Huang Ruo

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    Lincoln Center’s Audiences Deserve Music Worthy of Them

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    When listeners were given the power to program an orchestral concert, the results were surprising.I love the classical music canon, and I hate it.To be precise, I hate the way we assume audiences will invariably choose it over what’s new and unusual. If you listen to marketing departments, there may be grudging tolerance for some fresh sounds at the start of a concert, but basically, people want the standards — more than ever, as their ticket-buying behavior over the past few years suggests they are only more enamored of chestnuts like “The Planets” and Beethoven’s Ninth.So it was a small but sweet triumph over this narrative when, on Saturday at David Geffen Hall, an audience did exactly the opposite. Finally, the familiar and the less so were put to a fair fight — and who do you think won?The battlefield was Symphony of Choice, a kind of preview performance at the start of the three-week, 13-concert season of the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center. That’s the slightly awkward name of what was once the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, before the center’s warm-weather offerings were consolidated as Summer for the City two years ago.Streamlining previously competing series and festivals has made the schedule clearer. But it has also meant the disappearance of ambitious classical programming in favor of the sort of smaller-scale, pop-culture-oriented events that Shanta Thake, Lincoln Center’s chief artistic officer since 2021, produced when she ran Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater.Amid the silent discos, mindfulness sessions and comedy nights, you get the sense that classical music is now viewed with faint irritation, as a stodgy and expensive waste of resources. People already know Lincoln Center for operas and symphonies during the regular season, the thinking goes, so the center’s audience isn’t going to be expanded in the summer through more of that — especially if those symphonies aren’t packageable as “experiences.”Which is why Symphony of Choice gave me pause when I first heard about it. The goal was for the Festival Orchestra, newly under the direction of the young conductor Jonathon Heyward, to offer a taste of its programs over the next few weeks. The gimmick was a crowdsourced popularity contest.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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      Review: The Tragic Story of ‘An American Soldier’ Comes Home

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      An opera about Danny Chen, an Army private who died by suicide after experiencing racist hazing while serving, was performed in New York, his hometown.Thirteen years have passed since Danny Chen, an Army private from New York, killed himself while serving in Afghanistan after experiencing brutal hazing and racist taunts from fellow soldiers. “An American Soldier,” the opera based on his story, has been seen in Washington, D.C., and St. Louis.But when the work had its run in Missouri, in 2018, Huang Ruo, its composer, and David Henry Hwang, its librettist, promised Private Chen’s family that they would try to bring it home to the city where he was born and raised. This week, they succeeded, as “An American Soldier” was produced at the Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center — just a mile or so from Chinatown, where Private Chen grew up and where a stretch of Elizabeth Street was renamed Private Danny Chen Way in 2014.In Chay Yew’s clearheaded production, with an excellent cast, the touching opera had little trouble making its impact at the performance on Saturday evening. Huang and Hwang’s piece is a straightforward Chinese American family drama, but one with obvious, shameful resonances about the treatment of Asian people and other minorities in this country, and the limits on American ideals of the embrace of difference and easy assimilation.The piece opens on the court-martial of a brutal sergeant who was Private Chen’s chief antagonist. It then alternates between the courtroom and the chronological unfolding of Private Chen’s story, from the first glimmers of his idea to join the Army — an effort to prove that he was a “real American” — through the camaraderie of basic training, his endurance of racism at his next post and his nightmarish treatment once he reaches Afghanistan. His mother is a tender presence in her scenes at home with her beloved son, and a figure of fury and hurt during the court-martial, which resulted in the sergeant’s being found not guilty of the most serious charges.The version of “An American Soldier” that premiered at Washington National Opera in 2014 was a single act of just an hour. By 2018, at Opera Theater of Saint Louis, the piece had added an act and doubled in length, delving more deeply into Private Chen’s life beyond the account of the sergeant’s trial. With some tweaks, this is the work that was performed at the Perelman Center, in a version it commissioned with Boston Lyric Opera.Whether calmly undulating under an impassioned duet or anxiously sputtering as the plot darkens, Huang’s music tends to simmer out of the spotlight, allowing the storytelling to come to the fore. But there are some idiosyncratic touches in the score, like the almost ritualistic percussion hovering under some passages and the fractured trumpet — a kind of stifled fanfare — near the end, when there is an ironic choral paean to the American motto “E pluribus unum” (“Out of many, one”).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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      Goodbye Mostly Mozart, Hello Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center

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      The renamed ensemble will present a mix of new and old in its first season under the conductor Jonathon Heyward.Last summer, Lincoln Center bid farewell to the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, a fixture of the city’s cultural scene since 1973, saying it was time to reimagine the ensemble for a modern and more inclusive age.On Monday, the center offered a preview of its plans. While the ensemble will remain the same in size and membership, it now has a new name, a new music director and a program aimed at drawing more diverse audiences to classical music.The Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center, as the ensemble is now called, will convene in July for its first season under the rising conductor Jonathon Heyward, as part of the center’s Summer for the City festival.Heyward said in an interview that he wanted to maintain the orchestra’s innovative spirit.“It’s not that I am at all reinventing the wheel,” he said. “We’re just continuing in a way that is very much in line with a previous legacy of the orchestra.”The lineup for this summer includes a world premiere by the composer Hannah Kendall; the North American premiere of Huang Ruo’s “City of Floating Sounds”; and classics by Beethoven, Haydn and, yes, even a little Mozart.There will also be offerings aimed at drawing new people to Lincoln Center, including a “Symphony of Choice” concert in which audience members will be allowed to construct the program by voting, as well as an augmented-reality exhibition about mental health and Schumann, who suffered from depression.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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      Channeling the Pain of Chinese Immigrants, in Music and Verse

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      “Angel Island,” an oratorio by Huang Ruo, brings to life the stark poetry of Chinese detained on the California island in the first part of the 20th century.In “Angel Island,” a staged oratorio about the anguish and isolation of Chinese detainees at Angel Island Immigration Station in California, a choir recites a poem about tyranny and misfortune.“Like a stray dog forced into confinement, like a pig trapped in a bamboo cage, our spirits are lost in this wintry prison,” they sing in Chinese. “We are worse than horses and cattle. Our tears shed on an icy day.”The poem is one of more than 200 inscribed on barrack walls at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, where hundreds of thousands of people, mostly from China and Japan, were questioned and held — sometimes for months or even years — as they sought entry to the United States in the first part of the 20th century. Their harrowing accounts form the emotional core of “Angel Island,” by the Chinese-born composer Huang Ruo, which has its New York premiere this month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in a staging that is part of the opera and theater festival Prototype.The production, directed by Matthew Ozawa and featuring the Del Sol Quartet and members of the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, shines light on life at Angel Island, the port of entry for many Asian immigrants from 1910 to 1940, whose punishing atmosphere stood in contrast to the more welcoming spirit of Ellis Island.Angel Island, in San Francisco Bay, in 1949.San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers, via Getty ImagesOfficials examine Japanese immigrants on a ship at Angel Island in 1931.Corbis HistoricalThe oratorio also tackles the legacy of injustice and discrimination against people of Asian descent in America, weaving in historical events, including the 1871 massacre of Chinese residents in Los Angeles and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned the immigration of laborers from China.Huang described “Angel Island” as activist art, saying he wanted to “give people history that they didn’t learn in school.”“This is not just a Chinese American story,” he said. “This is an American story.”The oratorio, which premiered on Angel Island in 2021, comes to the stage at a time of heightened concern about the treatment of Asians and Asian Americans in the United States, following the wave of violence against people of Asian descent during the early years of the coronavirus pandemic.“Angel Island” hints at parallels between past and present — highlighting, for example, racist portrayals of Asians as carriers of disease in the late 1800s, a precursor to the pandemic’s xenophobia and the use of the “Chinese virus” label to describe Covid-19.In Ozawa’s staging, the dancer Jie-Hung Connie Shiau plays a modern-day woman who uncovers artifacts explaining her great-grandmother’s immigration to the United States. Through film and movement, she immerses herself in the world of her ancestors.The composer Huang Ruo at a recent rehearsal of “Angel Island.” “This is not just a Chinese American story,” he said. “This is an American story.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOzawa, who is Japanese American, said that taking part in “Angel Island,” which features a largely Asian American cast and creative team, was difficult because of the rawness of the history. But the work could also be uplifting.“It’s painful to be reminded of racism and prejudice and exclusion, but simultaneously it is very cathartic to be open with it and to allow ourselves to feel what our ancestors have felt and know that we’re not alone,” he said. “We are actually part of a much larger story that is filled with hope, redemption and the power to change things.”Huang and the Del Sol Quartet, which is based in San Francisco, began working on “Angel Island” in 2017, when they received a $150,000 grant from the Hewlett Foundation to create an oratorio about the detainees. The immigrants, who came from China, Japan, India, Russia and elsewhere, faced overcrowded and unsanitary conditions at Angel Island. They were typically held for weeks or months, though some were detained for as long as two years. Ultimately, many were deported.Charlton Lee, a Chinese American violist in the quartet, had pitched the idea of an Angel Island project to Huang, who had previously collaborated with Del Sol, including on chamber performances of Huang’s music ahead of the American premiere of his first opera, “Dr. Sun Yat-sen,” in 2014. Lee, who had been impressed by Huang’s ability to set Chinese text to music, said he thought the history of Angel Island had been neglected.“We’re staring at Angel Island all the time — it’s in the middle of the bay — but people don’t know about the detention center,” he said. “They don’t know about the plight of these immigrants who were trying to come here, start a new life and were just stuck.”Members of the Choir of Trinity Wall Street rehearsing in Brooklyn.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn 2018, Huang and the quartet visited the island, now a state park. They examined the poems, written in classical Chinese, in which detainees described feelings of anger, fear and homesickness. They began to improvise inside the barracks, with members of the quartet accompanying Huang as he sang a melody in Chinese.“Being in that spot — it was haunting,” he said, “but it was also heartwarming to bring something alive back to a place that was so dead.”Huang selected a few poems to set to music: “The Seascape,” “When We Bade Farewell” and “Buried Beneath Clay and Earth.” He added in historical writings to be read aloud with accompaniment by the quartet. These included a discussion of the Los Angeles massacre in 1871, when a mob shot or hanged at least 18 Chinese residents; a list of questions used by American immigration officials in the late 1800s to assess whether Asian women were prostitutes; and an essay by Henry Josiah West from 1873 warning of a “Chinese invasion.”“The question” West wrote, “is shall we submit to the growth of this heathen Chinese Republic?”In 2021, after a yearlong delay caused by the pandemic, Huang and the Del Sol Quartet returned to Angel Island for the premiere.Lee said it was jarring to hear the music in the barracks, which he had seen as dark and foreboding.“It felt like the spirits were just coming out of the walls,” he said. “It’s almost like we performed some kind of ritual and all of a sudden these people who had suffered — they were able to smile.”Immigrants arriving at Angel Island’s quarantine station around 1911.Fotosearch/Getty ImagesSince then, “Angel Island” has been performed several more times, including in Berkeley, Calif., Washington and Singapore.Huang has recently expanded the piece, adding another poem, “The Ocean Encircles a Lone Peak,” and a movement about Fang Lang, a Chinese survivor of the Titanic shipwreck who was barred from entering the United States because of the Exclusion Act.The New York production is the first full staging of “Angel Island.” Dancers are featured throughout, and film plays an important role, with historical footage and videos of Angel Island, shot by Bill Morrison, projected on screens. Choir members mimic carving Chinese characters and poems.“This is really the manifestation of a community,” Ozawa said. “You want the audience fully immersed and to experience a sense of hypnotic ritualism.”And, he added, he would like the story to resonate with a broad audience.“Angel Island is still living and breathing within the bodies of so many Asian Americans,” he said. “My true hope is that we all recall, connect and learn from our personal heritage, our past, our ancestor’s experience coming to America, but also feel empowered by the material to ignite discourse, empathy and understanding toward those newly coming into the country.”The director Matthew Ozawa, center, said: “This is really the manifestation of a community. You want the audience fully immersed and to experience a sense of hypnotic ritualism.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe detainees’ poems remain at the center of “Angel Island” and give the work its spiritual grounding.Huang, who came to the United States as a student in the 1990s, stopping first in San Francisco, said he could relate to many of the poems.“There is that same feeling of what it means to leave your family behind,” he said, “and of coming to a place in hopes of a new life and not knowing what is ahead of you.”At the end of “Angel Island,” members of the choir leave the stage and encircle the audience, a gesture meant to help them feel part of the community of detainees.The final poem in the oratorio describes leaving Angel Island and preparing to return home. It speaks of jingwei, a mythological bird that tries to fill the sea with twigs and stones:Obstacles have been put in my way for half a year,Melancholy and hate gather on my face.Now that I must return to my country,I have toiled like the jingwei bird in vain. More

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      World Trade Center Arts Space to Open With Music, Theater and Dance

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      A one-man Laurence Fishburne show, a Bill T. Jones premiere and a new take on “Cats” will be among the offerings at the new Perelman Performing Arts Center.As the marble-clad, cube-like Perelman Performing Arts Center has taken shape at the World Trade Center site, questions have swirled about what will actually happen inside.Some answers came on Wednesday, when the center announced a first year of programming that will feature original work, including the premiere of an autobiographical play written by and starring the actor Laurence Fishburne called “Like They Do in the Movies,” as well as partnerships, including with the Tribeca Festival.Bill Rauch, the center’s artistic director, said the roster was deliberately eclectic.“We much want to give many different audiences many different reasons to come into our building,” he said in a telephone interview, adding that PAC NYC — as the center is being called — is invested in “creating connections.”The year will feature dance, opera, music and theater. Some highlights include:The world premiere of “Watch Night,” a new multidisciplinary piece by the dance artist Bill T. Jones, the poet Marc Bamuthi Joseph and the composer Tamar-kali, in November.The New York Premiere of “An American Soldier,” an opera by the composer Huang Ruo and the playwright David Henry Hwang. The opera, which will be staged in May, tells the true story of Danny Chen, a New Yorker who enlisted in the Army and was subjected to hazing and racist taunts in Afghanistan, and who killed himself at 19.A reimagining of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical “Cats” set in New York City’s ballroom scene. The musical, planned for next June and July, will be directed by Zhailon Levingston and Rauch; its choreographers will be Arturo Lyons and Omari Wiles, and its dramaturg and gender consultant will be Josephine Kearns.Dance performances will include a celebration of street dance from around the world, including notable D.J.s. There will be a recital by the Easter Island pianist Mahani Teave, an evening with the Broadway performer Brian Stokes Mitchell and, in October, the 2023 Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz International Piano Competition.Performances at the center are to begin Sept. 19 with a five-evening, pay-what-you-wish concert series called “Refuge: A Concert Series to Welcome the World.”One night will feature New York artists who come from elsewhere, including Raven Chacon, Angélique Kidjo and Michael Mwenso. Another will focus on spiritually oriented performers, including the Klezmatics and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street. Other concerts will highlight educators (featuring Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra), family ensembles (such as the Villalobos Brothers) and childhood traditions (with Alphabet Rockers).The center is named for Ronald O. Perelman, the billionaire who made a $75 million pledge in 2016. But its largest donor wound up being Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor, who gave $130 million to get it built. The center, which used to call itself “the Perelman” for short, now calls itself PAC NYC.“There will be something for everyone at PAC NYC,” Bloomberg, the center’s chairman, said in a statement.The Tribeca Festival will do its own programming, but Rauch described its presence as “a collaboration.”“It’s a natural allyship for us, given our location — it made great sense,” he said. “We’re very excited to have them in the building.”PAC NYC has also partnered with Creative Artists Agency to present conversations with celebrity authors like Kerry Washington, Jada Pinkett Smith, Jenna Bush Hager and Barbara Pierce Bush.“Part of what we want to do is not only reflect the dynamic energy of all five boroughs but to invite conversation in our spaces,” Rauch said, “so having events that are book readings and getting to hear from the authors just feels like it’s well aligned.”Beginning June 23, tickets, starting at $39, are available through February. PAC NYC memberships starting at $10 for the inaugural season are available as of Wednesday.There are three stages at the PAC seating 99, 250 and 450 people. David Rockwell and his Rockwell Group designed the interior of the lobby and restaurant, which will be run by the chef Marcus Samuelsson, along with the bar and outdoor terrace.Plans for programming in the building’s lobby space will be announced in the future and will generally be programmed with less lead time, Rauch said.“All the performances on that stage will be open and free,” Rauch said. “That commitment to access is really crucial.” More

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      The Composer Huang Ruo on Illusion and Betrayal in ‘M. Butterfly’

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      Huang, who wrote the music for the operatic adaptation of David Henry Hwang’s play, says its exploration of race, gender and power still resonates today.The question from the Chinese-born composer Huang Ruo came out of the blue: Would David Henry Hwang, the American playwright, consider adapting his Broadway hit “M. Butterfly” for the opera stage?It was 2013, and Huang, who had worked with Hwang on an Off Broadway revival of “The Dance and the Railroad,” was eager to collaborate again. The playwright agreed, and in late July, almost a decade after their first conversation, “M. Butterfly” had its premiere at Santa Fe Opera.Like the play, the opera tells the story of René Gallimard, a civil servant at the French embassy in Beijing, who falls in love with Song Liling, a Chinese opera singer who seems to be the ideal woman. Gallimard eventually discovers that Song has been a man — and a spy — all along.“M. Butterfly” upends Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” which tells the story of Cio-Cio-San, a betrayed young geisha, waiting in vain for the return of Pinkerton, her American husband. It gives power to Asian characters instead of Westerners, and the fluidity in gender roles counters sexist tropes in Puccini’s opera.Kangmin Justin Kim as Song Liling in the Santa Fe Opera production of “M. Butterfly.”Curtis Brown for the Santa Fe OperaIn an interview from Santa Fe, Huang said the discussions of race, gender and power in “M. Butterfly,” which runs through Aug. 24, spoke to the present moment, more than three decades after the play’s premiere. He also talked about his early immersion in Chinese opera, the impact of the pandemic on the production and Asian representation in the arts. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Tell me about your first encounter with the play “M. Butterfly.”When I was at Oberlin, in my college days, the first play that I saw in America was “M. Butterfly.” It left a very deep impact. I knew Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” the opera, but I did not know “M. Butterfly.” I thought it was a misspelling. I went in expecting to see “Madama Butterfly” but walked out with a totally opposite and different story.Why turn the play, which was successful on Broadway and inspired a 1993 movie, into an opera?I saw several versions of the play, and I often felt it needed to be told in musical form because it was so related to Puccini and to the reversal of “Madama Butterfly.” I felt in opera I could freely integrate — to twist and to turn, to create all the drama with the music. Some plays should never be touched or turned into opera, but I felt this was one of the rare cases where it could work.You grew up on Hainan island, the southernmost edge of China, immersed in traditional Chinese opera and other music. What was that like?In every village in Hainan, there is a communal open-air space, like a square. People would bring their clothes during the day to dry under the burning sun or put the rice out to dry. At night, people would sit there, the guys would take their shirts off, to get cool and to fall asleep.Occasionally there were Hainanese opera troupes that came to the village to perform. And at that moment, the open square became an improvised theater. Every family would bring their own food and chairs. And my grandmother would take me to sit there, to see opera.How did those early experiences inform your artistic philosophy?My grandmother was never sent to school because her family was poor and she was a woman. But she got her education through watching opera. Opera was for everybody: men and women, the elderly and the young. She learned all these stories and moral lessons, and she taught me those as well.Kim, left, and Mark Stone as René Gallimard in “M. Butterfly.”Curtis Brown for the Santa Fe OperaHow did the story of “Madama Butterfly” influence your approach?Puccini’s opera shows a submissive, young Asian woman who will do everything — even change her faith — to be put in a cage, to serve as someone’s wife and even bear a child. And it shows her foolishly wanting him to come back, only to be abandoned and to have her only child, her only hope, brutally taken away. Pinkerton was portrayed by Puccini as this white man who doesn’t know or respect Eastern traditions or culture, and just abuses Cio-Cio-San, and takes advantage of her, both physically and psychologically.The big picture is this kind of imbalance between East and West, and the smaller picture is the interplay of male and female, and Asians being treated as subhuman. That is entirely reversed in “M. Butterfly.”Can you give an example of how Puccini’s music influenced the score of “M. Butterfly”?The overture of “Madama Butterfly” is very fast and energetic, in a minor key, that sounds very Western. I turned the overture upside down. I used the Puccini motif, and I reversed it. I made it quasi-pentatonic, to make it more Eastern. And then I have an opera gong, crash cymbal and all these instruments go along with it. So it’s quite unrecognizable if you don’t know the Puccini well, but I felt that in that way it’s related to the Puccini, and it also became new, just like “M. Butterfly” itself.The premiere of “M. Butterfly” was delayed for two years because of the pandemic. How does it feel to open in this moment?It’s even more timely now, because of the pandemic and the rise of anti-Asian hate. Asian Americans are again being treated with subhuman stereotypes and racial hate. They’re being treated as others, not as equals. With “M. Butterfly,” we are showing people this is the history of humanity — that this is not just an exotic story happening in the past.What has it been like witnessing the spike in hate directed toward Asians in the United States, particularly in New York City, your longtime home?You just don’t know when and where you might get attacked. For example, I took my kids out biking after the severe attack on a Filipino woman in Times Square last year. I basically disguised them, and disguised myself, so we all had masks, and they had helmets on, and I had a hat, so we all looked less Asian. That was the first time I felt I had to disguise myself in America.Normally Asians and Asian Americans want to be seen and heard. We have been complaining for a long time that we are invisible. But that was the moment that I wanted to be invisible. I did not want to be seen or identified. Is that normal? Is that real? I don’t think that’s normal, but that felt so real at that moment.What do you want audiences to take away from “M. Butterfly”?I want people to understand the story, but also to ask questions. That, to me, is the best opera can do: Not to provide answers, but to provoke questions. And to leave the audience asking questions about their own background, their own journey. More

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      Review: ‘M. Butterfly’ Metamorphoses Again, as an Opera

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      David Henry Hwang has returned to his Tony-winning play with a libretto for Huang Ruo’s new work. But can its story change with the times?SANTA FE, N.M. — “M. Butterfly” has been a Broadway hit, a watershed in Asian American representation, a film, and recently a revised version of the original play.Now, with the premiere on Saturday here at Santa Fe Opera of an adaptation by the composer Huang Ruo, with a libretto by David Henry Hwang, the play’s author, the butterfly has returned to its operatic chrysalis.It was inevitable, really. Hwang’s Tony Award-winning script, from 1988, came to him when he saw that he could use the Orientalist stereotypes of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” as a mirror to explore how, for two decades, the French diplomat Bernard Boursicot (renamed Rene Gallimard in the play) carried on an affair with the Chinese opera singer and spy Shi Pei Pu (renamed Song Liling), only to discover, amid a lurid espionage case, that “she” had been a “he” all along.Hwang’s smash exposé of empire and race, gender and domination, could always be read as a reflection on the Puccini and the biases it still perpetuates as well as a gloss on the real-life tale. Find the right composer who could blend its elements with metatheatrical flair while maintaining the elusive quality that so marks the play, and the opportunity was obvious.Huang, a Chinese-born professor at the Mannes School of Music, whose works have often integrated Eastern and Western influences into a distinctive personal style, was almost certainly the best bet to be that composer.But the opportunity is missed.“M. Butterfly” had plenty of potential to fly at Santa Fe. Delayed for two years on account of the pandemic, James Robinson’s production is simple but telling, making clean use of sensible projections, by Greg Emetaz, and moving easily between the personal and the geopolitical, as Gallimard’s fate entwines with that of the imperial pretensions of the French and Americans in Vietnam, and Song’s shifts with that of the Chinese Communist Party. Carolyn Kuan conducts with empathy, if not the rhythmic precision that the thudding score needs.James Robinson’s production is simple but telling, making clean use of sensible projections, our critic writes.Curtis BrownThe cast is an exemplary one, too. Mark Stone makes for a suitably worn, confused Gallimard, and he sings his thorny vocal lines with impressive shape. The more minor parts are neatly delivered, especially Hongni Wu’s amused Comrade Chin and Kevin Burdette’s connivingly bureaucratic ambassador to China.All must bow to Kangmin Justin Kim, whose drag performances as Kimchilia Bartoli must have helped him portray Song with the extraordinary conviction he displays here. More than credible singing Cio-Cio-San’s “Un bel dì” and other soprano excerpts from the Puccini, this astonishing countertenor’s alluring, ringing tone, and the sensitivity as an actor that he shows in toying with Gallimard’s delusions and exploring Song’s own sexuality, announced an artist to watch closely.The problem with “M. Butterfly” is a deeper one, and it’s the same difficulty that Hwang grappled with when he rewrote the script for its return to Broadway in 2017: As times change, can “M. Butterfly” change with them and still be true to itself?That’s not to say that Hwang’s earlier themes are irrelevant now; far from it. Violence against women of Asian descent remains outrageously persistent, and there is still considerable value in confronting the Butterfly stereotypes that sustain it, especially in an opera world that remains stubbornly — no, offensively — reluctant to reckon with its many racisms, including in “Madama Butterfly” and “Turandot.”But the play itself helped to expose related intricacies of sexism, racism and imperialism that have since become familiar, and the story has worn. Gender norms, for one thing, have shifted dramatically enough that the old question of whether Gallimard knew that Song was a man is barely titillating at all. By now we should also know that Gallimard’s desires are problematic; if we don’t, “M. Butterfly” still achieves its goal of showing us that we should. Either way, it’s hard to engage much with the bumbling, repressed central character, and the opera barely asks us to.Stone, left, and Kim in the opera, which has a distance from the original material, with a knowingly analytical air.Curtis BrownSo what is left? “M. Butterfly,” the play, always had ambiguity and illusion at its core, and this operatic version tries to break down binaries still further, especially through Song’s character. Fluidity washes; power blurs as East meets West; metaphor piles onto metaphor. There is a distance from the original material here, and the opera takes on a kind of knowingly analytical air.It’s more of a disquisition than a drama, and nowhere is that more apparent than in a big third-act aria for Song, “Awoke as a Butterfly.” She sings it as the Party tries to send her to France to spy on a lover she thinks has long forgotten her, and as the stage turns to black, you hope that her motivations are at last about to become more than dimly apparent. Is she just a Party stooge? Is she in love? What does she want from him?“I pretend to know, pretend to know the truth,” she sings. “I know the truth and so I pretend.”Alas, no luck.Huang Ruo’s music offers few such subtleties, though unlike in his earlier opera for Santa Fe, “Dr. Sun Yat-sen,” it declines to weave Chinese instruments into the orchestra. The intrigue here lies in how he deals with the musical legacy of “Madama Butterfly,” and, wisely, he has been careful with it.There’s no sense of pastiche, no resort to parody; direct quotation is limited to the few moments when Song is performing as Cio-Cio-San. When there are references, they are oblique or distorted, and they tend to follow Hwang’s story in inverting the original material, asking us who the Butterfly in the story really is. There’s a humming chorus, for instance, or at least a chorus that hums, but it intends to evoke Gallimard’s memories, not those of his lover.But much of the score otherwise tires as its pounding chords and thumping cross-rhythms alternate and overlap with more static, suspended passages. If there is plenty of tension, there is little variety, and this arid music rarely gives us insights that the words do not. It needed to; for without them, this Butterfly is lost.M. ButterflyThrough Aug. 24 at Santa Fe Opera, New Mexico; santafeopera.org. More

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      Review: In ‘Book of Mountains & Seas,’ Puppets Embark on Mythic Quests

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      Huang Ruo and Basil Twist’s new choral-theater piece at St. Ann’s Warehouse borrows from traditional Chinese tales.The giant is immense and craggy-limbed, like some primordial creature hewed from the earth or forged from lava. His name is Kua Fu, and in Huang Ruo and Basil Twist’s new choral-theater piece “Book of Mountains & Seas” he is a puppet, towering above his team of puppeteers. When thirst strikes, he lies prostrate to lap up a whole river of white silk, which slips down his gullet and disappears.This is splendid puppetry, imbued with poignancy and the pulsing, drum-driven drama of mythic quest. A figure from Chinese legend, Kua Fu desires one thing above all, and he will chase it as far as he has to: He wants to capture the sun.We should be rooting against him, then, if we want the planet to survive. But at St. Ann’s Warehouse on Tuesday night, as “Book of Mountains & Seas” made its American premiere, I found myself solidly on Kua Fu’s side — and feeling consequently like I had aligned my sympathies with Thanos, the ultra-bad guy in Marvel’s “Avengers” movies, which also borrow from mythology to tap into something ancient in us.Originally scheduled for January at the now-postponed Prototype festival, “Book of Mountains & Seas” is the aesthetic opposite of that blockbuster film franchise — live and handmade, harnessing the power of music, puppetry and human gathering. With a dozen choral singers from the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, two percussionists and six puppeteers — excellent, all — the show retells four Chinese tales borrowed from “Shanhaijing,” a text that is often called in English “The Classic of Mountains and Seas.”If you’re not already versed in those legends, or fluent in Chinese, you may be lost if you don’t read up on them in advance. The physical program provides two pages of clear, concise synopses. Presented by St. Ann’s Warehouse and Beth Morrison Projects, the performance is sung half in Mandarin and half in a language of the composer-conductor-librettist Huang Ruo’s invention, without English supertitles. Projected Chinese titles give the full text of the stories, but the English text is much briefer — occasional plot updates that generally do the trick if you’ve absorbed those program notes.For non-Mandarin speakers, it makes for an impressionistic experience, your mind allowed to drift a bit as the vocal tones wash over you. Huang Ruo has said that the combination of song and percussion is as old as humankind, and certainly it feels that way in the first slender myth, about the birth of Pan Gu, who created the world: Out of the primal darkness come the voices, and softly lit faces, of the singers, with percussion sounding from both sides.Twist, the production’s director and designer, keeps the puppetry minimal in that opening scene, but the pieces he uses to make Pan Gu’s enormous visage — rice-paper lanterns; large, rough pieces of what look like driftwood or fossils or bones — recur throughout the evening. They are building blocks of this show’s world.The performance is sung half in Chinese and half in a language of the composer-conductor-librettist Huang Ruo’s invention.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe second myth, “The Spirit Bird,” is about a princess who drowns, transforms into a bird and becomes consumed with her attempt to get revenge on the ocean. But the puppetry — a silken bird, a silken sky that becomes a silken sea — is too simple in its repetition. When an undulating sea creature (made of those driftwood-like bits) swims by, the variety is welcome.This is also the one section of the show where the precision of Ayumu Poe Saegusa’s otherwise extraordinarily meticulous lighting gives way, allowing an errant shadow — of a singer, possibly? — to break the illusion of the ocean.The last two myths are where “Book of Mountains & Seas” gets exciting. That’s partly because they, unlike the others, have built-in drama There is no conflict in the creation of the world, and the fight between the princess and the sea feels nebulous. But “The Ten Suns” and “Kua Fu Chasing the Sun” have stakes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow is it that the 10 puppet suns — rice-paper lanterns bobbing high in the air on long, slender stalks — are quite so charming and mesmeric? Glowing cherry-red when they first appear one by one, they are a happy band of siblings who share the duty of lighting the planet. Their fatal error is to go out together one day, which wreaks disaster. Twist makes it a menacing confrontation, with the suns aggressively approaching the audience — the show’s one real echo of climate change. Yet when nine of the suns are killed to save the Earth (the program, too, gives this away), the music and the moment have a mournful beauty.The pièce de résistance, though, is the appearance of Kua Fu, the giant we see awakening in the final myth. Never would anyone confuse this stony-looking creature with the mammoth King Kong puppet we saw on Broadway, yet as Kua Fu looks around, getting his bearings, that’s exactly who he resembles.With propulsive, high-tension music to match his urgency, Kua Fu runs in place at center stage, as the sun, a rice-paper lantern, moves around him, out of his long arms’ reach. It is mysteriously gripping: this huge, wordless being so filled with longing for what he cannot and should not have; this giant who, if he keeps going, will drink all of the fresh water of the Earth.He fails in his quest, of course; the program tells you that as well. But here the projected English text, at least, hedges a bit. Because in the legend, when Kua Fu dies, forests of peach blossom trees grow from his walking stick.The puppet has no walking stick, and no puppet peach blossom trees grow. But wouldn’t they have been magnificent?Book of Mountains & SeasThrough March 20 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      Asian Composers Reflect on Careers in Western Classical Music

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      For all their shared experiences, each of these five artists has a unique story of struggles and triumphs.Asian composers who write in Western classical musical forms, like symphonies and operas, tend to have a few things in common. Many learned European styles from an early age, and finished their studies at conservatories there or in the United States. And many later found themselves relegated to programming ghettos like Lunar New Year concerts. (One recent study found that works by Asian composers make up only about 2 percent of American orchestral performances planned for the coming season.)At times, the music of Asian composers has been misunderstood or exoticized; they have been subjected to simple errors such as, in the case of Huang Ruo, who was born in China, repeated misspellings of his name.For all their shared experiences, each of these artists has a unique story. Here, five of them provide a small sampling of the lessons, struggles and triumphs of composers who were born in Asia and made a career for themselves in Western classical music. These are edited excerpts from interviews with them.Tan DunMusic is my language. To me “West” and “East” are just ways of talking — or like ways of cooking. I’m a chef, and sometimes I find my recipe is like my orchestrations. It would be so boring if you asked me to cook in one style. Eastern and Western, then, have for me become a unique recipe in which one plus one equals one.I am in a very special zone historically. I’m 63, and part of the first generation of Eastern composers after the Cultural Revolution to deal with Western forms. But it’s just like rosemary, butter and vegetables. You can cook this way, that way — and that’s why the same orchestras sound so different, from Debussy to Stravinsky to myself.I’m lucky. When I came to the United States as a student, my teachers and classmates gave me enormous encouragement to discover myself. And I learned so much from John Cage. After this, it felt so easy to compose. And when people approach me for commissions, I re-approach them about what I’m thinking about. I remember when Kurt Masur asked me to write something for the New York Philharmonic — the Water Concerto for Water Percussion and Orchestra — I said, “Can I write something for water?” He said, “As long as you don’t flood our orchestra.”Yes, we often are misunderstood. It’s like when you cook beautiful black bean with chili sauce and chocolate. They may say, “Hey, this is a little strange.” But you explain why, and that can be very interesting. Thank God I love to talk. And there has been progress for us. I am the first Eastern composer to be the dean of a Western conservatory, at Bard. That’s like a Chinese chef becoming the chef of an Italian restaurant. That’s the future: a different way of approaching color, boundary-less, a unity of the soul.Du Yun”If I’m a spokesperson,” Du Yun said, “it’s for my own voice.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesOne thing about composers like Tan Dun: They came out of the Cultural Revolution, after a door had closed for so many years. So there was so much focus on what China was doing, a lot of curiosity — curiosity rather than active racism. Our generation — I’m 44 — is so different.We learn Western music with such rigorous systems. And we do not close our ears to different traditions or styles; that attitude determines early on that you don’t have that kind of boundary, or ownership. But you still hear those conversation topics about “East meets West.” It’s so tiring. East has been meeting West for thousands of years; if we’re always still just meeting, that’s a problem.Programming Chinese composers around Lunar New Year is in general very problematic. Do we need to celebrate the culture? Yes. Do we need to celebrate the tradition? Absolutely. But it can be part of the main subscription series, or a yearlong series. Then you can really tell stories, not just group people by a country.My name does not give me ownership of Chinese culture. There are so many things I don’t know. There are so many burdens and fights — as the woman, the woman of color, the Chinese woman — that I decided to fight nothing and just create my own stuff. I told myself that if I had a great body of work, that would speak to what a Chinese woman can do.I never wanted to be pigeonholed, to be a reduced representation. I wanted to always open that Pandora’s box of messiness — and I encourage others to celebrate messiness, the unclean narrative of your life. Every immigrant has her own path; your work should absolutely be reflective of that. So if I’m a spokesperson, it’s for my own voice. And through that particular voice, I hope there is something that resonates.Bright ShengWhen someone asks Bright Sheng whether he’s a Chinese or American composer, he responds, “100 percent both.”Nora Tam/South China Morning Post, via Getty ImagesWhen I left China, it was a time of economic and, in a different way, cultural reform. I’m glad I came to the United States, but I do have a little bit of guilt. I probably could have done more there. But my agenda was to try to learn Western music and become the best pianist, conductor and composer I could be. I was fortunate to meet Leonard Bernstein, and I was under his wing for five years. Now, at 65, when someone asks me if I consider myself a Chinese or American composer, I say, in the most humble way, “100 percent both.” I’m well-versed in both cultures.There has been racism and misunderstanding, but that is inevitable. Would that be different if there were Asian people running orchestras? Yes, of course. My response has just been to try to write the best music I can. I wrote an opera for San Francisco Opera — “Dream of the Red Chamber,” which they’re reviving. It’s a very popular Chinese story, and when I worked on it with David Henry Hwang, we asked ourselves: “Is this for a Western audience or Eastern audience?” We decided first and foremost it should just be good, and it had to be touching. Good music transcends.For example, a piece of mine, “H’un (Lacerations),” premiered at the 92nd Street Y in New York. It is subtitled “In Memoriam 1966-1976” — about the Cultural Revolution — and it is very harsh and dramatic, with no melody. My mother was there, and she said it brought back a lot of painful memories. I was also sitting next to this very old Jewish woman, and after I took a bow onstage, she leaned over and said, “If you changed the title to ‘Auschwitz,’ this would be just as appropriate.” That was the highest compliment.Unsuk Chin“I believe in multiple identities and think that without curiosity,” Unsuk Chin said, “any style or any musical culture atrophies and risks becoming a museum.”Julie Glassberg for The New York TimesThe Korea of my childhood and adolescence was a very different place from what it is today. In the 1960s, it was an impoverished developing country, devastated by colonialism and by the Korean War, and until the late 1980s, there was a military dictatorship in place. In order to develop as a composer, one had to go abroad, as there didn’t exist an infrastructure for new music. Now 60, and having lived for 35 years in Europe, it remains important for me to contribute to the contemporary music scene in Asia.When I moved to Germany, there was a tendency to put composers in certain boxes, with all the aesthetic turf wars back then. Since I was neither interested in joining any camp or fashionable avant-garde or other trends, fulfilling exotic expectations, or assumptions of how a woman should or should not compose, I had to start a career in other countries while still living in Germany. Prejudices such as viewing an Asian composer or performing musician only through “sociological” lenses are still relatively common in various countries, but times are changing. Of course, there exist prejudices and complacency in the whole world, including in Asia. Perhaps the only remedy to this apparently, and sadly, all-too-human impulse is try to retain a sense of wonder and attempt to find distance to oneself.I have worked in different countries for decades, and have felt a need to stay curious about different musical cultures, traditions and genres. I believe in multiple identities and think that without curiosity, any musical style or culture atrophies and risks becoming a museum: Art has always thrived when there has been cross-fertilization.At the same time, one should be wary of the danger of exoticism and superficial cultural appropriation. I think that a contemporary composer needs to study different cultures, traditions and genres, but make use of those influences in a selective, historically conscious and self-critical manner.Huang RuoHuang Ruo said that if he spoke English with an accent, he composed with one, too.Rathkopf PhotographyWhen people heard I came from China, they would often say, “Does your music sound like Tan Dun?” I don’t think they meant any harm, but it shows a certain ignorance. I tried to explain that China is a big country, and we all speak with our own voice.I started as an instrumental composer, and a lot of those works got programmed at Asian-themed or Lunar New Year concerts. I didn’t notice at first, but you begin to see patterns. I don’t feel my work has any less quality than my other colleagues who are not minority composers, but for conductors, programmers and artistic directors, it doesn’t seem to come to their mind that you can naturally program an Asian composer’s work next to Beethoven or Tchaikovsky.That’s one of the reasons I turned to opera. I thought, there must be no opera company having a themed season devoted to Asian composers. So finally, I got to be programmed next to “Fidelio” and “Madama Butterfly.” That was my revenge. Also, I’ve wanted to write on subjects that reflect Asian or Asian American topics, to really share these stories. In this case it is actually me making the choice.Someone once told me I speak English with an accent. I said, “Otherwise, how would you know that’s me speaking?” I feel the same way as a composer. I want to have my own originality, to speak with my own accent — with my love of Western musical styles, but also this heritage I carry of Chinese culture.Without coming to the United States, I would be a different composer. If I went to Europe instead, I would also be very different. But I feel I made the right decision, and at 44 I fully embrace who I am today, and where I am as well. More