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    Review: A Musician’s Portrait, as Both Composer and Pianist

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    At the Miller Theater at Columbia University, the composer Amy Williams joined the JACK Quartet in playing her chamber music.Whether as a composer or as a pianist, Amy Williams is first and foremost, in her heart of hearts, a chamber musician.“Chamber music is my love when it comes to music, as a listener and performer,” she said in an onstage interview during a Composer Portraits concert devoted to her work at the Miller Theater at Columbia University on Thursday evening.Miller’s composer portraits tend to focus on pieces for small groups, and therefore represent some artists more fully than others. Williams, born in 1969 and now a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, has, in her relatively tight body of work, written little but small-group pieces. Many of them involve the piano, which brought her to Thursday’s concert as a performer, too, and gave the audience another crucial facet of her musical life. (She is the longtime half, with Helena Bugallo, of the Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo.)The four pieces on the program at Miller were for combinations of piano and strings, and featured the JACK Quartet, which performed on its own, as part of a piano quintet and with two of its members joining Williams in a trio.Williams and JACK — the violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, the violist John Pickford Richards and the cellist Jay Campbell — have collaborated for over a decade and form a happy partnership. The quartet has the pristine clarity to execute all the challenges Williams calls for: the supersoft passages and tight coordination; the complex, exposed unison rhythms; the variety of touch among the four players; and a mood both easygoing and changeable.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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      Trinity Church’s ‘Messiah’ Is Still the Gold Standard

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      The church’s urgent and eloquent version of Handel’s classic oratorio remains an inspired communal rite.The holidays are a time for traditions — and for doubting them. Is Grandma’s ham drier than you thought when you were young? Is the movie the whole family watches every year maybe a little offensive?For me, the question on Wednesday was whether Trinity Wall Street’s version of Handel’s “Messiah” would be as good — as bracing, as riveting, as disturbing and consoling — as I remembered.Seeing Trinity’s “Messiah” for the first time, in 2011, showed me the galvanic possibilities of this classic work more than any recording or live outing I’d ever heard. This wasn’t the usual, quaintly sleepy Christmas routine, but a seething, electrically direct and dramatic enactment of an oratorio that both describes and calls for transformation: “And we shall be changed,” its crucial line promises.It had been a good few years since I’d heard the church’s Handel. But when people would ask me for a “Messiah” recommendation among the many options that pop up in New York each December, I always replied with a single word: Trinity.This “Messiah” long achieved its exhilarating quality because of an exceptional in-house choir and period-instrument orchestra — and because of Julian Wachner, Trinity’s director of music and the arts, who led the church’s medieval-to-modern music program with energy and ambition.Early last year, Wachner was fired by Trinity before the church completed an investigation into an allegation of sexual misconduct against him, but after it found he had “otherwise conducted himself in a manner that is inconsistent with our expectations of anyone who occupies a leadership position.” (He has denied the allegations.)His departure left one of the jewels of the city’s artistic and spiritual scenes leaderless until early this month, when the church announced that Melissa Attebury would be its next director of music. For almost two years, Trinity has depended on staff and guest conductors, including, for this year’s Handel, Ryan James Brandau.And what a relief to find that Trinity’s “Messiah” is still burning and gladdening, vivid in both darkness and light. If Brandau’s account lacked some of Wachner’s charged, even savage intensity, that wasn’t entirely a bad thing. The performance on Wednesday added some elegance to the urgent, heartfelt directness, the emphasis on communication, that has been Trinity’s standard in this piece.The soaringly resonant acoustics of Trinity Church smoothed some of the choir’s bite into airy creaminess, but the passion was still palpable. And while the orchestral sound was sleeker than I recalled, it had the same stirring commitment and bristling responsiveness to the vocalists, as well as a glistening, pastoral dawn quality to the shepherds.These forces are truly an ensemble, aided by my favorite aspect of the church’s version. Most “Messiah” presentations bring in a quartet of opera singers for the solos. Trinity’s soloists — almost 20 of them — come forward from the choir, giving the oratorio the feeling of an intimate, alternately sober and joyous communal rite, modest yet monumental.This practice also allows the ensemble to show off the strengths of its roster — no soprano is ideally suited to all the work’s soprano arias — and to experiment. In 2017, Wachner switched the traditional genders of all the solos, a change thrillingly recalled this year by having Jonathan Woody, a bass-baritone, blaze through “He was despised,” instead of the standard female alto.There was more sense than there usually is of the range of emotion within numbers, not just between them. The tenor Stephen Sands was calm, then pressing in the beginning of the work, and the soprano Madeline Apple Healey was sprightly, then tender in “Rejoice greatly.”Brandau guided the score so that “Hallelujah” seemed to emerge from the preceding numbers, which gradually rose in fieriness. And he, choir and orchestra built patiently to the work’s true climax — “The trumpet shall sound,” sung with annunciatory power by the bass-baritone Edmund Milly and accompanied with eloquence, on a difficult-to-control, valveless natural trumpet, by Caleb Hudson — before the shining waves of the final “Amen.”Though pleasant enough, a pared-down New York Philharmonic’s “Messiah,” heard on Tuesday, paled in comparison. Conducted by Fabio Biondi, the founder of the distinguished period-instrument group Europa Galante, in his debut with the orchestra, this Handel was a little stolid in the first part, though with more crispness and color in the second and third.Fabio Biondi made his debut with the New York Philharmonic conducting Handel’s “Messiah.”Chris LeeThe quartet of young vocal soloists made little impact in tone or interpretive zest; the star here was the venerable Handel and Haydn Society Chorus, from Boston. A few dozen strong, it sounded rich yet lucid, with metronomic clarity in the burbling 16th notes of “And He shall purify” and with evocative gauziness in “His yoke is easy.” Biondi led a lithe, brisk “Hallelujah,” seemingly designed to make this omnipresent number a bit more unassuming than the norm.Beyond the start of “Messiah” season, this was a banner week for early music in New York. On Saturday, the Miller Theater hosted the Tallis Scholars at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Manhattan, part of the ensemble’s 50th-anniversary tour. And yet more Handel: On Sunday, Harry Bicket and the English Concert continued their annual series of concert performances of his operas and oratorios at Carnegie Hall with “Rodelinda.”“Messiah” is Christmas music, but not entirely, since Jesus’ birth occupies only a few minutes of this long meditation on his life and example. The Tallis Scholars, though, offered a real Christmas program of largely Renaissance works focused on the shepherds who receive the news of the Nativity.Under their founder and director, Peter Phillips, these 10 singers displayed the floating silkiness, light without seeming insubstantial, that has been Tallis’s trademark over its remarkable career.With the parts of Clemens’s “Missa Pastores quidnam vidistis” interwoven with other pieces, the concert was notable for its exploration of different composers’ treatments of the same texts. Pedro de Cristo’s straightforwardly lyrical, almost folk-inflected “Quaeramus cum pastoribus” preceded Giovanni Croce’s grander version. And Jacob Obrecht’s plainchant-and-elaboration “Salve regina” came before Peter Philip’s later, more declamatory one.At Carnegie, the English Concert brought its characteristic spirited polish — moderate yet exciting — to “Rodelinda,” a work that Bicket has helped make a sterling recent addition to the Metropolitan Opera’s standard repertory. The cast of six was individually impressive and, even better, well matched. The soprano Lucy Crowe’s voice warmed in the title role as the afternoon went on, and her portrayal was gripping from the start. The countertenor Iestyn Davies, as her believed-to-be-dead husband, Bertarido, had, as usual, special time-stopping persuasiveness in slow music.It was refined work. But the performance over the past week that has lingered with me most is clear. If someone asks for a recommendation — for the holidays, or for music in New York in general — my answer is the same as it’s been for years: Trinity’s “Messiah.” More

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      Review: Kate Soper’s ‘The Hunt’ Makes the Medieval Modern

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      Kate Soper’s latest stage work freely moves between legend and anachronism for a story about three virgins taking charge of their bodies.“I was delighted to learn from this charming song all about the qualities, habits and foibles of the unicorn, or ‘monoceron,’” a character says near the start of “The Hunt,” Kate Soper’s latest work of music theater.“‘Monoceron,’” another replies, “is used to describe a real one-horned animal, whereas ‘unicornus’ is the term for the mythical creature” — only to nervously add, “I mean, I’m sure you already knew that.”It’s a quintessentially Soper moment: the language ever-so-slightly elevated, the dialogue bookish, droll and self-effacing. But “The Hunt,” which premiered on Thursday at the Miller Theater at Columbia University, is different from her other stage works.That fun fact about the proper name for a unicorn is actually one of just a few brainy asides in this show. Plot-driven and focused, and unambiguously political, “The Hunt” is more conventional — and more easily enjoyable — than Soper’s discursive, essayistic theater pieces that explore lofty questions about art and love, like “Ipsa Dixit” (2016) or “The Romance of the Rose” (remarkably, another major stage premiere of hers from this year).“The Hunt” most resembles Soper’s first music theater work, “Here Be Sirens” (2014), about three mythical sopranos passing time between encounters with doomed sailors, accompanying themselves at a piano. Now, fast-forward a bit to Middle Ages Europe, where three virgins, accompanying themselves on a violin and ukulele, have been hired by a royal court as bait for a unicorn, “whose conquest will bring riches to our kingdom, expansion of our realm, and everlasting power over all our enemies.”Each design element of the production, directed by Ashley Kelly Tata, blends medieval imagery with contemporary interjections.Rob Davidson for Miller Theatre at Columbia UniversityWhat follows is a darkly funny fairy tale — set, according to the score, in “medieval and/or contemporary times” — about their 99 days on the job: playing the part of perfect maidens, singing songs about unicorns and occasionally indulging in a filthy riddle. Think “Waiting for Godot,” but with the female rebelliousness of a Sofia Coppola film.Along the way, the three characters — sopranos, as in “Sirens” — begin to both fear and resent the king’s control over their bodies, with irony (“they said all the reading was disturbing my tranquillity”) that’s wry until it’s indignant. The only way out, to keep the unicorn from ever coming and to make a new life for themselves, is to take charge of their sexuality and, well, not be so pure anymore.In program notes, Soper admits that “The Hunt” is “the least abstract thing I’ve made,” but that it could be pulled back into abstraction — to not be “a little bit too like ‘Sex and the City’ meets Margaret Atwood” — by Ashley Kelly Tata, the director, who also staged “Ipsa Dixit.”Indeed, little of “The Hunt” suggests a literal treatment: neither Camilla Tassi’s projections that blend the aesthetic of illuminated manuscripts with selfie livestreams, nor Terese Wadden’s costumes, which evoke medieval maidenhood while revealing, under the performers’ dresses, white sneakers. Masha Tsimring’s lighting offers Brechtian distinction between dialogue and inner monologue, and Tata’s direction slowly dissolves pristine, satirized virginal presentation into something wilder, and free.Crucial to all this is Aoshuang Zhang’s scenic design. The action of Soper’s libretto unfolds in a forest clearing and a castle; but at the Miller, everything took place within a unit set of wooden panels that made up a large proscenium-filling wall. If you squinted long enough, they could be distant relatives of tree trunks. Mostly, though, the space just looks like a prison.And that’s how it feels over time for Fleur, Briar and Rue — the three virgins, who wanted this job, it emerges, to escape their different pasts, yet find themselves ambivalent about it. The room and board is nice, but after a while, the dumbly hot stable boy (a silent role played by Ian Edlund) begins to look increasingly tempting; so does any other latent desire.The show’s three performers take up folk songs adapted from historical texts by Hildegard von Bingen, Thibaut de Champagne, Christina Rossetti and more.Rob Davidson for Miller Theatre at Columbia UniversityEach performer charts this journey with charisma and persuasiveness, even if the jokes of Soper’s book don’t always land. As Rue, Hirona Amamiya matches sometimes showy, sometimes touching violin playing with petulant horniness and heart. Christiana Cole, as Briar, springs around the stage, often plucking the ukulele, with irrepressible energy and, in the end, more optimism than her fellow maidens.Brett Umlauf, who performed alongside Soper in “Sirens,” has a bright, Kristen Chenoweth-like soprano that lends itself well to Fleur’s desperate respectability and sinister sunniness. On livestreamed updates for the kingdom, she smiles through saying that she has “a good feeling” about Day 17 … and 43 … and 82. But the moment she stops recording, her face slackens into a hilarious but lonely frown familiar to anyone who has ever filmed a selfie.Together, they spin out the melodies of Soper’s score, which takes on a repetitive structure similar to the plot. (Mila Henry is the music director.) Each update from the virgins comes from the same sound world, just as each comment from the king unfurls over an electronic drone. Briar introduces deceptively straightforward folk songs, whose lyrics are pulled and adapted (sometimes even translated by Soper) from historical texts by Hildegard von Bingen, Thibaut de Champagne, Christina Rossetti and more. Entr’acte numbers step out of the action entirely for a solo ballad with a cappella backing.In the end, the work adds up to something that few would qualify as absolutely an opera or a musical, or even a play with music — but, in classic Soper fashion, none of them and all of them at once.Her finest touch in this score may be the occasional overlaying of three blocks of text for the sopranos, in which a small phrase is sung while the rest is babbled. It’s another trademark move, the kind of Soperian gesture that surfaces elsewhere in the singer-songwriter-meets-troubadour aesthetic; the carefree noodling on the instruments; the wit of a virtuosic violin solo gesture being met with the silly strum of the ukulele. Not to mention when, on a bad trip induced by sugar cubes, the virgins devolve into primitive communication, Meredith Monk-like tongue trilling that swirls in its phrasing, free of any traditional pitch or notation.That scene, though, drags on. As is often the case with Soper’s stage works, you feel, near the end, as if the score has overstated itself, that it could have benefited from a quick snip of the garden shears.What I do wish were longer is the run of “The Hunt” itself. Thursday’s premiere was one of just two performances. Not for the first time, Soper has written a show that could feasibly appeal to an Off Broadway crowd somewhere like Ars Nova. There, it could reach more people over more dates. And the more people who know about her, the better.The HuntRepeats on Saturday at the Miller Theater at Columbia University, Manhattan; millertheatre.com. More

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      Kate Soper Returns to Opera With a Story Medieval and Modern

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      On a recent summer morning in New York, three sopranos, a director and a small crew gathered for a rehearsal of “The Hunt,” a new opera by Kate Soper.One soprano had a ukulele stored offstage. Another had a violin close at hand. And a third, placed center stage at the Miller Theater at Columbia University, mimed speaking into a smartphone as the day’s blocking work began.While that character, Fleur, primped and preened for an imagined camera as if on a livestream, she bragged about her “social media fluency” on an address to a “royal hiring academy.” All three sopranos were creating separate, self-taped auditions, for a show within the show.And yet: They were clearly doing so in some bygone era.“The King seeks spotless maidens for the hunt of the unicorn,” the sopranos recited in unison, “whose conquest will bring riches to our kingdom, expansion of our realm and everlasting power over all our enemies.”So far, so anachronistic. All of this, though, was precisely on brand for Soper, the composer and librettist of “The Hunt,” who was also in the auditorium day, keeping a close eye on the early rehearsal for the opera, which premieres at the Miller on Oct. 12.Ever since her witty and sophisticated chamber opera “Here Be Sirens,” from 2014, Soper has been plying fields similar to the one she has cultivated in “The Hunt.” She consistently borrows ancient literary texts and tropes — freely quoting from and playing with, say, Aristotle or Christine de Pizan — in dramatic works that have contemporary urgency and comic thrust.Soper has been known for witty, idiosyncratic stage works since the creation of “Here Be Sirens” in 2014.Amir Hamja/The New York Times“The Hunt” revives texts from Hildegard von Bingen and Thibaut de Champagne, among others. (On some occasions, Soper also writes her own translations.) And, as in “Sirens,” the instrumentation is limited to what the soprano performers can play onstage while also singing her complex music.Because of pandemic delays, this new opera is Soper’s second major stage premiere of 2023: In February, her grandest dramatic creation to date, “The Romance of the Rose,” made its belated debut at Long Beach Opera in California.“Probably this is the only year of my life in which I’ll have two opera premieres,” Soper said, self-deprecatingly, with a laugh during a telephone interview. Still, there’s nothing that suggests she won’t remain in demand — in New York, on the West Coast or even elsewhere.After all, her work is readily available to curious listeners. An archival video of Morningside Opera’s scrappy, celebrated production of “Sirens” — which includes Soper in its cast — can be streamed for free on Vimeo. And on YouTube, Long Beach Opera’s more recent highlight reel from “Rose” shows Soper expanding her compositional palette.In “Rose” there is the kind of experimentalism that Soper has regularly engaged in as co-director of the cutting-edge Wet Ink Ensemble. But there are also numbers that approach the hummable quality of show tunes.“This is not the kind of opera I thought I would write when I was in grad school,” Soper said. “That’s part of what ‘Sirens’ is about, feeling just sort of disgruntled and ashamed of some of my musical impulses: ‘No one’s going to take me seriously if I write this stupid show-tunes stuff.’”She added that the character she sang in “Sirens” was “struggling with this idea that you can’t have pleasure and intellect at the same time, or something. Like most people, I just sort of have gotten over my completely pointless hangups I had in my 20s or early 30s.”Ashley Tata, center, is directing “The Hunt” at the Miller Theater at Columbia University.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesThe soprano Christiana Cole, who plays Briar in “The Hunt,” said that Soper’s writing is some of the richest that they have sung, in a career that has encompassed both contemporary classical music and Elton John’s stage adaptation of “The Devil Wears Prada.”“I have done so many new pieces in my career,” Cole said. “Sometimes there are big hits and sometimes there are big misses.” But in Soper’s music, they added, avant-garde density merges with tunefulness in rare fashion.“It’s as though Kate has a microscope, and she uses it on every measure,” Cole said. “The level of detail is not just incredible because it’s maximalist and baroque at the same time — but it’s amazing because it sounds good.”In “The Hunt,” Cole also plays the principal ukulele part, in songs that, they said, are not easily scanned for patterns.“The way the words sit on this very Minimalist, repetitive, beautiful ukulele part that I’m playing — the text sits differently every time,” Cole said. “For the audience, the feeling is that you are both listening to something that is ancient, that has been around forever, and that also does something different to your body than any music you’ve ever heard.”There is asymmetry, too, in Soper’s approach to contemporary political commentary in “The Hunt.” While the opera mines ancient lore about unicorns and how to catch them — per canonic literature, virgins are the best bait — it also tweaks that received wisdom through contemporary discussions surrounding gender presentation. By consciously setting out to cast a nonbinary soprano for the role of Briar, Soper hoped to welcome transgender rights to her earlier explorations of gender.“Sirens,” Soper said, asked: “How do you go through life when you want to change who you are but can’t? How do you deal with expectations, based on how you helplessly present yourself?”By contrast, she sees “Rose” as being “a bit more open: like ‘How do you stay in love?’ And ‘Who are you in love?’ And ‘How do you try to empathetically perceive the world, in other people, without constantly getting wrapped up in your own tendencies?’”A recent rehearsal for “The Hunt,” which Soper said is about how to “survive in a culture that is specifically hostile to what you are.”Amir Hamja/The New York Times“The Hunt” is less concerned with those internal questions, and more with threats from the outside. “Certain new norms and ways of behaving — and ways of reacting to thought — seem suddenly medieval,” Soper said. “Who has power, and who has rights?”This opera, she added, is ultimately about how to “survive in a culture that is specifically hostile to what you are. And what do you do? What’s the solution?”In the interview, Soper didn’t want to give an answer that would spoil “The Hunt.” But the production’s director, Ashley Tata, who also staged Soper’s “Ipsa Dixit” at the Miller, pointed to the fact that the theater’s listing for the show credits an intimacy choreographer — so it isn’t much of a spoiler to say that the opera embraces physical pleasure.Soper said that there were “two things I felt I could offer, despite the lack of optimism I feel.”First, “When someone tells you that you’re disgusting and shameful and you don’t own your body, you can use your body to give and receive pleasure,” she said. And second, “You can say: I can do what I want with my body. You actually do have autonomy.”The intimacy among performers in “The Hunt” is remarkable, in part because of the chaste turn that much of contemporary opera has pursued in a politically fraught era. By contrast, Soper’s characters are always alive to the possibility of pleasure, even when the path forward is murky.Also enjoyable is how literate her characters are in exploring their identities. “That tends to happen in my operas, that there’s a self-conscious readership going on,” Soper said. “In ‘Here Be Sirens,’ my character was constantly reading and referring to books — as if that was going to help her.”These investigations are also laced with humor — another seemingly lost art in American opera. And Soper hopes that the pleasure she allows for characters translates to enjoyment for audiences, too.“Somehow it’s important to me,” she said. “I’m also going to write some dirty jokes in this opera. And I am a woman — whatever, deal with it.” More

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      Capturing John Zorn at 70: One Concert Is Just a Start

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      The Miller Theater at Columbia University began a series of programs to celebrate this restless and eclectic musician’s milestone year.John Zorn may have turned 70 this month, but he looks younger.He sounds younger, too — energetic and irrepressible. Recent recordings of Zorn’s music, issued on his Tzadik label, include the swinging, mystic patterns of “Homenaje a Remedios Varo” and the brightly, largely consonant chamber guitar writing of “Nothing Is as Real as Nothing.” The coming “Parrhesiastes” showcases his trademark ferocity.Zorn has been taking his stylistically varied live performances on the road to celebrate this birthday. His packed calendar includes a recent multiday festival in San Francisco, a daylong marathon at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and appearances at Roulette in Brooklyn.On Thursday, the Miller Theater at Columbia University took its turn, with the first in a series of “composer portrait” concerts that continue into November. Throughout the evening, this most hyperactive of American composers could be seen bounding with ease between the stage and his seat in the audience.With a ringleader’s zeal, Zorn introduced different groupings of musicians. During the changes between pieces, he leaped up onstage to describe his childhood interest in, say, the Dada writer Tristan Tzara, whose theatrical work “The Gas Heart” provided inspiration for Zorn’s mini-opera of the same name, performed on Thursday.Befitting his reputation, the pacing of motivic events inside that work and others tended to be fast and furious. Yet each piece also communicated joy — and a certain fellowship among the interpreters who had spent time together mastering Zorn’s rigorous, change-on-a-dime aesthetic.Here, the music featured the barreling riffs familiar from a lot of his chamber works, jazz tunes and extreme rock. But I came away from the Miller show dazzled by way in which a supple new approach to beauty has established itself in the past decade or two of his output. (Something similar has been going on with Zorn’s saxophone playing — not least in his New Masada Quartet, which has held crowds rapt at the Village Vanguard and Roulette in recent seasons.)Thursday’s concert began with a two-trumpet fanfare, “Circe” (2019), rendered with panache by Peter Evans and Sam Jones. The shortest piece on the program at a mere three minutes, it was also the most consistently hardcore. Yet its aggressive motifs were precisely coordinated — and given the independence to roam, even amid the overall feel of maelstrom. In between piercing trills, you could perceive and appreciate the way units of melody passed between the players.From left, the violinists Christopher Otto and David Fulmer, the cellists Jay Campbell and Michael Nicolas, and the violist John Pickford Richards, who formed a quintet for Zorn’s “Sigil Magick.”Rob Davidson for Miller Theatre at Columbia UniversityThe three other pieces on the program, all from 2020, focused on Zorn’s writing for strings. Each involved one or more members of the JACK Quartet. (Austin Wulliman, a violinist with the group, was not available, but David Fulmer substituted with aplomb.) And there were other guests, including the cellist Michael Nicolas in the string quintet “Sigil Magick.”In that work, listeners were offered short, droning chords, as well as polyphonic ensemble passages of whipsawing extended technique. But players within the quintet also diverged to present deliriously contrasting material: At one such juncture, while two parts held down a static pattern with a parched, brittle approach to sound production, the violinist Christopher Otto launched into sumptuously singing parlando.At the end of the concert, the violist Yura Lee joined the JACK players and Nicolas to create a sextet for — deep breath — “Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science.” At over 20 packed minutes, this struck me as one of the loveliest and most widely ranging chamber music pieces in Zorn’s considerable catalog.In addition to moments of chromatic density, the work welcomed gently strummed early music melody into its soundscape. At another point, both cellists bowed doleful yet gorgeous patterns near the top of the necks of their instruments, close to the tuning pegs, collaborating on a slightly sour intonation that seemed in line with medieval tunings. Given this range, “Prolegomena” shares something with recent Zorn string quartets, like “The Alchemist,” which JACK has recorded with his other quartets (for a planned release on Tzadik in 2024).In between the quintet and sextet came Zorn’s adaptation of “The Gas Heart.” This was Zorn in absurdist-opera mode. Here, the JACK cellist Jay Campbell and Nichols joined two percussionists — Sae Hashimoto and Ches Smith — to form the cast. Smith provided expertly swinging rhythms at a traditional kit, but also slurped water and appeared to be operating a device that played back giddy laughter; when not playing vibraphone or other pitched percussion, Hashimoto could be seen torturing a pillow with a long whip or sawing a wooden board.The cello music — often smartly, subtly amplified — was sometimes grim and gravely, and produced by bowing below the bridge. But there were also delicate moments for the strings, often positioned in contrast to some of the wildness of the percussionists. This was all funny, as intended. Every bar, though, seemed as carefully deliberate as in the more obviously “profound” string music of “Prolegomena.”And here may be a secret of Zorn’s longevity: A piece may tend comic or grave, but every moment is intensely felt.Earlier on Thursday, rumors had swirled online about the possible arrival of the Tzadik catalog on streaming services. On Friday, Zorn’s distributor, Redeye, confirmed that the move would happen, next week. This is big news, given how long Zorn has held out against streaming — and given the amount of care he takes in designing his physical releases.However you access it — on recordings or in person — Zorn’s recent catalog is worth seeking out. This fall, the Miller will host Zorn and his New Masada Quartet, on a bill with one of his great metal groups, Simulacrum. Then comes a program of his music with the star soprano Barbara Hannigan.The implicit message: One night is probably insufficient in encapsulating this artist’s range. But it could, as on Thursday, provide a riotously good start. More

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      Review: A Portrait Reveals a Composer With a Dramatic Edge

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      The Miller Theater’s Composer Portraits series returns with a program of Liza Lim’s music, featuring the JACK Quartet.The last time I sat down with the music of the Australian composer Liza Lim, it was to take in the broad swath of her operatic catalog — collected last year by the Elision Ensemble in its “Singing in Tongues.” That release, which included Lim’s avant-garde take on “The Oresteia,” left me hungry to hear more of her theatrical music.Alas, a Lim program at the Miller Theater at Columbia University on Thursday didn’t feature any of it. Still, the concert — the Miller’s first Composer Portrait of the season — confirmed the ways in which Lim can create drama through experimental conceits.The program offered the U.S. premiere of her “String Creatures,” written for the JACK Quartet. It also featured the cellist Jay Campbell, a member of that pathbreaking group, in the 2016 solo work “an ocean beyond earth.”Or was it a solo? In “ocean,” each string of the cello is outfitted with a cotton thread attached to the strings of a nearby violin. Campbell occasionally tugged on those threads, vibrating the violin strings independently of his instrument; at other points, he alternately bowed the connective threads and the cello’s strings. The result was an invitation to consider a range of discrete ways to produce sound across the two instruments.That work was also a good example of what distinguishes Lim. Her approach is flush with aspects of contemporary experimental music that, in other hands, threaten to become clichés (like harsh, grating string sounds and breathy extended technique). But Lim uses those now-familiar timbres as suspense-fomenting moments in music that has a sure sense of proportion — and an unmistakable direction.In “ocean,” that dramatic trajectory resulted in ever-firmer evocations of the cello’s more booming stature — with Campbell gradually moving beyond initial, wispy, cotton-string disturbances. After that came gentle yet direct bowing; then, finally, forceful pizzicato.Lim’s expressive writing takes on more power with the addition of more instruments. At the outset of the three-movement “String Creatures,” country-western “chop” accents — a percussive bowing of the strings that is repeated for rhythmic effect — lent the music propulsive momentum.There were other highlights in the piece for the JACK players: The violinist Christopher Otto had multiple, sinewy solo features; a brief lullaby teased at the end of the first movement appeared later on as a spotlight for Campbell, progressing with what sounded like microtonal intervals.Yet ghostly ensemble textures for the entire quartet were the highlight. At times, the group seemed to fall in lock step, cohering around a mechanical Minimalism. But while keeping the hushed dynamics steady, Lim bent individual string lines away from the expected polyphonic patterns.It was all gripping material. So now, after an evening like this, who will bring her richly designed dramas to New York?Composer Portraits: Liza LimPerformed on Thursday at the Miller Theater at Columbia University, Manhattan. More

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      Review: For Once, Singing of Complete and Utter Clarity

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      “Voices of the Immaculate,” a new cantata by Kati Agocs performed on Thursday by Lucy Dhegrae, was entirely, word for word, lucid.It can be hard to understand people when they sing. Melodies are often complex; accompaniments are dense; vocalists favor the musical line over crisp diction. Millions, after all, have thought the Beatles wrote the lyric “The girl with colitis goes by.”Proponents of performing opera in English translation — in English-speaking countries, of course — say that intelligibility is their goal. But the results are often no clearer to the audience than German or Italian would have been.So it was no small feat that the text in “Voices of the Immaculate” — a simmering new cantata by Kati Agocs, given a resolute premiere performance by Lucy Dhegrae at the Miller Theater at Columbia University on Thursday — was entirely, word for word, lucid. What a relief not to be reaching for the program every other sentence to find out what was being sung.Indeed, “Voices,” scored for singer and quintet, was conceived, as Agocs said in an onstage discussion, with transparency as a first principle. Her text — an alternation of fragments from the Book of Revelation with lines from the testimony of survivors of sexual abuse by the clergy — demands to be heard, and is. In Dhegrae’s calm, purposeful delivery, there was no escaping what she and Agocs were saying in this seven-section, 30-minute piece.Not that their story isn’t ambiguous. Revelation is quoted here not, as usual, for its apocalyptic fervor, but in a mood of utopian sweetness. Is this meant to be an ironic counterpoint to the accounts of the abused? If so, the irony is held very close to the vest, with music that feels quietly, unremittingly sincere.Dhegrae, while not embodying a character per se, presented a beautifully underplayed childlike persona.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesMoving solemnly around the stage, Dhegrae, while not embodying a character per se, presented a beautifully underplayed childlike persona. A passage of scat turned into something eerily like baby talk, and a section of testimony with the refrain “I believe God should have been there with me” was delivered with plain, luminous simplicity.It isn’t Sprechstimme, but the vocal line has the naturalness of speech; direct without being tuneful, it recalled at moments the mid-20th-century American art song style of a Samuel Barber. This heavy material could have been milked for mawkish portentousness; Agocs and Dhegrae realized that restraint would be more powerful.In the accompaniment, from the quintet Third Sound (Sooyun Kim, flute; Romie de Guise-Langlois, clarinet; Karen Kim, violin; Michael Nicolas, cello; Mika Sasaki, piano), slight jittery motifs yielded to arid expanses. In one section, Sasaki switched to celesta, for a chilling melding of ominousness and guilelessness.All isn’t near-silence. A moment of aggressive winds illustrates the fires of Revelation, and the piece is filled out with spacious — if still understated — postludes after the vocal sections. But Agocs usually paints with a light brush: a faint drone in the strings, say, with a dark rumble in the piano underneath.This was the resumption of the Miller’s signature Composer Portraits series, and Third Sound opened the concert with Agocs’s intimate “Immutable Dreams,” from 2007. Its first movement is a gradually intensifying assemblage of feathery, glassy wisps; the second, dominated by a piano solo that harkens to Romantic heft; the third, an earnest elegy with tangy harmonies and an effusive cello line.Thursday also marked the return of in-person performances at the Miller. (Composer Portraits devoted to Luca Francesconi, Felipe Lara, Matana Roberts and Thomas Meadowcroft fill out the season.) To be back in a space that presents new music so warmly and, in the best sense, casually was a gift.Composer Portraits: Kati AgocsPerformed on Thursday at the Miller Theater, Manhattan. More