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    The Composer Julia Wolfe Focuses on Climate in ‘unEarth’

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    Julia Wolfe’s latest in a series of increasingly political, oratorio-like works, “unEarth,” premieres this week at the New York Philharmonic.Julia Wolfe, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and co-founder of Bang on a Can, has a way with words.In “Anthracite Fields,” the coal-dark highlight of a series of folklike, oratorio-adjacent works in which Wolfe, 64, has been putting American injustices under her unsparing sonic microscope, she lists the men named John with single-syllable surnames who can be found on an index of Pennsylvania mining accidents — a litany hundreds of Johns long.Her memorial to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory disaster, “Fire in my mouth,” concludes with an ethereal incantation of the 146 workers who died, their names drifting in sound, as if into the smoke of history. “Her Story,” a reflection on women’s rights, quotes some of the choicest insults that were spat at suffragists a century ago, as if to ask whether they sound familiar today.Now comes “unEarth,” a confrontation with climate change that premieres on Thursday at the New York Philharmonic, with Jaap van Zweden leading the soprano Else Torp, the men of the Crossing and the Young People’s Chorus of New York City, in a staging by the director Anne Kauffman. It starts, and ends, with words sung by the children who helped write them.Wolfe’s “Fire in my mouth” at David Geffen Hall in 2019.Caitlin Ochs for The New York Times“Of course, it’s so important for everyone but particularly poignant for younger people,” Wolfe said of the climate crisis in a recent interview. “A lot of the leadership right now, a lot of the feisty leadership is coming from young people, particularly from young women.”The texts that Wolfe uses in “unEarth” have a sense of literary adventure familiar from her earlier oratorios. She read widely to research it, and noted the influence of such writers as Sami Grover, Peter Wohlleben and Elizabeth Kolbert, a friend. The libretto draws on Emily Dickinson and the book of Genesis; in the second movement of three, “Forest,” the word tree is translated into myriad languages, which she pounds into a celebration of all things arboreal, backed by conga drums.“She is always taking kernels of text that have a lot of resonance in the stories of the world we live in,” Donald Nally, the conductor of the Crossing, said of Wolfe. “Honestly, at some point, you start to stop thinking about the words and you drift off into larger ideas.”Many of Wolfe’s compositions — another, an orchestral work called “Pretty,” will premiere at the Berlin Philharmonic next week, under its chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko, a Wolfe admirer — have had political themes. But the larger ideas of “unEarth” are more directly delivered than those of any of her other socially conscious but primarily historical oratorios, dating back to “Steel Hammer” more than a decade ago.The impulse to speak plainly comes not just from the subject matter, but from Wolfe’s chosen collaborators. When she decided to involve the Young People’s Chorus in the work, as she had in “Fire,” she sought the input of its singers; she and Kauffman asked its conductors to lead the choristers in discussions about the climate crisis, and recorded them.“Something that I remember is everybody agreeing on this sense of urgency,” Ryoko Leyh, 16, said of the conversations she took part in. “Everybody was saying something like ‘I’m scared,’ or ‘I’m always thinking about it, it’s always on my mind and making me anxious.’ So I feel like we all had different ideas of what is actually going on and what we can do to stop climate change, but we all had that collective sense of dread.”The children of the chorus come from all kinds of educational backgrounds, said Francisco J. Núñez, its artistic director. For many of them, the discussions were a learning opportunity; some were as young as 8.“It really made me think on how impactful learning about climate change and global warming itself can be on the young population,” Irene Cunto, 12, said, “because at the end, we’ll be the ones that’s facing it.”Wolfe’s works in this vein have grown increasingly political. “I can be poetic, poetic, poetic,” she said, “but then at a certain point it’s like, what are we doing here?”Amrita Stuetzle for The New York TimesThe process was instructive for Wolfe, too. She was amazed at the subtlety of the conversations, and decided to use parts of them in the piece. It begins with a quotation of one of the most junior participants, who saw global warming as “like a monster devouring the Earth.” The work ends with another quotation, this time of an older singer, as their phrase “hope requires action” is chanted like a mantra, before the chorus and the soprano demand that the audience “act,” with an insistent, if fearful and minor-key, final crescendo.“We just feel powerless because of this idea that we’ve inherited all these problems and now it’s our responsibility to fix everything,” Leyh said, pointing to the importance of the chorus singing words its members have written themselves. “It’s like we’re being given a platform that we don’t usually have, literally, to say what we want to say in a way that we know is going to be heard.”Making the Young People’s Chorus the voice of hope in “unEarth,” and ensuring that the audience would have to look at them “in the face,” as Wolfe put it, offered the composer something of a way through the dilemmas involved in creating explicitly political art, a challenge that climate-conscious composers are finding becomes more acute as catastrophes grow. Wolfe said that she was trying not to be too didactic, but that she was content with her solution in the final movement, “Fix It,” which lists a number of ways in which individuals can make a difference — Meatless Mondays, No Mow May — as well as broader policy concepts, like “reforestation” and “solarification.”“I can be poetic, poetic, poetic,” Wolfe said, “but then at a certain point it’s like, what are we doing here?”The Philharmonic commissioned “unEarth” after the success of “Fire in my mouth” four years ago, and is presenting it on the first of two programs that make up “Earth,” a climate mini-festival. The second program, next week, includes the belated local premiere of John Luther Adams’s “Become Desert,” which debuted in Seattle five years ago.“In the end, music is about emotion,” said Deborah Borda, the president and chief executive of the Philharmonic, “and Julia is able to combine, in that way that we cannot quite explain, a combination of beauty and emotion. It carries an even stronger message as a result.”Each of Wolfe’s oratorios has offered a different answer to the question of where the balance of poetry and politics lies, though she sees a progression through them. “Anthracite Fields” was not exactly shy about its views — it sets a speech by John L. Lewis, the militant leader of the United Mine Workers — but, as one listener pointed out to her, it does not explicitly mention protest. “Fire,” partly as a consequence, has an entire, thumping movement called “Protest.” “Her Story” is more of an inquiry into change than an indictment of the past, but as Wolfe put it, “it’s a little sassier.”“UnEarth,” though, includes lines like “the house is on fire,” and “clean up your corporation.” It goes further, and with good reason.“The others were more reflective. ‘Who were we?’ ‘Who are we?’” Wolfe said. “And this is like: ‘Guess what. We have to do something.’” More

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      Review: John Luther Adams’s ‘Vespers’ Pray for an Earth in Crisis

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      John Luther Adams’s latest premiere, “Vespers of the Blessed Earth,” is a tear-splattered departure from his usual style.Lately, the composer John Luther Adams has been thinking about art — and artists — in times of crisis.Amid war, a pandemic, political precarity and looming climate disaster, someone like him can retreat into nostalgia, or turn to an aesthetic of proselytism, or speak directly to current events as if following Brecht’s famous epigraph from his “Svendborg Poems,” “In the dark times / will there also be singing? / Yes, there will also be singing. / About the dark times.”Adams sees himself as something of a modern Monet, painting his monumental water lilies during World War I. “Like Monet, in my own lesser way, the best thing I can do now, for myself and for other people,” he wrote in a recent essay, “is what I’ve done throughout my life: to follow my art, with an ever-deeper sense of urgency and devotion.”That sense has led him to his latest work, “Vespers of the Blessed Earth,” which received its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on Friday, one night after its unveiling in Philadelphia. Rarely, if ever, has Adams written music that has been so explicitly felt, and more directly stated — but also so ineffective.In a way, the urgency of climate-related art has caught up to Adams, whose career has been an extended exercise in marveling at the natural world through music. He was once an activist but settled on full-time composition, mostly from his minimalist, longtime home in Alaska, a place lovingly and eloquently documented in his books “Winter Music” and “Silences So Deep.”And his work, while not overtly political, has come from a place of wonder and conscience, qualities that extend to his everyday life: Rather than fly, he took a train to Philadelphia from his house in New Mexico. Adams has long been a master of creating environments in sound — not tone paintings per se, but immersive, inventive evocations of, for example, bird song, the desert and, most famously, the open water in “Become Ocean,” for which he won the Pulitzer Prize (and the love of Taylor Swift). Awe-inspiring, nearly religious to experience, his music is, at its finest, a font of appreciation for forces larger than ourselves.The “Vespers,” however, are different. Over five sections, this tear-splattered score mourns and damns, and declares where in the past Adams might have simply observed. It is, he told The New York Times in an interview, unusually expressive and personal. But in its bluntness — down to a spoken-word introduction, delivered on Friday by Charlotte Blake Alston, that laid out not the structure of the piece but its purpose — it feels like the work of a less assured artist.These first performances — by the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Crossing, one of our most consistently thrilling choral ensembles — didn’t happen under ideal circumstances. The conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, withdrew because of illness; and the original soprano soloist, Ying Fang, has been recovering from a vocal cord hemorrhage. She was replaced by Meigui Zhang, and the Crossing’s director, Donald Nally, took up the podium for the Adams (while at Carnegie, Marin Alsop filled in for the concert’s second half, a precise and transparent, yet terrifyingly alive “Rite of Spring”).But the reading didn’t seem to suffer. Nally is an experienced hand in Adams’s music, having premiered and recorded his “Canticles of the Holy Wind” with the Crossing. And on Friday, he navigated with cool command the idiosyncratic layout of the “Vespers” — four choruses and four string-and-percussion ensembles arranged across the stage, with a piano and harp in the middle, then woodwinds, brass and additional instruments aloft in the balconies.Adams’s score calls for brasses and woodwinds to be perched in balconies on either side of the stage.Chris LeeIn the first section, “A Brief Descent Into Deep Time,” percussive ringing and ghostly breaths give way to geological texts — the names and colors of rocks — describing two billion years’ worth of layers in the Grand Canyon. The words, set against suspended, seemingly static strings, come quickly, unintelligible as they blend and best taken in, as with most of Adams’s music, as if letting them wash over you.Insistently downward melodic phrases appear to echo section’s title until they emerge as the idée fixe of the entire piece, doleful and reflecting a world in decline. The gesture takes form next, in “A Weeping of Doves,” as wailing vocalise; and is subtler in “Night-Shining Clouds,” as the slowly sloping sheen of harmonics in the strings.The clearest allusion to the work’s liturgical title comes in the fourth section, “Litanies of the Sixth Extinction,” which is set to the scientific binomials of 193 species Adams describes in the score as “critically threatened and endangered.” (Why that includes the Kauai O’o, the long-extinct bird whose call inspired the fifth section, “Aria of the Ghost Bird,” is beyond me.)If the litany doesn’t quite land, it’s not Adams’s fault — though he does overlay the names to the point rendering them indistinguishable, with no time to register, much less grieve for them. The bigger difficulty, though, is that since 2020, a list like this has lost its power; people routinely saw unfathomably high infection rates, and the deaths of more than one million Americans. If that hasn’t been enough to inspire collective mourning, what chance could there have been for him?The last name among the “Litanies” is Homo sapiens — uncharacteristic for Adams, and more expected of a comparatively immature artist’s rhetoric. But there is a return to form in that “Aria of the Ghost Bird,” in which the strings are again suspended, though foundational, under Zhang’s elegant but sorrowful vocal line, which is revealed to be drawn-out adaptation of the Kauai O’o call.That bird song — captured in 1987, in a recording of the last of the species — does appear as a transcription at the end, played by a piccolo and orchestral bells perched in a balcony at the rear of the hall. The moment unfurls with freedom, its long rests patient, its repeated call beautiful and heartbreakingly lonely. It’s here, as Adams turns his ear and pen back toward nature, that his music is most powerful.Philadelphia OrchestraPerformed on Friday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More