oscar Bettison’s “Livre des Sauvages”Ensemble Musikfabrik (Wergo 68692)On Aug. 23, Bettison and Talea reunite for a new work that channels similar energies. “I’ve got a little obsession about artificiality,” he said. “You know, distortion. There’s a lot of preparation on instruments. Those are the two things that are sort of themes that I keep coming back to in things I do.”“This piece is very up,” he added. “It’s always trying to move; it’s very frenetic.”This opus, though, is more intimate in forces than “Livre des Sauvages”; it’s written for just seven players. “I think of this piece as really being a chamber concerto for Talea,” Bettison said. “They really like to work, you know? They like to get into it. I wanted to write something that would push them a bit.”‘Neumond’The percussion and piano quartet Yarn/Wire is playing the premiere of a piece by Wolfgang Heiniger.Bobby FisherTo get a preview of Yarn/Wire’s next album, which will be released on the Wergo imprint on Sept. 10, you can hear its Time Spans set on Aug. 24. In addition to pieces by Andrew McIntosh and Zosha Di Castri, this percussion and piano quartet will give the premiere of this work by Wolfgang Heiniger.This is truly a premiere, said Russell Greenberg, one of the group’s percussionists, since the album version was recorded in multitrack fashion — with percussion and keyboard parts (and even some vocals) recorded individually.“So this will be the first time we’ve played it live,” Greenberg said.“The surface melodies and the harmonies, they’re so unique and dramatic; they kind of hit you immediately,” he said, adding, of Heiniger: “He thinks of it as a passacaglia. It’s pretty short, and just these motives just keep coming along. When I sent him the record, he said, ‘Yes you got it; it’s so goth.’”‘For George Lewis’The composer and instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey has formed a productive collaboration in recent years with the ensemble Alarm Will Sound. The group’s players have immersed themselves in his ongoing work “Autoschediasms” — which blends Sorey’s conducting skills, improvisational responsiveness and ventures into notated composition — with sterling results.They’ve also been preparing his meditative, fully notated tribute to the composer George Lewis, a mentor of Sorey’s. In an interview, Alarm Will Sound’s conductor, Alan Pierson, spoke of “a deliberateness with which Tyshawn places each of the sounds in this environment” as the work’s defining characteristic. (A recording will be released on the Cantaloupe label on Aug. 27.)“This is not a piece that belongs on a concert with other music,” he added. “So we’re really carefully and thoughtfully designing an experience of the piece for the DiMenna Center.” The ensemble will appear in the round, with specially planned lighting.“He spends all this time creating this landscape,” Pierson said, “and then once you’re there, there’s a kind of magical thing that happens — about 40 minutes into the piece — where Tyshawn suddenly takes you back to where the piece started. But takes a subtly different path, and makes the space for this really unexpectedly beautiful melodic thing to happen.”Time SpansThrough Aug. 29 at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in Manhattan; timespans.org. More

In early August, Verzuz — the pandemic-era staple that began on Instagram Live and within a year morphed into a multi-platform content powerhouse with artists “battling” hit for hit — held its first live, ticketed, in-person event. The night featured two of New York’s most historically vital hip-hop crews, the Lox and Dipset, facing off at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden.From a distance, it seemed like a light mismatch — Dipset, Cam’ron and his extended crew, are flashy and theatrical, and the Lox are workmanlike and relentless. But the battle took place in a boxing ring, and that set the tone: The Lox emerged triumphant.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about New York rap in the 1990s and early 2000s, the long-forgotten tension of pop crossover, and a night that brought the spirit of battle back to Verzuz, which had begun to turn into a lovefest.Guests:Jayson Rodriguez, a longtime hip-hop journalist and writer of the Backseat Freestyle newsletterJayson Buford, who writes about music for Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and others More

The pandemic forced the company outdoors and to trim staples by Verdi and Mozart. Our critic found the experience to be ripe with potential for drawing in new audiences.COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — The Glimmerglass Festival has long boasted two features that made it a magnet for opera lovers during summer seasons: A bucolic setting in upstate New York, and the acoustically splendid, ideally intimate Alice Busch Opera Theater, which has a sizable stage and just 914 seats.That very intimacy has made this theater an especially challenging space to present works during the pandemic, and like most performing arts institutions, Glimmerglass was closed last summer, though there was some online programming. But in July live opera came back: the company hosted a monthlong outdoor season — at least it could make the most of its environment.Under the adventurous leadership of Francesca Zambello, the Glimmerglass Festival built a temporary stage on the grassy grounds of the campus. Audience members either sit on the lawn in socially distanced squares, or purchase one of 14 wood sheds, seating six. Of course amplification was necessary. The singers wear microphones; the Glimmerglass Festival orchestra performed from the stage of the opera house, with its sound channeled into the general amplification. (Singers watch the conductor via video monitors.)Natural sound has been the glory of opera for centuries. It’s always hard to fully assess amplified voices. Yet, for the four rewarding programs I took in recently, the sound came across with resonance (sometimes too much) and clarity. The lawn theater, created by the set designer Peter J. Davison, served its function: the raised wood stage is framed by a network of black steel beams, with colored light bulbs dangling on cords from above. A group of tree trunks off to one side provided a permanent feature of scenic designs and blended in magically with the forest background.Raehann Bryce-Davis, a mezzo-soprano with a burnished voice and dramatic fervor, as Azucena in “Il Trovatore.”Karli Cadel/Glimmerglass FestivalThe ongoing challenges of Covid-19 compelled the company to keep performances to 90 minutes or less, with no intermissions. That meant making considerable trims to staples like Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” and Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” For some devotees this might seem sacrilegious. But during earlier golden eras of opera works were routinely cut. I found the experience fascinating, and rich with potential for drawing in new audiences. Zambello said in an interview that with the informal outdoor setting and intermission-less programs, the festival attracted many people attending for the first time. The crowds have averaged about 700 per performance, she said. The audiences I saw — beginning on Thursday morning with “Il Trovatore” — were eager, despite some steamy weather.The core of the “Trovatore” story might seem the ill-fated love between Leonora, a lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Aragon, and Manrico, the troubadour of the title, an officer in the forces of a rival prince at time of civil war. But the opera is driven by Azucena, supposedly the mother of Manrico, who is consumed with fulfilling her mother’s dying command to “Avenge me,” after the woman was accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake.Zambello, who directed the production with Eric Sean Fogel, decided to make Azucena the focus. This adaptation, set in contemporary times, opened with Part 2 of Verdi’s work, which the composer subtitled “The Gypsy.” Here, Azucena (Raehann Bryce-Davis, a mezzo-soprano with a burnished voice and dramatic fervor) sang the character’s gloomy, haunting aria, when she recalls her mother’s dying words, while looking at a steel container emitting smoke from burning refuse. Then, we were taken back to the actual start of the work, the scene with Ferrando (Peter Morgan) and his band of soldiers, here presented as scrappy militia forces of the count.In an opera with a plot as convoluted as this one, it was hard to complain that the reordering of scenes made a hash of the story. Dramatically, the reframing certainly gave a central place to the obsessed Azucena. The bright-voiced veteran tenor Gregory Kunde was a volatile Manrico; the soprano Latonia Moore, the Leonora of this production, was ill on Thursday and replaced by Alexandria Shiner, who displayed a gleaming, powerful voice. The young baritone Michael Mayes was a compelling Count di Luna. Joseph Colaneri conducted a sure-paced account of the abbreviated score.Eric Owens and Lisa Marie Rogali in “The Magic Flute.”Karli Cadel/Glimmerglass FestivalThat evening came Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” performed in an English adaptation and translation by Kelley Rourke, directed by NJ Agwuna, and conducted by Colaneri. This trimmed version introduced Sarastro, the priest who heads a temple of wisdom, as the narrator of Mozart’s fairy-tale opera. We first saw him (the formidable bass-baritone Eric Owens) reading the tale from a huge story book.The concept allowed the creative team to do away with whole chunks of spoken dialogue in Mozart’s work, which, truth to tell, there’s too much of. The other leads, mostly younger artists, were all impressive: the tenor Aaron Crouch as the questing Tamino; the soprano Helen Zhibing Huang as the tender Pamina; Emily Misch as the fearsome Queen of the Night; Michael Pandolfo as a wonderfully hardy Papageno.Concerns during a pandemic about casting three children in the roles of the three boys led to a bold decision: The three ladies who serve the queen see the light, turn against her, and eventually side with Sarastro! So they become the guiding spirits who help bring the opera to its joyous end. And why not? The relative goodness and badness of the characters in this opera is an open question.On Friday morning, the festival presented the final performance of a new play with music, “The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson,” which tells the story of the pioneering founder of the National Negro Opera Company in the early 1940s. Sandra Seaton wrote the play, which loosely focuses on an incident in 1943, when Dawson, who had been presenting opera performances on a floating barge on the Potomac River, tried to book a hall in Washington, D.C., for a performance of “Carmen.” But she was met with Jim Crow policies that would have entailed playing before a segregated audience, which she refuses here to do.Denyce Graves, center, with, to her left, Mia Athey, Victoria Lawal and Jonathan Pierce Rhodes in the world premiere of “The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson.” The play by Sandra Seaton has music by Carlos Simon. Karli Cadel/Glimmerglass Festival“Passion,” directed by Kimille Howard, was conceived as a vehicle for the mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves, who was glamorous, gritty and poignant in the title role. We see her rehearsing three young singers (Victoria Lawal, Mia Athey, Jonathan Pierce Rhodes) for the “Carmen” she hopes to present, while taking infuriating calls from the renter of the hall. Dawson’s story is little-known and this work is an important step in telling it. In a revealing moment for Dawson, we hear Graves sing a melting, wistful song, “Free,” by the composer Carlos Simon, with words by Seaton. But this 70-minute play could benefit by being a little longer and having more of Simon’s music. Zambello, in the interview, said she hopes to develop the work further with Graves in mind.Weather, of course, is always a factor in outdoor opera, and rain and lightning forced the cancellation of Friday evening’s performance of “Songbird,” an adaptation of Offenbach’s “La Périchole.” (It was only the second cancellation, so far, of a 28-performance season.)“Gods and Mortals,” on Saturday morning, was a 90-minute program of excerpts from Wagner operas, directed by Zambello (with Foley as associate) and led by Colaneri. The work came across not just as a staged concert, but also as a dramatic entity on its own terms. Selections from “Tannhäuser,” the “Ring” operas, “Der Fliegende Holländer” and, a rarity, “Die Feen,” Wagner’s first completed opera, were presented in a manner that invited you to simply follow the themes of fate, love, mortality and the supernatural that run through Wagner’s works.The singers were excellent. Shiner, so good in “Trovatore,” was the star here, singing several excerpts thrillingly. Ian Koziara proved a youthful, exciting Wagner tenor. Owens gave a solemnly expressive account of Wotan’s farewell from “Die Walküre.” There was even a feisty performance, with six female singers wearing jeans and forest-green T-shirts, of the “Ride of the Valkyries” ensemble, against a dream-come-true Wagnerian backdrop: a real forest.From left: Mia Athey, Emily Misch, Alexandria Shiner, Stephanie Sanchez and Lisa Marie Rogali in “Gods and Mortals” at the Glimmerglass Festival.Karli Cadel/Glimmerglass FestivalI found the baritone Mark Delavan’s brooding, powerful account of the Dutchman’s monologue from “Holländer” especially moving. He sang this role memorably in 2001, when, four days after the Sept. 11 attacks, New York City Opera returned with a new production of this opera, signaling a first step back to normalcy. The 20th anniversary of that horrific event is coming up, even as New York, the performing arts, and the entire world continue to grapple with a very different kind of crisis. “Glimmerglass on the Grass,” as this summer’s festival was called, provided rewarding signs of renewal.Glimmerglass FestivalThrough Aug. 17; glimmerglass.org. More

Barrie Kosky’s new production for the Berliner Ensemble, at the theater where the famous work premiered, knows where to break the rules.BERLIN — “I’m not asking for an opera here,” the notorious criminal Macheath says at his wedding, early in a work that happens to be called “Die Dreigroschenoper” (“The Threepenny Opera”).And in Barrie Kosky’s hauntingly enjoyable new production of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s famous “play with music” for the Berliner Ensemble — at the theater where it premiered in 1928 — Macheath then reaches into the orchestra pit in search of nuptial entertainment and steals the “Threepenny” score from the conductor’s stand. He flips through the pages while humming the show’s big hit, “Mack the Knife,” tears them up and throws the scraps into a metal bucket. Then he lights them on fire.The line “I’m not asking for an opera here” dates back to the ’20s, but Weill and Brecht never wrote what follows — nor did their essential collaborator Elisabeth Hauptmann, who with this production is finally getting proper billing alongside them after decades of neglect. Yet this kind of ironic gesture toward the art form wouldn’t be out of character for them; coming from Kosky, it’s a subtle tribute, and a blazing declaration of independence.It’s a moment, along with many others in Kosky’s production that epitomizes the adage of knowing rules in order to break them.Kosky clearly understands the work: the social critiques that course through Brecht and Hauptmann’s crass text; the ways in which Weill’s earworm score lodges those ideas in your mind; and how, in its tension between words and music, “Threepenny” dares you to connect with it emotionally amid constant reminders of theatrical artifice.He also seems to know that “Threepenny” is ultimately a problem piece. It may be the defining artwork of Weimar-era Berlin, but more often than not it makes for a joyless night at the theater. Its dizzying layers of satire and style tend to overwhelm directors, who as if operating with a Wikipedia understanding easily succumb to visual clichés, vicious affect and didacticism. The worst productions aspire to the sexily somber Berlin of Sam Mendes’s take on the musical “Cabaret.”But “Threepenny” isn’t, as Kosky said in an interview with The New York Times, “‘Cabaret’ with a little bit of intellectualism.” Indeed, it was quintessentially 1920s Berlin — a timely tale, despite its setting of London’s criminal underworld in the 19th century, that became a pop culture phenomenon known as “Threepenny fever” — but its legacy is far richer and more widespread than that. Especially after the 1950s, once the show found belated success in the United States with a long-running adaptation by the composer Marc Blitzstein.Covers of “Mack the Knife” abounded, and made for one of Ella Fitzgerald’s greatest live recordings; Brecht’s poetic lyrics influenced Bob Dylan; the artist Nan Goldin named her photography collection “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” after one of the show’s songs. And the metatheatrical devices of “Threepenny” are alive and well: In Leos Carax’s new film, “Annette,” emotion and artifice fit snugly together in a deliberate tension you could trace back to Brecht and Weill.Even so, the vitality of “Threepenny” depends on intervention and adaptation; it can never be performed, as it too often has been, as a museum piece. And Kosky never treats it as one. Instead he adds and subtracts, breathing new life into a work that desperately needed it. He sheds the excesses of Act I and eliminates entire characters, for example, to reveal a recognizable but freshly presented story focused on that most fundamental of human dramas: love.Capitalism, and Brecht’s scathing indictment of it, still loom over the show — but more obliquely, as an insidious force behind relationships that renders them slippery and unreliable. In Kosky’s view, it also feeds and thwarts Macheath’s pathological need to be loved, whether by his fellow characters or the members of the audience.Nico Holonics portrayed Macheath with a weariness that betrays the darkness behind his carefree demeanor. Joerg Brueggemann/OstkreuzMacheath, a.k.a. Mack the Knife — performed by Nico Holonics with unflappable joy but a weariness that betrays the darkness behind his carefree demeanor — is not a man to give up his habits, as he is described in the show. He gives away wedding rings as if they were pennies, and smiles as he watches women fight over him. Like Don Giovanni, he never loses faith in his ability to manipulate them, even as they abandon him one by one.He is introduced, as ever, with “Mack the Knife” (following the overture, here lithe yet lyrical in chorale-like passages, conducted by Adam Benzwi). Through a curtain of black tinsel, a sparkling face appears — that of Josefin Platt as the Moon Over Soho, a role created for Kosky’s production — to sing the murder ballad with the rapid vibrato of Lotte Lenya, Weill’s wife and a legendary interpreter of his music.Kosky is a showman — just look at the invaluable work he has done to revive Weimar-era operettas at his company here in Berlin, the Komische Oper — and he knows the power of a hit song. So he reprises “Mack the Knife” throughout the evening, at one point having its tune played through one of the souvenir music boxes tourists can buy in his nearby hometown, Dessau.In general, Kosky seems to have more of an affinity for Weill’s music, which he expands with relish, than the text. Where he truly defers to Brecht — his production, after all, is for Brecht’s company — is in the staging, which shatters the fourth wall from the start and continually reminds its audience, in anti-Wagnerian fashion, that what they are seeing isn’t real.Polly Peachum, here a commanding Cynthia Micas, calls for her own spotlight and gestures for the curtain to be raised, revealing a jungle gym of a set (by Rebecca Ringst) that is more dynamic than it at first appears; Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum (the darkly charming Tilo Nest), Polly’s father and Macheath’s underworld rival, cues the orchestra; stagehands make no effort to hide their work.The effect, in Brecht’s school of theater, is to temper the audience’s emotional response and trigger an intellectual one — which is crucial to the political success of “Threepenny,” yet is often difficult to reconcile with the seductive grip of Weill’s music. That can get messy, but Kosky’s production comfortably has it both ways; the result may not please purists of Brecht or Weill, but on balance it makes for persuasive, satisfying drama.And by homing in on Macheath, Kosky allows room for psychological richness, particularly with the women in his orbit: Polly; her mother, Celia Peachum (lent the authority of a power broker by Constanze Becker); Jenny (arguably the soul of the show, wistful and bitter as sung by Bettina Hoppe); and Lucy Brown (Laura Balzer, a master of physical and musical comedy). You could also count among them Lucy’s father, the police chief Tiger Brown, here performed by Kathrin Wehlisch in drag — not a gimmick, but a homoerotic treatment of Macheath’s oldest friendship as yet another fragile romance.From left, Cynthia Micas, Constanze Becker and Tilo Nest as the Peachum family.JR Berliner EnsembleAll these relationships fail — usually because of money, in some way. But Macheath is undeterred, by the end looking for his next connection as a brightly lit sign descends from the rafters: “LOVE ME.” That’s another Brechtian touch, a modern take on the projections used in Caspar Neher’s set for the original 1928 production.But what follows is all Kosky. After the winkingly jubilant finale, the Moon Over Soho shows its face again, bleakly sending off the audience with a “Mack the Knife” verse, written by Brecht in 1930, that says some people are in the dark, and some are in the light; and while you can see those in the light, you’ll never see the ones in the dark.Die DreigroschenoperThrough Sept. 4, then in repertory, at the Berliner Ensemble, Berlin; berliner-ensemble.de. More

In a career that began in Texas and spanned five decades, she was praised by critics for the thoughtful storytelling of her lyrics.Nanci Griffith, the Texas-born singer and songwriter known for thoughtful narrative songs like “Love at the Five and Dime” and “Trouble in the Fields,” has died. She was 68.Her death was announced by her management company, Gold Mountain Entertainment. The company’s statement provided no further information and said only, “It was Nanci’s wish that no further formal statement or press release happen for a week following her passing.”Ms. Griffith won the 1994 Grammy Award for best contemporary folk album for “Other Voices, Other Rooms.” Over a recording career that spanned five decades and about 20 albums, she was praised by critics for straddling the worlds of folk and country and for writing lyrics that were both vivid and literary.She began her career on the thriving Austin, Texas, scene of the mid-1970s. After moving to Nashville, she established herself as a writer when artists like Suzy Bogguss and Kathy Mattea recorded her songs — although she had her first hit not with one of her own compositions but with Julie Gold’s “From a Distance,” later an even bigger hit for Bette Midler. Early in her career Ms. Griffith was seen as a country artist. But, she told The New York Times in 1988, “Though the term folk tends to be perceived as a bad word in the music industry today, I’m proud of my folk background.” She added: “When I was young I listened to Odetta records for hours and hours. Then when I started high school, Loretta Lynn came along. Before that, country music hadn’t had a guitar-playing woman who wrote her own songs.” The daughter of parents who were both interested in the arts (although she once recalled them as “very, very irresponsible”), Ms. Griffith began performing when she was 14 and continued performing while at the University of Texas. She won a songwriting award at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas in 1977, which led to a deal with a local label. She made her major-label debut with the MCA Records album “Lone Star State of Mind” in 1987.A complete obituary will follow. More

Jennifer Hough said in a lawsuit filed in New York that the couple pressured her to recant her account of the rapper’s husband, Kenneth Petty, sexually assaulting her in 1994.A woman who accused the rapper Nicki Minaj’s husband, Kenneth Petty, of sexual assault during high school filed a lawsuit on Friday against the couple, alleging that they harassed and intimidated her while trying to convince her to recant her account.The case dates back to 1994, when Jennifer Hough, then 16, reported to the police that Mr. Petty — a 16-year-old she had known growing up in Jamaica, Queens — had raped her after leading her into a home at knife point, the lawsuit says. Mr. Petty was arrested that day and was charged with first-degree rape, and subsequently pleaded guilty to attempted rape, said Kim Livingston, a spokeswoman with the Queens district attorney’s office. He served about four and a half years in prison, according to inmate records.According to the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Ms. Hough, 43, and her family members started to receive communications from people claiming to be connected with Ms. Minaj and Mr. Petty shortly after Mr. Petty was arrested last year for failing to register as a sex offender in California. The lawsuit alleges harassment and witness intimidation, as well as intentional infliction of emotional distress by Ms. Minaj and Mr. Petty, and seeks unspecified damages. It also alleges sexual assault and battery against Mr. Petty, referring to the mid-90s case.A representative for Ms. Minaj did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A lawyer for Mr. Petty, Michael Goldstein, declined to comment on the lawsuit.The lawsuit says that an intermediary offered Ms. Hough $20,000 in exchange for signing a prepared statement recanting the accusation. At one point last year, the lawsuit says, Ms. Minaj called Ms. Hough, saying that she had heard Ms. Hough was willing to “help out”; days later, it says, Ms. Hough and her family members received an “onslaught of harassing calls and unsolicited visits” from people she believed to be associated with the couple.Ms. Hough “has not worked since May of 2020 due to severe depression, paranoia, constant moving, harassment and threats from the defendants and their associates,” the lawsuit says. “She is currently living in isolation out of fear of retaliation.”According to the lawsuit, Ms. Hough was on her way to school on Sept. 16, 1994, when she ran into Mr. Petty, a boy she knew from the neighborhood. The lawsuit says that Mr. Petty held a knife at her back as he led her to a house around the corner, where Ms. Hough said he raped her. The suit says that Ms. Hough escaped, ran to her high school and told security guards, who called the police.In an interview, Ms. Hough said that as her case was prosecuted, she faced harassment and retaliation in the neighborhood, prompting her family to force her to attend a court hearing for Mr. Petty and request that the charges be dropped — a request that was denied. At the time, the suit says, Mr. Petty had already accepted a plea deal.Ms. Hough said in an interview that she left New York City after the ordeal, and for years, it remained in the past: “I didn’t think it would be something that would come back and slap me in the face 20-something years later.”But in 2018, Ms. Minaj — a chart-topping rapper with a fiercely loyal social media following — posted about her relationship with Mr. Petty on Instagram, and questions about his status as a sex offender surfaced.Ms. Hough said in an interview that she had spoken to YouTube bloggers to defend herself and respond to an Instagram comment from Ms. Minaj that stated that Ms. Hough and Mr. Petty had been in a relationship at the time of the assault and that Mr. Petty was younger than Ms. Hough. (They were never in a relationship, and they were the same age, according to the lawsuit.)After Mr. Petty was arrested in 2020, Ms. Hough reconnected with a childhood friend from Queens, the lawsuit says, and told him she “wished it could all just go away forever.” Ms. Hough said that the friend replied, “I can make that happen.”The suit says that a few days later, the friend told Ms. Hough that Ms. Minaj had asked for her phone number, and the rapper later called her and offered to fly Ms. Hough out to Los Angeles or fly her publicist out to Ms. Hough; Ms. Hough said she declined and told the rapper, “I need you to know woman to woman, that this happened.”The lawsuit says there were then a series of encounters where Ms. Hough or her family members were offered inducements if she would recant: $500,000 at one point, $20,000 at another, with a proposed bonus that Ms. Minaj would send birthday videos to Ms. Hough’s daughter. Ms. Hough said she declined.Ms. Hough said in the interview that she never expressed interest in a bribe and was adamantly against recanting her story.“If I lie now and say that I lied then, you know what that does?” she said. “Do you know what that’s going to say to my two little girls, or even my sons?”Ms. Hough said in the interview that at one point she told the intermediary that the $500,000 offer was “not good enough.” She said she had been trying to deflect the conversation, not to express interest in a bribe. Tyrone Blackburn, a lawyer representing Ms. Hough, said Ms. Hough’s comment was an effort to dissuade the intermediary from thinking she would accept anything.At one point last fall, the suit says, Ms. Hough was contacted by a lawyer for Mr. Petty, who asked her about a recantation letter. In response to threatening calls and her own growing paranoia, the suit says that Ms. Hough moved three times in one year.“I feel like I’m living in secret,” she said in the interview, “like I can’t tell people my exact location.”Joe Coscarelli contributed reporting. Alain Delaqueriere contributed research. More