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      Kaija Saariaho, Pathbreaking Composer, Is Dead at 70

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      She brought new colors to modernist music, sometimes using electronics, and became the first female living composer to have two operas staged by the Met.Kaija Saariaho, a Finnish composer who was brought up in the world of male-dominated high modernism but who broke away to forge an identity of her own, becoming the first woman to have more than one work of hers staged by the Metropolitan Opera, died on Friday at her home in Paris. She was 70.She had been diagnosed with brain cancer in 2021, said her publisher, Chester Music, which confirmed the death.Ms. Saariaho brought new and often mysterious colors to classical music.In Paris, where she had settled permanently, she experimented with tape and live electronics, which she applied to nearly every form in classical music: works for solo instrument and small ensemble, and for symphony orchestra and opera. Over the years she rose to the top of her field, a slow-changing industry that only in recent years has made steps to correct the repertoire’s gender imbalances.Her first opera, “L’Amour de Loin,” which premiered at the Salzburg Festival in Austria in 2000 and came to the Met in 2016, won the Grawemeyer Award for music composition. Her most recent entry into that genre, “Innocence,” debuted at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France in 2021 and will travel to the Met in the 2025-26 season.When the Met joined the work’s list of commissioners, Ms. Saariaho in turn joined a select group of living composers to have a second opera mounted by that house — and the only woman to gain that distinction.Kaija Saariaho was born on Oct. 14, 1952, in Helsinki. She studied at the storied Sibelius Academy there, and was a pioneering impresario of contemporary music, forming the group Open Ears with fellow young artists. She left to continue her education in Freiburg, Germany, with summer courses taken in the modernist hotbed of Darmstadt. She moved to Paris in 1982 to finish her studies at IRCAM, the institute founded by Pierre Boulez.A complete obituary will appear soon. More

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      Review: Tomasz Konieczny Returns to the Met Opera in ‘Dutchman’

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      After a triumphant house debut in 2019, the bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny brought power and clarity to the title role in “The Flying Dutchman.”On Tuesday night, four years after being hailed as the breakout star of a revival of Wagner’s “Ring” at the Metropolitan Opera, Tomasz Konieczny returned there to headline “Der Fliegende Holländer,” or “The Flying Dutchman.” It was worth the wait.Konieczny’s Dutchman, cursed to ride the seas endlessly in a ghost ship with black masts and red sails, seemed to channel supernatural forces as he emerged from the bowels of François Girard’s unremittingly dark production. Konieczny possesses an instrument of granitic power and brassy resonance, combining the depth of a tuba with the brightly penetrating cast of a trumpet. He can also cover his voice and fill it with pitiful tears. For such a sizable instrument, his attack is astonishingly clean; he inflates a straight tone to a vibrating roar and makes it sound like an exquisite cri de coeur.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, offered the role to Konieczny, a Polish bass-baritone, in 2019 when Gelb heard Konieczny’s company debut as Alberich in the “Ring” that year. Konieczny brought unusual charisma and nobility to the designated villain of Wagner’s epic tetralogy, and his Dutchman is likewise a complex creation.A tragic figure whose stoic demeanor masks a writhing pain within, Konieczny’s Dutchman rises above earthly concerns but rages with focused fury against the ever-fresh torments of his Sisyphean predicament. His invincibility has made him disdainful of humans and desperate for death, and yet he harbors a romanticized fixation upon love. The Dutchman comes ashore once every seven years in search of a woman who can redeem him with her fidelity and break his curse. (Of course, the premise contains passive-aggressive misogyny — that a man in search of a faithful woman is doomed to look for her forever.)As Senta, the woman who returns the apparitional captain’s obsessive attention, Elza van den Heever sang with a ductile soprano. In “Senta’s Ballad,” she catapulted into high-lying phrases with strength and point and drew her voice into a slender thread for beautifully formed pianissimo high notes. As infatuation consumed her, van den Heever summoned the tonal amplitude to fill out Wagner’s portrait of a love that is annihilating in its totality.The clear thrust of Eric Cutler’s tenor gave the role of Erik, Senta’s abandoned lover, unusual poignancy. The bass Dmitry Belosselskiy effectively rendered Daland, Senta’s venal, easily dazzled father, as a strong yet foolish man who would trade his daughter for riches.Girard’s production — like his recent “Lohengrin” — attempts to get a lot of mileage out of a few ideas. It’s long on ambience, with billowing fog and undertones of sickly, hallucinogenic greens, and short on storytelling.Fortunately, the 29-year-old conductor Thomas Guggeis, making his Met debut, added depth to the atmosphere of roiling fantasy. The overture came alive with stormy eddies and pulsating vigor, even as video projections of a maelstrom and cracks of lightning felt redundant. The strings, in particular, found imaginative colors: Their throbbing vitality, unabashed romance and otherworldly shrieks covered the range of a work that swings from bel-canto influences to the enthralling mythmaking that would become Wagner’s signature. There were some missed opportunities — such as the dark timbres that color the Act II duet for Senta and the Dutchman — but overall, Guggeis was a confident, sensitive, decisive presence.At times, Girard’s abstract staging still seems to distrust the material, but kinetic conducting and a richly characterized central performance show that it may simply have been waiting for a few artists to redeem it.Der Fliegende HolländerThrough June 10 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      The Conductor Thomas Guggeis Is Rising Fast After a Surprise Debut

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      Thomas Guggeis was a young repetiteur at the Berlin State Opera five years ago when he was asked a career-changing question: Could he conduct “Salome”?He had worked with the singers, but this new production of Strauss’s opera was meant to be led by the veteran maestro Christoph von Dohnányi — until a dispute with the director led him to back out mere hours before the final dress rehearsal. So Guggeis went on in his place. And he was back in the pit on opening night.“This was a situation of a star is born,” said Bernd Loebe, the general manager of Frankfurt Opera, who saw Guggeis lead that performance.It wouldn’t be the last time Guggeis, now 29, stepped into a high-pressure situation. Earlier this season, as the State Opera’s Kapellmeister, or house conductor, he picked up rehearsals and two runs of a new “Ring” cycle after Daniel Barenboim withdrew because of illness. And on May 30, he will make his North American debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, leading a revival of Wagner’s “Der Fliegende Holländer,” taking over from Jaap van Zweden.Things are happening quickly — Guggeis starts as the general music director of the Frankfurt Opera this fall — but he is trying to maintain a steady development that some of his peers have abandoned in favor of peripatetic celebrity.“There was a question of how to go on,” he said in an interview at the State Opera here. “Do you jump on the moving train or do you stay on track? Together with my agent, I decided to keep calm. If an opportunity is meant to be, there will still be interest and possibility in two or three years.”APART FROM an uncle — the accomplished percussionist Edgar Guggeis — Guggeis grew up in a nonmusical family in Bavaria. His father was the director of a brewery, and his mother was a tax clerk. But he played instruments from a young age, and sang in choirs.Guggeis followed those interests to the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich, but not with single-minded focus. He studied conducting but, aware of the precarious life it promised, also picked up a degree in quantum physics.“I was really interested in the subject,” he said, “and I just wanted to have something on the safe side. You never know how it works out as a conductor. When I started, if you asked me, ‘Where do you see yourself in 10 years?’ I would say I don’t know. But I will have this other degree, and I can always go back to that.”Guggeis is trying to maintain a steady development. “There was a question of how to go on,” he said. “Do you jump on the moving train or do you stay on track? Together with my agent, I decided to keep calm.”Ava Pellor for The New York TimesNow, Guggeis might read about a discovery related to something he remembers studying in school. But his specialty was theoretical particle physics, which is impossible to follow on a part-time or casual basis. So he has stopped keeping up with the field.During his time in Munich, Guggeis was often at the Bavarian State Opera while it was under the music directorships of Kent Nagano and Kirill Petrenko. In between classes one day, he sat in on a rehearsal of Strauss’s “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” led by Petrenko. By the second act, he decided to skip school and stay. He was hooked, and saw nearly everything the house had to offer in what amounted to a parallel education. “To see those conductors,” he said, “was amazing, but also so formative.”Guggeis continued to study conducting in Milan, then returned to Germany to serve as a repetiteur in Berlin. He coached singers from the piano but almost never spoke with the house’s long-reigning maestro, Daniel Barenboim. “It was hard to get close to him,” Guggeis said, “because everyone wants something from him there.” But slowly, the two built a relationship in which Barenboim became increasingly approachable.For his part, Barenboim didn’t need much time at all. He recalled watching the young conductor lead a rehearsal and immediately thinking he was gifted.“You can see these things straight away with somebody,” Barenboim said. “And he was obviously a very natural conductor. He had a rare combination of easiness and comfortable responsibility. He moved his arms in a natural way, and was naturally in command. From the very beginning.”Their bond deepened. “It felt like family,” Guggeis said. “He was generous, supportive, kind and always there when I had questions about career.” They talked about music, art and philosophy, or gossiped about Pierre Boulez. Between those conversations and the rehearsals Guggeis would watch and later ask about, Barenboim became, he said, “the most influential mentor for me.”GUGGEIS BELONGS to a class of conductors — more common in Germany — that comes up through opera houses rather than concert halls, even if their careers eventually balance both. He said that the repertoire he learned as a repetiteur has stuck “deeply in my head and guts,” and that his time at the State Opera in Berlin, as well as in Stuttgart and Berlin as a Kapellmeister, has defined his approach to the podium, such as how to manage rehearsals and soloists or wrangle a large-scale work for orchestra and chorus.“You can never buy that experience,” he said, “no matter how talented you are.”He has also tried to test out famous pieces like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony away from very public stages like the Philharmonie in Berlin or the Musikverein in Vienna. He has conducted the Beethoven, but in Italy, in a five-concert series with the Milan Symphony Orchestra, following advice he once heard attributed to Herbert von Karajan, that regardless of where you lead this work, the first 15 times won’t be good; so start early.Guggeis at the Met. In fall, he becomes general music director of the Frankfurt Opera.Ava Pellor for The New York TimesWhen Guggeis shares memories and insights like that, he sounds like a conductor looking back on a career rather than forward. His mix of confidence and self-awareness was part of what endeared him to Barenboim, who said: “He’s very talented, but he knows that he has a lot to learn. He has a great curiosity, and that will go until the end of his life.”Curiosity, but also the courage to take on classics by Wagner and Strauss in front of the boo-happy audience at the Berlin State Opera. (Reviews during his time as Kapellmeister have tended to be positive.) So, when he stepped into the pit for “Salome,” it was just another day on the job. He was supported by Dohnányi, who remains a mentor — and gave him most of his score library — and stunned Barenboim.“It was remarkable,” Barenboim said. “There was no ‘What shall we do now?’ His future was absolutely clear.”Loebe, Frankfurt Opera’s general manager, was similarly struck by this 24-year-old conductor he had never heard of before. “I wanted to know more,” he said. “So I saw him many more times, and we started to have many meetings.” Loebe was looking for a new music director, and Guggeis was “the only guy I wanted.”Frankfurt’s orchestra, Loebe added, was used to having two or three choices, but he insisted on Guggeis, who formed a quick bond with the musicians. During the pandemic, he led them in a streamed performance of Mozart’s “Requiem” — one of the few videos online of his conducting — that reveals his clear direction, level head and sense of shape. Then, in 2021, he was named as their new music director.Mozart is how Guggeis will begin his tenure next season, with a new production of “Le Nozze di Figaro” premiering on Oct. 1. In a demonstration of the range he hopes for there, he will also lead Ligeti’s “Le Grand Macabre,” Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” Verdi’s “Don Carlo” and Strauss’s “Elektra,” in addition to concert programs.Guggeis’s inaugural season in Frankfurt took shape as he was wrapping up his time as Kapellmeister in Berlin. There, he was working with Barenboim on a new production of Wagner’s four-opera “Ring” that was unveiled all at once last October, an immense and virtually unheard-of undertaking for a repertory house. It was years in the making, but Barenboim’s health rapidly declined that summer, and the planned four cycles were split between Guggeis and Christian Thielemann.When his condition permitted, Barenboim shared his wisdom with Guggeis about, for example, which notoriously tricky passages in the operas’ 16 hours of music should be the focus of rehearsals. They still speak; Guggeis values his advice, seeing it as the equivalent of singers working with coaches long into their careers.Guggeis was also in constant contact with Thielemann, an experienced hand in Wagner. “We were working out problems together,” he said. “It was very interesting. But then he would also say things like not to worry about ‘Ride of the Valkyries,’ because it’s self-going, it will become loud by itself. All this was really fantastic for me.”Earlier this month, Guggeis said goodbye to Berlin, for now; his tenure as Kapellmeister ends this season. He led two concerts with the Staatskapelle, the opera house’s storied orchestra, and was on a plane to New York for “Holländer” rehearsals the next day.“The little bird is now flying from its nest,” he said in an interview at the Met. “I’m conducting professionally since five years, more or less. I was with this fabulous orchestra and now I’m here working at this tremendous place. To be here is something I never would have expected, and couldn’t ever wish for.” More

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      Salvatore Sciarrino Returns to Myth in the Opera ‘Venere e Adone’

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      Salvatore Sciarrino’s “Venere e Adone,” his 15th opera, premieres this weekend at the Hamburg State Opera.When the baritone Evan Hughes agreed to sing the part of the wild boar in Salvatore Sciarrino’s “Venere e Adone,” premiering at the Hamburg State Opera on Saturday, he didn’t expect to become the star of the show.In most opera versions of the Venus and Adonis myth, like John Blow’s “Venus and Adonis” (1683) and Hans Werner Henze’s “Venus und Adonis” (1997), the boar is silent or eliminated. But in “Venere e Adone,” with a libretto by Sciarrino and Fabio Casadei Turroni, the boar, or the Monster, is not just a singing role — he is the moral core of the story.In this version of the myth, the Monster, who has five solo scenes, doesn’t mean Adonis harm. The creature has been hit by one of Cupid’s arrows, and instantly falls in love with the boy hunting him.“I said yes to the project before I even really understood that the Monster was a sympathetic character,” Hughes said in an interview. “He only becomes violent because of the outside world.”Salvatore Sciarrino, a composer of stage scores that are intimate, fragile and sparse.Andreas Meichsner for The New York TimesIn an interview at his home in Città di Castello, Italy, Sciarrino, 76, said he considered the Monster to be the most human character in “Venere e Adone.” At the beginning, the Monster sings from a sort of existential limbo, unsure of who he is or what he wants. When he kills Adonis, who is hunting him, the Monster thinks he is caressing and kissing the most beautiful creature he has ever seen. Instead, he is mauling him to death.“What is life for you is death for another,” Sciarrino said. “It is one of the keys to being in the world.”“Venere e Adone” will be led by the Hamburg State Opera’s music director Kent Nagano and staged by it artistic director, Georges Delnon. It is the first Sciarrino production that Nagano has conducted, and although Delnon has known the composer for about 25 years, this is their first collaboration on a new opera.The project began when Turroni, 59, a writer and former tenor, approached Sciarrino with a draft libretto based on a version of the Venus and Adonis myth by the Italian Baroque poet Giambattista Marino.Sciarrino and Turroni began meeting frequently, often at a bar near the train station in Bologna, to shape the text together. (Drunk people can be useful sources of literary inspiration, said Turroni, who also works as a bartender in Bologna.) Over several months, they adapted it to the needs of the music; the final performance libretto was extracted directly from the score.Evan Hughes, left, as the Monster, and Scotting in a rehearsal for the opera.Andreas Meichsner for The New York Times“Venere e Adone” broadly follows the contours of the myth. Venus, the goddess of love, has descended to earth to be with Adonis, enraging her husband, Mars. Adonis wants to prove to Venus that he is not just handsome but also strong, so he makes a plan to go hunting. Venus discourages Adonis; petulantly, he ignores her. In battle, the boar sinks its tusks into Adonis’s groin.In Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Adonis is transformed into a flower by Venus as a memorial to his short-lived beauty. In Turroni and Sciarrino’s version, both the beauty and the beast who kills him are transformed into this flower, becoming one with nature and each other.“Venere e Adone” is Sciarrino’s 15th opera. His first, “Amore e Psiche,” also based on a mythical theme, was completed 50 years ago. In these works, Sciarrino has honed an unmistakable theatrical style: intimate, fragile and sparse, with clearly audible text.While some artists go through distinct periods, Sciarrino has spent his career pursuing his peculiar brand of beauty. “I don’t really see a radical departure or sudden burst of experimentation that’s taken place over the years,” Nagano said in a video interview. “Rather, I would say that it’s a deepening and perhaps refining of a language so that it speaks in evermore poetic ways.”From left, the conductor Kent Nagano, the director Georges Delnon and Sciarrino at the Hamburg State Opera.Andreas Meichsner for The New York Times“It is impossible to hear a human voice and remain indifferent,” Sciarrino once told the Brooklyn Rail.He added: “Using the voice means employing simultaneously two forces, words and music. Singing without words is nonsense, like making a car without wheels.”Unlike opera composers whose orchestral music reflects both the conscious and unconscious emotions of the characters, Sciarrino writes instrumental parts that summon their environment. In “Venere e Adone,” there is little accompanying music at all. Furtive echoes, forlorn bird calls and windlike breath sounds evoke a naked earth.“The music of this opera is very dry,” Sciarrino said. “There are not so many sounds in this world, because it is an empty world.”In “Venere e Adone,” the vocal music is also restrained. The singers intone the text quickly while sliding downward with their voices, or hold long, clear notes that blossom into brief melismas.The countertenor Randall Scotting, who plays Adonis, compared “Venere e Adone” to an Emily Dickinson poem. “There’s so much in it,” he said, “but you have to think about it, interpret it, bring your own things to it in order to understand it.”Sciarrino’s vocal style can be challenging for singers. The Canadian mezzo-soprano Layla Claire, in the role of Venus, spent so much time walking around her house while practicing rapid Italian phrases that her two young daughters started repeating fragments of the libretto.Delnon’s production aims for the artificiality of Baroque opera.Andreas Meichsner for The New York Times“Once I started listening to Sciarrino’s music, I realized it was a language I didn’t speak,” said Hughes, the baritone. “As I started to work on it, I felt the same way that I felt at the beginning of studying, singing, learning a language that I really didn’t understand, like trying to sing in Russian.”But Sciarrino’s vocal style isn’t completely unfamiliar. He is fascinated by the art and music of the Italian Renaissance and the Baroque periods. The walls of his home are covered in paintings, including a 17th-century depiction of Adonis and his mother Myrrha by an anonymous Venetian artist.Sciarrino himself almost became a painter. The influence of Renaissance and Baroque art will be palpable at the premiere of “Venere e Adone.” Delnon and his team have hung historical depictions of the Venus and Adonis myth in their rehearsal space at the State Opera, adapting the stylized gestures from the paintings to the stage. The set designer, Varvara Timofeeva, and the costume designer, Marie-Thérèse Jossen, are developing sleek, minimalist interplays of black, white, gray and blood red.Like Baroque opera, “Venere e Adone” uses a chorus, but to ambiguous ends.Andreas Meichsner for The New York TimesDelnon is aiming not for psychological realism, but for the artificiality of Baroque opera in his production. “You stage it in a way that you’re not trying to be the character,” he said, “but just trying to show the character.”“Venere e Adone” also includes music that sounds explicitly Baroque. For Scotting, it is the rare work where his early and contemporary music come together. “There’s this thread of antiquity that ties into it all,” he said.Sciarrino also uses the Baroque trope of a chorus that narrates and comments on the action. But while operas from that era often use the chorus to superimpose a neat moral on the story, Sciarrino deploys the vocal ensemble to more ambiguous ends. “Venere e Adone” concludes with a question: “Who triumphs, love or death?”Here, the Monster is redeemed by those universal forces. “It’s as if Sciarrino is saying that the Monster is almost rewarded,” Delnon said, “and Adonis is punished.”Sciarrino said the question was intentionally absurd and unanswerable. But, he continued with a laugh: “To tell the truth, love always wins. Or what we call love. That is the power of the word.” More

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      Review: ‘Stranger Love’ Premieres at the Los Angeles Philharmonic

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      The premiere of Dylan Mattingly and Thomas Bartscherer’s six-hour opera was presented by the orchestra — an institution at an inflection point.The composer Dylan Mattingly’s cheeks turned red, and he held a hand up to his eyes, as he began to cry late Saturday night during the bows for the world premiere of his opera “Stranger Love.”It was an understandably emotional moment. “Stranger Love,” created with Thomas Bartscherer, had been in development for over a decade and performed piecemeal, but was now being presented in its entirety at Walt Disney Concert Hall, by the perhaps the only orchestra that could do it: the Los Angeles Philharmonic.That’s because “Stranger Love” is a six-hour, durational opera, an earnest exercise in deep feeling that takes sensations and stretches them from the personal to the cosmic, and goes big in a time when contemporary music tends to go small. It requires the kind of pipe-dream planning that many institutions shy away from, but that has been characteristic of the Philharmonic.Characteristic in large part thanks to the work of Chad Smith, the orchestra’s chief executive and one of its longtime administrators, who said last week that he would leave Los Angeles for the Boston Symphony Orchestra this fall. That news followed another recent blow: the announcement that the Philharmonic’s superstar maestro, Gustavo Dudamel, would depart for New York in 2026.The Los Angeles Philharmonic is now at an inflection point. At stake is the preservation of an ethos that has made this orchestra the kind that can throw its ambition, and deep pockets, into projects like John Cage’s outrageous “Europeras” at Sony Studios; regular commissions at the length of symphonies and full evenings; and “Stranger Love,” whose first act alone is as long as Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” (also programmed there this season), but which doesn’t have a fraction of its marketability.So, as Mattingly cried onstage, his triumph felt bittersweet, with a tinge of fear about the Philharmonic’s next phase. “Omnia mutantur,” someone says in the opera, nodding to Ovid: Everything changes. Yet it’s also natural to want more from the Smith-Dudamel era — to “tarry a while” and “linger in this moment,” to pull another line from the show.No matter what happens, “Stranger Love” deserves life beyond its one-night-only run at Disney Hall, which was hosted by the Philharmonic and performed by Mattingly’s ensemble, Contemporaneous. The most natural fit in New York, where epically avant-garde opera has all but vanished from earlier bastions like the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Lincoln Center, would be the Park Avenue Armory, the city’s most generous promoter of large-scale work.If anything, the Armory would be a more appropriate space than Disney Hall, its vastness able to accommodate Mattingly’s musical and emotional sprawl — the way his score does nothing but linger, luxuriating in the good and the bad, the spiritual and the doubtful, and above all the ecstatic.The largely abstract opera follows a pair of lovers: Tasha, sung by Molly Netter, and Andrew, sung by Isaiah Robinson.Craig T. Mathew/Mathew ImagingLike most works of extreme ambition and magnitude, “Stranger Love” isn’t perfect. When it name-checks the likes of Anne Carson and Octavio Paz, it behaves more like creative nonfiction than opera and yanks its audience from an experience of pure feeling. Some stretches of the score are more trying than transporting, and the second act seems destined to torment any director.That 80-minute act — in which singers exist more as instrumentalists than traditional characters — certainly appears to have stumped Lileana Blain-Cruz, an imaginative, effective director who wasn’t in full control of the material here, or much of elsewhere. There were references, in her modest staging, to the work’s lineage of opera and durational art. In Matt Saunders’s scenic design, a tall backdrop (made of threads that formed a canvas for Hanna Wasileski’s projections) was at one point illuminated with Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s celestial, forced-perspective set for “The Magic Flute.” As if playing off an “Einstein on the Beach” reference in the line “These are the days my friends,” Blain-Cruz has two people carry and sit in chairs that could have been used in Robert Wilson’s original “Einstein” production.That’s far from the only tip of the hat in “Stranger Love,” but it may be the most explicit. Mattingly has internalized a wealth of musical styles: the gamelan-influenced, West Coast sounds of Lou Harrison; the propulsive cadences of John Adams; the vocal technique and poetic dramaturgy of Meredith Monk. Three female voices — Holly Sedillos, Catherine Brookman and Eliza Bagg, often employing woodwind-like vocalise — could have been pulled from a Minimalist ensemble.But Mattingly doesn’t quote. Instead, his influences surface subtly, abstracted in, say, a rhythmic gesture. In the end, the language is entirely his own. Although his score often instructs singers to “sound as beautiful as possible,” his writing calls for the directness of pop rather than an operatic color. His 28-piece orchestra includes restless percussion and three pianos: one with standard tuning, one roughly half a tone lower, the other in between. The microtonal effect, in Mattingly’s polyrhythms, can be that of a gently melodic choir of wind chimes.The plot is narrated by an otherworldly character named Uriel, played by Julyana Soelistyo.Craig T. Mathew/Mathew ImagingIn each scene, Mattingly prolongs a musical idea with mantra-like focus, relishing and delicately transforming it. Bartscherer’s poetic and slim story follows a couple, Tasha and Andre, through the seasons, a vague timeline guided more by mood than chronology: fresh, promising spring; pleasantly lethargic summer; suddenly shifting autumn; suffocatingly glacial winter. This general arc is narrated by Uriel — a charismatic Julyana Soelistyo, whose otherworldliness is emphasized in Kaye Voyce’s costume design — and accompanied by two allegorical figures, Threat from Without (temptation) and Threat from Within (doubt).David Bloom conducted Mattingly’s pitfall-ridden score with a sure hand. Occasionally, his hips betrayed an urge to groove, but even then he remained unflappably precise. As Andre, the tenor Isaiah Robinson had a bright purity that served the score with an egoless instrumental timbre similar to the soprano Molly Netter’s Tasha. As the Threat from Without, Jane Sheldon sang with birdlike leaps redolent of Monk’s “Atlas”; Luc Kleiner, as the Threat from Within, was gloomier and darkly seductive.Blain-Cruz’s production featured six dancers, who during the first act are made to behave with unpredictably fast and slow stylized movement that snaps into focus only when Tasha and Andre spot each other and sustain eye contact from across the stage. But in the second act, the dancers merely retell the lovers’ story through Chris Emile’s tiresomely obvious choreography.Most impressive were the members of Contemporaneous, which Mattingly founded with Bloom while students at Bard College. These are players well versed in Mattingly’s idiom, and well suited to take on such an immense, difficult score for one night: exact and detailed, but also lively and openly dancing, as full of personality as any singer.They are the stars of the purely instrumental third act, repeating versions of earworm phrases for about 20 minutes. As the score ritualistically stretches a kind of communal love to the cosmos, one melody begins to spread out as well, until, in the final seconds, it unfurls slowly, ending before it reaches its last note.And why should it? When something is this special, you can’t help but want to tarry a while and linger in the moment.Stranger LovePerformed on Saturday at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles. More

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      This ‘Magic Flute’ Has Ringtones, Bird Tracks and a Foley Artist

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      Supernatural happenings, curses and romances, heartbreaking arias and vocal fireworks — what’s not to love?Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” (“The Magic Flute”), a wildly popular gateway opera, has been a frequent presence on stages since its premiere in 1791. It’s a fair bet, though, that Simon McBurney’s production, which opens at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, is the first to feature a ringtone duplicating the bird catcher Papageno’s five-note musical trademark. Or to use about 100 speakers strategically placed all over the house.Morley (Pamina) and Brownlee (Tamino) rehearsing “Die Zauberflöte.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesThe tenor Brenton Ryan, as Monostatos, in the production.Lila Barth for The New York TimesFor McBurney, the use of technology is less about embracing the present than about nodding to the creation of “Zauberflöte.” That was at Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna, which was run by the multitasking Emanuel Schikaneder, the opera’s librettist and originator of the role of Papageno.“Schikaneder had the latest ways of making thunder, he had machines make the sound of rain, he had bird calls, he had people making the sound of horses’ hooves,” McBurney said in an interview. “The use of sound creates a magical world, and yet at the same time at the heart of ‘The Magic Flute’ are real human concerns.”The juxtapositions of intimacy and cosmic scale, simplicity and complexity, low and high technology have long been emblematic of McBurney’s work as a founder and artistic director of the London-based theater company Complicité. Audience members at his solo show “The Encounter” (which had a Broadway run in 2016) experienced the production through earphones, immersing them in sophisticated soundscapes. Something that could have added distance between performer and theatergoer brought them closer.Morley rehearsing with the orchestra, which is raised almost to the level of the stage.Lila Barth for The New York TimesMcBurney experimented with sound again for “Zauberflöte,” which was first staged in 2012 at the Dutch National Opera and has been presented around Europe. (It replaces the 19-year-old Julie Taymor production at the Met; her abridged, English-language version for families remains in the repertory.) A distinctive trait of McBurney’s “Zauberflöte” is the importance of the sonic environment.“For a forest scene I have five or six bird tracks that I can send out, a running brook that I’m going to put in a speaker in the far right side of the stage, two tracks of wind blowing in trees,” Matthieu Maurice, a sound designer, said at a recent rehearsal.The singers are amplified through body microphones, though only for the spoken sections — plentiful in “Zauberflöte,” which is a singspiel, a numbers show with dialogue between arias. The mics are turned off for the sung parts, requiring constant adjustments by two sound mixers.“There’s so much more I can do with the dialogue with a mic,” said the soprano Erin Morley, who plays the pure-hearted princess Pamina. “I can face upstage, I can whisper something. I’m sure there will be some purists out there who will hate this, but the important thing is that we are not singing with mics.”The director Simon McBurney at the Met. “The use of sound creates a magical world,” he said, “and yet at the same time at the heart of ‘The Magic Flute’ are real human concerns.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesNathalie Stutzmann, this production’s conductor, was also on board. “In a house as big as this one, it is obvious to me that we need to use modern technology,” she said. “The Met is huge. It’s a lack of intelligence not to adapt to a space. It’s normal to help the singers fill the space when they are speaking. It’s also important that the volume of the spoken parts match the volume of the sung parts in an opera like this one, otherwise it feels like two different works.”Amplification also allows the integration of a live Foley artist, Ruth Sullivan, who operates out of a self-contained space, visible stage left, that looks like a zany inventor’s laboratory. “Her relationship with the actors is a musical one, essentially,” McBurney said of Sullivan. “They know the sounds she is going to make, and so it is a dance in the same way Nathalie Stutzmann is dancing with the singers, trying to make the cellos and the voices work together.”The artist Blake Habermann contributes drawings and ingenious effects to live projections.Lila Barth for The New York TimesHabermann’s drawing adds to the projections.Lila Barth for The New York TimesStutzmann works as closely with Maurice as she does with the musicians and singers. (The associate sound designer, he has been implementing Gareth Fry’s original vision for the past eight years, while adding flourishes of his own, including the ringtone.) The sound effects are indicated on the sheet music, so she knows exactly what to expect and when.Adding to the increased interconnection among the opera’s moving parts, the pit is almost level with the stage.“We decided, ‘Let’s raise the orchestra, let’s make people aware of the players,’” said Michael Levine, the set designer. “Because we’re so used to the players being hidden, and they weren’t in the 18th century.”From left, Luka Zylik, Deven Agge and Julian Knopf as the three spirits that guide Tamino and Papageno.Lila Barth for The New York TimesDuring the spoken sections at rehearsal, players in the orchestra turned toward the stage like flowers to the sun. They could watch the action for a change.“There’s nothing more boring than being an orchestra musician and being in the back of a cave with no idea of what’s happening on the stage,” Stutzmann said. “Can you imagine spending three or four hours, five for Wagner, at the bottom of a pit and have no idea what’s happening above you?” Not only can the musicians see this “Zauberflöte”; some also become part of the action.Being positioned higher creates a challenge, though. “We have to be careful not to cover up the singers,” Stutzmann said. “The sound balance is changed because we’re up and above, so we’re louder. You have to be vigilant while avoiding being bland.”Ruth Sullivan, the production’s live Foley artist. “Her relationship with the actors is a musical one, essentially,” McBurney said. “They know the sounds she is going to make, and so it is a dance.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesMuch of the production’s visuals are also created in plain view. The artist Blake Habermann contributes drawings and ingenious effects — watch how he renders a starry sky — to live projections. “I show all my tricks and then they become doubly magical,” McBurney said with an impish grin.For Levine, making the entire house part of one organism reminds everybody that the artificiality and evanescence of the art form constitute its strength. “What we wanted to do is to bring the audience into the fallibility of theater,” he said. “Things are being made before your eyes, and it’s live, and it’s not going to happen again. And the people that are constructing it are here with you in the same room, and we’re all doing it together.”A scene from the production at the Met.Lila Barth for The New York TimesIf the projections are the modern equivalent of the magic lanterns developed in the 17th century, McBurney and Levine also came up with a contemporary version of a magic carpet: a central square platform that can transport the characters, but that also suggests the instability they experience. It can go up and down, and it can be inclined as various angles; the singers can scamper on top or scurry below. “It is much more secure when you’re on it,” Morley said. “From afar, it looks terrifying.” Laughing, she allowed that “when we go underneath the platform, there were a few moments in rehearsal when I said, ‘You want me to do what?’”Some modern directors have been criticized for overemphasizing an opera’s staging over its music, and forcing interpretations that depart from the familiar. But McBurney’s North Star remains the music, and trying to stay faithful to what it meant for its creator.“I think that for Mozart, if you can make music so beautiful, people will come out changed,” he said. “We can debate whether he was right or not well, but it’s called ‘The Magic Flute.’ The flute changes the way that people behave.”Mozart, he added, had confidence in his music: “He knew that it could move people in a way that might alter their lives.” More

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      A Six-Hour Opera Goes On for One Euphoric Night Only

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      “Stranger Love,” a singular and hypnotic work by Dylan Mattingly and Thomas Bartscherer, opens (and closes) on Saturday in Los Angeles.Years ago, when the composer Dylan Mattingly was at work on a new project, he wrote to his collaborator, Thomas Bartscherer, telling him, “I often find that *really* long is better than just long.”Mattingly followed his own advice — and then some. “Stranger Love,” a singular, tender, euphoric, hypnotic opera that he and Bartscherer first envisioned 11 years ago, eventually grew to six hours, well past the point at which people start calling something impossible to produce.“We went into it thinking it would never happen, because how could it?” Mattingly, 32, said in a recent interview.Chunks of the piece have been performed in concert. But on Saturday — for the first time, and for one performance only — the whole thing will be staged at Walt Disney Concert Hall, the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which has embraced “Stranger Love” as one of its trademark pie-in-the-sky presentations.“Young, emerging artists who have big ideas deserve a place for that work to be seen,” said Chad Smith, the Philharmonic’s chief executive. “If the big institutions are not swinging for the rafters, why are we here?”David Bloom, who founded the group Contemporaneous with Mattingly, rehearsing that ensemble in New York.Michael George for The New York TimesDirected by Lileana Blain-Cruz and played by Contemporaneous — the ensemble Mattingly founded as an undergraduate at Bard College with David Bloom, who will conduct — “Stranger Love” is not exactly Puccini, even if it does sketch a kind of love story. Largely abstract and intensely earnest, slowly telescoping into the cosmic sphere, it offers a heightened experience more than it does a concrete plot.“The mood of the piece is something special,” said the composer John Adams, long a friend and mentor to Mattingly. “I believe the length of it is part of its spiritual — what can I say? — its spiritual impetus.”“Stranger Love” recalls two other operas that sustain a time-suspending tone of meditative ecstasy for many hours, Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s “Einstein on the Beach” and Olivier Messiaen’s “Saint François d’Assise.” Its sensibility was shaped by a CD Mattingly grew up with that featured the Tahitian Choir: “this glorious, polyphonic, joyous sound,” he said, “that’s moving around itself and congealing and drifting apart.” The early Minimalism of Glass is there, too, in the score’s vast expanses of shifting harmonies and repeating rhythms.Mattingly observing a rehearsal of “Stranger Love,” which has been presented in fragments but never in its entirety.Michael George for The New York TimesThree pianos, each tuned slightly differently, give a woozy, honky-tonk feel to some of the music, and sometimes offer a clangorous evocation of gamelan, a tie to the open-eared, pan-Pacific California spirit of Harry Partch and Lou Harrison.There’s some of the lush overripeness of Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-Symphonie” and the billowing fragrance of Debussy. And echoes of the stylized approach to character and the deceptively simple, sometimes almost childlike sound world of Meredith Monk’s wordless opera “Atlas,” which Mattingly said he listened to every night (literally) for a year before he began “Stranger Love.”His piece seems to float above the current-events themes of so much in new music. “It’s not telling you who to vote for or where to stand on an issue,” Bartscherer said, “but it’s asking that you imagine a world that could be otherwise.”“I also think the dedication to joy is an interesting politics,” Blain-Cruz said. “The dedication to fighting for the beauty in life, for people to see that and appreciate it. Like, don’t kill our world; let’s see it in its splendor and see that it’s worth fighting for.”Bartscherer’s spare text manages references to Anne Carson, Octavio Paz and Matthew Arnold, among others. A writer, translator and scholar, he was among Mattingly’s first professors at Bard, and quickly became a fan of Contemporaneous after its founding in 2010. Leaving one of the group’s concerts, Bartscherer had a vague idea for a piece of music theater: There would be two voices in love whose relationship develops, facing symbolic conflict from within and without, before resolving, all during a cycle of the four seasons.He shared the notion with Mattingly, who had been composing since he was 6 but had been wanting to try writing vocal music. Passing material back and forth, they were soon off to the races; the two talk about “Stranger Love” almost as something that already existed complete, in some realm, needing to be discovered or channeled more than consciously created.After the nearly four-hour first act of “Stranger Love,” the voices gradually drop out, with the instrumentalists broadening the work’s scope to the cosmos.Michael George for The New York Times“It was there, somewhere,” Bartscherer said. “And Dylan’s antenna was hearing it somehow.”At a certain point, they abandoned trying to corral the project into a traditionally manageable length, embracing the kind of epic world-building that Mattingly loved in “The Lord of the Rings” and “Battlestar Galactica.” On a 2014 visit to Point Reyes, on the California coast, Mattingly had a vision: The already sprawling score that he and Bartscherer had been working on was just Act I.In this new conception, two more acts would follow, in which the voices would gradually drop out and the opera’s scope would expand to encompass, first, human lovers beyond the initial pair, and then the expanding universe.It took years to finish, even given Mattingly’s single-minded focus. “Sometimes you have students, and you talk to them, and it takes two years to know that what you’re talking about got into their daily life,” said the composer David Lang, one of Mattingly’s teachers during graduate school at Yale. “But he made music so fluidly, and in such a dedicated fashion, that everything we were talking about immediately came out in the work.”Mattingly and Bartscherer briefly thought about producing “Stranger Love” themselves, perhaps in an airplane hangar, but it was clear the cost would be prohibitive without an institutional partner. There were a lot of ignored emails from arts organizations; some who replied said that they couldn’t say yes without seeing it first.Rehearsals have been leading to a single performance in Los Angeles, with none currently planned beyond that.Michael George for The New York TimesA concert performance of the nearly four-hour first act, presented by Beth Morrison and the Prototype festival in 2018, proved the material’s viability — to its creators, at least. But it was only when Adams encouraged Smith of the Los Angeles Philharmonic to take a look at the score, and Mattingly began to send along recorded clips, that “Stranger Love,” long finished, was ex post facto commissioned by the Philharmonic for a staged production.Blain-Cruz said that her staging aimed to be “both super simple and super grand,” with projections (designed by Hannah Wasileski) that evoke the natural world and beyond. Chris Emile’s choreography has been inspired by the cyclical movements of the planets and seasons.“Chris as a choreographer is someone who’s tapped into — not lightly or glibly, but tapped into spirit,” Blain-Cruz said. “All of his physical work, it reaches levels of possession in some ways. Dylan mentions gospel music and spiritual music, riling people up to make themselves open. And I think the choreography matches that.”Will “Stranger Love” have a life beyond Saturday? Mattingly has dreamed of doing it at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. But in the meantime, he and Bartscherer are already at work on another project. They claim that it will be shorter, but the title — “History of Life” — doesn’t give the sense that their scope has gotten any less ambitious.“I did voice my concern,” Adams said, “that Dylan was creating a body of work that was always going to be a challenge to produce. And then I felt like a terrible old dad, like, ‘Are you going to get a job?’ He’s willing to just live an extremely modest life, absolutely devoted to his art.” More

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      The Los Angeles Opera, Post-Plácido Domingo

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      LOS ANGELES — When the tenor Russell Thomas appeared at the Los Angeles Opera in 2017, Plácido Domingo, the company’s general director, asked him to return one day to sing the title role in Verdi’s “Otello.” It was a notable invitation coming from Domingo, the leading Otello of his day, who sang the role in 1986 at the very first performance of the Los Angeles company.Six years later, Thomas is back in Los Angeles starring as Otello in a six-performance run that begins Saturday. But Domingo, who had initially contemplated singing opposite him as the opera’s villain, Iago, is gone, having resigned in 2019 at the age of 78 amid allegations that he had sexually harassed multiple women over the course of his career.So it is that the company’s season-ending production of “Otello” is at once a look back to its foundations and a glimpse into its future, as the Los Angeles Opera charts its course in a post-Domingo era at a moment when it faces the same challenges as other companies in recovering from the loss of audience members and revenues since the pandemic.“It’s slow — it’s much slower than I would have desired,” Christopher Koelsch, the company’s president and chief executive officer, said of the audience’s return. But he noted that attendance was in line with what other opera houses across the country were seeing these days, and that there were signs that the company was overcoming its recent setbacks. “By most criteria, other than audience attendance, the company is in significantly better shape than it’s been in its 38-year history,” he said.Christopher Koelsch, the company’s president and chief executive officer, has been programming new work alongside the classics to reach new audiences.Damon Casarez for The New York TimesAttendance so far this season has averaged 64 percent of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion’s 3,033-seat capacity — still short of the 83 percent the company logged in 2018-2019, but showing improvement since it first reopened after the shutdown. Two productions that sold well, and sometimes sold out, reflected the company’s efforts to balance new works with the classics: “Omar,” the new Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels opera based on the autobiography of an enslaved Muslim scholar that won the Pulitzer Prize for music this week, and “The Marriage of Figaro,” the Mozart comedy.In a season when the Metropolitan Opera in New York was forced to dip into its endowment to make up for declining revenues, the Los Angeles Opera’s endowment is at a record high — $74.1 million, up from $28.8 million in 2012 — reflecting a continued influx of contributions, said Keith Leonard, the chairman of its board. It survived the downturn without running a deficit, relying on salary reductions, a handful of layoffs, a $5 million five-year loan against the endowment, and federal aid.Domingo’s downfall stunned Los Angeles and its opera company, which had been so closely identified with the star tenor, who had been singing there since the 1960s and was instrumental in the creation of the company. An investigation by the Los Angeles Opera found accusations that he had engaged in “inappropriate conduct” with women “to be credible,” but did not find evidence that he had engaged in “a quid pro quo or retaliated against any woman by not casting or otherwise hiring her at L.A. Opera.” When he left, the company pledged to strengthen its measures for preventing misconduct.It is difficult to say precisely whether attendance was affected by the departure of Domingo, given that the coronavirus shutdown followed so soon afterward. For many years his performances had drawn the biggest crowds, and his image was as integral to the company’s marketing as Gustavo Dudamel’s is for its neighbor, the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “It is unmistakably a loss because he’s such a titanic figure in the world,” Koelsch said. But, he added, “a scientific controlled experiment is impossible here.”The opera never filled the general director position after Domingo left; those responsibilities were picked up by Koelsch, who already was running its day-to-day operations.Domingo, in an email interview, said that in his view, the company had continued to thrive even after what he made clear was his unhappy departure from a position that had been a high point of his career.Rachel Willis-Sørensen as Desdemona, Thomas as Otello, Sarah Saturnino as Emilia and Igor Golovatenko as Iago during a rehearsal for “Otello.”Damon Casarez for The New York Times“I saw it grow and I believe that I gave it my all, to the point that it became one of the leading opera houses in the U.S. and the world,” he said, adding: “I see the programming and the seasons appear to be very diverse, with a big focus on new works that can attract new audiences and I think this is a great added value for all the people of Los Angeles.”With a $44 million operating budget, the Los Angeles Opera is the fifth largest company in the United States. Despite its (by opera standards) short existence, and with its modest roster of six productions a season (compared with 23 this season at the Met), it has been establishing itself as one of the more adventurous mainstream opera houses in the country: working to be more edgy than stuffy.Even before Domingo left, the company — aware of his age, and that an institution should not be too closely tied to any one person — had been planning for its future, working to forge an identity that would combine war horses with more contemporary work.For a decade it has been working with Beth Morrison Projects, which has been at the vanguard of producing contemporary opera: they collaborated on the world premiere of Ellen Reid’s opera “p r i s m” in 2018 at Los Angeles’ smaller Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, or REDCAT, and the work won a Pulitzer Prize. And in 2020, “Eurydice,” by Matthew Aucoin, who was then the opera’s artist-in-residence, had its world premiere at the Dorothy Chandler before moving to the Metropolitan Opera.“L.A. Opera is doing very, very well,” said Marc A. Scorca, the president of Opera America, a nonprofit service organization for opera companies. “Of all the major companies in the country, it is the youngest and is still discovering new audiences and new momentum as L.A. continues to build out its cultural infrastructure. I am very optimistic about the company.”James Conlon, the music director, said that the company has work to do to regain its audience after the pandemic.Damon Casarez for The New York TimesThis spring, it collaborated with Beth Morrison Projects to present two operas by Emma O’Halloran, the Irish composer, at the 250-seat black box theater inside REDCAT.One of them, a 70-minute, two-person work called “Trade,” explores an emotionally unsettling hotel room liaison in working-class Dublin between an older married man and a younger male prostitute, hardly the kind of story that has historically been presented on the opera stage.“When we started this relationship, most opera companies were not doing new work,” Morrison said. “L.A. Opera, in terms of the big companies, was very much ahead of the curve on that. They believe in experimental work, and they believe we need to have these things to make sure that opera evolves into the future and brings in new audiences.”Now other large companies, including the Met, are programming more new works in hopes of attracting new audiences.If this is a recovery, it is still a tentative one; crucial questions about how audience behavior has changed remain to be answered. James Conlon, who has been the opera’s music director since 2006, after being recruited for the job by Domingo, said that the opera was “working very hard to regain that audience.”“My own suspicion,” he said, “is that a lot of the competition is not going to be other venues but people who are sitting home who became used to making more use of their televisions.”With “Otello,” the company is returning to the work it opened with in 1986.Damon Casarez for The New York TimesThat is a particular issue in Los Angeles, considering the early evening traffic that can make trips downtown to the Music Center an exhausting, hourslong adventure.When the company was first formed, there was much talk about whether Los Angeles had an appetite for grand opera. “Up until the early 80s the received opinion by many of the leading figures at the Music Center was that ‘L.A. is not an opera town’ and ‘L.A. can afford a great symphony or a great opera, but not both,’” said Don Franzen, an original member of the opera’s board of directors.But 38 years after that opening night, that question appears to have been answered.“Los Angeles is very much an opera town — I see the growth of the company and its success as a testimony to that,” Scorca, of Opera America, said.Now Thomas, the company’s current artist-in-residence, is getting ready to take his place singing the demanding role that launched the company: Otello. He recalled that invitation from Domingo, who had floated the idea of appearing with him in the lower-lying baritone role of Iago, since he had stopped singing high tenor roles.“He was very interested in my singing Otello, and he and I performing the show together,” Thomas said the other day. “I would have loved that to happen. I would have loved to be onstage with one of the legendary singers in opera. Things happen the way they do.” More