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      Reimagining ‘Madame Butterfly,’ With Asian Creators at the Helm

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      As opera houses rework Puccini’s classic, criticized for stereotypes about women and Japanese culture, artists of Asian descent are playing a central role.The auditorium lights dimmed, and the cast and crew of Cincinnati Opera’s new production of Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly” anxiously took their places.For months, the team, made up largely of Asian and Asian American artists, had worked to reimagine the classic opera, upending its stereotypes about women and Japanese culture. They had updated the look of the opera with costumes and sets partly inspired by anime, scrubbed the libretto of historical inaccuracies and recast much of the work as a video-game fantasy. They gathered at the Cincinnati Music Hall one evening last week to fine-tune their creation before its opening last Saturday.“It feels a little like a grand experiment,” said the production’s director, Matthew Ozawa, whose father is Japanese and mother is white. “It’s very emotional.”“Madame Butterfly,” which premiered in 1904 (and is set around that time), tells the story of a lovelorn 15-year-old geisha in Nagasaki who is abandoned by an American Navy lieutenant after he gets her pregnant. The opera has long been criticized for its portrait of Asian women as exotic and submissive, and the use of exaggerated makeup and stereotypical costumes in some productions has drawn fire.Now, after years of pressure by artists and activists and a growing awareness of anti-Asian hate, many companies are reworking the opera and giving artists of Asian descent a central role in reshaping its message and story. In a milestone, directors with Asian roots are leading four major productions this year in the United States.San Francisco Opera recently staged a version, directed by Amon Miyamoto, that explored the suffering and discrimination experienced by a biracial character. Boston Lyric Opera is setting part of its coming production in a Chinatown nightclub in San Francisco in the 1940s, and part in an incarceration camp.New Orleans Opera rewrote the traditional ending in a recent production to give the title character a sense of agency. Instead of committing suicide, she throws aside a dagger handed to her, picks up her son and storms offstage.Adam Smith dons a virtual reality headset as the overture begins in the Cincinnati production. “We decided we’re going to honor the fact that this is a white man’s fantasy — a fantasy of a culture and a fantasy of a woman,” Ozawa said.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesIn Cincinnati, the opera begins in the apartment of a lonely white man in his 20s who worships Japanese video games. The overture begins when he puts on a virtual-reality headset to enter a fantasy about Japan, assuming the character of the American lieutenant, B.F. Pinkerton.“We decided we’re going to honor the fact that this is a white man’s fantasy — a fantasy of a culture and a fantasy of a woman,” Ozawa said.At times, the fantasy breaks down and the characters freeze, such as when Pinkerton says something offensive or the chorus makes stereotypical gestures. “We see these moments that hearken to what the tradition usually would look like and then we erase it,” Ozawa said.A scene from San Francisco Opera’s recent “Butterfly,” directed by Amon Miyamoto, which explored the suffering and discrimination experienced by a biracial character. Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera.The re-examination of “Madame Butterfly” comes as cultural institutions face pressure to feature more prominently musicians, dancers, choreographers and composers of color amid a broader discussion about racial discrimination.The reconsideration extends beyond the United States: The Royal Opera House recently updated its “Madame Butterfly” production, getting rid of white makeup and other elements, like wigs and samurai-style coiffures.While the changes have alienated some traditionalists, the artists behind the new productions say they want to preserve the spirit of Puccini’s work while making it accessible to a broader audience.Phil Chan, who is directing the production in Boston and has helped lead the push to confront stereotypes in opera and ballet, said he hoped to make familiar stories more authentic and relevant. The creative team in Boston includes Nina Yoshida Nelsen, a founder of the Asian Opera Alliance, which was formed in 2021 to help bring more racial diversity to the field.“Some people might be afraid that we’re somehow messing with a masterpiece,” said Chan, whose father is Chinese and mother is white. “But we see it as an opportunity to make the work bigger and resonate with more people.”As they reimagine “Butterfly,” artists of Asian descent are working to help each other, exchanging ideas and offering encouragement.Aria Umezawa, who directed the New Orleans production, was distressed after coming across photos of white chorus members in exaggerated makeup and costumes in an old Canadian production of “Madame Butterfly.” She sought out Ozawa.“It’s just been always really helpful to talk to my colleagues,” Umezawa said, “to hear their concerns, to understand the nuance and the shades of gray that exist between different elements of our community. It’s just nice not to be alone.”A scene from the New Orleans production of “Madame Butterfly.” Instead of killing herself at the end, the title character picks up her son and takes him offstage.Jeff StroutWhile the experience of remaking “Madame Butterfly” has been liberating for many artists, the reaction from the public has been mixed.In New Orleans, many people applauded Umezawa’s production, saying it was refreshing to see a strong woman at the center of the opera. But some were critical of the ending.“Not having her die stole the pathos of the story,” an operagoer wrote in response to a survey by the company. “I don’t need an empowered Butterfly. What lesson do I learn from Butterfly riding off into the sunset?”Umezawa said she felt constrained at times by Puccini’s vision. “Ultimately, no matter what I do,” she said, “it’s still Puccini’s music, and it’s still his best guess with Japanese culture.”Next year, when she directs a production of “Butterfly” in Philadelphia, she said she hoped to experiment some more, perhaps by incorporating taiko drums into the orchestra.The focus on “Madame Butterfly” has helped shine light on the dearth of Asian artists in opera. While Asian singers make up a large share of conservatory vocal programs, they remain significantly underrepresented in principal roles at major opera companies, and among stage directors and in other leadership posts.The production in Cincinnati, which closes on Saturday, almost didn’t happen. In 2020, Ozawa backed out of a plan to direct a traditional version of “Madame Butterfly” at the opera house, worried that it would not be true to his artistic mission.But Evans Mirageas, the company’s artistic director, persisted, agreeing to support Ozawa’s vision for a reimagined work. The idea gained the backing of several co-producers, including Detroit Opera, Pittsburgh Opera and Utah Opera, which will stage the Cincinnati production in the coming years.Mirageas said it had become increasingly difficult to ignore the problems of “Madame Butterfly” because of the surge in violence and harassment targeting Asians in recent years. “It’s a production that’s found its moment in time,” he said.At Ozawa’s request, Cincinnati Opera hired three women of Japanese descent — Maiko Matsushima, Yuki Nakase Link and Kimie Nishikawa — to oversee costumes, lighting and scenery.The almost entirely Asian cast and crew brought a sense of camaraderie to the production.“We can easily understand each other because we know each other’s stories and cultures,” said Karah Son, a South Korean soprano who sings the title role. She recalled being able to quickly master a geisha dance because she knew what Ozawa wanted.The production’s conductor, Keitaro Harada, used a Japanese phrase to capture the dynamic: “aun no kokyu,” describing a sense of harmony.“We just understand each other in a very natural way,” said Harada, who was born in Japan. “We know what we’re all thinking.”Ozawa directing a rehearsal in Cincinnati. “It feels a little like a grand experiment,” he said of the reimagined production. “It’s very emotional.”Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesOzawa said he felt an obligation to “Madame Butterfly” because he is of Japanese descent, even if working on it could be uncomfortable. Earlier in his career, he recalled that white colleagues would sometimes squint their eyes, bow to him or greet him by saying “konichiwa” while working on the production.He said he was nervous that he would let down the Japanese community if his production was not a success. But on opening night, his fears subsided when cheers erupted after the final curtain fell at Cincinnati Music Hall.“We have an immense duty to this piece, to Butterfly and to the Asian community,” he said. “There might be some discomfort in our story, but change can only come if there’s discomfort.” More

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      At Wagner’s Festival, New Technology Reveals a Leadership Rift

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      The Bayreuth Festival’s production of “Parsifal” will feature augmented reality. Securing the equipment set off a financial and philosophical dispute.The American director Jay Scheib was looking at a bank of monitors inside the Bayreuth Festival Theater on a recent afternoon.He was rehearsing his new production of Wagner’s “Parsifal,” which opens the storied Bayreuth Festival on Tuesday, and as performers circled a large metallic monolith onstage, the screens showed three-dimensional flowers floating through blank space — psychedelic animations that will come to life for audience members who see them with augmented-reality glasses.Through those glasses, Scheib said, the flowers, and other items during the performance, will appear to float through the auditorium. In keeping with the opera’s themes, he added, these moments are meant to provide the audience with “sacred visions” of “a world where wonder still exists.”Scheib’s production is one of the most ambitious, and high-profile, attempts to incorporate augmented reality into opera performance. But it also caps months of tumult at Bayreuth, after plans to outfit nearly 2,000 audience members with the glasses for each performance were downscaled because of an apparent money dispute between the festival’s artistic and financial leadership. The compromise, in which only 330 attendees will be provided with the glasses to experience the production’s signature flourishes, has left many fuming, and concerned that internal conflicts at one of the most important events in opera were undermining its relevance.Founded by Wagner in 1876 as a showcase for his work, the Bayreuth Festival draws opera fans from around the world for one month every summer to hear a handful of the composer’s works in repertory — including a new production at the start of each edition. A major event on the German cultural calendar, the opening is usually attended by prominent political figures including Angela Merkel, the country’s former chancellor.Angela Merkel, the former chancellor of Germany, with her husband, Joachim Sauer, at the opening of last year’s Bayreuth festival, which remains a major event on the German cultural calendar.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe festival remains treasured worldwide for the pristine acoustics of its theater, a hilltop opera house that Wagner had a hand in designing, and for its connection to the composer: It has been led by a family member since his death in 1883. His great-granddaughter Katharina Wagner took over creative leadership with her half sister, Eva Wagner-Pasquier, in 2008, before becoming the sole artistic director in 2015.In recent years, though, a new leadership structure has added a layer to the festival’s decision-making. In 2008, the budget came under the control of four members of an independent board representing outside shareholders that collectively provide about 40 percent of the budget: the city of Bayreuth, the state of Bavaria, the German federal government and a group of private donors called the Society of Friends of Bayreuth, who currently chair the board.Although the funders are meant to refrain from interfering with choices made by Bayreuth’s artistic leadership, some in the media have argued that the decision to withhold the money for the purchase of 2,000 glasses represented an attempt by the shareholders to rein in Wagner’s approach to the festival and her great-grandfather’s work.Since World War II, Bayreuth directors — including Richard Wagner’s descendants — have brought a modern or experimental sensibility to the composer’s works. In 2013, Katharina Wagner invited Frank Castorf to reimagine the “Ring” as an anticapitalist epic about oil; the next “Ring,” Valentin Schwarz’s production, which opened last year, recast the cycle as, in part, an allegory about the anxieties of aging.Toni Schmid, a former high-ranking Bavarian civil servant who led the festival’s board of shareholders until 2020, said the decision not to fund the glasses was emblematic of the Society of Friends of Bayreuth’s “more conservative idea of how a Wagner opera should look today,” which is at odds with Katharina Wagner’s vision.A scene from Frank Castorf’s reimagined “Ring,” in 2013. Since World War II, Bayreuth directors have brought a modern and sometimes experimental sensibility to their Wagner stagings.AlamyThe largely older members of the donor group, Schmid said, “would like to have the productions they saw 50 years ago back, when they were young — but that’s not art, it’s a museum.” He added that he wished the shareholder’s board was occupied by representatives “who know what they’re talking about” and described the decision to not finance the full number of glasses as “a joke.”Manuel Brug, a German journalist and critic for Die Welt, said in a phone interview that the current festival structure allowed too much power to Friends of Bayreuth. “The group is too old, with many people who joined because it makes it easier to get tickets,” he said, arguing that the donors should be excluded from the governing body in the future. The Bavarian arts minister Markus Blume said in article in the Nordbayerischer Kurier on Thursday that the state of Bavaria might take over some of the donor group’s shares in the future.Georg von Waldenfels, the chairman of the shareholders board and head of Friends of Bayreuth, disputed that he had interfered in Wagner’s decision-making and said in a phone interview that the decision to downscale the number of glasses was “purely a decision of the artistic leadership.” He added that the shareholders had merely “stuck to the business plan.” Wagner, however, said that the original plan failed “because of the financing and divergent views about the glasses” and that the outcome was “unfortunate.”This disagreement reflects a broader debate about Wagner’s legacy, and adds another chapter to the festival’s history of public arguments and reckonings. Winifred Wagner — the English-born wife of Richard’s son, Siegfried — who oversaw the festival from 1930 to 1944, was an avowed fan of Adolf Hitler until her death in 1980. Following World War II, the composer’s grandsons, Wieland and Wolfgang, opened the festival anew as something more apolitical.More recently, the festival has been a subject of chatter, including longstanding rumors of a feud between Katharina Wagner and her former musical director, Christian Thielemann, who left his post in 2020. Last year, he publicly criticized her decision to replace the word “Führer” (“leader”) with the word “Schützer” (“protector”) in a production of “Lohengrin,” a change that had been made out of sensitivity to Bayreuth’s past associations with Nazism.Katharina Wagner, a great-granddaughter of the composer, took over creative leadership of the festival with her half sister in 2008, before becoming the sole artistic director in 2015.Enrico NawrathJay Scheib, the American director who is staging “Parsifal” for the festival this year.Helen DurasIn a phone interview, Thielemann denied any feud with Wagner, and said that Bayreuth has long been plagued by gossip. “There is something about Wagner that poisons people,” he added. “He is both an intoxicant and a perfume.”Wagner’s contract will be up for renewal this fall, pending a vote by the festival’s board of directors. She said that if the offer were made, her acceptance would be contingent on changes to the festival’s organization. “You need to make this place ready for the future, and if some structural things don’t change, then it’s impossible to do the work,” she said, though declined to provide specifics.If she were to depart the festival, it would likely mean the end of the Wagner family’s creative leadership: No other relative has publicly expressed an interest in taking over.Wagner said that her push to find innovative ways of staging her great-grandfather’s work was necessary, given the “limited repertoire” of the festival — Richard Wagner’s 10 mature works — and global competition among high-profile theaters staging his operas. If Bayreuth just continued to mount old-fashioned productions, she added, “people can just watch a DVD.”The idea of incorporating augmented reality into “Parsifal” emerged in early 2019. Among the challenges was adapting the technology, which is conceived for looking at nearby objects in brightly lit spaces, for a large, darkened theater. Ultimately, Scheib’s team solved the problem by creating a laser scan of the entire auditorium, down to the millimeter.Scheib said that augmented reality would emerge during crucial scenes, and would include a gigantic floating tree and a flaming horse. When Parsifal naïvely kills a swan, a pair of enormous ones will appear to fly near the auditorium’s ceiling, spouting blood.An example of the augmented-reality that viewers with glasses will see in “Parsifal.” Scheib said the uncertainty about the glasses had been a “distraction.”Bayreuth FestivalThis “Parsifal,” however, can still be experienced without the glasses, with sets, lighting and costume design depicting what Scheib described as a “post-human landscape in which the last group of people are hanging on, trying to make sense of faith, forgiveness and belonging.” But, he noted, the uncertainty about the glasses has been a “distraction.”The use of the technology, Scheib said, was in keeping with Wagner’s own way of approaching opera. “He carried out so many innovations, with lighting and architecture,” he added. “Ultimately, he wanted the theater to completely disappear.” More

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      Nico Muhly Modernizes Monteverdi With ‘Irreverent Veneration’

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      When a new production of Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo” premieres at Santa Fe Opera on July 29, something about it might seem slightly odd.Sure, there will be the usual Orfeo, in this case the tenor Rolando Villazón, and a familiar sight at the podium in the conductor Harry Bicket. If the staging by Yuval Sharon, one of the most creative opera directors at work today, provokes a thought or two — well, that is only to be expected by now.No, what might surprise people most is the sound emerging from the orchestra pit. This will not be Monteverdi as we have heard him; there will be nary a period instrument in sight, neither a harpsichord nor a sackbut, a theorbo nor a cornett. It will be, rather, Monteverdi as newly orchestrated by Nico Muhly and brought right into the contemporary.“It’s a piece of music I’ve always loved, and I love Monteverdi,” said Muhly, a composer whose opera credits include “Marnie” and “Two Boys.” Accepting the Santa Fe commission, to him, “seemed like a really easy ‘yes.’”Santa Fe’s production, titled “Orfeo,” is not intended as a grand revanchist blow against the period-instrument movement that has claimed early music as its own for decades. Bicket, after all, is the music director of the English Concert, once in the vanguard of that movement and still one of its eminent groups. And Muhly was offered the assignment because his love for Byrd, Tallis and the like is not just avowed, but audibly present in much of his own music.Yuval Sharon, left, the director of Santa Fe’s “Orfeo,” and Muhly.Brad Trone for The New York TimesWhat Santa Fe’s “Orfeo” does speak to, though, are the artistic opportunities that are starting to open up as the first generation of period-instrument pioneers pass from the scene, the early-music movement confronts an uncertain future and all the old polemics about how works ought to be performed start to seem passé.At any rate, doing “Orfeo” in the way that Nikolaus Harnoncourt, John Eliot Gardiner and Jordi Savall have would be impossible at Santa Fe. The company has a resident orchestra that uses modern instruments, and even if period instruments could be brought to the desert for the summer, “the size of the building,” Bicket said, “means we would probably have to have, like, five theorbos and three harps and all these harpsichords, which in an open-air theater is not really practical.”Typical repertory companies, too, aren’t able to present the work as it has come to be heard — which is not just a shame, but also a detriment to our collective understanding of opera itself.“It’s not appropriate to call it the first opera, because we know it was not the first opera,” Sharon said of “Orfeo.” “Opera was not a genre at this point, when this piece was created. But in many respects, I think it makes perfect sense to call it the first opera, because it set the benchmark for what we look to opera to create for us.”This orchestration, Muhly explained, therefore aims to make the work more practical to perform in standard houses, beyond Santa Fe. “I’m not doing anything crazy to it,” he said. “It’s just about it not being this unwieldy thing.”COMPOSERS HAVE LONG been interested in reorchestrating “Orfeo” for contemporary ears; in its treatment of the Orpheus myth, it is, fundamentally, an opera about the power of music.Sharon said of “Orfeo” that “it set the benchmark for what we look to opera to create for us.”Brad Trone for The New York TimesThe conductor Henry Bicket, who said that in preparing this new production, “We agreed that it would be Monteverdi’s ‘Orfeo.’”Brad Trone for The New York TimesThe work, with a libretto by Alessandro Striggio, premiered in 1607. But, according to the musicologist Nigel Fortune, it was largely forgotten after Monteverdi’s death, in 1643, until the late 19th century. Then, Vincent d’Indy, Carl Orff, Ottorino Respighi and Bruno Maderna all tried their hand at a reorchestration. For the Maggio Musicale in Florence in 1984, Luciano Berio convened a quintet of young composers — Betty Olivero and Luca Francesconi among them — to rewrite “Orfeo,” employing electronic tapes and even a rock band. By then, however, the period-instrument revolution was in full flow; when Paul Hindemith presented a scholarly “attempt to reconstruct the premiere” in Vienna in 1954, Harnoncourt and other members of his recently formed Concentus Musicus Wien played in the ensemble.To Bicket, none of those versions, or others, seemed appropriate for use at Santa Fe; they involved cuts, or were too of their own time. But since Santa Fe has had a tradition of presenting a premiere each year, he explained, a new production seemed an ideal opportunity to commission “a young, contemporary composer to say what this century has to say about this music.”And Muhly is an admirer of “Orfeo.” “There are so many moments of slyness, where what you’re getting in terms of plot and what you’re getting in terms of emotional content is coming from literally one tiny little harmonic move, like one strange flat,” he said. “Also, there’s very traditional word painting. You go up to heaven, and he goes up the scale. It’s this wonderful combination of trickery and things that are quite obvious and theatrical.”A rendering of Sharon’s production for Santa Fe.Matthew Johnson & Alex Schweder, visual environment designersOne of the reasons that so many composers have felt able to try their hand at orchestrating or adapting “Orfeo” is that Monteverdi left them the opportunity. Even the most conscientious, scholarly performer of “Orfeo” has to make choices about how to play it, because scores that were published early in the 17th century omit crucial details, especially in the continuo parts that comprise so much of the work.“All of it is a sketch, because there was no international music scene,” Bicket said. “Composers did not have to write information into the score, apart from a vocal line and a bass line and maybe a bit of harmony here or there, because there was an understanding, a style, which was part of being a musician in those days.”“When I do this with my own players in the English Concert,” Bicket added, “we do read the notes, but we are actually reading the rhetoric — and the heart of it is finding the rhetorical gesture.”Many of the conductors who have performed or recorded “Orfeo” have chosen to create their own editions; listen to some of the historically informed recordings of the work, Muhly pointed out, and you can hear divergences far more marked than in period accounts of, say, Beethoven symphonies, sometimes on matters as fundamental as cadences.Bicket leading a rehearsal of “Orfeo.”Brad Trone for The New York TimesThere is therefore no one, true “Orfeo” that anybody can be faithful to, and that invites creativity. For Sharon, a production of it can sit easily within his interest in how operas from the past can be recreated today. It’s an urge that — beyond his lauded work with the Detroit Opera and the Industry, the company he founded in Los Angeles — has seen him stage parts of “Götterdämmerung” as a drive-through and led him to present the four acts of “La Bohème” in reverse.“We’re all making a guess as to what it must have been like to have done this piece,” Sharon said of the Monteverdi. “We have to interpret it; we have to decide. What instruments are going to play this? What is the proper performance style for this? There’s no such thing, there’s just the humans that are bringing it to life at that particular moment in time, needing to take this blueprint that Monteverdi and Striggio left us and interpret it in our own way, and for our own time. So I think that makes it eternally an opportunity for constant reimagination.”Even so, Muhly asked for, and Bicket laid down, some ground rules. “We agreed that it would be Monteverdi’s ‘Orfeo,’” Bicket said, and it was stipulated that the vocal and the bass lines should remain unchanged from the primary source. Bicket wrote out a vocal score, filling in the harmonies that Monteverdi left out, noting where chords could be restated or shift in other ways.Otherwise, though, Muhly was left to translate the material into his own compositional language, which he had come to in dialogue with early music and even early instruments; among his published scores is a “Berceuse With Seven Variations” for solo theorbo.“I think because music of the past features so heavily in my own, original music,” he said, “I stepped to this with a form of irreverent veneration.”Muhly described Monteverdi’s score as “this wonderful combination of trickery and things that are quite obvious and theatrical.”Brad Trone for The New York TimesThat’s not to say the process was easy. While it was in some ways simpler than writing another opera of his own, Muhly said, in others it was harder, requiring him to innovate and defer at the same time. He has adapted the continuo part mostly for a small ensemble of alto flute, English horn, clarinet, bass clarinet and harp, and voiced the figured bass in octaves far higher and lower than tradition would suggest. Some of the trickier problems involved echoing the way in which Monteverdi shrinks and expands his orchestration, and making the underworld distinct, yet not “cartoonishly evil.”But what Muhly argues against, and confesses to being “a little bristly about,” is the perception that “a new take or a new interpretation of something in some way erases, or is in conflict, with the previous interpretation.” His version of “Orfeo” is not intended to supplant those that have come before it, still less to render early-music takes on the material redundant. Far from it.“You know what would be great, literally what would be fantastic?” Muhly said. “Let’s just say someone saw this thing and was like, ‘Wow, I’m totally fascinated by this piece,’ goes back and gets any of the period recordings, and it’s a gateway drug that way. Similarly, if someone hears it and is like, ‘I hated that so much, I really want to hear the original again,’ and then they go to the original again, that’s also good. I think that’s just fine.”The more Monteverdi, in the view of Muhly and his collaborators, the better.“It’s really not about me; it’s about you having a great night at the theater,” Muhly said. “I want the music to serve the drama. And that’s always how it should be.” More

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      Bel Canto Rarities, Delivered With Unflashy, Revelatory Style

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      Teatro Nuovo’s concerts of Donizetti’s “Poliuto” and the Ricci brothers’ “Crispino e la Comare” delight with historically informed singing.Opera fandom is often built around a preoccupation — zealous, territorial, absolute — with distinctive voices. Maria Callas, Renée Fleming, Cecilia Bartoli, Luciano Pavarotti — they’re all immediately identifiable by timbre alone. Not coincidentally, all of these singers have been major recording artists.Teatro Nuovo, the brainchild of the bel canto specialist Will Crutchfield, inverts that value system. It asks: What would happen if all of the singers onstage shared a particular school of singing and even a certain vocal quality?In semi-staged concerts of Donizetti’s “Poliuto” and Federico and Luigi Ricci’s “Crispino e la Comare” at the Rose Theater at Lincoln Center on Wednesday and Thursday, Teatro Nuovo found manifold beauties in a brand of homogeneity that aims to reconstruct bel canto style from historical sources that predate the mid-20th-century revival and its recording stars.The singers in the two casts largely shared a vocal profile and style — a trim yet colorful sound with a quick, understated vibrato and an emphasis on legato, portamento and unaspirated coloratura. They eschewed abrupt pivots in color and dynamics. And, unconstrained by the need to project over a modern orchestra in a vast hall, they rarely pushed their voices for volume, size or drama, choosing instead an unforced, even emission of sound.Teatro Nuovo’s ingenious use of projections leveraged historical set designs — the Metropolitan Opera’s 1919 production of “Crispino” and the 1840 premiere of the French version of “Poliuto” — as backdrops for each concert. It was a quick, cost-effective way to add theatrical context.Donizetti completed “Poliuto” in 1838, having already composed the operas that would make him immortal: “L’Elisir d’Amore,” “Lucia di Lammermoor” and the so-called Tudor trilogy. In its extensive recitatives, unhurried melodic elaboration and dramatic silences you can hear his well-earned confidence. After “Poliuto” riled censors in Naples for its depiction of a Christian martyr, Donizetti refashioned it in French. But the original Italian version gained a hold after his death.The tenor Santiago Ballerini embodied the virtues of Teatro Nuovo’s house style in Donizetti’s “Poliuto.”Steven PisanoAs Poliuto, Santiago Ballerini embodied the virtues of Teatro Nuovo’s house style with a pretty, graciously produced tenor capable of reaching dramatic heights. The baritone Ricardo José Rivera, as his rival Severo, had the evening’s richest instrument — powerful yet capable of softness. As Poliuto’s wife, the soprano Chelsea Lehnea dug into Paolina’s conflicting emotions with a mercurially colored, highly responsive instrument that flew seamlessly through its registers, even if some of her choices felt exaggerated. Hans Tashjian (Callistene), with a somewhat hollow bass, was hard to hear.If “Poliuto” is a prestige drama by a generational talent, one who was stretching a genre and challenging convention, then “Crispino e la Comare” is a network sitcom by a pair of brothers with a nose for diverting entertainment. Everyday character types — a down-and-out blue-collar cobbler and the smug doctors he outsmarts — are harmlessly yet incisively mocked. The score foregrounds a font of melodies over spare, efficient accompaniments; no one would mistake it for the sparkling sophistication of Rossini or Donizetti, but it has its charms.In the Riccis’ fantastical satire, a fairy godmother grants the cobbler Crispino the ability to predict whether patients will live or die, turning him into Venice’s top doctor, much to the chagrin of medical professionals. As Crispino’s self-pity — even the chorus tells him to shut up already — morphs into self-regard, he alienates everyone, including his wife, until the fairy teaches him a lesson with a quick trip to the underworld.Mattia Venni was a sensational Crispino — his handsome baritone and capacity for self-parody allowed him to evolve from the melodramatic sobs of an almost-suicide scene to the complacent patter of success. As Crispino’s wife, the soprano Teresa Castillo sang her spirited, flirty showpieces mellifluously. The mezzo-soprano Liz Culpepper’s fairy godmother, all chesty low notes and wry amusement, felt like an ancestor of Mistress Quickly in Verdi’s “Falstaff.” Dorian McCall, with his rich lows and light snobbery, and Vincent Graña, with his rubber-voiced comedic stylings, cut up as Crispino’s rivals.Venni and Liz Culpepper in “Crispino.” The backdrop projection is from the Metropolitan Opera’s 1919 production of the opera.Steven PisanoTeatro Nuovo’s period-style orchestra astonished again and again. The instruments don’t have the invincible brilliance of their modern counterparts. But something more personal, even intimate, comes across in the woody bassoons, earthy cellos, translucent violins and ravishingly rangy clarinet. Period instruments can be temperamental, but the players didn’t sacrifice tuning or polish.The orchestra’s almost musky timbre made it a versatile collaborator. In the concertato at the end of Act II of “Poliuto,” it complemented rather than competed with the singers, with transparent textures that allowed the mildly lustrous voices to come through. In “Crispino,” its rough-hewn energy gave it a sincere, good-humored quality.In the Donizetti, Jakob Lehmann, who both played violin and conducted with his bow, relished accelerating the tempo of concluding allegros and guided the music with such subtlety that even staccatos had shape to them. The maestro al cembalo Jonathan Brandani effectively conducted “Crispino” from the keyboard and let the bass and cello lead in recitatives.In a few brief seasons, Teatro Nuovo has staked out a singular place for itself by marrying the thrill of discovery with a shared sense of purpose. More

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      Review: A Met Opera-Bound ‘Semele’ Takes Its First Bows

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      Claus Guth’s entertaining and often sexy new staging of Handel’s opera-oratorio hybrid in Munich is a coproduction with the Metropolitan Opera.Staging oratorios in the opera house is nearly routine nowadays, especially those by Handel; for every “Agrippina,” you’re likely to get a “Messiah” too.Somewhere in between is “Semele,” a dramatic work that Handel described as “after the manner of an oratorio.” It lends itself both to the concert hall and the opera house, and with a long list of principal characters thrives best with a luxury cast — which it received at the Bavarian State Opera in an entertaining, lucid and often sexy new staging by Claus Guth that premiered on Saturday, a coproduction with the Metropolitan Opera that will eventually travel to New York.That “Semele” has been categorized as an oratorio has more to do with context than form. By the time it premiered at Covent Garden in 1744, Italian operas, which Handel had been composing for decades, were falling out of fashion, and he had moved on to English-language concert works like “Messiah.”In writing “Semele,” Handel and an unknown collaborator adapted William Congreve’s early 18th-century opera libretto of the same name. But rather than present it as a theatrical work, Handel disguised it as an oratorio for the Lenten concert season — even though the secular story, based on Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” wasn’t right for the occasion. There was hardly anything Christian about its brazen eroticism and adultery, or about a god having to explain to his mortal mistress that she needs rest because she doesn’t have his sexual stamina.Handel wasn’t able to have it both ways; “Semele” ran for several performances, then languished until the 20th century. But its resurgence has been richly mined, with musicians and directors continuously inspired by its Epicurean longing and sensuality, its psychological complexity and its timeless treatment of incompatible love — all thoughts and feelings, in Handel’s aria writing, repeated, examined sculpturally and reconsidered with doubt and revelation.From left, Nadezhda Karyazina, Rae and Emily D’Angelo in the production, in which the world of Semele’s fantasies is rendered in shades of black to contrast with the white of reality.Monika RittershausGuth’s production dives into the Semele’s subconscious, her frustrations and fantasies, on the day of her wedding. A reluctant bride, she is first shown posing next her groom, Athamas, before stepping out of a shell-like gown that maintains its shape without her. It’s not the last time that happens; she always seems to be getting into or out of a dress as she drifts between reality and daydream, between accepting her life and rejecting it.During the overture, crisply and briskly articulated in the pit under Gianluca Capuano’s baton, Semele and Athamas are seen posing with friends and family for increasingly cringe-worthy group portraits, their forced smiles as uncomfortably glaring as the enormous floral letters spelling out “LOVE” behind them. Distracted by a black feather — Guth’s nod to the libretto’s depiction of the god Jupiter as an eagle — Semele retreats into her mind, represented by a sudden change in light from bright to dark in Michael Bauer’s design.She imagines breaking out of her wedding’s austerely white, grand room with an ax as she tears a hole into the wall of Michael Levine’s bandshell-like set of a three-sided room enclosed with a ceiling. In doing so, she opens a portal into the world of the gods, where her affair with Jupiter will set off a chain of events that leads to her doom.Here, however, the story isn’t so straightforward. And neither are the performances. A Guth production often demands actorly skill of its singers, and in Munich — at the Prinzregententheater, one of the Bavarian State Opera’s smaller halls — the principal cast members were intimately close to the audience, exposed both visually and musically.No one more so than the soprano Brenda Rae as Semele, who rarely leaves the stage and is given one of the show’s most athletic arias, “Myself I shall adore.” As an actor, she sympathetically traced a downward plunge from hesitation to ecstasy, then harried despair and hollowed catatonia. Musically, however, she struggled to match the challenging score; her voice on Saturday was agile but thin, particularly through runs and ornamentation. Even the soft serenity she achieved in “O sleep, why dost thou leave me?” gave way, on a sustained trill, to a disorientingly jagged warble.As Jupiter, Michael Spyres, too, gave an unsteady account of a difficult role. His instrument remains baffling: immense in its power and remarkable in its baritone-tenor range, but also unwieldy and better suited to the legato phrasing of the famous aria “Where’er you walk” than the more acrobatically breathless “I must with speed amuse her.” At the end of that, though, he impressively joined a high-kicking chorus line choreographed by Ramses Sigl.He wasn’t the only singer given movement onstage. Jakub Jozef Orlinski, the countertenor in the role of Athamas, is also a breakdancer, which Guth spotlights when his character desperately attempts to entertain Semele. Charismatic and handsome, Orlinski stopped the show with the applause his dance earned. But more enchanting was the purity of his sound — sublimely crystalline in “Come, Zephyrs, come” — which blended warmly with the lower end of Athamas’s altolike tessitura.Orlinski, a break dancer beyond the opera house, is made to do so in a scene of his character trying to impress Semele.Monika RittershausThat aria, put in Athamas’s mouth rather than Cupid’s, made for a shattering juxtaposition with Semele’s “O sleep.” Orlinski and Rae sang near, but not at, each other, embodying that painfully familiar feeling of two people expressing themselves yet failing to truly communicate.As Jupiter’s enraged and scheming wife, Juno, the typically mighty but pleasant mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo seemed to have been handed a part not suited to her voice; but with the sprightly soprano Jessica Niles as Iris, she provided much of the show’s levity, through musical delivery and physical comedy. Charming, as well, was the bass-baritone Philippe Sly, his sound focused and vibrant as Semele’s father, Cadmus, and the drowsy Somnus.Among the smaller roles, Nadezhda Karyazina, as Semele’s sister, Ino, was prone to excessive gesture, but found a touching balance of outward emotion and poise in the climactic scene of her stepping in to marry Athamas.By that point, Guth shows Semele as alive, but so deep in her imagination that she can’t find her way back to reality; rather than reduced to ashes by Jupiter’s thunderbolts, she sits in the wedding hall lifeless as the world goes on around her. Semele may be free from the institution of marriage, but the institution endures without her.It’s a bittersweet ending that comes through persuasively and clearly. In that regard, when it reaches New York, Guth’s staging will be a fitting addition to the Met’s current era of many handsome, cosmetically modern productions. More uncertain, though, is how it will scale from the Prinzregententheater — whose seating capacity barely tops 1,100 — to the 3,800-seat Met, a company in desperate need of a second, smaller house.Semele transforms in the final moments from lifelessness to something like rebirth, suggesting that she may be more of a prophet than a mere dreamer. But the change occurs on her face alone; the question, now, is whether Guth can repeat that subtlety at the Met.SemeleThrough July 25 at the Prinzregententheater in Munich; staatsoper.de. More

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      “The Greek Passion” Takes Center Stage at the Salzburg Festival

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      Bohuslav Martinu’s “Greek Passion” poses a timeless question: when a group of refugees seek protection in a new community, what will the locals do?Bohuslav Martinu’s final opera, “The Greek Passion,” explores a story that was as explosive in the mid-twentieth century as it is today. When a group of refugees seeks protection in the village of Lycovrissi, the community is thrown into upheaval: Will the villagers reaffirm their Christian virtues or indulge in acts of selfishness?This Aug. 13-27, the opera will be performed for the first time at the Salzburg Festival in a production directed by Simon Stone. Maxime Pascal, the 2014 winner of the summertime event’s annual Young Conductors Award, leads — his first fully staged opera here — in the Felsenreitschule.The festival has performed Martinu’s work occasionally since 1950, presenting the world premiere of his orchestral piece “Les Fresques de Piero della Francesca” in 1956. Recent editions have seen mostly chamber music.“The Greek Passion” had personal resonance for Martinu, who was perpetually homesick in his last years. Born in 1890 in Policka — a town in Bohemia just over the Moravian border (in the modern-day Czech Republic) — he came into maturity as a composer in Paris in the 1920s and ’30s. In 1941, as a member of the French Resistance, he fled the Nazis for the United States. Martinu would die in Switzerland, in 1959, unable to return to his native country for political reasons.Bohuslav Martinu in 1948.Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone, via Getty ImagesAfter a long search for a tragic subject matter that he could personally adapt into a libretto, he discovered the novels of Nikos Kazantzakis and won approval to adapt his book “Christ Recrucified.”“I now feel ready for another step,” the composer wrote to the Guggenheim Foundation in 1956, “which is most difficult and entails the greatest responsibility, and that is a musical tragedy.”Martinu collaborated closely with Kazantzakis as he worked through the novel, in an English translation by Jonathan Griffin. The original conflict, involving Turkish rule, was tightened, so that the standoff in Lycovrissi (a town north of Athens) involved only Greeks.Ales Brezina, director of the Bohuslav Martinu Institute, explained that the story line, as such, had particular import to the composer in the context of Cold War politics that pitted people of the same nation against each other. Having taken up American citizenship, Martinu was considered a traitor in his home country. In the United States, he had to face the repercussions of being a Czech native during the anti-communist McCarthy era.“In the context of a bipolar world where everything was suspect,” Mr. Brezina said, “Martinu was moved by the topic of what people were capable of doing to their fellow countrymen.”Mr. Pascal, the conductor, also emphasized the centrality of this dynamic to the work. “A group of Greeks arrives in a Greek village, and they start to chase them away,” he said. “This reveals the viciousness of an angry mob toward another human being and humanity itself.”The score features two choruses — one representing the people of Lycovrissi, another, the refugees — a structure that follows a long tradition of musical settings of the Passion, or the story of the Crucifixion, as told in the Gospels of the Bible. In “The Greek Passion,” art becomes life as the villagers re-enact a Passion play. The shepherd Manolios, who portrays Christ, is ultimately murdered after he challenges his fellow villagers about the authenticity of their values.Mr. Pascal pointed out that Kazantzakis was considered a heretic for reinterpreting the doctrines of faith as they had been handed down by the church. “He saw a revolutionary figure in the figure of Christ but most of all saw in the mystery of Christianity something along the lines of a legend or myth,” he said.Simon Stone is directing the production.Jan Friese/SFMartinu left behind two very different versions of “The Greek Passion” because of an unusual twist of events. He chose the Royal Opera in London as the location for the premiere, although there was also interest from the Vienna State Opera, the Salzburg Festival and La Scala in Milan.Yet the opera was ultimately rejected by external advisers to the theater’s board. The musicologist and conductor Anthony Lewis argued that certain works by the Czech natives Smetana and Janacek had yet to be heard in London, and that the house needed to champion contemporary English composers.Despite the relentless support of the Royal Opera’s music director, the Czech-born Rafael Kubelik, the board would not reverse its decision. Martinu, for his part, believed that the war for independence in Cyprus — which was affecting diplomatic relations between Britain and Greece — might have tainted the subject matter.He revised and tightened the score for the Zurich Opera, where the show premiered in June 1961, after Martinu’s death, under the baton of his friend and patron, Paul Sacher. The original version, intended to premiere in London, did not hit the stage until 1999 at the Bregenz Festival in Austria.Mr. Brezina, who reconstructed the score for that production, compared the original version to a “dramatic fresco” or a “mosaic in which individual scenes and appearances blaze against each other.” The Zurich version, which will be performed in Salzburg, by contrast resembles “a kind of oratorio with wonderful melodies and choral scenes,” he said.Martinu’s mature works achieve an unprecedented synthesis of Czech and French elements, combining Bohemian rhythms and Moravian cadences with the influences of such composers as Stravinsky and Debussy. His “Greek Passion,” however, is distinct in that he carefully absorbed Greek Orthodox music, only occasionally alluding to his Czech roots. In 1955, Martinu traveled to New York to meet with friends of Kazantzakis and learn about Greek folk music and liturgy.Mr. Brezina explained that Martinu was keen to portray simple people while keeping his distance from the “farmer’s music” that can be found in the works of Janacek, who was the first composer to adapt Moravian speech patterns and melodies to the operatic stage. “He found in Kazantzakis exceptional intelligence, but also a down-to-earth person,” he said. “All the characters in the ‘Greek Passion’ have almost no education. They behave instinctively.”Mr. Pascal noted that the displacement of peoples in Greece echoed developments in Martinu’s native Czechoslovakia. “The oral songs and dances that migrated from region to region must have spoken enormously to him,” he said.The conductor also pointed to the score’s strongly Impressionist character. “There is incredible violence, but at the same time everything seems to be bathed in sunlight,” he said.Mr. Pascal further reflected on the superimposition of time periods that can be typical for a composer’s ultimate statement: “The after-war period, the period of Christ, Greece: There is a continuity between the past and present that is vertiginous.This is also found in Mahler’s ‘Das Lied von der Erde’ — in which 8th-century Chinese texts bifurcate with a text that the composer wrote himself — or Gérard Grisey’s ‘Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil.’”Although it is rarely performed, “The Greek Passion” is considered Martinu’s greatest operatic achievement, alongside his 1938 surrealist masterpiece “Juliette.” “It is the self-proclaimed pinnacle of his work for the stage,” Mr. Brezina said. 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      The Baritone Andrè Schuen Performs at the Salzburg Festival

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      Andrè Schuen stars as Count Almaviva in the Salzburg Festival’s new production of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.”Andrè Schuen, a fast-rising young Italian baritone, brings innate musicality to his performances. Born in La Val, a small village in Südtirol, the mountainous region at the border with Austria, Schuen grew up speaking three languages: Ladin, Italian and German.This summer, Schuen, 38, stars as Count Almaviva in the Salzburg Festival’s new production of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro,” running from July 27 to Aug. 28. With rehearsals underway in late June, he spoke in a video call about his background and upcoming performance. The following conversation, translated from German, has been edited and condensed.You hail from a remote region and are part of a cultural-linguistic minority, the Ladin people. How did this background influence your musical formation?From childhood onward, music was always the most important thing. That was also the case with my father, who got his love of music from his father.You need to remember that 100 years ago people were very poor where I come from. Before tourism, they were all farmers who lived off their fields and cows.My grandfather acquired a small collection of instruments, which my father passed on to us. That means that we grew up with music, including many folk songs, with my father playing accordion and clarinet, my two sisters on violin, and me on cello.We also made music together as a family and put together a program connected to our Ladin national saga, about the legend of the Kingdom of Fanes. Later, I was in a band and did covers of everything, including punk songs.You weren’t listening to Schubert alone in your room.Not at all! Quite the opposite. For instance, when I was 13, soccer meant everything to me. I was on a team. It’s not like my parents forced me in a musical direction. If I had said I wanted to be a carpenter, then I would have become a carpenter.When did you start playing cello?When I was about 7. I studied cello for 12 years. I knew that I liked to sing, but singing classically would have never occurred to me. One of my sisters told me, “You sing well. Why don’t you give it a shot?”So I auditioned for voice at the Mozarteum [University] in Salzburg. And that’s how it happened. Without ever thinking about it too much, everything pretty much came together harmoniously.What does singing give you that playing the cello doesn’t?I think it has a bit to do with the fact that you are the instrument yourself, that you don’t have to take something in your hand and practice on it. And of course, there’s the added element of text. I think being an opera singer has more parameters. It’s not just about singing.This summer you’ll be appearing as the Count in “Figaro.” You’ve also sung the title character many times. What’s it like being both upstairs and downstairs in this opera?Personally, I prefer singing the Count. He’s not exactly a positive character, but that’s exactly what makes him interesting. He has more layers than Figaro. He has a soft, seductive side, but he’s also aggressive or irascible and you need to switch quickly between emotions.Most recently, you sang the Count in Barrie Kosky’s acclaimed, comically astute Vienna production of “Figaro.” Is Martin Kusej, the director in Salzburg, going to show us a different side of “Figaro”?Definitely. [Kusej] doesn’t want to reproduce the piece the way it was intended in [Mozart’s] time. He’s trying to bring out something relevant that still touches or concerns us nowadays. But I don’t think he’s looking for that through the comedy.You recently sang your first Wolfram in “Tannhäuser.” How was it singing such a meaty Wagner role?I was emotionally transported. As for other Wagner roles, we’ll see where else my voice leads me. But Mozart will probably remain a key part of my repertoire until the end. The Count is not a part I want to retire, because it’s a role you can still sing when you’re 60. More

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      At the Aix Festival, Premieres in Pursuit of Happiness

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      Two works at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, by two inventive opera partnerships, use fables to explore grief and queer utopian dreams.Happiness doesn’t come quickly. Aristotle claimed that as one swallow does not make spring, neither does one good day make someone happy. That would take a lifetime, at least.Those measures — days, lifetimes, even generations — are put to the test in the pursuit of happiness in two new, fablelike works at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France: George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s “Picture a Day Like This,” and Philip Venables and Ted Huffman’s “The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions.”Yet in either case, time doesn’t guarantee anyone’s success in reaching that elusive goal.In “Picture” — Benjamin and Crimp’s fourth opera, a taut one-act of masterly craft — the aim is to find the embodiment of happiness. The protagonist, a woman whose infant son has died, is told that if she cuts a button from the sleeve of a happy person’s shirt, her child will be brought back to life. She has until nightfall, and is equipped only with a sheet of paper listing whom to seek.Crimp’s text, characteristically mysterious and strange, both untethered from reality and peppered with the banality of daily life, is something of a return to the aesthetic his first collaboration with Benjamin, “Into the Little Hill,” a 2006 retelling of the Pied Piper legend. (They went on to create the well-traveled psychosexual thriller “Written on Skin,” as well as a similar follow-up, “Lessons in Love and Violence.”) Here, in what makes for a natural double bill with “Little Hill,” Crimp draws from folk tale, the Alexander Romance, Christianity and Buddhism for a synthesis not unlike Wagner’s grab-bag approach to mythology.The woman encounters several archetypal personalities on her quest, a journey redolent of the Little Prince among the planets, or Alice in Wonderland. There are a pair of lovers, an erstwhile artisan, a composer and a collector. In a series of scenes, subtly linked in Benjamin’s score but operating as discrete set pieces, these people present as happy but crumble at the slightest scrutiny or self-disclosure. Only Zabelle, a seeming mirror image of the woman, has the wisdom to offer her something more like contentment, and salvation.In Daniel Jeanneteau and Marie-Christine Soma’s straightforward, intimate production at the Théâtre du Jeu de Paume, each scene fluidly emerges from three walls that wrap around the stage. Marie La Rocca’s unintrusive costumes differentiate the characters, who are played by a small cast in multiple roles: the soprano Beate Mordal, nimbly lyrical as a lover and the composer; the elegant countertenor Cameron Shahbazi as the other lover, weaving darkly sensual lines, and the composer’s assistant; and the baritone John Brancy as the artisan and the collector.Crebassa, left, and the baritone John Brancy, a standout in “Picture a Day Like This.”Jean-Louis FernandezBrancy is given some of Benjamin’s most adventurous vocal writing in the piece, and rises to it with impressive skill — seamless passaggio between the richly resonant depths of his range and a weightless, dreamy falsetto, about three and a half octaves from a low B flat to a soprano E.Special care appears to have been given, as well, to the soprano Anna Prohaska as Zabelle, her sympathetic stage presence feeding Benjamin’s firm yet humane music for her, and vice versa. In Zabelle’s scene, what is described in the libretto as her garden is rendered in video projections by the artist Hicham Berrada that show a barren aquarium as it blooms with surreal, alien life alluringly lush and menacing.As the woman, the mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa is determined but aching, her resolute manner betrayed by tense vibrato or wide-eyed concern. It’s through her that Benjamin, who also conducted the excellent players of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in the pit, ties together his episodic score. Her reading the sheet of paper is accompanied by a motif of muted trumpets and a trombone; tubular bells, quietly embedded in each scene’s climax, suggest a clock striking, and time running out.Her race against time, however, is less important in the end than the woman’s epiphanic encounter with Zabelle. Whether that leads to happiness is impossible to say in a day, and is as ambiguous as Benjamin’s music itself, which despite its immaculate construction is never obviously representational or tidily resolved.Collin Shay, at center singing into a loudspeaker, and other performers in the 15-person ensemble of Phillip Venables and Ted Huffman’s new show, seen here in its premiere at the Manchester International Festival in England a week before its opening at Aix.Tristram KentonAmbivalent, too, is Venables and Huffman’s show, “The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions,” at the Pavillon Noir. This music theater adaptation of the cult classic Larry Mitchell book of the same name from 1977, with illustrations by Ned Asta, recasts queer history in mythic, utopian terms in opposition to the patriarchy, referred to as “the Men.” (Among the work’s co-commissioners is NYU Skirball in New York, where it will travel next year.) Whereas the ’70s fable ends with uncertainty, Venables and Huffman take the story even further, introducing a cautionary tale of assimilation and offering a vision for life after the revolutions that Mitchell said “will engulf us all.”The last collaboration between Venables, a composer, and Huffman, a writer and director, was the 2019 opera “Denis & Katya,” a chamber piece based on the true story of two Russian teenagers who a few years earlier had run away from home, hidden in a cabin and died in a shootout with police. Barely more than an hour long, yet smoothly layered and ethically complex, that work was fundamentally about how stories are formed and told.And how they are performed; “Denis & Katya” existed in a theatrical space, occupied by two singers and four cellists, but also decorated with projections of Venables and Huffman’s correspondence, devoid of hierarchy or operatic tradition. It’s a concept the creators take even further in their new show, an astonishing feat of controlled chaos in which an ensemble of 15 does it all: sings, narrates, dances, plays instruments.Venables’s score is a delirious stylistic fantasia, with elements of folk, jazzy turns of phrase and Baroque instrumentation. He exercises a restraint similar to Benjamin’s, and is explicit, to comic effect, only when he is at his most prurient: An episode near the beginning recounts “the ritual” of cruising, building toward a climax of “ecstatic communion” and the exchange of something vulgar that can’t be repeated here, before the music quickly subsides to a piano. The Richard Strauss of “Der Rosenkavalier” and “Symphonia Domestica” would be proud.Throughout the show, no one artist can be easily described, because no one artist has a defined role. This approach to theater-making, in which each performer is essential to the whole, is particularly suited to the spirit of Mitchell’s book and its roots in his time at the Lavender Hill commune for gay men and lesbians in upstate New York.Kit Green, left, and Yandass, two of the show’s narrators.Tristram KentonBut some of the performers are given a little brighter spotlight. The musical direction of Yshani Perinpanayagam, an agile instrumentalist, holds the group together in crucial moments. Two of the narrators naturally stand out: Yandass, a dynamo of speech delivery and dance, and Kit Green, a presence at once charismatic, commanding and thoroughly comedic. Venable’s score is at its most patient showcasing the vocal beauty of Deepa Johnny and Katherine Goforth, but also reveals flashes of Collin Shay’s gifted countertenor (not to mention their talent at a keyboard).That the performers are presented as such — a group of artists sharing Mitchell’s fable rather than embodying it, as they constantly break the fourth wall — also helps to sidestep some of the book’s dated, peak-hippie politics. Venables and Huffman treat the non-Men other as a universal concept that applies, extremely broadly, to anyone oppressed. But a passage that warns against assimilation, of “looking like the Men,” has a narrower focus. Blending in is a distinctly white, gay, bourgeois luxury; not for nothing was Pete Buttigieg the first openly queer person to stand a chance at the American presidency.Yet that contradiction, a dramaturgical wrinkle in an appropriately wrinkled show, is at the heart of queerness as an unfinished project — one still in search of, if not Mitchell’s utopia, then some kind of post-liberation happiness. And that will take time. More