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    ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones’ Review: A Met Milestone Returns

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    After making history as the Metropolitan Opera’s first work by a Black composer, Terence Blanchard’s “Fire” is back — with its showstopping step dance.The Metropolitan Opera premiere of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” on Sept. 27, 2021, was a momentous event. Doubly so: “Fire” was the company’s first staged opera after an 18-month pandemic closure, and it was, after 138 years, its first work by a Black composer.The opera, with a score by Terence Blanchard and a libretto by Kasi Lemmons, took on some of the grandeur and excitement of that moment. The raucous fraternity step dance that opens the third act brought down the house.That step dance still stopped the show on Monday evening, when “Fire” returned to the Met. Two and a half years later, the work is a test case. The company has sharply increased its diet of contemporary operas — some of which, including “Fire,” sold very well as new productions. But how will these operas perform when they’re brought back, without the same promotional push?On Monday, at least, the audience seemed robust and, as it was during the initial run, notably diverse. And “Fire” remains a heartfelt piece, emanating a touching if vague sadness. But without the exhilarating sense of occasion it had at its Met premiere, the opera’s shortcomings were clearer.Based on the New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow’s memoir of his turbulent upbringing in Louisiana, “Fire” is a progression of episodes — some upbeat, some forlorn. It takes the form of a search: The lonely Charles, his psyche wounded as a child by his cousin’s sexual abuse and his mother’s real but distracted love, looks for belonging and healing.He tries church, fraternity membership, his siblings, a woman, another woman, but none offer what he’s seeking; all want him to be different than he is. Only after a hasty, therapy-speak conclusion in the final minutes, presided over by an ethereal choir and the voice of his younger self, can he finally accept himself and sing, “Now my life begins.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Hey, Mr. Living Composer’: ‘Champion’ Takes Shape at the Met

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      Terence Blanchard has been in rehearsals, with pencil and paper at the ready, as he tailors his opera ahead of its New York premiere.A basement rehearsal room at the Metropolitan Opera was so packed recently that it began to resemble a sweltering boxing gym.In one corner, members of the Met’s music staff were grouped together like judges tallying punches as they looked down at their scores. Nearby, a drummer and pianist locked into a syncopated groove, following the beat of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who was conducting while seated on an elevated platform.A phalanx of dancers rushed in to evoke an intense, collective workout regimen filled with balletic grace and pugilistic intensity. Those moves were choreographed by Camille A. Brown, who was close by, keeping an eye on every acrobatic feint. A former World Boxing Organization heavyweight champion paced the room, offering exhortations and encouragement.Supervising all this was the composer and trumpeter Terence Blanchard. He watched as his first opera, “Champion,” took shape ahead of its Met debut on Monday. (A Live in HD simulcast is planned for April 29.)After premiering at Opera Theater of St. Louis in 2013, “Champion” has played at the Washington National Opera‌ ‌and, scaled to a chamber-size orchestration, at SFJazz in San Francisco. But when this work — modeled on the life of the boxer Emile Griffith, and following Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which arrived triumphantly at the Met in 2021 — opens in New York this week, it will be thoroughly revised and expanded to embody the composer’s recent thoughts about opera, as a form. To wit: in this latest version of “Champion” there are not only new arias (and new lines for supporting characters); what will be heard in New York this season also reflects Blanchard’s latest work when it comes to orchestral complexity and vocal elegance.Performers in “Champion” evoke the world of boxing in choreography by Camille A. Brown.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesBlanchard has been in “Champion” rehearsals, at the ready to revise his score as needed.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesThe opera tells the life story of Emile Griffith, who is depicted in two roles sung by Ryan Speedo Green and Eric Owens.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesFor example, during the rehearsal last month, the soprano Latonia Moore, as Griffith’s mother, was singing a rhythmically bumptious riff from the first act when she and Blanchard noticed that the phrase, as written, wasn’t sitting in the most powerful part of her range. “Hey, Mr. Living Composer,” she called out, in a teasing tone. “Could you rewrite this for me?”Blanchard got to work immediately, composing a new vocal part on a blank page of staff paper: a melodic line that could work atop the existing orchestral harmony. He took a photograph of the revision before passing it along.“I couldn’t believe that he just sat there right in the room and wrote it,” Moore said later. “I expected he would come in with it a few days later, OK? It was like, ‘No, here it is.’ Oh my God! And it was really good.”In an interview after a rehearsal, Blanchard explained how his flexibility — unusual in the world of opera, in which scores, like schedules, are set far in advance — was the result of some early, on-the-job training in his career as a jazz performer.“Art Blakey taught me years ago: The easiest thing to do is to write something nobody can play,” Blanchard recalled. “The magic comes in not just through the melody and the harmony, but who’s playing it.”“You can see she has a powerful voice,” he said of Moore. To him, the calculation was simple: He wanted to feature that voice in the strongest possible way. “So that’s what it’s gonna be changed to.”Blanchard, right, with Joshua Balan, a cast member.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesMoore’s role, as that of Griffith’s manipulative and sometimes absent mother, is hardly the only one to be subjected to extensive revisions. The bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green — a standout in “Fire” and the star of “Champion” — said that when he first discussed this opera with Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, he felt that the role was a touch high for him.Gelb told him, “Speedo, That’s the beauty of having a living composer: Things can change,” Green recalled.“CHAMPION,” WITH A LIBRETTO BY MICHAEL CRISTOFER, TELLS Griffith’s tabloid-ready life story. Green sings Young Emile, while the veteran bass-baritone Eric Owens is cast as Old Emile, who lives in a nursing home on Long Island in the early 2000s. The boxer leaves the Virgin Islands for New York, then works in a hat factory before becoming a welterweight champ in the 1960s. In the ring with Benny Paret, Griffith unintentionally delivers blows that prove to be fatal, leaving Griffith anguished for years.“There’s this dream state that Emile is in,” Blanchard said, “because he’s dealing with dementia. There’s a combination of that harmony and that voicing, versus when it’s younger Emile. And chords moving; it goes back and forth. But it’s all story-driven, and it’s story-driven inside my language that I grew up listening to, as a jazz musician.”There is another thread in the opera, of Griffith’s journey from a straight-coded world to one of queerness. As a young man, in New York, he is drawn to gay bars and men while also excelling in the “man’s world” of boxing. The sports universe either doesn’t want to hear about queerness, or openly derides him for his sexual orientation.Just as Griffith navigates dramatic contrasts, so too does Blanchard’s score.The composer likes to talk about his love for Puccini — and you can hear some of that in Young Emile’s Act I aria “What Makes a Man a Man?” But in the boxing sequences, there’s a driving sense of muscular, post-bop jazz tumult. (As in “Fire,” the drummer Jeff Watts, known as Tain, leads a jazz combo embedded within the orchestra.) And there are some moments in which the fusion is well blended enough that no stylistic input seems to have the upper hand.Blanchard said that from his first visits to New York, starting in the spring of 1980, he took in a wide range of music. Although he was associated with traditionalist-minded players of New Orleans, he made a point of hearing the trio Air, which included the cutting-edge music of composer Henry Threadgill.“People were like, ‘Why are you going to that?’” Blanchard said. “And I’m like: ‘Bruh, because I’m trying to figure out what fits for me. I want to experience it all. Why limit myself, because you think I shouldn’t like this? Let me find out for myself.’”Those experiences pay off in “Champion.” In one of the early scenes at a gay bar, Blanchard writes sumptuous orchestral music — a cousin of sorts to the bluesy music heard in a club that figures in the story of “Fire,” but with the string section, not the jazz combo, taking center stage during the bacchanal. “It’s the sexiest sound those Met strings will ever make,” Moore said after a rehearsal. “You could see that they were feeling it!”In an interview, Blanchard tipped his hat to an early teacher, the composer Roger Dickerson, who used timbres and modes from American jazz when writing classical works like the New Orleans Concerto. (The pianist, composer and critic Ethan Iverson recently lavished praise on that rarely heard piece, describing its finale as “boogie-woogie gone surreal, the kind of thing Louis Andriessen tried to write over and over again, but better.”)When Blanchard started working with classical musicians, as he has done in his long partnership with Spike Lee as the composer of his soundtracks — Dickerson informed him that he had a unique opportunity, and a responsibility.“‘You have to keep in mind, the library of music for orchestral music has been limited,’” Blanchard recalled his teacher as saying. “‘There needs to be an expansion of it, through jazz — and maybe you’re the person to do that.’ He put that in my mind way back when.”Blanchard’s score for “Champion” synthesizes the varied musical genres he has taken in during his career as a composer and performer.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesBlanchard, who in 2021 became the first Black composer to have his work staged at the Met, has moved opera forward in exactly that way with his latest revisions to “Champion,” Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, said.Even as the conductor has offered small suggestions in rehearsals — like proposing a bit of bowed, marcato playing for the strings instead of pizzicato that could get lost in the Met’s grand auditorium — he has also deferred to Blanchard, who he said has been “much more hands on” about fine-tuning the orchestration.“I think he’s using the orchestra not to amplify his thoughts,” Nézet-Séguin said. “It’s more: How can I use it as a vehicle, the same way I would use a band? It doesn’t replace anything; it becomes its own thing.”Looking up at the stage after a recent run-through of “Champion,” Nézet-Séguin added of Blanchard, with a touch of pride in the musicians: “I’m pretty sure that in his next ventures — whether it’s film music, or whatever it is — he’s going to miss all that.” More

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      Review: The Philharmonic Departs From Business as Usual

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      “The March to Liberation” offers a rarity that should be more regular: a world premiere, a symphony and an oratorio, all by Black composers.Gustavo Dudamel, recently named, to cheers, as the New York Philharmonic’s next music director, will arrive to lead the orchestra officially in 2026. But the time before then shouldn’t be thought of something to be endured or, at worst, a slog.Just look to the Philharmonic’s program this week — titled “The March to Liberation” and conducted by Leslie B. Dunner — which on Thursday had a streak of urgency and plenty of orchestral splendor.A world premiere from Courtney Bryan, “Gathering Song,” with text by Tazewell Thompson, opened the show; William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 2 followed; and, after intermission, a 45-minute, oratorio-style work by the veteran composer Adolphus Hailstork, “Done Made My Vow, A Ceremony.” Squint at this sequence — a premiere from an up-and-comer, a venerable half-hour symphony, a dramatic finish — and you could almost see the outlines of a typical subscription concert.Yet an all-Black roster of composers is hardly business as usual at a mainstream institution like the Philharmonic. William Grant Still’s 1937 symphony, subtitled “Song of a New Race,” is the kind of chestnut we should be hearing American orchestras playing regularly. But his music remains a rarity. Hailstork is also too infrequently heard, despite a prolific, half-century career.A program like this ought to be big news on its own. But the Philharmonic amped up the proceedings by inviting the video artist Rasean Davonté Johnson to create a visual accompaniment for each work, multimedia playing in parallel with the music. (Thompson, the librettist for Bryan’s premiere, was credited as the show’s director.)More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.This was tastefully done, but I tended to feel that the music didn’t need the help. From the outset, Bryan’s work proved thrilling in its polish and expressive range. In its early going, triumphal writing for brass was tugged at — and moodily complicated — by descending string motifs that traipsed across unpredictable intervals. It had the calmly challenging poise of the composer and saxophonist Wayne Shorter, who died on Thursday at 89.Thompson’s text is voiced by a griot character, on Thursday the bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green, who calls out to the audience and initiates the piece’s titular sense of gathering. The lines unfurl in short lines, which Bryan paces generously in the music. Green relished every morsel, with a bright sound in his higher range and burnished roundness in lower-slung passages. (He is soon to be heard in Terence Blanchard’s “Champion” at the Metropolitan Opera, so his performance here was also something of a promising preview.)Later in the Bryan, there are fillips of Afro-Cuban rhythm and moments of thick orchestral modernism, as well as traces of stentorian, post-Minimalist American opera. But the score does not come off as a stylistic grab bag. Though prismatic, it feels carefully woven as it touches on gospel and jazz traditions as well as contemporary idioms.In Still’s Second Symphony, the Philharmonic strings in particular seemed to savor the down-home, pastoral airs of the first movement — even as flutes (one doubling on piccolo) executed their oscillations and divebombing phrases with terrific energy and articulation. Dunner sagaciously managed the call-and-response qualities of the score, though his suave, controlled reading also seemed to glide past stray bursts of piquant personality in Still’s writing.Toward the end of the second movement, Still alternates between brief flecks of lush, 40s-style Hollywood romance and noir. When Neeme Järvi recorded this work with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, he played up those contrasts, whereas Dunner seemed to sand off the contrastive edges with the Philharmonic. But because I’ve heard this music in person so rarely, I’m of the mind to say: Let a thousand interpretations bloom.During Hailstork’s piece — structured as a Black American history lesson given by a character named Toil — I felt that some sparer moments were less than ideally balanced in the auditorium. Given that Toil is an amplified speaking part, those questions of balance could have something to do with the orchestra finding its acoustic footing inside the recently retrofitted Geffen Hall. Yet the climatic moments, during which the New York Philharmonic Chorus navigated the Hailstork’s setting of various psalms, came across as grandly cosmic.So forget the Philharmonic’s distant future for now. This program only runs through Saturday, and who knows how long it will be before New Yorkers can hear the music of these three composers again on the same evening?New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Classical Music to See and Hear in Spring 2023

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      This spring, Gustavo Dudamel, the Philharmonic’s next music director, conducts the big deal symphony, the Met Opera stages Terence Blanchard’s “Champion”; and in Chicago, Riccardo Muti says farewell.It was a hint about as subtle as a siren when the New York Philharmonic announced its current season a year ago: Gustavo Dudamel, the superstar conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, would be coming to New York as a guest in May 2023 to lead Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.One of the repertory’s most sprawling and profound works, Mahler’s Ninth has been played by the Philharmonic almost exclusively under the batons of its music directors. It’s not an assignment the orchestra gives rising hotshots or conductors it sees once a decade. It’s the kind of musically knotty, deeply emotional score you want led by the artists closest to you.That was just one of many suggestions that Dudamel, 42, would, before too long, join the ranks of New York music directors, a group that has included eminences like Mahler, Toscanini, Bernstein and Boulez. And so it came to pass: Earlier this month, the Philharmonic said that he would succeed Jaap van Zweden in the position, for a five-year term beginning — because of classical music’s oddly glacial planning cycles — in the 2026-27 season.But before all that comes Mahler’s Ninth, which Dudamel has convincingly, with tenderness and naturally unfolding intensity, recorded with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The three New York performances, May 19-21, were already sure to be well attended, given the famous conductor and the beloved piece. Now, since the concerts will be Dudamel’s first appearances on the Philharmonic’s podium since the announcement, these will be some of the hottest tickets in town this spring.When Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” opened the Metropolitan Opera’s 2021–22 season, in a run that sold out several performances, it was a landmark: the first time the company had put on the work of a Black composer. Now Blanchard’s earlier opera, “Champion,” from 2013, is coming to the house, beginning April 10.As in “Fire,” themes of identity, sexuality and the negotiation of traumatic memories dominate. “Champion” tells the true story of the closeted gay boxer Emile Griffith, who knocked out his opponent, Benny Paret, during a 1962 title bout; Paret never recovered consciousness and died 10 days later. At the Met, two bass-baritones share the role of Griffith: Ryan Speedo Green plays him as a young athlete in his prime, and Eric Owens, as an aging man looking back on his complicated past.A scene from Terence Blanchard’s “Champion,” in James Robinson’s production at Opera Theater of Saint Louis.Ken Howard/Opera Theatre of Saint LouisIn the wake of the box-office success of “Fire,” the Met — which has been struggling with ticket sales and said in December that it would withdraw $30 million from its endowment to cover costs — rushed “Champion” into production, part of a coming burst of contemporary operas aimed at broadening the audience. The staging reunites members of the team that helped make “Fire” vivid: the director James Robinson, the choreographer Camille A. Brown — the step dance routine that she conceived for “Fire” stopped the show — and the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Three veterans, Latonia Moore, Stephanie Blythe and Paul Groves, round out the cast.It is unusual for the Met (or any company) to unveil two new productions of Mozart operas back to back. And even rarer for both to be led by one conductor: in this case, Nathalie Stutzmann, a former mezzo-soprano turned maestro making her Met debut on the podium for “Don Giovanni” and “Die Zauberflöte.”Replacing a dreary, unilluminating Michael Grandage production on May 5, the new “Giovanni” is an import from the Paris Opera, where the much-discussed Dutch director Ivo van Hove and his colleagues put onstage what Joshua Barone described in The New York Times as “a de Chirico-like set populated by handsomely dressed people in a state of sexy desperation.” (It can hardly help but be an improvement on the Grandage.)Stutzmann, who started at the Atlanta Symphony this season — the only female music director leading one of the 25 largest American orchestras — conducts a promising cast, including Peter Mattei, a star in the title role at the Met for the past 20 years, as well as Adam Plachetka, Federica Lombardi, Ana María Martínez, Ying Fang and Ben Bliss.The situation with “Die Zauberflöte,” opening on May 19, is slightly complicated. The Met is planning to retain its existing production — which the director Julie Taymor and the designer George Tsypin filled with plexiglass and fanciful puppets — in its abridged, English-language, family-friendly form as “The Magic Flute,” now a holiday-season tradition.Performed in full and in German, the new-to-the-company “Die Zauberflöte,” a much-traveled staging directed by Simon McBurney, has the orchestra spilling over onto risers placed onstage and contemporary-style costumes. Stutzmann’s cast here includes Erin Morley, Lawrence Brownlee, Thomas Oliemans, Kathryn Lewek and Stephen Milling.Dudamel’s appointment is perhaps the biggest news in music this season: a new beginning. But the other crucial conductor move in America this spring signals the end of an era.Riccardo Muti is bringing his 13 years leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to a close in June.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesAt 81, Riccardo Muti — a fixture on the country’s major podiums since the 1970s and the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra during the ’80s — is bringing to a close a 13-year tenure at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with performances of Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis,” June 23-25.Despite being an experienced Beethoven interpreter and a specialist in huge choral works, Muti stayed away from the notoriously thorny “Missa Solemnis” for decades, until he led it — with radiant dignity and grandeur — at the Salzburg Festival in 2021.“I always felt too small,” he said in an interview last year on Chicago radio, “never I felt ready to perform this huge monument, because it’s so deep, so vast.” Muti and other great conductors are not known for this kind of humility or patience, so these performances will be the fruit of uncommonly many years of study and thought.Given that the Chicago Symphony has not yet appointed his replacement, Muti will remain a crucial presence next season, and possibly beyond. But this “Missa Solemnis” — with the chorus coached by a distinguished guest, Donald Palumbo, the chorus master at the Met — is nevertheless sure to be a love fest between a superb orchestra and a conductor it has revered. More

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      Metropolitan Opera’s Concert Honors Ukraine

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      A concert to benefit relief efforts featured a young Ukrainian singer, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” and the Met’s prima donna of the moment.Vladyslav Buialskyi stood center stage at the Metropolitan Opera, his hand on his heart, and sang the national anthem of his country, Ukraine.That was on Feb. 28, when the house reopened after a month off from performing and the Russian invasion of Ukraine was just a few days old. The company’s chorus and orchestra joined Buialskyi, a member of the Met’s young artists program, in a message of solidarity with him and his suffering people.Exactly two weeks later, on Monday, Buialskyi, a 24-year-old bass-baritone from the besieged port city of Berdyansk, stood center stage once more, his hand again on his heart, and sang the anthem with the orchestra and chorus.This time it wasn’t a prelude to Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” but the start of “A Concert for Ukraine,” an event hastily organized by the Met to benefit relief efforts in that country and broadcast there and around the world.Banners forming the Ukrainian flag stretched across the travertine exterior of the theater, bathed in blue and yellow floodlights. Another flag hung above the stage; a few in the audience brought their own to unfurl from the balconies. Seated in the guest of honor position in the center of the parterre, Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations, responded to an ovation at the start by raising his arms and making resolute V-for-victory signs.The Ukrainian bass-baritone Vladyslav Buialskyi, a member of the Met’s young artists program, was featured in a performance of Ukraine’s national anthem.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThe Ukrainian flag hung above the Met’s chorus and its orchestra, led by the company’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesIt has been a trying time for the Met, which broke with Anna Netrebko, its reigning diva, over her unwillingness to speak against the war and distance herself from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.But the conflict has also given the company — still bruised by labor battles despite remarkable success staying open during the Omicron wave — a sense of unity and moral purpose. Who would have predicted a few months ago that the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, broadly reviled within the ranks for imposing a long unpaid furlough on many employees during the pandemic, would get applause from some in the orchestra as he declared from the stage that they were “soldiers of music”?His remarks had a martial tinge, saying that the Met’s work could be “weaponized against oppression.” But much of the concert, led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director, was consoling, with favorites like Barber’s Adagio for Strings, here fevered and unsentimental, and “Va, pensiero” from Verdi’s “Nabucco,” with its chorus of exiles longing for their homeland, “so beautiful and lost.” Most powerful was Valentin Silvestrov’s delicate, modest a cappella “Prayer for the Ukraine,” written in 2014 amid the Maidan protests against Russian influence.The soprano Lise Davidsen, the company’s prima donna of the moment, sang Strauss’s “Four Last Songs.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesRichard Strauss’s “Four Last Songs” wasn’t quite on message, with its autumnal vision of accepting death’s imminence. But it provided a vehicle for the Met’s prima donna of the moment: the young soprano Lise Davidsen, currently starring in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos.”At opening night of “Ariadne” two weeks ago, Davidsen kept inundating the theater, seeming intent on proving just how much vibrating sound can flow out of her. It was thrilling, and a little much. At the performance of the opera on Saturday afternoon, she seemed consciously trying to restrain herself — even a bit tentative, fumbling a phrase in her opening aria and only gradually building to a true compromise of power and nuance.On Monday, Davidsen again seemed to be finding her way. Her high notes in the first of the “Four Last Songs,” “Frühling,” had a steely edge rather than soaring freedom; in “September,” she sounded muted in lower registers; and in “Beim Schlafengehen,” her phrasing was stiff. But she began “Im Abendrot” with a soft cloud of tone and proceeded with unforced radiance to an ending that felt light and hopeful.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 7Olga Smirnova. More

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      Review: Two Years Later, a Beethoven Cycle Reaches Its Finale

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      Delayed by the pandemic in 2020, then again in January, the Philadelphia Orchestra brought a long-awaited Ninth Symphony to Carnegie Hall.The Philadelphia Orchestra’s cycle of Beethoven symphonies was supposed to come to Carnegie Hall in spring 2020. It should go without saying: It didn’t.But that series of concerts belongs to the lucky class of canceled performances that have found their way back to the stage. The journey, however, has been a mirror of our continued pandemic uncertainty. Although the cycle started last fall when the Fifth Symphony opened Carnegie’s season, it was delayed once again in January when the Omicron variant pushed off Beethoven’s Ninth — and its full-choir “Ode to Joy.”So only on Monday did the cycle reach its conclusion, with the Philadelphians’ music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, at the podium for the First Symphony and the mighty Ninth, alongside a world premiere inspired by it, Gabriela Lena Frank’s “Pachamama Meets an Ode.”In New York, Nézet-Séguin has taken on something like the role of resident conductor, even to the point of exhaustion; the performance on Monday came exactly a week before he leads a new production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos” at the Metropolitan Opera, where he is also the music director.And because the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Beethoven concerts were an addition to its others planned at Carnegie this season, it has become the hall’s de facto house band. The ensemble was just there two weeks ago, with departures from the standard repertory (and Beethoven) that Zachary Woolfe applauded in The New York Times, while wagering that “nothing the Philadelphians do at Carnegie this season will be more impressive.”At the very least, there won’t be much competition from Monday’s appearance. Beethoven’s extremes — the consummate Classicism of the First, and the controlled excess of the Ninth — were absorbing but imperfect in this reading. But it was nevertheless a moving program, in large part because of Frank’s premiere.At their best, Beethoven cycles that fold in new commissions offer a conversation between past and present. Frank’s is quite literally a dialogue, however imagined, with the composer she calls “Great Man.” And who better to contend with Beethoven? As a composer with hearing loss, Frank has written about perceiving him as a kindred spirit. The world-spanning background that inspires her practice — as the American daughter of a father with Lithuanian-Jewish heritage and a Peruvian mother of Chinese and Indigenous descent — provides a nuanced perspective, and check, on the brother-embracing aspirations of the “Ode to Joy.”Her new work is a fantastical encounter between Beethoven and a contemporaneous Cusco School painter, tracing the climate crisis of today to the exploitation of natural resources and the global expansion of European powers in Beethoven’s time. In the piece’s 10 minutes, the text, written by Frank, invokes colonialism, animal extinction and images like a river “on oily fire.”Nézet-Séguin, right, conducted a program that included a pairing of Beethoven’s Ninth and a Gabriela Lena Frank premiere inspired by it.Chris LeeUsing the same orchestration as Beethoven’s Ninth, minus its four vocal soloists, “Pachamama” is big, and deploys the emotive force of the “Dies Irae” from Verdi’s Requiem. Distinct textures do break the waves of sound: chromatic chattering in the strings, and dissonant humming in the choir — a nod, Frank notes, to Indigenous South American vocal music. The words are set straightforwardly, transformed only in the end to elongate the questions “What of odes?” and “What of joy?” Then a horn lingers indefinitely, a looming punctuation mark and a subtle bridge to the first bar of the Beethoven.The two symphonies here demonstrated the Great Man’s enormous transformation in the 24 years between their premieres, but also how much of his late style was gestating in his youth.His First is transparently indebted to Mozart and Haydn, until it isn’t. That moment, the Menuetto, is where Nézet-Séguin’s interpretation found its footing. Before, the strings — too many of them — were still mired in the introduction’s flowing phrases. But their articulation came sharply into focus with the Menuetto, a kind of artistic coming-of-age, with flashes of the Beethoven to come.Nézet-Séguin is a gifted Mozart conductor, and his treatment of the finale — witty and nimble — could have been the overture to one of that composer’s operas. It was dampened only by the inflated orchestra; Beethoven can benefit from fewer instruments, for balance, clarity and, above all, energy.Outsize scale was more problematic in the Ninth. Nézet-Séguin took a long view of the work, beginning in mysterious quiet, as if descending into the symphony from a great height, and building toward relentless grandeur in the “Ode to Joy” finale. But 25 minutes is a long time to sustain a climax, and the effect wore off long before the ending came.The orchestra was at its best in the second movement, in which the strings maintained a fleet lightness that allowed for pronounced contrasts and, crucially, made room for the winds and brasses, drowned out elsewhere. Later, the players were sensitive accompanists to the vocal soloists, though the bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green needed no help commanding the stage with his booming entrance.Green pulled back to mix, beautifully, with his fellow soloists. His voice was a surprising complement to the more slender brightness of the tenor Matthew Polenzani, and together, they wove rich textures with the soprano Angel Blue and the mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb. The Philadelphia Symphonic Choir was more difficult to follow. If you listened closely, you could make out an “alle Menschen” here and there, but the group’s sound was for the most part cloudy, as if coming from backstage, blending into the orchestra when it should have been heard above it.Even the best performance of this symphony, though, would have been haunted by the Frank, which rendered Beethoven’s ecstatic finale a tad delusional, and his naïve optimism difficult to stomach — a reminder of how this work’s universal message has been dangerously put to universal use, and of its Enlightenment hopes yet to be realized, nearly 200 years later. In the fermata rest of the Ninth’s final bar, Frank’s horn still resonated in the mind, still asking: What of odes? What of joy?Philadelphia OrchestraPerformed on Monday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan, and returning there on April 8 and 21; carnegiehall.org. More

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      Review: ‘Porgy and Bess’ Returns to a New Opera Landscape

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      The Metropolitan Opera’s revival boasts strong performances but raises difficult questions about race and American music.George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” is both easy and impossible to love.Its contradictions may have been captured best in Truman Capote’s “The Muses Are Heard,” his 1956 dispatch from a touring company’s historic stop in the Soviet Union. “Porgy,” he wrote, was like an allergen to Russian officials — its characters erotic, God-fearing and superstitious.But its reflection of America was a different story. “An exploited race at the mercy of Southern whites, poverty-pinched and segregated in the ghetto of Catfish Row,” Capote said, “could not be more agreeably imagined if the Ministry of Culture had assigned one of their own writers to the job.”“Porgy” — which returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Sunday after two years, its performances still exhilarating but its staging still blandly naturalistic — keeps raising questions over its three hours. And after a long pandemic closure, during which the Met, like the rest of the country, took a fresh look at racial inequities, those questions are increasingly difficult to sit with.Just a couple: Does “Porgy,” a leading contender for the Great American Opera, fulfill Antonin Dvorak’s prophecy that this country’s homegrown music would be founded on Black melodies? If so, did the work’s all-white creative team achieve that by exploiting stereotypes?Opera is rife with troubled histories and receptions. Of two works now playing at the Met, Puccini’s “Turandot” is set in a fairy-tale China out of late Romantic Orientalism; Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” ends with a startling paean to German nationalism. Classics like those tend to be defended with a logic that some have applied to “Porgy”: This is an art form that deals in broad strokes and the mythic. Who, then, are Porgy and Bess if not just another pair of star-crossed lovers?The soprano Angel Blue, left, as Bess and the bass-baritone Alfred Walker as a mighty and menacing Crown.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut that argument is on shakier ground with “Porgy” than “Turandot”; Gershwin’s work inevitably carries the baggage of American history. And its characters, mythic or not, can feel like cartoons of Black pain, violence and poverty. Black artists have had vastly divergent responses to the piece, but what James Baldwin called “a white man’s vision of Negro life” has remained ensconced in the repertory, held up by the same institutions that have long overlooked the work of Black composers.There’s no clear resolution to any of the problems that have dogged “Porgy” since its premiere, in 1935. But it is here to stay — a discomfort to be experienced, pondered and managed, not removed. It’s no coincidence that the Met accompanied this production’s debut two years ago with face-saving initiatives like talks, an album celebrating Black artists of its past and an exhibition to match, and the announcement that it would present its first opera by a Black composer. (That work, Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” opened the season in September.)If “Porgy” is the Great American Opera, it is more for its score — an innovative and seamless blend of grand opera, Broadway, and invented spirituals and folk melodies — than for its subject matter. (For that, we have the melting pot milieu of Kurt Weill’s “Street Scene,” the original sin of American greed in Marc Blitzstein’s “Regina” or stateside verismo in William Grant Still’s “Highway 1, U.S.A.,” to name just a few.)And at the Met, James Robinson’s production — a mostly timid, literal presentation of the libretto, by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward and Ira Gershwin — undercuts the defense of “Porgy” as timelessly mythic with its realistic direction and designs (by Michael Yeargan and Catherine Zuber). Even the preshow curtain, a towering photograph of Catfish Row, suggests something documentary. At odds with all this is the stylized and thoroughly modern choreography of Camille A. Brown.Much of the 2019 cast remains intact, including, from left: Latonia Moore as Serena, Eric Owens as Porgy and Denyce Graves as Maria.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut in the pit, the conductor David Robertson made an argument for the triumphs of Gershwin’s score, with stylistic shifts fluid and distinctly articulated. “Porgy” is also one of the great operatic portraits of a community; as such, its true stars are the chorus singers, matching the instrumentalists with vigor and richly textured delivery.As Porgy, the bass-baritone Eric Owens sang with limited power, but imbued each line with dramatic consideration. The soprano Angel Blue’s Bess was one of tragic juxtapositions: luminous in “Oh, the train is at the station” and shattering in the conflicted Act III reprise of “Summertime.” (That standard was first heard, lush and stylishly ornamented, at the start of the opera, sung by Janai Brugger as Clara).Much of the cast remains intact from 2019: Denyce Graves’s caring and comical Maria; Ryan Speedo Green’s mighty Jake; Alfred Walker’s similarly mighty but menacing Crown; Frederick Ballentine’s flamboyant Sportin’ Life; and Latonia Moore’s Serena, this production’s finest pairing of artist and aria in the showstopping “My man’s gone now,” and a commanding comfort in the later “Oh, Doctor Jesus.”Moore, Green and Blue — all Met regulars — come to this revival fresh from “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” As recently as last year, the idea of two operas with exclusively Black ensembles running at the company in the same month would have been fantastical. Thankfully, that’s no longer the case.Porgy and BessThrough Dec. 12 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      San Diego Gets Its Answer to the Hollywood Bowl, Just in Time

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      The dazzling new $85 million Rady Shell was intended as a summer home for the San Diego Symphony. But with the coronavirus still spreading, the orchestra plans to stay through the fall.SAN DIEGO — The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park, a billowing white sail of an outdoor concert hall along the San Diego Bay, was planned as this city’s answer to the Hollywood Bowl: an $85 million summertime stage for the San Diego Symphony, a project of such architectural and acoustical distinction that it would distinguish San Diego on any national cultural map.But now, its arrival — it opened with a sold-out gala performance Friday night — has turned out to be welcome for an additional reason. With the stop-and-start coursing of the Covid pandemic, the symphony, finally playing before a full audience again, is planning to extend its stay in its new summer home at least through November. It won’t be returning to its regular venue, the downtown Copley Symphony Hall, for a while.“It was planned before Covid, but became prescient with the timing,” said Martha A. Gilmer, the chief executive of the symphony. “We just decided we’re going to stay outside and do the fall concerts outdoors.”And that it did on Friday, inaugurating this new chapter for the state’s oldest symphony with a burst of orchestral music and a dash of electronica that swelled over its six sound-and-light towers and an opening-night crowd of 3,500. The opening fanfare was commissioned from the composer Mason Bates, and it signaled — loudly and dramatically — the musical and sonic ambitions of the San Diego Symphony and the yearning of this city to move on from the pandemic.It had all the trappings of a big event, a welcome contrast after 15 years in which the symphony’s outdoor offerings relied on temporary stages and portable toilets. The new space was heralded with fireworks, and a six-course dinner with champagne for donors. The night began with a suitably dramatic flair, as the projected image of the orchestra’s music director, Rafael Payare, instantly recognizable to this crowd, filled a scrim raised nearly to the top of the 57-foot-high stage. After a few build-up-the-tension moments, the scrim dropped to reveal Payare and the orchestra, ready to play. That drew the first of many standing ovations.The night began with a projection of Payare, instantly recognizable in silhouette to this crowd, that filled a scrim raised nearly to the top of the 57-foot-high stage. John Francis Peters for The New York Times“In the way that Disney Hall solidified the mission and importance of the L.A. Phil and the cultural life of L.A., I think this new venue will do the same for an orchestra that really is on the ascent,” said Steven Schick, a professor of music at the University of California, San Diego, and the music director of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus. “Those things do happen with new venues.”There were more suits than masks — though not many of either — as people arrived to celebrate this new addition to the San Diego waterfront. It was a dramatic setting: The skyline of San Diego framed the stage on the right, as the masts of sail boats glided past the audience on the left, some dropping anchor to enjoy the show.The venue can hold up to 10,000 people, but its red seats can be removed, making it flexible.  John Francis Peters for The New York TimesPassing boats formed a nautical backdrop for the new concert venue.John Francis Peters for The New York TimesAt the Hollywood Bowl, Gustavo Dudamel, the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, must sometimes contend with the roar of passing helicopters. Here, Payare’s competition was the put-put-putting of boat engines, the blast of an air horn, and occasional “All Right” shouted from a party boat.The opening fanfare by Bates, “Soundcheck in C Major” — with the composer, 44, sitting in the percussion section, playing an Akai drum machine and two MacBook Pros — was cinematic and bracing. It was composed with this sound system in mind, Bates said in an interview, and written to evoke Wagner, Pink Floyd and Techno beats (he is a D.J. as well as a composer). The whirl of electronic sounds he generated flew out across the audience, ricocheting among the sound-and-light towers.There would be more familiar fare before the night ended — Mozart, Gershwin, Stravinsky. Alisa Weilerstein, an acclaimed cellist who is married to Payare, was the soloist for the Saint-Saëns Cello Concerto No. 1 in A Minor, the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet was the soloist on “Rhapsody in Blue,” and Ryan Speedo Green, a bass baritone who is a rising star in the opera world, sang several arias. Gladys Knight (without the Pips) took the stage on Sunday night. But the choice of a new inaugural number was a statement by the San Diego Symphony under Payare, who was appointed in 2019.“It shows that the San Diego Symphony is thinking about the future,” Bates said. “They could have opened this with any number of overtures, the Candide Overture. But the San Diego Symphony wanted to show off the capabilities of their space and also make a statement about new art and new work.”Ryan Speedo Green, a bass baritone with an international opera career, sang several arias. John Francis Peters for The New York TimesConstruction on the Rady Shell began in September 2019, and it was supposed to open the following summer. That date was, of course, delayed by the pandemic, which made Friday night particularly welcome after a difficult 16 months for culture in San Diego. “It was decimated, and I’m not exaggerating — particularly the performing arts,” said Jonathon Glus, the executive director of the city’s Commission on Arts and Culture. “A lot of the organizations are still just quasi-opened. I think it’s going to be another two or three years until we truly find out the fallout.”While there were 3,500 people there Friday night, some seated on the red folding seats and others sprawled on the artificial turf, it has a capacity of up to 10,000 seats. And the seats can be removed: It will be a public park when the symphony is not there.From the beginning, the combination of the new space and the new music director was intended to distinguish San Diego in a state with a roster of strong cultural offerings, from San Francisco to Los Angeles. This city’s classical music scene has long existed under the cultural shadow of Los Angeles and Dudamel, and that was a challenge when Gilmer took over as chief executive in 2014.“There were people who felt they had to get on a train or the 5 to go to L.A. and hear music on a high level,” Gilmer said, referring to the highway that runs from here to downtown Los Angeles. “That has changed. Or we hope that has changed.”Payare, like Dudamel, is a product of El Sistema, Venezuela’s famed music-training system. He played principal horn under Dudamel at the Simón Bolívar Orchestra, and was a member of the Dudamel fellowship program for conductors at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Dudamel was in the audience on Friday.Payare, 41, said that the new venue opened up new opportunities. “It is going to be a change not only for classical music, but for guest artists who will be going through California,” he said.The performers who opened the new venue took their bows: Payare, the conductor; Mason Bates, the composer; Speedo Green, the bass baritone; Jean-Yves Thibaudet, the pianist; and Alisa Weilerstein, the cellist. They received a standing ovation. John Francis Peters for The New York Times“The views, they are fantastic,” he said. “The sound is phenomenal. As an artist, that is what you want.”San Diego has always been popular tourist destination, but visitors are more likely to come here for the beach, the weather and Comic-Con than to see the symphony. But in recent years, a number of philanthropists have stepped in to bolster the city’s cultural offerings and raise its profile.The San Diego Opera almost closed in 2014, after 49 years in operation, but it was revived by a coalition of opera buffs, labor union and community leaders who raised money to transform it and keep it alive. The area has one of the nation’s most prominent regional theaters, the Old Globe. In 2002 the Symphony, which was financially struggling, was saved with a record $100 million gift for its endowment from Irwin Jacobs, the co-founder of Qualcomm, and his wife, Joan. And in 2019 the Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center opened as the new home of the La Jolla Music Society.The lead donation to this project — $15 million — came from Ernest and Evelyn Rady, two of San Diego’s most prominent philanthropists. Rady is a billionaire who built his fortune in insurance and real estate.“We have always thought of making this a cultural destination as well as a beach destination and weather destination,” said Jacobs, who, with his wife, donated $11 million toward construction of the venue. “There’s a lot here. We don’t get that story out as well as we should.” More