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      John Adams, an American Master at 75

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      BERKELEY, Calif. — “I have to apologize,” the composer John Adams said as he approached his car. “The front seat was torn up by a bear.”Patches of the passenger seat were slashed open, revealing the stuffing inside. Bears aren’t a hazard in the hilly neighborhoods of “the People’s Republic of Berkeley,” as Adams wryly referred to his town, but they are in the Sierra Nevada, where he sometimes retreats to work at his cabin.One night, while Adams was in the mountains with his dog, Amos, beer exploded in the car’s trunk because of the altitude, and a bear wreaked havoc trying to get a taste. “It’s probably a problem that Stravinsky didn’t have,” he said.Adams and Stravinsky might not have that in common, but they share much else: a recognizable yet constantly evolving musical language; a body of work across a wide breadth of genres and forms; and, above all, something close to supremacy in the classical music of their time. And, at 75 — the same age as Stravinsky when he took a stylistic turn for his late masterpiece “Agon” — Adams is making a swerve with his latest opera, “Antony and Cleopatra,” which premieres at San Francisco Opera on Sept. 10 ahead of future productions, including at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.There is an easy argument to be made that Adams is the greatest living American composer. He is an artist for whom Americanness truly matters, as much as the tradition of Western classical music — both heritages treated not with nostalgia, but with awareness and affection. Whose DNA carries traces of Beethoven and Ellington, Claude Debussy and Cole Porter. Whom younger composers regard with a mixture of awe and fondness, and who, in turn, is quick to give advice and life lessons. And who has made opera, as the singer Gerald Finley said, “a force for social commentary.”That corner of Adams’s output, which began in 1987 with “Nixon in China,” has never been mere art for art’s sake. “Nixon” — an essential American opera of the last 50 years, along with Meredith Monk’s “Atlas” and Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha” — made myth of recent history. Even more immediate was “The Death of Klinghoffer” (1991), an account of the Achille Lauro hijacking, which had happened just six years earlier. “Doctor Atomic,” from 2005, reached farther back to meditate on J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project; and in 2017, “Girls of the Golden West” revisited a 19th-century California with eerily coincidental connections to the Trump era.“Doctor Atomic” had its Metropolitan Opera premiere in 2008. Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times“Nixon in China,” Adams’s first opera, at the Met in 2011.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAdams has brought contemporary politics “into the cultural sphere,” said Finley, the bass-baritone who originated the role of Oppenheimer, and opened discussion “about the role of opera and music in society, and who we are as people.”As the classical music world celebrates Adams’s 75th year — not least with a new 40-disc box set of collected works from the Nonesuch label — and San Francisco Opera (itself marking a milestone of 100 seasons) prepares for the premiere of “Antony and Cleopatra,” he was understandably anxious during a recent hike in Tilden Regional Park.He followed a ridge trail that, to the left, revealed a vista of the foggy San Francisco Bay, with the peak of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County emerging from the clouds, and, to the right, sun-streaked hills and valleys leading to the distant Sierras. In between pointing out a bunny or sharing a story about Amos and coyotes, he — a composer who cares about public reception and reviews — said that while the new opera was at least obliquely relevant, in the way that Shakespeare tends to be, he worried people would be expecting something like “Nixon.”“When you get to be my age, you’re not compared to other composers,” he said. “You’re compared to your earlier works.”COULD ADAMS BE ANYTHING other than a deeply American composer? “Not with my name,” he said with a chuckle. But that name — John Coolidge Adams — “so blue-bloodedly Yankee in its import,” he wrote in his 2008 memoir, “Hallelujah Junction,” “was in fact a conjunction of a Swedish paternal grandfather and a maternal grandfather I never knew.”Born in Massachusetts and raised around New England, with a singer for a mother and clarinetist for a father, he grew up around big band music and the Great American Songbook alongside symphonic classics. On the family turntable he listened to Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” and an album called “Bozo the Clown Conducts Favorite Circus Marches,” conducting along with a knitting needle.Adams with music for “Antony and Cleopatra” at his longtime home in Berkeley, Calif.Marissa Leshnov for The New York TimesBy adolescence he aspired to composing, while playing clarinet and formally learning to conduct. During one formative summer, he saw the film adaptation of “West Side Story.” “It was the moment,” he wrote in his memoir, “when I felt most aroused to the potential of becoming an artist who might forge a language, Whitman-like, out of the compost of American life.”That did not come easily during his years at Harvard University, where he studied with teachers including Leon Kirchner, David Del Tredici and Roger Sessions, in the spirit of the mid-20th century high modernism that was fashionable around composers of the Darmstadt School. On the side, Adams continued with the clarinet, subbing at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, including at the American premiere of Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron.” Aaron Copland, Adams wrote, once heard him play and remarked, “Yeah, the kid knows his stuff.”After college, Adams moved to the Bay Area — his first views of the untamed California coast later found their way into “The Dharma at Big Sur” (2003) — and took a teaching job while programming concerts packed with works by avant-gardists like John Cage, Robert Ashley and Ingram Marshall. He also toiled away at electronic music, blending it with acoustic sounds in “American Standard,” from 1973; the middle movement, “Christian Zeal and Activity,” stretches a hymn melody to glacial beauty alongside, on Edo de Waart’s recording with the San Francisco Symphony, a looping sermon.“Phrygian Gates,” a Minimalist yet sprawling piano solo from 1977, is Adams’s first mature work. More accomplishments quickly followed, like “Shaker Loops” and the chronically underrated “Common Tones in Simple Time” — which, he wrote in his memoir, summed up the goals of Minimalism in its title alone, and served as a farewell to the “chaste, scaled-down aesthetics of that particular style.”He wasn’t long for the Minimalism of Glass and Steve Reich, two composers a decade older than him. “I felt that in obeying that kind of rigor, there wasn’t a lot of potential for not only emotional surprise and emotional expression, but also formal flexibility,” Adams said. “I wanted to make a music that had potential for surprise, because that’s always what we’re looking for in any kind of artistic experience.”You can hear, in Adams’s strain of Minimalism, a harmonic language that grabs listeners by the heart, and a gift for layering lyricism with the style’s trademark pulses, as in “Harmonium” (1981). Robert Hurwitz, the longtime president of Nonesuch — who brought Adams to the label and created the new box set — said that while Glass and Reich “looked at music a different way,” Adams was continuing the path of music in the 20th century.“I think whether or not he was influenced at different points by Steve and Phil,” Hurwitz added, “he passed through those in the way that Picasso passed through Cubism or Stravinsky passed through Neo-Classicism. He is of the moment, and yet his music is always his own.”Adams was most brazenly idiosyncratic, and surprising, in his 1982 work “Grand Pianola Music,” which begins in comfortable, Minimalist territory before giving way to a cascading excess and a sweeping melody both familiar and unplaceable. The piece left early listeners perplexed — or angry at what they perceived as a thumbed nose at the hyperseriousness of modernism. It wasn’t a joke, though: It was a glimpse of a more honest voice in the making, one that would bloom with the symphonic “Harmonielehre” and “Nixon.”Adams also diverged from other Minimalists in his medium: At the time, they largely operated outside institutions, writing for their own ensembles and performing in lofts and galleries. But Adams’s music was popular among orchestras and institutions, and he brought Minimalism to the concert hall in the process.“The thing that he did is, I think, the hardest thing to do,” said the composer Nico Muhly. “Which is to take the influences of — let’s pretend that it’s a kind of American Minimal tradition — and the time space that you find in Wagner, and figure out how to make those things live next to each other, to work together.”As Adams’s more personal style developed, it carried traces of the Western classical tradition — with the colorist acuity of Debussy and the American vernacular of Ives and jazz — in a way that could be mistakenly labeled postmodern but isn’t. The composer Dylan Mattingly said that Adams brings an element of the familiar into his work with sincerity because “John just loves that music, and so he’s interested in writing music that uses the instrument of the orchestra, while still being totally revolutionary and totally exploratory.”Whiffs of popular idioms in, say, “The Chairman Dances” (1985) were a clear break from the Darmstadt School brand of modernism that had dominated Adams’s youth — the music of composers like Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen — but had begun to be overtaken by Minimalism and a broader return to tonality. And it coincided with what Adams called “one of my Saul on the road to Damascus moments,” when he started reading Dickens novels in his 30s.“The first thing that struck me was that there was a person making great art,” Adams recalled. “I mean, sometimes terrible, sappy sentimentalism, but you turn the page as fast as you can. And, like Tolstoy or Victor Hugo, he was writing important work with social connections or social influence. They had enormous audiences. I thought about our time; we composers have sort of surrendered that to pop music.”A pop star Adams isn’t, but he is one of the few composers who approaches that status, second only, perhaps, to Glass. And from that perch he has, in the vein of his literary heroes, written music of conscience and consequence. Alongside exercises in form and timbre, like the Violin Concerto (1994) and, more recently, “Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?” (2019), have been “On the Transmigration of Souls,” Adams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning response to the Sept. 11 attacks, and collaborations with the director Peter Sellars that explored contemporary social issues through classic lenses: “El Niño” (2000), a Christmas oratorio with the mastery of Handel’s “Messiah,” or the “The Gospel According to the Other Mary,” a retelling of the Passion from 2012.Davóne Tines and Julia Bullock in “Girls of the Golden West” at San Francisco Opera in 2017.Cory Weaver/San Francisco OperaAlong the way, Adams has also provided an invaluable service to the next generations of composers. He doesn’t teach, but he curates concerts, championing younger artists, some of whom he has helped as a mentor, like Mattingly and his peer Gabriella Smith, who said, “I hardly know any composers who have not been influenced by his music.”Adams is known to look at scores and give frank, productive feedback, but also lessons applicable beyond the work at hand. Smith described their time together as “more like hanging out,” but also a confirmation that her two biggest interests — music and nature — could coexist, as they do in Adams’s life. He got her thinking, she said, “about what it would be like to have my own, unique compositional voice.”Mattingly said that Adams once responded to a piece of his by pulling out a Mahler score and talking about the physicality of it. Mattingly eventually realized the conversation was about how music could be embodied. Adams was pushing him to think about “music as the amorphous, invisible thing that it actually is,” Mattingly said, “instead of as specific durations and straight lines. I remember thinking about it nonstop for months, and then creating something that was way more compelling afterward.”“THE MOST TEDIOUS THING an artist can do,” Adams said, “is brand himself or herself.” If there’s a genre in which this most applies to him, it’s opera. Although all his stage works are on some level political, they occupy distinct sound worlds. In “Nixon,” created with the librettist Alice Goodman and Sellars, the mode was, Adams wrote in his memoir, “Technicolor orchestration.” But when the team reunited for “Klinghoffer” — their triumph, though, as a magnet for controversy over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one that is virtually impossible to produce in the United States — the text called for “something that was intensely poignant and lyrical, but also violent,” Adams said.Adams and Sellars assembled the libretto for “Atomic” from found texts. Critics called the result of their method undramatic, but the work has been increasingly accepted in recent years, in part because of a 2018 recording that, with the soprano Julia Bullock as Kitty Oppenheimer, brought the dramaturgy more into focus. Such a turnaround has yet to come for “Girls of the Golden West,” whose libretto had few fans, despite a lean, focused score that will have its moment in the sun when the Los Angeles Philharmonic presents it in concert in January.John Adams with his dog, Amos, in Tilden Regional Park, where they take daily walks.Marissa Leshnov for The New York Times“Antony and Cleopatra” is a departure in more ways than one. Its libretto is almost entirely chipped from the Shakespeare original, in collaboration with Lucia Scheckner and Elkhanah Pulitzer, who is directing the premiere in San Francisco. And as such, it is a work of written-through drama, rarely pausing for reflection and moving propulsively toward its tragic climax.The title roles were written with Finley and Bullock in mind (along with Paul Appleby, another Adams veteran, as Caesar); Bullock, though, is pregnant and withdrew from the San Francisco run, so Cleopatra will be sung by Amina Edris. During recent rehearsals, the orchestra and cast were settling into the score, whose breakneck pace is set from the start by “archetypal” rhythms, Adams said, that may remind listeners of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or Wagner’s Nibelheim music from “Das Rheingold.” The vocal writing, meanwhile, largely follows the pace of speech like Debussy in “Pelléas et Mélisande,” or Janacek in his operas.“He really went from the words,” said Eun Sun Kim, the opera company’s music director, who is conducting the run. “It’s really about storytelling, but he also challenges us to be precise and at the same time musical.”As in Adams’s partnership with Sellars, the production’s concept seems conceived alongside the development of both the libretto and score. Pulitzer said that their entry point was “manifestations of Cleopatra, mostly through the lens of Hollywood, whether it’s Liz Taylor winking at the camera or the de Mille ‘Cleopatra’ integrating glamour and ancient Egypt.” That led them to the idea of movie palaces and news reels, which were then woven into the show.The approach is one way to bring the opera’s themes to the fore — principally, its depiction of one nation’s fall and the rise of another. “We all worry that America is in decline with Donald Trump and this horrible polarization,” Adams said. “I thought the dichotomy between Rome, which is ascendant, and Egypt, which is in decline, is very much a contemporary topic.”During the hike in Tilden, Adams followed a lot of reflections on the new opera with a “we’ll see.” Unsure of what audiences will think of it, he also doesn’t know what a success now would mean for the future. “I keep a mental picture of Meyerbeer,” he said, referring to the once ubiquitous and now rarely heard 19th-century composer, “just to remind myself: Here today, gone tomorrow.”He brought up about a performance that he conducted recently, of Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, with the Juilliard Orchestra. At one point, near the end, he got “this absolute chill running up my back.”“A chill is not the right word, because it was warm,” he continued. “It was just the feeling having a genuine, deep experience with a great creation. I know that it’s impossible not to sound trite, but that’s something that makes life and culture worth it. So, if somebody has an experience like that at some point from a piece of mine, then that’s all I really care about.” More

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      Daniel Barenboim, Star Conductor, Withdraws from ‘Ring’ Cycle in Berlin

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      “I must now give priority to my health and concentrate on my complete recovery,” the conductor said.A new production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Berlin State Opera, featuring the eminent conductor Daniel Barenboim, was one of the most highly anticipated events on the classical music calendar this season.But on Tuesday, the production, which opens in October, suffered a setback when Barenboim, who has been grappling with a variety of health issues in recent years, announced he was withdrawing.“I am deeply saddened not to be able to conduct the new ‘Ring,’” Barenboim, 79, said in a statement. “I must now give priority to my health and concentrate on my complete recovery.”The Berlin State Opera, in a statement, said that the conductor Christian Thielemann would take over for the first and third planned “Ring” cycle this fall, and the conductor Thomas Guggeis for the second. The production, which runs through early November, is being staged by Dmitri Tcherniakov.It was the latest setback for Barenboim, a titan in classical music, who has withdrawn from performances lately.“I am still struggling with the consequences of the vasculitis I was diagnosed with in the spring, and with this decision I am following the advice of my attending physicians,” he said in the statement.Matthias Schulz, director of the Berlin State opera, said it was “extremely sad” that Barenboim could no longer take part. In a statement, he called the production “a unique undertaking that is very close to his heart and that of the entire house.”“Preparations have been underway for many years, and we have done everything in our power to make the ‘Ring’ with Daniel Barenboim possible, especially in the year of his 80th birthday,” Schulz said.As music director of the State Opera and principal conductor for life of its orchestra, the Staatskapelle, Barenboim is a towering figure in the European cultural scene. He is also a founder of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, an ensemble of young musicians from around the Middle East, and he helped create a conservatory, the Barenboim-Said Akademie, as well as a concert hall, the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin.In his statement, Barenboim said the Berlin State Opera was “very close to my heart.” He praised the conductors who will replace him.“I wish them and everyone involved all the best with this production,” he said. More

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      She Made Glimmerglass a True Festival. Now She’s Moving On.

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      During Francesca Zambello’s 12 years as the festival’s leader, she did what she set out to do: took on “complex issues through storytelling and music making.”COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — Before every opera performance at the Glimmerglass Festival, Francesca Zambello, its artistic and general director, cruises around its bucolic campus in a golf cart that she calls “Grane” after Brünnhilde’s trusty steed. Zambello greets audience members, gives welcome lifts to some older patrons, and gets out regularly to mingle. That a leader should be the festival’s public face is something Zambello takes seriously.On a recent steamy Friday afternoon, she was an especially enthusiastic greeter. A performance of “The Jungle Book,” a youth opera she had commissioned, was about to begin at the Alice Busch Opera Theater, and lots of children, including very young ones, were in the crowd. “Hi,” she said to two little girls holding hands. “Is this your first opera?” When the girls nodded yes, Zambello, like a den mother, said: “That’s so exciting. I bet you’ll love it!”After 12 ambitious, innovative years running Glimmerglass, Zambello, 65, is stepping down after this year’s six-week summer festival, which ends on Aug. 21. She will turn her focus to the Washington National Opera, where she has been artistic director since 2012. Proud of her tenure at Glimmerglass, and for leaving the company, in “a very healthy financial position, far different than I found,” she said in a recent interview, she felt the time was right to move on.She has accomplished what she set out to do. “Creating a ‘festival’ environment and focusing on our brand of theater as a bridge to diverse communities,” she wrote in an email, as well as “addressing complex issues through storytelling and music making.”Commissioning youth operas was just one initiative that Zambello brought to Glimmerglass, one that allowed her to give composers and librettists a chance. And it was essential to her, she said, that “young people should see works by living composers; they should know that music is alive.”She also expanded the young artists program, created an artist residency (this year, it’s Kamala Sankaram, the composer of “Jungle Book”), and commissioned works for almost every festival — 11 in all, including one-acts and, a high point, “Blue” (2019), a timely opera with a score by Jeanine Tesori, and a libretto by Tazewell Thompson. A gripping, timely work about a Black policeman and his wife trying to raise a rebellious teenage son in Harlem, “Blue” has gone on to national stages. It plays in Toledo, Ohio, this month and next spring at Zambello’s Washington company and the English National Opera in London.From the start, Zambello set a goal that “a third of the company should be nonwhite,” she said. This was a public manifestation of her efforts at diversity, and for the most part, she delivered.And while most performing arts institutions talk up their community outreach programs, few have made more efforts than Glimmerglass under Zambello, including bringing opera to Attica, the maximum-security prison in western New York.A scene from the “The Jungle Book,” with a score by Kamala Sankara, this year’s artist in residence.Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass FestivalThese initiatives helped Zambello with her mission — to transform the Glimmerglass Opera, as it was known when she arrived, into the Glimmerglass Festival. Many opera companies and orchestras present summer seasons called festivals that are essentially more of the same. Under Zambello, Glimmerglass has been a true festival, with mostly new productions of works, new and old, with ancillary concerts and talks. All of these often touch on larger themes and issues, a way, she said, to make the festival “more socially responsible,” particularly “during the second half of my tenure.”Last summer, with the pandemic lingering, Zambello presented Glimmerglass on the Grass, with inventively staged, trimmed-down productions performed on a makeshift platform outdoors with amplification. This summer, opera has returned to the main stage — an intimate 918-seat theater — but, to be cautious, no ancillary events were scheduled.This year’s six productions touched to various degrees, Zambello said, on “serious questions around faith, around resistance, around freedom and community.” Especially, to my delight and surprise, “The Jungle Book.”In this version, directed by Zambello and Brenna Corner, Mowgli, the feral boy raised by a pack of wolves, is a girl (the sweet-voiced, impish Lily Grady). In the opening scene, Raksha, the matriarch of the pack (Kendra Faith Beasley), gathers her underlings and tells them: “To get along in the jungle, you have to know who you are.”Sankaram’s music is an enchanting blend of Indian styles, especially from the Carnatic tradition, with Western harmonies, cyclic rhythms, inventive instrumental colors and tender, snappy vocal writing. I hope the young girls and boys in attendance noted that the composer, librettist (Kelley Rourke), conductor (Kamna Gupta), and directors of this enchanting production were all women.A scene from “Taking Up Serpents,” a one-act by Sankaram.Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass FestivalSankaram’s range came through in a production of “Taking Up Serpents,” a 2018 one-act opera, with a libretto by Jerre Dye, on a double bill with a Glimmerglass commission and premiere, “Holy Ground,” with music by Damien Geter and a libretto by Lila Palmer. “Taking Up Serpents” is a dark, intense story of a young woman, Kayla (Mary-Hollis Hundley), who has taken a job at a drugstore in an Alabama gulf town to get away from her parents, who lead a rural church that believes in speaking in tongues and practices rituals with snakes.Sankaram and Dye dig below the parents’ seeming fanaticism to explore the spiritual yearnings that drive them and that, in some way, speak to the confused Kayla. “Holy Ground” explores spirituality quite differently. With a fanciful, skillfully written score, the piece presents a beguiling present-day story of a group of hapless archangels having trouble recruiting a young woman to bear God in human form. (Again? Did the first time not take hold?)Within the context of this summer’s offerings, even a work as familiar as Bizet’s “Carmen” came across with extra bite: a tale of exploited female factory workers and a dark portrait of a “community,” Carmen (Briana Hunter) falls in with a group of bandits. Denyce Graves, a renowned interpreter of the title role, directed the psychologically penetrating production. Zambello’s imprint on the festival had never seen clearer.But back in 2010, when her appointment was announced, she might not have seemed a logical choice for the job. For nearly 30 years, Paul Kellogg (who died last year) had brought gracious leadership skills and a “superb aesthetic,” as Zambello said, to Glimmerglass. When he stepped down in 2006, amid staff turmoil, it went into a four-year transitional period under Michael MacLeod. It was ready for an artistic jolt.Zambello had earned international acclaim as an opera director at major houses in Paris, Milan, London, Moscow and more. She had taken her share of knocks for staging concepts that critics felt did not work, especially in the early years. Her 1992 debut at the Metropolitan Opera, “Lucia di Lammermoor,” was deemed by many a symbolism-strewn fiasco. She came back to the Met in 2003 with a visually stunning and emotionally involving production of Berlioz’s epic “Les Troyens.”But she had never run a company.Ben Heppner and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in Zambello’s visually impressive and emotionally involving production of “Les Troyens” at the Met, in 2003.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I had hit 30 years of being an itinerant director,” she said. “I wanted to have an anchor.”Sherwin M. Goldman, then the president of the Glimmerglass board (and still a member), said the board took a leap in going with Zambello.“I was not overwhelmed by her taste, to be quite frank,” Goldman said in an interview. “It was more her intelligence than her talent that intrigued me.” Zambello, who was born in New York and grew up in Europe, speaks five languages and talks with sweeping confidence about all facets of theater and the arts.What finally convinced Goldman, he said, was Zambello’s readiness “to fight for what she believed in.” And she was no pushover. “Every day was a fight with Francesca,” he said. “That’s the way she communicated.”At the time, Glimmerglass’s endowment had gone down, and there was a stubborn deficit, Zambello recalled. Along with tireless fund-raising skills, she articulated a bold vision that moved the festival into its next chapter. Her commitment to diversity was clear by her second season, in 2012, when artists from the Cape Town Opera were on the summer roster along with a number of Black American singers. That summer, years before the current discussions about race-conscious casting in opera and theater, Zambello’s festival explored dimensions of this complex issue.Zambello, dressed for “The Sound of Music,” which she director this summer.via The Glimmerglass FestivalThere was a poignant production (by Thompson) of Kurt Weill’s musical “Lost in the Stars,” based on Alan Paton’s novel “Cry, the Beloved Country,” about a Black priest in South Africa struggling to serve his rural congregation. The festival was able to cast with affecting sensitivity to the racial identities of the characters; Eric Owens excelled in the lead role of Stephen Kumalo.There was also a contemporary production of Verdi’s “Aida” directed by Zambello with a Black soprano (Michelle Johnson) in the title role of an Ethiopian princess held captive in Egypt, and, daringly for the time, a Black tenor (Noah Stewart) as Radamès, the leader of the Egyptian forces who is in love with her. The production was asking you to see beyond assumptions about the racial identities of the lovers.Verdi’s opera “is not about race,” Zambello said. “It’s almost a civil argument between Ethiopia and Egypt. It’s not even like there is a fixed border; these are like two tribes.”Then there was a lively staging, by Marcia Milgrom Dodge, of Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man.” With so many Black singers to call upon, the town of River City, Iowa, and its small-minded, gossipy citizenry, came across here as a racially mixed community.“The Music Man” was an early entry into Zambello’s series of classic American musicals, presented in fresh productions, with full orchestras (a rarity on Broadway), singers who combine operatic training and musical theater savvy, and, for the most part, no amplification.This summer Zambello directed “The Sound of Music,” starring Mikaela Bennett in a radiant, endearing performance as Maria. In this vibrant staging, with adorable child performers as the von Trapp children, the musical’s themes of faith, community and resistance to tyranny, which often seem smothered in sentimentality, felt real and timeless.Mikaela Bennett, right, as Maria in Zambello’s production of “The Sound of Music.”Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass FestivalZambello’s successor will be Robert Ainsley, who has been the director of the Washington National Opera’s young artists program and its American opera initiative. “Rob will bring his own sensitivity to programming,” Zambello said, adding, “I know he is committed to continuing to provide a range of ways for people to come together around song and story.”For her part, Zambello is gratified to have overseen the return of live opera to Glimmerglass. Nothing, she said, can replace a “group of strangers, responding together, magnifying each other’s sense of tension, shock, wonder and delight.” More

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      A Conductor Comes Into His Own in the Opera Pit

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      SANTA FE, N.M. — “I was skeptical,” James Gaffigan said while waiting for huevos rancheros during a recent lunch here, where his run conducting a taut “Tristan und Isolde” at Santa Fe Opera ends on Tuesday.Skepticism is not normally the emotion you hear expressed, or at least admitted, when interviewing conductors about their next big post. But Gaffigan, 43, is a congenial, quick-talking musician who is more honest and open than many of his peers. And the post in question — the one he was initially skeptical of — is at the Komische Oper Berlin, where he takes over as general music director next year.Already doing a similar job at the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia in Valencia, Spain, where his first season included “Wozzeck” and a Romeo Castellucci staging of Mozart’s Requiem, it seemed absurd, he said, to take on a second opera house — especially if it was to be the Komische.Not exactly renowned for its conductors, with the small exception of Kirill Petrenko before he had really become Kirill Petrenko, the Komische has been a playground for directors since its founding by Walter Felsenstein in 1947. For the past decade, it has drawn acclaim under the virtuosic showmanship of Barrie Kosky, the outgoing intendant, who will continue to stage new productions at the house.“It’s been the Barrie show, and that’s why my first instinct was to say no, or I’m not sure,” Gaffigan said. “I thought that whatever I did in the pit, how I developed the orchestra, would be overshadowed.”Gaffigan rehearsing Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” in Santa Fe.Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesIt’s a hesitation that Philip Bröking, formerly an in-house director who has been promoted to co-intendant alongside the Komische’s former managing director, Susanne Moser, understands, though he makes no excuses for the house’s specific character.“Our choices, and I have to admit these were also my choices, of chief conductors haven’t been as successful as we expected,” Bröking said in an interview. “When Susanne and I got the job as intendants, we asked ourselves, ‘Where can we really improve?’ And we do know that the orchestra has a lot of potential.”But Gaffigan marveled at the orchestra’s flexibility while first conducting them in a streamed concert of Webern, Gulda and Mozart in April 2021, and he agreed to take responsibility for two new productions, four concerts and a number of revivals in each of his four contracted seasons. Kosky, he said, convinced him that a double appointment — one at a newly built Spanish house that concentrates on the standard repertoire, the other among company that is as comfortable in Nono as in Handel, as committed to musicals as to the canon — would be an opportunity, not a burden.“The more I thought about it, I realized they are the most versatile orchestra in town,” Gaffigan explained, adding that his first experience as an audience member at the Komische was a snowy, sold-out Tuesday night of Offenbach’s “Orphée aux Enfers” that showed him just how much its diverse audience trusts in what he called the “wackiness” of the house.“We already have the public behind us because of what Barrie has done, and if we build the musical level even higher, it won’t just be a Regie theater,” he said. “I want people to come for the full package, and I think it’s possible.”Even so, it’s a striking move. Gaffigan’s future had always seemed to lie on the symphony stage, not in the opera pit. Starting his career with junior posts at the Cleveland Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony, he then served as the chief conductor of the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra for a decade, producing an eclectic list of recordings. He also became the principal guest of both the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic and the Trondheim Symphony orchestras, tenures that end this season.Only a few years ago, Gaffigan was reputed to be on the shortlists of more than a few American ensembles searching for new music directors, and his enthusiasm, his keen interest in education and his flair for programming made him a strong candidate.Simon O’Neill, left, and Eric Owens in the Santa Fe production of “Tristan.”Curtis Brown/Santa Fe Opera“He’s certainly somebody who American orchestras have their eye on,” said Gary Ginstling, the incoming president and chief executive of the New York Philharmonic, who leads the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, where Gaffigan conducts Bernstein’s “Mass” to celebrate the Kennedy Center’s 50th anniversary in September. “I think he has a lot of options, and will continue to.”But although Gaffigan has been in the running for a number of American posts, he has decided to step out of the fray for the time being.“I would need it to be the right city in America, with the right vision,” he said. “I don’t want to do the complete Brahms symphonies. Who cares? It needs to be a forward-thinking institution. I don’t want to be repeating the same stuff over and over again, and right now, I don’t see it.”Tired of the old routines, of programs announced far in advance that run through an overture, a concerto and a symphony, Gaffigan is also bothered by orchestras that refuse to reckon with their whiteness.“I hate that something that I love so much is defined as something elitist,” said Gaffigan, a native Staten Islander and public school graduate. “It upsets me that I’m from a country that has so many different types of people, yet when I look into the audience, I only see one type. That hurts me, as an American. I don’t just say it to sound politically correct; it’s something I believe.”Gaffigan may see no good fit for him at home, or none that is open to him, but Bröking said that the conductor’s interest in music not traditionally explored by American ensembles made him a natural choice for the Komische Oper when it was searching for someone to replace its current music director, Ainars Rubikis.“The first phone call with James was in April 2020,” Bröking recalled. “What was very special about this telephone call was that he did not ask: ‘What can my repertoire be? Is it Verdi, is it Puccini, is it Wagner?’ These are the questions you usually get, because as a general music director, you would like to present yourself in the core repertoire, especially in Berlin. He was much more interested in the special situation of the Komische Oper, between the Staatsoper and the Deutsche Oper.”Audience members at Santa Fe, where Gaffigan has developed a reputation as collaborative partner.Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesWhat also appealed to the Komische is that Gaffigan, ambitious but far from egoistical, actually seems to practice what so many of his colleagues preach about a consciously collaborative style.“In Berlin, we have some experience with old, master conductors,” Bröking said wryly. “They do fantastic work, of course they do, but half of our orchestra are women, there are many young instrumentalists, and they don’t want to be treated as in former times. They want to communicate, they want to build something together, they want to be a team. This is what James is able to do well.”Gaffigan’s “Tristan” in Santa Fe sounded as though it had been carefully prepared, as indeed it had, with him listening to every historical recording he could find and even getting “crazy into poetics,” as he put it. But it was also evident that he was far less concerned with prosecuting his own interpretation of the drama, than in sustaining the staging that was in front of him.“He’s in service to the whole,” said Zack Winokur, who co-directed the “Tristan” with Lisenka Heijboer Castañón and is the artistic director of the avowedly egalitarian American Modern Opera Company. “It’s an unusual thing with conductors, that it’s not Machiavellian, that it didn’t feel manipulative,” Winokur said of the experience. “It felt actually supportive.”Tamara Wilson, the soprano who made a breakthrough debut as Isolde, agreed that Gaffigan’s style is unusual in the opera world, and happily so.“The first thing that he asked,” Wilson recalled of an early meeting on Zoom, “was, ‘How do you want to run rehearsals?’ For a singer, that’s unheard-of. That is never, ever how it goes. I had an immediate sense of relief, because I knew that this was going to be a collaboration, versus me being yelled at.”She added: “Even listening to the Santa Fe orchestra the first time, you could tell it wasn’t about just doing it and getting it right, making it correct — it was about making it special. And that’s what he does. He makes things special.” More

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      At the Salzburg Festival, Riches, Retreads and Notes of Caution

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      Classical music’s pre-eminent annual event had more revivals than usual, but also a breathless new staging of Janacek’s “Kat’a Kabanova.”SALZBURG, Austria — The premiere of a new production of Janacek’s opera “Kat’a Kabanova” had just ended at the Salzburg Festival here last week. When the lights went up, Kristina Hammer, the festival’s new president, was wiping tears off her cheeks.It was hard to blame her for crying. “Kat’a” is a breathless tragedy about a small-town woman trapped in a loveless marriage and driven to suicide after having a brief affair. Janacek’s music stamps out her ethereal fantasies with the brutal fist of reality.Barrie Kosky’s staging was the highlight of a week at Salzburg, classical music’s pre-eminent annual event, which runs through Aug. 31. Kosky has pared down this pared-down work even further, to its core of quivering human beings.The only set is rows of uncannily realistic models of people, standing, wearing street clothes, and facing away from us — and away from Kat’a and her pain. (I admit: I was fooled into thinking these were many dozens of very still extras.) Behind them loom the stone walls of the Felsenreitschule theater, whose vast stage has rarely seemed bigger or lonelier than when the soprano Corinne Winters races across it, running with nowhere to go.David Butt Philip and Winters in “Kat’a.” Behind them are uncannily realistic models of people standing in street clothes.Monika RittershausJittery and balletic, ecstatic and anxious, Winters has a child’s volatile presence, and her live-wire voice conveys Kat’a’s wonder and vulnerability. She is the production’s center, but the entire cast is powerful; Winters’s interactions with Jarmila Balazova’s headstrong Varvara make years of friendship between the characters easy to believe. The conductor Jakub Hrusa confidently paces the work as a bitter, intermission-less single shot, even if the Vienna Philharmonic — the festival’s longtime house band — sounded a bit thin and uncertain in what should be heated unanimity.There is a kind of familial resemblance between Kat’a and Suor Angelica, the agonized young nun at the center of one of Puccini’s three one-acts in “Il Trittico,” directed here by Christof Loy, with the Philharmonic conducted with sensual lightness by Franz Welser-Möst. Like Winters, the soprano Asmik Grigorian, who stars in all three acts, is an intense actress with a voice of shivery directness. (This is the vocal taste at the moment in Salzburg; the days in which Anna Netrebko’s plush tone ruled here seem over.)Spare yet detailed, unified by an airy buff-color space with shifting walls, Loy’s staging reorders the triptych, beginning rather than ending with the comic “Gianni Schicchi,” which now precedes the grim adultery tale “Il Tabarro,” with Roman Burdenko as a firm Michele.In “Suor Angelica,” Asmik Grigorian, left, faces off against Karita Mattila in a blazing confrontation of dueling pains.Barbara Gindl/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Suor Angelica,” the closer, is the reason to see this “Trittico”; it’s the only one of the three roles in which Grigorian’s lack of tonal warmth plays fully to her advantage. Her face-off against the veteran soprano Karita Mattila — not an alto, as the role of Angelica’s aunt really requires, but properly imperious — is a blazing confrontation of dueling pains. And Grigorian’s final scene, which milks the unexpected poignancy of her simply changing in front of us from her habit into a sleek black cocktail dress and letting down her hair, is just as wrenching.A woman is also on the verge of a breakdown, but far more amusingly, in Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville.” Now that the star mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli runs the springtime Whitsun Festival here, every summer includes a production vehicle for her. But there were snickers when it was announced that Bartoli, at 56, planned to play Rosina, usually sung at the start of careers. (Bartoli made her professional stage debut in the role, 35 years ago.)But her voice — and her rapid-fire coloratura — are remarkably well preserved, and her enthusiasm is irresistible. Directed by Rolando Villazón, the show is a love letter to the movies, like “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” which has characters walking on and off screen. Here it’s the silent era that comes to life, with Bartoli as a diva whose experience is winked at in a rundown of her pictures, from Joan of Arc to pirates, projected during the overture. But the concept is not held to so stringently that it detracts from the adorably madcap fun.Cecilia Bartoli, right, as Rosina in “The Barber of Seville,” a role usually sung at the start of careers.Monika RittershausThe ensemble Les Musiciens du Prince-Monaco plays with silky spirit for Gianluca Capuano, who leads a cast as expertly easygoing as Bartoli — including Alessandro Corbelli, Nicola Alaimo and, as a Nosferatu-esque Basilio, Ildebrando D’Arcangelo. And the existence of a rarely performed mezzo version of the climactic aria “Cessa di più resistere” lets Bartoli trade off verses with the agile young tenor Edgardo Rocha.The other opera in the relatively intimate Haus für Mozart this summer also takes a hint from the movies: Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” framed by the director Lydia Steier like “The Princess Bride,” with a grandfather telling the story to a young child — here, three boys. As when this staging was new, in 2018, this is a clever way of super-compressing the work’s extensive spoken dialogue.Four years ago, the production sprawled in the festival’s largest theater; now it’s been smushed into its smallest. Steier has wisely jettisoned a whole strand of steampunk circus imagery and concentrated more on the plot as a parable of the start of World War I, with “Little Nemo” touches. It’s subtle work as the boys gradually become participants in the action, not merely observers. The Philharmonic played under Joana Mallwitz with an ideal mixture of crispness and roundedness.Not every Salzburg Festival includes a revival of a past show; this year there are two. In 2017, the Iranian-born photographer and video artist Shirin Neshat’s staging of Verdi’s “Aida” was that summer’s most eagerly awaited offering, a rare full production conducted by the Verdian giant Riccardo Muti, and Netrebko’s debut in the title role.Rather in the background was Neshat, her first time doing opera — and a pristine, bland effort. Now, with less starry collaborators, her work has come to the fore, still decorous but deeper. To poetic effect, some of her blurry, languid early videos of slow-moving crowds on Middle Eastern streets and coasts have been added; her photographs also now play a part, and some dancers are covered in Arabic calligraphy, a trademark of her art.Directed by Rolando Villazón, “The Barber of Seville” is a love letter to the movies.Monika RittershausThere are some good ideas, like the ominous, violent renderings of the ballet in Amneris’s chamber and the Triumphal Scene. Also some bad ones: Amonasro, Aida’s father, here seems to be a specter, already dead, at the start of Act III, which makes the plot incomprehensible. Alain Altinoglu’s conducting of the Philharmonic is sensibly paced but, compared to the exquisite colors and textures Muti elicited, otherwise ordinary. (The nocturnal beginning of the Nile Scene is one of many passages less evocative this year than in 2017.)Elena Stikhina’s soft-grained Aida and Ève-Maud Hubeaux’s dignified Amneris were impressive, but Piotr Beczala, a shining Radamès, was the only really glamorous singer. And glamour is, like it or not, part and parcel of the ideal Salzburg experience: an extravagance of imagination and achievement that surpasses what you can get at the Met or the Vienna State Opera.There was grumbling among Salzburg watchers about the two revivals and the not-quite-new “Barber,” which premiered in June. An almost $70 million budget for just three truly new stagings?This was clearly a note of caution as the pandemic wears on. “I’m convinced it is the right thing artistically, and from the economic side,” Markus Hinterhäuser, the festival’s artistic director, said when the season was announced last year.But the economic part seems truer than the artistic. “Flute” and “Aida” were improved — the Mozart was tighter, the Verdi more nuanced. The question is whether opera’s most famous and rich summer festival needed repeats of two repertory standards — works that can be seen all over the world during the regular season — in performances that, while solid, weren’t much more distinguished than what you’d get in any major house.It is a telling bit of weakness as Salzburg faces renewed competition, especially from the growing Aix-en-Provence Festival in France — and even from the likes of Santa Fe Opera, which this year presented “Tristan und Isolde,” its first Wagner in decades, and a world premiere (“M. Butterfly”). For all its resources, Salzburg has of late abandoned major commissions in favor of bringing back underappreciated modern works.Aix and Salzburg went head-to-head this summer, both offering productions by the in-demand auteur Romeo Castellucci. It was a showdown that Salzburg soundly lost. Aix got a huge, haunting staging of Mahler’s Second Symphony as the exhumation of a mass grave. Here in Austria, though, as Joshua Barone wrote in The Times, Castellucci’s double bill of Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” and Orff’s “De Temporum Fine Comoedia” was a grim, murky slog, played sludgily by the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra under Teodor Currentzis.But even an expanding Aix lacks the scope of Salzburg’s concert schedule, which begins with a long Ouverture Spirituelle mini-festival and offers an enviable, overlapping array of often superb orchestral programs and recitals.Though less widely publicized, the weekend Mozart Matinees featuring the Mozarteum Orchestra often present the most joyful, vibrant playing of the festival. Marco BorelliThis year the concerts didn’t all satisfy. The pianist Grigory Sokolov’s pillowy touch was alluring in Beethoven’s “Eroica” Variations and Brahms’s Op. 117 pieces, but smoothed Schumann’s “Kreisleriana” into slumber. The tenor Jonas Kaufmann’s voice rarely came alive in a recital whose halves were dully drawn from his two most recent albums.But it was touching to see the superstar pianist Lang Lang show his respect for Daniel Barenboim by joining that conductor and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra for Manuel de Falla’s “Nights in the Gardens of Spain,” not at all a virtuoso showpiece. And while the Vienna Philharmonic under Andris Nelsons made a muddle of Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with Yefim Bronfman, the orchestra sounded sumptuously ripe in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.More memorable was a less exalted, less widely publicized concert: one of the festival’s 11 a.m. weekend Mozart Matinees featuring the Mozarteum Orchestra. These mornings often have the most joyful, vibrant playing of the festival, and last week’s program was no exception, led with verve by Adam Fischer.The Mozart Matinees are well attended and happily received. But they still feel like a Salzburg secret. More

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      Lea Desandre Gives a Modern Voice to Early Music

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      The mezzo-soprano will sing with the Jupiter Ensemble in a concert of 17th-century Italian compositions at the Salzburg Festival.The mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre, a member of the Jupiter Ensemble, does not distinguish between the Baroque era and the age of rock ’n’ roll.“We grew up with this music,” she said by video call from Montreal. “Just like we grew up with the Beatles and Amy Winehouse.”The 28-year-old has established herself as one of today’s most exciting voices in early-music performance. She also cultivates 18th- and 19th-century operatic repertoire from Mozart to Meyerbeer, at prominent houses such as Zurich Opera and the Paris Opera.The singer has appeared annually at the Salzburg Festival, on both the opera and concert stages, since 2018. On Saturday, she and musicians of Jupiter arrive at the Stiftung Mozarteum with the program “Lettres amoureuses” (“Love Letters”). The concert of 17th-century Italian music — which the group has thus far performed in France and the Netherlands — juxtaposes arias and instrumental music from well-known composers such as Monteverdi and Handel with exciting discoveries such as Tarquinio Merula and Andrea Falconieri.Ms. Desandre has sung at prominent houses on both sides of the Atlantic, from the Paris Opera to Carnegie Hall, above, where she took the stage with the Jupiter Ensemble. Jennifer TaylorMs. Desandre enjoys something of a symbiotic relationship with the ensemble, which was founded by the lute player Thomas Dunford in 2018. They joined forces last year for her first solo album, “Amazone,” exploring French and Italian repertoire written about the female warriors of Greek myth known as Amazons. Their next recording, scheduled for release this fall, is a lineup of numbers from Handel oratorios titled “Eternal Heaven.”Mr. Dunford, 34, promotes a democratic spirit, taking suggestions from members of the ensemble in the curation of programs. “It’s a bit like a jazz group in that way,” he said by phone from Montreal, where he and Ms. Desandre were on tour with the ensemble Les Arts Florissants (the two met performing with that group in 2015 and maintain a close relationship with its founder, William Christie). “It’s people who love spending time together and working on the music.”For Jupiter’s first album, “Vivaldi,” the members started a poll on Facebook asking about friends’ favorite arias. In another surprising twist, each of Jupiter’s albums ends with a newly composed surprise track: For “Amazone,” Mr. Dunford contributed “Amazones,” a song that addresses the importance of environmental consciousness.Mr. Dunford, a French native with American roots, cited Jordi Savall, a player of the viola da gamba (with whom both his parents studied), and Mr. Christie as among the trailblazers who set the stage for today’s generation of players. “The best lesson we can learn is to be authentic and passionate,” he said. “Because we don’t really know what Vivaldi sounded like [in his time] — we can just understand his music in a logical way and put our personalities into it.”Ms. Desandre contributes a particular affinity for Italian Baroque music. The singer, who is of French-Italian heritage, left the conservatory track to study with the contralto Sara Mingardo in Venice, who had access to unpublished manuscripts by Vivaldi, along with works by rarely heard composers.Spiritual songs by Tarquinio Merula quickly became a starting point for “Lettres amoureuses.” In “Hor ch’è tempo di dormire” (“Now That It’s Time to Sleep”), the text hovers between tenderness and violence as the Virgin Mary has a vision of Jesus’ crucifixion while rocking him as a baby.Ms. Desandre, who debuted at the Salzburg Festival in 2018, has particularly strong memories of singing the role of Despina in the 2020 production of “Così Fan Tutte,” above.Christian Bruna/EPA, via ShutterstockMs. Desandre compared the music to “a beating of the heart” or a kind of spiral. “She says ‘sleep peacefully,’ but she knows that something tragic is going to happen,” she explained.Her studies with Ms. Mingardo were based on a holistic, rather than technical, approach to vocal studies. At a certain point, Ms. Desandre said, she was advised to “go out and have a good time, find a boyfriend and live — so that you can transmit this experience onstage.”Further singer-mentors include Natalie Dessay (who inspired Ms. Desandre to enter the profession when she saw her on television at age 12), Vivica Genaux, Véronique Gens and Cecilia Bartoli. The latter two singers perform on “Amazone”; Mr. Christie also joins for an instrumental work by French composer Louis Couperin.“The album is a kind of homage to key people in my life,” Ms. Desandre said. The singer also personally chose the photographer, Julien Benhamou, who works with dancers at the Paris Opera, to create the cover art.This is also a nod to Ms. Desandre’s training as a ballerina, which she says allows her to let go physically onstage. “It is one of the best ingredients for singing,” she said. “To be anchored and not become mentally stressed.”For her Salzburg Festival debut in 2018, the director Jan Lauwers gave her full artistic freedom to dance onstage while singing the comprimario roles of Amore and Valletto in Monteverdi’s “L’incoronazione di Poppea.” The singer said that, if Paris was the city in which she was born and raised, Salzburg had become a “city of the heart, because I found a kind of family there — people who are willing to take risks with me.”A lover of nature, she also pointed to the city’s inspiring landscape. “To leave rehearsals and find oneself in front of a mountain and surrounded by greenery in five minutes is extremely nourishing,” she said. “These are moments of communion which allow us to connect with our energy, center ourselves and be very focused.”Singing the role of Despina in a production of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” that took place at a scaled-down Salzburg Festival in August 2020, amid the coronavirus pandemic, remains a particularly strong memory. “There was an intensity during rehearsals,” she recalled. “Of remembering why we love to make music and be together.”A similar spirit drives the Jupiter Ensemble. The group’s members take the time to work on a program until it comes to full maturation, and they always live in the moment.“There are also the experiences we share offstage,” Ms. Desandre said. “Which means that when we perform, we take confidence in each other, we listen to each other, we adore each other. We want to share this happiness with the audience.” More

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      Review: An Opera’s Exquisite Brutality Arrives in America

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      George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s “Lessons in Love and Violence” is a masterly follow-up to their acclaimed “Written on Skin.”LENOX, Mass. — The problem with “Lessons in Love and Violence” has always been that it is not “Written on Skin.”“Skin,” George Benjamin’s unflinchingly savage second opera with the librettist Martin Crimp, was hailed as a landmark at its premiere at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2012. Its stature has only grown since, and it’s a routine choice as one of the great operas of the century so far.Benjamin and Crimp stuck to their template for the gruesome “Lessons,” the successor piece that was more coolly received after its debut in London in 2018 and that received its American premiere on Monday night at Ozawa Hall here, with the composer leading the youngsters of the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in dagger-sharp support of an incisive cast of current and past Tanglewood vocal fellows.Like “Skin,” “Lessons” has a dense, historically contrived libretto, offering a callous plot that hacks away at any sentimentality you might have left about power or love. There is music that seethes and soothes — its every last, creepy twang of a cimbalom or bludgeon of brass conceived and executed with flawless clarity of gesture and precision of timbre.Yet somehow this jewel-studded, velvet-wrapped mace of a score never once feels too deliberately methodical or sounds anything but fully alive. Its imposing rigor scalds in the heat of the murderous moment.Listen to it, and you might ask yourself which of these two unsparing operas is supposed to be Benjamin’s masterpiece. For if “Skin” disappeared, “Lessons” would be sufficient to anoint its composer all on its own.The operas are similar, but “Lessons” is no mere reproduction of its predecessor. It abandons the metahistorical flourishes of the earlier work, focusing on the story at hand rather than creating a superstructure of characters to drag it into the present. Despite the medieval setting, the core conceit of a prince receiving (dubious, shall we say) instruction in governance from the machinations of his parents — the King and his wife, Isabel — and their scheming courtier-lovers, Gaveston and Mortimer, has a Machiavellian timelessness to it.“Don’t bore me with the price of bread,” the King sings when Mortimer confronts him with the ruin that his favor for Gaveston has unleashed on the body politic. “There is no connection between our music and your labor,” Isabel assures the impoverished supplicants who demand an end to entertainments whose costs could pay their wages for a year. Not for nothing did the concert performance here, instinctively acted behind music stands though it was, take on the morality tale feel of an oratorio.However revealing the unstaged approach might be, it’s regrettable that “Lessons” had its premiere like this. How is it possible, one has to ask, that the first American performance of such a major work should be entrusted to a group of summer-school attendees for one sparsely attended night only — a Monday, no less — in the Berkshires?The Lyric Opera of Chicago is one of seven co-commissioners of “Lessons,” but there is still no sign of it mounting Katie Mitchell’s original staging, which it had to postpone in 2020. In the absence of a major house taking up “Skin,” the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York, at its bravest, gave that work its staged premiere in 2015, but that festival is no more.It is to Tanglewood’s immense credit that it has taken the initiative, pushing its fellows to their limit at the end of the annual Festival of Contemporary Music and building on the long, close relationship that the Boston Symphony Orchestra has enjoyed with Benjamin, who led “Skin” in its quickly mounted American debut here in 2013 and followed it with a song cycle, “Dream of the Song,” in 2016.And you would be glad, though gladdening this opera is not, to hear a performance as strong as Monday’s in any major house. Three of the main parts were taken by recent graduates of Tanglewood’s vocal program; greater testament to its worth would be hard to imagine. Nathaniel Sullivan sang the King — Edward II, as imagined by Christopher Marlowe then reimagined by Crimp — with sniveling command, the monarch’s weakness to the fore. Daniel McGrew was eerily believable portraying the soldier-technocrat Mortimer’s earnest association of orderly progress with the necessity of killing, while Dominik Belavy gave Gaveston a deliciously unhinged air.Surely no soprano takes on a role written for Barbara Hannigan without fear, but the current Tanglewood fellow Elizabeth Polese made it seem as if she had as the haughty Isabel. She excelled just as Edmond Rodriguez brought frightening dignity to the Boy who learns his lessons all too well, chillingly scheduling the execution of Mortimer after the general has installed him on the throne. Meredith Wohlgemuth, Claire McCahan and Jack Canfield acquitted themselves well in smaller roles.But the orchestra was the star. Benjamin conducted it with his customary, graceful efficiency. Short of Alban Berg, few composers have been able to make abject brutality sound so exquisite, even so tender as Benjamin does here, his use of silence as intentional as his careful etching of textures around the voices.There is an unerring flow to “Lessons”: Several of its seven short scenes echo one another; interludes link them, commenting on and even extending the action; and the odd leitmotif pokes through, most noticeably the braying trombones that announce the King and that reappear, with mutes, when his son assumes the throne.Yet it is Benjamin’s merciless ability to hunt down the most specific of sounds that makes him such a potent dramatist. A desperately longing solo horn, fraught with desire, plays as Gaveston relates how the King likes to hold his hand over a flame; pawing woodwinds surround a Madman who fatally insists to the Boy that he is the real king, based on testimony from a cat.Gaveston gets the grisliest death of all, nothing like the horrifying tower of dissonance that accompanies the killing of the King, but one that we have to imagine in absentia, as the powerless ruler reads the details of his lover’s death from a letter while a percussionist taps out a rhythm on the rim of a side drum.You might hear in that the loneliness of Gaveston, or the dread of a King confronting the passage of time before his own, sure murder. I heard cockroaches, scurrying around the dead. Either way, what in any other composer’s hands could be predictable, Benjamin makes magical.Lessons in Love and ViolencePerformed on Monday at Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood in Lenox, Mass. More

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      Review: A New ‘Ring’ at Bayreuth Does Wagner Without Magic

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      Valentin Schwarz’s production of the four-opera epic presents human characters with relations even more tangled than usual.BAYREUTH, Germany — About 150 years ago, in a megalomaniac’s coup, Richard Wagner built a theater on a hilltop here in northern Bavaria.His immense, complex, innovative operas had never been presented as he imagined them. If he wanted them done right, he concluded, he would have to do them himself.But when the Bayreuth Festival Theater opened in 1876, with the premiere of his full “Ring of the Nibelung” — a four-opera, 15-hour mythic tale about nature and power with a cast of gods, warriors, dwarves, giants, talking birds and spitting dragons — Wagner was still unsatisfied.Among the most intractable (and inadvertently laugh-inducing) problems were the magical effects he called for: girls frolicking in the depths of a river; transformations into serpents; Valkyries riding through the air on horseback. Even now, with 21st-century stage technology, what Wagner makes musically persuasive has struggled to be visually and dramatically so.In his intriguing, insightful new production of the “Ring” at the Bayreuth Festival, the young director Valentin Schwarz has dealt with those problems by sidestepping them entirely.Schwarz’s acidic, passionately performed, contemporary-dress version is a “Ring” without magic or nature, in which all the characters are human, their relations even more tangled than usual, and all the events take place on a single estate.While in the libretto, the dwarf Alberich briefly turns himself into a lowly toad, that is here just a metaphor; it’s mentioned in the text, but nothing happens. The mighty Valkyries don’t fly through the sky, but bray around a waiting room in spike heels, flame-colored nouveau riche outfits and cosmetic surgery bandages. Siegfried, the flawed hero, is given a sword — or at least a shard that resembles one — but it does nothing supernatural. (The weapons here are mostly handguns.)In Valentin Schwarz’s staging of “Die Walküre,” the mythic Valkyries are instead women in spike heels, nouveau riche outfits and cosmetic surgery bandages.Enrico NawrathThis is all of a piece with the demythologizing trend in Wagner stagings over the past 50 years, especially in Europe. The most influential ones over that period have been made in the shadow of George Bernard Shaw’s interpretation of the “Ring” as an allegory of anticapitalism, with the action set more or less in the present and the gods depicted as members of the modern upper classes, the characters’ nobility and valor as mostly sham.That was also the case with the last Bayreuth “Ring,” by Frank Castorf, which ran from 2013 to 2017. But compared with Castorf’s gleefully baffling staging, which often abandoned coherent storytelling altogether, Schwarz’s is fairly straightforward in its account of the codependence and acrimony running through a family. There are whiffs of daytime soaps in the harsh vividness of the visuals and acting, and a bit of “Succession,” too.If the “Ring” is an allegory — a reach for some conservative operagoers, but a given for many directors — the conceptual anchor of a production is the nature of the gold, the theft of which from the Rhine, in the opening minutes, is the sin that sets the epic plot in motion.The gold — and the powerful, toxic ring it’s molded into — symbolizes the commodity that the onstage world values most. For Castorf, it was oil, corroding political and social relations as it circulated through the globalized economy. For Schwarz, picking up on the magic apples the libretto says the gods require to retain their freshness, it is youth, innocence, children.His “Ring” is full of adults obsessed with appearing younger — through exercise, plastic surgery, absurd attempts at hip clothing — even as, more than in most stagings, they visibly age over the cycle.In Schwarz’s most original and inspired idea, the stolen gold is a young boy (Erik Scheele) whose abduction by Alberich (Olafur Sigurdarson) embodies a society curdled by its attempts to outrun death.Enrico NawrathThis obsession tips over into ominous hints of child trafficking and abuse; the slaves of Nibelheim are here a roomful of identically dressed blonde girls drawing at tables. (The girls aren’t overtly hurt, but they’re clearly being hoarded.) The dwarf Mime’s workshop is a creepy tea party and puppet theater for raggedy homemade dolls. And in Schwarz’s most original and inspired idea, the gold is not a bit of metal, but an actual young boy whose abduction embodies a society curdled by its attempts to outrun death.The life cycle is the focus from the beginning. The libretto sets the start of the “Ring” beneath the flowing waters of the Rhine, but Schwarz instead shows us an animated projection of a womb, in which twin fetuses are frozen in a gesture somewhere between love and combat.That image of a family’s foundational claustrophobia is a key to all that follows, as the action plays out in and around the gods’ home, Valhalla. (The forbiddingly sleek, spare sets are by Andrea Cozzi, the evocatively changing light by Reinhard Traub, and the fiercely trashy costumes by Andy Besuch.) The giants who, in the libretto, have been conned into constructing the lair are here chic architects of a glassy expansion. Alberich now isn’t of a different race than Wotan, the king of the gods, but is his less successful brother.Michael Kupfer-Radecky, left, and Stephen Gould (who was replaced last week by Clay Hilley) in “Götterdämmerung,” in which the family property is now inhabited by even more depraved people.Enrico NawrathThe all-knowing Erda and the brutal Hunding are part of the estate’s omnipresent, watchful servant underclass, which shines the silver as the main characters suffer. Later, Mime and the dissipated Gibichungs, Gutrune and Gunther, are ever more depraved inhabitants of parts of the property, long after the gods have passed on.The role of Wotan, his hands ever pawing at women at their most vulnerable, is shared by the sturdy Egils Silins (in “Das Rheingold”) and the brooding Tomasz Konieczny (“Die Walküre” and “Siegfried”). In the second act of “Walküre” last week, Konieczny had an appropriately bourgeois accident — the back of his Eames lounge chair broke off, and he tumbled to the floor — so he sat out the third act, giving Michael Kupfer-Radecky the opportunity to jump in, superbly, a few nights before his manic turn as Gunther.In “Siegfried,” the title character was sung by the tirelessly secure Andreas Schager, subtly unfolding the lovable side of a drunken degenerate. In “Götterdämmerung,” Clay Hilley was a last-minute replacement as Siegfried, and he would have been impressive even under less dramatic circumstances.“Die Walküre” was notable for Klaus Florian Vogt’s pure, rapt Siegmund and Lise Davidsen’s tender, surging Sieglinde, by far the most vocally resplendent performance of the week. Daniela Köhler sang brightly in the short but daunting Brünnhilde part in “Siegfried”; in the much longer “Walküre” and “Götterdämmerung,” Iréne Theorin acted with intense commitment to the staging, but her sizable voice wobbled under pressure.Lise Davidsen, left, gave the most vocally resplendent performance of the week alongside Klaus Florian Vogt in “Die Walküre.”Enrico NawrathStepping into the production just a few weeks ago to replace a sick colleague, the conductor Cornelius Meister led a solid, sensibly paced, somewhat faceless reading of the sprawling score.For all that is clear, even blatant, about Schwarz’s staging, there is much that is memorably, lyrically ambiguous. Appearing periodically throughout his “Ring” is a small, glowing white pyramid in a glass cube. Characters occasionally carry it, and it sometimes sits next to furniture or in the corner, but it’s never explained or dwelled on. It is whatever you think it is: a model of the pyramidal addition to Valhalla; a stylized sword or spear tip; purity; energy; antiquity; aspirations before and beyond the complications of reality. It is, in essence, a line of poetry, enigmatic and evocative.Similarly, drawings of stereotypically Wagnerian faces with winged helmets keep popping up — they’re what the girls are making in Nibelheim — before taking form as the red masks carried by the sinister crowd of vassals in “Götterdämmerung.” Do they represent the stultifying weight of tradition in presenting the “Ring”? The dark side of German nationalism?Thankfully, it’s not specified — nor is the meaning of the omnipresent horse figurines and toys. The most important horse in the cycle, Brünnhilde’s Grane, is, like the gold, here a real person: a tall, dependable, silent aide with an equine mane and beard.Enigmatic images abound in the staging, including red masks with stereotypically Wagnerian faces.Enrico NawrathThere were indelible images throughout the week: the giant Fafner (Wilhelm Schwinghammer) moldering at home on his deathbed; Alberich (Olafur Sigurdarson) and Hagen (Albert Dohmen) confronting each other on a palely lit stage, empty but for a punching bag that Hagen attacks, then forlornly embraces; Hagen’s slow, mournful dance as he leaves, waving Alberich’s leather jacket like a bullfighter.And at the end of “Die Walküre,” we don’t see Brünnhilde asleep in a ring of fire, but rather the final attempt of Fricka (Christa Mayer) to reconcile with Wotan, her husband. He walks away, leaving a single candle burning as the curtain closes, a nod toward the libretto’s fire that captures the emotions of the music and the moment in a fresh light.But while the abandonment of enchantment is often illuminating, occasionally it ties Schwarz in knots. Since there is no potion to cause Siegfried to forget — and cruelly betray — his love for Brünnhilde, their ecstatic duet earlier in “Götterdämmerung” needs to be staged, unconvincingly, as a fight to give motivation for his bitterness. And both Theorin and the staging run a bit out of steam in the closing, apocalyptic Immolation Scene, with Brünnhilde wandering aimlessly, then cradling Grane’s decapitated head as she lies down next to the murdered Siegfried at the bottom of the estate’s drained, dirty pool.Instead, the real coup of “Götterdämmerung” is the realization, earlier on, that the kidnapped Rheingold-boy has grown up to become the embittered, ambivalent Hagen. Painfully, in Schwarz’s staging, we see him treat Brünnhilde and Siegfried’s young child (an addition to the libretto) as callously as he was — the wheel of fear and abuse continuing to turn.And the production’s final image is a reprise of its first: again, twin fetuses, but this time in seemingly peaceful embrace. Is that peace lasting? Or will birth inevitably bring about a renewal of resentment, betrayal and violence? With admirable restraint, Schwarz doesn’t define whether he thinks a sick world is capable of change.Der Ring des NibelungenThrough Aug. 30 at the Bayreuth Festival, Germany; bayreuther-festspiele.de. More