Adams, John (1947- )

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    Watch Five Highlights From the Met Opera Season

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    There were some great shows at the Metropolitan Opera this season. I went three times to a vividly grim new production of Strauss’s “Salome” and to a revival of his sprawling “Die Frau Ohne Schatten,” and I would have happily returned to either one.But overall the season, which ends on Saturday with a final performance of John Adams’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” had considerably more misses than hits.Lately, the company has given more resources to contemporary work. That’s an admirable endeavor — and a risky one, both financially and creatively. This season the Met presented four recent operas, none of them box office home runs or truly satisfying artistically.“Antony and Cleopatra” had passages of Adams’s enigmatic melancholy, but the piece slogged under reams of dense Shakespearean verse. “Grounded,” by Jeanine Tesori and George Brant, which opened the season in September, starred a potent Emily D’Angelo as a drone operator, but couldn’t rise above a thin score. Osvaldo Golijov and David Henry Hwang’s “Ainadamar,” its music raucously eclectic, struggled to make its dreamlike account of Federico García Lorca’s death into compelling drama.Best of the bunch was “Moby-Dick,” by Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer, a bit bland musically but at least clear and convincingly moody. The tenor Brandon Jovanovich’s world-weary Ahab, stalking the stage with a belted-on peg leg, has stayed with me.So too has the pairing of a volatile Julia Bullock and Gerald Finley, the embodiment of weathered authority, as Adams’s Cleopatra and Antony. Among other strong performances, Ben Bliss and Golda Schultz, the two leads in a revival of a scruffy staging of Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte,” sang with melting poise.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      John Adams’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ Sags at the Metropolitan Opera

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      John Adams’s Shakespeare adaptation has been trimmed since its premiere, but still struggles with setting a flood of dense Elizabethan verse.“Antony and Cleopatra” played a crucial role in the history of the Metropolitan Opera. In 1966, Samuel Barber’s new adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy opened the company’s Lincoln Center home — back when the Met barely did anything from the 20th century, let alone world premieres.Things could hardly be more different now. John Adams’s version of “Antony and Cleopatra” arrived at the Met on Monday at a time when new and recent pieces are frequently on offer, a shock for an art form in which the standard repertory pretty much ended with Puccini. This is the fifth Adams title the company has presented, the kind of sustained commitment to a living composer that would have once been unthinkable.Barber’s “Antony” was a notorious fiasco. Even with Leontyne Price as Cleopatra, the opera was buried beneath a lavish staging, designed to give the theater’s new machinery a workout. Deeply wounded by the blowback, Barber eventually revised the work.Adams, too, has futzed with his “Antony” since its premiere in San Francisco in 2022 and a later production in Barcelona. By now, some 20 minutes have been trimmed from a score that ran nearly three hours at the premiere.But the opera still slumps and sags, for all of the music’s nervously chugging energy and despite an excellent cast led by the eloquently weary Gerald Finley and a bristling Julia Bullock.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Inspirations Behind the Met Opera’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’

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      On the page, John Adams’s opera “Antony and Cleopatra” is a pretty straightforward adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy. But on the stage, it is something else entirely.The production of “Antony and Cleopatra” that opens at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday is by Elkhanah Pulitzer, who turns Shakespeare’s play of torn allegiances, thwarted love and ascendant authoritarianism into a study of how people’s public images are constructed. She imagines a world in which celebrities can be tantamount to gods, the way they long have been treated in Hollywood.With all that in mind, Pulitzer developed an aesthetic universe for her production, with the help of the scenic designer Mimi Lien and the costume designer Constance Hoffman, made of three principal elements: Egypt in 30 B.C., Hollywood in the 1930s and celebrity media culture.Bullock, center, in the Met’s production.Karen AlmondYou can see each of those references in the third scene of the opera. Cleopatra has been left behind by Antony after he returned to Rome, and she is lounging by her pool in Alexandria, described by Pulitzer as “a deco gold world with palm leaves and her in a lovely robe drinking martinis.” Then Cleopatra receives the news of Antony’s marriage to Octavia, which throws her into a rage.Take a closer look at how this moment comes to life through the layers of Pulitzer’s staging.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: The Philharmonic Gives a Master Class in Programming

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      The composer John Adams led the New York Philharmonic in a program of contemporary works that didn’t make a big deal of contemporary music.For a master class in orchestral programming, look to this week’s concerts at the New York Philharmonic.Blink, though, and you might miss them. The program, while the best-crafted of the season so far, opened on Thursday night at David Geffen Hall and repeats only once, on Saturday. Led by John Adams, our greatest living American composer, in his occasional capacity as a conductor, it is a rarity for this orchestra: an evening billed as ordinary yet featuring mostly contemporary work, with the sole “classic” just eight decades old.You could see the concert as parallel halves, each with a brief, spare 20th-century work (Arvo Pärt’s “Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten” and Aaron Copland’s “Quiet City”) followed by a hefty modern portrait of California (Gabriella Smith’s new cello concerto, “Lost Coast,” and Adams’s “City Noir”).On a superficial level, you could also call it an evening of contemporary music. Of the four composers, three are alive: Adams, Pärt and the young, brilliant Smith. But even that doesn’t seem fitting for works that nod to centuries-old chant music and film noir.Regardless, these pieces have been assembled, as well as conducted, with thoughtfulness and care. And as an audience member, all you need to do is sit back and enjoy. This is contemporary sound to dispel clichéd fears of abrasive modernism while never cheaply pandering to mass appeal. It’s just fundamentally good music.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Luca Guadagnino’s Key Musical Moments in “Challengers” and More Films

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      Hear songs from “Challengers,” “Call Me by Your Name” and more.From left: Mike Faist, Zendaya and Josh O’Connor in “Challengers.”Metro Goldwyn Mayer PicturesDear listeners,This week I saw Luca Guadagnino’s much-hyped tennis love-triangle movie “Challengers” — like a lot of people, it seems. And also like a lot of people, including The Times’s chief film critic, Manohla Dargis, I had a good time at the movies. This film “isn’t trying to say anything important, which is a relief,” Dargis writes in her astute review. “It wants to engage and entertain you, and it does that very nicely.” She also characterizes Guadagnino, correctly I think, as a filmmaker adept at “blissfully gliding along the surfaces of life.”Throughout his career, Guadagnino has used music as a crucial tool in creating those slick surfaces. His first film to charm me was the lush 2015 drama “A Bigger Splash,” which features Tilda Swinton playing a rock star and Ralph Fiennes doing an ecstatic and very memorable dance to the Rolling Stones’ “Emotional Rescue.”Dance sequences recur throughout Guadagnino’s filmography, often as opportunities for bodies and desires to collide, and whether it’s a bunch of young people bopping to the Psychedelic Furs in his great 2017 romance, “Call Me by Your Name,” or Zendaya and her friends getting down to Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” during a flashback scene in “Challengers,” the accompanying song choices feel authentic. In both of those scenes, Guadagnino isn’t looking for the most obscure needle drop, but a song that would convincingly get those characters on the dance floor in the particular cultural moment he is creating.“Challengers” got me thinking back to all the great musical moments in Guadagnino’s films, and before I knew it, I was compiling this playlist. It features a few of the aforementioned moments, along with original songs composed for his movies from the likes of Thom Yorke and Sufjan Stevens, and a selection from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s thumping and prismatic “Challengers” score, which I have been listening to all week. I highly recommend it if you would like every moment of your life — washing the dishes, dashing for the subway, writing a newsletter — to feel like a high-stakes tennis match.Also! I’m out next week but will be leaving you in the capable hands of two special guest playlisters. Till then!Not like the other girls,LindsayWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: John Adams’s ‘El Niño’ Arrives at the Met in Lush Glory

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      The opera-oratorio, an alternate Nativity story, featured a flurry of Met debuts, including the director Lileana Blain-Cruz and the conductor Marin Alsop.On Tuesday night, the Metropolitan Opera continued to play a bit of catch-up with the American composer John Adams.As a Minimalist of striking imagination and moral probity, Adams has developed a distinct musical style and point of view that have earned him a firm place in the pantheon of American art music over the past 40 years or so. His operas, though, didn’t make it to the Met stage until 2008, when “Doctor Atomic” had its East Coast premiere. “Nixon in China” followed in 2011 and “The Death of Klinghoffer” in 2014, decades after they were written. These are Adams’s so-called CNN operas, with subject matter ripped from headlines and history books. But “El Niño,” a hybrid opera-oratorio from 2000 that had its Met premiere on Tuesday, is a different animal.Created with the librettist and director Peter Sellars, a frequent collaborator, “El Niño” is an alternative Nativity story, drawing its Spanish, Latin and English texts from the Apocrypha, 20th-century Mexican and South American poetry, a medieval mystery play and, of course, the New Testament. The gospels of James and Pseudo-Matthew, which didn’t make it into the codified Bible, provide some of the most characterful scenes, as when Joseph comes home to find Mary six months pregnant and exclaims irately, “Who did this evil thing in my house and defiled her?”The air of triumph as the curtain came down on Tuesday night owed as much to the piece as to the director Lileana Blain-Cruz’s vibrant and infectiously exultant production. It was almost as inspiring to see as it was to hear Adams’s marvelous work on the Met’s stage.It was an evening of firsts. The trailblazing conductor Marin Alsop made her long overdue Met debut to much applause. The singers Julia Bullock and Davóne Tines and most of the creative team also made their first appearances.Taking a cue from the piece’s Latin flavor, Blain-Cruz trades the Middle Eastern climate of standard biblical depictions for a lushly tropical realm. The set designer Adam Rigg’s storybook framework, with rolling hills and broad-leaved plants that look like cardboard cutouts, achieves grandeur without aloofness. Montana Levi Blanco’s moss-green costumes for the chorus amplify the sense of a thriving natural world, but shocks of hot pink and aquatic blue, particularly in Yi Zhao’s hallucinogenic lighting design for “Shake the Heavens,” recall the iridescent striations of a Mexican serape. The puppet designer James Ortiz’s contributions reach a captivating zenith in the “Christmas Star” finale of Part 1.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lileana Blain-Cruz Directs ‘El Niño’ For Her Met Opera Debut

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      When Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera’s general manger, asked the director Lileana Blain-Cruz what she wanted to stage, she didn’t need any time to think about her answer: “El Niño.”A couple of years ago, she had already been hired to direct Missy Mazzoli’s “Lincoln in the Bardo,” an adaptation of the George Saunders novel that will premiere in the 2026-27 season, but Gelb was curious about what else she might be interested in.Long a fan of John Adams and his collaborations with the director-librettist Peter Sellars, Blain-Cruz particularly loved their 2000 oratorio “El Niño,” a blending of the Nativity story with ancient and modern texts, like poetry by Rosario Castellanos and Gabriela Mistral.“It makes you weep, and you don’t expect it,” Blain-Cruz said of the piece. “It shook me and stayed in my imagination for a while after I heard it, but I didn’t know when I would have a chance to make it happen onstage myself.”Gelb quickly said yes. Now, Blain-Cruz’s production of “El Niño” will premiere at the Met on Tuesday, bringing with it the return of the brilliant mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges and the long-awaited house debuts of Julia Bullock, Davóne Tines and the conductor Marin Alsop.Davóne Tines, center, makes his Met debut in “El Niño. Costumes are by Montana Levi Blanco. Lila Barth for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Pathbreaking Singer Arrives at the Met, With Pearls and Tattoos

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      Dav­óne Tines, who stars in the oratorio “El Niño,” is challenging traditions in classical music and using art to confront social problems.The bass-baritone Dav­óne Tines, wearing Dr. Martens boots, a sleeveless black shirt and six vintage pearl rings, stood on a rehearsal stage at the Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan the other day and began to sing.“My soul’s above the sea and whistling a dream,” he sang, a passage from the Nativity oratorio “El Niño” by John Adams, in which Tines makes his Met debut this month. “Tell the shepherds the wind is saddling its horse.”Tines, 37, known for his raw intensity and thundering voice, has quickly become one of classical music’s brightest stars. He has won acclaim for performances of Bach, Handel and Stravinsky, and he has helped champion new music, originating roles in operas like Adams’s “Girls of the Golden West” and Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.”Tines has also used his art to confront social problems, including racism and police brutality. In 2018, he was a creator of and starred in “The Black Clown,” a searing rumination on Black history and identity inspired by a Langston Hughes poem. In 2020, he released a music video after the police killing of Breonna Taylor, calling for empathy and action.During a rehearsal break at the Met, he described his art as cathartic, saying his aim was to “pick apart the complicated, contentious existence that is knit into the American landscape.”“It’s a blessing to be a performing artist because you get an explicit place to put your feelings,” he said. “It’s the blessing of having a channel.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jaap van Zweden Bids Farewell, and Other Classical Highlights

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      The Philharmonic’s maestro ends his tenure, Igor Levit comes to Carnegie Hall, and the Metropolitan Opera takes a chance on reviving two recent hits.The New York Philharmonic’s spring gala is not usually of much musical interest. It tends toward mild fare — just enough to keep the donors happy before dinner and dancing.But this year, the playing will draw closer attention. The gala, on April 24, features the only appearance this season by Gustavo Dudamel, the Philharmonic’s next music director. He will take part in the celebration of the orchestra’s education programs, including its signature Young People’s Concerts, which are turning 100.The Philharmonic has been careful not to have its Dudamel-led future step too much on its less starry present. This season also brings the final months of Jaap van Zweden’s brief tenure as music director, which will begin on his favored ground: the classics.A mid-March program of Mozart’s elegant Piano Concerto No. 17 (with Conrad Tao as soloist) and Beethoven’s deathless Fifth Symphony is such a sure audience pleaser that the Philharmonic is confidently giving it four performances, rather than the usual three.Van Zweden led the orchestra in Beethoven’s Fifth in October 2015, a few months before he got the music director job. I wrote then that “conducting this imaginative and playing this varied don’t appear at Geffen Hall every week.” His meticulousness didn’t come off as mannered, as it sometimes does. The inner two movements felt especially inventive, and I’ll be listening for whether the whole thing has the polish and momentum that have tended to elude the orchestra recently.A few days later, van Zweden will turn his attention to the new, as the Philharmonic plays fresh pieces by Tan Dun — a concerto for the principal trombonist, Joseph Alessi, called “Three Muses in Video Game” — and Joel Thompson.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More