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      ‘Last Days,’ Opera Inspired by Kurt Cobain Film, Heads to L.A.

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      Oliver Leith’s opera, based on the Gus Van Sant film that fictionalized the end of Kurt Cobain’s life, has its U.S. premiere in Los Angeles.It can feel easy to cast a swift judgment on the composer Oliver Leith. First, there are his titles, such as “Uh huh, Yeah,” “Bendy Broken Telemann No.3,” and “yhyhyhyhyh.” Then, there is the inspiration for his sounds, in which everyday objects like glass bottles and cereal bowls are considered intensely, becoming weird instruments themselves.But if Leith seems flippant, he rejects that characterization entirely.“People talk about irony in society all the time now, and I find that a little dull,” Leith said in an interview. “It’s a very British way of looking at things. Like, ‘Oh, are you being serious or are you not?’ No; I am deadly serious when I’m doing these things. I’m just chasing this strange feeling.”Leith’s way of talking about music is a lot like his actual music: blurry and discursive, but also precisely evocative. That strange feeling he’s chasing, for example, is one he compared to being at a wake, where “outward joy and outward sadness” are possible at the same time.Listen to his works, and you’ll see what he means. Take his opera “Last Days,” which receives its U.S. premiere on Feb. 6 in Los Angeles as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella series. (The opera’s first recording will also be released on the Platoon label on April 5.) It is adapted from Gus Van Sant’s 2005 film of the same name, which fictionalizes the final days of Kurt Cobain.During its premiere run in London, in 2022, the opera garnered a lot of attention based on the assumption that it was a biographical work. “It’s so not about Kurt Cobain,” Leith said. “It couldn’t have more distance from its subjects than it has, I think.”Instead, Leith and the opera’s librettist, Matt Copson, wanted to write archetypes — like characters in a genre film, in which the magic lies in how far they stray from their stock expectations. Formally, “Last Days” also mirrors “the way that oral histories or myths are transmitted, where every iteration keeps the soul of a story, but changes skin,” said Caroline Polachek, who sings a prerecorded aria in the show.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 Boston Symphony Plays a Sober ‘Lady Macbeth’

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      The orchestra, under Andris Nelsons, gave a clear and controlled concert performance of Shostakovich’s crushing opera at Carnegie Hall.The Metropolitan Opera’s production of Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” is a garish explosion, its imagery drawn from cartoons and the Keystone Kops, its madcap energy never-ending. It’s fabulous, but the score can feel whooshed into a blender’s whirlwind.That was very much not the case on Tuesday at Carnegie Hall, when the Boston Symphony Orchestra played “Lady Macbeth” in concert. Even with some bits of staging, Boston’s performance under its music director, Andris Nelsons, was undistracted: firmly, soberly clear and controlled.Shostakovich has been a yearslong focus of this ensemble and conductor. They approach the composer with a poise that reveals just how much of this opera’s score is sheerly lovely, tender and melancholy; the frenetic, exaggerated jokiness for which it became best known is less omnipresent than you might have recalled.“Lady Macbeth,” about a 19th-century housewife in the Russian provinces who is surrounded by boorish men and turns to murder, was written in the early 1930s, when Shostakovich was still a budding brilliance. The work’s initial good fortunes — and its composer’s bright future — were infamously derailed in 1936, when Joseph Stalin walked out of a production in Moscow and an unsigned editorial appeared in Pravda, condemning the “stream of deliberately discordant sounds” and the “fidgeting, screaming neurasthenic music.”Often you can listen to the work and nod along to those words, even if today we may mean the judgment as praise. But on Tuesday, remarkably little sounded discordant, fidgeting, screaming or neurasthenic. Even a notorious effect at the end of Shostakovich’s raucous sonic depiction of sex, a slow trombone slide to evoke — well, you can decide what it evokes — was so understated that it didn’t arouse the usual audience laughter.Instead, the most memorable moments were quiet ones. Mellow strings and an almost pastoral flute combining under the protagonist’s father-in-law’s warning against workers trying to seduce her. A timpani’s rumble rising softly off growling cellos.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?  More

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      Met Opera Taps Its Endowment Again to Weather Downturn

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      The company has withdrawn nearly $40 million in additional funds from its endowment to cover expenses, but sees signs it may be emerging from its post-pandemic woes.The Metropolitan Opera, still reeling from the disruption brought by the pandemic, said on Thursday that it had withdrawn nearly $40 million in additional emergency funds from its endowment as it works to survive one of the most trying periods in its 141-year history.The move came after the Met took $30 million from its endowment fund last season to help cover operating expenses amid weak ticket sales and a cash shortfall. Nonprofits usually try to avoid drawing down their endowments, which are meant to grow over time while producing investment income. The Met’s endowment fund is now worth about $255 million, down from $309 million in July.“For most people the pandemic is over. For arts institutions, we’re still in it,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “But we see a way out. There is light at the end of the tunnel.”The company pointed to several signs that it may be turning the corner.Paid attendance has risen to about 73 percent so far this season from roughly 63 percent at the same point last season, and is nearly back to what it was just before the pandemic hit. The Met’s Live in HD cinema broadcasts — which contributed more than $15 million to the company’s bottom line before the pandemic, but are currently only breaking even — are beginning to draw larger crowds. And as the Met presents more contemporary opera, it is attracting younger audiences: The average age of single-ticket buyers for in-person performances has fallen to 44 from 50 before the pandemic.The Met expects cash gifts of more than $100 million to help replenish the endowment over the next few years. The company is also working to land a “transformative” gift, Gelb said. He declined to provide details, saying only that he hoped it would come “sooner rather than later.”Gelb said that the Met “obviously can’t make a habit” of dipping into its endowment, but that the withdrawal would help the company while ticket revenues recover and as it waits for expected donations.Victor Ryan Robertson, left, and Will Liverman, right, in Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” a contemporary opera that attracted an audience this season. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Under the extraordinary financial challenges and circumstances that we’re facing we believed it was the prudent thing to do,” he said. “The alternative would be not to perform.”The Met is hardly the only performing arts organization still struggling to emerge from the pandemic. Across the United States, regional theaters are staging fewer shows, giving fewer performances, laying off staff and, in some cases, shutting down. Orchestras and dance and opera companies have in recent months slashed budgets, sold real estate and trimmed their seasons to try to stay afloat.But the Met faces acute challenges. Mounting live opera is expensive, requiring lavish sets, star singers and a much larger orchestra and chorus than the biggest Broadway shows can boast. Inflation has added to the opera company’s burden, with the costs of shipping and materials increasing sharply. And ticket revenues last season from in-person performances and movie-theater broadcasts were down by about $25 million from before the pandemic.In addition to tapping its endowment, the Met said it would institute measures to cut costs and increase revenues that were suggested by Boston Consulting Group, which conducted a study of the company’s operations on a pro bono basis.The Met has already begun giving fewer performances: 194 this season, down from 215 last season. It plans to change its scheduling over the next few years so that each opera has a more condensed run; they currently can have two or three short runs that may be spread out in the fall, winter and spring. Doing so will allow the company, which sometimes presents as many as four different operas in the course of a week, to have fewer operas in rotation at any given moment. And the plans call for scheduling more of the Met’s most popular titles, like Puccini’s “La Bohème,” on weekends, when they tend to bring in substantially more revenue than less familiar works. These changes, along with other cost-cutting measures and more targeted marketing efforts, are expected to net the company about $25 million to $40 million each year.Even before the pandemic, the Met, the largest performing arts organization in the United States, with an annual budget of about $312 million, faced existential questions, as the old model in which subscribers would buy tickets to many productions each year faded.The pandemic, which forced the company to shut down for more than a year and a half, exacerbated those troubles. Many of the Met’s patrons, who are older, stopped attending live performances and cinema broadcasts as frequently, leaving the company looking for new audiences.This season, the Met accelerated its embrace of contemporary works, which have made up a greater share of the repertory in recent seasons.Modern operas have proved over the past few years to be more of a box-office draw on average than the classics. In December, Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” ended an eight-performance run with 78 percent attendance — outselling “La Bohème,” which had 74 percent attendance. Others fared less well: Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking,” which was promoted heavily and given the coveted spot to open the 2023-24 season, ended its nine-performance run in October with 62 percent attendance.Later this season the Met will bring back Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” hoping to replicate their success in earlier seasons, when they drew sellout crowds.Next season, the Met will present four contemporary operas, down from six this season. “Grounded,” about the toll of drone warfare by Jeanine Tesori and George Brant, will open the season in September. John Adams will conduct the Met premiere of his latest opera, “Antony and Cleopatra.” And Heggie’s “Moby Dick” and Osvaldo Golijov’s “Ainadamar” will also be on the agenda.Gelb said he was confident that the Met’s bet on contemporary opera would pay off, adding that ticket sales could surpass prepandemic levels next season. “We’re demonstrating that accessible, new work that is emotionally impactful can be as successful or more successful than revivals of classics,” he said.While works like “La Bohème” and Bizet’s “Carmen” continue to draw crowds, and a holiday version of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” had 87 percent attendance over 13 performances in December, there has been less interest in other staples of the repertory. A nine-performance revival of Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” ended in November with 56 percent attendance; an eight-performance run of Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” with a starry international cast, finished with 64 percent attendance.Gelb said that the company would continue to present an array of classics and revivals: Richard Strauss’s fairy tale opera “Die Frau ohne Schatten,” for one, will be staged in the 2024-25 season.The recent withdrawals have undone some of the Met’s halting attempts to rebuild its endowment, which has long been seen as too small for an institution of its size, and meant that the smaller fund did not benefit as much from the recent stock market rally. The Met, which has been authorized to draw an additional $40 million from the endowment, has withdrawn $36 million so far.Asked if he was concerned about the dwindling endowment, Gelb said: “It’s what keeps me up at night.” He said the latest withdrawals were necessary because the company was “fighting for our survival.”“The endowment is there certainly not to be raided,” he said, “but to be used in a time of crisis rather than going out of business.”Across the country, opera companies of all sizes are still grappling with the effects of the pandemic as they face smaller audiences because of shifting habits and lifestyles, rising costs and the loss of government aid that kept many alive during the pandemic.Opera Philadelphia eliminated five staff positions this season and slashed its budget by about 15 percent. Seattle Opera, seeing a steep drop in subscriptions, has significantly reduced its slate of performances, and Portland Opera recently said it would sell its headquarters to help pay off debt and replenish its endowment. Tulsa Opera scaled back its season, moving some performances to smaller venues. And Syracuse Opera, facing ticket sales that were still more than 40 percent below prepandemic levels and difficulties securing sponsors, announced in November that it was canceling the rest of its season and furloughing staff.“We’re competing with traveling Broadway shows and popular concerts,” said Camille Tisdel, the chair of Syracuse Opera’s board. “Families have only so much money to spend, and during the pandemic, people really got used to being at home.”The Met has so far avoided serious disruptions to its operations. But there are still fears that without a significant infusion of cash in the near future, there could be more turbulence.“I believe ultimately we are going to find a winning path,” Gelb said. “We have very loyal audiences and very loyal new audiences who believe the Met is a thrilling and exciting cultural institution. And ultimately that is how we’re going to fight our way out of this difficult hole that the pandemic has helped put us in.” More

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      Ewa Podles, a Rare Contralto With Sweeping Range, Dies at 71

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      With her molten chest voice and commanding presence, Ms. Podles, a galvanizing Polish opera singer, developed a cult following.Ewa Podles, the Polish contralto whose darkly molten, three-octave-plus voice and commanding presence made her a favorite of opera connoisseurs, died on Friday in Warsaw. She was 71.Her death, in a hospice center, was confirmed by her stepdaughter, Ania Marchwinska, who said the cause was lung cancer.Aficionados embraced Ms. Podles (whose full name was pronounced AE-vuh PODE-lesh) not just for her exciting performances, but also for how unusual she was: True contraltos — the lowest-lying female voice type, deeper than a mezzo-soprano — are hardly common.Developing the low chest register as much as the rest of the voice, a contralto is “like an alto in the lower range, like a soprano on top,” Ms. Podles told The New York Times in 1998. And she fit that bill: Though her tone was melancholically hooded and brooding, with a cavernous chest register, she also had the high notes and agility to excel at Handel and Rossini’s most demandingly florid roles.“It’s a very rare voice,” Ms. Podles said of her instrument.And she wielded it with utter authority. “Never, for even one moment of one recitative in any opera, was she anything but riveting in her conviction,” the conductor Will Crutchfield, who collaborated with her several times, said in a phone interview. “She had something to say.”Ewa Maria Podles was born on April 26, 1952, in Warsaw to Walery and Teresa (Sawicka) Podles, a member of the chorus of the Polish National Opera.“My mother was an extraordinary singer,” Ms. Podles told The Times. “She had a very, very deep voice, like a man. She recorded a bit on the radio, but everyone who heard her asked: ‘Is it really a woman singing?’”Ms. Podles didn’t have to fight for her low notes, either. “It’s the most natural register in my voice,” she said. “I was born with this chest voice. Some people hate the chest voice, and some people say: ‘Oh, it’s magnificent. I adore you.’”She studied in Warsaw at the conservatory that is now the Chopin University of Music, and she was a prizewinner at the 1978 International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. She made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1984, taking over for the great mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne, another singer with both earthy power and dazzling coloratura, in the title role of Handel’s “Rinaldo.” (That part, like many of Ms. Podles’s Baroque specialties, was originally written for a male castrato and is typically sung today by a lower-register female singer or a male countertenor.)While Ms. Podles was hardly unknown in American opera circles, the repertoire in which she specialized wasn’t standard fare at U.S. opera houses, and her only Met appearance after “Rinaldo” was a 2008 run in the small but crucial role of La Cieca in Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda.” Ms. Podles became something of a cult figure, one of the singers that fans make a point of traveling to hear.And, like many cult artists, she was not to all tastes. Her acting was unabashedly old-fashioned — a sometimes wide-eyed, arms-outstretched embodiment of opera’s stylized, semi-mythic side.Ms. Podles, left, with the soprano Deborah Voigt in Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda” at the Metropolitan Opera in 2008.Richard Termine for The New York TimesWell-groomed modern singers aim for a smooth, unobtrusive flow between the different parts of their voices; Ms. Podles reveled in the breaks between them. As she told The Times, gutsily relishing the chest register, as she did, is off-putting to some listeners. She said that while the top and bottom extremes of her voice came easily, the rest needed to be diligently built, and her middle register could be a bit breathy.But for many, she was unforgettable. “The sheer, round, sensuous beauty of her voice was staggering,” the eminent pianist Garrick Ohlsson, who toured and recorded with her, said in an interview. “I don’t want to make comparisons, but when I worked with Jessye Norman” — the American soprano who died in 2019 — “you had the same sense of this huge, engulfing but not piercing sound, a wide sound.”And when elemental intensity was called for, as in Mussorgsky’s cycle “Songs and Dances of Death,” Ms. Podles was ideal.“She had this mournful quality,” Mr. Crutchfield said. “She could draw you into states of sadness and lament and pain that were overwhelming in their sincerity and beauty, so you liked feeling bad with her.”Ms. Podles’s husband, Jerzy Marchwinski, a prominent pianist who curtailed his performing career because of back problems and who was a close adviser to his wife, died in November. In addition to her stepdaughter, Ms. Marchwinska, she is survived by her and her husband’s daughter, Maria Madej, and four grandchildren.Among a wide-ranging repertoire, Ms. Podles sang songs by Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff and works with orchestra by Mahler, Brahms, Prokofiev and Penderecki. Her operatic characters extended to Verdi’s Azucena and Eboli, Adalgisa in Bellini’s “Norma,” Erda in Wagner’s “Ring” and Klytämnestra in Strauss’s “Elektra.” (She even played the bearded lady Baba the Turk in Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress.”)Ms. Podles appeared onstage for the last time in Barcelona in 2017, as the comically highhanded Marquise de Berkenfield in Donizetti’s “La Fille du Régiment.”“She had that unmistakable great-singer quality,” Mr. Crutchfield said, “of holding the audience absolutely in the palm of her hand.” More

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      In a New ‘Simon Boccanegra,’ Family Ties Are Tightened

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      “Simon Boccanegra,” a story of fathers, politics, love and duty, is returning to La Scala, where personal connections to the opera run deep.Fathers and history loom large, both onstage and off, in the new La Scala staging of the Verdi opera “Simon Boccanegra,” running in Milan for seven performances from Feb. 1 to 24.For the director and conductor, it is an opportunity to embrace the opera professionally after a lifetime of personal connection. It is also an exciting undertaking for the baritone performing the title role.The director, Daniele Abbado, 66, is taking on his first “Simon Boccanegra” (he is also a designer, with Angelo Linzalata, in a production he describes as modern and abstract). Mr. Abbado attended the now-famous 1971 staging, which was conducted by his father, the prolific Claudio Abbado, who died in 2014. That staging helped make the opera a hit at La Scala — 90 years after its debut at the house.The conductor Claudio Abbado, who died in 2014. He conducted the 1971 staging, and his son Daniele Abbado will be directing the new “Simon Boccanegra” at La Scala next month.Jeremy Fletcher/RedfernsWe 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?  More

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      An American Soprano on the Importance of Opera

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      An American soprano who sang when the United States rejoined UNESCO weighed in on the agency’s addition of Italian opera singing to a heritage list.Is opera an endangered art form that needs to be protected and preserved for the generations to come?For a group of about 30,000 Italian music professionals and practitioners, the answer was yes. Consisting of singers, musicians, scholars, composers, conductors and directors, the group formed a committee supported by Italy’s leading opera houses and musical institutions, then persuaded UNESCO to add “the practice of opera singing in Italy” to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The inscription was made official in December.The list identifies what UNESCO, the United Nations cultural organization, calls “fragile” nonphysical elements that play a crucial role in “maintaining cultural diversity in the face of growing globalization.”Five months earlier, UNESCO celebrated the U.S. rejoining of the organization in a ceremony in Paris attended by the first lady, Jill Biden. (The United States had withdrawn from UNESCO during the Trump administration.)Pool photo by Bertrand Guay At the ceremony, “The Star-Spangled Banner” was sung by a leading American soprano, Lisette Oropesa. In a recent phone interview, Ms. Oropesa discussed the UNESCO inscription (which she played no part in) and what is special about opera. The conversation has been edited and condensed.How do you feel about this UNESCO inscription?Delighted. Any opportunity where opera and classical music are brought into the limelight is important.What’s significant about opera, and what I love about it, is that it’s the last truly human art form. It’s sung by voices, unamplified, and created by human beings who compose the music and play an instrument in an orchestra. The costumes are designed and made by people. Opera is directed by people, and is meant to resonate in an acoustic and natural space built by people. That’s what’s special about it.Will this UNESCO distinction help protect it in the future?I certainly hope so. Opera can often be stereotyped as this archaic museum piece. We think of it as very elitist nowadays. But it was originally a people’s art form. Just a few generations ago, it was in cartoons: The youngest of the young were learning about characters such as the Barber of Seville.Nowadays, a lot of young people when first exposed to opera say, “This is so pompous and old-fashioned, and it doesn’t speak to me.” What is your response?I believe opera doesn’t get marketed properly. I don’t think there has ever been a generation that wasn’t interested in history. If history is presented well, and interestingly, everybody wants to know. People watch “The Crown,” “Downton Abbey.” People want to be transported. What alienates young people is how opera can often be presented. If you just say, “Opera is about romance and beauty and passion and fabulous costumes,” you take all the meat off the bone. There are plenty of extremely forward-looking pieces that have been written about women, power struggle, class struggle, race.Opera is all narrative. The stories are there: You’re reading lines, and you’re following what’s going on. It’s like reading a book. And the sound of the voice is simply the sound of the trained voice.Now, it’s not to everybody’s taste. I get that not everybody likes it. But not everybody likes the sound of rock singers, or the sound of country singers. There is an ear for everything. Ultimately, nine times out of 10, the music sells people on opera, because the music is simply divine.Are you personally concerned about opera’s future?During the pandemic, I was really concerned about it. I thought that gathering in theaters would be the last thing to come back — that people would say: “This is so unnecessary. Let’s drop it. We’re going to put everything online, and stream it, and it’ll be the same thing.” We learned that it’s not the same thing, that you don’t have the same experience.What concerns me nowadays is that we have to compete for people’s time.The committee that applied for UNESCO inscription felt that opera was in danger.In Europe, opera and the arts are generally funded by the government. So there’s an assurance that the art form will go on, because there’s funding for it. In the United States, there’s very little state funding for high art. You have to ask people to give money to it. And it often operates on a flimsy budget. So the business model of opera in the United States is very unsustainable.When it comes to the arts in general, people feel like there are more important things to spend time and money on. They’re not wrong. But I can also tell you that without a safe emotional outlet for pain and negativity and suffering, all you will have is more pain, negativity and suffering.If you take music away from your everyday person — going to work, coming home, and taking care of their family — all they will be left with is politics, war, pain, suffering, disease and poverty. If you take away music and drama and theater and movies, you rob people of their ability to process and cope with the more important things. More

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      Opera Greets the Morning at the Prototype Festival

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      The offerings at this annual presentation of new opera and music theater tend to be politically charged, scrappy and stirring.“These people are not drunk,” a choir in quirkily customized blue robes sang on Saturday, “because it’s nine in the morning.”Watching these smiling performers in the light-flooded Space at Irondale in Brooklyn, I was surprised to discover that this startlingly contemporary sentence was a translation of a biblical verse, Acts 2:15. And it was an appropriate sentiment at, yes, about 9 a.m.In “Terce,” presented as part of this year’s Prototype festival of new opera and music theater, about three dozen choir members were praying, as Christians have done at that hour from the era of the early church. The work adapts and takes its name from the traditional liturgy for 9 o’clock, the time when the Holy Spirit is believed to have appeared to the apostles on Pentecost.In Brooklyn, there’s a twist, if not a wholly unfamiliar one: The divinity being celebrated in this folk-soul-gospel-medieval amalgam is, according to the script, a woman, a mother, “an undeniably female creator.”The singers of “Terce” celebrate “an undeniably female creator.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPolitically charged, scrappy, stirring, deeply earnest: “Terce,” created and led by Heather Christian, embodies Prototype, now in its 11th season and organized by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE, the arts center in SoHo. (The festival runs through Sunday.)The hourlong performance had the intimacy that is crucial to this year’s best festival offerings. The members of the community choir that Christian has organized sing, dance and play instruments only steps from the audience that surrounds them. And, whether it’s the cold weather or the constant bad news, that closeness feels sweet and reassuring this January.It’s sweet and reassuring, too, in even cozier confines at HERE, where Prototype is presenting “The Promise,” a rock-cabaret song cycle that Wende, a Dutch singer, conceived with a group of collaborators.Wende’s “The Promise” at HERE.Raymond van OlphenAmong those creators is the composer Isobel Waller-Bridge, perhaps best known for scoring her sister Phoebe’s hit TV show “Fleabag.” And the lyrics of “The Promise” — the work of five writers — do reflect a kind of “Fleabag” sensibility. They are the voice of a modern woman, single, funny, dissatisfied, morbid, ambivalent at best about having children, prickly yet vulnerable. “I’m a lonely bitch,” goes one song’s rueful refrain.Restlessly stalking the tiny space and moving among the three other musicians, Wende has a mischievous grin that can swiftly give way to sneering anger and quiet despair. Her voice is tautly powerful yet quivering, a little like Fiona Apple’s — sometimes sultry, sometimes airy and wry. With resourcefully varied lighting by Freek Ros, the 19-song, 100-minute cycle keeps shifting its tone and pace; songs with pounding, propulsive jungle beats exist alongside vocals half-spoken to a piano.If the final minutes come close to being cloying without quite tipping over, they have that in common with “Terce.” But just as the physical proximity of the performers feels welcome this season, some sentimentality does, too. Wende somehow manages to create that rarity: anthemic crowd singalongs that even a hardened critic feels compelled to join.“The Promise” and “Terce,” the Prototype presentations that are sticking with me most this year, are both plotless and characterless. Also leaning abstract, but in a far wilder and more surreal mode, is “Chornobyldorf,” a sprawling production of well over two intermissionless hours at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater. It has bravely traveled from Ukraine as a kind of nostalgic reminder of the loud, messy, nudity-filled, often self-serious, generally baffling shows that were once fixtures of downtown New York.“Chornobyldorf,” at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater.Valeriia LandarThe many-page synopsis describes a convoluted genesis for this “archaeological opera in seven novels,” created by Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko. But the premise is similar to “Station Eleven,” the book turned TV show, and the play “Mr. Burns”: After an apocalypse — the Chernobyl nuclear disaster is the specter here — a society tries to rise from the ashes though whatever fragments of culture remain.In the case of “Chornobyldorf,” this takes the form of revived yet still-distant memories of Baroque opera and polyphonic chant, shot through with eruptions of blastingly amplified punkish rage. The texts are difficult to decipher. The costumes are cut in ornate antique styles, but dolled up with bits of electrical wiring, and the instruments, many hand-built, are seemingly a collection of whatever was left over when the world ended: percussion, trombone, fluegelhorn, flute, folk string instruments like the bandura and dulcimer, sighing accordions.The sonic landscape creaks and roars, squeals and simmers, as this little society puts on eerily robotic, intensely solemn rituals, building to a screaming Mass and a climactic, hysterical danse macabre around a huge medallion of Lenin hanging from the ceiling. On a screen behind the performers, film footage pans through outdoor scenes, with nature looking majestic — and almost entirely abandoned by humans.“Chornobyldorf” is reminiscent of the loud, nudity-filled, generally baffling shows that were once fixtures of downtown New York.Artem GalkinThe slow, stylized pace and insular symbolism, together with the vivid film element and arcane eroticism, evokes Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster” cycle. And though the work is baggy, a dreamlike atmosphere takes hold; it’s hard to tell the exact meaning of a statuesque naked woman being stripped of the cymbals that hang from her arms, but the sequence is nevertheless arresting.“Adoration” is the most standard-issue, proscenium-theater opera Prototype is presenting this year. Based on a 2008 Atom Egoyan film, the 90-minute piece — being performed at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture in Manhattan — trudges through a complicated plot involving a teenage boy’s announcement to his classmates that his father is a terrorist. (It turns out he’s not telling the truth, though to what narrative or emotional end is never quite clear.)Setting the story to music offers the promise of delving into the nuances of a group of troubled people. But the drearily expository monologues go on and on in Royce Vavrek’s leaden libretto. And while Mary Kouyoumdjian’s score offers some sinuous music for string quartet, its fevered quality feels generic and eventually tiresome; the drama, shapeless.More compelling than any character in “Adoration” is Dominic Shodekeh Talifero, the performer-protagonist of “Vodalities,” one of Prototype’s three short, online streaming offerings — and he doesn’t even speak words or sing pitches.Joined for the piece’s 16 minutes by the quartet So Percussion, he virtuosically yet subtly explores what he calls breath art, a delicate form of beat-boxing that inevitably, painfully suggests the Black Lives Matter rallying cry “I can’t breathe.” (The other digital presentations are “Swann,” a longing aria based on the true story of a 19th-century Black man who wore drag, and the antic, voice-processed “Whiteness.)Huang Ruo’s “Angel Island,” at the Harvey Theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Maria BaranovaHuang Ruo’s “Angel Island,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, delves into the dark history of American discrimination and violence against Chinese immigrants, many of whom were processed on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay.The 90-minute work’s structure is elegant: Sections of historical narration, as in a Ken Burns documentary, alternate with poetic pieces for chorus, with members of the Choir of Trinity Wall Street singing the words of writings found on the walls of the island’s immigrant processing center. Filling the back wall of the stage is a screen for the film artist Bill Morrison’s trademark, haunting manipulations of scratchy, blurry archival footage, its ghostliness echoed by the choir’s floating, elegiac sound.The slow-burning patience of Huang’s score is a virtue, even if the sections tend to linger too long — particularly the nonchoral ones, with the narration on top of a string quartet sawing away as accompaniment to balletically aggressive duets for two dancers, an Asian woman and white man.But the gradual build to a hypnotic conclusion was moving, with choral repetitions as relentless as waves on a beach, punctuated by the slow, steady beat of a gong. It was reminiscent of “Terce,” which ends with the metallic shimmer of a gently shaken chandelier made of keys and cutlery.There was a sense, in both finales, of the potential of music and performance — of community — to cleanse. To help us both remember and move forward. More

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      An Opera Superfan’s Surprise Gift: $1.7 Million for the Arts

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      Lois Kirschenbaum, who died in 2021, made the donations to cultural groups from unexpectedly large life savings.When Lois Kirschenbaum, a cultural aficionado who was a fixture at the Metropolitan Opera for more than half a century, died in 2021 at 88, star singers gave tributes and fellow fans offered remembrances.But that was not the end of Kirschenbaum’s relationship with the arts.Though even her closest friends didn’t know, Kirschenbaum, a former switchboard operator who lived in a rent-controlled apartment in the East Village, had made plans to give away a large share of her life savings — some $1.7 million — to cultural groups upon her death. After years of legal proceedings, donations of $215,000 apiece have started to arrive, surprising groups like New York City Opera, American Ballet Theater, Carnegie Hall and the Public Theater.“I was just astonished,” said John Hauser, the president of the George and Nora London Foundation for Singers, one of the recipients. “I had no idea that she had that kind of money.”Kirschenbaum had no spouse, siblings or children, and lived a no-frills lifestyle, working as a switchboard operator for the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian aid organization, until her retirement in 2004. On most nights, she traveled by bus and subway to Lincoln Center, where she secured free or cheap tickets just before performances began.Kirschenbaum was known to rush to collect autographs after performances at the Metropolitan Opera.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesElena Villafane, a lawyer for the executor of the estate, said that Kirschenbaum had “an incredibly frugal, Depression-era lifestyle.” Her father was an optometrist who died in 1990, Villafane said; his first and second wives died before him.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?  More