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      Reawakening the Antichrist (and Other Lost Opera Gems)

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      It can be challenging to revive forgotten works like “Antikrist.” But the absence of entrenched traditions can be liberating.BERLIN — The Whore of Babylon, in a grotesque fat suit, belts out a hymn to hedonism midway through the Deutsche Oper’s new production of “Antikrist” here.Ersan Mondtag’s riotously colorful, boldly stylized staging of what this work’s Danish composer, Rued Langgaard, called a “church opera” is a near-breathless swirl. Nodding to various early-20th-century art movements, including Symbolism, Expressionism and the Bauhaus, it is only the third full staging of the work, which was written and revised between 1921 and 1930, but which remained unperformed at the time of Langgaard’s death, in 1952.Inspired by the Book of Revelation, “Antikrist” premieres Jan. 30 and runs through Feb. 11. It is the latest in a series of operatic rediscoveries at the Deutsche Oper, which, in recent decades, has made a point of highlighting works from outside the canon. In recent seasons, it has lavished attention on Meyerbeer’s “Le Prophète” as part of a series devoted to that once-renowned 19th-century composer, as well as two early-20th-century titles, Korngold’s “Das Wunder der Heliane” and Zemlinsky’s “Der Zwerg.”A scene from “Der Zwerg,” another rarely performed work that was revived at the Deutsche Oper.Monika RittershausAlong with the Deutsche Oper’s commitment to commissioning new operas, these rediscoveries are a way of refreshing and enlarging opera’s notoriously narrow repertoire. An essentially unknown work like “Antikrist” presents a host of logistical challenges, from training singers to attracting audiences, but it can provide its director with rare creative license. The absence of entrenched performing traditions can be artistically liberating.“It’s totally crazy,” Mondtag, who also designed the sets and helped design the costumes, said of the piece. “It’s something between Schoenberg and Wagner, and like a sacred opera without linear narration. So you have the freedom to do whatever you want.”Mondtag, one of Germany’s leading young avant-garde directors, was putting the finishing touches on “Antikrist” when the pandemic locked the country down for the first time, in March 2020. Since then, he’s staged two other rarely performed 20th-century works, Schreker’s “Der Schmied von Gent” and Weill’s “Silbersee,” both for Vlaamse Opera in Belgium. A relative newcomer to opera, Mondtag said it was hardly surprising that he’s been getting assignments like these, rather than war horses like “Tosca.”Mondtag onstage at the Deutsche Oper. He says he didn’t set out to become a specialist in unknown operas: “It just happened that way.”Gordon Welters for The New York Times“It’s considered more experimental to do unknown things,” Mondtag said. In his short time working in opera, he added, he has acquired something of a reputation as an “expert of unstageable or unknown operas. I didn’t choose that; it just happened that way.”When the Deutsche Oper returned to live performance in the summer of 2020, it concentrated on a new production of Wagner’s four-opera “Ring.” All four titles premiered at the house during the pandemic, but after the “Ring” played its last performances earlier this month, the company turned its attention to the delayed “Antikrist” premiere.“It’s such impressive music that I think it’s necessary to do it,” said Dietmar Schwarz, the Deutsche Oper’s general director. He added that while he would love it if Mondtag’s production inspired new interest in “Antikrist,” he was mostly focused on finding a curious and open audience in Berlin.“We’re not necessarily doing it for the survival of this old opera,” he said.Isolated productions of rediscoveries rarely catch fire. One exception was David Pountney’s acclaimed staging of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s punishing 1965 work “Die Soldaten,” which was first seen in 2006 at the Ruhrtriennale festival in Germany and traveled to the Park Avenue Armory in New York two years later. A spate of productions followed in Berlin; Munich; Salzburg, Austria; and elsewhere.A scene from a 2008 performance of “Die Soldaten” at the Park Avenue Armory. Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s opera had been revived at the Ruhrtrienniale festival in Germany two years before.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYet even if rediscoveries are confined to a single production, German opera administrators have increasingly made them a priority. This contrasts with the United States: These days, it is more common for the Metropolitan Opera or the Lyric Opera of Chicago to present an attention-generating world premiere than to dust off a forgotten work. (Leon Botstein’s full-production revivals at Bard College in New York are a notable exception.)“There is a treasure trove of stuff out there,” said Barrie Kosky, who leads the Komische Oper in Berlin. Since arriving at that company in 2012, he has scored some of his greatest hits with productions of long overlooked works, including operettas by German-speaking Jewish composers like Paul Abraham and Oscar Straus.“Let’s face it, we can’t survive on just a diet of the 20 most famous titles,” Kosky said.“Of course, it’s always a risk because sometimes you bring back a piece and it doesn’t work,” he said. Or, he added: “You say: ‘Look, we’re bringing this back. It’s not a perfect piece, but this score is still worth hearing.’ I think that’s also very legitimate and valid; I don’t think everything has to be a masterpiece.”Kosky pointed to his own eclectic programming at the Komische Oper — where, before the pandemic, the house was selling 90 percent of its seats — as evidence that theaters can be filled with works by composers other than Mozart and Puccini.“All of that’s been blown out of the water when I see that we can sell out ‘The Bassarids’ completely,” he said, referring to Hans Werner Henze’s 1965 opera, which Kosky staged in 2019. “Or we can have incredible advance sales for an operetta where people don’t even know the title or the music.”Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, center, in “The Bassarids,” a sold-out production at the Komische Oper Berlin in 2019.Monika RittershausWhen Matthias Schulz, the general director of the Staatsoper in Berlin, programmed a Baroque festival in his first season leading the company, he didn’t go for the usual suspects.“I wanted to do everything except Handel,” he said.The centerpiece of the festival’s first edition, in 2018, was Rameau’s “Hippolyte et Aricie.” Since then, two rarities have followed: Scarlatti’s “Il Primo Omicidio” and, this past fall, Campra’s “Idoménée,” far more obscure than Mozart’s later “Idomeneo.”Hidden in the corners of opera history, Schulz said, “there are real masterworks and we have a responsibility to find them. We need to convince the audience that what we do is interesting, and to challenge them.”A scene from a 2021 production of Campra’s “Idomenée” at the Staatsoper in Berlin.Bernd UhligThat process looks different in Berlin, with a rich opera landscape thanks to three full-time companies, than it does in smaller cities. Laura Berman, the artistic director of the Staatsoper in Hanover, in northern Germany, said that drawing an audience with obscure titles can be a challenge. But, she added, the right work and the right production can also put a smaller house on the map.In her first season in Hanover, Berman scored a hit with Halévy’s religious potboiler “La Juive” — which, like Meyerbeer’s grand operas, faded from the repertory by the early 20th century. Lydia Steier’s production conjured a historical survey of antisemitism, starting in post-World War II America and working back to 15th-century Konstanz, Germany, the setting specified by the libretto. The 2019 staging was acclaimed, and helped the company earn the title of Opera House of the Year from Oper Magazine.Berman said she wasn’t surprised that a production about the need for tolerance had resonated in Hanover, a religiously and ethnically mixed city she that called “extremely diverse.”“People have always talked in the theater about ‘hooks’: how to get the audience hooked into going to see something,” she added. “I truly feel today that the topic is major, especially for younger audiences, more than the title.”A scene from the Staatsoper in Hanover’s 2019 production of Halévy’s “La Juive.”Sandra ThenShe added that works like “La Juive” were excellent for convincing people “that an opera house is a forum for social and political discussion — which, in the end, it always has been, for at least several hundred years.”The Staatsoper’s next big premiere in Hanover will be Marschner’s “Der Vampyr” in late March — directed by Mondtag. “His visual world is really special,” Berman said. “But for me, the main factor is being able to think through works and being able to bust them open.”That is less “terrifying,” she added, “if you do a work where there are no preconceived notions.” More

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      Lucy Rowan Mann, Doyenne of a Prime Classical Music Prize, Dies at 100

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      With her husband, the violinist Robert Mann, she mentored young classical musicians and administered the Naumburg Foundation’s storied annual awards.Lucy Rowan Mann, whose guidance of the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation and its influential awards helped propel a raft of major classical music careers for 50 years, died on Jan. 16 at her home in Manhattan. She was 100.The cause was Covid-19, her daughter, Lisa Mann Marotta, said.Ms. Mann was the executive director of the foundation, which she ran with her husband, Robert Mann, who was its president and the founding first violinist of the renowned Juilliard String Quartet. She handled administration and fund-raising, while Mr. Mann, who died in 2018 at 97, focused on the musical aspects of the competition and on the judging.But Ms. Mann, who started at the Naumburg Foundation in 1972 and continued until this year, did more than office work. She scheduled performances for the young Naumburg winners, did publicity for them and even arranged travel. The couple were a well-oiled machine; Carol Wincenc, who in 1978 won the inaugural Naumburg Competition for flute, said in an interview that the Manns exhibited “teamwork of the highest order.”Naumburg winners who have gone on to prominent careers include, in addition to Ms. Wincenc, the violin soloists Leonidas Kavakos and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg; Frank Huang, the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic; the pianists Andre-Michel Schub, Stephen Hough and Anton Nel; the clarinetist Charles Neidich; and the cellist Colin Carr. Singers who have won include Julia Bullock, Dawn Upshaw and Lucy Shelton.Music competitions are often key pieces in building a career, offering prize money, concert dates and public validation, but they can be rife with pressure and are often criticized for valuing technical brilliance over personality.But, as Mr. Mann wrote in The New York Times in 1985, “a competition is as musical, humane and culturally meaningful as it wants to be.” Ms. Mann’s administration and care for the competitors lent that humanity, colleagues and musicians said.The Naumburg Foundation, established in 1925, started administering annual awards in 1926. Robert Mann himself won a Naumburg Award for violin in 1941.The awards categories rotate among instruments each year. Initially, they included pianists, cellists and violinists, but the competition has expanded to include vocalists, chamber ensembles and flutists, and it also features other instruments on a rotating basis. The 2022 Naumburg Competition will be for saxophonists.First-prize winners receive $25,000 and two New York recitals and have a work commissioned for them.Ms. Mann made it part of her mission to push for greater awareness of 20th-century American composers. In her office at the Manhattan School of Music, where the Naumburg Foundation is based, she was known to stage birthday celebrations for contemporary composers, bribing students with candy to encourage them to attend and learn more about musical history.Lucille Ida Zeitlin was born on June 20, 1921, in Brooklyn. She and her two siblings were raised by their mother, Rose Kuschner. Their father, Irving Allen Zeitlin, was a nightclub manager. “My father was a scoundrel and a womanizer,” Ms. Mann told The Times in 2013. “He was never around.”She attended public high school in Brooklyn and went on to Brooklyn College to study acting, but dropped out and moved to Washington. There, she studied drama under Walter Kerr, who was teaching at the Catholic University of America and later become a theater critic for The Times. During World War II, Ms. Mann worked in secretarial roles at the War Department and elsewhere.Her marriage to Mark Rowan, who served in the Army and later became an English professor, ended in divorce after eight years.She returned to New York and in 1947 and became the manager for concerts at the Juilliard School. She met Mr. Mann while also managing the Juilliard String Quartet. They married in 1949.In addition to their work at the Naumburg Foundation, the Manns performed together in the Lyric Trio: Ms. Mann narrated folk stories from Rudyard Kipling and Hans Christian Andersen over music played by Mr. Mann and the pianist Leonid Hambro. Eric Salzman, reviewing a Lyric Trio concert at Carnegie Hall for The Times in 1962, called their performance “witty, pointed and delightful.”Their son, Nicholas Mann, who is also a violinist, occasionally performed with them as part of the Mann family-centered Baca Ensemble, for which Robert Mann composed. In a 1986 Times review of a performance by the group at Carnegie Hall, Allen Hughes wrote, “Miss Rowan is a persuasive reader, Mr. Mann’s scores are serious and well-wrought, and words and music coexisted amiably in these performances.”Ms. Mann was also an artist: She began painting as a hobby but became more serious about it later in life, culminating in retrospectives of her bright abstract works at the Tenri Cultural Institute in Manhattan in 2017 and 2019.In addition to her two children, she is survived by five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. More

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      5 Classical Music Albums You Can Listen to Right Now

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      Recordings of Brahms, Haydn, Grieg, Nikolai Kapustin and George Walker are among recent highlights.‘Blueprint’: Piano Music by Nikolai Kapustin for Jazz TrioFrank Dupree, piano; Jakob Krupp, bass; Obi Jenne, drums (Capriccio)When I reported last year on the pianist Frank Dupree’s first album of works by Nikolai Kapustin, Dupree previewed things to come. For his follow-up engagement with Kapustin, a swing-influenced Russian composer, Dupree said he would release a series of solo piano works played by a traditional jazz trio.Now that the results are out, the wisdom of the idea is evident. Dupree could have recorded an enjoyable solo set, as his feel for Kapustin is as fluid as ever. But we currently have no lack of one-player recitals of this music — including from Marc-André Hamelin, Steven Osborne and Kapustin himself.The improvised element on “Blueprint” is subtle. Dupree plays the piano solos as they were notated, and the bassist Jakob Krupp follows his left hand. The album’s distinguishing element of improvisation is left to the percussionist Obi Jenne. And it’s his interventions that truly elevate this set. In a piece like the Op. 41 Variations, Kapustin moves briskly between different syncopated styles; Jenne’s mutable beat-juggling highlights each change. Perhaps not every item here needed the jazz combo treatment. But when the arrangements work — as on selections from the Eight Concert Études — this trio adds to the material a new jolt. SETH COLTER WALLSBrahms: Late Piano WorksPaul Lewis, piano (Harmonia Mundi)To listen to the pianist Paul Lewis’s new album of late Brahms, you would think these pieces had been written just after the last sonatas of Schubert, which Lewis has recorded with wrenching restraint. Splicing the gap between 1828 and the early 1890s, Lewis’s is a vision of Brahms as fully Classicist; these final four sets of solos are rendered with judicious tempos and a clean, calm touch — intelligent, sensitive readings.The pearly moderation that makes Lewis’s Schubert so movingly humble sometimes keeps his Brahms shy of grandeur and especially mystery. These are tender, affecting interpretations more than pensive, let alone unsettling, ones; Lewis sometimes stints the softest dynamics, giving a slight sense of straightforwardness when you want intimations (at least) of the epic. The Intermezzo in E flat (Op. 117, No. 1) doesn’t seem to lose itself in the middle section — as it does in Radu Lupu’s benchmark 1987 recording — so the return to the theme is less than overwhelming.But a cleareyed Intermezzo in A (Op. 118, No. 2) is deeply satisfying; the Intermezzo in E Minor (Op. 119, No. 2) leavens lucidity with dreaminess. And Lewis’s sparkle in the middle of the Romanze in F (Op. 118, No. 5) gives the shift back to sober feeling at the end quietly immense power. ZACHARY WOOLFEGrieg: SongsLise Davidsen, soprano; Leif Ove Andsnes, piano (Decca)The recording industry has finally found a way to capture Lise Davidsen. A luminous soprano of remarkable range, equally capable of floodlight power and the piercing smallness of a laser pointer, she wasn’t well represented on her first two albums for Decca, which were documents of sensitive and intelligent interpretation more than versatility or resounding might.Now, after programs of Wagner, Strauss, Beethoven and Verdi, comes a much more intimate album of Grieg songs performed with the pianist Leif Ove Andsnes — a pairing of two excellent Norwegian musicians in works by their country’s most treasured composer. The scale of this program is better suited than Davidsen’s earlier albums at conveying the dexterity of her voice, and her gift for endearing levity; there are playful turns of phrase here that you just don’t get in “Tannhäuser.”Throughout the album — which begins with the eight-song cycle “The Mountain Maid” and continues with excerpts from other collections — Andsnes is an evocative tone painter, with dreamy glissandos in “Singing,” galloping festivity in “Midsummer Eve” and flowing momentum in “A Boat on the Waves Is Rocking.” And Davidsen is a nimble raconteur, lovingly warm in the opening cycle’s “Meeting,” then shattering in its Schubertian finale, “At the Gjaetle Brook,” and later bringing both folk lightness and Wagnerian heft to the six songs of Op. 48. To the credit of Grieg and these artists, you’ll never be so moved by a song called “Snail, Snail!” JOSHUA BARONEHaydn: SymphoniesAcademy of St. Martin in the Fields; Neville Marriner, conductor (Eloquence)It’s easy now to be a little sniffy about Neville Marriner’s achievements with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, a partnership renowned as the most recorded in history. With the success of the period-instrument movement, their hundreds of recordings on modern instruments have gained the reputation of being a bit staid — practical and reliable, to be sure, but nevertheless dusty relics of an era best forgotten.But this thoroughly enjoyable 15-disc set — which for the first time brings together 33 Haydn symphonies set down between 1970 and 1990 — is ample reminder that there were perfectly good artistic reasons Marriner and his chamber-orchestra forces were such a roaring commercial success.Conceiving their work initially as a crisp, stylish rejoinder to an older, stouter approach to the Baroque and Classical repertoire, they played this music with insatiable collective commitment — the slow movements singing gracefully, the outer movements sparkling in their drive and invention. If there is a little more zest in their accounts of Haydn’s earlier symphonies than his later ones, they are all brilliantly well judged, and full of life. DAVID ALLENGeorge Walker: Piano SonatasSteven Beck, piano (Bridge)In 2018, when the composer and pianist George Walker died at 96, there were plenty of accomplishments to memorialize, including his Pulitzer Prize — the first awarded to a Black composer. But there was also a dispiriting acknowledgment of a missed opportunity, given that so few elite classical institutions had seriously engaged with Walker’s work while he was alive.The inattention extended to recordings; there remains a notable dearth of sets devoted exclusively to Walker. Very partial redress comes in the form of this new album, in which Steven Beck takes on all five of Walker’s piano sonatas, written between 1953 and 2003.The first sonata, revised in 1991, offers some of the galloping energy seemingly required when suggesting Americana, but it also includes a rambunctious harmonic edge that bristles with maverick spirit. By the time of the Third Sonata, written in 1975 and revised in 1996, atonality had taken center stage. But Walker’s signature feel for contrast — including alternations between motifs that ring out and peremptory chordal bursts — is still evident. With playing that’s slashing and sensitive by turns, Beck’s recital accentuates the through lines in a protean artistic life. SETH COLTER WALLS More

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      ‘The Conductor’ Review: Seizing the Baton

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      In this biographical documentary, Marin Alsop recounts how she became the first woman to lead a major American orchestra.When Marin Alsop became the music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 2007, she was the first woman to lead a major orchestra in the United States. Alsop, who concluded her tenure in that position last year, recounts her life in classical music in the documentary “The Conductor,” directed by Bernadette Wegenstein. Alsop’s biography is a story of continually challenging a field in which the sexist idea that women can’t conduct persists.The only child of a cellist and a violinist, Alsop recalls being a young girl and seeing Leonard Bernstein conduct; she saw his remarks to the audience as being directed straight at her. Alsop would eventually work under the mentorship of Bernstein (shown looking animated and, frankly, oblivious to the boundaries of personal space in old video) at the Tanglewood Music Center. But much of her career required taking initiative when opportunities were denied to her.She formed an all-female, mostly string swing band. (She speaks of how the demands of the genre ran counter to the perfection classical musicians aspire to.) After being rejected from Juilliard’s conducting program (she says a teacher told her she would never conduct), she founded her own orchestra. And in Baltimore, where her selection for the job originally rankled musicians, she started a music program for children.As filmmaking, “The Conductor” takes a fairly standard approach. The most engaging portions involve music-making itself. Alsop explains her ideas about Mahler. (“There’s a reason why Mahler put every single note in the piece,” she says in voice-over, as the movie shows her on a boat in Switzerland, where she likens a mist to the opening of a Mahler symphony; her job, she continues, is to understand his motivations.) Elsewhere, musicians and pupils describe Alsop’s encouraging approach.The ConductorNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      A Singer Brings His Authentic Self to the Philharmonic

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      Anthony Roth Costanzo, a restless countertenor with a vast network of collaborators, has planned a wide-reaching festival.Anthony Roth Costanzo was never just going to step onstage and sing.Instead, as the New York Philharmonic’s artist in residence, this countertenor is planning a series of events — beginning Thursday and continuing through the spring — that add up to a self-portrait of a musician who, among other things, is also a charismatic impresario, cross-discipline connector and community organizer.His festival, “Authentic Selves: The Beauty Within,” reaches from Lincoln Center to the Lower East Side, the Bronx and Queens; includes premieres as well as recastings of classic repertory; and brings the queer joy of “Only an Octave Apart,” his show with the cabaret artist Justin Vivian Bond, into the concert hall.It’s the product of a restless personality who believes there are too many hours in the day to be only a countertenor.“I sleep eight hours every night,” said Costanzo, who turns 40 in May and speaks with unflappable effervescence. “So I have 16 other hours. Singing more than two hours is not a great idea, because you’ll just kill your voice. I can probably handle two more hours of learning — doing ornaments, something musical. That then leaves me with 12 other hours. If I wanted four of those to live a life, then I’ve got a full workday left.”That feels like plenty of time, he added, but the schedule is certainly daunting. He’s also releasing the album version of “Only an Octave Apart” this week, preparing a revival of Handel’s “Rodelinda” at the Metropolitan Opera and returning there later this spring to repeat his star turn in Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten.”You can see why he hasn’t taken a vacation in a decade.
      Costanzo didn’t even go on much of a break when the pandemic brought live performance to a halt in March 2020. Within a week of the first lockdown, he was writing an essay for Opera News about the effect mass cancellations might have on the industry. Then, over Zoom cocktails with Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s chief executive, he began to shape an idea that became Bandwagon: pop-up concerts from a pickup truck that doubled as community engagement programs and, leading up the presidential election, a voter-registration drive.Rest, such as it is, comes whenever Costanzo rides a bicycle or cooks a meal, which is often. (Among those who know him, he is famous as a host.) “I cannot have my phone or be checking email,” he said. “I have to be focused on just that.”Life has more or less always been like this for Costanzo, a former child actor. James Ivory, the director of films like “Howards End” and “A Room With a View,” recalled in an interview the pluck of a young Costanzo handing him a cassette recording of his singing after an audition.“The next day, I was driving and played the music,” Ivory said. “It was music that I very much like — Bach and Handel — and he sang it so beautifully.”Costanzo singing last summer from the bed of the pickup truck that was the Philharmonic’s venue for the first iteration of its Bandwagon project.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesCostanzo got the part, and the two have been friends ever since; Ivory was even involved with Costanzo’s undergraduate thesis project at Princeton University. There, instead of writing the typical paper, the young singer marshaled a team of prestige artists, including the dance-maker Karole Armitage, to create a film imagining the life of an 18th-century castrato. Costanzo raised $35,000 from various academic departments, and eventually persuaded Princeton to provide roughly $100,000 more to produce a documentary about the project.After he graduated, in 2004, Armitage asked Costanzo to be the executive director of her company, Armitage Gone! Dance, where he raised about $3 million, planned a gala and continued to wrangle the support of celebrities — such as Christopher Walken, who filmed a commercial for the troupe. His “pretty gigantic network,” as the director Zack Winokur described it, has since been deployed in projects like “Glass Handel,” an interdisciplinary concert that incorporated choreography by Justin Peck, live art-making by the painter George Condo and costumes by Raf Simons.Bond joked that after walking offstage at the end of “Only an Octave Apart,” Costanzo could text 20 people and make a dinner reservation in the time it took Bond to pull out a single bobby pin. But Costanzo, a member of the enterprising collective American Modern Opera Company and the recent recipient of a $150,000 Mellon Foundation grant to support interdisciplinary collaboration, said he doesn’t network for its own sake.From a young age, Costanzo has marshaled a vast network of high-profile collaborators to pull off his ambitious projects.Erik Tanner for The New York Times“I’m not interested in any artist because of their fame,” he said. “My relationships are beyond that. Unless there’s a sense of community, you can accomplish nothing; without that, it’s so boring.”Borda, the Philharmonic’s leader, said that he “develops a rapport with everyone, and has that capability of relating to the guy driving the truck and the diva superstars of the Met.”In late summer 2020, Costanzo was at an entrance to Brooklyn Bridge Park, explaining what a countertenor is from the bed of the Bandwagon pickup truck. About a year later, he was just down the street, at St. Ann’s Warehouse, performing “Only an Octave Apart” with Bond.That St. Ann’s show, and the new album it’s based on, were inspired by Carol Burnett and Beverly Sills’s 1970s special of the same name, blending Bond’s gravelly pop with Costanzo’s classical repertory.“The dreaded word ‘crossover’ never even occurred to me because that’s not how I see this project,” Costanzo said. “Each thing amplifies the other and makes it more than what it is.”Winokur directed the show, which featured arrangements by Nico Muhly, music direction by Thomas Bartlett and costumes (at times blinding) by Jonathan Anderson. It had Bond’s trademark political fervor masquerading as frivolity, and laughs galore, but also, opening as performances cautiously returned indoors, a touch of melancholy.“It tethered us to ourselves throughout the pandemic,” Bond said, adding that with two artists, one transgender and the other a countertenor, whose voices routinely defy expectations based on appearances, “it was one of the most profoundly queer projects I’ve ever been involved in.”Costanzo, used to the rigor and precision of classical music, grew comfortable with a looser style. Bond, usually not needing more than a bare stage and a small band, developed an appreciation for the interlocking parts of a large production. Now they plan to take the project as far as possible.Justin Vivian Bond, left, and Costanzo in “Only an Octave Apart” at St. Ann’s Warehouse last fall.Nina Westervelt“What we say is that we should try to EGOT with this,” Costanzo said, referring to the rare artist who wins an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony.At the very least, “Only an Octave Apart” will travel to the Philharmonic — where excerpts, arranged for orchestra by Muhly, close this week’s program. “I’m very aware of how queer this is in that space,” said Winokur, who is returning to direct the concert presentation. “But it doesn’t really have any choice to be any other way.”Bond said there will still be banter and gags: “I’m not just going to stand up there and be silent. That’s not the way I do it.”“Authentic Selves” also includes premieres by Joel Thompson and Gregory Spears, both settings of commissioned texts by the poet Tracy K. Smith; an unconventional take on Berlioz’s “Les Nuits d’Été,” which is virtually never sung by a countertenor; the Philharmonic’s first performances of work by the posthumously rediscovered composer Julius Eastman; and a series of talks and community events.“I’m an artist first,” Costanzo said, “but my brain exists in a world of engagement, marketing, education, press, leadership, fund-raising, collaboration, curation — all of those things.”Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s chief executive, said that Costanzo “should be running an opera company or an orchestra.”Erik Tanner for The New York TimesHe often sounds like an administrator in the making. Opera singers, like ballet dancers and professional athletes, all face expiration dates. Borda said that, while Costanzo should stay onstage as long as it’s comfortable, “when I see a talent like that, he should be running an opera company or an orchestra.”Bond said that it was just a matter of what he wanted to do: “He could limit himself to something as small as running the Met, but I can see him doing more than that.”The future, Costanzo said, is “always” on his mind.“I feel like my identity is and always will be as a singer, but I’m most interested in where I can have impact,” he added. “So far that’s as a combination of being a singer and sometimes being a producer and creator and leader. If at some point the impact looks like it’s going to be in the direction of not singing, that doesn’t really faze me.” More

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      A Day of Divas

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      Two star sopranos, Renée Fleming and Sonya Yoncheva, held court in two of New York’s grandest venues on Sunday.A little imperiousness? A lot of extravagance? A touch of the supernatural?You could try to come up with the recipe for a diva, but you just know one when you see it. Or hear it: In an appraisal of André Leon Talley this weekend, the New York Times fashion critic Vanessa Friedman described his words as those “of a diva, uttered at a time when divas were going out of style.”Out of style, perhaps, but not out of existence. In fact, I read that appraisal on Sunday as I was getting ready for a day of rare diva alignment, with two star sopranos holding court in two of New York’s grandest venues: Renée Fleming at Carnegie Hall in the afternoon, and Sonya Yoncheva at the Metropolitan Opera in the evening.If you were looking for evidence of the demise of the diva — at least of the stereotypical variety — it’s true, neither of these seemingly genial, generous women came across as imperious. And clutch your pearls: Fleming didn’t even change gowns at intermission.But divadom still shows signs of life. It’s in tiny things, like this sentence in the program at Carnegie: “Ms. Fleming’s jewelry is by Ann Ziff for Tamsen Z.” And at the Met, when Yoncheva sang the phrase “ta première larme” (“your first tear”) in a Chausson song, she slowly raised her hand to her face, as if she really believed she was wiping that larme away. Sometimes, even in opera, it’s the gesture that makes the diva.In a gesture of becoming modesty, Fleming shared a reasonably crowded stage for the most prominent part of her concert: the New York premiere of “Penelope,” an account of the wife who waits very, very patiently for Homer’s Odysseus to return from the Trojan War.The soprano Renée Fleming, center, was joined on Sunday at Carnegie Hall for the New York premiere of André Previn and Tom Stoppard’s “Penelope” by (from left) the pianist Simone Dinnerstein, the Emerson String Quartet and the actress Uma Thurman.Chris LeeLeft unfinished at the death of its composer, André Previn, in 2019, the piece was stitched together from manuscript sketches and drafts of Tom Stoppard’s text. The 40-minute result is as talky as a Stoppard play but far less sparkling or affecting. Its tone mostly pseudo-archaic, this is pretty much just an “Odyssey” in extreme digest, lightly backed by the Emerson String Quartet and the pianist Simone Dinnerstein.There are so many words that many of them were assigned to be spoken, to shorten the running time. Thus the title role was split between a singer and an actress (at the premiere three years ago and here, the movie star Uma Thurman).Thurman is a natural at intoning amid the wispy thatches of underscoring, and she sometimes tries to inject some attitude into the dry libretto. But it’s never quite clear why the role has been divided. Couldn’t a single performer just shift between speaking and singing? The bifurcation works only to dilute interest in both parties.Fleming is game, even if she doesn’t get to take lyrical flight: The soprano part is almost entirely recitative — sung narration — and never blossoms into aria or gives us any real sense of Penelope’s character or emotions. There are reminders of Previn’s stylish facility, as when a quietly swirling little quartet interlude slips into a minor-key whisper of “Here Comes the Bride” before modulating, almost quicker than you can hear it, into gentle satisfaction. But mostly the music seems scant and exhausted trying to keep up with Stoppard.It followed intermission; earlier, the Emerson played Barber’s 1936 Quartet, dedicating it from the stage to Roger Tapping, the superb Juilliard Quartet violist, who died last week. Dinnerstein rolled out the deliberate arpeggios and rushing surges of Philip Glass’s “Mad Rush,” and accompanied Fleming in a set of five songs altogether more memorable than “Penelope.” The first, Grieg’s lively “Lauf der Welt,” didn’t play to this singer’s mellow strengths, but his “Zur Rosenzeit” very much did.Fleming is 62, but there is still considerable richness in the middle of her voice, and her dips into low notes were done cleanly, without the syrupy scooping for which she was once often criticized. In the wistful quiet of “Zur Rosenzeit” she was moving, almost vaporizing the second syllable in “meinem Garten” (“my garden”) for the touching effect of the past vanishing as she remembered it. Fauré’s “Les Berceaux” had discreet, dusky power.And she was earnestly impassioned in “Evening,” Kevin Puts’s new setting of a Dorianne Laux poem, most charming in a middle section with a Joni Mitchell vibe: a deliberate, repetitive piano riff anchoring a free and easy vocal line. (Fleming takes the Meryl Streep role in Puts’s coming operatic adaptation of “The Hours.”)Yoncheva’s solo recital on the Met stage was a sign that she had swiftly risen to become one of the company’s core artists.Ken Howard/Met OperaAt the Met, Yoncheva was given one of the dearest gifts the company can bestow on a valued artist: a solo recital on its stage. And at 40, she has become valued with dizzying swiftness. Though she jumped into a few memorable revivals starting in 2013, it was only when she opened the 2015-16 season, in Verdi’s “Otello,” that she cemented her place in this house; at the end of February, she will star in a new production of “Don Carlos.”On Sunday she displayed the ease with which she can fill even the vast Met with an encompassing mood: darkly nostalgic and death-haunted, as you’d expect from her melancholy repertory. Even her sensuality brooded, compellingly joyless; Malcolm Martineau’s relative effervescence at the piano placed her gifts in high relief.Her voice is supple but lean. It feels like an instrument, in the most literal sense: a vehicle of expression rather than a remarkable sound in its own right. It has a low center of gravity and a quality of intimacy; Yoncheva gives the sense of singing to herself even when she’s not being soft.As she began with a set of French songs by Duparc, Viardot, Chausson, Donizetti and Delibes, her high notes were thin and stiff. Indeed, throughout the evening those notes above the staff were a problem, mostly when she had to rise to them through a long musical line. Stabbed out of the air, loud ones had startling fullness and clarity.But from the first number — Duparc’s “L’Invitation au voyage” — her interpretive intentions were intriguing, as she stretched the poem’s vision of “luxury, calm and delight” into a clear, forbidding premonition of the afterlife. With Yoncheva, details are everything: In Duparc’s “Au pays où se fait la guerre,” the repetitions of “son retour” (“his return”) at the end of each verse had a different gauzy texture, subtly increasing the complexity and tension of the illusion that a lover will come back.A silvery sheen to “printemps” in Chausson’s “Le temps des lilas” gave a brief impression of dewy spring; there was grandeur in Donizetti’s “Depuis qu’une autre a su te plaire” without overkill. The Spanish-style ornaments in Delibes’s “Les filles de Cadix” weren’t dashed off for smiles, but were sung with intensity, turning what could be a throwaway number into an unlikely burning drama.In a second half of Italian songs, Yoncheva was dreamy in Puccini, though her voice wanted greater size and juiciness to fill out her epic conception of “Canto d’anime.” In works by Martucci, Tosti and Verdi, her phrasing had confidence and style, a carefully constructed but persuasive evocation of naturalness; though she had a music stand in front of her throughout the evening, she sang with focus and commitment.Tosti’s “Ideale” was particularly striking, its finale building from faintness to climax. Warmly received, she moved to classic arias for encores: a refreshingly unsappy “Donde lieta uscì” from “La Bohème”; a genuinely sexy, insinuating “Carmen” Habanera; and “Adieu, notre petite table” from “Manon,” tenderly mused.Oh, and she spent the first half in a black gown, billowing above the bodice, and the second in white — shiny satin throughout, a dream of a diva. More

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      Renée Fleming and Uma Thurman Share an Odyssey

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      The actress and opera star come together in “Penelope,” a Homeric monodrama by André Previn and Tom Stoppard, at Carnegie Hall.When the polymathic musician André Previn died in 2019, he left behind an unfinished score: “Penelope,” a monodrama he was writing for the star soprano Renée Fleming.It was set to premiere that year at Tanglewood to celebrate Previn’s 90th birthday. Instead, the performance became, “as it were, in memoriam,” the playwright Tom Stoppard, who wrote the work’s text, said in a recent interview.That the premiere happened at all was something of a miracle; the incomplete score’s pages weren’t even in an easily discernible order. But David Fetherolf, Previn’s longtime editor, reconstructed and completed the piece, then published a final version after the Tanglewood performance. And now the original performers — Fleming; the pianist Simone Dinnerstein; the Emerson String Quartet; and the actress Uma Thurman, as Fleming’s speaking avatar — are reuniting to bring “Penelope” to Carnegie Hall on Sunday.Previn and Stoppard had collaborated before, on the 1977 play “Every Good Boy Deserves Favour,” but Stoppard said that he was reluctant to take on a project like “Penelope” because “I don’t really have any musical intelligence.” Still, Fleming — for whom Previn had composed works including the opera “A Streetcar Named Desire” — kept asking for a monodrama, and Previn eventually persuaded Stoppard to do it.What Stoppard came up with was a retelling of Homer’s “Odyssey” from the perspective of Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, who waits 20 years for her husband to return from the Trojan War and fends off scores of suitors ready to take his place.“The only idea I had about her was that she starts off by resenting the way that she’s perceived by posterity,” Stoppard said. “The first couple of pages are quite slangy, modernistic and ironic, and even sarcastic. I wanted to end up with a feeling which was not about any kind of grievance she was holding, but about the pain she had gone through. And I wanted to account for her being a byword for wisdom.”If set to music, Stoppard’s original draft would have run for about two hours, Fleming said during a recent video interview with Thurman. As a solution, the piece evolved to portray Penelope with two performers: one singing, one speaking. “Both the soprano and the narrator are Penelope, and should be presented as such,” Fetherolf notes in the published score.Fleming, left, and Thurman, right, with the pianist Simone Dinnerstein and the Emerson String Quartet at the 2019 premiere of “Penelope” at Tanglewood.Hilary ScottThe two performers pass the narrative back and forth, sometimes completing each other’s sentences — the sung part poetically spare (at least relatively, given Stoppard’s idiosyncratic verbal complexity), the spoken one elevated and melodic. In the interview, Fleming and Thurman discussed sharing the role, and what it means to tell Penelope’s story today. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Renée, you have been involved with this from the start, but Uma, what was the appeal of the project for you?UMA THURMAN Renée. And Tom, whose work I have known all my life, and who I met when I was a teenager and was sort of daunted by his work and his beautiful, complex use of language.RENÉE FLEMING Uma, the fact that you were involved was so perfect. You are the archetype. You just stand for everything that we imagine Penelope to be, in your professional persona. I think of you as a Greek goddess: her strength, her ability to say no for 20 years and be clever and work around all of these men. I really cannot think of anybody better to do this with.THURMAN It was very hair-raising: I was in this play at Williamstown when we performed “Penelope” at Tanglewood, and I was stepping into the situation of Tom’s muscular, articulate language inserted into the music.Whenever music and language meet, it’s so different from being in a drama or comedy in theater. When you put language to music, it becomes very specific: the pacing, the dividing of words and sentences; it all has to obey the music. It’s a challenge that makes me feel like I’m doing things for the first time, as if you had to fix a bicycle and then you had to go work on a plane. You need the same skill set, but it doesn’t feel like it.FLEMING When I’ve done theater, even musical theater, I have felt completely untethered because I didn’t have the musical framework. It was terrifying to me; there was so much space.THURMAN It’s kind of like a white space. But actually there has to be an architecture inside of it. In this piece, we do switch between those two disciplines and mediums in a beautifully compact way.The spoken text is nevertheless quite musical. What goes into bringing that out in the delivery?THURMAN It’s a lot of breaking things down into patterns of vowel sounds and muscular nouns that paint pictures, and finding tempo and space. This comes from circling vowels and choosing T’s and these kinds of things. But in general, I think that Tom Stoppard’s use of language is elevated. He has a vocabulary triple the normal usage of anyone. I’ve had some very keen eyes help me on that, too. I wouldn’t interpret Stoppard with only my mind.FLEMING I think he’s a genius, honestly. During my first engagement at the Royal Opera in London, I saw “Arcadia,” which was brand-new then, and I was completely hooked. Vocally, “Penelope” is like a long recitative. André was by nature melodic, but for this, because of all the text, I’m just singing words on pitch. And I’m working as hard as I can to make them understood.How did this piece change your relationship with Penelope as a character?FLEMING What I said to Tom was, I want to know why Penelope waited. But that didn’t register with him, and he’s Tom Stoppard, so obviously he wrote it as he saw it. There’s a lot in the original story that we bristle at today — like the killing of all those handmaidens, because they were doing what they were coerced to do? He didn’t soften any of those points.THURMAN Interestingly, having been a great fan of the myth since childhood, I just bought a nice children’s collection for my 9-year-old and was reading to her and freshly engaging with it. We’re dealing with our history; let’s be real. Tom did redact one reference, which had to do with women’s work. It wasn’t coming from him, it was an interpretation of our history, but it was too much.FLEMING From the beginning, one of the things I connected with was this incredible device of her weaving and unweaving her tapestry every night, for years. To me that notion is so musical. Every version of Goethe’s “Faust” has some sort of weaving aria. And that was something I admired, how clever Penelope was, and her strength of conviction.THURMAN She also says, “In tears we outdid each other in forgiving.” And her defense of herself and honoring her marriage and her choice of which man will take her father’s property — the enormous skill that she has to put into play to defend herself. She’s an admirable politician. And the politics in which she is exercising her rights and her choice are not the politics in which we exercise rights and choice today.What goes, then, into her earning the title Penelope the Wise by the end?FLEMING Well, she survived. She survived by wit and she was — as you said, Uma — wise enough to forgive. More

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      One Opera Opening Would Make Any Composer Happy. He Has Two.

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      Ricky Ian Gordon’s “Intimate Apparel” and “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” are premiering in New York almost simultaneously.When the composer Ricky Ian Gordon saw Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies” on Broadway in the early 1970s, it was unlike anything he’d watched on a stage.“He was creating this musical theater that felt like foreign film to me,” Gordon said in a recent interview. “And I wanted to make something in the theater that felt like foreign movies.”“That’s what ‘Follies’ was: a musical about broken lives and disappointment,” he continued, adding an expletive for emphasis. “I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’”Gordon, now 65, did go on to create art inspired by those subjects — in the process becoming considerably better known in the world of opera than theater.In a coincidence caused by pandemic delays, not one but two of his operas are opening nearly simultaneously before this month is out, and both involve the darkness Gordon adored in “Follies.” “Intimate Apparel,” at Lincoln Center Theater, for which Lynn Nottage adapted her own play, deals with lies, deceptions and thwarted dreams in the story of a Black seamstress in 1905 New York. And “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” presented by New York City Opera, is based on a semi-autobiographical Giorgio Bassani novel about the fate of privileged members of the Jewish community in Ferrara, Italy, who were tragically blind to what awaited them during World War II.It’s a highly unusual situation for a living composer: To have two of your operas playing at once in New York, your name usually has to be something like Puccini, whose “Tosca” and “La Bohème” are both running this January at the Metropolitan Opera.“One new opera demands an enormous amount of attention, but two is downright invasive,” Gordon said. “It is incredibly stressful, no matter how often I meditate, but it is also enormously fulfilling, and thankfully, pride-building. It is also strange to be going back and forth between the Lower East Side in 1905 and Ferrara in 1945, but thank God for the IRT.”From left: Krysty Swann, Kearstin Piper Brown and Naomi Louisa O’Connell in “Intimate Apparel,” for which Lynn Nottage has adapted her play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTo fully grasp Gordon’s career, it is important to travel back a little less far than that, to the years that bridged the turn of the 21st century, when it appeared as if he would be among a new generation of composers rejuvenating the American musical. Drawing inspiration from Ned Rorem and Alban Berg, Dmitri Shostakovich and Scott Joplin, he was often lumped in a similarly arty cohort that included fellow composers Adam Guettel, Michael John LaChiusa and Jason Robert Brown.Songs by all four were included on Audra McDonald’s debut solo album, “Way Back to Paradise,” a hybrid of musical theater, avant-pop and art song that came out in 1998 — and, in hindsight, announced a changing of the guard that ended up not happening, as more mainstream rock and pop styles conquered Broadway.Gordon’s subtly lyrical harmonies slowly worked their way into your subconscious, and he suggested emotion rather than hitting the listener with it. That was not what musical theater wanted.“They always called us ‘children of Sondheim,’ ” Gordon said. “He opened a door, but it wasn’t an open door — it was just the door for Sondheim to walk through.”“People started saying that we didn’t write melodies and beats,” he added, then shot out a joking expletive, as if responding to the charge. “Every one of us writes melodies and writes rhythm, but in the language we grew up on and that we evolved out of.”Born in 1956, Gordon was raised on Long Island; he was — as Donald Katz documented in “Home Fires,” a much-praised 1992 book about the Gordon family’s middle-class aspirations and frustrations — once in line to inherit his father’s electrical business. But he discovered opera when he was eight, stumbling onto The Victor Book of the Opera at a friend’s house.“My memory of it is like a Harry Potter moment, like there was smoke and light behind this book,” he said.He was also open to pop, and in his early teens became “transfixed, mesmerized, completely and overwhelmingly obsessed with Joni Mitchell,” as he put it in a story he wrote about her last year for Spin magazine. The story is drawn from a forthcoming memoir that grew out of a writing group Gordon started with some poets and novelists during the pandemic; self-examination is not new to him, and he is candid about his past struggles with alcoholism, drug addiction and eating disorders.He initially enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University as a pianist, but ended up a composer, obsessed with bringing words to musical life. “If I’m setting a poem to music, I memorize it and I let it marinate and live inside of me,” he said. “I love singers, so I want to give them something to act. Even if it’s a song, it should be like a little mini opera.”By the 1990s and early 2000s, he was straddling various forms and genres. He wrote the song cycle “Genius Child” for the soprano Harolyn Blackwell, and his first opera, “The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” a meditation informed by the AIDS epidemic, premiered at Houston Grand Opera in 1996. But his work also appeared Off Broadway, including such musical-theater projects as “Dream True,” a collaboration with the writer and director Tina Landau, and the Proust-inspired show “My Life With Albertine,” which opened at Playwrights Horizons in 2003 with a then-unknown Kelli O’Hara in the title role.After being touted as part of a new generation of musical theater composers, Gordon found more of a home in the opera world.Sarah ShatzThat show, alas, did not go over well, even if Ben Brantley praised the score’s “lovely, intricately layered melodies” in his review for The New York Times.Gordon was proud of “My Life With Albertine” and its failure hurt him deeply. “I thought I needed to face facts: The musical theater right now is not where I am going to flower,” he said. “I had written to all these opera companies that I wanted to do opera, so the next thing I did was ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ with Minnesota Opera. Suddenly, I felt this was where I could do what I do. Now I’m at Lincoln Center, where musicals are usually done, but I’m doing my opera here.”Gordon was, indeed, happily chatting away in an empty room at Lincoln Center Theater, where “Intimate Apparel” — which was well into previews when the first pandemic lockdown came, and now opens Jan. 31 — had just wrapped up a rehearsal in the Mitzi E. Newhouse space.Suddenly, voices piped in from a monitor: A matinee of the musical “Flying Over Sunset” had begun at the Vivian Beaumont Theater above. Coincidentally, that show’s lyrics were written by Michael Korie, Gordon’s librettist on “The Grapes of Wrath” and now “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” which City Opera is presenting with the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, starting Jan. 27.Doing “Intimate Apparel” at Lincoln Center Theater was not a given. It is part of the company’s joint commissioning program with the Met, and the other works from that program that have reached the stage, like Nico Muhly’s “Two Boys” and the recent “Eurydice” by Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl, have been produced at the opera house.“It was really time for Lincoln Center Theater to get the benefit of one of these shows,” Paul Cremo, the Met’s dramaturg, said in an interview. “We thought that with the intimacy of the play, it would really benefit from that space, where some audience members are just six feet away from the characters. And Ricky wrote a beautiful orchestration for two pianos.”Gordon “was a really lovely guide through this process,” said Nottage, left, and the two are at work on other opera.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesWhile Gordon was working on a small scale, for just a couple of instruments, Nottage was tasked with expanding her play, which consists mostly of two-person interactions, into a libretto that would bring together larger groups of characters and make use of a chorus. (Bartlett Sher directs.)“I shared with Ricky what I was listening to and we spoke a lot about what the texture and the feel of the piece should be,” Nottage said. “He’s very deeply invested in Americana music and, in particular, ragtime. What he does really beautifully is weave all of these traditional forms together without it feeling like pastiche. He was a really lovely guide through this process.” (The pair got along so well that they are now at work on a commission from Opera Theater of St. Louis with Nottage’s daughter, Ruby Aiyo Gerber.)The musical style of “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” draws from a different well. “It’s my Italian opera,” Gordon said. “I just thought of putting myself in the head of Puccini, Verdi, Bellini. It’s very different from ‘Intimate Apparel,’ which is very American.”Anthony Ciaramitaro and Rachel Blaustein in rehearsal for “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” about Jewish Italians on the cusp of World War II.Sarah ShatzOne major difference is size: The “Finzi-Continis” score has been arranged for a 15-piece orchestra for the City Opera run and can be expanded for larger ensembles, especially as there are tentative plans to produce it in Italy.“It’s absolutely, unabashedly melodic, just beautiful sweeping melodies,” said Michael Capasso, the general director of City Opera, who is staging the production with Richard Stafford.The two Gordon projects illustrate both the composer’s ecumenical tastes and his versatility. “Ricky sounds like Ricky,” Korie said in an interview, “but he’s not afraid to do what classical opera composers did, or what Rodgers and Hammerstein did for years, and what composers in theater still do, which is they allow themselves to immerse themselves in the sounds of other characters, other times, other places.”From left: Gordon with Michael Korie, the librettist of “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” and Richard Stafford, who is staging the production with Michael Capasso.Sarah Shatz“Finzi-Continis” keeps with his early desire to make something in the theater that felt like foreign movies: Gordon has long been a fan of Vittorio De Sica’s Academy Award-winning film version, from 1970. But rewatching it a few years ago hit him especially hard.“I think there was something about the juxtaposition of personal pain and universal pain — I suddenly saw what made that story so tragic,” he said. “I couldn’t even endure it.”So he called Korie to suggest they adapt Bassani’s book.It’s not a coincidence that both “Intimate Apparel” and “Finzi-Continis” are set in the past, because most of Gordon’s work is. “In some way I’m a memorialist,” he said. “I very often write from a place of grief.”Yet, asked by email what she thought was his signature style, Kelli O’Hara unexpectedly answered: “Joy. I don’t think the subject matters are always joyous, but the music-making is the healer. So yes. Joy.”And, indeed, Gordon chuckled when he said: “I’m lucky that I’m activated by my unhappiness rather than paralyzed. I’ve never been able to sit still because I never felt like I had done enough, I never felt important enough. It has caused me enormous pain but it made me never stop writing. And I’m glad I didn’t shut up.” More