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      The Conductor John Wilson Doesn’t Like Musical Distinctions

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      With the Sinfonia of London, Wilson has explored the variety of music — light and serious alike — that defined his musical upbringing.The conductor John Wilson spends a lot of time doing what he calls “home scholarship”: reconstructing lost scores from MGM musicals, correcting mistakes in orchestral parts and preparing new editions of pieces that can seem illegible.Then, he “fixes” his orchestra, the Sinfonia of London, a project-based ensemble that Wilson revived in 2018, which will appear at the BBC Proms on Sunday. Sometimes, he offers the players work via text message. “I’ve always had a say in who’s in the orchestra,” he said, “because it has to be the right kind of sound.”Wilson, who was born in Gateshead, England, in 1972, has always opted for this front-loaded way of working, in which the conductor actively engages in the types of logistics that others might find menial.“You’d be amazed at the difference good quality orchestral parts make to performance,” he said. “They can make it or break it. You can hit the ground running without having to decipher things.”All this preparation, he said, is to resuscitate the Sinfonia’s sound of old, “a sound in my head which never left me.” Wilson has a sentimental streak when it comes to his formative influences, and the origin story behind his rejuvenation of the Sinfonia, which disbanded in 2002, is romantic.When he was 11 and realized that he could buy classical records in his local, pop-oriented HMV, he picked out a copy of the Sinfonia of London’s “English Music for Strings,” conducted by John Barbirolli. That recording was from the ensemble’s earliest era, when it was a freelance recording orchestra made up of London’s premier chamber players and section principals, from 1955 to 1969.Then, during college, Wilson assisted the composer Howard Blake, who had brought back the orchestra and led it from 1982 to 2002. Wilson’s long-held obsession with the idea of reviving an orchestra, and a desire to record Korngold’s Symphony in F sharp, helped drive the orchestra’s relaunch in 2018. In the five years since, his edition of the orchestra has recorded 26 albums.Live performances from the ensemble are rarer, but no less anticipated than its award-winning recordings. In two sold-out nights of meaty, early-20th-century orchestral works at the Aldeburgh Festival in June, the Sinfonia produced two dazzlingly colorful performances, underpinned by a ravishing, at times eccentrically exuberant string sound. Yet Wilson’s gestures were economical to the point of near detachment from the ecstatic sounds around him, unleashing a fuller vocabulary of movements only a handful of times.It’s a different story in rehearsals. There’s an affability between Wilson and the players, many of whom he’s had relationships with for two decades. (“I feel very much as if I’m one of them,” he said in an interview later.) But that didn’t stop him tersely admonishing them for not giving “sheer naked concentration.”“The whole point of this overture is to be violently on the beat,” Wilson said during a rehearsal of William Walton’s exceedingly rhythmic “Scapino.”While working with the orchestra, “John is demanding from beginning to end,” said John Mills, a leader of the Sinfonia. “Most of us enjoy that; that’s why we come back,” he added. “We want to be in that very demanding, high-achieving environment, where most of us, 90 percent of the time, feel like we’re impostors. You’re surrounded by brilliant players, and then you talk to the other players, and they feel exactly the same.”The Sinfonia of London, despite the history of its name and the cohesiveness of its sound, is still in essence a session orchestra. Wilson aims “for a different kind of homogeneity,” Mills said. For string players, that means conserving bow to make long, spinning, bulge-free lines, and finding a vibrato that Mills described as “almost invisible”: narrow, fast and drawn from inside the note, rather than added on as an optional extra.“There’s plenty of sizzling vibrato,” said Charlie Lovell-Jones, another leader of the orchestra, making “a sound you can chew.”While he growing up, Wilson said, “music was just music.”Alex Ingram for The New York TimesWilson also encourages individuality within the sound, in part because of the kinds of players he books. “I have an orchestra full of artists,” he said. During one session, Mills and Wilson realized they had nine British orchestral leaders in the section, alongside some top freelancers, and a selection of chamber players.With the Sinfonia, Wilson prioritizes a particular repertoire. At Aldeburgh, they performed Rachmaninoff, Elgar and Respighi; at the Proms, they perform Lili Boulanger’s “D’un Matin de Printemps,” Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto and Walton’s First Symphony. Their Ravel, Dutilleux and Korngold recordings have won awards, and their next major recording project is a complete version of Ravel’s “Daphnis and Chloe,” featuring new parts that took Wilson 18 months to compile.He’s drawn to orchestral scores driven primarily by color, craft and texture. “I guess I’ve never ever grown tired of the possibilities of what we call the modern orchestra,” he said. “There are so many things you can do with an orchestra to make it sound.”Exploring the orchestra by color has led Wilson down some unusual avenues. With the BBC Philharmonic, he has recorded a third volume of orchestral works by Eric Coates, a prolific composer of light music. He’s drawn to the slithering sound of Frederick Delius, and to oddities like the “garish but amazing” Stokowski orchestration of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C sharp minor. Wilson recently conducted two performances of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta “Princess Ida” on period instruments, with “tiny trombones and cornets and gut strings and everything.”Wilson is a period performance specialist, but the periods he’s interested in aren’t Baroque. The John Wilson Orchestra, which he founded in 1994, and which would later bring him broader recognition through a 10-year run at the Proms, became known for “historically informed” performances of Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Golden Age movie musicals.During that time in his career, Wilson didn’t exactly feel pigeonholed, but, he said, “so many people’s perceptions of what I actually did were just skewed compared to reality.”Shifting his energies to the Sinfonia of London — in part, because of a spate of canceled dates for the John Wilson Orchestra during the pandemic — has coincided with more of a focus on the variety of music that shaped his musical upbringing. Wilson was a largely self-taught pianist and percussionist, who had “a general light music education” in northeast England, playing in Gilbert and Sullivan shows, brass bands and operetta, and fixing his own orchestras for performances of musicals like “West Side Story.”“Music was just music,” he said, “and I was lucky to grow up with movies on in the background and LPs from Sinatra, all performed to an exalted level.”Wilson grew up with a value system in which musical distinctions between “light” and “serious” were much less pronounced than elsewhere in the country. A few weeks before he moved to London to study at the Royal College of Music, he had an encounter with a soprano from a local choir after he performed a piece by Coates.“She said, ‘I hope you don’t take all that rubbish down with you when you go to London,’” he recalled. “I was shocked. She said, ‘You’ll be laughed out of the place when you go to the Royal College of Music.’ It had never crossed my mind that people wouldn’t take to that sort of music.”Wilson has continued to champion light music in all its varieties. “In its own way, it’s a very pure kind of music,” with “a direct emotional appeal.” It’s a sound and feeling that he heard in Barbirolli’s strings, and that he brings to the Sinfonia of London today: strong, immediate and indisputable. More

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      Has Scott Joplin’s ‘Thoroughly American’ Opera ‘Treemonisha’ Found Its Moment?

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      “Treemonisha” — brilliant, flawed and unfinished — is ripe for creative reimagining at a time when opera houses are looking to diversify the canon.“He has created an entirely new phase of musical art and has produced a thoroughly American opera.”The anonymous critic who wrote these bold words didn’t have a performance of Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha” to evaluate, or a recording. In June 1911, all the reviewer had to go on was Joplin’s 230-page piano-vocal score.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

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      Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’ at the Bayreuth Festival Experiments With AR

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      Cutting-edge technology has again come to the Bayreuth Festival, where Wagner premiered his final opera with the latest stagecraft in 1882.For Richard Wagner, the latest technology was crucial to staging his operas.In Bayreuth, Germany, where he opened a hilltop theater in 1876 to realize his vision for his works, he promised that “the most up-to-date artistic resources will be used to offer you scenic and theatrical perfection.”That year, the Rhinemaidens at the start of his “Ring” were supported behind the scenes by wheeled machines that made them seem to swim. A projector with prisms tried to create the effect of gods walking across a rainbow. The auditorium was dimmed — unusual at the time — to focus the audience’s attention and enhance the illusions.Nearly 150 years later, cutting-edge technology has come again to Bayreuth: augmented reality, which adds a dense, often impenetrable layer of surreal imagery to Jay Scheib’s new production of “Parsifal,” which opened on Tuesday.Among the many AR images visible through special glasses are motion-capture outlines of figures walking, embracing and suddenly ablaze.Joshua HiggasonThis medium could hardly be further from the creaky machinery and gas lighting of the 19th century. But the goal is the same as Wagner’s: to create “scenes such as you might imagine had come from an ideal world of dreams.”But there’s a catch.After a squabble within the notoriously squabbling Bayreuth Festival about funding the expensive augmented reality, or AR, glasses, money was allotted for 330 sets in a theater of 1,925 seats.So 83 percent of the audience just experiences the old-fashioned article: Wagner’s operatic mystery play about a young man who ends up redeeming the ailing rituals of a corps of Holy Grail knights, straightforwardly staged and superbly sung, and conducted with muscular solidity by Pablo Heras-Casado. A much smaller group, including critics, gets the glasses, which superimpose on that live staging a crowded AR environment that is constantly in motion.Are the 83 percent missing much?They miss the space between them and the stage seeming to fill with twinkling stars as the soft prelude begins. The bare trees rotating in the ether. The motion-capture outlines of figures walking, embracing and suddenly ablaze. The asteroids. The fly that seems to land on the outside of the AR lenses.Later, the flocks of birds, blood-red globules and spiky strawberries. The slithering snakes and spinning, silently cackling skulls. The blossoming flowers. The arrows, spears, machetes, axes, grenades and severed arms. The forlornly quivering plastic bags and the bounding fox. The rocky ledge that appears to fill the area beneath the seats in the third act.In AR style, the 3-D images don’t move with you as you move your head. Rather, you seem to be able to pan across an environment that surrounds you: not a realistic landscape but a galaxy of disembodied elements floating in the darkness, a free-association, stream-of-consciousness panoply linked, to varying degrees, to the plot.Some of the images’ textures are photorealistic, but most emphasize their computer-generated unreality, their unnatural angles and fake finishes, their eerie weightlessness. The aesthetic — with its collagelike excess of uncanny juxtapositions and its flat affect — evokes the digital art that has sometimes been winkingly called post-internet.Georg Zeppenfeld on the spare, slightly ominous, vaguely sci-fi set for Act I, designed by Mimi Lien.Enrico NawrathBut for those wearing the glasses, the union of the production’s AR and live aspects isn’t generally happy. The lenses are tinted, so the live performance looks considerably dimmed, and the staging’s frequent video projections are almost invisibly faint.The AR elements (designed, along with the video, by Joshua Higgason) often block the onstage action, even as those elements are fragmented enough to suggest they are offering a complement to that action, rather than a self-sufficient alternative.However dreamlike, the resulting visual confusion doesn’t convey the hypermaximalist, proudly absurdist overload of Bayreuth productions like Christoph Schlingensief’s 2004 “Parsifal” or Frank Castorf’s 2013 “Ring.” This is because Scheib’s sensibility — in both the virtual and live spheres — is basically plain and direct.When I peeked below the glasses to watch bits of the performance without AR, there was nothing particularly imaginative or illuminating about this “Parsifal.” The first act takes place in a spare, slightly ominous, vaguely sci-fi landscape — the sets were designed by Mimi Lien — with a halo of flashing lights that brings to mind the spaceships of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” or “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.”These Grail knights wear stylish, contemporary clothes — long tunics, yellow skirts, boldly patterned hoodies — designed by Meentje Nielsen. The sorcerer Klingsor’s enchanted garden in Act II is a psychedelic pool party in “Barbie” colors. After Parsifal destroys the garden, the third act is set in a lonely desert encampment, alongside a machine on the blurry line between war and industry: maybe an earthmover, maybe a tank.The tenor Andreas Schager is tirelessly passionate and convincingly boyish as the guileless Parsifal, and the bass-baritone Derek Welton is mournful yet reserved as Amfortas, the wounded king of the Grail. The bass Georg Zeppenfeld is an elegiac Gurnemanz, who oversees the knights; the baritone Jordan Shanahan, a brooding Klingsor.Klingsor’s enchanted garden in Act II is depicted as a psychedelic pool party in “Barbie” colors.Enrico NawrathThe mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca sounds luxurious — lean yet velvety — as the ambiguous, ambivalent Kundry, cursed to shuttle forever between the realms of Klingsor and the Grail and a role too often screamed. Bayreuth’s chorus, directed by Eberhard Friedrich, is, as ever, poised and powerful. On Tuesday, the orchestra didn’t quite bring out the exquisite transparency and delicacy of some important passages, but Heras-Casado’s conducting was vibrant, even-keeled and well-paced.There were a few memorable AR moments. At the end of Act I, a boy in jeans seems to walk through the space, slowly flapping wings attached to his arms — perhaps a melancholy nod to the winged children in Stefan Herheim’s celebrated 2008 “Parsifal” here, just as the dam we seem to be at the bottom of at the start of Act II may be a reference to the hydroelectric plant that opened Patrice Chéreau’s centennial “Ring” at Bayreuth in 1976.Yet there is something bland and empty at the production’s core. It’s not clear what Scheib thinks the nature of the sickness is at the root of this Grail cult, so it’s not clear what Parsifal’s climactic redemption offers. If the final AR image of plastic bags, echoed by one onstage, gestures toward a critique of environmental despoliation, it’s a wan gesture.This means the augmented reality has little profound substance to support, just a jittery desire to stimulate — to ornament and impress — which is just what Wagner didn’t want from stage technology. Scheib’s AR decorations rarely inspire emotion or a sustained sense of wonder: the impression, as Gurnemanz says to Parsifal, of time becoming space.The inadvertent result of all the lavish resources is to prove the superiority of the live over the digital — to keep us sneaking back under our glasses from the augmented real to the really real. The closest parallel in the opera to contemporary technical wizardry is Klingsor’s false garden; it feels rather perverse to extend those artificial seductions to the rest of a piece that’s condemning them.We have come a long way from this opera’s premiere at Bayreuth in 1882, when Gurnemanz and Parsifal stepped in place as a painted backdrop scrolled by, turned by hand on rollers, to create the illusion they were walking. “The simplest of means,” one observer wrote, “had brought about an overwhelming effect.”For all its ambitions and expense, Scheib’s “Parsifal” never overwhelms.ParsifalThrough Aug. 27 at the Bayreuth Festival in Bayreuth, Germany; bayreuther-festspiele.de. More

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      Review: At Mostly Mozart, the Sense of an Ending

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      Louis Langrée, in his last season with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, conducted a classic Langrée program: Mozart and a premiere by Amir ElSaffar.Change is coming for the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra and for its longtime music director, Louis Langrée — this month is the beginning of the end of his tenure with the orchestra. When the ensemble appears at Lincoln Center next year it will be with a freshly conceived name, and with the conductor Jonathon Heyward at the helm. (Heyward also leads the orchestra in concerts on Aug. 4 and 5.)So there is a sense of finality hovering over this summer’s offerings, which began last weekend with a free outdoor concert in Damrosch Park. On Tuesday night, Langrée and his players resumed their more typical places in the recently refurbished David Geffen Hall — renovations that kept the festival orchestra out of that theater last year.In remarks before the concert, Langrée warmly recalled his two-decade relationship with the orchestra and with New York audiences. The program was classic Langrée: a substantial world premiere from Amir ElSaffar, a prominent jazz trumpeter and composer, nestled next to the Mass in C minor by Mozart, who, Langrée noted, sometimes looked eastward (as in the “Turkish March” movement of Piano Sonata No. 11).ElSaffar also spoke, telling the audience how his “Dhikra” (“Remembrance”) — inspired by the 20th anniversary of the second U.S. invasion of Iraq — incorporated Western classical instruments from the festival orchestra’s ranks, alongside the players in his Two Rivers ensemble. (Among other instruments, that group features oud, a steel-string lute and an Iraqi hammered dulcimer, as well as ElSaffar’s trumpet, which channels the melodic style of Iraq’s maqam tradition.)The composer Amir ElSaffar, performing in “Dhikra,” his world premiere, on Tuesday.Lawrence SumulongAll cogent and stylistically broad minded as a précis. But “Dhikra” is not on the same exalted level as ElSaffar’s past work for larger groups, particularly as heard on the album “Not Two” (2017). While “Dhikra” contained some passages of wondrous blended sonority, the amplification of ElSaffar’s musicians had the unfortunate effect of making the Mostly Mozart players inaudible, and for long stretches.It began promisingly enough, with Two Rivers players positioned on the stage near Langrée, and with 10 festival orchestra musicians — the only ones participating in this piece — strewn among the audience, one level up from the orchestra. (The conductor often faced the audience, in order to conduct his far-flung orchestral partners.)A convening salvo from ElSaffar’s trumpet — mellow yet mournful — seemed to inspire droning notes in the strings that gradually flowered into plucked passages that ricocheted across the hall. And when fervid motifs for oboe, clarinet, bassoon and French horn — all positioned at the back of the house — mingled with gentle notes from the Two Rivers bassist onstage, there was a glorious sense of collective blooming.But this was not to last. The orchestral players soon left their stations in the audience, gradually reappearing onstage. And it was there that the amplified nature of Two Rivers tended to swamp ElSaffar’s writing for his Mostly Mozart collaborators. (It was sad to see the violinist Ruggero Allifranchini sawing away with abandon, at a climactic moment, and not be able to hear his contributions over the Two Rivers rhythm section.)Some of this might be improved with slight tweaks to the levels on the Geffen Hall mixer. But some of the balance problems may be baked into the piece as written; 10 musicians is not a significant enough portion of an orchestra to graft onto a group as potent as Two Rivers.After intermission, audiences got to feel the full force of the festival orchestra in Mozart’s Mass in C minor. Also on hand were a quartet of vocal soloists — including the soprano Erin Morley — and a double chorus (well drilled by the director Malcolm J. Merriweather).Following his own edition of Mozart’s unfinished score, Langrée managed to inject an airy, delicate sense of bounce into the gravity of the Kyrie. Taken too sternly, the Mass sounds overindebted to Bach. Taken too lightly, you skate around the profundity of the work. Langrée found the right balance throughout. And he had a star turn from Morley, when it came to a showstopping “Et Incarnatus Est” aria, in the Credo.Change, for this festival and for classical music on the whole, is inevitable. But this Mass was a reminder of the wonders that should be carefully shepherded going forward. After Langrée departs, it will be important for the leaders of this orchestra — whatever it’s called — to continue to balance interpretations of this high order and taking big swings with artists on the level of ElSaffar.Mostly MozartProgram repeats Wednesday night at David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center, lincolncenter.org. More

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      Reimagining ‘Madame Butterfly,’ With Asian Creators at the Helm

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      As opera houses rework Puccini’s classic, criticized for stereotypes about women and Japanese culture, artists of Asian descent are playing a central role.The auditorium lights dimmed, and the cast and crew of Cincinnati Opera’s new production of Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly” anxiously took their places.For months, the team, made up largely of Asian and Asian American artists, had worked to reimagine the classic opera, upending its stereotypes about women and Japanese culture. They had updated the look of the opera with costumes and sets partly inspired by anime, scrubbed the libretto of historical inaccuracies and recast much of the work as a video-game fantasy. They gathered at the Cincinnati Music Hall one evening last week to fine-tune their creation before its opening last Saturday.“It feels a little like a grand experiment,” said the production’s director, Matthew Ozawa, whose father is Japanese and mother is white. “It’s very emotional.”“Madame Butterfly,” which premiered in 1904 (and is set around that time), tells the story of a lovelorn 15-year-old geisha in Nagasaki who is abandoned by an American Navy lieutenant after he gets her pregnant. The opera has long been criticized for its portrait of Asian women as exotic and submissive, and the use of exaggerated makeup and stereotypical costumes in some productions has drawn fire.Now, after years of pressure by artists and activists and a growing awareness of anti-Asian hate, many companies are reworking the opera and giving artists of Asian descent a central role in reshaping its message and story. In a milestone, directors with Asian roots are leading four major productions this year in the United States.San Francisco Opera recently staged a version, directed by Amon Miyamoto, that explored the suffering and discrimination experienced by a biracial character. Boston Lyric Opera is setting part of its coming production in a Chinatown nightclub in San Francisco in the 1940s, and part in an incarceration camp.New Orleans Opera rewrote the traditional ending in a recent production to give the title character a sense of agency. Instead of committing suicide, she throws aside a dagger handed to her, picks up her son and storms offstage.Adam Smith dons a virtual reality headset as the overture begins in the Cincinnati production. “We decided we’re going to honor the fact that this is a white man’s fantasy — a fantasy of a culture and a fantasy of a woman,” Ozawa said.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesIn Cincinnati, the opera begins in the apartment of a lonely white man in his 20s who worships Japanese video games. The overture begins when he puts on a virtual-reality headset to enter a fantasy about Japan, assuming the character of the American lieutenant, B.F. Pinkerton.“We decided we’re going to honor the fact that this is a white man’s fantasy — a fantasy of a culture and a fantasy of a woman,” Ozawa said.At times, the fantasy breaks down and the characters freeze, such as when Pinkerton says something offensive or the chorus makes stereotypical gestures. “We see these moments that hearken to what the tradition usually would look like and then we erase it,” Ozawa said.A scene from San Francisco Opera’s recent “Butterfly,” directed by Amon Miyamoto, which explored the suffering and discrimination experienced by a biracial character. Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera.The re-examination of “Madame Butterfly” comes as cultural institutions face pressure to feature more prominently musicians, dancers, choreographers and composers of color amid a broader discussion about racial discrimination.The reconsideration extends beyond the United States: The Royal Opera House recently updated its “Madame Butterfly” production, getting rid of white makeup and other elements, like wigs and samurai-style coiffures.While the changes have alienated some traditionalists, the artists behind the new productions say they want to preserve the spirit of Puccini’s work while making it accessible to a broader audience.Phil Chan, who is directing the production in Boston and has helped lead the push to confront stereotypes in opera and ballet, said he hoped to make familiar stories more authentic and relevant. The creative team in Boston includes Nina Yoshida Nelsen, a founder of the Asian Opera Alliance, which was formed in 2021 to help bring more racial diversity to the field.“Some people might be afraid that we’re somehow messing with a masterpiece,” said Chan, whose father is Chinese and mother is white. “But we see it as an opportunity to make the work bigger and resonate with more people.”As they reimagine “Butterfly,” artists of Asian descent are working to help each other, exchanging ideas and offering encouragement.Aria Umezawa, who directed the New Orleans production, was distressed after coming across photos of white chorus members in exaggerated makeup and costumes in an old Canadian production of “Madame Butterfly.” She sought out Ozawa.“It’s just been always really helpful to talk to my colleagues,” Umezawa said, “to hear their concerns, to understand the nuance and the shades of gray that exist between different elements of our community. It’s just nice not to be alone.”A scene from the New Orleans production of “Madame Butterfly.” Instead of killing herself at the end, the title character picks up her son and takes him offstage.Jeff StroutWhile the experience of remaking “Madame Butterfly” has been liberating for many artists, the reaction from the public has been mixed.In New Orleans, many people applauded Umezawa’s production, saying it was refreshing to see a strong woman at the center of the opera. But some were critical of the ending.“Not having her die stole the pathos of the story,” an operagoer wrote in response to a survey by the company. “I don’t need an empowered Butterfly. What lesson do I learn from Butterfly riding off into the sunset?”Umezawa said she felt constrained at times by Puccini’s vision. “Ultimately, no matter what I do,” she said, “it’s still Puccini’s music, and it’s still his best guess with Japanese culture.”Next year, when she directs a production of “Butterfly” in Philadelphia, she said she hoped to experiment some more, perhaps by incorporating taiko drums into the orchestra.The focus on “Madame Butterfly” has helped shine light on the dearth of Asian artists in opera. While Asian singers make up a large share of conservatory vocal programs, they remain significantly underrepresented in principal roles at major opera companies, and among stage directors and in other leadership posts.The production in Cincinnati, which closes on Saturday, almost didn’t happen. In 2020, Ozawa backed out of a plan to direct a traditional version of “Madame Butterfly” at the opera house, worried that it would not be true to his artistic mission.But Evans Mirageas, the company’s artistic director, persisted, agreeing to support Ozawa’s vision for a reimagined work. The idea gained the backing of several co-producers, including Detroit Opera, Pittsburgh Opera and Utah Opera, which will stage the Cincinnati production in the coming years.Mirageas said it had become increasingly difficult to ignore the problems of “Madame Butterfly” because of the surge in violence and harassment targeting Asians in recent years. “It’s a production that’s found its moment in time,” he said.At Ozawa’s request, Cincinnati Opera hired three women of Japanese descent — Maiko Matsushima, Yuki Nakase Link and Kimie Nishikawa — to oversee costumes, lighting and scenery.The almost entirely Asian cast and crew brought a sense of camaraderie to the production.“We can easily understand each other because we know each other’s stories and cultures,” said Karah Son, a South Korean soprano who sings the title role. She recalled being able to quickly master a geisha dance because she knew what Ozawa wanted.The production’s conductor, Keitaro Harada, used a Japanese phrase to capture the dynamic: “aun no kokyu,” describing a sense of harmony.“We just understand each other in a very natural way,” said Harada, who was born in Japan. “We know what we’re all thinking.”Ozawa directing a rehearsal in Cincinnati. “It feels a little like a grand experiment,” he said of the reimagined production. “It’s very emotional.”Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesOzawa said he felt an obligation to “Madame Butterfly” because he is of Japanese descent, even if working on it could be uncomfortable. Earlier in his career, he recalled that white colleagues would sometimes squint their eyes, bow to him or greet him by saying “konichiwa” while working on the production.He said he was nervous that he would let down the Japanese community if his production was not a success. But on opening night, his fears subsided when cheers erupted after the final curtain fell at Cincinnati Music Hall.“We have an immense duty to this piece, to Butterfly and to the Asian community,” he said. “There might be some discomfort in our story, but change can only come if there’s discomfort.” More

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      At Wagner’s Festival, New Technology Reveals a Leadership Rift

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      The Bayreuth Festival’s production of “Parsifal” will feature augmented reality. Securing the equipment set off a financial and philosophical dispute.The American director Jay Scheib was looking at a bank of monitors inside the Bayreuth Festival Theater on a recent afternoon.He was rehearsing his new production of Wagner’s “Parsifal,” which opens the storied Bayreuth Festival on Tuesday, and as performers circled a large metallic monolith onstage, the screens showed three-dimensional flowers floating through blank space — psychedelic animations that will come to life for audience members who see them with augmented-reality glasses.Through those glasses, Scheib said, the flowers, and other items during the performance, will appear to float through the auditorium. In keeping with the opera’s themes, he added, these moments are meant to provide the audience with “sacred visions” of “a world where wonder still exists.”Scheib’s production is one of the most ambitious, and high-profile, attempts to incorporate augmented reality into opera performance. But it also caps months of tumult at Bayreuth, after plans to outfit nearly 2,000 audience members with the glasses for each performance were downscaled because of an apparent money dispute between the festival’s artistic and financial leadership. The compromise, in which only 330 attendees will be provided with the glasses to experience the production’s signature flourishes, has left many fuming, and concerned that internal conflicts at one of the most important events in opera were undermining its relevance.Founded by Wagner in 1876 as a showcase for his work, the Bayreuth Festival draws opera fans from around the world for one month every summer to hear a handful of the composer’s works in repertory — including a new production at the start of each edition. A major event on the German cultural calendar, the opening is usually attended by prominent political figures including Angela Merkel, the country’s former chancellor.Angela Merkel, the former chancellor of Germany, with her husband, Joachim Sauer, at the opening of last year’s Bayreuth festival, which remains a major event on the German cultural calendar.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe festival remains treasured worldwide for the pristine acoustics of its theater, a hilltop opera house that Wagner had a hand in designing, and for its connection to the composer: It has been led by a family member since his death in 1883. His great-granddaughter Katharina Wagner took over creative leadership with her half sister, Eva Wagner-Pasquier, in 2008, before becoming the sole artistic director in 2015.In recent years, though, a new leadership structure has added a layer to the festival’s decision-making. In 2008, the budget came under the control of four members of an independent board representing outside shareholders that collectively provide about 40 percent of the budget: the city of Bayreuth, the state of Bavaria, the German federal government and a group of private donors called the Society of Friends of Bayreuth, who currently chair the board.Although the funders are meant to refrain from interfering with choices made by Bayreuth’s artistic leadership, some in the media have argued that the decision to withhold the money for the purchase of 2,000 glasses represented an attempt by the shareholders to rein in Wagner’s approach to the festival and her great-grandfather’s work.Since World War II, Bayreuth directors — including Richard Wagner’s descendants — have brought a modern or experimental sensibility to the composer’s works. In 2013, Katharina Wagner invited Frank Castorf to reimagine the “Ring” as an anticapitalist epic about oil; the next “Ring,” Valentin Schwarz’s production, which opened last year, recast the cycle as, in part, an allegory about the anxieties of aging.Toni Schmid, a former high-ranking Bavarian civil servant who led the festival’s board of shareholders until 2020, said the decision not to fund the glasses was emblematic of the Society of Friends of Bayreuth’s “more conservative idea of how a Wagner opera should look today,” which is at odds with Katharina Wagner’s vision.A scene from Frank Castorf’s reimagined “Ring,” in 2013. Since World War II, Bayreuth directors have brought a modern and sometimes experimental sensibility to their Wagner stagings.AlamyThe largely older members of the donor group, Schmid said, “would like to have the productions they saw 50 years ago back, when they were young — but that’s not art, it’s a museum.” He added that he wished the shareholder’s board was occupied by representatives “who know what they’re talking about” and described the decision to not finance the full number of glasses as “a joke.”Manuel Brug, a German journalist and critic for Die Welt, said in a phone interview that the current festival structure allowed too much power to Friends of Bayreuth. “The group is too old, with many people who joined because it makes it easier to get tickets,” he said, arguing that the donors should be excluded from the governing body in the future. The Bavarian arts minister Markus Blume said in article in the Nordbayerischer Kurier on Thursday that the state of Bavaria might take over some of the donor group’s shares in the future.Georg von Waldenfels, the chairman of the shareholders board and head of Friends of Bayreuth, disputed that he had interfered in Wagner’s decision-making and said in a phone interview that the decision to downscale the number of glasses was “purely a decision of the artistic leadership.” He added that the shareholders had merely “stuck to the business plan.” Wagner, however, said that the original plan failed “because of the financing and divergent views about the glasses” and that the outcome was “unfortunate.”This disagreement reflects a broader debate about Wagner’s legacy, and adds another chapter to the festival’s history of public arguments and reckonings. Winifred Wagner — the English-born wife of Richard’s son, Siegfried — who oversaw the festival from 1930 to 1944, was an avowed fan of Adolf Hitler until her death in 1980. Following World War II, the composer’s grandsons, Wieland and Wolfgang, opened the festival anew as something more apolitical.More recently, the festival has been a subject of chatter, including longstanding rumors of a feud between Katharina Wagner and her former musical director, Christian Thielemann, who left his post in 2020. Last year, he publicly criticized her decision to replace the word “Führer” (“leader”) with the word “Schützer” (“protector”) in a production of “Lohengrin,” a change that had been made out of sensitivity to Bayreuth’s past associations with Nazism.Katharina Wagner, a great-granddaughter of the composer, took over creative leadership of the festival with her half sister in 2008, before becoming the sole artistic director in 2015.Enrico NawrathJay Scheib, the American director who is staging “Parsifal” for the festival this year.Helen DurasIn a phone interview, Thielemann denied any feud with Wagner, and said that Bayreuth has long been plagued by gossip. “There is something about Wagner that poisons people,” he added. “He is both an intoxicant and a perfume.”Wagner’s contract will be up for renewal this fall, pending a vote by the festival’s board of directors. She said that if the offer were made, her acceptance would be contingent on changes to the festival’s organization. “You need to make this place ready for the future, and if some structural things don’t change, then it’s impossible to do the work,” she said, though declined to provide specifics.If she were to depart the festival, it would likely mean the end of the Wagner family’s creative leadership: No other relative has publicly expressed an interest in taking over.Wagner said that her push to find innovative ways of staging her great-grandfather’s work was necessary, given the “limited repertoire” of the festival — Richard Wagner’s 10 mature works — and global competition among high-profile theaters staging his operas. If Bayreuth just continued to mount old-fashioned productions, she added, “people can just watch a DVD.”The idea of incorporating augmented reality into “Parsifal” emerged in early 2019. Among the challenges was adapting the technology, which is conceived for looking at nearby objects in brightly lit spaces, for a large, darkened theater. Ultimately, Scheib’s team solved the problem by creating a laser scan of the entire auditorium, down to the millimeter.Scheib said that augmented reality would emerge during crucial scenes, and would include a gigantic floating tree and a flaming horse. When Parsifal naïvely kills a swan, a pair of enormous ones will appear to fly near the auditorium’s ceiling, spouting blood.An example of the augmented-reality that viewers with glasses will see in “Parsifal.” Scheib said the uncertainty about the glasses had been a “distraction.”Bayreuth FestivalThis “Parsifal,” however, can still be experienced without the glasses, with sets, lighting and costume design depicting what Scheib described as a “post-human landscape in which the last group of people are hanging on, trying to make sense of faith, forgiveness and belonging.” But, he noted, the uncertainty about the glasses has been a “distraction.”The use of the technology, Scheib said, was in keeping with Wagner’s own way of approaching opera. “He carried out so many innovations, with lighting and architecture,” he added. “Ultimately, he wanted the theater to completely disappear.” More

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      Bel Canto Rarities, Delivered With Unflashy, Revelatory Style

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      Teatro Nuovo’s concerts of Donizetti’s “Poliuto” and the Ricci brothers’ “Crispino e la Comare” delight with historically informed singing.Opera fandom is often built around a preoccupation — zealous, territorial, absolute — with distinctive voices. Maria Callas, Renée Fleming, Cecilia Bartoli, Luciano Pavarotti — they’re all immediately identifiable by timbre alone. Not coincidentally, all of these singers have been major recording artists.Teatro Nuovo, the brainchild of the bel canto specialist Will Crutchfield, inverts that value system. It asks: What would happen if all of the singers onstage shared a particular school of singing and even a certain vocal quality?In semi-staged concerts of Donizetti’s “Poliuto” and Federico and Luigi Ricci’s “Crispino e la Comare” at the Rose Theater at Lincoln Center on Wednesday and Thursday, Teatro Nuovo found manifold beauties in a brand of homogeneity that aims to reconstruct bel canto style from historical sources that predate the mid-20th-century revival and its recording stars.The singers in the two casts largely shared a vocal profile and style — a trim yet colorful sound with a quick, understated vibrato and an emphasis on legato, portamento and unaspirated coloratura. They eschewed abrupt pivots in color and dynamics. And, unconstrained by the need to project over a modern orchestra in a vast hall, they rarely pushed their voices for volume, size or drama, choosing instead an unforced, even emission of sound.Teatro Nuovo’s ingenious use of projections leveraged historical set designs — the Metropolitan Opera’s 1919 production of “Crispino” and the 1840 premiere of the French version of “Poliuto” — as backdrops for each concert. It was a quick, cost-effective way to add theatrical context.Donizetti completed “Poliuto” in 1838, having already composed the operas that would make him immortal: “L’Elisir d’Amore,” “Lucia di Lammermoor” and the so-called Tudor trilogy. In its extensive recitatives, unhurried melodic elaboration and dramatic silences you can hear his well-earned confidence. After “Poliuto” riled censors in Naples for its depiction of a Christian martyr, Donizetti refashioned it in French. But the original Italian version gained a hold after his death.The tenor Santiago Ballerini embodied the virtues of Teatro Nuovo’s house style in Donizetti’s “Poliuto.”Steven PisanoAs Poliuto, Santiago Ballerini embodied the virtues of Teatro Nuovo’s house style with a pretty, graciously produced tenor capable of reaching dramatic heights. The baritone Ricardo José Rivera, as his rival Severo, had the evening’s richest instrument — powerful yet capable of softness. As Poliuto’s wife, the soprano Chelsea Lehnea dug into Paolina’s conflicting emotions with a mercurially colored, highly responsive instrument that flew seamlessly through its registers, even if some of her choices felt exaggerated. Hans Tashjian (Callistene), with a somewhat hollow bass, was hard to hear.If “Poliuto” is a prestige drama by a generational talent, one who was stretching a genre and challenging convention, then “Crispino e la Comare” is a network sitcom by a pair of brothers with a nose for diverting entertainment. Everyday character types — a down-and-out blue-collar cobbler and the smug doctors he outsmarts — are harmlessly yet incisively mocked. The score foregrounds a font of melodies over spare, efficient accompaniments; no one would mistake it for the sparkling sophistication of Rossini or Donizetti, but it has its charms.In the Riccis’ fantastical satire, a fairy godmother grants the cobbler Crispino the ability to predict whether patients will live or die, turning him into Venice’s top doctor, much to the chagrin of medical professionals. As Crispino’s self-pity — even the chorus tells him to shut up already — morphs into self-regard, he alienates everyone, including his wife, until the fairy teaches him a lesson with a quick trip to the underworld.Mattia Venni was a sensational Crispino — his handsome baritone and capacity for self-parody allowed him to evolve from the melodramatic sobs of an almost-suicide scene to the complacent patter of success. As Crispino’s wife, the soprano Teresa Castillo sang her spirited, flirty showpieces mellifluously. The mezzo-soprano Liz Culpepper’s fairy godmother, all chesty low notes and wry amusement, felt like an ancestor of Mistress Quickly in Verdi’s “Falstaff.” Dorian McCall, with his rich lows and light snobbery, and Vincent Graña, with his rubber-voiced comedic stylings, cut up as Crispino’s rivals.Venni and Liz Culpepper in “Crispino.” The backdrop projection is from the Metropolitan Opera’s 1919 production of the opera.Steven PisanoTeatro Nuovo’s period-style orchestra astonished again and again. The instruments don’t have the invincible brilliance of their modern counterparts. But something more personal, even intimate, comes across in the woody bassoons, earthy cellos, translucent violins and ravishingly rangy clarinet. Period instruments can be temperamental, but the players didn’t sacrifice tuning or polish.The orchestra’s almost musky timbre made it a versatile collaborator. In the concertato at the end of Act II of “Poliuto,” it complemented rather than competed with the singers, with transparent textures that allowed the mildly lustrous voices to come through. In “Crispino,” its rough-hewn energy gave it a sincere, good-humored quality.In the Donizetti, Jakob Lehmann, who both played violin and conducted with his bow, relished accelerating the tempo of concluding allegros and guided the music with such subtlety that even staccatos had shape to them. The maestro al cembalo Jonathan Brandani effectively conducted “Crispino” from the keyboard and let the bass and cello lead in recitatives.In a few brief seasons, Teatro Nuovo has staked out a singular place for itself by marrying the thrill of discovery with a shared sense of purpose. More

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      André Watts, Pioneering Piano Virtuoso, Dies at 77

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      One of the first Black superstars in classical music, he awed audiences with his charisma and his technical powers.André Watts, a pianist whose mighty technique and magnetic charm awed audiences and made him one of the first Black superstars in classical music, died on Wednesday at his home in Bloomington, Ind. He was 77.The cause was prostate cancer, said his wife, Joan Brand Watts.Mr. Watts was an old-world virtuoso — his idol was the composer and showman Franz Liszt — with a knack for electricity and emotion. He sometimes hummed, stomped his feet and bobbed his head while he played, and some critics faulted him for excess. But his charisma and his technical powers were unquestioned, which helped fuel his rise to the world’s top concert halls.“My greatest satisfaction is performing,” Mr. Watts told The New York Times in 1971, when he was 25. “The ego is a big part of it, but far from all. Performing is my way of being part of humanity — of sharing.”“There’s something beautiful,” he added, “about having an entire audience hanging on a single note.”Mr. Watts, whose father was Black and whose mother was white, was a rarity in a field where musicians of color have long been underrepresented. While he preferred not to speak about race, he was celebrated as a pioneer who defied stereotypes about classical music and helped open doors for aspiring artists of color.His own arrival in the spotlight was auspicious. In 1963, when he was 16, he won an audition to appear with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic as part of the maestro’s nationally televised series of Young People’s Concerts.Mr. Bernstein was effusive as he introduced the young pianist to the crowd at Philharmonic Hall. “He sat down at the piano and tore into the opening bars of a Liszt concerto in such a way that we simply flipped,” Mr. Bernstein said, recounting the young pianist’s audition.Mr. Watts was then living in relative obscurity in Philadelphia, practicing on a beat-up piano with 26 missing strings. But he emerged from his performance of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 a bona fide star.A couple weeks later, Mr. Bernstein invited him to make his formal Philharmonic debut, substituting for the eminent pianist Glenn Gould. He later credited Mr. Bernstein with handing him a career “out of thin air.”“It was like being God Almighty at 16,” he told The Times.André Watts was born on June 20, 1946, in Nuremberg, Germany, the son of Herman Watts, a noncommissioned officer stationed overseas for the U.S. Army, and Maria (Gusmits) Watts, an amateur pianist from Hungary.His mother, who was fond of playing Strauss waltzes on the family’s Blüthner piano, encouraged André’s musical studies, and as a 6-year-old he took up the piano after a flirtation with the violin.“I liked the sound,” he recalled in a 1993 television appearance. “I would hold the pedal down for pages and pages of music and just let this mushroom sound go.”When he was 8, the family moved to the United States for his father’s work, ultimately settling in Philadelphia. But his parents’ relationship grew strained, and they divorced when he was 13. He rarely saw his father in the following decades.His mother, who worked as a receptionist at an art gallery to help pay for his piano lessons, became a dominant influence. When he was young, she served as teacher, coach and manager, and she enforced a strict practice regimen.Mr. Watts with Leonard Bernstein in 1963 after he performed a Liszt piano concerto with the New York Philharmonic as a last-minute substitute for Glenn Gould. Mr. Watts later credited Mr. Bernstein with handing him a career “out of thin air.”Associated PressAndré struggled to fit in at school, quarreling with teachers and classmates (he taught himself judo to deter bullies). He sometimes felt isolated, he recalled in interviews, because he identified as neither Black nor white.When he went to Florida as a teenager to perform, his manager, invoking the state’s history of discrimination against interracial couples, warned that he could be viewed suspiciously.But his mother told him that he should not blame racism for his troubles. “If someone is not nice to you,” Mr. Watts recalled her saying when he was interviewed by The Christian Science Monitor in 1982, “it doesn’t have to be automatically because of your color.”“These kinds of advice have taught me that when I’m in a complex personal situation, I don’t have to conclude it is a racial thing,” he said. “The more subtle things in interpersonal exchange are, first of all, never provable as racist anyway. So it’s a waste of time.”He later credited Mr. Bernstein with helping him gain acceptance in the classical music industry, which had long been seen as the dominion of the white and wealthy. In introducing Mr. Watts at the Young People’s Concert, Mr. Bernstein described his international heritage and said, “I love that kind of story.”In 1964, the year after his debut with Mr. Bernstein, Mr. Watts won a Grammy Award for most promising new classical recording artist. Despite his early success, he tried to remain grounded, adopting a motto, “Even this shall pass away,” taken from a poem by the 19th-century poet and abolitionist Theodore Tilton. (His mother had the phrase inscribed on a gold medallion that he wore around his neck.)He graduated in 1972 from the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he studied with the pedagogue and performer Leon Fleisher. He was already a regular on the global concert circuit by the time he graduated, playing the Liszt concerto for which he was known, as well as works by Chopin, Franck, Saint-Saëns and others, before sold-out crowds in Boston, Los Angeles, London and elsewhere.Mr. Watts in performance with the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center in 2005.Richard Termine for The New York TimesMr. Watts earned mixed reviews early in his career; critics said that while he had flair and confidence, he could sometimes get carried away. But they agreed that he possessed a special ability to communicate from the keyboard.“He has that kind of personal magic that makes an Event of a concert, and Philharmonic Hall had the electric feeling that occurs only when an important artist is at work,” Harold C. Schonberg of The New York Times wrote in 1970. “It cannot be taught, this mysterious transmission from stage to audience, and Mr. Watts has it in very large measure.”While Mr. Watts thrived on the stage, recording was more of a challenge; he said he was prone to clam up without an audience. And at times he suffered financial and management difficulties, including in 1992, when he was ordered by a New York State appellate court to pay Columbia Artists Management nearly $300,000 in disputed commissions.But he maintained his popularity, performing at White House state dinners, making frequent appearances on television and becoming one of classical music’s most bankable stars. His success brought new luxuries and curiosities. He grew fond of Montecristo cigars, fine wines and caviar, and he began to study Zen Buddhism.In 1987, Mr. Watts was featured in an episode of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” about learning from mistakes.“When I’m feeling unhappy,” he said on the program, “going to the piano and just playing gently and listening to sounds makes everything slowly seem all right.”His collaborators described him as a musician of preternatural talent who was always looking to improve. The conductor Robert Spano said that Mr. Watts never performed a piece the same way twice, intent on finding fresh meaning each time.“Every night was a new adventure,” Mr. Spano said. “He radiated love to people and to the music, and it was unmistakable. That’s why he was so loved as a performer, because of the generosity of his music making.”He was also a role model for many Black musicians. The conductor Thomas Wilkins, a colleague of Mr. Watts’s at Indiana University, where Mr. Watts had taught since 2004, recalled him as a devoted teacher who was eager to “hand down this ferociousness about trying to become better.”“Whenever we were onstage together, there was this unspoken acknowledgment that we were in a world where a lot of people think we shouldn’t be,” said Mr. Wilkins, who is Black. “It was an affirmation.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Watts is survived by a stepson, William Dalton; a stepdaughter, Amanda Rees; and seven step-grandchildren.At the start of the pandemic in 2020, Mr. Watts, who was diagnosed with Stage 4 prostate cancer in 2016, had been planning a feat: He would play Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in a version that he had reworked for the right hand (his left was recovering from a nerve injury). As he practiced on his twin Yamaha pianos, he got daily inspiration from a one-legged starling that emerged outside his home in Bloomington.Ultimately, Mr. Watts was unable to perform the concerto because of health problems and the pandemic. He mostly stopped playing the piano after the concerts were canceled, instead spending time with students.His wife said that music had sustained him throughout his life, beginning with his demanding childhood and through his health struggles.“Music was how he endured and how he survived,” she said. “When he actually played, then he was happy. It just really lifted up his soul.”He described music as a sacred space in which he felt he could breathe and flourish.“Your relationship with your music is the most important thing that you have, and it is, in the sense of private and sacred, something that you need to protect,” he said before a concert in Baltimore in 2012. “The dross of everyday life is very, very powerful and very strong. So you need to protect your special relationship with your music.”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More