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      American Modern Opera Company Arrives at Lincoln Center

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      The stage of the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center had been transformed into a split-screen tableau depicting ancient Rome and contemporary New York. A harpsichordist was playing ominous chords at furious speed. Singers, dressed in capes, suspenders and robes, scaled a rotating set.This was the start of the American Modern Opera Company taking over Lincoln Center for a residency from Wednesday through mid-July.“The Comet/Poppea” is a pairing of George Lewis’s opera adaptation of the W.E.B. Du Bois story “The Comet” and Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea.”Shuran Huang for The New York TimesThe company, known as AMOC, is an experimental collective of singers, dancers and instrumental players. And the project it was putting together at the Koch Theater is the New York premiere of “The Comet/Poppea,” a work that pairs George Lewis’s adaptation of the W.E.B. Du Bois story “The Comet” and Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea.”Directed by Yuval Sharon, “The Comet/Poppea” is classic AMOC fare: an irreverent mash-up of stories that unearths difficult questions about race, society and art. “We’re getting it,” the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, a star and producer of the show, told his fellow cast members while frolicking in a golden cape at the end of a rehearsal on Sunday. “It’s all coming together.”Anthony Roth Costanzo, left, and Tines, two members of the American Modern Opera Company.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Pint-Size Singers at the Met Opera Children’s Chorus Tryouts

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      The Metropolitan Opera Children’s Chorus has long been an elite training ground for young singers. Getting in requires grit, personality and a soaring voice.The Metropolitan Opera’s stage door, a plain entrance hidden in the tunnels of Lincoln Center, routinely welcomes star singers, orchestra musicians, stagehands, costumers and ushers. But a different bunch of visitors arrived there on a recent afternoon, carrying stuffed toy rabbits and “Frozen” backpacks.They were children, ages 7 to 10, dressed in patent leather shoes, frilly socks and jackets decorated with dinosaurs. They were united in a common mission: to win a spot in the Met children’s chorus, a rigorous, elite training ground for young singers.“This might be the biggest day of my life,” said Naomi Lu, 9, who admires pop singers like Taylor Swift and Katy Perry. She was knitting a lilac friendship necklace to stay calm as she waited in the lobby. “I feel nervous and excited at the same time,” she said. “You could say I’m nerv-cited.”Anthony Piccolo, the director of the Met’s children’s choir, auditions a group of hopefuls.Alexander Zhou waits his turn.Skye Yang.Singing in the shower or in a school choir is one thing. But these students, who came from across New York City and its suburbs, were vying for the chance to perform at the Met, one of the world’s grandest stages, a temple of opera that presents nearly 200 performances each year. Chorus members have a chance at roles like the angelic boys in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute”; the Parisian kids in Puccini’s “La Bohème”; or the street urchins in Bizet’s “Carmen,” to name a few.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      5 Highlights From the 2025 Ojai Music Festival

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      A crowd had gathered at the Ojai Meadows Preserve early Saturday morning. The nearby mountains were still shrouded in mist, and the cool, gray quiet was interrupted only by the sound of birds.Then a throaty quivering of flute emerged from behind the audience — and a stab of clarinet from another spot, a distant burr of saxophone, pips from a second flute. An almost avian quartet gradually coalesced from specks of song and chatter among the instruments, in conversation with the animals in the trees. This was Susie Ibarra’s “Sunbird.”That a couple of hundred people showed up at 8 a.m. for an experimental performance in the middle of a field speaks volumes about the Ojai Music Festival. Since the 1940s, this annual event, nestled in an idyllic valley in Southern California, has catered to audiences eager to be challenged.Each year, a different music director is invited to guide the programming. For this installment, which took place Thursday through Sunday, morning to night, the festival looked to the flutist Claire Chase, one of the most important nodes of creation and collaboration in contemporary music.Chase, a founder of the International Contemporary Ensemble and the instigator of “Density 2036,” an ongoing 24-year commissioning project to create a new repertoire for her instrument, has an aesthetic well matched to Ojai. Her approach is rigorous yet relaxed, with an improvisatory, cooperative, nature-loving, even hippie bent — meditative, sunny and smiling, encouraging open minds and open ears. Two dozen musicians performed in shifting combinations throughout the weekend, so you had the feeling of being dropped in the middle of a joyfully bustling commune.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      They Led the 2000s Indie-Rock Boom. Now They’re Vying for Oscars.

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      As Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross continue to spotlight film music, members of Dirty Projectors, Grizzly Bear, Interpol and Animal Collective have been joining the field.When Daniel Blumberg ascended the stage at the Oscars this year to accept his best original score trophy for “The Brutalist,” the bald, mild-mannered Englishman in the all-black suit read nervously from notes. “I’ve been an artist for 20 years now, since I was a teenager,” he said, perhaps jogging some music fans’ memories: This was the once curly-mopped singer and guitarist from the 2010s indie-rock band Yuck.His Academy Award put him in good company. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails have won the category twice, while Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood is a two-time nominee. And bubbling up beside Blumberg are a crop of artists from New York’s early 2000s indie boom, when idiosyncratic and ambitious bands made their careers on blog love, critically acclaimed albums, relentless touring schedules and the occasional lucrative sync deal.Two decades later, entering their midlife years, an increasing number of their members are turning to film scoring as a new creative outlet — one they can pursue from home studios — rather than rely on the millennial nostalgia industry.A scene from “Sister Midnight.” Paul Banks, the frontman of the band Interpol, recorded its propulsive score.MagnoliaDavid Longstreth, the central figure of Dirty Projectors, created the imaginative and sprawling score for the fantasy journey “The Legend of Ochi,” which A24 released in theaters this year. Paul Banks, Interpol’s frontman, recorded propulsive music for Magnolia Pictures’ deadpan satire “Sister Midnight,” which opened in New York in May and will soon expand nationally. Various permutations of Animal Collective have provided haunting sounds for small-budget projects, including the stripped-down sci-fi tale “Obex,” which Oscilloscope Laboratories will distribute later this year.“The creative conversations I find really interesting,” said Christopher Bear of Grizzly Bear, who is now a prolific film and TV composer. “You’re not necessarily talking about music references. Often it’s more interesting if you’re not, because then it’s about story and picture and just more aesthetic questions. I find myself doing creative things that I probably wouldn’t if I was just left to my own devices in my studio.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At 85, Composer Annea Lockwood Is Far From Done Listening

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      Lockwood, a composer who spins music from the sounds of the natural world, is sharing with and learning from a new generation of artists.Outside Annea Lockwood’s house you could hear the sounds of a gentle breeze, rustling the leaves of her tree-lined driveway and swinging the wind chimes in her backyard. Every so often birds would interject with a bit of song over the rumble of a car down the road.“This neighborhood is a lovely, peaceful little place,” Lockwood said one morning last month. “But it has a very radical background.”Lockwood, 85, a composer of insatiable curiosity and a singular ear for the music of the natural world, lives about an hour north of Manhattan, on street named after Baron de Hirsch, a 19th-century philanthropist who sponsored the resettlement of persecuted Russian Jews. Her house was originally built for the Mohegan Colony, a community with anarchist roots. Not far away, toward the Hudson River, people attending a Paul Robeson concert were once attacked in what came to be known as the Peekskill Riots.“So this is an area with a right-wing town and a left-wing colony,” Lockwood said. “Fascinating, isn’t it?”For the last 50 years, Lockwood has lived and worked here in Crompond, N.Y., in a house that she shared with her partner, the composer Ruth Anderson, until her death in 2019. But Lockwood also spends a lot of time outdoors, especially in recent collaborations with a younger generation of musicians that have taken her on adventures along rivers like the Columbia and the Elwha.For Lockwood, listening is a way to connect with the nonhuman world. “I am seeking ways to recognize that we are part of that world, not dominant and not separate,” she said. Brian Karlsson for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Per Norgard, Daring Symphonic Composer, Dies at 92

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      Considered the father of Danish contemporary music, he aspired to works in which “everything came out of a single note,” he said, “like the big bang.”Per Norgard, a prolific and daring Danish composer whose radiant experiments with sound, form and tonality earned him a reputation as one of the leading latter-day symphonists, died on May 28 in Copenhagen. He was 92.His death, at a retirement home, was announced by his publisher, Edition Wilhelm Hansen.Mr. Norgard (pronounced NOR-gurr) composed eight symphonies, 10 string quartets, six operas, numerous chamber and concertante works and multiple scores for film and television, making him the father of Danish contemporary music. Following his death, he was described as “an artist of colossal imagination and influence” by the critic Andrew Mellor in the British music publication Gramophone.Mr. Norgard’s musical evolution encompassed the mid-20th century’s leading styles, including Neo-Classicism, expressionism and his own brand of serialism, and incorporated a wide range of influences, including Javanese gamelan music, Indian philosophy, astrology and the works of the schizophrenic Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli.But he considered himself a distinctively Nordic composer, influenced by the Finnish symphonist Jean Sibelius, and that was how newcomers to his music often approached him. The infinite, brooding landscapes of Sibelius — along with the intensifying repetitions in the work of Mr. Norgard’s Danish compatriot Carl Nielsen and the obsessive, short-phrase focus of the Norwegian Edvard Grieg — have echoes in Mr. Norgard’s fragmented sound world.The delirious percussive expressions of Mr. Norgard’s composition “Terrains Vagues” (2000), the plinking raindrops of the two-piano, four-metronome “Unendlicher Empfang” (1997) and the vast, discontinuous fresco of the Eighth Symphony (2011) all evoke the black-and-white northern vistas of Sibelius, with their intense play of light and shadow.As a young student at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen in the early 1950s, he was immersed in the music of Sibelius, writing to the older composer and receiving encouragement in return. “When I discovered there was a kind of unity in his music, I was obsessed with the idea of meeting him,” he said in an interview. “And to let him know that I didn’t consider him out of date.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lakota Music Project Merges Two Traditions for One Common Cause

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      For almost 20 years, the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra has been collaborating with Native artists, aiming to address a history of racial tension.The Prairie Wind Casino and Hotel is a couple of modest buildings just inside the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the southwest corner of South Dakota. On a recent morning, the hotel, surrounded by vast expanses of rolling land, was almost empty, but the low-ceilinged banquet room was filled with music.Nine members of the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra and their conductor, Delta David Gier, were working on a piece with the Dakota flutist Bryan Akipa. They were figuring out how Akipa, who doesn’t read music, could be cued for a new section.Emmanuel Black Bear — the keeper of the drum, or leader, of the Creekside Singers, a traditional Lakota drum and vocal ensemble — was huddling with the composer Derek Bermel in the hotel’s lobby. Bermel had transcribed some Creekside recordings, arranging a part for the symphony players to join with the Native musicians. One challenge: Black Bear and his group don’t commit in advance to a given tempo when they’re performing their richly wailing songs.“Sometimes we get excited and want to sing it fast,” he said of one song. “Sometimes it’s lullaby-ish. It’s not set in stone.”This was a day of colleagues and friends making music together, working through obstacles like those in any rehearsal process. But since the artists involved were part of the orchestra’s longstanding Lakota Music Project, the goal was far greater than just getting ready for a concert: This collaboration between Native American and Western classical artists aimed to address a whole history of racial tension.“Racism and prejudice, how do we counteract that?” Black Bear said in an interview. “I’ve always said it’s through music. If non-Native people can see us in our natural way of life — music and dance and ceremony and prayer — maybe their minds will change about who we are. Not every one of us is the stereotype. We’re not all drunks and druggies.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Donald Palumbo Reinvigorated the Met Opera Chorus. Next Stop Chicago.

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      The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has hired Donald Palumbo, 76, the former chorus master of the Metropolitan Opera, to lead its chorus.When Donald Palumbo departed his post as chorus master of the Metropolitan Opera last year after nearly two decades, he could have easily taken a break.But Palumbo, 76, wasn’t finished. “I knew it was not a retirement situation for me,” he said.Now Palumbo has lined up his next position: the Chicago Symphony Orchestra announced on Tuesday that he would serve as its next chorus director — only the third in the choir’s 67-year history — beginning an initial three-year term in July.“I love this chorus,” Palumbo said in a telephone interview from Chicago, where he was rehearsing the chorus. “I love this city.”Palumbo was a fixture at the Met from 2007 to 2024, helping turn the chorus into one of the most revered in the field. He could often be seen during performances racing around backstage, working with singers to refine bits of the score.He was chorus master at Lyric Opera of Chicago from 1991 to 2007. At the Chicago Symphony, he said, he hoped to work with the singers on “creating an identity as a chorus from the way we sing, and the way we devote ourselves to the music.”Jeff Alexander, the Chicago Symphony’s president, said that Palumbo had built a close relationship with the chorus during guest appearances over the years, creating ”an atmosphere of collaboration that yielded exceptional artistry.”“We knew this would be the ideal choice to build on the legacy of this award-winning ensemble,” Alexander said in a statement.Palumbo, who lives in Santa Fe and will commute to Chicago, is already at work with the Chicago singers. He will serve as guest chorus director this month for Verdi’s Requiem, working with Riccardo Muti, the Chicago Symphony’s former music director. In July, he will begin his tenure as chorus director with a performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony at the Ravinia Festival, led by the festival’s chief conductor, Marin Alsop.While Palumbo has forged a close relationship with Muti, he said, he was still getting to know Klaus Mäkelä, the Chicago Symphony’s incoming music director, who begins in 2027. (Palumbo said he has been watching videos of Mäkelä on YouTube: “Everything he does musically is exciting,” he said.)Palumbo said he hoped to stay in Chicago beyond the end of his initial term in 2028.“I certainly am not planning on having a cutoff point,” he said. “I intend to keep working.” More