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      Carlisle Floyd, Whose Operas Spun Fables of the South, Dies at 95

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      His celebrated works drew from the musical traditions of revival meetings and country hoedowns, telling stories of intolerance.Carlisle Floyd, the composer-librettist whose operas explored the passions and prejudices of the South in lyrical tales that drew on rural fundamentalism, the Great Depression, the aftermath of the Civil War and other regional themes, died on Thursday in Tallahassee, Fla. He was 95. His death was announced by his publisher, Boosey & Hawkes.Among the leading 20th-century American opera composers, Mr. Floyd is often cited with Ned Rorem, Philip Glass, John Coolidge Adams, the Italian-American Gian Carlo Menotti, Samuel Barber and others whose works have joined the standard repertory, including George Gershwin, who called his “Porgy and Bess” a folk opera, and Leonard Bernstein, whose “Candide” was an operetta.The son of an itinerant South Carolina preacher, Mr. Floyd grew up with the music of the South: revival meeting hymns, square dance fiddlers, rollicking country hoedowns and folk songs. He wrote them into many of his operas, whose plots were largely derived from classics of literature, featuring social outcasts and narrow-minded neighbors who ostracized them.Mr. Floyd said his exposure to religious bigotry early in life had shaped his operatic themes. “The thing that horrified me already as a child about revival meetings,” he told The New York Times in 1998, “was mass coercion, people being forced to conform to something against their will without ever knowing what they were being asked to confess or receive.”His best-known opera was “Susannah,” based on the Apocrypha story of Susanna and the Elders. Taken from the Book of Daniel to the Tennessee hills and rendered in Smoky Mountain dialect, it portrays a young woman wrongly accused of promiscuity and a traveling preacher who incites a mob, then seduces her. The preacher is slain by her brother, and Susannah stands defiant, holding off the mob with a shotgun.With hymns, square dances and arias simulating folk songs, “Susannah” leapt to national renown at the New York City Opera under Erich Leinsdorf in 1956. It won the New York Music Critics’ Circle Award, was entered at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958 as an outstanding example of American opera, and over the years became a favorite of regional companies, one of the most performed operas of the American musical stage.Other notable Floyd operas included “Of Mice and Men,” his adaptation of John Steinbeck’s story of two tragic migrant farm workers in the Dust Bowl; “Willie Stark,” his treatment of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” about a ruthless politician modeled on Louisiana’s Huey P. Long; and “The Passion of Jonathan Wade,” about a Reconstruction-era love affair destroyed by intolerance and hate.American audiences flocked to regional performances of Mr. Floyd’s work, especially “Susannah” and “Of Mice and Men.” But New York critics were negative about his music, if not his storytelling. In 1999, four decades and some 800 regional performances after it opened, “Susannah” was finally performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Valhalla of grand opera in America.Renee Fleming as Susannah Polk and Samuel Ramey as Olin Blitch in the Met Opera’s 1999 production of “Susannah,” composer Carlisle Floyd’s best-known work.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Amiable, direct, wholly without guile, Carlisle Floyd’s American heroine and the work that bears her name arrived at the halls of grand opera on Wednesday night, looking like some lonely tourist lost in the vastness of Grand Central Terminal,” Bernard Holland wrote in The Times.He added: “The piece is perfect in size and difficulty for the regional opera house or the amateur production, but lesser singing, I suspect, reveals its thinness even more. Mr. Floyd has a nice way with hoedowns, countrified modal melody and drumroll crescendos, but there is amazingly little going on at the musical end of this opera.”Other critics disparaged his operas as narrowly drawn. But Mr. Floyd insisted that his stories reflected larger realities and that his characters — insular people fearful of outsiders and anyone different — were universal. And he scoffed at perceptions of his music as folk opera, implying that its tonal country sounds were naïve.“A lot of critics don’t like to acknowledge that there are no absolutes in taste, which is intensely personal and which governs a composer’s choice of idiom,” he told Opera News in 1999.Mr. Floyd’s “Of Mice and Men,” based on the John Steinbeck novel, at the New York City Opera in 2003. From left: Rod Nelman as George Milton, Anthony Dean Griffey as Lennie Small and Peter Strummer as Candy.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Floyd never sought to join the New York-Northeast musical establishment. He devoted much of his life to teaching, starting at Florida State University in 1947, and over 30 years wrote most of his operas in Tallahassee. From 1976 to 1996, he was a professor at the University of Houston, where he wrote several of his last operas, including “Cold Sassy Tree,” based on a novel by Olive Ann Burns about the romance between an aging widower and a young northerner that scandalizes a small Georgia town.His last opera, “Prince of Players,” was premiered by the Houston Grand Opera in March 2016, months before his 90th birthday, and was performed by the Little Opera Theater of New York at Hunter College in February 2017.Adapted from a Jeffrey Hatcher play (and subsequent 2004 film) about Edward Kynaston, one of the last actors of Restoration England to play female roles, “Prince of Players” centers on Kynaston’s crisis in 1661, when Charles II declares that all female roles on London stages must be played by women.Reviewing the Houston production, Opera News said it revealed “Floyd’s deep understanding and sympathy for issues that pervade our culture today — the complexities and subtleties of gender identity, sexual preference and their social consequences — played out in a story from 17th-century England.”Anthony Tommasini, in a review of the New York production for The Times, said: “It’s miraculous that a composer whose reputation dates to his 1955 ‘Susannah,’ one of the most performed American operas, is still working with assurance and skill.”Carlisle Sessions Floyd was born in Latta, S.C., on June 11, 1926, one of two children of Carlisle and Ida (Fenegan) Floyd. He and his sister, Ermine, were schooled in a succession of South Carolina towns where their father was a Methodist preacher. Their mother nurtured Carlisle’s creative instincts, giving him piano lessons and encouraging him to write short stories.After graduating from high school in North, S.C., he entered Converse College in Spartanburg in 1943. He studied music and piano under the composer Ernst Bacon. In 1945, when Mr. Bacon became director of the music school at Syracuse University, Mr. Floyd followed him there and earned a bachelor’s degree in music in 1946.He began teaching at Florida State and was soon composing. In 1949, he earned a master’s degree at Syracuse. His first two operas sputtered, but “Susannah,” his third, thrived. It opened at Florida State in 1955, and its New York City Opera premiere was hailed a year later. Ronald Eyer, in Tempo, called it an “unadorned story of malice, hypocrisy and tragedy of almost scriptural simplicity.”In 1957, Mr. Floyd married Margery Kay Reeder. She died in 2010. No immediate family members survive.Mr. Floyd’s only non-American subject, an interpretation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” premiered at the Santa Fe Opera in 1958.After a long gestation, “Of Mice and Men” opened at the Seattle Opera in 1970. It was widely performed by regional repertory companies. But when it finally landed at the New York City Opera in 1983, Donal Henahan of The Times said it “failed ultimately because it is a feeble score too dependent on gray declamatory lines and melodramatic clichés of the sort that no longer turn up even in television serials.”Composer/librettist Carlisle Floyd, right, talks with conductor Patrick Summers about the music for Floyd’s upcoming opera “Cold Sassy Tree” during rehearsals Thursday, April 6, 2000, in Houston. “Cold Sassy Tree,” set to open Friday, April 14 in Houston, is Floyd’s latest and perhaps final opera.BRETT COOMER/Associated PressIn 1999, David Gockley, then general director of the Houston Grand Opera and a longtime admirer of Mr. Floyd’s work, told Opera News that New York reviewers were unfair to composers like Mr. Floyd.“Carlisle Floyd is America’s foremost opera composer,” Mr. Gockley was quoted as saying. “If you’re not part of the Northeastern establishment, specifically the New York scene, you have no status. Because Floyd always lived and taught in Florida or Houston, he has been regarded as a regional figure, when in fact he is a national one.”Mr. Floyd, who lived in Tallahassee, received the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush at the White House in 2004. In 2008 he was named, along with the conductor James Levine and the soprano Leontyne Price, as among the first honorees of the National Endowment for the Arts for lifetime achievement in opera.“Falling Up: The Days and Nights of Carlisle Floyd, the Authorized Biography” by Thomas Holliday, was published in 2013. More

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      The Score of Final Fantasy Gets Its Due at the Concert Hall

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      The beloved music for this video game and others have been covered on YouTube for years. Now some are performed at classical music’s grandest venues.LONDON — At a recent concert here, the bows of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra rose and fell like the mighty sword of Sephiroth, the silver-haired villain of Final Fantasy VII. Onstage, a 32-person choir thundered the antagonist’s name: “Sephiroth!”The audience in the 19th-century theater burst into applause when it recognized the opening notes of “One-Winged Angel,” a battle theme from the game that merges Latin opera, influences from Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” and caustic rock music.Almost 6,000 people of all ages attended this Final Fantasy VII Remake concert at the Royal Albert Hall on Sunday, which showcased the soundtrack to the seventh installment of the hugely popular Japanese video game.Aine McColgan dressed in cosplay for the concert.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesCharlotte Ball as the game’s protagonist, Cloud Strife.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesA group of concert goers dressed as Final Fantasy VII characters, including Rufus Shinra, Cloud Strife and Scarlet.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesAt the concert, the two worlds of gaming and classical music merged, and while some concertgoers wore suits and bow ties, others dressed in cosplay as their favorite characters from the game.Charlotte Ball, 27, attended the evening dressed as the game’s protagonist, Cloud Strife, an ex-soldier and mercenary. She spent hours laboriously researching and designing her costume, a sleeveless turtleneck with embroidered brown braces, one shoulder of armor made from foam, and a short-haired blond wig that could easily belong to a member of BTS.“Whenever I hear its music, it brings me back to when I was a kid,” Ball said of the game. “It’s a homage to my childhood.”The audience burst into applause when it recognized the opening notes of “One-Winged Angel,” a battle theme from Final Fantasy.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesFinal Fantasy VII was released in 1997 on PlayStation, and has now been bought more than 11 million times across all major platforms. The enormous popularity of its electronically synthesized score by Nobuo Uematsu evidences the huge impact video game music can have.The Final Fantasy games have an interactive, role-player format, which immerses gamers in the journeys of its heroic protagonists. These journeys are interwoven with music throughout, like a film score. As a result, “you do not just watch a game. You play it, you feel it, you embody it,” said Melanie Fritsch, a professor in media and cultural studies at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany. “Sometimes, people start crying when there is a good moment in a game that’s nicely implemented with the music.”Because of this emotional connection, the influence of these scores extends far beyond the games themselves. Since 2007, there have been more than 200 official Final Fantasy concerts across 20 countries, according to Square Enix, the company behind the game.At the Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony this summer, athletes marched to songs from popular games including Dragon Quest, Kingdom Hearts, Sonic the Hedgehog and Final Fantasy, music described by its organizers as “a quintessential part of Japanese culture that is loved around the world.”Uematsu, now 62, single-handedly composed the first nine installments of Final Fantasy scores, creating music that remains a nostalgic rabbit-hole for many fans. A self-described musical omnivore without formal musical training, Uematsu’s work draws on influences from an eclectic mix of progressive rock, Led Zeppelin, Elton John, Celtic and classical music.But video game scores have often been dismissed by devotees of mainstream classical music. Even in Japan, the birthplace of modern video game music, “up until after the millennium, it was regarded as a lesser type of music,” said Junya Nakano, 50, the co-composer of the Final Fantasy X soundtrack.Yoko Shimomura, a prolific video game composer.Osamu NakamuraNobuo Uematsu, who single-handedly composed the first nine installments of Final Fantasy scores.David Wolff-Patrick/Redferns, via Getty Images“There are some melodies I composed almost 30 years ago I’ve almost forgotten,” the composer Junya Nakano said. “But fans are still playing them.”Kosuke Okahara for The New York TimesGrowing up as a video game fan who also had classical music training, Nakano aspired to join the early generation of game composers, like Uematsu and Koichi Sugiyama.For the tenth installment of Final Fantasy, Nakano worked with Uematsu on the game’s score. Released in 2001, it was the first game in the franchise to use voice actors for its characters. The challenge for Nakano was to compose the music, along with Uematsu and Masashi Hamauzu, with only a “very rough outline” of the narrative for each movie scene. “We really had to create music based on our imagination,” Nakano said. Along with its sequel, Final Fantasy X sold more than 14 million copies.Writing video game scores isn’t always respected by those in the classical music fields. After majoring in piano at the Osaka College of Music, Yoko Shimomura, 53, applied for a job as a video game composer, a career path that her professors discouraged, she said.“Adults in my generation back then had little awareness about game music,” Shimomura said in a video interview. “So they had no concept to compare it to whatsoever.”But Shimomura went on to become one of the most prolific female video game composers in the world. Her magnum opus is the eclectic score for Kingdom Hearts, first released in 2002, which combines her signature piano, opera and opening music sung by the Japanese American singer, Hikaru Utada.Outside of Japan, the “hegemonic thinking” that elevated classical music at the expense of video game compositions has also persisted, according to Fritsch, the media and cultural studies professor.“There is so much music out there in the world that is not composed by white males with wigs. And it’s good music,” said Fritsch, who also works in ludomusicology, a nascent field of academic research dedicated to the study of video game music.Since 2007, there have been more than 200 official Final Fantasy concerts across 20 countries.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesThe first installment of Final Fantasy, released in 1987, used technology that initially meant the music was limited to a handful of electronic sounds. As the technology of the game systems evolved, the music metamorphosed with it. The arrival of Final Fantasy VIII in 1999 allowed Uematsu to use recordings from a live orchestra and choir for the first time. “The fans were always aware of the quality of music,” Nakano said.Online, those fans are now giving the music new life. Previously, illegal MP3 downloads, expensive CD imports from Japan and sheet music were the only way video-game-music enthusiasts could replay their favorite songs. Now, a community of fans post videos to YouTube of covers, tutorials and their own compositions, providing a way into the often inaccessible world of classical music.“There are some melodies I composed almost 30 years ago I’ve almost forgotten,” Nakano said, “But fans are still playing them.”For 18 years, Kyle Landry has created piano arrangements of music from various anime, video games and movies on YouTube, gaining more than 700,000 followers. Shimomura’s music, and Uematsu’s in particular, have been gold mines of inspiration.“Nobuo Uematsu’s compositions have been touching my life since 2003, and contributed much inspiration for me over the years,” said Landry.Among the most prolific cover artists is the mysterious “Zohar002,” a Japanese pianist whose covers of music from Chrono Trigger — a 1995 RPG game considered the greatest of the 16-bit era — enticed a huge following on YouTube from 2007, until the account was mysteriously removed, sparking mournful odes to Zohar002’s brilliance, and rumors that they were in fact the game’s composer, Yasunori Mitsuda.“I never dreamed such a great variation would be created by so many fans,” Shimomura said of the online renditions, adding that some fan compositions were better than the originals. “It’s a really great honor for me to say that people love my music.”Hisako Ueno contributed reporting. More

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      Review: The Philharmonic Tries Out Another Temporary Home

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      After opening its season at Alice Tully Hall, the orchestra found more congenial surroundings at the Rose Theater.Maybe it was the surge of adrenaline that the New York Philharmonic felt at finally returning to live concerts at Lincoln Center after a year and a half. Maybe sizing down symphonic power for a temporary venue — Alice Tully Hall, with just over a third of the seats of the orchestra’s usual theater across the street — was a work in progress on opening night.Whatever the reason, the Philharmonic’s clenched, loud performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 last week left me jangled and headachy. From my seat close to the action — maybe that was part of the problem, too — the performance seemed in line with the worst impulses of Jaap van Zweden, the orchestra’s music director, who announced just before the season that he would leave his post in 2024.That bullied, blatant Beethoven swept up even a normally suave soloist, Daniil Trifonov, who huffed and pounded. It didn’t bode well for the remainder of this season, much of which will be held at Tully as the Philharmonic’s home, David Geffen Hall, undergoes renovations.Not so fast. On Thursday — the orchestra’s nerves perhaps settled, and now at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, another temporary home much smaller than Geffen, but airier in feel than Tully — a different Beethoven piano concerto, the Third, was superb.Yes, I know: Another week, another Beethoven concerto. But it’s slightly easier to forgive unimaginative programming when the performance is as spirited and full-bodied as it was with Yefim Bronfman as soloist.Beloved by this orchestra, particularly in this composer, Bronfman built imperceptibly through the first movement to organ-like grandeur in his cadenza. Then his tone receded into pearly dreaminess before ending in a shivery trill. His serene poise at the start of the Largo (later recalled in his encore, Chopin’s Nocturne No. 8 in D flat) was matched by silky strings. The Rondo finale had dash all around, but Bronfman never seemed to be putting phrases in italics or boldface; this was easygoing playing, in the best sense.The concerto followed Hannah Kendall’s “Kanashibari” (2013), which has a few ethereal moments before falling into a long stretch of John Adams-esque chugging strings and brassy fanfares, with the odd slap of wood. But the orchestra played it with focus and polish.Opening with a contemporary work of seven or eight minutes that’s swamped by the subsequent hour of Beethoven and Haydn, the program was in the classic mode of an ensemble that’s profoundly cautious yet wants to appear progressive.A slight complication is that while Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto is frequent fodder for the Philharmonic, Haydn’s Symphony No. 92 in G (“Oxford”) isn’t. It’s standard repertory, sure, but not for this orchestra, which until trying it out this summer hadn’t played it in almost 20 years.Van Zweden leading Haydn’s Symphony No. 92 in G (“Oxford”).Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesIt made you, as performances of his symphonies often do, want to hear them all the time. Particularly when they gleam like the “Oxford” did on Thursday, the phrases at the start sculpted but not overly managed. Perhaps, going for crispness, van Zweden occasionally erred on the side of curtness, and the final movement sometimes tipped into feeling more driven than witty. But the playing was largely rich and good-humored: balanced and gentle in the second movement, then graceful and patient, and with even a hint of mystery, in the third.Based on first impressions, it seems that, of the Philharmonic’s two main residences this season, the intimate yet spacious Rose Theater might give the orchestra and its sound more room to breathe.New York PhilharmonicProgram repeats Friday and Saturday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Carmen Balthrop, Soprano Known for Joplin Opera Role, Dies at 73

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      After winning a vocal competition in 1975, she starred in “Treemonisha,” which ended up on Broadway. She also sang for a senator.The soprano Carmen Balthrop made her Metropolitan Opera debut on April 6, 1977. Thirteen days later she made an entirely different sort of debut, in a hearing room of the United States Senate.That day Ms. Balthrop, still early in a career that would take her to opera and concert stages all over the world, was one of a number of people testifying at a meeting of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee in support of funding for the arts.It was a dreary and underattended meeting, with Senator Mark O. Hatfield, Republican of Oregon and the subcommittee chairman, the only member of the panel present. Dreary, that is, until Senator Hatfield, skeptical of the funding request, challenged Ms. Balthrop’s assertion that opera singers were a disciplined and hard-working lot.“He said, ‘Come on, are you really that disciplined?’” she told Knight-Ridder afterward. “And he said he’d like to hear some of the results. I said, ‘Why, certainly.’”She stood up and sang “Signore, ascolta” from Puccini’s “Turandot.”“He was delighted and declared a recess,” she said, “and later on, we got the money.”Ms. Balthrop, a noted Black star when opera was still early in its efforts to become more diverse, died on Sept. 5 at her home in Mitchellville, Md. She was 73.Her husband, Patrick A. Delaney, said the cause was cancer.Two years before that impromptu Senate performance, Ms. Balthrop’s career took off after she wowed audiences at the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in April 1975, winning that competition. During the finals, she had sung that same “Turandot” excerpt, as well as “Che sento? O Dio!” from Handel’s “Julius Caesar,” performances that had been broadcast live on National Public Radio.“The announcement of Miss Balthrop’s victory brought cheers from the audience, which had clearly approved of her singing,” The New York Times reported.Later that year she landed perhaps her most prominent role, the title character in “Treemonisha,” Scott Joplin’s folk opera about an 18-year-old Black girl who is trying to lead her people to a better life. The opera, written before World War I, was not produced in Joplin’s lifetime, but in 1972 a version of it was staged in Atlanta, and three years later the Houston Grand Opera mounted a production with Ms. Balthrop in the lead.The opera was performed in Houston seven times as part of a free opera series, with thousands attending. At the final performance, the opera’s finale, “A Real Slow Drag,” was reprised three times for the enthusiastic crowd.That production moved to Broadway. At the time, Elizabeth McCann was managing director of Nederlander Productions, which brought the show to New York. (Ms. McCann died this month.) She told The Times that the ability of Ms. Balthrop, who was then 27, to portray a teenager was a large part of the reason.“Carmen Balthrop, who plays the title role, is just tremendous,” she said. “The part needs an enchanting and innocent girl with strength. How often do you get a combination like that?”Ms. Balthrop as Pamina in Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte.” She made her Metropolitan Opera debut in the role in 1977.James Heffernan/Metropolitan Opera ArchivesCarmen Arlene Balthrop was born on May 14, 1948, in Washington. Her father, John, worked in the printing office of the Department of Justice, and her mother, Clementine (Jordan) Balthrop, was a homemaker.As Ms. Balthrop often told the story, she set her career goal early — when she was 8. Her father had a hobby: In the basement of the family home, he would tinker with radios and televisions. She had an assigned Saturday chore: to clean the house while her mother went to the market.“One Saturday I was running the vacuum cleaner, and I turned it off because I heard something very unusual coming from the basement,” where her father was testing a radio and speakers, she told “The Opera Diva Series,” a web interview program, in 2011.“I went to the top of the steps and I called out,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Daddy, what’s that?’ He said, ‘That’s opera.’”Specifically, it was the voice of Leontyne Price, the groundbreaking Black soprano.“Something was awakened in me,” Ms. Balthrop said, “and I began from that moment on to try to re-create that sound myself.”She graduated from Theodore Roosevelt High School in Washington in 1967 and earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Maryland in 1971. The next year she received a master’s degree in music at the Catholic University of America.Her Met debut in 1977 was in “Die Zauberflöte,” in which she sang the role of Pamina. She performed with numerous other opera companies and symphonies, including Washington Opera, Deutsche Oper of Berlin and Opera Columbus in Ohio, where in 1999 she performed the title role in the world premiere of “Vanqui,” an opera about the travels of the souls of two slaves composed by Leslie Burrs and with a libretto by John A. Williams.Ms. Balthrop began a career as a teacher at the University of Maryland in 1985. She also filled administrative roles there, including coordinator of the voice and opera division.A marriage to Dorceal Duckens ended in divorce. In addition to Mr. Delaney, whom she married in 1985, Ms. Balthrop is survived by a daughter from her first marriage, Nicole Mosley; her daughter with Mr. Delaney, Camille Delaney-McNeil; and three grandchildren.In a blog entry on the University of Maryland website, Ms. Balthrop once wrote of being surprised by Ms. Price, who turned up unexpectedly at a rehearsal when Ms. Balthrop was preparing to perform in San Francisco.“There was no one in the hall,” she wrote of their encounter. “I was standing there with the voice that inspired me to sing. Every time I think about it, I just well up, because I don’t think people get to meet their idols very often.” More

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      Review: For Armory Recitals, a Modest but Memorable Return

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      Paul Appleby and Conor Hanick presented a song program focused on cycles by Beethoven and Berg.The past few weeks have brought heartening signs that classical music is coming back to New York after the devastating pandemic closures of the past year and a half. The Metropolitan Opera reopened the doors for an inspiring performance of Verdi’s Requiem on Sept. 11. The New York Philharmonic inaugurated its new season last week.On Monday evening a much more modest, but no less meaningful, return took place when the tenor Paul Appleby and the pianist Conor Hanick presented a song recital in the elegantly intimate Board of Officers Room at the Park Avenue Armory.Just over 90 people, a near-capacity crowd for the salon-like space, attended this intelligent and beautifully performed program of German lieder — lasting two hours, with an intermission, just as concerts generally used to before everything stopped. The program repeats on Wednesday, and two more artist pairs fill out the fall in the space: Will Liverman and Myra Huang next month, and Jamie Barton and Warren Jones in November.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesAppleby is best known for opera, including the title role in Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” and David in Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” which he sings next month at the Met. Yet he has long been devoted to the song literature, including many new and recent works.This Armory program arose from his desire to pair two song cycles, Beethoven’s “An die ferne Geliebte” and Berg’s “Altenberg Lieder” — both of which, as he wrote in program notes, “address ways of coping with unfulfilled wishes, with dreams that did not come true.” To place these cycles in context, he performed selected songs by Schumann and Schubert that also grapple with loss and pain and offer coping mechanisms — including, as Appleby put it, “numb nihilism.”Both cycles were historically momentous. Beethoven’s set of six songs, from 1816, offered a template for the 19th-century German song cycle. The poems, by Alois Jeitteles, present a protagonist thinking of his lost home, his distant beloved, his unfulfilled love. The songs flow from one to the next, giving the cycle the sense of a unified, if episodic, narrative. Appleby sang the tender pieces with warmth and heartache, and brought almost eerie vitality to moments of heady nostalgia. Hanick, a brilliant pianist more often heard in thorny contemporary scores, played with crispness, nuance and grace.Berg’s 1912 work, which sets five short texts by the German writer Peter Altenberg, was originally written for mezzo-soprano and lush orchestra. The public reaction when two of the songs were introduced at a concert in Vienna was so hostile that their aggrieved composer never had them performed again. But the work pointed the way to a new 20th-century musical language. Appleby and Hanick performed a version with a piano reduction that allowed the tenor — with a relatively lighter, lyric voice — to bring out subtleties in the vocal lines. And Hanick’s playing was a revelation of clarity and bite.There were lovely accounts of all the Schubert and Schumann works. I was especially gratified to hear these artists call attention to little-heard songs from Schumann’s later years, like the dreamy “An den Mond,” which opened the wonderful program, and the autumnal, harmonically tart “Abendlied,” which ended it.Paul Appleby and Conor HanickRepeats Wednesday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.com. More

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      At 75, the Ojai Music Festival Stays Focused on the Future

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      This storied California haven of contemporary classical music returned, organized by the composer John Adams.OJAI, Calif. — Returning is a process. Rarely is it linear.The Ojai Music Festival, for instance, returned, Sept. 16-19, to celebrate its 75th year after a long pandemic absence. But there were setbacks among the comebacks. Compromises were made to accommodate its move from spring to the final days of summer. An artist was held up in Spain by travel restrictions. Diligently enforced safety measures slightly harshed the vibe of this storied event, a rigorous yet relaxing haven for contemporary music tucked in an idyllic valley of straight-faced mysticism and sweet Pixie tangerines.This edition of the festival is the first under the leadership of Ara Guzelimian, back at the helm after a run in the 1990s. Each year, the person in his position organizes the programming with a new music director; for Guzelimian’s debut, he chose the composer John Adams, the paterfamilias of American classical music, who happens to have been born the year of the first festival. Uninterested in a retrospective for the milestone anniversary, they billed their concerts as a forward-looking survey of young artists — fitting for a festival that has long focused on the future.But in music, past, present and future are always informing one another. Bach and Beethoven haunted new and recent works; the pianist Vikingur Olafsson treated Mozart, as he likes to say, as if the ink had just dried on the score. There is no looking forward without looking back.The Chumash elder Julie Tumamait-Stenslie led a storytelling hour on a misty field at Soule Park on Friday.Timothy TeagueGuzelimian and Adams looked back about far as possible in weaving the valley’s Indigenous history into the festival. The cover of its program book was the Cindy Pitou Burton photograph “Ghost Poppy” — the flower’s name given by the Chumash people, the first known inhabitants of this area, who after the arrival of Europeans were nearly annihilated by disease and violence, and who no longer have any land in Ojai.It’s a history that was shared, among more lighthearted tales, by the Chumash elder Julie Tumamait-Stenslie, who opened Friday’s programming with storytelling on a misty field at Soule Park; that evening, she began a concert with a blessing.Despite the best of intentions, these were among the more cringe-worthy moments of the festival. The predominantly white, moneyed audience responded to details of colonial brutality with an obliviously affirmative hum, not unlike the way it later cheered on Rhiannon Giddens’s “Build a House,” a searing and sweeping indictment of American history — as if these listeners weren’t implicated in its message.Members of the Attacca Quartet with Giddens and her partner, Francesco Turrisi.Timothy TeagueThe festival was at its best when the music spoke for itself. (Most of the concerts are streaming online.) It should be said, though, that the programming still had its limits; just as this review can’t possibly address the entire event, Ojai’s three days (and a brief prelude the evening before) represented only a sliver of the field, and excluded some of the thornier, more experimental work being done.Adams was nevertheless interested, it seemed, in artists who operate as if liberated from orthodoxy and genre — far from what he has called “the bad old days” of modernism’s grip.Beyond the composers, that translated to the performers, a roster that included the festival orchestra (no mere pickup group with the brilliant violinist Alexi Kenney as its concertmaster); members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group; and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. And soloists like the violinist — for one piece, also a violist — Miranda Cuckson, who summoned the force of a full ensemble in Anthony Cheung’s “Character Studies” and Dai Fujikura’s “Prism Spectra,” and nimbly followed Bach’s Second Partita with Kaija Saariaho’s “Frises” in place of the partita’s famous Chaconne finale.The violinist Miranda Cuckson in Samuel Adams’s Chamber Concerto, conducted by his father, John Adams.Timothy TeagueOlafsson, whose recordings have demonstrated his brilliance as a programmer — with a sharp ear for connections within a single composer’s body of work, or across centuries and genres — persuasively moderated a conversation among Rameau, Debussy and Philip Glass, as well as another of Mozart and his contemporaries, with masterly voicing and enlightening clarity.Giddens was also at ease in a range of styles, her polymathic musicality and chameleonic voice deployed as affectingly in an Adams aria as in American folk. Performing with her own band (whose members include Francesco Turrisi, her partner) she was deadpan and charismatic; alongside the Attacca Quartet, she simply sat at a microphone with a laser-focus stare, commanding the stage with only her sound.Attacca’s appearance was all too brief, but could justify their own turn at directing the festival one day. Whether in works by Adams, Jessie Montgomery or Caroline Shaw, in Paul Wiancko’s vividly episodic “Benkei’s Standing Death” or Gabriella Smith’s jam-like “Carrot Revolution,” these open-eared and open-minded players don’t seem to bring a piece to the stage until it is etched into their bones, so fully is each score embodied.There was overlap of composer and performer in Timo Andres, whose works were well represented but who also served as the soloist — twinkling, patient and tender — in Ingram Marshall’s humbly gorgeous piano concerto “Flow.”Andres later gave a chilly Sunday morning recital that opened with selections from “I Still Play,” a set of miniatures written for Robert Hurwitz, the longtime and influential leader of Nonesuch Records. It continued with one of Samuel Adams’s Impromptus, a work of inspired keyboard writing designed to complement Schubert, with flashes of that composer along with warmth and subtle harmonic shading to match. And it ended with the first live performance of Smith’s “Imaginary Pancake,” which had a respectable debut online early in the pandemic but truly roared in person.In very Ojai fashion, there were so many living composers programmed that Esa-Pekka Salonen didn’t even qualify as a headliner. If anything, he was a known quantity that unintentionally faded amid the novelty of other voices. Carlos Simon’s propulsive and galvanizing “Fate Now Conquers” nodded to Beethoven, but on his own brazen terms. And there continues to be nothing but promise in the emerging Inti Figgis-Vizueta, whose “To give you form and breath,” for three percussionists, slyly warped time in a juxtaposition of resonant and dull sounds of found objects like wood and planters.Much real estate was given to Gabriela Ortiz, who in addition to being performed — providing a blissfully rousing climax for the festival with an expanded version of her “La calaca” on Sunday evening — stepped in as a curator when a recital by Anna Margules was canceled because she couldn’t travel to the United States. That concert, a survey of Mexican composers, offered one of the festival’s great delights: the percussionist Lynn Vartan in Javier Álvarez’s “Temazcal,” a work for maracas and electronics that demands dance-like delivery in a revelation of acoustic possibilities from an instrument most people treat as a mere toy.From left, Emily Levin, Abby Savell and Julie Smith Phillips in Gabriela Ortiz’s “Río de la Mariposas.”Timothy TeagueOrtiz’s chamber works revealed a gift for surprising acoustic pairings, such as two harps and a steel plan in “Río de las Mariposas,” which opened a late morning concert on Sunday. It’s a sound that had a sibling in a premiere that ended that program: Dylan Mattingly’s “Sunt Lacrimae Rerum,” its title taken from the “Aeneid.”The work is also for two harps (Emily Levin and Julie Smith Phillips) — but also two pianos that, microtonally detuned, could at times be confused with a sound of steel pan. There is a slight dissonance, but not an unpleasant one; the effect is more like the distortion of memory. And there was nothing unpleasant about this cry for joy. Ecstasy emanated from the open pianos, played by Joanne Pearce Martin and Vicki Ray, as they were lightly hammered at their uppermost registers, joined by music-box twinkling in the harps.The mood turned more meditative in the comparatively subdued middle section, but the transporting thrill of the opening returned at the end: first in fragments, then full force. “Sunt Lacrimae Rerum” was the newest work at the festival, a piece that looked back on a year that was traumatic for all of us. But Mattingly met the moment with music that teemed with defiant, unflappable hope for the future. More

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      A Cabaret Star and an Opera Star Walk Onto a Stage …

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      The punchline is “Only an Octave Apart,” featuring the unlikely collaborators Justin Vivian Bond and Anthony Roth Costanzo at St. Ann’s Warehouse.“This show has been 10 years in the making,” the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo said recently.He was talking about “Only an Octave Apart,” an undefinable event — A staged concert? A revue, maybe? — which he created with Justin Vivian Bond and which runs at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn from Tuesday through Oct. 3.On paper, the two seem to be unlikely collaborators. Bond, 58, is a throaty-toned pioneer of the alternative cabaret scene, both as a solo artist and as half of the duo Kiki and Herb. Costanzo, 39, is a classical star whose luminous voice takes him to opera houses and concert halls around the world. (In the spring, he’ll return to his body-waxed role as the titular character of Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” at the Metropolitan Opera.)But Costanzo’s voracious taste for collaboration has encompassed artists as disparate as the painter George Condo, the ballet dancer David Hallberg and the fashion designer Raf Simons. And Bond recently appeared in an opera, Olga Neuwirth’s “Orlando,” in Vienna in 2019.Costanzo is a countertenor who is returning to the title role in Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” at the Metropolitan Opera in the spring.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesBond is an alt-cabaret artist who rose to fame as half of the duo Kiki and Herb.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesSo it’s not entirely implausible that they’ve ended up together at St. Ann’s, where their set list ricochets giddily from Gluck to Jobim to the Bangles, and the artistic team includes the director Zack Winokur (“The Black Clown”), the fashion designer Jonathan Anderson and the composer Nico Muhly on arrangements.Bond and Costanzo’s partnership is more organic than most “when worlds collide” projects, which often feel as if an enterprising impresario had pulled random names out of a hat and precipitately pushed the unlucky artists onstage.“We were seeing each other because we were friends, not because we were intending to collaborate,” Bond said, sitting with Costanzo after a recent rehearsal.Back in 2011, Costanzo was in the audience at Joe’s Pub for one of Bond’s cabaret outings. When Bond mentioned from the stage that the guest artist for an upcoming performance had just dropped out and there wasn’t a replacement, Costanzo leaned over to a friend and whispered, “Me!”The friend, the photographer and director Matthew Placek, also knew Bond and made the introductions. Costanzo nabbed the guest spot and prepared a Handel aria, but he was also keen to join voices on “Summertime.”“You said no,” Costanzo recalled to Bond in the interview. “Then right before the show started, I was practicing it and you were like, ‘All right, all right, we will do it as a duet.’”The inspiration for “Only an Octave Apart,” and the title number, came from a television special Carol Burnett and Beverly Sills recorded at the Met in 1976. Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThe combo was a success. “We sounded so good together,” Bond said. “Of course, that song’s problematic and we can’t sing it anymore, but it gave us an opportunity to see our chemistry onstage, which was really fun.”So much so that they are back for more, though the initial impetus was rather pedestrian: Costanzo wasn’t sure what to do next for his record company. “I just didn’t want to make ‘Scarlatti Cantatas’ or something,” he said. “I mean, they’re beautiful, but it’s been done.”Teaming up with Bond provided a creative solution. (And this won’t be their last partnership of the season. They will come together at the New York Philharmonic in January as part of the “Authentic Selves” festival that Costanzo is organizing.)The inspiration for “Only an Octave Apart,” and the title number, came from a pop-culture footnote: a television special that Carol Burnett and Beverly Sills recorded at the Met in 1976. A similar encounter of disparate influences and high and low culture (or at least what audiences associate with high and low), flavored with vaudevillian touches, will now be played out at St. Ann’s.At first, even the longtime Bond collaborator Thomas Bartlett — who is the show’s music director and producer of the album version of “Octave,” which comes out in January — was skeptical.“When the idea was pitched to me, it sounded a bit like a fun joke,” he said in a video call. “It didn’t occur to me that Anthony’s voice would make Viv’s voice feel rich and kind and wise in this way, and that Viv would make Anthony sound even more ethereal.”Bond, Costanzo and Bartlett came up with a wide range of material. Some of the songs are duets, like Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush’s “Don’t Give Up.” Some are solos in conversation with each other, such as when an aria from Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen” segues into the early-20th-century ditty “There Are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden.” Some are classics from the cabaret repertoire, like “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.” And some are the kind of free associations in which Kiki and Herb used to specialize, like a surprisingly effective medley of “Dido’s Lament” — also by Purcell — and Dido’s “White Flag.”“We’re holding our own space, but we’re doing it together,” Bond said.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesDespite the mingling of their musical universes, the performers stay true to their respective styles. “We’re not crossing over,” Bond said firmly. “We’re holding our own space, but we’re doing it together.” They do not scat-sing Purcell, for example, and Costanzo does not imitate the disco singer Sylvester’s famous falsetto when the pair covers his track “Stars.”“I was like, how do I take an application of this voice and technique that feels honest and that sings the song?” Costanzo said. “I listen to opera singers try to sing pop and it’s so lame, because inevitably they wind up trying to sing some classical arrangement to a pop song.”During a recent rehearsal, Bond often left space for future improvisation. “I’m going to come out, they’re going to see me, I’m going to milk it for a moment,” Bond said at one point, describing an entrance. Costanzo, on the other hand, is used to the precision of classical music, where every note and step is carefully planned.“Sometimes my frustration with opera is that all spontaneity dies in pursuit of perfection,” he said. “I want to uphold and cherish the tradition, but in order to make it feel alive, it needs some kind of being in the moment and spontaneity.”“But it’s challenging because I am always looking for structure and Viv is always like, ‘Don’t box me in because it’s not going to be as good,’” Costanzo said.Still, Bond pointed out that there is a safety net. “I obviously don’t want Anthony to feel uncomfortable, or that he’s going to be in any way undermined or not feel that he’s going to be seen at his best, so we’ve been establishing points where things definitely have to happen,” Bond said.Working out the sound of a crow’s caw, the pair seemed ready for their spotlight — at the most stylish comedy hour ever. “I’ve never laughed so hard in the rehearsal process,” Winokur, the director, said.But if there are many jokes in the show, the performers are in on them.“Being a countertenor, whenever I open my mouth, even at the Met, people go, ‘Why is he singing like that?’” Costanzo said. “I go work with kids and they laugh the minute you start singing. Which I love, I welcome it, but I’m like a novelty in that way, which I enjoy exploiting.”“As a classical musician,” he added, “you can be gay or queer or whatever, and then you go do your show. You are not expressing yourself as much in that theatricality or your identity. You are embodying a character. This project feels like, for whatever reason, this real theatrical expression of who I am.”Bond suggested, “It’s expressing your artistry through a place of truth, as opposed to trying to make something that is artificial seem true.”Costanzo laughed and said: “See? Viv is so good!” More

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      Fake Rock Nearly Crushes Opera Star: Accident or Sabotage?

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      Feuding stagehands, falling props: It might sound like the plot of an opera, but in France it has been the subject of a court case.LONDON — The tenor Robert Dean Smith was lying onstage — eyes closed, pretending to be dead — when he felt something very close above him.Smith was appearing as Tristan in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” at the Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse in France, and he assumed that what he sensed looming was his colleague, the soprano Elisabete Matos, who was singing Isolde. She’d probably decided to alter the choreography and had come to stand over him, he thought.But when Smith opened his eyes, he saw a 467-pound fake rock hanging just inches from his face. “I panicked and just threw it out of the way,” he recalled of the 2015 incident in a telephone interview. He rolled out from underneath the object, and quickly got to his feet — which likely confused an audience that had watched Tristan die a short while before. (His co-star kept singing throughout.)The cause of this dangerous mishap was at first a mystery. But the reality turns out to be so bizarre that it could be an opera itself.Robert Dean Smith and Elisabete Matos onstage in “Tristan und Isolde” at the Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse in 2015Partrice NinLast week, a court in Toulouse found a stagehand at the theater guilty of tampering with the computer system that controlled the prop rock’s descent. The production, which was directed by Nicolas Joel, intended for the object to stop about 30 inches above the tenor, and its continued descent at the performance in question was only stopped when another member of the technical staff realized something had gone wrong, according to a report in La Dépêche du Midi, a local newspaper.According to the prosecutors, the stagehand, Nicholas S., whose surname has not been revealed by French newspapers out of respect for his privacy, had long been in conflict with a rival stagehand, Richard R., whom he hoped would be blamed for the error. Two months before the incident, Nicholas S. had won a court case where he accused Richard R. of assault.Nicholas S., who denied the allegations that he had tampered with the computer system, was given an eight-month suspended prison sentence and made to pay a symbolic one-euro fine to the Théâtre du Capitole. His lawyer did not respond to requests for comment.Smith, the tenor, said he had never imagined someone had been trying to hurt him or had tampered with the equipment. “I’ve seen too many accidents onstage,” he said. “I’ve seen trapdoors open with people on them, and doors and walls fall down onto people.” Smith once cut his hand open while playing Don José in Bizet’s “Carmen,” because someone had forgotten to blunt the knife.In 2008, Smith was actually the beneficiary of such a mishap — making his Metropolitan Opera debut, as Tristan, after the tenor Gary Lehman was injured during a prior performance because of a prop malfunction. Lehman had been lying on a palette on a steeply raked section of the stage when the palette broke loose from its moorings and plummeted into the prompter’s box. Lehman hit his head and could not take part in the next performance.Given the frequency of accidents onstage, that the 2015 incident was the result of feuding stagehands was “just really bizarre and very unfortunate for the theater,” Smith said.After the 2015 performance, the tenor apologized to Matos for his part in ruining the show. After that, he said, he had tried to ensure he died onstage in positions where he could keep his eyes open to see if anything was coming.Constant Merheut contributed reporting from Paris. More