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      Review: In ‘Monochromatic Light,’ Artists Saturate and Vacate Space

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      Tyshawn Sorey’s music, initially written with Mark Rothko’s abstractions in mind, comes to the Park Avenue Armory with art by Julie Mehretu.If you write a musical composition in homage to Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel,” and if you premiere it in the actual Rothko Chapel in Houston, you’d seem to be anchoring its meaning and context in rather firm ground. But the American composer and percussionist Tyshawn Sorey is a more restive and conjectural artist than that; and his “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” which commemorated the 50th anniversary of the chapel earlier this year, has come to New York rewritten, reorganized and reinvigorated.This latest, and now staged, version of “Monochromatic Light” premiered at the Park Avenue Armory on Tuesday, and it retains the spare and ritualistic tenor of Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel,” with long rests between its inquiring viola phrases and soft rumbles of the timpani. Here in New York, though, Sorey’s music is heard in the company not of Rothko but of another American painter: the contemporary artist Julie Mehretu, whose dense and digitally conversant abstractions flow and swarm where Rothko’s brooded. The production, by the avant-garde journeyman Peter Sellars, has been souped up for the Armory’s cavernous drill hall and augmented with young dancers. The running time has ballooned, too, from under an hour to a good 90 minutes.In scaling up, Sorey may have sacrificed the ecclesiastical concentration that both he and Feldman before him had found in Houston. The night has its longueurs. But this rethought and more antagonistic “Monochromatic Light” strikes a new richness in New York, and it affirms how abstraction can give form to suffering and freedom in ways more straightforward expression so often cannot.At the Armory, “Monochromatic Light” is staged in the round. Sorey, at center, conducts an ensemble of just three musicians, playing viola, keyboards and percussion: nearly the same instrumentation as Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel.” Singers from the Choir of Trinity Wall Street sit at a distance, and behind the audience is an octagonal gangway, with one massive reproduction of a Mehretu painting hanging above each side. Three of the eight abstractions were seen in her 2020 exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery; one appeared this year at David Zwirner in a group show devoted to Toni Morrison; and four are new, incorporating dense layers of halftone dots, sprayed clouds of bright yellow or green and seething black squiggles.The staging echoes Philip Johnson’s octagonal nave of the Houston chapel, but from the opening moments of gently struck tubular bells, it’s clear that Rothko’s dark reticence is being left behind. For Mehretu’s works here are not paintings but blowups on translucent screens, lit from front and back by colored spots. (The lighting designer, James F. Ingalls, a longtime Sellars collaborator, synchronizes the color adjustments across all eight paintings so that, at a given moment in the score, their backgrounds will all glow purple or aquamarine and their tremulous blacks will emerge or recede.)Deidra “Dayntee” Braz, one of the eight dancers who performed in the Brooklyn-born style known as flex.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesUp on the gangway are eight dancers, one per painting, who bend and writhe throughout in a Brooklyn-born style of dancing known as flex. The performers are athletic, the men among them perform shirtless, but choreographed by Reggie Gray (also known as Regg Roc) they appear vulnerable, fragile, under threat; they contort their arms as if they’re fractured or disjointed and draw in their stomachs as if taking a punch.The score is rangy and spatial, the tempo largo to larghissimo. (There’s no beat as such; Sorey marked time with strokes of his baton lasting a second or longer.) Its opening minutes are especially minimal. Against a long and attenuated trill of the viola, Mehretu’s backgrounds become a lurid green or mysterious blue and the black lines of the paintings start to look more querulous. The dancers moonwalk and roll their necks; their motions are smooth and spasmodic by turns, and several of them present bulging eyes and pained expressions that recall the existential intensity of butoh.The dancers’ broken movements, and Mehretu’s colliding layers and shaking lines, bring out an anxiety in Sorey’s score that probably did not come through in front of Rothko’s hushed paintings in Houston. There’s an angst and frailty in the scattered notes Kim Kashkashian brings from her viola, while the percussionist Steven Schick bows between the bars of a marimba to produce a spooky, theremin-like keening. The silky ah-ah-ah choral lines, a Feldman quotation that I imagine worked better amid the Rothkos, feel out of place against Mehretu’s unsettled paintings, though there is sharper accompaniment from Davóne Tines, the solo bass-baritone, walking through the audience and later circumnavigating the gangway. As he wrenches forth fragments from the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” the words octaves apart and isolated by long silences, the evening takes on the tone of a funeral march.The solo bass-baritone Davóne Tines singing in front of an enlarged reproduction of a painting by Julie Mehretu, with the flex dancer Jeremy “Opt” Perez lying on the gangway below.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesSorey’s interpolation of a spiritual into “Monochromatic Light,” as well as the dancers’ channeling of Jamaican vernacular movements and the violent news imagery that Mehretu abstracts into her churning backgrounds, all imbue this threnody with the particularities of Black grief. But it resists resolution throughout. This is a work of Blackness (or blackness) in abstraction — one that defies the supposed blankness of nonobjective painting or art music on the one hand, and current market demands for social advocacy on the other. Blackness in abstraction, as the curator Adrienne Edwards has written, is a more capacious and immanent model of artistic creation than many of our institutions can handle. It requires a dual engagement with form and identity, which, in Edwards’s words, “shifts analysis away from the Black artist as subject and instead emphasizes blackness as material, method and mode.” It can draw as much from Rothko, whose murals in Houston are black with purplish-blue undertones, as from Du Bois or Eastman or O’Grady. It pushes past biography or storytelling, and enters the realms of the psychic, the global, the cosmic.What I most admired about Mehretu’s midcareer retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art last year was how she used magnitude to defy the diminishment and simplifications that even our “diversified” cultural institutions still assign to artists outside the dominant representation. Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light,” for all its spareness, does the same. Where Mehretu saturates space, Sorey vacates it, yet both painter and composer offer vital examples of how to create at full scale when the times impel others to reduce their ambition. This is how you speak to some and to all at once; this is how you mourn and stay free.Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)Through Oct. 8 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. More

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      Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Manuscript Settles in Cleveland

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      The Cleveland Orchestra has been given the autograph score, which was sold at auction to a previously anonymous buyer for $5.6 million.When Gustav Mahler took the New York Philharmonic to Cleveland for a concert in December 1910, he drove the critic Miriam Russell, of The Plain Dealer, to paroxysms of prose:Little Mahler with the big brain.Little Mahler with the mighty force.Little Mahler with the great musical imagination.That, however, was to be his sole appearance there; by the following spring, he was dead.An important piece of Mahleriana will nevertheless now reside in Ohio for good. The Cleveland Orchestra announced today that it has received the manuscript of Mahler’s Second Symphony as a gift. And in doing so, it revealed the identity of the mystery buyer who paid $5.6 million for that autograph score in 2016: Herbert G. Kloiber, an Austrian media mogul.“He’s very much in the family,” André Gremillet, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, said of Kloiber, who is a trustee and chairs its European advisory board. “Given his deep knowledge and love of music, the fact that it’s coming from him has special meaning to us. It’s not just any collector who bought the score.”Kloiber, 74, who built his Tele München Group into a major European media company before selling it to the investment firm KKR in 2019, said that his decision to buy the Mahler manuscript had reflected a lifelong interest in music, as well as a friendship.The godson of the conductor Herbert von Karajan, Kloiber ran the production company Unitel, which made several renowned films of performances, before founding Clasart Classic in 1976. Clasart distributes Met in HD broadcasts internationally, and has made visual recordings of the Clevelanders playing Bruckner and Brahms with their music director, Franz Welser-Möst.It was through his business dealings that Kloiber became acquainted with Gilbert Kaplan, the Mahler devotee who had bought the 232-page manuscript in 1984 from the foundation of Willem Mengelberg, a Dutch conductor who had received it from the composer’s widow, Alma. Kaplan, a financial publisher with no musical training, was obsessed with the “Resurrection,” as the work is known, and controversially conducted it with leading orchestras, recording it twice.“We had both sold a piece of our companies to Capital Cities, the owner of the ABC network, so every year we gathered in Phoenix, Arizona, at the Biltmore Hotel for a corporate retreat,” Kloiber said. “Whilst everybody else was doing horse routes or playing golf, we were sitting at the bar talking about Gustav Mahler, and his particular inclination to the Second Symphony.”The score is unaltered, unbound and marked in blue crayon with Mahler’s own edits.David A. Brichford, the Cleveland Museum of ArtWhen Kaplan died in 2016, he left the manuscript to his widow with the intention that it be sold. Kloiber’s winning bid at Sotheby’s that November set a record for a manuscript score at auction. The acquisition was anonymous, but not entirely a secret.“We agreed to have a coffee in Vienna,” Welser-Möst said, recalling a meeting from a few years ago with Kloiber, a friend. “I knew he had bought it, but that was it. He showed up with a black briefcase. We sat down for coffee — you know, chatty, chatty — and it was like in one of those spy films. He pushed the briefcase underneath the table and said, ‘Have a look at it.’”For Welser-Möst, who occupied Mahler’s post of general music director at the Vienna State Opera from 2010 to 2014, examining the pristinely preserved manuscript — unaltered, unbound and marked in blue crayon with the composer’s own edits — was an emotional experience, not to mention a nerve-racking one. The clarity of Mahler’s handwriting convinced him, he said, that his scores ought to be followed to the letter.“When I opened the score in our apartment in Vienna, I got really teary,” Welser-Möst said. “How close can you get to a masterpiece, whatever it is? You can’t get any closer than that, and to have that intimate moment just for myself, not being in a museum and pushing other people to the side to get a glimpse of it, that was really a very special moment in my life.”He hid the manuscript under his bed, then returned it three days later.Kloiber, who admires the Cleveland Orchestra’s commitment to its youth programs and has been a board member since 2010, told officials that he would give them the manuscript in 2019, after a Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra concert at St. Florian, the abbey near Linz, Austria, where Bruckner was organist.“They are a lovely lot,” Kloiber said. “I like the way they are run and come on all these tours, and make a really big effort for the United States to be present on the European concert circuit.”Selections from the manuscript will be displayed at Severance Hall in a free public showing on Wednesday, and for ticket holders at the orchestra’s season-opening performances of the “Resurrection” on Thursday and Friday. The score will then be housed nearby at the Cleveland Museum of Art, which is led by William M. Griswold, the former director of the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, where several of Mahler’s other manuscripts are held.“It will be kept permanently at the museum,” Gremillet said. “We are still working on where it will be exhibited, but we want people to see that score. Certainly this is going to be a great source of pride for Cleveland as a whole, in addition to the Cleveland Orchestra.” More

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      A Work of Mourning Comes to New York, With No Rothkos in Sight

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      Tyshawn Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” written for the Rothko Chapel in Houston, becomes longer and grander for the Park Avenue Armory.Few pieces of music are as tied to the place where they premiered as Tyshawn Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife).”Commissioned to honor the 50th anniversary of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Sorey’s work was first heard in February in that intimate room, surrounded by Mark Rothko’s brooding late canvases. But the site specificity goes deeper: “Monochromatic Light” closely echoes the instrumentation and the mournful, glacial style of Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel,” written for the space soon after it opened in the early 1970s.Sorey’s work wouldn’t seem fit for any other setting. But along with the chapel and the Houston arts organization DaCamera, the Park Avenue Armory commissioned the work, and from Tuesday through Oct. 8, “Monochromatic Light” will be presented there — with no Rothkos in sight.“We decided we wouldn’t try to recreate the experience of the Rothko Chapel,” Sorey said in an interview. “You can’t do that anywhere. You can’t redo that situation.”The Armory’s vast drill hall dwarfs the chapel, where “Monochromatic Light” was given a straightforward, concert-style presentation. The New York production, staged by the veteran director Peter Sellars, has grown to match.An octagonal playing space, nodding to the shape of the chapel in Houston, has been constructed within the drill hall. The audience — about 600, versus 150 at the premiere — is seated in the round and surrounded by eight paintings by another abstractionist, Julie Mehretu, blown up to billboard-size dimensions. A dancer is stationed in front of each painting, sinuously twisting and bending in the Brooklyn-born street dance style called flex.An octagonal performance space that nods to the Rothko Chapel in Houston has been constructed inside the Armory’s drill hall.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesSorey has added to the piece itself, bringing its length to almost 90 minutes, from 50 minutes in Houston, particularly broadening the music for the pianist Sarah Rothenberg. She also plays celesta (the only keyboard instrument in the Feldman) and is joined in the center of the space by the violist Kim Kashkashian, the percussionist Steven Schick, and Sorey, as conductor.Sorey said he knew earlier this year that “Monochromatic Light” hadn’t yet reached its final form, but simply didn’t have enough time before the premiere to write more. And the rehearsal process in New York, particularly the addition of the dancers, had inspired him.“At the Houston performances, while I was very satisfied, I felt I needed more of this experience,” he said. “In terms of having more material and developing off what we did at the chapel, now I’m at a place where it’s like, we’ve left the chapel. I’m dealing with everything the chapel stood for, but also things we’re dealing with now.”His additions had arrived in the musicians’ email inboxes just a few hours before a rehearsal on Sept. 14, on an upper floor of the Armory. The stress level in the room was high. But the meditative music, with its spacious if unsettling quiet, gradually brought down the blood pressure.With mock-ups of the Mehretu paintings on the walls, a few dancers stood in for what would eventually be the full complement of eight, while four singers — one for each voice part — represented the choir of Trinity Wall Street. The choreographer, Reggie Gray, a flex innovator also known as Regg Roc, sat to the side watching, and the bass-baritone Davóne Tines slowly walked around the space, intoning the score’s vocalizations, which can evoke fragments of the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.”Tyshawn Sorey, center right, conducting his work, which he has expanded to 90 minutes for the Armory production.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesSellars occasionally called out cues to the dancers, representing shifts in mood that would be reflected in the staging by dramatic changes in the lighting on the paintings. “The heart of the world opens,” he cried at one point; at another, “walking on the razor-blade bridge on the day of judgment.”Gray, in a joint interview with Sorey, Sellars and Mehretu, said of the dancers’ movements: “It’ll be different every single night. It’s how do the emotions go through their bodies at that time.”When he was discussing the formation of a creative team with the Armory, Sorey said, he wanted to reunite with Sellars, after working with him on several iterations of “Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine,” an evening-length recomposition of Josephine Baker songs, starting in 2016. Sellars, in turn, suggested Mehretu (with whom he had staged Kaija Saariaho’s opera “Only the Sound Remains” in 2016) and Gray (with whom he created “Flexn” at the Armory in 2015).At first, Mehretu didn’t know how closely to hew to the works in the Houston chapel. “I thought a lot about making black paintings,” she said. What she ended up producing was far more active and jittery than the Rothkos, with the swooping calligraphic gestures and kaleidoscopic, colorful flecks she is known for.“I contacted Peter as I was working and said, ‘These are not monochromatic,’” Mehretu recalled with a laugh.Among the performers are members of the choir of Trinity Wall Street, left, rehearsing here with the production’s director, Peter Sellars.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesBut, Sellars said, “a lot of the staging is monochromatic light. Seeing these paintings under these single lighting temperatures or colors, they get new identities under monochromatic light.”The underpaintings — invisible in the final works — are blurred images, mostly taken from the news, including coverage of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol and the 2017 far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va. Those ghosts of history and trauma, personal and societal, are a veiled presence, like “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” in Sorey’s score.“It’s constantly playing back as the piece is going, but you only hear it now and again,” Sorey said. “You have this musical information that is in a lot of ways inspired by that spiritual, but you only really hear it from time to time. It’s there, and it’s not there.”In Sellars’s telling, the past is invoked in this way in “Monochromatic Light” in order to heal and press toward the future. “Coming out of the two years we’re coming out of, it’s important to move forward,” he said, “The past is ongoing, but we have to move this whole thing forward.”Unlike in Houston, where audience members faced in the same direction toward the performers, the Armory’s in-the-round presentation also has political reverberations. “It’s about a society looking at itself,” Sellars said. “There is no way out; we’re all in this together. None of us is experiencing the exact same thing, but we’re with each other.”Sorey’s music, he added, “is experiential. It’s lived in; it’s an experience.”The question is how audiences will respond to an experience so long, spare, rigorous and ritualistic. “It is about endurance,” Sellars said. “How long a minute can be. Not ‘Oh, let’s change the subject.’ We’re going to stay here until we really find something. It’s a space of concentrated investing.”And the music gives the sense that it could keep on quietly expanding forever. Sorey, however, said that he thought it had reached its final form: “This feels like what it is.”Then, with a grin, he added: “I’ve got another hour to add. Easily, right?” More

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      Abel Selaocoe Finds a Home in Improvisation

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      The classically trained South African cellist draws on musical traditions from across the globe for his debut album, “Where is Home (Hae Ke Kae).”MANCHESTER, England — On a recent evening at the Bridgewater Hall here, Abel Selaocoe surveyed the audience from his cello podium. Holding his bow aloft like a staff, the musician asked attendees to add their voices to the strutting groove sweeping the auditorium.This was The Oracle, a touring program built around Selaocoe’s multiplicity: During the concert, the South African artist, 30, best known for his work on the cello, moved swiftly between roles as a singer, improviser, section player and master of ceremonies. During the evening, Selaocoe performed with the chamber group Manchester Collective, covering Stravinsky, Vivaldi and Mica Levi, and with his trio, Chesaba, adding influences from groove-centered improvisation and sounds from across the African continent. In a classical music industry that encourages performers to be either/or, Selaocoe has chosen both — and more.Themes of belonging, journey and history punctuate Selaocoe’s debut album, “Where is Home (Hae Ke Kae),” which arrives Friday on Warner Classics. The genre-blending album harnesses an intimate emotional energy that is disrupted by regular fiery outbursts, as on the hymn-like “Ibuyile I’Africa / Africa is Back” and the spiky “Ka Bohaleng / On the Sharp Side.” (The album’s name and many of the track titles include translations in African languages, including Sotho and Zulu.)In recent years, Selaocoe’s ability to float above rigid genre categories has resulted in a growing influence among a classical music community increasingly conscious of its deference to longstanding traditions. In 2021, he curated a concert at the BBC Proms, one of the world’s largest classical music festivals, and he is an artist in residence at London’s Southbank Center for its upcoming season. Even as he is embraced by these British institutional spaces, his additive approach is deeply rooted in his homeland’s rich musical traditions.“South African tradition doesn’t draw these hard lines between performance music, participative music, music for daily activities,” Gwen Ansell, the author of “Soweto Blues: Jazz, Popular Music and Politics in South Africa,” said in a recent video interview. Instead, music is “just part of what happens,” she added.Born in 1992 in Sebokeng, a township south of Johannesburg, Selaocoe’s journey with the cello began when he followed his older brother, Sammy, to Saturday school at the African Cultural Organization of South Africa in Soweto, another township around 30 miles away.Traveling to class on a packed train, on which passengers resorted to standing in the spaces between carriages, Selaocoe would remove the bridge of his cello, take off the endpin and put both parts in his pocket, standing with the instrument flat against his chest to take up as little space as possible. He began playing on a shared instrument, before teachers spotted his potential and gifted him his own.In a classical music industry that encourages artists to be either/or, Selaocoe has chosen both, drawing on his homeland’s rich musical traditions even as he is embraced by institutional spaces.Leon BarkerGrowing up, his brother, who also works as a musician, “had a philosophy that, if you’re living in a township, in a place that doesn’t have a lot of sustenance, and employment, you have to start looking really early,” Selaocoe said. Selaocoe listened — though he would later come to realize the townships’ own unique artistry — and at 13 won a scholarship to St John’s College, a prestigious boarding school in Johannesburg.At St John’s, Selaocoe dreamed of a move to Europe, and his classmates romanticized the continent as “the mecca of classical music, of musical expression,” he said. After studying with the teacher Michael Masote, who was one of the most influential voices in South African classical music, Selaocoe eventually took the leap in 2010, when he enrolled at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester at 18.Despite his classical training in the cello, everything stems from singing for Selaocoe. “The voice does things my body cannot imagine, but my musicality can,” he said over lunch near his home in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, a suburb south of Manchester.Selaocoe learned to sing the same way one might pick up a language in childhood: “by seeing adults do it and copying them.” Growing up, his parents, a domestic worker and a mechanic, taught him cultural ceremonies and church. About six years ago, a friend gave Selaocoe a grounding in umngqokolo, a form of South African overtone singing, he said, which added a new dimension to the musician’s already charismatic performances.His onstage request at Bridgewater Hall for the audience to join in the performance is typical of Selaocoe’s belief in the connective power of the voice. In rehearsals for a 2018 Manchester Collective show, “Sirocco,” Selaocoe “would sing things to demonstrate to other ensemble members,” Adam Szabo, the chief executive of the group, said in a recent phone interview. “We pushed him to do it in the show, something he hadn’t done much before at all.” Now, Szabo said, he’s refined that singing in his practice, “which is this amazing melting pot of different influences.”Over lunch, Selaocoe returned frequently to idea that “singing is so universal.” But that universality has its limits. For the music journalist and author Ansell, “the song is universal, the fact that people sing is universal, but in fact the language, the meaning, the discourse of that song, isn’t.”Selaocoe said he wanted his work to offer routes to universally felt experiences. “There are things that go beyond language, the things that are just part of the human instinct,” he said. “The first one is movement — the idea of expressing with your body. Then we go even deeper into things like faith.”Selaocoe’s relationship to faith is multifaceted: In addition to attending Methodist and Apostolic churches, he was brought up around traditional medicinal, healing and spiritual practices. “My heart has always stayed with appeasing my ancestors — seeing if I can get in touch with them, to ask for advice,” he said.Themes of belonging, journey and history punctuate Selaocoe’s debut album, “Where is Home (Hae Ke Kae),” which was released Sept. 23. Adama Jalloh for The New York TimesAt Bridgewater Hall, Selaocoe channeled this history through aphoristic pronouncements, telling the audience: “The future is in the past.” Connecting with the past — in and out of his music — is one way Selaocoe has explored the question posed by his album’s title.“‘Where is home?’ is no longer [just] a question of the geographical space,” he said. “It can be an ideology, within artistic practice, or the people I surround myself with.”Artistically, Selaocoe’s current home is in improvisation, a shift confirmed when he was invited to perform with the renowned Art Ensemble of Chicago at the 2019 London Jazz Festival. That concert was a key moment “in understanding that my expression doesn’t always have to be prepared‌,” he said. “Coming from a classical music background, preparation is almost everything.” But with an improvised performance, he added, “I leave the moment on‌ ‌stage and be like, ‘I can never recreate what we did.’”Still, Selaocoe spends a lot of time with classical ensembles, introducing fresh approaches to groove, including techniques informed by Africa’s wealth of stringed instruments. Does he meet resistance to his ideas? “Yes,” he said, “but I think it’s important that you choose your collaborators well. As soon as you have curiosity in the room, that’s 70 percent of the job done.”Selaocoe has also paid attention to how his performances are marketed. “If I’m coming to play a sonata, they’ll call me a classical cellist,” he said. “But if I play something else, I’m no longer that — I’m just, like, an African musician.”His dream, he said, is for his mixed-genre, groove-orientated approach to become intuitive. To be able “to walk into a room, set a groove and people understand what to do with their bows, rather than be told,” he said.“When you put it on a piece of paper, it looks dead simple,” he added. “And it really isn’t.” More

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      How Much Would You Pay to Hear Great Music?

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      With ticket prices for performing arts rising, could fresh approaches like pay-what-you-can increase access and foster more adventurous programming?“I’m a cellist, and I have played in orchestras my entire life,” Blake-Anthony Johnson, the president and chief executive of the Chicago Sinfonietta, said recently. “I used to ask the other musicians, ‘What is the most you would pay for your ideal concert?’ And it was nowhere near what our patrons actually pay.”Johnson was describing a slow-moving crisis in the performing arts: Ticket prices have risen far more precipitously than most Americans’ earnings — to say nothing of the seductively low cost of streaming services at home.This rise doesn’t just trouble short-term sales. It also affects the long-term health of arts organizations, which depend on the philanthropic support of patrons who have generally built close relationships with the objects of their giving.“I have long been concerned that ticket prices present a barrier to newcomers who are curious, and a barrier to inciting habitual attendance,” said Marc Scorca, the president and chief executive of the trade organization Opera America, noting that kind of habit can lead to later giving.“High ticket prices are a disincentive to experimentation, and they raise the level of expectation,” he added. “And the higher the price, the less likely that expectations will be met, leading to disappointment.”It’s axiomatic: High ticket prices are barriers at a time when organizations need their doors to be open ever more widely. And dependence on ticket sales also hobbles programming innovation. (In Europe, where arts institutions receive sometimes substantial public subsidies, ticket sales are a far smaller percentage of budgets, so artistic decisions don’t have to prioritize attendance.)But could new approaches to ticketing work to increase access and foster more adventurous programming?“Removing socioeconomic barriers is one of those things we have to be ahead of,” said Johnson, whose Chicago Sinfonietta introduced a pay-what-you-can ticketing approach last season. “I sleep really well at night, to have someone say, ‘I’m able to bring my family to these concerts.’”Experimentation in this area has been spreading in the theater world. Most recently Ars Nova, the prominent Off Broadway incubator, announced that it would move to a pay-what-you-want model for the coming season.In classical music, this kind of initiative has been far rarer, with the Sinfonietta leading the recent charge. But a much larger and more influential institution, Lincoln Center, threw down a gauntlet this summer, when it made the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra’s brief season choose-what-you-pay.The results were heartening. According to the center, 90.5 percent of tickets were sold for the concerts, which took place at Alice Tully Hall since the orchestra’s usual home, the larger David Geffen Hall, was being renovated.The suggested ticket price was $35, but the average paid was just over $19 — compared with almost $60 during the orchestra’s 2019 season, when face value ranged from $35 to $90. Sixty-three percent of Mostly Mozart ticket buyers this summer were first-timers to a Lincoln Center presentation (though not, perhaps, to the center’s constituents, like the Metropolitan Opera or New York Philharmonic).Of course, many institutions have reduced-price tickets available for students or seniors, or for last-minute buyers. And increasingly some have subscription-style programs that make cheaper tickets available for a monthly or annual fee. But those programs effectively penalize newcomers and occasional ticket buyers. And what about those who aren’t students or seniors, but are still challenged by rising prices?“I find it really odd that we subsidize tickets for youths and senior citizens,” Johnson said. “There is a very large group of people in between. What I’m suggesting is that we have the kind of relationship with the community in which we are a public service and want to be a part of your life regardless of whether you’re giving us money.”As Renee Blinkwolt, the producing executive director of Ars Nova, told The New York Times when that company’s new pricing policy was unveiled in August: “It’s not income based, it’s not age based, there’s no demographic basis. It’s just radically accessible — the doors are wide open to any and everyone to pay what they will.”The rise of dynamic pricing — in which ticket prices fluctuate based on demand — is spreading beyond the commercial theater world. This can help maximize revenue for institutions when they have a hit.But it can also do a disservice to audiences and the long-term fate of presenters. Aficionados are probably less likely to be purchasing tickets at the last minute, when in a dynamic pricing situation they’ll be most expensive. So relative newcomers will disproportionately be the ones stuck needing to pay a premium, when they should be most diligently targeted with discounts. (For this reason, the Metropolitan Opera did not employ dynamic pricing during its highly successful run of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” last season.)The obvious solution would be for institutions simply to systemically lower prices — without expecting patrons to comb through websites for special ticketing programs or know how to game the dynamic pricing system.One way to lower prices is to eliminate ticket revenue as a factor in budgeting. Yes, that sounds extreme: When Emilee Syrewicze, the executive director of Opera Grand Rapids in Michigan, told her board earlier this year that their company was going in that direction, there was a little freakout.“Their first thought was, We’re no longer selling tickets,” Syrewicze said.What she was envisioning, though, was something different. Syrewicze had realized that the company’s ticket sales, as at many small and midsize institutions, were bringing in only a small portion of the budget: in the case of Opera Grand Rapids, around 15 percent. She also saw that the company consistently lacked a steady source of income to direct toward new projects and new works.What if, she thought, the opera reorganized its finances — and juiced its fund-raising to compensate — so that all of the money from ticket sales would be devoted to creative programming? In other words, as she put it: “What if we had a couple hundred thousand laying around?”When she explained to the board that the company was not simply disappearing the ticket revenue, but was planning to put it into other programs — and that the change would happen gradually over a few years, starting this fall — the members calmed down.“The freakout was only momentary,” Syrewicze said with a laugh.In Grand Rapids, the goal is not to lower prices, which are already cheap and addressed by several accessibility programs. But other organizations could use the same strategy as a model for price reductions: If ticket revenue doesn’t matter, tickets can be cheaper.Small or midsize institutions may well have an easier time experimenting, because if changes to ticket strategy are going to work without cutting budgets, donations will need to rise to fill the gap. That said, smaller organizations also tend to have less fund-raising prowess; the Stavros Niarchos Foundation supported the Mostly Mozart pilot program this summer, and Syrewicze and her new development director are confident that their city — which has a notably strong philanthropic record — will support their experiment.But it is still a gamble, and it requires a rethinking of the entire organization around a goal of lowering prices.For larger companies that sell more tickets, and those that still look to ticket sales as a bigger percentage of their budgets, the losses — and increased pressure on fund-raising — might not be workable. And as Johnson pointed out, the very configuration of most concert halls, in hierarchical tiers, resists truly democratic approaches to pricing.But Lincoln Center has shown that even the biggest organizations can at least experiment in this area, embracing the radical accessibility espoused by Ars Nova and opening the door to broader audiences of their own while providing inspiration for the rest of the field.There is still work to do. Syrewicze said she didn’t know of other organizations doing truly creative thinking in the pricing area, though a couple of her colleagues approached her to learn more after she had presented what she was working on in Grand Rapids at an Opera America meeting.“They liked the sound of it, but we like the sound of a lot of things,” she said. “How things translate to a budget is totally different. Because of our size and because we keep ourselves lean, we’re comfortable experimenting with this.”Of course, even if ticket prices came down, it wouldn’t solve all of the problems faced by orchestras and opera companies seeking to build their audiences and secure their donor bases.“When we’re talking about folks who have not come to the opera generally, price is not the only barrier,” Scorca said. “We should not kid ourselves that lower ticket prices will make people feel totally comfortable. But it is a potent, tangible, identifiable barrier.”Just the same, it would be unfortunate if the fact that lowering prices won’t solve everything keeps it from solving anything.“Let’s see what happens,” Scorca added. “It doesn’t have to be all or nothing in an experimental mind-set.” More

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      With a Sound Forged in War, Iannis Xenakis Embraced Chaos

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      The Greek-French composer, who was born 100 years ago, created a revolution in music.“Greeks are like that,” the composer Iannis Xenakis said in 1967. “They are a people continually in search of themselves, always ready to launch out into all kind of rapid, violent actions, and end up by not finding themselves.”He was in his prime when he made that comment, known internationally for his music and collaborations with, for example, Le Corbusier. Yet the search never stopped, and Xenakis managed to stay elusive until his death in 2001, along the way building a legacy that is being observed this year, the centennial of his birth.The premiere of “Metastaseis,” in 1955 in Germany, put Xenakis in the company of the era’s respected composers. Admirers and opponents alike were struck by the work’s sheer violence of the masses of sound, which were constructed not by notes, but by ever-changing glissandos going up and down, and landing briefly into visceral clusters of pitches.It was something new and exciting. The composers of the Darmstadt School, then the powerhouse of avant-garde music, had been focused on serialism, and the belief that every aspect of composition should be under control, measured and organized in a highly abstract manner. But Xenakis, in an article titled “The Crisis of Serial Music,” took issue with the likes of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, essentially accusing them of leading music into an impasse.Xenakis, for his part, embraced chaos. A Greek French artist born in Romania, he went to explore it through philosophy and science, as the ancient Greeks did; “I felt I was born too late — I had missed two millennia,” he used to say. In the first chapter of “Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition,” a dense 1971 treatise on compositional technique and methods, he wrote about the “collision of rain with hard surfaces” or “the song of cicadas in a summer field” as inspirations for his concept of stochastic music, an approach to writing music that was concerned with large numbers, chance and probabilities, which were manipulated to achieve a particular goal. (“Stochos” means “target” in Greek.)Another example he gave: Imagine a large crowd of people demonstrating in the streets. They chant slogans in waves from front to rear, determining where to go next. Suddenly, the enemy attacks, dispersing the crowd by firing machine guns into the air and into the crowd itself. “After sonic and visual hell,” Xenakis wrote, “follows a detonating calm, full of despair, dust and death.”DURING WORLD WAR II, Xenakis joined the Greek Communist resistance and fought against Italian and German occupying forces. That was short-lived, however: In late 1944, Winston Churchill ordered British troops to suppress the Communists and keep Greece within the Western sphere of influence. Their ideals were crushed within a few weeks. On Jan. 1, 1945, a shell from a Sherman tank scarred Xenakis for life.“He told me once,” the composer Pascal Dusapin recalled in a recent documentary, “that he keeps trying to reproduce the sound he heard when the shrapnel went into his face.”There is no shortage of explosions, at extremities of force, in Xenakis’s music — whether in “Terretektorh” (1966), one of the first modern spatial compositions, or “Jonchaies” (1977), in which the full dynamic power of 109 musicians slowly builds up after a surprisingly melodic introduction. “Keqrops” (1986), on the other hand, starts with a sonic blast, with a solo piano trying to catch up and penetrate the massive orchestral sound.It wasn’t just the sound of war that shaped Xenakis. He spoke with vigor about the “fantastic spectacle” created by the German occupiers when, while the air was filled with echoes of whistling bullets and explosions, enormous military searchlights lit up the night. Those memories directly affected the “Polytope” series, a daring journey toward a creative assemblage of architecture, light show and electronic music, usually on a grand scale.He talked about his wartime experience with sinister overtones. And if one thing stands out in his music, it is the absence of “human pathos and emotional compulsion,” said the cellist Arne Deforce in an interview. But that style, leaning toward the extreme, egoless but at the same time natural — in the way a deafening storm is natural — had its origins on the streets of Athens.“Xenakis has been discovered — liberation!” the composer Reinhold Friedl said. “To lose oneself in the sound was intoxicating. He was a freedom fighter against the bourgeois distinction of new music.”Laszlo Ruszka /INA, via Getty ImagesXenakis left Greece in 1947, while the country was being torn apart by civil war, after hiding in Athens. He was sentenced to death, officially for political terrorism. (A pardon came only after the end of the right-wing junta, 27 years later.)A young civil engineering graduate, he initially wanted to go to the United States but never made it beyond Paris. After a few harsh, depressing weeks of getting to know the city, he found a job with the architect Le Corbusier. He also studied with the composer Olivier Messiaen from 1951 to ’53, whose interest in non-Western music inspired Xenakis to follow suit. (In 1978, having exploring the music traditions of Southern and Eastern Asia, he created “Pléïades,” a 45-minute, multicultural tour de force for six percussionists.)Xenakis’s relationship with Le Corbusier went on to be both fruitful and celebrated, leading to the creation of the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. And as Xenakis garnered fame, his dramatic past stirred up fantasies for many people, especially during May 1968 protests in Paris. A banner reading “À bas Gounod! Vive Xenakis!” (“Down with Gounod! Long live Xenakis!”) was hung from the windows of the Paris Conservatory, and Xenakis said on television, “It’s not just about sound and music; it’s about transforming people, too.” Unlike his Italian contemporary Luigi Nono, though, Xenakis refrained from sharing strong political statements, and left mixed impressions on the public.The composer Reinhold Friedl, who directs the Berlin-based contemporary music ensemble zeitkratzer, remembered his discovery of Xenakis in the mid-1980s: “Xenakis has been discovered — liberation! To lose oneself in the sound was intoxicating. He was a freedom fighter against the bourgeois distinction of new music.” The music writer Ben Watson, however, criticized Xenakis’s lifelong commitment to classical instruments: “Ironically, Xenakis’s lack of interest in alternative methods of realizing music — such as free improvisation (which he calls ‘a fashion, like jazz’) — fixes 19th century methods as absolute.”Xenakis nevertheless was revolutionary in music. “Concret PH” (1958), a short musique concrète piece used for the Philips Pavilion, along with Edgard Varèse’s “Poème Électronique,” is the first known occurrence of granular synthesis, a basic part of any electronic artist’s vocabulary today. As a pioneer of electronic music, Xenakis was also behind the creation of UPIC, a graphic sound synthesizer.The relationship between the graphic and the auditory was essential for Xenakis. He typically created a graphic score first, then meticulously transformed it into a traditional one. The means of production notwithstanding, he opened new horizons through the use of clouds or masses of sound. “Do not think in pitches but in sound processes,” said Deforce, who frequently performs Xenakis’s demanding solo cello pieces “Nomos Alpha” (1966) and “Kottos” (1977). “That perspective has been one of the big game-changers Xenakis realized in Western art music.”The baritone Holger Falk said in an interview that Xenakis’s music “feels like diving into a world of rituals that pushes you beyond your everyday consciousness.” Falk often sings Xenakis’s “Aïs” (1980), a dazzling, sonorous piece about death that makes use of exaggerated falsetto, lip smacks and neigh-like glissandos, accompanied by a large orchestra. John Eckhardt, a double bass player, used the word “ritualistic,” to describe his state of mind when performing “Theraps” (1975-76), along with “focused and heroic.”Glimpses of these feelings can be reached by listening, too. Heard live, the music pins you to your seat. How did Xenakis manage that? Perhaps it is the urgency with which he tackled the unknown, went beyond known musical idioms and clichés, and thus found something both unique and universal. His works resemble natural events both terrifying and awe-inspiring: storms, the formation of branches, tsunamis. But instead of mimicking the forces of nature, his music is a force of nature on its own. More

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      After 13 Years, a Zesty Haydn Survey Makes Its Mark

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      Jean-Efflam Bavouzet has released a rare, 11-volume collection of the composer’s 62 piano sonatas.Jean-Efflam Bavouzet faced both good and bad news in 1989.This French pianist, still then making his way as what a New York Times review from around that time called “a rigorously severe modernist,” had earned his first recording contract, with a small label of impeccable taste.But at the same time, his right hand had been diagnosed with functional dystonia, a painful muscle condition that has blighted the careers of many musicians.Unable to bite into octaves as he usually could, Bavouzet had to abandon his hopes of recording Bartok. What to do instead? He eventually chose Haydn, four or five of whose piano sonatas he had in his repertoire at the time. It was just about the only music he could still play.Cleanly articulated, a little cheeky and taking the composer seriously but never too seriously, the tone of that buoyant recording was amply summed up by the title of the booklet notes that his fellow pianist Zoltan Kocsis wrote for the release: “Haydn Without Wig.”Three decades later, that is exactly what Bavouzet, 59, has delivered on a far greater scale with the release last month of the 11th and final volume in his flamboyant, ebullient, brilliant survey of Haydn’s 62 sonatas on the Chandos label, with a few sets of variations and some other works thrown in for the fun of it.An addition, 13 years in the making, to a discography that already includes similarly excellent explorations of Debussy and Beethoven, Bavouzet’s Haydn is unmatched in its zest and its wit. But it is also substantial, informed and deeply rewarding.Sonata No. 35 in A flat: Rondo(Chandos)Moreover, it is a scarce achievement. Routine is the pianist of stature who records the Beethoven sonatas, but pianists who release even one or two albums of Haydn are all too rare, and few indeed have paid the arguably underperformed composer such sustained attention.“I did it with the most intense pleasure,” Bavouzet said in an interview. “Out of 62 sonatas, you have probably 25 indisputable masterpieces that we know, that are on concert programs — not enough, but still. Playing them is wonderful, absolutely wonderful. But they didn’t bring me the same joy as discovering the much less-known sonatas and bringing them to life.”The spirit of discovery suffuses every bar that Bavouzet has recorded, whether reinterpreting one of the almost symphonically sonorous sonatas from Haydn’s days in London in the early 1790s, or reinvigorating a slighter, two-voiced partita or divertimento from the late 1750s.“Haydn wrote all these sonatas almost as a laboratory of musical experience, an IRCAM for its time,” Bavouzet said, referring to the French avant-garde institute that Pierre Boulez founded in 1977. “These were a place where he could experiment and see what works.”“What I will miss the most, now that I have covered everything,” Bavouzet said, “is the joy of discovering one of the early sonatas.”Aurélien Bergot for The New York TimesIt’s the distinctly forward-thinking quality Bavouzet hears in Haydn that makes his set an especially valuable antidote to the view that all but the latest or the grandest of the composer’s piano works offer meager fare compared with his string quartets or symphonies — the idea that they are pieces written for amateurs that require “all our historical sympathy” to appreciate now, as the pianist Charles Rosen, a Haydn interpreter himself, wrote in “The Classical Style.”“When I was a student at the Paris Conservatory in the late ’70s, early ’80s,” Bavouzet recalled, “Haydn was a composer you would consider playing if you were not totally, fully equipped to master a Beethoven sonata — a composer that was too ‘easy,’ so to speak.”But Bavouzet was convinced otherwise by hearing Sviatoslav Richter play four of the sonatas at La Grange de Meslay, an abbey near Tours, France, where the Russian master held an annual festival. Richter had 19 of the sonatas in his repertoire, and counted the composer among his favorites.“Dear Haydn, how I love you!” Richter wrote privately in 1971. “But other pianists? They’re rather lukewarm towards you. Which is a great shame.”Bavouzet, who recalled taking Martha Argerich’s mother along to the performance, said: “We went to hear the maestro, Richter, of course, but we were thinking, four sonatas of Haydn — that’s very light, that’s not a real concert program. The revelation was that when the concert finished, we were totally fed with centuries of musical gestures. Richter did not miss any opportunities to make it sound as modern, as striking as possible. It was incredible, how Richter played Haydn onstage.”From Richter, Bavouzet borrowed a taste for playing Haydn on a Yamaha piano, and he is equally eager to draw connections across the centuries in his own work. “I love the analogy of Haydn throwing arrows into the future,” he said, “and these arrows land on the page of Schumann, of Brahms, of Prokofiev, of Stravinsky.”Haydn’s Sonata No. 50 in D: Largo e sostenuto(Chandos)Beethoven’s Op. 10, No. 3 in D: Largo e mesto(Chandos)Sometimes those arrows don’t fly terribly far, though they still strike true. The slow movement of No. 50, as numbered by the scholar H.C. Robbins Landon, is a Largo e sostenuto in D minor, and stares straight at its kin in Beethoven, the brooding Largo e mesto of Op. 10 No. 3; draw out the dramatic opening of No. 33 in C minor, the most substantial of the earlier works, and you find yourself in the anguished sound world of Schubert’s last sonata.But in other works, Haydn displays the range of a longbowman. The Moderato of No. 44 in F looks to Prokofiev with its repeated notes; the trio of No. 12 in A, when practiced at half the speed, struck the pianist as being so close to Chopin or even Scriabin that he recorded it that way as a postscript to the fifth volume; the Adagio of the Piano Concerto in G, among the three that Bavouzet recorded as a side project with Gabor Takacs-Nagy and the Manchester Camerata, inspired a nod to Poulenc in its cadenza.The original version of Sonata No. 12 in A: Trio(Chandos)Bavouzet’s version of the Trio(Chandos)If Bavouzet feels free to engage in a little bit of anachronism when the time seems right — partly inspired by period-instrument pioneers like Paul Badura-Skoda, his Haydn has a touch more spontaneity to it than Paul Lewis’s strict rigor or Marc-André Hamelin’s awe-inspiring bravura allows in their hugely admirable recent recordings — that’s because the composer left the pianist plenty of choices to make, especially in the earlier works.“What I will miss the most, now that I have covered everything,” Bavouzet said, “is the joy of discovering one of the early sonatas, where you have absolutely no indications, and it is sight-readable quite easily, but you start working on it and there is the feeling of a bottomless well.”Recording Haydn’s sonatas, in other words, is not entirely like recording Beethoven’s, even after a decision has been taken as to how to make enjoyable, coherent programs out of them. Beethoven’s scores are comparatively explicit about how they should be played, although they are, of course, open to interpretation. Haydn’s are far less so.“You try to dig,” Bavouzet continued, “and every time you dig you find new beauties, and new ideas, and you start embellishing, putting clothes on a rather naked skeleton, and you try to have a valid dynamic plan, and your interpretation takes shape, trying to make it as interesting as possible, with your taste, with your instinct, with the knowledge you have. You have this joy of bringing it to life with all the tools you can imagine.”Sometimes the problems are specific to a work — how to interpret the crazily brief finale of No. 41, for instance, in which Bavouzet imagines that Haydn suddenly decided that he had something else to do the day he wrote it — but the pressing ones are common. There is ornamentation, or an implied cadenza.Sonata No. 41 in A: Finale(Chandos)Then there is the fraught issue of whether to take repeats indicated in the second halves of sonata-form movements — a practice Haydn adhered to but his successors sought to escape from — and, if so, whether to include codas within the repeats, so that the endings would effectively be played twice. Consulting with the scholars Laszlo Somfai and Marc Vignal for the sake of historical accuracy, Bavouzet found himself moving repeat markings around for the sake of flow.One aspect of the choices involved in filling in Haydn’s blanks has convinced Bavouzet that these works are much more profound than they often get credit for. “We easily forget that the solemn Adagio,” another great champion of the composer, Alfred Brendel, once wrote in an article about Schubert, “originated in Haydn.”If Haydn the joker is amply on display here, the pauses that he so often uses before delivering his punch lines can suggest something much deeper, Bavouzet said.“You can read them as a pause to have an effect on what comes next,” he said, “but you also can read them as a pause of reflection, a moment when Haydn asks if all this agitation and activity is actually in vain. He is stopping because he is doubting, in a moment of introspection, which of course gives a totally different, almost philosophical attitude to this continuous energy.”Sonata No. 62 in E flat: Finale(Chandos)That’s particularly true, Bavouzet said, of the later sonatas, as in the first movement of No. 53 in E minor, which has 14 pauses to deal with, or in the finale of the culminating sonata, No. 62 in E flat, which is the last work programmed in his collection aside from a little Allegretto that he offers as an epilogue, holding the pedal down in dreamy nostalgia for his years of work.“The task is never anything other than absolutely fascinating, but for the performer it is also testing, and even risky,” Bavouzet writes of all these decisions in the booklet notes for his sixth volume, defending a mini-cadenza of his that takes the jolly finale of No. 36 in a momentarily dark direction.“He must, even more than usual, create his own world, his own logic, left only to hope that, in the absence of tangible evidence, he will not distance himself too far from the composer’s intentions, which remain forever unknowable,” Bavouzet continues. “The more my work progresses down this course, the more an almost infinite horizon of interpretive possibilities opens up before me, all of them valid.”And that, this project confirms, is one of the many elations of Haydn. 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      Review: A Molten Song Recital, Without Comic Relief

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      The mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo doubled down on melancholy in a superb concert at the Park Avenue Armory.There wasn’t comic relief on offer at Emily D’Angelo’s recital on Friday at the Park Avenue Armory. Not a giggle, not a wink. Her rare smile during the performance was wistful. The subjects she sang about were, for the most part, longing, death and tears.Instead of leavening the gravity, D’Angelo, joined by the pianist Sophia Muñoz in the Armory’s Board of Officers Room, doubled down. Her program was like her mezzo-soprano voice: a flood of melancholy, molten but articulate.Rarely, though, is it so pleasurable to linger in so much pain. The event — D’Angelo’s first American solo appearance — gave a small audience the treat of an intimate encounter with one of the world’s special young singers.Still in her 20s, and emerging on the international scene just in the past few years, D’Angelo has a rich, mellow voice, an encompassing serenity and confidence. But with a slight press on the gas her tone turns stern and flashing, almost scary. In “I’ve Heard an Organ Talk Sometimes” — one of her three selections from Aaron Copland’s “12 Poems of Emily Dickinson” — her sound really did take on organlike amplitude.The first half of her program borrowed some numbers from her debut solo album, “Enargeia,” released last year — but now in new company, like the two austere songs by Schoenberg that followed Hildegard von Bingen’s “O frondens virga,” a sober introduction.But while on “Enargeia,” lush, woozy instrumental arrangements turned some of the tracks lugubrious, on Friday, with just Muñoz’s gentle, sensitive piano accompaniment, they felt both more restrained and more affecting, D’Angelo’s voice even more direct. Shorn of its new age-y trappings, Sarah Kirkland-Snider’s “Nausicaa” was a consolatory prayer, and two Missy Mazzoli pieces smoldered without being too heavy.There was nothing affected about her singing or her presence. D’Angelo wore a black vest over a sleeveless top with drawstring pants and a pixie haircut, looking a bit Peter Pan and a bit Joan of Arc. Her hand resting on the edge of the piano’s curve, gently leaning into the instrument, she had the casual assurance of an experienced cabaret artist.So it wasn’t surprising to find she also has a gift for pull-up-a-chair storytelling, whether in Randy Newman’s “Wandering Boy” or Rebecca Clarke’s “The Seal Man” — the words clear without being overenunciated, her manner patient, as if she had all the time in the world. She was superb in Cecilia Livingston’s monologue “Penelope,” in its 2020 version for mezzo, which starts with a watery tremble in the piano and moves to a series of slow-burning, sometimes fiery questions: “What is it to be waiting? What is it to be waiting for you?”Near the end came a series of nocturnes — here true premonitions of death — by Clarke, Fanny Mendelssohn and Florence Price. Before D’Angelo’s encore, a glowing account of the Dvorak chestnut “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” she closed the written program with Clara Schumann’s “Lorelei,” about that folkloric temptress.The Heinrich Heine poem that Schumann sets describes the Lorelei’s singing as “wundersame, gewalt’ge”: wondrous and powerful. D’Angelo’s is, too.Emily D’AngeloPerformed on Friday at the Park Avenue Armory. More