Blanchard, Terence

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    ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones’ Review: A Met Milestone Returns

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    After making history as the Metropolitan Opera’s first work by a Black composer, Terence Blanchard’s “Fire” is back — with its showstopping step dance.The Metropolitan Opera premiere of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” on Sept. 27, 2021, was a momentous event. Doubly so: “Fire” was the company’s first staged opera after an 18-month pandemic closure, and it was, after 138 years, its first work by a Black composer.The opera, with a score by Terence Blanchard and a libretto by Kasi Lemmons, took on some of the grandeur and excitement of that moment. The raucous fraternity step dance that opens the third act brought down the house.That step dance still stopped the show on Monday evening, when “Fire” returned to the Met. Two and a half years later, the work is a test case. The company has sharply increased its diet of contemporary operas — some of which, including “Fire,” sold very well as new productions. But how will these operas perform when they’re brought back, without the same promotional push?On Monday, at least, the audience seemed robust and, as it was during the initial run, notably diverse. And “Fire” remains a heartfelt piece, emanating a touching if vague sadness. But without the exhilarating sense of occasion it had at its Met premiere, the opera’s shortcomings were clearer.Based on the New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow’s memoir of his turbulent upbringing in Louisiana, “Fire” is a progression of episodes — some upbeat, some forlorn. It takes the form of a search: The lonely Charles, his psyche wounded as a child by his cousin’s sexual abuse and his mother’s real but distracted love, looks for belonging and healing.He tries church, fraternity membership, his siblings, a woman, another woman, but none offer what he’s seeking; all want him to be different than he is. Only after a hasty, therapy-speak conclusion in the final minutes, presided over by an ethereal choir and the voice of his younger self, can he finally accept himself and sing, “Now my life begins.”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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      Terence Blanchard and Anthony Davis in Close-Up at Jazz Concerts

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      Terence Blanchard and Anthony Davis, recent pioneers at the Metropolitan Opera, returned to earlier works in a pair of performances over the weekend.In the musical “Jelly’s Last Jam,” which just had an acclaimed revival in the New York City Center Encores! series, Jelly Roll Morton, a pianist and composer who claims he invented jazz, pays for his hubris. But while the show occasionally excoriates him, its fictionalized tale revels in his real-world achievements.On Saturday, during the final weekend of the run, Nicholas Christopher summoned wave after wave of electricity as Morton — not only during the song and dance numbers, but also during scenes in which he managed to create an affecting portrait of a figure who needed to hustle to receive his due credit.Morton’s biography resonated in two other concerts presented in New York on Friday and Saturday. These performances likewise featured the music of composers who have cut significant profiles in jazz, but with a privilege never afforded to Morton: Their works have made it to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, the largest performing arts institution in the United States.Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” was the first opera by a Black composer to be presented by the Met, where it will be revived in April. At Jazz at Lincoln Center on Friday, he began a two-night retrospective with a program that delved into his early experiences playing with Art Blakey as well as his later work scoring films for Spike Lee.Then, at the NYU Skirball on Saturday, some early, sizzling early chamber music by Anthony Davis — whose opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” arrived at the Met last fall — received a rare airing from the International Contemporary Ensemble in a performance that also featured Davis playing some ferociously elegant solo piano.With their Met premieres, Blanchard and Davis have attained a status for Black jazz artists that would have made Morton, an opera lover, envious. But as these concerts demonstrated, there is much more in each composer’s catalog for audiences to mine.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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      North Carolina Radio Station Won’t Ban Met Opera Broadcasts After All

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      The station, which had called the Met’s newer operas unsuitable because of their “difficult music” and “adult themes and harsh language,” reversed course.The music director of a nonprofit North Carolina classical radio station said on Thursday that the station would reverse course and air several contemporary operas being performed by the Metropolitan Opera this season that the station had originally said were unsuitable for broadcast, citing their “adult themes and harsh language.”“It was a very hard decision,” Emily Moss, the music director of WCPE, a nonprofit station based in Wake Forest, said in an interview. “It’s been a hard day and a hard week.”The reversal came after the station faced widespread criticism.The Met, the nation’s leading opera company, has been staging more contemporary work in recent seasons as part of a push to attract new and more diverse audiences; the company has found that these newer works draw more first-time ticket buyers than the classics do.But Deborah S. Proctor, the general manager of WCPE, took issue with new works planned for the current season in a survey she sent to listeners on Aug. 31.“This coming season, the Metropolitan Opera has chosen several operas which are written in a nonclassical music style, have adult themes and language, and are in English,” she wrote. “I feel they aren’t suitable for broadcast on our station.”In the survey, Proctor cited her problems with several of the Met’s offerings this season.She described the violence in Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking,” the death row opera that opened the season. She cited the “non-Biblical” sources of the libretto of John Adams’s “El Niño,” and the suicidal themes in Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” which is based on the Michael Cunningham novel and the Oscar-winning film it inspired. She wrote that “Florencia en el Amazona,” by the Mexican composer Daniel Catán, was “simply outside of the bounds of our musical format guidelines.” And she said that both Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” and Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” contain “offensive language plainly audible to everyone.”“We want parents to know that they can leave our station playing for their children because our broadcasts are without mature themes or foul language,” she wrote in the letter. “We must maintain the trust of listeners.”The station decided last season not to broadcast Blanchard’s “Champion.”The Met, which has said it follows Federal Communications Commission guidelines regarding profanity and language, said it was happy with the change of course. “We’re pleased that opera fans in North Carolina will be able to hear all 27 of our scheduled broadcasts this season,” the Met said in a statement.The station’s letter, and the survey attached to it, received scant attention before reaching social media last week. Rhiannon Giddens, a North Carolina native who shared the Pulitzer Prize this year with Michael Abels for their opera “Omar,” wrote an open letter voicing her displeasure over the station’s stance and noted that challenging adult themes are staples of many of the most popular operas of the past.“The Met broadcasts are the only way many people get to hear the productions, which are situated in New York and priced way out of many people’s budgets,” Giddens wrote. “Radio is supposed to be egalitarian and an equalizer, not used as a weapon, as you are doing.”The station reversed course after receiving feedback from the public and holding internal conversations.“We really value being safe for a general audience, especially children,” Moss said in the interview. “But one of our core values is that we are a refuge from the political and troubles of the world and we are returning to that value.” More

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      Terence Blanchard, Pushing Jazz Forward From a New Perch

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      The trumpeter and composer follows the premiere of two Met operas with an appointment as executive artistic director of SFJazz in San Francisco and a Jazz Masters honor.Two big announcements came down recently about the trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard — both monumental, neither one a surprise.In June, the National Endowment for the Arts announced that Blanchard, 61, would receive a 2024 Jazz Masters fellowship, the highest lifetime-achievement honor available to a United States-based improviser.Then a month later, as if a reminder that this lifetime still has a few major chapters ahead, the nonprofit organization and performance center SFJazz named Blanchard its executive artistic director. Hardly any other musician has so solid a grasp on the scope of what’s going on in jazz today — and no institution is as committed to reflecting, even goading, its growth.A six-time Grammy winner, Blanchard possesses one of the most commanding and slippery trumpet styles in jazz, and for almost a decade he has led one of its most reliable ensembles, the E-Collective, full of musicians a couple of decades his junior. He has written and recorded over 40 film scores, including for most of Spike Lee’s movies. Despite being a conservatory dropout himself, he has become a leading educator, helping shape programs at U.C.L.A., the University of Miami and the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz. And in recent years, he has made headlines for the back-to-back Met premieres of his two operas, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and “Champion.”All of which makes for relevant job training for the new role. “The thing that I’ve always loved about SFJazz is that they don’t treat the music like it’s a fossil,” Blanchard said in a phone interview. “It’s a living, breathing, ongoing thing. And they respect young artists who are bringing something different to the table.”Blanchard is taking the reins directly from SFJazz’s founder, Randall Kline, who has run the organization since it started in 1982, always with a passion for what’s next. “I remember thinking how much I love that dude,” Blanchard said. “He was just a serious music lover who happened to be a promoter.”Blanchard onstage at the SFJazz Gala in June 2022.Drew Altizer PhotographySFJazz began as a jazz festival and traveling presenter around San Francisco. It convened a house ensemble of all-star musicians, the SFJazz Collective, in 2004, and opened the $64 million, state-of-the-art SFJazz Center in 2013. This week, Blanchard and Kline will both be at the kickoff for the center’s 2023-24 season, the last booked by Kline.SFJazz’s board chair, Denise Young, who led the search for Kline’s replacement, said Blanchard stood out because he “had a vision that matched what we believed was important to this music in these times.”Blanchard will relish the chance to pick up on one of Kline’s pet obsessions: bringing new technologies to the SFJazz stage. And as a musician who consistently uses his platform to speak about social issues — recording music with Cornel West, dedicating an album to the memory of Eric Garner, putting narratives of Black queer life into song — he’s also eager to confront questions of unequal access in a city where inequality continues to balloon.He’d like to keep SFJazz high-tech, but low-barrier when it comes to entry. To promote “outreach into the community,” he said, he envisions a matinee concert program directed at students in local high schools, and a series of traveling shows that might bring SFJazz-level talent into some of the Bay Area’s more neglected neighborhoods.Last week Blanchard stole an hour for an interview from his new office there. The building buzzed around him as the team prepared for the season launch, and by the end of the call an assistant was hovering, waiting to whisk him away to a donor meeting.Born and raised in New Orleans, Blanchard broke out on the New York scene in the early 1980s — the so-called Young Lions era, when many were longing for a return to the halcyon sounds of midcentury jazz. In 1982, he joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, taking over the trumpet chair from Wynton Marsalis, his childhood friend. Then he followed Marsalis onto the roster of Columbia Records, where he recorded a series of straight-ahead albums with a quintet he and Donald Harrison led.While Marsalis doubled down on Neo-Classicism, founding and directing Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York as a beacon of tradition, Blanchard has veered toward the cutting edge. With his E-Collective, he has emulated Blakey in one crucial way: His side-musicians are all significantly younger. On other fronts, Blakey wouldn’t recognize much of that quintet’s tool kit: the electronic effects, the hip-hop backbeats, the swatches of distorted guitar and electric bass.So there’s something poetic about seeing Blanchard — the Young Lion-turned-innovator — land at SFJazz, which has long been positioned as a kind of left-coast alternative to Marsalis’s JALC. “The idea was eclecticism: Don’t fly the flag of one thing,” Kline said in an interview. “San Francisco at the time had all these amazing scenes going: There was an Asian American jazz scene, there was this kind of trad-jazz scene, there was this hard-core avant-garde thing going, there was Brazilian music and Afro Cuban music.”To the extent that SFJazz has developed a winning formula, Kline said, “it’s been a formula around being open.”That conviction came in handy when Blanchard was invited to SFJazz in the mid-2010s for a series of artist residencies. He had recently composed “Champion,” which tells the tragic story of the world champion boxer Emile Griffith, and an opera company in San Francisco was hoping to stage it. The center had never done an opera before, and sure, this wasn’t exactly “jazz,” but it was just the kind of ambitious project that the center was built to handle.“The thing that I’ve always loved about SFJazz is that they don’t treat the music like it’s a fossil,” Blanchard said. “It’s a living, breathing, ongoing thing. And they respect young artists who are bringing something different to the table.”Ike Edeani for The New York Times“It fit so perfectly with our programming aesthetic, and also getting creative around the space,” Kline said. “It was just as good as it gets.”When Blanchard had first been approached about an opera commission in the early 2010s, he was thrilled. His father had sung opera, and he had grown up hearing Puccini and Verdi in the house, along with the sounds of jazz and Black popular music. But he wasn’t sure where to begin.So he did what he’d done at so many inflection points throughout his career: He went to his teacher, Roger Dickerson, a now 89-year-old composer and pianist and a New Orleans music giant in his own right, who had helped Blanchard write his first large-scale compositions.“He told me, ‘Stop thinking about writing an opera, just tell a story,’” Blanchard remembered. “That was extremely helpful for me, because then I wasn’t trying to live up to something.”“Tell your story” is, of course, a catchphrase among jazz musicians. But partly thanks to his work with Dickerson, Blanchard has developed a special aptitude for using music to narrate ideas and convictions — which swiftly moves listeners past any fixation on genre. Dickerson also thinks of it as a reminder that complexity, nuance and misdirection don’t have to dilute narrative drive — or even relatability — but can in fact enhance a story line.“He could pick up on little things that I would show him, and very quickly discover the inside meaning of it. That is, make it his own,” Dickerson said in an interview, remembering Blanchard’s interpretive skills even at age 16. That ideal — learn the fundamentals, and then make something undeniably yours — is something that Blanchard has passed on to his own students.Ambrose Akinmusire, who studied with Blanchard in the 2000s, remembered him stopping class whenever he heard students making direct references to old jazz tropes. “We don’t do that here,” he recalled him saying.On the flip side, Blanchard remembers having to convince the cast of “Fire” that they should draw upon their whole musical lexicon. “I’m listening to them warm up, and I’m realizing a lot of those singers grew up in the church, sang gospel, some of them were jazz singers — but they were all taught to throw that away when you sing opera,” he said.“I said, ‘Listen man, bring all of that back to your performance. This is a current story, so hearing gospel in the middle of this is no problem. Hearing you sing a blues phrase, because you’re a jazz musician, is no problem. And, man, I can’t tell you the type of performances we got out of people.” More

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      Putting the Brutality of a Prize Fight on the Met Opera Stage

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      Terence Blanchard’s “Champion,” about the fighter Emile Griffith, is the rare opera to engage with sports. A boxing consultant helped keep it gritty.Emile Griffith fought Benny Paret on March 24, 1962, in a highly anticipated welterweight championship bout at Madison Square Garden.In the 12th round, Griffith knocked Paret into the ropes and pounded him with more than a dozen unanswered blows. As The New York Times put it the next day, “The only reason Paret still was on his feet was that Griffith’s pile-driving fists were keeping him there, pinned against the post.”Paret never regained consciousness and died 10 days later. The fight and its terrible aftermath were high drama. One might even call the story operatic.There has been little overlap between the high drama of sports and the high drama of opera, beyond the bullfighting in “Carmen” or perhaps that odd singing competition in “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.” But in telling Griffith’s story, Terence Blanchard and Michael Cristofer’s 2013 opera “Champion,” which opened earlier this month at the Metropolitan Opera and streams live in movie theaters on Saturday, brings together the brutality of boxing with the soaring passions of opera.It helps that “Champion” is not just a tale of boxing, but also of Griffith’s life as a closeted gay man, an immigrant with a tough childhood and complicated relationship with his mother, and later an old age troubled by dementia and regret.But boxing is the catalyst for the story. The 1962 bout was the third between Griffith and Paret, who had split their first two fights. (Those earlier contests are omitted from the opera, keeping the focus on the fateful third.)Ryan Speedo Green, center, as Griffith after winning the fight against Paret (Eric Greene) in “Champion.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt was a time when big boxing matches were big news. Pre-fight hype was everywhere, with all aspects of the fighters’ preparations scrutinized. The Times marveled at Griffith’s “$130 a day suite with two television sets and a closet the size of a Y.M.C.A. room” in Monticello, N.Y., as well as the “turtleneck sweaters, seal coats and Ottoman club chairs” that surrounded the ring as he sparred.The terrible aftermath of the fight brought even more intense coverage. News of Paret’s serious condition made the front page of The Times, days after the fight, with the headline “Paret, Hurt in Ring, Given Little Chance.”At the time, the biggest controversy was the referee’s delay in stopping the contest. “Many in the crowd of 7,500 were begging” the referee to intervene, The Times reported. The referee, Ruby Goldstein, was later exonerated by the State Athletic Commission.But there was more to the story. Though Griffith said he was “sorry it happened,” he added, “You know, he called me bad names during the weigh-in” and during the fight, “He did it again, and I was burning mad.”“Bad names” was how Griffith, The Times and other newspapers described Paret’s taunts. The true nature of those words was not widely known at the time. But in the mid-2000s Griffith revealed the full story. Paret had called Griffith “maricón,” a Spanish slur for a gay man. Griffith was secretly bisexual.The opera’s second act deals with the fallout from the fatal punches, and Griffith’s later life, including a brutal beating he received outside a gay bar. Griffith died in 2013 at 75.The Met worked hard to get the details and the atmosphere of a prize fight right: the ring announcer (who acts here as a Greek chorus of sorts), the sound of the bell, the trophies and championship belts, a “ring girl” signaling the changing of the rounds and the macho posturing of the weigh-in. (The conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin emerges in the pit for the second act in a boxer’s hooded robe.)Helping to make it look accurate was Michael Bentt, a former professional world champion who served as the opera’s boxing consultant. “I’m not an expert on opera,” he said. “But I’m an expert on rhythm. And boxing is rhythm.”Bentt told the production team that there should be no stool in the ring before the first round, only between later rounds. And he thought that the boxing mitts, used by a trainer to block a fighter’s punches, looked too clean. “I said: ‘Make them look gritty. Rub them on the concrete to get them nasty looking.’ There’s nothing clean about the world of boxing.”The Met’s fight director, Chris Dumont, is used to working out sword fights. But for “Champion,” he had to choreograph fisticuffs and make them look convincing without anyone getting hurt.Champion. Griffith after winning the middleweight title in 1966.Larry Morris/The New York Times“For the body shots, they might make some contact with each other,” he said. “But you don’t want someone to get hit in the face. Even if it’s light, it won’t feel too good.”There are several ways to depict boxing: One is to simulate it as closely as possible, as some boxing movies do, by showing powerful punching and splattering blood. A more apt choice for the stage is stylization.“Since they have to sing, actually boxing through those scenes would wind them,” Dumont said of Ryan Speedo Green, who portrays the younger Griffith, and Eric Greene, who plays Paret. Most of the time, when a blow lands, the singers freeze, as if in a snapshot. Some parts are performed in slow motion.The show reaches its sporting peak with the re-creation of the 1962 fight, which ends the first act. The tension and anticipation operagoers may feel as the ring appears onstage is not all that different from the mood among fight fans or sportswriters in the moments before a big bout. All sports have some atmosphere of pregame expectation. But when the sport involves two combatants trying to hurt each other with repeated blows to the head, there is an added frisson of fear, or even dread.In “Champion,” Griffith goes down in the sixth round, and the shouts of a boisterous onstage crowd add to the tension. Then comes the fatal moment.Although the boxers’ blows onstage do not land, that does little to temper the grim moment when a flurry of unanswered shots floor Paret. “I watched the actual fight and tried to keep it as real as possible,” Dumont said. “The 17 blows are fairly close to what it was, in real time. We are not actually landing blows, but moving fast enough so the audience is tricked. It moves back to slow motion as he is falling to the mat.”And in the orchestra pit, the snare drummer looks up at the stage. Each time a blow falls, he raps a synced snare shot.A night at the opera can bring murder or war or bloodshed. But the historically and sportingly accurate depiction of a prize fight that ended with a man’s death has an unsettling quality all its own. As Goldstein, the referee, testified: “It’s the type of sport it is. Death is a tragedy that occasionally will happen.” Or, as Bentt said of “Champion,” “We can’t tiptoe around that it’s violence.” More

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      ‘Hey, Mr. Living Composer’: ‘Champion’ Takes Shape at the Met

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      Terence Blanchard has been in rehearsals, with pencil and paper at the ready, as he tailors his opera ahead of its New York premiere.A basement rehearsal room at the Metropolitan Opera was so packed recently that it began to resemble a sweltering boxing gym.In one corner, members of the Met’s music staff were grouped together like judges tallying punches as they looked down at their scores. Nearby, a drummer and pianist locked into a syncopated groove, following the beat of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who was conducting while seated on an elevated platform.A phalanx of dancers rushed in to evoke an intense, collective workout regimen filled with balletic grace and pugilistic intensity. Those moves were choreographed by Camille A. Brown, who was close by, keeping an eye on every acrobatic feint. A former World Boxing Organization heavyweight champion paced the room, offering exhortations and encouragement.Supervising all this was the composer and trumpeter Terence Blanchard. He watched as his first opera, “Champion,” took shape ahead of its Met debut on Monday. (A Live in HD simulcast is planned for April 29.)After premiering at Opera Theater of St. Louis in 2013, “Champion” has played at the Washington National Opera‌ ‌and, scaled to a chamber-size orchestration, at SFJazz in San Francisco. But when this work — modeled on the life of the boxer Emile Griffith, and following Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which arrived triumphantly at the Met in 2021 — opens in New York this week, it will be thoroughly revised and expanded to embody the composer’s recent thoughts about opera, as a form. To wit: in this latest version of “Champion” there are not only new arias (and new lines for supporting characters); what will be heard in New York this season also reflects Blanchard’s latest work when it comes to orchestral complexity and vocal elegance.Performers in “Champion” evoke the world of boxing in choreography by Camille A. Brown.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesBlanchard has been in “Champion” rehearsals, at the ready to revise his score as needed.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesThe opera tells the life story of Emile Griffith, who is depicted in two roles sung by Ryan Speedo Green and Eric Owens.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesFor example, during the rehearsal last month, the soprano Latonia Moore, as Griffith’s mother, was singing a rhythmically bumptious riff from the first act when she and Blanchard noticed that the phrase, as written, wasn’t sitting in the most powerful part of her range. “Hey, Mr. Living Composer,” she called out, in a teasing tone. “Could you rewrite this for me?”Blanchard got to work immediately, composing a new vocal part on a blank page of staff paper: a melodic line that could work atop the existing orchestral harmony. He took a photograph of the revision before passing it along.“I couldn’t believe that he just sat there right in the room and wrote it,” Moore said later. “I expected he would come in with it a few days later, OK? It was like, ‘No, here it is.’ Oh my God! And it was really good.”In an interview after a rehearsal, Blanchard explained how his flexibility — unusual in the world of opera, in which scores, like schedules, are set far in advance — was the result of some early, on-the-job training in his career as a jazz performer.“Art Blakey taught me years ago: The easiest thing to do is to write something nobody can play,” Blanchard recalled. “The magic comes in not just through the melody and the harmony, but who’s playing it.”“You can see she has a powerful voice,” he said of Moore. To him, the calculation was simple: He wanted to feature that voice in the strongest possible way. “So that’s what it’s gonna be changed to.”Blanchard, right, with Joshua Balan, a cast member.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesMoore’s role, as that of Griffith’s manipulative and sometimes absent mother, is hardly the only one to be subjected to extensive revisions. The bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green — a standout in “Fire” and the star of “Champion” — said that when he first discussed this opera with Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, he felt that the role was a touch high for him.Gelb told him, “Speedo, That’s the beauty of having a living composer: Things can change,” Green recalled.“CHAMPION,” WITH A LIBRETTO BY MICHAEL CRISTOFER, TELLS Griffith’s tabloid-ready life story. Green sings Young Emile, while the veteran bass-baritone Eric Owens is cast as Old Emile, who lives in a nursing home on Long Island in the early 2000s. The boxer leaves the Virgin Islands for New York, then works in a hat factory before becoming a welterweight champ in the 1960s. In the ring with Benny Paret, Griffith unintentionally delivers blows that prove to be fatal, leaving Griffith anguished for years.“There’s this dream state that Emile is in,” Blanchard said, “because he’s dealing with dementia. There’s a combination of that harmony and that voicing, versus when it’s younger Emile. And chords moving; it goes back and forth. But it’s all story-driven, and it’s story-driven inside my language that I grew up listening to, as a jazz musician.”There is another thread in the opera, of Griffith’s journey from a straight-coded world to one of queerness. As a young man, in New York, he is drawn to gay bars and men while also excelling in the “man’s world” of boxing. The sports universe either doesn’t want to hear about queerness, or openly derides him for his sexual orientation.Just as Griffith navigates dramatic contrasts, so too does Blanchard’s score.The composer likes to talk about his love for Puccini — and you can hear some of that in Young Emile’s Act I aria “What Makes a Man a Man?” But in the boxing sequences, there’s a driving sense of muscular, post-bop jazz tumult. (As in “Fire,” the drummer Jeff Watts, known as Tain, leads a jazz combo embedded within the orchestra.) And there are some moments in which the fusion is well blended enough that no stylistic input seems to have the upper hand.Blanchard said that from his first visits to New York, starting in the spring of 1980, he took in a wide range of music. Although he was associated with traditionalist-minded players of New Orleans, he made a point of hearing the trio Air, which included the cutting-edge music of composer Henry Threadgill.“People were like, ‘Why are you going to that?’” Blanchard said. “And I’m like: ‘Bruh, because I’m trying to figure out what fits for me. I want to experience it all. Why limit myself, because you think I shouldn’t like this? Let me find out for myself.’”Those experiences pay off in “Champion.” In one of the early scenes at a gay bar, Blanchard writes sumptuous orchestral music — a cousin of sorts to the bluesy music heard in a club that figures in the story of “Fire,” but with the string section, not the jazz combo, taking center stage during the bacchanal. “It’s the sexiest sound those Met strings will ever make,” Moore said after a rehearsal. “You could see that they were feeling it!”In an interview, Blanchard tipped his hat to an early teacher, the composer Roger Dickerson, who used timbres and modes from American jazz when writing classical works like the New Orleans Concerto. (The pianist, composer and critic Ethan Iverson recently lavished praise on that rarely heard piece, describing its finale as “boogie-woogie gone surreal, the kind of thing Louis Andriessen tried to write over and over again, but better.”)When Blanchard started working with classical musicians, as he has done in his long partnership with Spike Lee as the composer of his soundtracks — Dickerson informed him that he had a unique opportunity, and a responsibility.“‘You have to keep in mind, the library of music for orchestral music has been limited,’” Blanchard recalled his teacher as saying. “‘There needs to be an expansion of it, through jazz — and maybe you’re the person to do that.’ He put that in my mind way back when.”Blanchard’s score for “Champion” synthesizes the varied musical genres he has taken in during his career as a composer and performer.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesBlanchard, who in 2021 became the first Black composer to have his work staged at the Met, has moved opera forward in exactly that way with his latest revisions to “Champion,” Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, said.Even as the conductor has offered small suggestions in rehearsals — like proposing a bit of bowed, marcato playing for the strings instead of pizzicato that could get lost in the Met’s grand auditorium — he has also deferred to Blanchard, who he said has been “much more hands on” about fine-tuning the orchestration.“I think he’s using the orchestra not to amplify his thoughts,” Nézet-Séguin said. “It’s more: How can I use it as a vehicle, the same way I would use a band? It doesn’t replace anything; it becomes its own thing.”Looking up at the stage after a recent run-through of “Champion,” Nézet-Séguin added of Blanchard, with a touch of pride in the musicians: “I’m pretty sure that in his next ventures — whether it’s film music, or whatever it is — he’s going to miss all that.” More

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      Classical Music to See and Hear in Spring 2023

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      This spring, Gustavo Dudamel, the Philharmonic’s next music director, conducts the big deal symphony, the Met Opera stages Terence Blanchard’s “Champion”; and in Chicago, Riccardo Muti says farewell.It was a hint about as subtle as a siren when the New York Philharmonic announced its current season a year ago: Gustavo Dudamel, the superstar conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, would be coming to New York as a guest in May 2023 to lead Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.One of the repertory’s most sprawling and profound works, Mahler’s Ninth has been played by the Philharmonic almost exclusively under the batons of its music directors. It’s not an assignment the orchestra gives rising hotshots or conductors it sees once a decade. It’s the kind of musically knotty, deeply emotional score you want led by the artists closest to you.That was just one of many suggestions that Dudamel, 42, would, before too long, join the ranks of New York music directors, a group that has included eminences like Mahler, Toscanini, Bernstein and Boulez. And so it came to pass: Earlier this month, the Philharmonic said that he would succeed Jaap van Zweden in the position, for a five-year term beginning — because of classical music’s oddly glacial planning cycles — in the 2026-27 season.But before all that comes Mahler’s Ninth, which Dudamel has convincingly, with tenderness and naturally unfolding intensity, recorded with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The three New York performances, May 19-21, were already sure to be well attended, given the famous conductor and the beloved piece. Now, since the concerts will be Dudamel’s first appearances on the Philharmonic’s podium since the announcement, these will be some of the hottest tickets in town this spring.When Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” opened the Metropolitan Opera’s 2021–22 season, in a run that sold out several performances, it was a landmark: the first time the company had put on the work of a Black composer. Now Blanchard’s earlier opera, “Champion,” from 2013, is coming to the house, beginning April 10.As in “Fire,” themes of identity, sexuality and the negotiation of traumatic memories dominate. “Champion” tells the true story of the closeted gay boxer Emile Griffith, who knocked out his opponent, Benny Paret, during a 1962 title bout; Paret never recovered consciousness and died 10 days later. At the Met, two bass-baritones share the role of Griffith: Ryan Speedo Green plays him as a young athlete in his prime, and Eric Owens, as an aging man looking back on his complicated past.A scene from Terence Blanchard’s “Champion,” in James Robinson’s production at Opera Theater of Saint Louis.Ken Howard/Opera Theatre of Saint LouisIn the wake of the box-office success of “Fire,” the Met — which has been struggling with ticket sales and said in December that it would withdraw $30 million from its endowment to cover costs — rushed “Champion” into production, part of a coming burst of contemporary operas aimed at broadening the audience. The staging reunites members of the team that helped make “Fire” vivid: the director James Robinson, the choreographer Camille A. Brown — the step dance routine that she conceived for “Fire” stopped the show — and the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Three veterans, Latonia Moore, Stephanie Blythe and Paul Groves, round out the cast.It is unusual for the Met (or any company) to unveil two new productions of Mozart operas back to back. And even rarer for both to be led by one conductor: in this case, Nathalie Stutzmann, a former mezzo-soprano turned maestro making her Met debut on the podium for “Don Giovanni” and “Die Zauberflöte.”Replacing a dreary, unilluminating Michael Grandage production on May 5, the new “Giovanni” is an import from the Paris Opera, where the much-discussed Dutch director Ivo van Hove and his colleagues put onstage what Joshua Barone described in The New York Times as “a de Chirico-like set populated by handsomely dressed people in a state of sexy desperation.” (It can hardly help but be an improvement on the Grandage.)Stutzmann, who started at the Atlanta Symphony this season — the only female music director leading one of the 25 largest American orchestras — conducts a promising cast, including Peter Mattei, a star in the title role at the Met for the past 20 years, as well as Adam Plachetka, Federica Lombardi, Ana María Martínez, Ying Fang and Ben Bliss.The situation with “Die Zauberflöte,” opening on May 19, is slightly complicated. The Met is planning to retain its existing production — which the director Julie Taymor and the designer George Tsypin filled with plexiglass and fanciful puppets — in its abridged, English-language, family-friendly form as “The Magic Flute,” now a holiday-season tradition.Performed in full and in German, the new-to-the-company “Die Zauberflöte,” a much-traveled staging directed by Simon McBurney, has the orchestra spilling over onto risers placed onstage and contemporary-style costumes. Stutzmann’s cast here includes Erin Morley, Lawrence Brownlee, Thomas Oliemans, Kathryn Lewek and Stephen Milling.Dudamel’s appointment is perhaps the biggest news in music this season: a new beginning. But the other crucial conductor move in America this spring signals the end of an era.Riccardo Muti is bringing his 13 years leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to a close in June.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesAt 81, Riccardo Muti — a fixture on the country’s major podiums since the 1970s and the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra during the ’80s — is bringing to a close a 13-year tenure at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with performances of Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis,” June 23-25.Despite being an experienced Beethoven interpreter and a specialist in huge choral works, Muti stayed away from the notoriously thorny “Missa Solemnis” for decades, until he led it — with radiant dignity and grandeur — at the Salzburg Festival in 2021.“I always felt too small,” he said in an interview last year on Chicago radio, “never I felt ready to perform this huge monument, because it’s so deep, so vast.” Muti and other great conductors are not known for this kind of humility or patience, so these performances will be the fruit of uncommonly many years of study and thought.Given that the Chicago Symphony has not yet appointed his replacement, Muti will remain a crucial presence next season, and possibly beyond. But this “Missa Solemnis” — with the chorus coached by a distinguished guest, Donald Palumbo, the chorus master at the Met — is nevertheless sure to be a love fest between a superb orchestra and a conductor it has revered. More

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      How ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones’ Brought Step to the Met

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      The opera’s choreographer and co-director, Camille A. Brown, talks about the legacy of the African diaspora and influence of “School Daze” in her dances.Camille A. Brown had a lot of catching up to do. She wasn’t part of the original creative team behind Terence Blanchard’s opera “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” when it was presented in 2019 in St. Louis. But at the Metropolitan Opera, where the production runs through Saturday — the first time a work by a Black composer has been presented there in its 138-year history — her touch is palpable.Clearly, she caught up. And she’s making history, too: Brown, who shares directorial duties with James Robinson, is the first Black artist to direct a Met production. She is also the opera’s choreographer, and as such has brought social dance — step, the percussive form popular at historically Black colleges and universities (H.B.C.U.) — to the Met stage.Opening Act III is a step number that stops the show in its tracks. On opening night, the dancers held their final pose, one foot crossed over the other as sweat poured down their faces. Frozen in a line facing the audience, they tried to control their breathing as the audience clapped and roared. And clapped and roared some more. It lasted for more than a minute, and it was spectacular.When was the last time a dance stopped an opera in its tracks? Brown, a Tony-nominated dance-maker who choreographed “Porgy and Bess” under Robinson’s direction at the Met, has never experienced anything like it.Brown at opening night last month.Krista Schlueter for The New York Times“I was just thrilled,” she said. “I was thrilled for the moment. I was thrilled for social dance. I was thrilled for the dancers onstage that had been working for six weeks to put this show together.”She added: “I feel like the audience — to me — was clapping for several reasons. It was about the dance, but it was about what it meant to see that on the stage. And legacy.”Step and its use of the body as a percussive instrument speaks to the Black experience: When their drums were taken away, enslaved people created rhythm with their bodies. In the opera, step enters the picture when the protagonist, Charles (Will Liverman), is a college student and pledges at the fraternity Kappa Alpha Psi. He also continues to grapple with the experience of having been molested by his older cousin when he was a young boy, seen in flashbacks. (The opera is based on the 2014 memoir by The New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow.)While Act I contains no actual dance, the characters roam the stage with vibrant texture — their everyday, pedestrian movement, both rich and real, is recognizably Brown. Along with the step number, Brown choreographed another major dance, which opens Act II and shows Charles surrounded by dancers slipping in and out of erotic moments. Full of tension and longing, it reveals the character’s state of mind: confused and anguished, yet also intrigued.The baritone Will Liverman surrounded opens surrounded by dancers slipping in and out of erotic moments. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBrown is adept at baring emotion through the body. The dancers, their arms reaching imploringly, move vividly and broadly as if washing the stage with brushstrokes. Later, they transform into trees as Charles sings: “We draw our strength from underneath. We bend, we don’t break. We sway!”As he sings, Charles rounds his body forward in a powerful contraction and opens his arms as he stands straight and ultimately rises above his suffering.In “Fire,” which will be broadcast theatrically on Oct. 23 as part of the Met Live in HD series, Brown displays her choreographic range. “There was the more contemporary dance side, and then there’s the more rhythmical side,” she said. “You don’t get to feel those extremes in one place very often.”And her directorial prowess is only growing. Up next? She directs the Broadway revivalof Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” Recently Brown spoke about her work on “Fire” and honoring her ancestors. What follows are edited excerpts from that conversation.Brown with her co-director, James Robinson, during a rehearsal in August.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesHow did you, as a choreographer and director, envision the opera?When I’m working on a show, and as a director of my company, I always try to find, what is my entry point to the story? I thought about some of my dear friends that had very similar stories, so I entered it in that way.When I first heard about the opera and I found out that there was a fraternity section, I was so excited. There’s an opportunity to do a step dance inside of an opera?Why is it so important to put social dance on the Met stage?We talk about Terence being the first Black composer on the Met stage. And so along with that comes the Black lens and along with that comes Black culture spoken through or danced through the Black lens. And knowing that, at one point in the Met’s history, Black people weren’t allowed to perform on that stage.So you go from that to now: We are doing something that is so rooted in African tradition on the Met stage. That is so powerful. You see the fraternity-sorority, you see the H.B.C.U., but you also see the Juba dance [the African-American percussive form that uses the feet and the hands]. And you see the African diaspora onstage.“We are doing something that is so rooted in African tradition on the Met stage,” Brown said of the fraternity scenes.Jackie Molloy for The New York TimesHow did you put the number together?I was inspired by two movies: “Drumline” and “School Daze.” I’ve always loved “School Daze,” and when this opportunity came about to create the fraternity scene, I thought this needs to be a moment. Yes, Charles is pledging, and he’s going through that experience, but it’s also important, especially being on the Met stage, to show as much as we can of what that whole entire experience is. I want to talk about the dream ballet. Is it OK if I call it that?[Laughs] Yeah, yeah, that’s totally fine.What were you thinking?In any show that I’ve done, there’s always one piece that is really, really hard for me. And that was what you call the dream ballet. The first two weeks of working on it, I was freaking out a little bit because I wasn’t liking what I was doing.What happened?I was talking to my co-director, James Robinson, about the movie “Moonlight” and about how Charles was wrestling with what we are calling phantoms in his dreams — and how they haunted him, but they also enticed him. And so I gave myself a break and eased back on criticizing myself and said, You know what? Just play. Give yourself the space to figure it out.How did “Moonlight” influence you?Just by the beautiful imagery. Just wanting to talk about relationships and the sensitivity, and how does it feel to touch someone for the first time? Feeling like it’s wrong, but wanting to trust that it’s OK.“We talk about Terence being the first Black composer on the Met stage. And so along with that comes the Black lens.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow involved were you in the first act?It may be easy for someone to come in and go, Oh, well, she just did the choreography. But that really wasn’t the case. James and I were both thinking about the molestation scene and how the chorus interacts.Most of the chorus members were also in “Porgy,” so I’d already worked with them. We were talking about how they move because even though they’re technically not dancing, they still are moving. And it’s the 1970s. We looked at some videos and talked: What were the small ways that people walked to indicate the time period?Was Katherine Dunham in your mind throughout this experience?Oh! Why do you ask?Because of your use of social dance and the fact that she choreographed at the Met. And because so much of this opera, at its root, is about the body as a force. It’s urgent. It made me think of your lineage.I always carry her and Pearl Primus and Dianne McIntyre and Marlies Yearby in the space with me. This is a historical moment, but this is also about people who have paved the way for you. It is coming from a deep place — it is coming from the social dance. How can I contribute to that legacy of Black choreographers delving into the African diasporic space? It’s about contributing to the space. When we do what we know, and we show how honest we are with our decisions, that is honoring our ancestors. More

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      Jazz and Opera Come Together in ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones’

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      Two critics discuss Terence Blanchard’s “Fire,” the Metropolitan Opera’s first work by a Black composer.“Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the Metropolitan Opera’s season last week, was a milestone: the company’s first work by a Black composer. The music, by Terence Blanchard —  a jazz trumpeter also known for his scores for Spike Lee films — has earned praise from both classical and jazz critics.The New York Times’s chief classical critic Anthony Tommasini described “a compositional voice dominated by lushly chromatic and modal harmonic writing, spiked with jagged rhythms and tart dissonance.” The jazz writer Nate Chinen wrote for NPR that “the smooth deployment of extended jazz harmony, often in breathing, fleeting passages, marks the piece as modern — as does the work of a rhythm section nestled within the orchestra.”The Times sent two more critics to the second performance on Friday. Seth Colter Walls, based on the classical desk, and Giovanni Russonello, who specializes in jazz, have both covered figures who cross with ease between concert halls and jazz clubs. But “Fire,” based on a 2014 memoir by the Times columnist Charles M. Blow, was their first night at the opera together, the spur to an extended discussion.SETH COLTER WALLS As we walked into the Met, you described yourself as an opera neophyte. But as Duke Ellington said, good music is good music. And from our intermission chats, I know we agree that this was a richly enjoyable work. How do you place it within Blanchard’s career?GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO We knew going in that Blanchard’s body of work is one of the broadest and most imposing of any living jazz musician. But I was struck by how many aspects of his past output seemed to come together in “Fire.” He’s one of the rare jazz composers who can load up a piece with rich harmony and real rhythmic pleasure, without feeling the need to tie things up neatly or deliver a clean payoff. That style fed perfectly into the emotional ambivalence that gives this opera its power.WALLS I find that quality to be one of the weapons he offers Spike Lee, who in his films tends to delight in keeping alive ambiguous tension. Blanchard can suture small wings of hope to what otherwise seems a rock of despair, and keep you wondering whether the whole assemblage will rise or fall.Will Liverman, left, and Angel Blue star in “Fire” at the Met.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRUSSONELLO From the opening scene of “Fire,” his diverse palette was put in the service of narrative nuance. As Charles, the main character, speeds down the highway, holding a pistol and a fatal decision in his hands, a distant swing feel wafted up from the pit, propelled by the bassist Matt Brewer and the drummer Jeff Watts, who’s known in jazz circles as Tain. It had the same restless, pushing-forward feeling as many of Blanchard’s small-group jazz compositions. But a drape of violins also hung above, moving in unison with the baritone Will Liverman’s vocal lines — and calling to mind some of those sweeping film scores.WALLS True, though Liverman also sounded a bit swamped by some of that opening brass-and-percussion-heavy writing. But soon after, the subtlety of his singing impressed me. Flintier aspects of his tone dominated during the first act, but then fell away as the night wore on. Even by the time of the “golden buttons” melody in the first act, I think we both were moved by the warmth in his voice.RUSSONELLO And by the gravitas of his duet on that melody with the soprano Angel Blue, who plays three characters: the half-menacing Destiny; the all-too-sympathetic Loneliness; and Greta, with whom he falls in love.Which leads me to another successful element of “Fire” that reflects Blanchard’s roots in the Black musical tradition: the interplay between vocalists, in duets and ensembles. Some of the most rousing moments were not solos but shared performances: When Charles’s mother, Billie (Latonia Moore), sings about her frustrated dreams early in the opera, the chorus is behind her describing the tough conditions of their town, giving her struggles texture and weight. Charles’s brothers’s recurring taunt — “Charles baby, youngest of five” — becomes one of the opera’s most memorable refrains.From left, Blue, Walter Russell III, Latonia Moore and Liverman. One of the opera’s strengths is in the interplay between vocalists in duets and ensembles.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWALLS Following Billie to her job at the meat-preparation plant also turns into a fine group number. And, crucially, there are laugh lines in these and other scenes.RUSSONELLO Group dance performances stood out, too. Act II’s opening ballet sequence and the step-team number in Act III were probably the clearest examples of African diasporic tradition meeting opera convention; in both moments, something sparked.Blanchard has said that, like his first opera, “Champion” (2013), “Fire” is an “opera in jazz.” But like any postmodernist, his understanding of what constitutes jazz is quite open. It can mean wildly extended harmony, blues inflections, odd-metered cadences, unconventional instrumental pairings. With “Fire,” the blueprint was classic Italian opera, but the furniture was these other elements. And magnetic rhythm was a constant throughout.WALLS The cast clearly loved sliding bluesy figurations between passages delivered with operatic vibrato.At the start of Act III, when Charles pledges the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, the step routine drew the night’s longest and most vigorous applause.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRUSSONELLO Blanchard has such a knack for counterintuition: A consequential scene at a blues club begins with the orchestra playing some straightforward blues in the background, but when the bandleader character (Spinner, Charles’s scalawag father, played by Chauncey Packer) gets onstage, he sings something more operatic and complex.WALLS I loved that head-fake from Blanchard. (I also wanted to attend a full set of Spinner’s at that club.)RUSSONELLO Spinner’s “Lord Love the Sinner” is a rapscallion anthem that harks back to Sportin’ Life’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So” in “Porgy and Bess.” Which brings up the question of how “Fire” relates to other works in the American canon that toe the line between blues, jazz and opera — including works by William Grant Still (a favorite composer of yours, Seth) or Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. (What powerful work might they have made with a Met commission?) Were there any major touchstones that jumped out as we took in “Fire”?WALLS Blanchard sounds like Blanchard, which is key. He’s coming out of a folk tradition, like Still. He’s adding ringers from his jazz career to the opera pit, like Anthony Davis and Leroy Jenkins have done. But he’s his own composer. Some piano-led moments made me think of what Jelly Roll Morton, known to riff on Verdi’s “Il Trovatore,” would have done if given a chance to let his New Orleans aesthetic shine forth from the Met stage.Blanchard, holding up his finger, rehearses the jazz ensemble that is embedded in the “Fire” orchestra.Simbarashe Cha for The New York TimesRUSSONELLO It bears noting that New Orleans — Blanchard’s hometown, too — has its own rich (though badly forgotten) history of Black opera. The first opera in the United States was staged there, and in the years between Reconstruction and Jim Crow a number of opera houses featured casts of color. Blanchard’s father, an amateur opera singer, was an inheritor of that tradition; this, in turn, became part of his son’s musical DNA.WALLS That second-act dream-ballet music — perfect for the languid, suggestive dancing that it was paired with — was but one passage suggesting Blanchard’s love for the standard repertory. Yet we haven’t had anything quite like “Fire.” Leonard Bernstein looked at intergenerational trauma amid a distinctly American sound world in “A Quiet Place” — and while I love it, it’s also a notorious problem piece. And “Porgy and Bess” has never really worked as an evening of theater for me. (Great tunes, though.)So my response to this big-budget production was: Finally! Real classical music resources are being used here, for a real exploration of American musical culture. I feel like there’s a huge potential audience for this material — even for people who may not think of themselves as operagoers. (“Fire” will be simulcast to movie theaters on Oct. 23 as part of the Met’s Live in HD program.)RUSSONELLO At the start of Act III, when Charles pledges the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, the step routine drew the night’s longest and most vigorous applause. It tapped into a dance tradition that’s basically unrelated to opera, but was accorded a different kind of power appearing at the Met.WALLS One of the virtues of Kasi Lemmons’s libretto — and what Blanchard does with it — is that we get these sequences that are at are both encomiums to bulwarks of Black life and critiques. Charles’s extended family, his church and his fraternity each play a part in keeping him from telling the truth about being molested by his cousin. The drama and the music keep braiding together pride and frustration, in a way that makes the opera’s conclusion and Charles’s self-acceptance feel truly momentous. More