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      ‘Norma’ and ‘La Traviata’ Return to the Met Opera

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      Sonya Yoncheva doesn’t fill out the long lines of “Norma” at the Met, while Angel Blue is a warm, sincere Violetta in “La Traviata.”“An irresistible force drags me here,” a character says of the man she loves in Bellini’s “Norma,” which was revived at the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday with the soprano Sonya Yoncheva in the title role. “The breeze echoes with his dear voice.”Every opera, of course, wants the voices in it to be irresistible forces, echoing in our minds; that is the point of the art form. But in the bel canto works of the early 19th century — of which “Norma,” from 1831, is a lasting masterpiece — vocal quality is more than a want. It’s a need.Particularly in the monumental title role. Norma is a descendant of Medea, a character who opened the Met’s season in Luigi Cherubini’s 1797 opera. Both are women wronged by their lovers and contemplating the murder of their children; both are figures of immense, mystical stature. And in both works, the drama lies in the breaking down of their authority: the revelation of an archetype, a myth, a goddess who is also a woman.In bel canto works like “Norma,” the protagonist’s grandeur, the heights from which she falls, are established by the soprano’s vocal technique, by the long, confident musical lines she spins. Bellini’s orchestra is subtle and sensitive, but austere enough that this opera’s stakes are purely vocal. If the score isn’t sung beautifully, it’s not simply bad — it’s almost nonexistent, which is the case in the Met’s drab revival.Over the past decade, Yoncheva has risen from a series of last-minute fill-ins to solo recitals on the Met’s stage and starring roles in new productions, including Umberto Giordano’s 1898 potboiler “Fedora” this past New Year’s Eve. But even for an established leading lady, Norma, which Yoncheva first sang in London seven years ago, is a daring proposition.As this druid high priestess, caught in a forbidden love triangle with a Roman soldier and a fellow priestess, Yoncheva can be forceful in declamation — the singing that’s more like speechifying. And she’s long been able to convey the sense of a character thinking as she sings.But crucial to this score, as to all bel canto, are the seemingly endless, time-defying lines that, on the revival’s opening night, she struggled to sustain, with an unsettled vibrato and big, gulping breaths breaking up core arias like “Casta diva.” Without powerful, poised, flexible singing — “beauty of tone and correct emission,” as Lilli Lehmann, a great Norma, put it — we feel none of the necessary awe for the character. So her fall from grace and the opera she dominates both lose their meaning. While Yoncheva doesn’t betray Bellini’s score, she doesn’t fill its sails, either, and the boat stagnates.The result is a kind of pencil sketch of “Norma” — not imprecise, but colorless. Yoncheva has coloratura agility, retained from her early days as a Baroque specialist, and isolated high notes pop out clearly. But when those notes are the climaxes of arching lines, they’re thin. She is spirited and scrupulous, and her voice is not ugly, but it’s inadequate for this music.The soprano Sonya Yoncheva comes to the Met’s latest revival of “Norma” after rising from a series of last-minute fill-ins to solo recitals on the Met’s stage and star turns in new productions.Marty Sohl/Metropolitan OperaShe neither loses control nor takes real command. And it’s not just strength you can’t convey if you’re not vocally in command as Norma; it’s weakness, too. Yoncheva spends much of the time blandly moping around, small-scale on this soaring canvas.With Maurizio Benini conducting briskly on Tuesday, the rest of the cast, too, lacked the suggestion of the epic. The wayward Roman warrior Pollione is the second big part in a much-anticipated Met season for the acclaimed tenor Michael Spyres, and the second disappointment. There’s a tarnished-bronze, baritonal nobility to Spyres’s voice, but strain in reaching the high register, and a kind of fogged wooliness just below.As Adalgisa, who unwittingly becomes Norma’s romantic rival, the mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova makes the warmest outpourings of sound onstage, and her classic duets with Norma are neatly done. The bass-baritone Christian Van Horn presses out muscular tone as Oroveso, Norma’s father. In the small role of Clotilde, Norma’s aide, the soprano Brittany Olivia Logan sings with creamy urgency.The sighing “ba-dum, ba-dum” motif in the prelude to Act II anticipates Verdi’s “La Traviata,” which premiered just 22 years after “Norma” and mines that same motif for the same pathos. But by midcentury, operatic orchestral music had increased in density and complexity, and had begun to develop into a character in its own right. And “Traviata,” which returned to the Met on Saturday afternoon, is a far more naturalistic melodrama than the carefully antique, stylized “Norma.”So, unlike “Norma,” “La Traviata” makes its impact — it breaks your heart — pretty much no matter what. (By Giordano and Puccini’s time, 40 or 50 years later, operas were even more indestructible.) Which is not to say that “Traviata” can’t be derailed by its star. Or that it doesn’t bloom with an excellent one, like the soprano Angel Blue, who took on the role of Violetta at the Met on Saturday.The tricky curlicues and fast lines of the first act are sometimes not quite secure for her, and in “Sempre libera,” which brings down the Act I curtain, she exudes vague contentedness rather than bigger, riskier feelings. But even in those opening scenes, she is a warm presence — warm vocally, too, but with a quickly vibrating shimmer to her tone that keeps the sound buoyant and refreshing.There is no cynicism or hardness to her conception of the role, just the woundedness of a quick-smiling woman who has trusted too easily. Blue’s Violetta is always human-size, even in full, rich cry in her confrontation with Germont, the bourgeois father seeking to tear his son away from a liaison that threatens the family.She shows restraint in the third act, not milking the music for extra emotion. Her “Addio del passato” was brisk and bleak; her “Gran dio,” angry rather than pleading. The irrepressible Nadine Sierra and the scorched-earth Ermonelo Jaho offered accomplished Violettas at the Met earlier this season, but the sweet, sincere Blue — who lets the tragedy patiently unfold — may be my favorite.The tenor Dmytro Popov is an earnest, ringing Alfredo; as his father, the disapproving Germont, the baritone Artur Rucinski sometimes forces his seductive tone. In tiny parts, Megan Marino is a sprightly Flora, and, over 600 performances into his Met career, Dwayne Croft (here Baron Douphol) still brings a hearty voice and dramatic investment every time he steps onstage.Michael Mayer’s vulgar production drags down the opera. In the first act, Alfredo warns Violetta, “The way you’re living will kill you,” which makes no sense if, as here, the opening scene has all the demimonde danger of a Hamptons garden party. And, in this period setting, the visibly contemporary labels on the bottles of bubbly come across as yet more lazy summer-stock falsity in a staging full of it.But the show is surprisingly bearable with Blue’s tender honesty at its center. More

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      Review: A Blunt New ‘Lohengrin’ at the Met Stars a Shining Knight

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      The tenor Piotr Beczala sings with uncanny serenity and command in the title role of Wagner’s opera, directed by François Girard with little subtlety.Directors love Wagner’s operas, which infuse the suggestive sketchiness of parables into clearly conceived plots and characters. They offer both strong bones and flexibility.“Lohengrin,” about an anxious and divided society into which arrives a figure with magical powers and secrets, has recently been placed in settings as varied as a laboratory, a classroom and a neo-fascist town square.And, on Sunday at the Metropolitan Opera, in a dark, blunt mixture of pre-modern and post-apocalyptic elements. Directed by François Girard, the production suffers from a facile children’s-theater color scheme, but boasts a shining musical performance from the orchestra and the two leading singers.At the Met in 1998, Robert Wilson distilled “Lohengrin” into a vision of hovering bars of light and glacially shifting gestures. The opening night audience, used to hyper-naturalistic Wagner productions, rebelled with a storm of boos. But 25 years later, the Wilson staging seems like an ahead-of-its-time landmark, a harbinger of how the company’s dramatic range would broaden.Among the highlights of this new era has been Girard’s staging, from 2013, of Wagner’s “Parsifal.” Set on a stark hillside among a group of men in white button-ups and black pants, this was a take on the opera’s protectors of the Holy Grail as a contemporary cult over which planets loomed and orbited in projections.Those cosmic projections have returned in Girard’s “Lohengrin,” with a kind of catastrophic heavenly explosion depicted during the orchestral prelude. The action that follows begins under a blasted wall that hangs at an angle over the stage, a huge hole open to a view of morphing stars and galaxies.The people who enter are dressed in early medieval robes and heavy jewels; a pagan throne is formed from tree roots. But the wall is made of reinforced concrete, and Lohengrin, the mystical knight who soon arrives to avenge the honor of a woman accused of killing her brother, is wearing the spare modern-day outfit of the Grail defenders in Girard’s “Parsifal.”The connection makes some sense: As we learn at the end of “Lohengrin,” when its title character’s secrets are revealed, Lohengrin is Parsifal’s son. But Girard’s nod to his “Parsifal” doesn’t do his new production any favors. While that “Parsifal” was revelatory in imagining the opera’s climax as the integration of women into the Grail cult, this “Lohengrin” isn’t interested in fresh interpretations. No one will mistake it for a landmark in Met history.Instead, Girard’s “Lohengrin,” which brings the opera back to the company after 17 years, is an emphatic, serviceable, basically conservative framework for the piece. Thankfully, some superb singers fill the frame. Most important, almost floating through the staging with uncanny serenity and dignity, is Piotr Beczala in the title role.Beczala, who has appeared at the Met mostly in French and Italian classics, was an impressive Lohengrin.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis square-jawed, always stylish tenor is best known at the Met for playing dashing men in French and Italian classics, like the Duke in “Rigoletto,” Rodolfo in “La Bohème” and, this winter, the ardent Loris in “Fedora.” But the clearest precursor to his melancholy Lohengrin is his Lensky in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” who sings with wintry loneliness as he prepares to duel and die.Beczala performs the Wagner role — pure, precise and often treacherously exposed — with total security and elegance. The soft passages have fairy-tale delicacy; his outpourings, a robust plangency reminiscent of his more extroverted roles. But this Lohengrin, even at his most passionate, has the proper coolness of an otherworldly figure. He is human, but not entirely.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.There is also an intriguing coolness when we meet Tamara Wilson’s unjustly accused Elsa, a glassy sheen to her tone as icy-blond as her hair. But while Beczala’s Lohengrin maintains his reserve, Wilson’s voice gradually warms, gently molten in their love duet and palpably angry in confrontation.Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, conducts this grand score with a sure sense for the elasticity of pace that makes Wagner’s scenes breathe. He led the orchestra on Sunday in broad expansions before focusing it back into tumbling momentum. The shimmering start of the prelude to Act I was fragile without being wispy, building with lyrical flow to a stirring climax.There are onstage trumpets in this opera, and extra brass forces in the balconies. But Nézet-Séguin kept the textures light; even at its mightiest, the sound was never stolid.Tamara Wilson as Elsa with Beczala.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesChanging shirts between the acts, from black to red to white, he also underlined the already obvious play with color that is all too central to the staging. The choristers manipulate complicated sets of magnets in their robes to reveal red, green or white linings, depending on the dramatic needs of the moment. (The sets and costumes were designed by Tim Yip, an Academy Award winner for “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”; the gloomy lighting, by David Finn; the interstellar projections, by Peter Flaherty.)Green symbolizes King Heinrich, who has arrived in Brabant (around Antwerp in present-day Belgium) with his followers to rally the people there to join him in fighting off a coming invasion from the east. Red is the color of the native Brabantians, who are under the sinister influence of Friedrich von Telramund and his wife, the sorceress Ortrud. And white evokes the innocence and purity of Elsa, to whose aid Lohengrin has come.Fine, if rather on the nose. But the endless flashings of the different linings on the beat of musical flourishes — and the visible struggles that some choristers on Sunday had with the magnets — grew tiresome.And must every Met production now have bits of choreographed slinking and twirling? Here, credited to Serge Bennathan, were lightly dancing attendants with lanterns, heads-thrown-back courtiers, whirling nobles and laughably in-time marching. It was all of a piece with a production that’s straightforward to the point of eye-roll overstatement.As Ortrud, the soprano Christine Goerke was perhaps the performer closest to the mood of the staging: She’s unsubtle, if effective, constantly wringing her hands and gripping her necklaces. Girard strands her alone, making over-the-top witchy gestures, for almost the whole of the Act III prelude. We get it: She’s evil!Goerke’s voice has vigor, but rich phrases alternate with sour, snarled ones; some high notes shiver, while some just miss the mark. The bass-baritone Evgeny Nikitin, an imposing presence, sounded weary and out of tune as Telramund. I found myself wishing that the baritone Brian Mulligan, who sang the Herald with unusually vivid intensity, had that larger part instead. The bass Günther Groissböck was a forceful Heinrich.Wilson and, top, Christine Goerke. The choristers manipulate their robes to reveal red, green or white linings, depending on the dramatic needs of the moment.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Met’s chorus, in one of the most difficult works in its repertory, was both stentorian and evocative: In the awe-struck passage after Lohengrin introduces himself, its ethereal singing was almost more felt than heard. Only in some of the most complex counterpoint could the sound have been crisper, the words sharper.Girard’s staging is more lucid than his murky take on Wagner’s “Der Fliegende Holländer,” which will be revived at the Met this spring. It does, at least, convey the urgency of the march toward war that gives the opera its stakes. And this production will always be an unintentional memorial to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.Conceived as a co-production of the Bolshoi Theater and the Met, it premiered at the Bolshoi in Moscow on Feb. 24, 2022, the day of the invasion. Soon it became clear that sharing the production would be impossible, and that the sets would have to be rebuilt from scratch, adding over $1 million to the show’s cost.“Lohengrin” is an opera with war on its mind. But King Heinrich and his call to defend Germany against invaders don’t make for an easy parallel with the besieged Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky.That is because Heinrich’s story was taken up — by Wagner and, later, by the Nazis — as a symbol of pan-Germanic nationalism, with all its darkness and xenophobia. That is the context in which a few opera companies have changed a word in Lohengrin’s final line, when he declares, at the magical return of Elsa’s brother, that the people’s “Führer,” or leader, has arrived.To further avoid the associations of this savior figure with Hitler, many directors offer a comment in how they depict the brother. Is there something ominous about him? Something redemptive? Anything?Girard, though, has a very Aryan-looking, blond young man in flowing, angelic white come down the stairs, a final odd bit of naïveté in this “Lohengrin,” a production that ends up being too simplistic for a complex moment and a complex opera.LohengrinContinues through April 1 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Jessye Norman Rejected These Recordings. Should They Be Released?

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      The maestro was in a foul mood. And the singer was unhappy. The Berlin Wall had fallen almost a decade earlier, but Leipzig, in the former East Germany, still left something to be desired when it came to an opera star’s material needs.The conductor Kurt Masur and the soprano Jessye Norman — whose album collaboration on Strauss’s “Four Last Songs” was already a classic — had joined the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra to start recording Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.” But things had quickly soured.“She and Masur quarreled,” recalled Costa Pilavachi, then an executive at Philips Classics, the label making the recording. “It was a very, very difficult couple of weeks.”With costs spiraling and spirits low, the label eventually abandoned its plan for a complete “Tristan” and focused on excerpts featuring Isolde, a character Norman had never put on record beyond the famous “Liebestod.” But even this curtailed effort was never released.Until now. Those “Tristan” excerpts are perhaps the most eagerly anticipated part of “Jessye Norman: The Unreleased Masters,” coming from Decca — part of Universal Music Group, which acquired Philips years ago — on March 24.Jessye Norman singing from “Tristan und Isolde”Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra; Kurt Masur, conductor (Decca)The collection consists of three albums recorded with different orchestras and conductors over a period of nine years. One thing they have in common: Norman, one of the most beloved singers of our time, did not approve their release before her death, at 74, in 2019.“When she passed on, I raised with Decca: Isn’t it time to revisit these?” said Cyrus Meher-Homji, an executive at Universal in Australia. The label approached Norman’s estate, which gave its blessing.James Norman, her brother, said in a statement to The New York Times, “There’s no way of knowing whether Jessye would ever have approved the releases per her very high standards, as the subject was not one we ever discussed.”But, he added, they had frequently discussed her philanthropic interests, “and we see the releases as a way to help the estate to advance those interests.”More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Fosse Dancers: The thrill of “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’,” a revival of the 1978 musical is, aptly, its dancers. All are principals. No two are alike, not even a tiny bit. And that’s the way Fosse wanted it.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.However worthy the beneficiary, though, should labels and estates sanction the release of material that artists rejected?Sometimes, the label answers with a clear no: Maria Callas’s final studio recording, for example, was judged artistically inferior and canned. And sometimes, an unsanctioned album comes out during an artist’s lifetime. In the early 1980s, Deutsche Grammophon put out a “Tristan” against the wishes of the notoriously recording-shy conductor Carlos Kleiber, leading to the severing of his relationship with the label.After Kleiber died, his estate remained adamant that other material languishing in the vault should stay there. The family of Sergiu Celibidache, another conductor who frowned on recording, took the opposite position, allowing the release of many albums after his death.This question is more familiar in the literary world. Most of us are thankful that Max Brod didn’t burn Franz Kafka’s unpublished works at the author’s request. But in 2006, when a volume of uncollected material by the poet Elizabeth Bishop was published, the scholar Helen Vendler wrote that Bishop would have greeted it “with a horrified ‘No.’”Martha de Francisco, a record producer who worked with Norman (though not on the projects included in the new set), said, “We’re really all the time thinking of what is the artist’s integrity.”But the nature of that integrity is often far from straightforward. Artists’ wishes can be ambiguous or ambivalent. And some observers believe that the value to posterity of certain material can in some cases supersede even clear wishes. As far as the criteria, though, most admit that it’s more or less “I know it when I hear it.”For Norman, approving recordings was a painstaking and protracted process, even when the answer ended up being yes. “She was extraordinarily professional, and an extraordinarily severe critic of her own work,” said Anthony Freud, then one of her producers and now the general director of Lyric Opera of Chicago.That would seem to give weight to her “no.” But those who spoke with her over the years about these unreleased projects suggest that she wasn’t always resolute about them, and that her reasons for not giving her approval were vague or fixable.“She was a great artist, and she had the right to decide what the public would hear and what the public wouldn’t hear in terms of her commercial output,” Pilavachi said. “She definitely did soften: She was less militant when I spoke to her, maybe 10 years ago, for the last time. She was much more willing to discuss some of this.”The earliest of the three projects is a collaboration with one of her champions, the conductor James Levine, drawn from live performances with the Berlin Philharmonic. The repertory includes the “Four Last Songs” — seven years after her sublime 1982 rendition with Masur — and, from 1992, Wagner’s “Wesendonck Lieder.”“She was thrilled with the ‘Wesendoncks,’” Pilavachi said. “But she wasn’t happy with one note in one song in the ‘Four Last Songs.’ She wanted us to redo that with Levine and the Berlin Philharmonic, and it just never happened. I had extensive conversations with her throughout the ’90s about it.”There was talk of using the Masur recording to patch the note she indicated. (While memories of her complaint are now blurry, it might have been in the first song, “Frühling,” though nothing in any of the four with Levine stands out as blatantly off.) But the original tapes of the older album turned out to have been recycled. The label couldn’t see its way to releasing the Wagner songs alone, so the whole project stayed in storage.These “Four Last Songs” are sleeker than the luscious version she set down with Masur, while Norman’s voice, even if it had lost some easy opulence, was still majestic and flexible. The “Wesendoncks,” which she had already recorded twice, are excellent: brooding, urgent and lush, the orchestra glistening.Norman came up with the idea for the next project, which brought together three queenly characters: Haydn’s “Scena di Berenice,” Berlioz’s “La Mort de Cléopâtre” and Britten’s “Phaedra,” all recorded with Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in February 1994.Pilavachi said Norman had vague misgivings about the Berlioz; Meher-Homji said her complaint in that work was less about her performance than the sound.“By the late 2000s, she approved some of the material,” Meher-Homji said. “She approved the Britten, and she approved the Haydn, but she didn’t like the mix on the Berlioz. And I could understand why. The sound was really hollow; she wanted it tightened up. The orchestra sounded like it was playing in a bathtub.”The mix was adjusted for the new release, and sounds properly balanced, with the Bostonians glittering. Her singing in the Berlioz is slightly more pressed and less plush than it had been with Daniel Barenboim a decade earlier, but she is still fully in command. The Haydn is magisterial but tender; the Britten, blistering and articulate.There is a case to be made that Norman’s objections to these two recordings were minor, and that the performances are worthy of standing alongside her prime work. But that still leaves the “Tristan” — which poses the thorniest questions.In a way, it is the most precious of the set, setting down a role that Norman never sang in full, one for which her capacious but thrusting voice was, in theory, beautifully suited. Its afterlife has also been the messiest of the three albums: The documentation related to the recording is scant and faded, as are the memories of those who worked on it.The similarity between the surnames of Kurt Masur and the tenor Thomas Moser initially caused confusion about who had sung Tristan. More bizarre, when Decca announced the new set last fall, it led with the blazing news that through overdubbing Norman had recorded both Isolde and the supporting role of Brangäne. It took two and a half months for the label to correct itself: Brangäne was actually the mezzo-soprano Hanna Schwarz.Norman, left, performing with Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.Lutz KleinhansMeher-Homji said that at some point after the sessions had ended in April 1998, Cord Garben, the recording’s producer, flew to England to play the edit for Norman. “She listened and said nothing,” Meher-Homji said. “There were plans to continue, and she decided she didn’t want to.”Pilavachi believes the troubled recording process had irretrievably colored her view of it. “She didn’t have any objections to her own singing,” he said. “I think she didn’t want to listen to all the tapes, having had such a lousy experience in Leipzig. I don’t think she had ever listened to it properly so that she could say yes or no.”Dominic Fyfe, Decca’s label director, said: “Obviously this was done quite late in her career. We’re perfectly well aware there may be people who react and say this should not have been released. There may be some controversy around it. But I think on balance, collectively, we all felt that the strengths of the recording outweigh many of the weaknesses.”It’s true: There are strengths and weaknesses to the “Tristan” excerpts. Norman’s voice is richly vehement and full of mystery. Her sensibility is lively, even if Masur’s conducting tends to be limp. Her diction is pungent; the tone has her familiar echoey depth — far plummier than Schwarz’s Brangäne — if fewer sumptuous colors. Some longer phrases are heavy lifting; the high notes are not all comfortable; and some of the intonation wavers in softer passages of Isolde’s Narrative and Curse. The album gives great pleasure, but, more than the other two, one can understand Norman doubting it.When Pilavachi would see her in New York, he would ask her about these projects. “She became less negative about them as time went on,” he said. “But when I went back to London and I would follow up, I wouldn’t hear back. Or I’d send her the masters again, but I don’t know if she ever listened to them. With time she lost interest in them.”The liner notes for the new set thoroughly describe the equivocal position the recordings hold in Norman’s body of work. “It’s important that people appreciate that she had misgivings,” Fyfe said.But that context will not be available on streaming platforms. There, these albums will appear as indistinguishable from music that Norman did approve.“In a digital world,” Fyfe said, “it’s slightly out of our hands.”James Norman said in his statement, “We did agonize some about approving the release of something about which Jessye had some concerns.” But whatever the ethical quandaries, it is certainly the legal right of Norman’s estate and her label to approve the release of this new set. Now it is up to listeners — and to history — to judge.“Common sense is right to prevail,” said Freud, her onetime producer. “I’m not trying to second guess why an artist might have a problem with a recording. But there are clearly recordings that are of a quality that deserves to be heard, and there are other recordings that aren’t. I suppose logically, to me, the answer needs to lie in the quality of the result somehow. Is it good?” More

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      What to See This Spring in NYC: Broadway Shows, Concerts and More

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      “Life of Pi” and Laura Linney on Broadway, Lise Davidsen at the Met Opera, SZA on tour: Here’s what we’re looking forward to this season.Broadway | Off Broadway | Dance | Classical | PopBroadway‘PARADE’ It doesn’t exactly scream out for the big splashy Broadway musical treatment, does it, this disturbing tale of Leo Frank, accused of the rape and murder of a teenage girl and lynched by an antisemitic mob in Georgia in 1915? And yet, the original 1998 production grabbed Tony Awards for the book, by Alfred Uhry, and the score, by Jason Robert Brown. Almost 25 years later, Michael Arden directed a well-received Encores! production, starring Ben Platt, that had a blink-and-you-miss-it short run. Thankfully the production is headed to Broadway, again featuring Platt as Frank and Micaela Diamond as his wife, Lucille.In previews; opens March 16 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, Manhattan.‘SHUCKED’ When the crop starts to fail in the small town of Cob County, an expert “corn doctor” arrives to help, but is he really a huckster? That’s the kernel of this cornpone musical comedy, anyway. Well-received in a premiere run at the Pioneer Theater Company, it promises earworm songs and many laughs — sounds amaizing. The book is by the Tony Award winning “Tootsie” writer Robert Horn, with songs by Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally. The ubiquitous Jack O’Brien directs.Previews begin March 8; opens April 4 at the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan.‘LIFE OF PI’ The long, tense standoff between a 16-year-old boy and a Bengal tiger stuck on a lifeboat is a tale of hope and survival first told in Yann Martel’s award-winning 2002 novel. A decade later, it became an Oscar-winning film directed by Ang Lee, and most recently has been adapted for the stage by Lolita Chakrabarti — the 2021 West End production won five Olivier Awards. The kid keeps surviving, so a stop on Broadway seems like a good next step. Hiran Abeysekera, who starred in London, will reprise the role of Pi, with Max Webster directing. No, no actual tigers will be among the cast; the puppetry and movement direction is by Finn Caldwell, with puppet design by Caldwell and Nick Barnes.Previews begin March 9; opens March 30 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, Manhattan.Hiran Abeysekera, left, with puppeteers operating the Bengal tiger in “Life of Pi.”Johan Persson‘PETER PAN GOES WRONG’ What’s the worst that could happen? When the Mischief Theater Company, which staged “The Play That Goes Wrong,” takes on the J.M. Barrie classic about a boy who won’t grow up, a few flying mishaps are sure to happen. This farce, which premiered in the West End in 2015, arrives to Broadway this spring, with Adam Meggido directing the chaos.Previews begin March 17; opens April 19 at the Barrymore Theater, Manhattan.‘THE THANKSGIVING PLAY’ You can’t please everyone … but you can try! A troupe of super progressive artists creates a culturally sensitive elementary school pageant that embraces both Thanksgiving and Native American Heritage month (without the participation of any actual Native Americans) in this satirical comedy by Larissa FastHorse. After a well-received premiere at Playwrights Horizons in 2018, the show arrives on Broadway, with Rachel Chavkin (“Hadestown”) directing.Previews begin March 25; opens April 20 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan.Jennifer Bareilles, left, and Margo Seibert in “The Thanksgiving Play.”Jenny Anderson for The New York Times‘NEW YORK, NEW YORK’ What’s old is new when Broadway hosts a new musical inspired by a 1977 film about young artists with big dreams in the big city after World War II. It ain’t easy, but if they can make it here, they can make it anywhere (or so we’re told). The musical includes classics like the title number, as well as new songs — and a huge cast. The score is by Kander and Ebb, with an original story by David Thompson with  Sharon Washington and additional lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Susan Stroman directs.Previews begin March 24; opens April 26 at the St. James Theater, Manhattan.‘ROOM’ Like “Life of Pi,” also opening this spring, “Room” has gone from best-selling novel to award-winning film and now to a Broadway production. The play, adapted by Emma Donoghue from her 2010 novel about a mother and son held captive in a shed for years, has songs and some theatricalized aspects, like an older alter ego for young Jack. The essence of the story, though, about hope, imagination and resilience, remains the same. The songs are by the Scottish artists Kathryn Joseph and Cora Bissett, and Bissett (“Roadkill”) directs.Previews begin April 3; opens April 17 at the James Earl Jones Theater, Manhattan.‘SUMMER, 1976’ The casting alone, with Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht, ought to get you to the box office. Set in Ohio in the year of the bicentennial, David Auburn’s latest is about the budding friendship between Diana (Linney), an artist and single mother, and Alice (Hecht), a naïve housewife. As the nation celebrates independence, the women grapple with motherhood, ambition and intimacy and aim for their own sense of freedom. Daniel Sullivan directs.Previews begin April 4; opens April 25 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan.‘GOOD NIGHT, OSCAR’ Sean Hayes plays the impossible-to-describe pianist, performer and incomparable wit Oscar Levant in this new play by Doug Wright. Levant famously did a number of television interviews with Jack Paar when Levant talked openly and perhaps a bit scandalously about his battles with depression and mental illness. The play premiered last year at the Goodman Theater in Chicago to raves like this one from The Chicago Tribune: “It’s a stunner of a lead performance: moving, empathetic, deeply emotional and slightly terrifying.” Anticipation is in the air. Lisa Peterson directs.Previews begin April 7; opens April 24 at the Belasco Theater, Manhattan.Sean Hayes in “Good Night, Oscar.”Liz Lauren‘PRIMA FACIE’ On “Killing Eve,” Jodie Comer proved to be transfixing, so this riveting solo show will certainly be a highlight of the spring season. The play comes with trigger warnings — Comer plays a lawyer who ruthlessly defends men accused of sexual assault, but then she suddenly finds herself on the witness stand. Comer won the 2022 Evening Standard Award for best actress for her West End performance in the role. The play, by Suzie Miller, is directed by Justin Martin. STEVEN McELROYPreviews begin April 11; opens April 23 at the Golden Theater, Manhattan.Jodie Comer in “Prima Facie.”Helen MurrayOff BroadwayBEDLAM THEATER Those of us who grew up in New England all thought Lizzie Borden did it — she gave her mother 40 whacks with an ax, and when that was done, she gave her father 41. Or so went the story of the infamous Borden, who was actually acquitted in the murder trial of her father and stepmother in Fall River, Mass., in 1893. Bedlam Theater takes an irreverent look at the story in “Fall River Fishing,” an absurdist dark comedy about unrequited love, self-loathing and disappointment.In previews; opens Feb. 26 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan.Following that play, Bedlam will stage “The Good John Proctor,” by Talene Monahon, a sequel of sorts to Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” focusing on the young Salem women in the time leading up to the infamous witch trials.Opens March 11 at the Connelly Theater.‘BLACK ODYSSEY’ The playwright Marcus Gardley knows his classics and has created imaginative riffs on Molière’s “Tartuffe,” and Federico García Lorca’s “The House of Bernarda Alba.” Now he’s going back a wee bit further to Homer’s Odysseus saga, about a warrior who faces daunting challenges in finding his way home. Gardley places us in contemporary Harlem, where the soldier Ulysses Lincoln relies on his ancestors and family history to help him on his journey to reunite with his family. Stevie Walker-Webb (“Ain’t No Mo’”) directs.In previews; opens Feb. 26 at Classic Stage Company, Manhattan.James T. Alfred, at right, in “Black Odyssey.”Jeenah Moon for The New York Times‘HOW TO DEFEND YOURSELF’ After a sorority sister is raped, some college students start their own self-defense class. And as they create a space to release their pent-up rage, they struggle with how best to respond — seek systemic change, or learn to land a palm strike? Or both? The play by Liliana Padilla was developed at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago and won the 2019 Yale Drama Series Prize. The Off Broadway production will be directed by Padilla, Rachel Chavkin and Steph Paul.In previews; opens March 13 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan.‘THE COAST STARLIGHT’ This title refers to the Amtrak daily route that runs between Los Angeles and Seattle, with unbelievable scenery along the way. Keith Bunin’s play — which premiered at La Jolla Playhouse in 2019 — ponders what might be going on inside the minds of several people traveling solo on this train and fantasizes the encounters they might have with one another in a different reality. At least one of them holds a dangerous secret. Tyne Rafaeli directs.In previews; opens March 13 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Manhattan.‘THE STRANGE UNDOING OF PRUDENCIA HART’ It’s hard to believe it’s been 12 years since I was first captivated by this National Theater of Scotland production at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This wild tale of a stuffy academic who attends a conference in a Scottish border town and somehow, surrealistically, finds herself dancing with the devil is told with an immersive approach that can be intoxicating for an audience member. You can take that literally — the show is being presented at the McKittrick Hotel in a pub environment, as it was in Edinburgh and at the hotel in 2016-17. The writer, David Greig (“The Events”), has a knack for yearning and fantasy, and “Prudencia” is unlikely to get old anytime soon.Previews begin March 8; opens March 13 at the McKittrick Hotel, Manhattan.‘WHITE GIRL IN DANGER’ Tired of being a “Blackground player” in the soap opera town of Allwhite, Keesha Gibbs is determined to take center stage in this new musical comedy with book, music and lyrics by the Tony and Pulitzer Prize winner Michael R. Jackson (“A Strange Loop”). And as you might surmise from the title, there is indeed a killer on the loose in Jackson’s mash-up of soaps and melodramatic movies. Lileana Blain-Cruz directs.Previews begin March 15; opens April 10 at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater, Manhattan.From left, Liz Lark Brown, Latoya Edwards and NaTasha Yvette Williams at a reading of “White Girl in Danger.”Lauren Lancaster for The New York Times‘DÍA Y NOCHE’ This coming-of-age story, set in El Paso, Texas, in 1984, is about racism and class struggle experienced through the unlikely friendship between a Chicano punk-rock kid and a Black upper-middle-class nerd who is gay and closeted. Carlos Armesto directs the LAByrinth Theater Company production, written by LAB actor/playwright David Anzuelo.Previews begin March 18; opens March 26 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan.RED BULL THEATER Even we Elizabethan geeks might not be familiar with “Arden of Faversham,” a 16th-century thriller from the quill of an anonymous playwright (Shakespeare? Marlowe? Thomas Kyd?). A wife is having an affair and, with her lover, plots the murder of her wealthy husband; naturally, things get complicated. Jesse Berger directs the adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher and Kathryn Walat for Red Bull Theater.Previews begin March 6; opens March 16 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan.For 20 years, Red Bull has, thankfully, continued to keep many great classic plays alive for contemporary audiences — they’ll also stage Francis Beaumont’s hilarious comedy “The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” directed by Noah Brody and Emily Young this spring.Previews begin April 17; opens April 27 at the Lucille Lortel Theater.‘KING JAMES’ The timing could hardly be better for this show, arriving onstage just a few months after LeBron James broke the all time NBA scoring record. This play by Rajiv Joseph (“Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo”), which follows two LeBron super fans who forge an unlikely bond during the basketball player’s days with the Cleveland Cavaliers, is a study of the important place sports can hold in some of our lives. I don’t even like basketball (I’m too short), and I still can’t wait! Glenn Davis and Chris Perfetti will revisit the roles they played at Steppenwolf Theater Company, where the play had its world premiere last year. Kenny Leon directs.Previews begin May 2; opens May 16 at Manhattan Theater Club.‘DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES’ This world premiere musical brings together the composer and lyricist Adam Guettel (“Floyd Collins”) and the playwright Craig Lucas (“An American in Paris”) for the first time since their musical “The Light in the Piazza.” Adapted from J.P. Miller’s 1962 film and 1958 teleplay, the story about a couple’s yearslong battle with alcoholism doesn’t sound super uplifting, but the creative team has quite a track record. Michael Greif (“Dear Evan Hansen”) directs the Atlantic Theater Company production. STEVEN McELROYOpens May 5 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan.Dance‘COPPELIA’ In “Coppelia” (1870) the old toymaker Dr. Coppelius is obsessed with creating a female doll so realistic that she can be — and is — mistaken for a human girl. But that’s not enough: Through magic spells, he tries to bring her to life. In 2023, our magic is artificial intelligence, and in Morgann Runacre-Temple and Jessica Wright’s ingenious “Coppelia,” which Scottish Ballet brings to Sadler’s Wells theater in London, Dr. Coppelius is a charismatic Steve Jobs figure in a black turtleneck, dominating technicians and androids as he attempts to create the perfect woman. The heroine, Swanhilda, is a journalist investigating Coppelius’s NuLife laboratory; her boyfriend Franz comes along and, just as in the 19th-century original, falls for the nonhuman Coppelia. The ballet won rave reviews after its debut at the Edinburgh Festival last year. ROSLYN SULCASMarch 2-5, Sadler’s Wells, London.JORDAN DEMETRIUS LLOYD Like so many dance artists, the choreographer and dancer Jordan Demetrius Lloyd has spent the past few years resourcefully creating work outside of theaters. In 2020, he directed the stirring, contemplative short film “The Last Moon in Mellowland,” a poem in images. Last summer, his site-specific “Jerome” drew crowds of dance lovers and curious passers-by to a schoolyard in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. With his latest project — his first evening-length commission — Lloyd returns to the theater, both embracing its familiarity and testing out new directions, as he finds himself “on not the other side but another side of the pandemic,” he said in a phone interview. In “Blackbare in the Basement,” at Danspace Project, he and seven dancers extend on ideas from “JEROME” while considering the particularities of this hallowed downtown performance space and the history of the artists who have moved through it. SIOBHAN BURKEMarch 9-11, Danspace Project, Manhattan.From left, Paul Hamilton, Keely Garfield and Angie Pittman.Whitney BrowneKEELY GARFIELD As a choreographer and performer, Keely Garfield has long blurred the lines between irony and sincerity, the absurd and the profound. Her unpredictable works, unafraid of kitsch, are costume pageants with room for prayer, feats of endurance and bravery that don’t disguise awkwardness and vulnerability. Garfield is also a yoga teacher, an urban Zen integrated therapist and a hospital chaplain. Her newest piece, “The Invisible Project,” is her first to explore explicitly the crossover between her work as a choreographer and her work in wellness, experimenting with how endurance, patience, healing and catharsis can be danced. If compassionate presence is an aim, the cast is ideal: Opal Ingle, Angie Pittman, Paul Hamilton and Molly Lieber. BRIAN SEIBERTMarch 10-12 at N.Y.U. Skirball, Manhattan.TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY The question of how to stay current, relevant, haunts every dance company built on the vision of a single choreographer. What happens when that person is no longer here? Six years after the death of the postmodern trailblazer Trisha Brown, her company has, for the first time, commissioned a new dance from another artist: the Cuban-born Judith Sánchez Ruíz, a member of the Brown company from 2006 to 2009. Now living in Berlin, Ruíz combines a visceral understanding of Brown’s work with her own daring, intensely physical approach to movement invention. In addition to Ruíz’s “Let’s talk about bleeding,” with a score by the Cuban composer Adonis Gonzalez, the company’s Joyce Theater season features two of Brown’s collaborations with the sound artist Alvin Curran, “For M.G.: The Movie” (1991) and “Rogues” (2011). And Ruíz is not the only fresh voice on the program: Five of the troupe’s eight dancers are new. BURKEMay 2-7, Joyce Theater, Manhattan.Thaji Dias and Amandi Gomez from Nrityagram Dance Ensemble.Ravi ShankarNRITYAGRAM DANCE ENSEMBLE About a decade ago, Nrityagram — unsurpassed exponents of the Indian classical form Odissi — came to the Joyce Theater with surprise guests. They were members of Chitrasena Dance Company from Sri Lanka, experts in that nation’s Kandyan tradition. A collaboration among the dancers, all female, brought out both the shared ancient roots of the two styles and their differences: the more sinuous refinement of Odissi, the folksier verve of Kandyan. They danced to different drummers and found a new harmony. The two companies return together to the Joyce with a new program, “Ahuti,” or “Offering.” One change is the presence of men, who come from the Chitrasena side — bare-chested, virile, spinning end-over-end through the air. They are a novelty in Nrityagram performance, introducing a complementary energy and adding to a larger-than-usual cast, a more populous party. SEIBERTMay 9-14, Joyce Theater, Manhattan.ClassicalCARNEGIE HALL Last year, the Vienna Philharmonic’s Carnegie visit was upturned by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the last-minute dumping of its guest conductor, the Putin-affiliated Valery Gergiev. Things should be much calmer when the orchestra returns for three days of works by Schoenberg, Strauss, Mendelssohn, Brahms and Bruckner — all led by Christian Thielemann, a master of this repertoire (March 3-5). Another Carnegie staple, the English Concert, brings Handel’s oratorio “Solomon” (March 12); later, its fellow period ensemble Les Arts Florissants, led by the essential William Christie, comes with an all-Charpentier program for Holy Week (April 26).Among visiting pianists are the gracefully intelligent Alexandre Tharaud, playing works including his transcription of the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony (March 26); Seong-Jin Cho, who heroically flew in to salvage those Vienna concerts last February (April 12); and the mighty Beatrice Rana, taking on Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata (April 20). Other recitals include the cellist Alisa Weilerstein’s multimedia Bach show “Fragments” (April 1); the continuation of the Danish String Quartet’s Schubert-inspired “Doppelgänger” project, with a premiere by Anna Thorvaldsdottir (April 20), who has also written the latest installment of the flutist Claire Chase’s sprawling, multi-decade initiative “Density 2036” (May 25). Chase appears as well as the soloist in Kaija Saariaho’s “Aile du songe,” with Susanna Mälkki and the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra (May 9).Other ensembles are bringing local premieres to Carnegie: the Philadelphia Orchestra, presenting John Luther Adams’s “Vespers of the Blessed Earth” with the vocal group the Crossing (March 31); and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which over two evenings is performing Thierry Escaich’s Cello Concerto, with Gautier Capuçon, and Thomas Adès “Air,” for violin and orchestra, with Anne-Sophie Mutter (April 24 and 25). The Met Orchestra continues its tradition of postseason Carnegie appearances, led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, in Brahms’s “Ein deutsches Requiem” and a program that includes Renée Fleming and Russell Thomas in Act IV of Verdi’s “Otello,” as well as the world premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s “Lear Sketches” (June 15 and 22).Susanna Mälkki conducting at Carnegie Hall.Chris LeeNEW YORK PHILHARMONIC The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, whose career continues to thrive in the face of a terminal brain cancer diagnosis, returns to the Philharmonic podium to lead the local premiere of his “Meditations on Rilke” and Schubert’s “Great” Symphony (March 9-12). Then, the orchestra’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, leads Messiaen’s immense “Turangalîla-symphonie,” featuring Jean-Yves Thibaudet as the piano soloist (March 17-19), followed by Bach’s similarly expansive “St. Matthew Passion,” with vocalists including Nicholas Phan, Davóne Tines, Paul Appleby, Tamara Mumford and Philippe Sly (March 23-25).More firsts come in the New York premiere of Felipe Lara’s Double Concerto, featuring Claire Chase on flute and Esperanza Spalding on bass and led by Susanna Mälkki (March 29-31); the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition winner Yunchan Lim’s Philharmonic debut in Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto with James Gaffigan (May 10-12); the U.S. premiere of Chick Corea’s Trombone Concerto, led by Marin Alsop and featuring the orchestra’s principal trombone, Joseph Alessi (May 25-27); the world premiere of Julia Wolfe’s large-scale “unEarth” (June 1-3); and the New York premiere of John Luther Adams’s “Become Desert” (June 8-10).METROPOLITAN OPERA Earlier this season, the Met announced that it would devote more resources and calendar time to contemporary works and, inevitably, new productions. But revivals are still the bread and butter of a repertory house, and many this spring have something to look forward to. When Robert Carsen’s elegant production of “Falstaff” returns (March 12-April 1), it will feature as the decadent title character the German baritone Michael Volle — a solemn presence known for embodying Wagner heroes like Wotan and Hans Sachs — in his first Verdi role. Carsen’s similarly clean, and sobering, “Der Rosenkavalier” (March 27-April 20) will be a vehicle for the soprano Lise Davidsen, the Met’s reigning diva, who is making her role debut as the Marschallin.Lise Davidsen, at right, in “Ariadne auf Naxos.” This season she will make her role debut as the Marschallin in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier.”Marty Sohl/Met OperaYannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director, has been largely absent so far this season, but will take the podium for Puccini’s “La Bohème” (April 21-28, then May 2-14). And the conductor Thomas Guggeis, turning 30 this year and on a rapid rise abroad, as the general music director of Frankfurt Opera and a substitute for Daniel Barenboim in a high-profile Berlin “Ring” cycle last fall, makes his Met debut leading another Wagner work: “Der Fliegende Holländer,” in the first revival of François Girard’s obtuse 2020 staging (May 30-June 10).PARK AVENUE ARMORY Recital spaces are preciously rare in New York, and few can compare with the Armory’s intimate and acoustically rich Board of Officers Room. There, the French baritone Stéphane Degout, with the pianist Cédric Tiberghien, will present an evening of art songs from composers including Fauré, Schubert, Debussy and Lili Boulanger (April 3 and 5). The tenor Allan Clayton — revered abroad and recently celebrated locally in the title roles of “Hamlet” and “Peter Grimes” at the Metropolitan Opera — comes next with the pianist James Baillieu for a program of works by Schumann and Nico Muhly, as well as Clayton’s countrymen Henry Purcell, Michael Tippett and Benjamin Britten (April 27 and 29). Later, the young pianist Pavel Kolesnikov brings his account of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, which he has performed alongside the choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, as well as an eclectic mix of works inspired by Joseph Cornell’s “Celestial Navigation” (May 22 and 24). JOSHUA BARONEPopWEYES BLOOD The clarion-voiced Natalie Mering, under the name Weyes Blood, makes intricately wrought Laurel Canyon folk-pop updated for an era of millennial unease. She wrote many of the songs on her stirring 2022 album “And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow,” as hymns to the collective epidemic of loneliness brought on by the pandemic. Mering’s music is intimate but sweeping; she uses her own personal experiences to access larger and more generalized undercurrents of emotion. It will be heartening to hear a song like the anthemic single “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody” performed live, with a venue full of voices proving the communal sentiment of its title. LINDSAY ZOLADZMarch 3 and 4 at Brooklyn Steel.Weyes Blood performs at Primavera Sound Festival in Barcelona, Spain, in 2022.Jordi Vidal/Redferns, Getty ImagesSZA In the details of a song and in the shape of her career, SZA’s timing has been utterly her own. To sing about relationships and ambitions that unfold as messily as everyday life, SZA — Solana Imani Rowe — writes melodies and lyrics that seem to be spilling out spontaneously: crooning, pausing, suddenly racing, then curling neatly into a hook. Her recordings have arrived with the same kind of unpredictability. She released her debut album, “CTRL” in 2017; five years later, in 2022, she expanded it to a deluxe version that was half again as long, then went on to release an entire new album, “SOS.” In the meantime, an ever-expanding audience found their own lives in her songs: in their desires, jealousy, doubts, seductions, setbacks and triumphs, and in their leisurely grooves. SZA is touring arenas this year, and singalongs will likely join her, phrase for eccentric phrase. JON PARELESMarch 4 and 5 at Madison Square Garden, Manhattan.YO LA TENGO Since forming nearly four decades ago, the Hoboken indie-rock legends Yo La Tengo have been staggeringly consistent: The trio of Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, and James McNew never seems to tire in its search of eclectic new elements to bring into its ever-expanding sonic universe. Still, the band sounds particularly inspired on its latest (and 17th!) album, the richly enveloping “This Stupid World,” which flickers from despair to hard-won hope and moves fluidly between jammy abstractions (“Sinatra Drive Breakdown”) and succinctly rendered indie-pop (“Fallout,” “Aselestine”). Both of those sides of “This Stupid World” are likely to translate well live, but the new album probably won’t be the set list’s only focus — naturally, their back catalog runs pretty deep. ZOLADZMarch 18 at Brooklyn Steel.SOLANGE Futuristic R&B, righteous jazz, gospel, performance art, poetry, sculpture, film and opera are all part of a generation-spanning seven-event series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music curated by Solange Knowles for Saint Heron, her project to preserve and celebrate Black culture. Named “Eldorado Ballroom” after a historic Black music hall in Houston, the series begins March 30 with a concert headlined by the ambitious, electronics-loving songwriter Kelela, along with the adventurous R&B songwriters Res and KeiyaA. On April 7, the long-running gospel group Twinkie Clark and the Clark Sisters are paired with a program of spiritual choral compositions by Mary Lou Williams. And on April 8, the pioneering free-jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp shares a bill with the poet Claudia Rankine and the avant-garde vocalist Linda Sharrock, in her first New York City concert since the 1970s. The whole series offers deep, promising connections. PARELESBegins March 30 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. More

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      Classical Music to See and Hear in Spring 2023

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      This spring, Gustavo Dudamel, the Philharmonic’s next music director, conducts the big deal symphony, the Met Opera stages Terence Blanchard’s “Champion”; and in Chicago, Riccardo Muti says farewell.It was a hint about as subtle as a siren when the New York Philharmonic announced its current season a year ago: Gustavo Dudamel, the superstar conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, would be coming to New York as a guest in May 2023 to lead Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.One of the repertory’s most sprawling and profound works, Mahler’s Ninth has been played by the Philharmonic almost exclusively under the batons of its music directors. It’s not an assignment the orchestra gives rising hotshots or conductors it sees once a decade. It’s the kind of musically knotty, deeply emotional score you want led by the artists closest to you.That was just one of many suggestions that Dudamel, 42, would, before too long, join the ranks of New York music directors, a group that has included eminences like Mahler, Toscanini, Bernstein and Boulez. And so it came to pass: Earlier this month, the Philharmonic said that he would succeed Jaap van Zweden in the position, for a five-year term beginning — because of classical music’s oddly glacial planning cycles — in the 2026-27 season.But before all that comes Mahler’s Ninth, which Dudamel has convincingly, with tenderness and naturally unfolding intensity, recorded with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The three New York performances, May 19-21, were already sure to be well attended, given the famous conductor and the beloved piece. Now, since the concerts will be Dudamel’s first appearances on the Philharmonic’s podium since the announcement, these will be some of the hottest tickets in town this spring.When Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” opened the Metropolitan Opera’s 2021–22 season, in a run that sold out several performances, it was a landmark: the first time the company had put on the work of a Black composer. Now Blanchard’s earlier opera, “Champion,” from 2013, is coming to the house, beginning April 10.As in “Fire,” themes of identity, sexuality and the negotiation of traumatic memories dominate. “Champion” tells the true story of the closeted gay boxer Emile Griffith, who knocked out his opponent, Benny Paret, during a 1962 title bout; Paret never recovered consciousness and died 10 days later. At the Met, two bass-baritones share the role of Griffith: Ryan Speedo Green plays him as a young athlete in his prime, and Eric Owens, as an aging man looking back on his complicated past.A scene from Terence Blanchard’s “Champion,” in James Robinson’s production at Opera Theater of Saint Louis.Ken Howard/Opera Theatre of Saint LouisIn the wake of the box-office success of “Fire,” the Met — which has been struggling with ticket sales and said in December that it would withdraw $30 million from its endowment to cover costs — rushed “Champion” into production, part of a coming burst of contemporary operas aimed at broadening the audience. The staging reunites members of the team that helped make “Fire” vivid: the director James Robinson, the choreographer Camille A. Brown — the step dance routine that she conceived for “Fire” stopped the show — and the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Three veterans, Latonia Moore, Stephanie Blythe and Paul Groves, round out the cast.It is unusual for the Met (or any company) to unveil two new productions of Mozart operas back to back. And even rarer for both to be led by one conductor: in this case, Nathalie Stutzmann, a former mezzo-soprano turned maestro making her Met debut on the podium for “Don Giovanni” and “Die Zauberflöte.”Replacing a dreary, unilluminating Michael Grandage production on May 5, the new “Giovanni” is an import from the Paris Opera, where the much-discussed Dutch director Ivo van Hove and his colleagues put onstage what Joshua Barone described in The New York Times as “a de Chirico-like set populated by handsomely dressed people in a state of sexy desperation.” (It can hardly help but be an improvement on the Grandage.)Stutzmann, who started at the Atlanta Symphony this season — the only female music director leading one of the 25 largest American orchestras — conducts a promising cast, including Peter Mattei, a star in the title role at the Met for the past 20 years, as well as Adam Plachetka, Federica Lombardi, Ana María Martínez, Ying Fang and Ben Bliss.The situation with “Die Zauberflöte,” opening on May 19, is slightly complicated. The Met is planning to retain its existing production — which the director Julie Taymor and the designer George Tsypin filled with plexiglass and fanciful puppets — in its abridged, English-language, family-friendly form as “The Magic Flute,” now a holiday-season tradition.Performed in full and in German, the new-to-the-company “Die Zauberflöte,” a much-traveled staging directed by Simon McBurney, has the orchestra spilling over onto risers placed onstage and contemporary-style costumes. Stutzmann’s cast here includes Erin Morley, Lawrence Brownlee, Thomas Oliemans, Kathryn Lewek and Stephen Milling.Dudamel’s appointment is perhaps the biggest news in music this season: a new beginning. But the other crucial conductor move in America this spring signals the end of an era.Riccardo Muti is bringing his 13 years leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to a close in June.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesAt 81, Riccardo Muti — a fixture on the country’s major podiums since the 1970s and the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra during the ’80s — is bringing to a close a 13-year tenure at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with performances of Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis,” June 23-25.Despite being an experienced Beethoven interpreter and a specialist in huge choral works, Muti stayed away from the notoriously thorny “Missa Solemnis” for decades, until he led it — with radiant dignity and grandeur — at the Salzburg Festival in 2021.“I always felt too small,” he said in an interview last year on Chicago radio, “never I felt ready to perform this huge monument, because it’s so deep, so vast.” Muti and other great conductors are not known for this kind of humility or patience, so these performances will be the fruit of uncommonly many years of study and thought.Given that the Chicago Symphony has not yet appointed his replacement, Muti will remain a crucial presence next season, and possibly beyond. But this “Missa Solemnis” — with the chorus coached by a distinguished guest, Donald Palumbo, the chorus master at the Met — is nevertheless sure to be a love fest between a superb orchestra and a conductor it has revered. More

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      Review: A New Opera Puts Real Emotions in a Fantasy Garden

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      Kate Soper’s “The Romance of the Rose,” which had its long-delayed premiere at Long Beach Opera, showcases her signature quick-shifting eclecticism.SAN PEDRO, Calif. — “What is art?” the composer Kate Soper asked at the beginning of “Ipsa Dixit,” her last big stage work, from 2016.In her tender, whip-smart new opera, “The Romance of the Rose,” which premiered this weekend at Long Beach Opera, she quotes a chunk of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” that poses another query: “What is love?”No one has ever accused Soper of shying away from the big questions. And her works go about answering them studiously but sensuously — with earnestness, wit, whimsy, self-awareness and music that ranges freely among, for a start, Baroque madrigals, power ballads and barbed modernism.In “Ipsa Dixit,” she answers the question “What is art?” with, more or less, the piece’s title: It is whatever I say it is. In “The Romance of the Rose,” the answer to “What is love?” is something like: It’s a lot of conflicting things, in a scary, delicate balance. It’s every thing.Over a decade in the making and based on the medieval epic of the same name — nearly 22,000 lines of octosyllabic Old French couplets — “The Romance of the Rose” adapts some of the poem’s strands while adding inventions of Soper’s own. (She usually writes her librettos, often with interpolations from other authors, ancient to modern.) In an allegorical garden, the Dreamer guides the Lover as she pines for a rose: “What a perfect symbol for a dream of love!”Aroused and confused, the Lover is set upon by the God of Love, Lady Reason and Shame — and all have advice that’s at once persuasive and suspect, compelling and incomplete, about how the Lover should feel, about what love means.As the loose, stylized, funny, often poignant plot progresses, these allegorical characters seem to lose their moorings; in Soper’s world, even stock figures can’t be trusted to maintain their points of view. (This isn’t, or isn’t just, the old battle between head and heart.) The fatal seductiveness of narcissism; ambivalence about performing; the nature of reality — it’s all, ambitiously, here.I should insert what has become a standard caveat about this composer: Describing “The Romance of the Rose” might make it sound dry and bookish, but it isn’t. Soper’s text is so sly and eloquent — “Since the truth’s thus riddled with such tears, the essential question’s not ‘What is the truth?’ but ‘Who cares?’” — and her music so eclectic and quick-shifting that her work keeps you engaged even when you’re a bit baffled. Like her other stage pieces, “Rose” is high culture and low, talky but agile, brainy but — and! — feeling.Few composers are as interested in, or as gifted at, exploring the transitions and the middle ground between speaking and singing, which gives Soper’s works a familial relationship to book-based musical theater. There’s something of “Hadestown” in this new piece’s opera-pop-Broadway amalgam and mythological milieu, even though Soper’s vision is less folksy and more crystalline — more like Sondheim in its precision and cleverness, its laughing-crying lucidity about life’s complications, if not in its sound.Her vision of musicals extends from sumptuous golden-age lyricism through “Phantom of the Opera”-style rock belting to contemporary confessional intimacy, though she’s also unafraid of astringency, complexity and moments of plain noise. There is also the lovely, pared-down tunefulness that gives away Soper’s early-career roots as an aspiring singer-songwriter: She writes in an online essay about “The Romance of the Rose” that the germ of an aching torch-song duet for Idleness and Pleasure (two minor characters who nod toward a Greek chorus), a highlight of the score, dates back to those days.Like a true singer-songwriter, Soper trusts economy of musical expression. Christopher Rountree, Long Beach Opera’s music director, conducts an ensemble of nine, but often the instrumental textures are sparer than even those modest forces. In one memorable passage at the end of the first act, the Dreamer’s elegy is accompanied by the slow calligraphy of a solo viola.Lucas Steele, center, surrounded by cast members in “Rose,” directed by James Darrah, the new head of Long Beach Opera.JJ GeigerIt’s Long Beach Opera’s luck to have ended up with the piece after its premiere — planned for April 2020 at Montclair State University’s Peak Performances series — was canceled by the pandemic.Long Beach, which in 2019 premiered Anthony Davis’s “The Central Park Five” before it went on to win a Pulitzer Prize, has had some internal rockiness in the past year over its commitment to inclusion efforts but also a new artistic director, James Darrah, who has staged “The Romance of the Rose” at the Warner Grand Theater here.Darrah’s production is a mixture of scrappiness and chic, and emphasizes the otherworldliness of Soper’s conception. Prairie T. Trivuth’s set, lit starkly by Pablo Santiago, depicts the garden as a pristine white courtyard dotted with potted plants and, eventually, dripping with blood. Molly Irelan’s costumes, with period cuts, vivid fabrics and sparkling touches, further the opera’s mood of pert pastiche. Its Baroque references connect medieval France to the glittery splendor of 17th-century allegorical court masques.In keeping with Soper’s stylistic variety, the cast comes from a range of musical backgrounds but shares a commitment to making the bountiful, erudite text legible. (The supertitles, for once, aren’t really necessary.) As the Dreamer, Lucas Steele has a sweet voice and Disney-prince ingenuousness with a self-referential wink. Radiating a charming mixture of naïveté and intelligence, Tivoli Treloar has a light mezzo-soprano flexible enough to convey all the Lover’s changes of perspective.As the God of Love, Phillip Bullock travels from airy falsetto to basso profundo depths. Anna Schubert is a fiercely articulate Lady Reason, Laurel Irene a punkish Shame. Tiffany Townsend and Bernardo Bermudez bring rich-toned gusto to Idleness and Pleasure, here a couple of louche lounge lizards.“The Romance of the Rose” isn’t perfect. The piece experiments with giving each of the three main allegorical foils a distinctive live-electronic vocal processing identity — Lady Reason, angular vocoding; the God of Love, echoey reverb; Shame, angry distortion. But even if it had been more perfectly executed, this conceit feels like a complication too many in an already complicated piece.Soper’s previous major stage works, “Here Be Sirens” (2014) and “Ipsa Dixit,” were substantial single acts. Conceiving “The Romance of the Rose” in two acts was Soper setting a new challenge for herself, not just in length but also in structure. What, in theater, should prompt an intermission, and what brings the audience back for more? What hunger in the first act does a second act satisfy; what crisis is resolved?These are questions that “The Romance of the Rose” doesn’t entirely solve. The second act feels like more of the same, with a somewhat blurrier version of the characters having the same debates they had before the break. (The production could be clearer in the final half, too.)Discussing the piece later with the friend I brought to the performance, I thought that Shame, which we learn at the beginning is our “urge for self-annihilation” — “an emissary from the gut to foil both the head and the heart” — might have been more effectively introduced as a crisis at the end of the first act. The war that ensues between her and the rest of the dramatis personae might then have given the second act higher and sharper stakes.Shame’s role in the first act as an equal point in the allegorical triangle surrounding the Lover might be true to the original poem. But in the opera this figure feels like the odd one out, rather than the singular nihilistic force opposing everyone else onstage.It’s a criticism, sure. But the fact that my friend and I spent hours going over what we enjoyed and what we might tweak about “The Romance of the Rose” gives you a sense of the piece and its marvels, its ability to stick in the mind and soul. After all, a lesson of the opera is that, for better or worse, we can’t help wanting to perfect the things we love.The Romance of the RoseThe final performance is on Saturday at the Warner Grand Theater in San Pedro, Calif.; longbeachopera.org. More

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      ‘The Romance of the Rose,’ Delayed by the Pandemic, Opens at Last

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      On a recent afternoon in Los Angeles, a mezzo-soprano paced during an opera rehearsal before letting her sound loose. When she did, she appeared to shock herself — so much that she broke the fourth wall.“Whoa, whoa, that wasn’t my voice,” that vocalist, Tivoli Treloar, declared to her colleagues, and to an imagined audience. “I mean, I can’t sing like that!”A male voice in the cast parried with a hint of old-world courtliness: “Yet ’twas well sung, my friend!”Welcome to Kate Soper’s “The Romance of the Rose.”In addition to breaking the fourth wall, Soper’s latest work of music theater, which premieres on Saturday at Long Beach Opera, also collapses centuries, bringing its source material — a medieval French poem of the same name — into colloquial and witty collision with our understanding of opera as perhaps our most artifice-strewn art form.In Soper’s script, the mezzo, who is surprised to find herself singing (and so well!), is merely required to respond to that old-world praise with a simple “thanks.” But during the rehearsal, observed by video call, Treloar sang the word as though it were a grand encore, teasing its vowel sound into generous helpings of ornamentation.From left, Bernardo Bermudez, Tivoli Treloar and Tiffany Townsend rehearsing the opera, which was originally scheduled to premiere in 2020 but was canceled because of the pandemic.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesWhen Treloar brought her “thanks” in for a long-delayed landing, others in the room laughed at her effective resolution of the comic-opera beat. Yet the director, James Darrah, wondered if she could stretch out the revelry even more on the next pass. A rehearsal pianist began the scene again, and Treloar indulged Darrah — this time earning an even bigger laugh.This playful moment of extended experimentation felt appropriate to both Soper’s work — her hyperverbal, zigzagging scores, filled with pools of tonal lushness as well as thickets of philosophical discourse — and the prolonged path to Saturday’s premiere.“Rose,” which has been highly anticipated for years, was mere weeks away from opening at Peak Performances, in New Jersey, when, in early 2020, the pandemic shut it down. It then languished until Darrah selected it for his first full season of programming as the artistic director of Long Beach Opera.In an interview, Soper described how “Rose” both extends and deviates from her earlier, celebrated pieces like “Here Be Sirens.” For one, those works, unlike this opera, didn’t have an intermission. “You do the whole thing in one fell swoop,” she said. “Whatever those Aristotelian time-place things are; it’s kind of a big gulp. For this one, the idea of a full two-act opera was interesting to me.”A rehearsal for “Rose,” in which, Soper said, “Who are these characters who think their normal language is operatic singing? What falls apart for them when they start to question that?”Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesIn “Sirens,” Soper gave subjective voice to characters who were mere devices in Homer; in “Rose,” she again reinterprets vintage literary concepts, but with expanded ambition and scope. In the three years since its canceled premiere, Soper has worked to refine the libretto. The text, she said, was difficult to write, when creating a “really strange story that was inspired by this incredibly bizarre medieval text.”In the medieval poem, the male protagonist — the Lover — is a dreamer whose affections are aimed at the symbolic entity of a rose. When his advance toward the rose is blocked, he’s schooled on and nudged toward the right way to think about love by a wide range of allegorical characters, such as Reason, Idleness or the God of Love.Two different contributors, separated by decades, worked on the poem as it is known today. And now Soper is having her turn to augment the text. Here, a figure she calls the Dreamer initially puts the character of the Lover through the various allegorical paces. (In the original poem, the pursuer of the rose is himself a dreamer.) And in Soper’s version, there’s a mysterious yet evident rapport between the Dreamer and the Lover — even as the latter, the mezzo-soprano, is still discovering her voice within this dreamy opera world.“Part of it is about: What is music, what does it mean when you sing opera?” Soper said. “Who are these characters who think their normal language is operatic singing? What falls apart for them when they start to question that?”Christopher Rountree, left, the production’s conductor, with Soper at a rehearsal.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesAs a composer, Soper answers such destabilizing questions with a wealth of sonic reference points. She’s firmly in the contemporary classical mold, which means comfort with experimentation and extended techniques — as well as the electronic processing of acoustic sounds. But as the piece progresses, she feasts on polystylism and hummable melody.The production’s conductor, Christopher Rountree, said that, during a recent rehearsal, he had the experience of feeling “like we were solidly inside of Philip Glass.” Then, “within a second, we were in Gilbert and Sullivan,” he added. “And then, a second later, we were in a very heartfelt new-music ballad, but with a character who had not sung in that new-music straight tone yet.”“It’s amazing to see all the things that are being asked of the singers by Kate,” Rountree said. “And it’s cool that we have folks who are willing to go there.”The casting intentionally brings together vocalists from different backgrounds. The dramatic soprano Tiffany Townsend, who plays Idleness, is in the young artist program at Los Angeles Opera, where she has specialized in the standard repertoire. But, she said, she enjoys the way Soper braids different traditions together. Referring to the “Torch Song,” which is sung by Pleasure and Idleness, she said, “The harmony speaks to medieval music; but the way it’s set gives a jazz feel.”The vocalist Lucas Steele, who starred in the musical “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” on Broadway, is making his opera debut in the role of the Dreamer. He said that in Soper’s writing, he sees “a height to the language that reminds me a little bit of Shakespeare” — but also a Brechtian sense of “talking to the audience, shifting in and out of the narrative.” (The rehearsal videos that Long Beach Opera has posted online give a sense of what Steele describes: Soper’s fluid approach to allegory and audience acknowledgment.)“Because Kate is so great at when she decides to insert accessible melody into a piece,” Steele said, “I think it’s going to give the audience something to grab onto, in the moments where it may start to become a little more on the experimental side of things.”Darrah said that “at an intellectual level, I look at it and I go, Oh, she’s very aware of opera as this centuries-old art form. There’s a way that she’s referencing clichés and mocking them at times, but also using the structure.”He paused for a beat, then added, “No one’s writing music like this.”Soper hopes to record the score soon. But for now, she’s enjoying the fruition of a yearslong effort that has pushed her into new creative directions. During her training as a composer — first at Rice University, in Texas, then at Columbia, in New York — she viewed opera singers as “a different species of beautiful people, swanning around wearing scarves. And I was with the composers trying to get people to play our music. I have this distant sense from it.”“I think opera for me,” Soper said, “is a premise and an element of the story rather than an actual medium that I’m writing in.”But with “Rose,” she said, she’s finding a way to edge closer to opera’s mainstream, even as she keeps questioning it on a fundamental level.“Playing around with quote-unquote real opera singers, and lower voices, and coloratura — if something about this is more of a real opera,” she said, “at the same time I can still kind of investigate what it means to be a real opera.” More

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      What Is Russia Thinking? A ‘Documentary Opera’ Tries to Answer.

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      “Russia: Today,” a piece by the composer Eugene Birman, is based on hundreds of interviews with hundreds of Russians, in which they share their private feelings about the country.Many things have been said about Russia since the country launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine a year ago. But getting a sense of what Russian citizens privately feel about their nation is hard: State news outlets are more strident than ever and independent ones have been closed down. Western reporters still working there are treated with suspicion or fear.Unlikely as it might seem, a new “documentary opera” is attempting to cut through the noise to find something approaching the truth. Called “Russia: Today” — the title is a wry nod to the propaganda-spouting, Kremlin-funded media company, now known as RT — the piece, by the Russian-born, Hong Kong-based composer Eugene Birman, is assembled from hundreds of interviews with Russian citizens, people of Russian heritage and people who live in neighboring countries, conducted over the last few years. On Thursday, the piece receives a rare performance at Kings Place, a London concert hall, after an aborted attempt to premiere it in Moscow and a controversial first outing in Estonia, near the border with Russia.A collage of recorded testimony, new music and chant inspired by Orthodox liturgical practice, “Russia: Today” tries to open a window into Russia’s psyche — exactly when many people outside are wondering what’s on its mind.“I thought it would be a useful thing to give voice to people who are not typically in the Russian press, or aren’t reachable by Western journalists,” Birman said. “The idea is to let people’s words speak for themselves.”Topical though “Russia: Today” seems, it dates from before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year. Yet the themes it explores — post-Soviet nostalgia, uncertainty about Russia’s place in the world, anxiety about escalating conflict — seem eerily prescient. At one point, we hear a woman describing Russia as “a huge broken freezer: ripe bananas and rotten tomatoes.” Someone else brusquely compares the country to a “fat kid at a birthday party who everyone makes fun of‌” — until “he explodes.”Birman, second from right, in rehearsal with the singers from Exaudi, the group who will perform “Russia: Today” at Kings Place, in London, on Thursday.Suzie Howell for The New York TimesYet there are notes of optimism too: Another voice suggests that, while Russia is “a mess” right now, there is “hope for change.”The State of the WarRussia’s Heavy Losses: Weeks of failed attacks on the Ukrainian stronghold of Vuhledar have left two Russian brigades in tatters, renewing doubts about Moscow’s ability to maintain its offensive.Bakhmut: With Russian forces closing in, Ukraine is barring aid workers and civilians from entering the besieged city, in what could be a prelude to a Ukrainian withdrawal.Arms Supply: Ukraine and its Western allies are trying to solve a fundamental weakness in its war effort: Kyiv’s forces are firing artillery shells much faster than they are being produced.Prisoners of War: Poorly trained Russian soldiers captured by Ukraine describe being used as cannon fodder by commanders throwing waves of bodies into an assault.In 2017, when the dust was still settling on Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Birman was invited on a European Union-funded program to encourage cultural dialogue between artists from Eastern and Western Europe. For that project, he staged a series of workshops in Riga, Latvia — a city with a large ethnic Russian population. Birman set up a sound booth inside an arts center there and invited anyone who stepped inside to anonymously record their thoughts on Russia’s past, present and future.“There was a queue out the door,” Birman said. “One person spoke for, like, 30 minutes.”To capture a wider range of perspectives, the production team also set up recording booths in Helsinki, Finland, and Vladivostok, Russia, in 2018 and 2019, collecting hundreds more pieces of testimony. These were transcribed and pieced together into a libretto by the writer Scott Diel, with whom Birman has collaborated on other verbatim projects. (Those include the 2013 cantata “Nostra Culpa,” which was based on a Twitter tussle between the Times Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman and Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the then-president of Estonia.)Despite being billed as an opera, “Russia: Today” has no apparent plot; instead, the material is framed as an hourlong Orthodox memorial service, moving from opening prayers through lamentation to a kind of peace.“There are many different layers to the piece, just as there are many different layers to Russia,” said Sergej Morozov, the director of “Russia: Today,” by phone. “From outside, we see this political, aggressive layer, but there are different layers hidden underneath.”Birman himself left Russia with his family when he was six, in 1994, and grew up in San Francisco, before studying in Britain. As much as anything else, “Russia: Today” was an attempt to understand a country he often feels estranged from, he said. “I wanted to find what Russia is, because I didn’t have the answer myself.”In the version that will be performed in London, five singers are clustered around microphones beneath a screen that shows stark images of the Russian landscape shot by the filmmaker Alexandra Karelina. Snow-swathed railroad tracks and apartment blocks blur into glowering fir forests; vivid green tundra gives way to gray frozen lakes.We see no people, but we hear voices continually. Sometimes the interview recordings are played straight, or woven into cacophonous layers; other times, the words are declaimed verbatim by the performers, in Russian and English. At moments, Birman molds them into eerie, angular vocal lines. Coloring the score are the sounds of bells, whistling, birdlike cries and the growl of a low bass voice.Birman’s original idea was to present stagings of the work in Moscow and London. Plans were well advanced until summer 2021, when the singers of a Russian vocal ensemble that had agreed to premiere the piece, took a closer look at the text and pulled out.“The conductor just called me and said, ‘I’m so sorry, the singers don’t feel comfortable,’” said Tonya Wechsler, the show’s producer. “She said, ‘Look, one of them told me, ‘Do you not realize that it could be our last performance?’”Birman guessed that it was the religious element of “Russia: Today,” as much as its political overtones, that spooked the Moscow singers, given President Vladimir V. Putin’s alignment with the Russian Orthodox Church. “I think it was the appropriation of sacred music,” he said. “They feared that this would be problematic for their careers and their safety.”“Russia: Today” was premiered in Sept. 21 in Narva, Estonia, a city with a large ethnic Russian population.Anastasia VolkovaWhen another ensemble gave the first performance in September 2021 — in Narva, Estonia — some Russian-speaking audience members also made their displeasure felt.“We had a post-show discussion and some of the people there said, ‘Oh, it’s all lies, we cannot believe people actually said this,’” Wechsler said.Further attempts to get a live performance in Russia came to nothing. When a recording was screened in a Vladivostok movie theater a few weeks later, the venue requested that it be shown without subtitles, in case photos of the text found their way onto social media.Given everything that’s happened since, could Birman see “Russia: Today” being performed in the country of his birth any time soon? He laughed. “Nobody’s going to touch this for as long as the current government is in,” he said.Even if he could visit Russia without risking the military draft, it would be impossible to repeat the fieldwork he did just a few years ago, Birman added. “Who’s going to be willing to talk about Russia in this way at this point? Who’s going to say anything honest?” More