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      American Modern Opera Company Takes Over the Ojai Festival

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      The American Modern Opera Company, a collective of restless and enterprising young musicians and dancers, is preparing for the Ojai Music Festival.CATSKILL, N.Y. — At the Lumberyard center here on a recent evening, more than 15 artists gathered outdoors around a long banquet spread over several picnic tables that had been lined up and topped with tea lights, bottles of rosé and accouterments for a feast of roasted pork lettuce wraps.The group — mostly members of the American Modern Opera Company, or AMOC, a collective founded five years ago by some of the most restless and enterprising young people in the performing arts — locked hands around their place settings. “Close the circle,” one said, nodding toward a remaining gap. Bobbi Jene Smith, the dancer and choreographer, arrived with her toddler, a multilingual mega fan of “Frozen,” to fill it.There was no prayer or any kind of speech. Just a pause, before they all smiled and said in near unison, “Thanks.” Then dinner began.As friends caught up and musicians mingled with dancers, Rebecca Sigel, the company’s manager for its Lumberyard residency, relayed pandemic safety measures, like daily testing, and asked for help cleaning up after dinner. Cooking, something of a competitive sport in AMOC, had been planned in advance; but dishwashing was handled just as easily. The night before, the honors fell to Julia Bullock, one of the world’s great sopranos, who had happily volunteered.That is how AMOC operates: with an all-in-it-together, egalitarian spirit. And that’s how its members insist on offering themselves to partnering institutions and presenters — the latest of which is the Ojai Music Festival in California, where the company will have its largest platform yet, programming and performing four days of events, beginning June 9. As at any AMOC show, anything goes; with disciplines colliding, a violinist may dance, or a concert may turn theatrical. Regardless, novelty and experimentation will reign.The company’s role as this year’s music director at Ojai — a festival overseen by a different guest each year, in collaboration with the artistic director, Ara Guzelimian — is a testament to the precious space it occupies. Endlessly adventurous, it is also a magnet for major support; its members have performed on high-profile stages, been commissioned by the likes of the Paris Opera and even won a MacArthur “genius” fellowship. In March, it received a $750,000 Mellon Foundation grant.From left, Smith, Zack Winokur, Bullock, Schraiber and Hanick debrief at Lumberyard after a rehearsal for “Harawi.”Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesDespite such prestige, AMOC is “an island of misfit toys,” said the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, who like everyone in the company balances his work with it and a busy outside career. “I don’t know what the ‘misfit’ means, but I know that part of it is a yearning for a different sort of way.”That type of yearning is how the company was born, over a lunch between the composer Matthew Aucoin and the stage director Zack Winokur in 2014. The two had grown up in each other’s orbits, overlapping at camp and the Juilliard School, but never really had a substantial conversation until then. They talked about the frustrations of getting a project done quickly with a group of strangers, and wondered what would happen instead if a small network of artists were brought together for intentional, enduring relationships.Over the next couple of years the idea grew more earnest, and Aucoin and Winokur began to invite some of their favorite colleagues from the worlds of music and dance to join. They also sought recommendations; Aucoin asked the violinist Keir GoGwilt, a member, “Who is the violinist you respect the most?” Miranda Cuckson, GoGwilt responded. So she came on board, too.“There was a very particular profile that we were looking for in the artists, which is people who are virtuosos in their area and therefore are appreciated by institutions, but sometimes chafe at the limitations,” Aucoin said. “It was the people who had the chops to excel in the capital-C classical versions of these art forms but didn’t want to live there all the time.”One such artist was Paul Appleby, a tenor who appears regularly at the Metropolitan Opera. When he heard from Aucoin, he recalled, he had been looking for more new-music projects. “How many times,” he said, “can you do ‘Magic Flute’ before you start to glaze over a bit?” Tines felt similarly, describing repertoire like Schumann’s “Liederkreis,” for all its beauty, as “a straitjacket.”During the more nebulous days of AMOC, its artists found refuge in the rural town of Stamford, Vt., where they were regularly hosted by the dancer Marta Miller on an idyllic property with a vegetable garden, pool and rehearsal studio. (Aucoin and Winokur have also bought houses nearby.) It’s now a tradition to meet there in August.“Usually the Vermont time has not been about creating a project as much as working on stuff,” Winokur said. “Or workshopping ideas or totally experimenting. And there’s a level of social engagement: You’re living together, eating together, doing dishes together.”Vermont is where the ritual of giving thanks at dinner started. It’s also where, between the meal and dessert, AMOC members tend to give impromptu performances — a private entertainment that inspired “Family Dinner,” a modular set of miniature concertos by Aucoin that will premiere at Ojai.When they get together, artistic disciplines blur in an open-minded manner redolent of Black Mountain College, the short-lived liberal arts college where Merce Cunningham, John Cage and Anni Albers, for example, freely experimented alongside their students. With AMOC, Smith said, “One thing feeds another.” She continued: “Why would Keir pick up a violin to play, and why would I dance to it? It’s amazing to understand the why, and so much gets answered from there.”Less formal cross-pollination has been productive, too. One night, Bullock danced with the former Batsheva company member Or Schraiber after dinner, and the casual fun led to Schraiber joining a staged production of Messiaen’s song cycle “Harawi” at Ojai, directed by Winokur and choreographed by Smith.When the company formally announced itself, in 2017, it had a mix of instrumentalists (including the JACK Quartet cellist Jay Campbell, the exhilaratingly versatile pianist Conor Hanick, the genre-blending flutist Emi Ferguson, the bassist and composer Doug Balliett, and Jonny Allen, of Sandbox Percussion); vocalists (among them the ubiquitous countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo); and dancers (in addition to Schraiber and Smith, Julia Eichten — though the cellist Coleman Itzkoff has convincingly pulled off this role as well).From left, Miranda Cuckson, Anthony Cheung and Paul Appleby preparing for the premiere of Cheung’s “The Echoing of Tenses.”Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesAt first, the company really had only one project on the calendar: a small festival at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., where it had an early champion in Diane Borger, the theater’s executive producer. She already knew Tines and Aucoin — their talent, she said was obvious and extraordinary — and committed to three years of hosting them for an event that, she recalled, had to be called Run AMOC!, because “how could it not?”It was essential to the company that its members receive equal pay for their work. “All of these people are at the same caliber, yet their pay is so different based on their disciplines,” Winokur said. “Musicians make more, and dancers make less.” So they set a precedent of a high minimum pay for performance and rehearsal weeks. “It’s less, obviously, than what Anthony or Julia can make in a night,” he added, referring to Costanzo and Bullock’s star status in opera, “but it’s not chump change, either.”The policy is built into the company’s contracts. Sometimes, it’s too expensive — most often at dance institutions, which tend to be chronically underfunded. So when it can, AMOC makes up the difference with subsidies. (That Mellon grant will help.) In the end, Winokur said, “everyone enters the room feeling the same way.”Usually, Winokur said, partners are fine with AMOC’s pay standards. One reason could be that most institutions would be willing to support the company’s artists anyway. Many of them have been regulars at Lincoln Center; during the 2018-19 season, Bullock was in residence at Metropolitan Museum of Art. Costanzo was instrumental in bringing the New York Philharmonic back from its pandemic hiatus. “We have,” Tines said, “earned our stripes.”That puts the company in a position not enjoyed by many avant-gardists, or young artists generally. They have freedom, and means.“The way AMOC engages with institutions is, we are happy to utilize the resources of the hardware,” Tines said. “We need the spaces, we need the financial support. We do not need the artistic ideals or ideas even. Just allow people to be their full selves and artists to create, and hopefully you will allow an ecosystem for beautiful things to be made. The provider of resources cannot also be the arbiter of them.”When AMOC is left to its own devices, it operates in a disciplined, democratic way. It has a “small but busy staff,” Winokur said, consisting of him, the managing director Jennifer Chen, the producer Cath Brittan and the company manager Mary McGowan. The company is also made up of committees, such as the one overseeing Ojai.Anthony Cheung, who composed one of the festival premieres, “The Echoing of Tenses,” said: “I’ve never seen an organization like this, where even in the planning stages people involved or not in the project are so invested.” Guzelimian laughed while recalling the sight of a shared Google Docs file for Ojai, where changes from all members were happening in real time. “Even editing documents,” he said, “is a collective effort.”During the pandemic lockdown, the company met regularly on video calls in which members had long, seminar-like discussions about AMOC’s mission and future. Group decisions, they learned, don’t come easily. Cuckson said, “There’s a lot of work you have to put in,” while Appleby put it more bluntly: “Democracy can be a pain in the ass.”But at their best, the artists achieve what Guzelimian described as “Brownian motion,” adding: “They exert creative pulls on each other that just make more energy. I’m still scratching my head, because conventional wisdom would say that the larger the committee, the more it becomes leveled. In their case, the interaction seems to push them.”Winokur directing a rehearsal of “Harawi” with, from left, Schraiber, Bullock and Hanick.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesWhen they do push one another, it’s often friendly. At Lumberyard, they were preparing a dense slate of Ojai programming, including new works, a tribute to the long-overlooked composer Julius Eastman and dances including the premiere of Smith’s “Open Rehearsal,” based on her film “Broken Theater.” Days are long, and sometimes hot, with one of the spaces cooled only by open doors and fans. Winokur had the most aerial view, moving from room to room with his dog, a young mutt named Henry (one of three on site, joining Sigel’s senior beagle-terrier mix, Ollie, and new puppy, Otis).Even amid struggle — repetition of a single passage, say, for an hour at a time — the mood stayed light. With Costanzo in New York singing in “Akhnaten” at the Met Opera, Tines playfully sang his part in falsetto during rehearsals for Aucoin’s setting of the poet Jorie Graham’s “Deep Water Trawling,” newly arranged for AMOC. And the artists were quick to compliment. Appleby told Cheung that he felt like “The Echoing of Tenses” made him “see the Matrix.” In a break from the thorniness of “Deep Water,” Bullock told Aucoin, “I like this music, Matt,” to which he said, “Thanks, Jules; it’s nice to hear every once in a while.”As she spoke, Bullock rubbed her baby bump. Her coming parenthood is a reminder of the life events that loom over AMOC. They all have independent careers, and some already have families. Winokur said that the company’s structure — more of a relationship network than an organization with regular programming — could protect it from committing to a future it can’t maintain. AMOC’s sustainability, Tines said, is a “big philosophical question.”“I’m interested in understanding what we look like in our next phases of scale,” he added. “Does it mean inviting new people? Does it mean modeling what we’re doing for other groups?”For now, the company’s institutional support continues apace. Winokur said the coming year, after the wave of work created for Ojai, will entail a lot of touring. “Harawi” is going to the Aix-en-Provence Festival in July. “Comet/Poppea” — which blends Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” with a new opera adaptation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s story “The Comet” by George Lewis — will premiere at the Spoleto Festival USA next spring.And that future, as open-ended as it is micromanaged, is currently taking shape at picnic tables in the Hudson Valley, alongside expressions of thanks, songs from “Frozen” and dinner recipes explained in great detail.“I only refer to AMOC as a group of my closest friends and colleagues,” Tines said. “When I’m doing any other project, this is home.” More

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      Rhiannon Giddens’s ‘Omar’ Premieres at the Spoleto Festival

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      Three productions, including the premiere of Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels’s “Omar,” distort time in approachable yet provocative ways.CHARLESTON, S.C. — Wander the streets of this Southern city, and you might notice a warping of time and place: a Porsche parked in the driveway of a fastidiously preserved antebellum mansion; a memorial to the American Revolution neighboring one to the secession that spurred the Civil War; a horse-drawn carriage taking tourists past cobblestone streets on their way back to a Carnival cruise ship.Time is no more stable among the three opera productions at the Spoleto Festival USA, which continues here through June 12. A world premiere, “Omar,” is both specific to history and freely anachronistic; while, on another stage, a classic love story, “La Bohème,” is told in reverse; and, nearby, the Crusades are given a modern critique by way of the Baroque in “Unholy Wars.”In all, opera is treated as an act of liberation — a fitting debut for Mena Mark Hanna, the festival’s new general director, who comes from a scholarly background that involved interrogating colonialism’s legacy in classical music. He inherited “Omar,” by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels, but he made it this year’s centerpiece, and surrounded it with works that, like it, are approachable yet refuse to accept or adhere to convention.“Omar” is a homecoming of sorts for Giddens, a conservatory-trained singer who made her reputation as a folk musician of omnivorous inspiration. This project, she recently told The New York Times, is “a return to opera, but on my own terms.”She wasn’t kidding. Only a musician like Giddens could have created “Omar,” for which she wrote the libretto and composed in recorded drafts — she sang and accompanied herself — that were then orchestrated by Abels, with an ear for subtle connections and propulsive drama. Their score, nimbly handled by the conductor John Kennedy and the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra, is a melting pot inspired by bluegrass, hymns, spirituals and more, with nods to traditions from Africa and Islam. It’s an unforced ideal of American sound: expansive and ever-changing.Giddens and Abels’s sweeping achievement is all the more remarkable because of the intimate story it tells: of Omar Ibn Said, a Muslim scholar who was captured in what is now Senegal and sold into slavery at a market in Charleston — a history he later documented in an autobiographical essay while living in North Carolina, still as property but with relative peace.A rich American portrait emerges from Said’s life, in Giddens’s interpretation of that essay. He bore witness to the dangerous Middle Passage of the slave trade and represented a largely unacknowledged community of Muslims brought to the United States. Giddens imagines him on the sidelines of a family being torn apart at the slave market. And, in a tribute to a pillar of Black American life, he is often surrounded by a chorus.That ensemble — tireless members of the Spoleto Festival USA Chorus — carries this opera, in a way that inevitably recalls Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” which is set in Charleston and is often spoken of as the Great American Opera, despite its complicated legacy as the work of white men who long provided crucial work for Black singers. Works like “Omar” — such as Anthony Davis’s recently revived “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” and Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” — offer an alternative: fresher, more honest depictions of Black life on an operatic scale.Although “Porgy” is firmly in the repertory, “Omar” at least has the opportunity to stake a claim alongside it: Next season, the opera will travel to Los Angeles and Boston, then San Francisco, Chicago and, appropriately, North Carolina. Moving, joyous and in its final moments intensely spiritual, it should not have trouble winning over audiences, as it did on Friday.Kaneza Schaal’s production is as plain-spoken as the libretto, yet absorbingly vivid in Christopher Myers’s scenic design, for which he made prints from Said’s manuscripts in English and Arabic, as well as from woodcuts of slavery documents and runaway ads. Characters wear language on their clothing, and words cover walls; the look of the show propels the story as much as the score does toward the climax of Said’s burning need to write.Language is crucial to the plot as well. Said, sung by the tenor Jamez McCorkle with delicate lyricism in prayer and steely power in adversity, arrives in Charleston unable to understand anyone. Giddens cleverly renders his first owner’s text as Said would have heard it; he and the slaver, Johnson, sing discrete lines in counterpoint, never in the same language, until, under the threat of violence, Said lets out an acquiescent phrase, his first words in English.Johnson is sung by the baritone Malcolm MacKenzie, who returns — after Said escapes his cruel plantation — in Act II as the more benevolent owner Owens. He respects Said’s passionate faith but all but forces him to convert to Christianity. This casting decision makes a clear point: Kind or not, a slaver is still a slaver.Those two men may be in control of Said’s life, but he is more guided by dreams of his mother, Fatima (the mezzo-soprano Cheryse McLeod Lewis), who was killed in the raid that led to his kidnapping; and Julie (the soprano Laquita Mitchell, a smooth-voiced and soothing presence), who escapes from the slave market in Charleston but urges Said to meet her in Fayetteville, N.C., at Owen’s property. When they reunite there, she explains why she was helping him to begin with, in the opera’s finest aria, which begins with the line “My daddy wore a cap like yours.”When she gives Said a new head wrap, to replace the one that had been ripped off his head at the slave market, he realizes that he must reconcile his religious devotion with the existence he is bound to, and tell his story in writing. The opera then ends with a long choral meditation, with singers spread throughout the auditorium, conducted by McCorkle from the stage. When the curtain — which before the show had been decorated with a projection of Said’s face — comes down, his likeness is joined by a dense collage reflecting the accumulation of his experience, with images that resonate across time to the present.George Shirley was the Wanderer, a new character created for Yuval Sharon’s staging of “La Bohème.”Leigh Webber/Spoleto Festival USAIf “Omar” looks forward, then Yuval Sharon’s staging of “La Bohème,” which opened on Saturday, does the opposite, presenting the opera’s four acts in reverse. (The production, which premiered at Detroit Opera last month, will travel next to Boston and Philadelphia.) With no intermission and small cuts to streamline it for a brisk hour and 45 minutes, it was moved along by Kensho Watanabe’s lush yet flowing music direction and John Conklin’s minimal, quickly adaptive set design.To help situate the audience, Sharon introduces the Wanderer, a spoken role played by the 88-year-old George Shirley, the first Black tenor to perform in a leading role with the Metropolitan Opera. As the acts rewind, he stops the action to ask questions that make Puccini’s tragedy more about the why than the what of it all. Rodolfo could have gone back inside in Act III; Musetta could have remained silent at Café Momus; Mimì could have just left Rodolfo’s apartment. This is a production of decisive moments.More than ever, “La Bohème” was also an opera of objects. A bonnet, a muff, a coat — these things are so crucial to the tragic climax that when they are introduced earlier in the story, they too begin to feel like turning points. And, in Sharon’s reading, amid the stormy lovers — Rodolfo (Matthew White) and Mimì (an aching Lauren Michelle); Marcello (Troy Cook) and Musetta (Brandie Sutton) — there is one steady relationship: Colline (Calvin Griffin) and Schaunard (Benjamin Taylor), playful companions who here might be a little something more.Raha Mirzadegan, Coral Dolphin, Karim Sulayman and John Taylor Ward in “Unholy Wars,” a staged program created by Sulayman. Leigh Webber/Spoleto Festival USA“Unholy Wars,” a staged program created by the tenor Karim Sulayman that opened on Sunday, also recasts the familiar. A child of Lebanese immigrants, Sulayman is interested in how Europe has historically decided what constitutes the Middle East, and how it is depicted in Western art. To examine the Crusades, he has turned to Baroque music, with new, mostly prerecorded interludes composed by Mary Kouyoumdjian.The production — directed by Kevin Newbury, and incorporating dance (performed by Coral Dolphin and choreographed by Ebony Williams) and animated projections (by the artist Kevork Mourad) — unfolds in effectively three parts: an exploration of the Middle Eastern “other” in Western works; a dramatic account of Monteverdi’s “Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda”; and a mournful denouement that attempts to make peace with a musical tradition both violent and sublime.Sulayman performs throughout, joined by the bass-baritone John Taylor Ward and the soprano Raha Mirzadegan, who embody the doomed lovers in “Combattimento,” a story Sulayman recounted with gripping fervor and expressivity that rendered surtitles unnecessary. He ends the evening — at just 70 minutes, still a song too long — with what seem a tired choice: Handel’s “Lascia ch’io pianga.” But here, at the end of a personal journey through lyrics like “She is Black but beautiful,” the aria feels like an urgent plea from Sulayman to be left alone to reflect.Reflect and, perhaps, break free from the long, knotty tendrils of history. It’s a struggle that would have been familiar to Omar Ibn Said, one that plays out in the streets of this city — even throughout this country, in our or any time. More

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      ‘I Would Love to Sing Lucia’: A Male Soprano Comes Into His Own

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      Samuel Mariño, a singer with a rare voice type in opera, is making his Decca album debut with a glimpse at a more gender-fluid future.BERLIN — Samuel Mariño is a rarity in opera: a true male soprano.Rather than relying on falsetto as a countertenor would, Mariño, 28, is able to comfortably sing high notes with his chest voice. Now he is branching out from Baroque parts originally written for castrati. A big step in that direction: “Sopranista,” his debut album on the Decca label, which is out on Friday.He has his eye on a variety of roles, including Sophie, the ingénue of Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” and Dvorak’s Rusalka, he said in an interview, with the aim of sending a message that classical music should be “open to all communities,” including a multiplicity of genders. And “Sopranista,” named after the Italian term for a male soprano, offers a glimpse at that more fluid future.The album opens with Cherubino’s aria “Voi che sapete,” from Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.” Cherubino, originally written for a female soprano, is now a signature trouser role — an often young male character performed by a mezzo-soprano. Mariño’s program includes more Mozart, as well as the world premiere recording of “Son amour, sa constance extrême,” an aria (again, originally for a woman) from Joseph Boulogne’s little-known chamber opera “L’ Amant Anonyme” (or, “The Anonymous Lover”).Mariño, who was born in Venezuela and is based here in Berlin, didn’t lose the boyish aspects of his voice at puberty; it only “partially broke,” he said. With a high speaking voice, life as a teenager — a gay one, at that — was difficult. “Everyone was making jokes, bullying me,” he said.So he sought help from his mother; she took him to doctors who offered surgery or vocal therapy. But one suggested he could be a singer. After studying at the Paris Conservatory, he took lessons with the soprano Barbara Bonney. He then spent his early career specializing in castrato roles.Mariño’s voice only “partially broke” during puberty, he said.Maria Sturm for The New York TimesUnlike castrati of the 17th and 18th centuries — always beardless, and typically tall and paunchy — Mariño is short and lithe, and was already sporting a five o’clock shadow on a recent afternoon walk with Leia, his Cavalier King Charles spaniel.At his apartment, Mariño spoke about his new album, his desire to go beyond castrati roles and his campaign to free himself — along with classical music generally — from the confines of traditional gender boundaries. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.When were you first exposed to classical music?We sang at home, and my family loved dancing. We did salsa, merengue, this kind of thing — but no classical music at all. My parents were both university teachers, and they worked from 7 a.m. until 9 in the evening. I finished school by 1 p.m., and they put me in a lot of things to fill the time. I did piano, karate, baseball, painting and sang in choirs, and I started doing ballet when I was 12 or 13. I finished high school at 16, and I wanted to study biology because I love animals and nature. I didn’t get a place for that at university, and I told my mom I wanted to be a ballet dancer. She said, “Why don’t you try singing?”When you started studying voice in Paris, were you training as a male soprano?The teachers were trying to treat me as a countertenor. I had to sing lower when I could sing much higher. Being a countertenor is an established thing, and they were trying to put me into that box. Then, in 2017, I met Barbara Bonney. A friend told me that I sing very much like her. I wrote to her and said: “Hi. I’m Samuel and I want to take lessons with you.” I went to Salzburg, Austria, and Barbara was like a fairy godmother. She told me to sing how I speak, to just put notes to my speaking voice. And that is what I do today.When did you start taking pride in how you speak?I did a lot of psychotherapy when I was a teenager, and I’m still working to respect myself and value who I am. Some people are bigger, some people are smaller; some people have dark eyes, some people have blue eyes. I have this voice. I don’t see it as special. I see it as part of my nature.“Cherubino is a young teenager, and I do him as a boy who is innocent and confused,” Mariño said. “It’s a totally different vision of how the role can be sung.”Maria Sturm for The New York TimesYour new album starts with a famous Mozart aria written for a woman who is playing a man. What do you bring to the role as a male singer?My voice is a light lyric soprano, with a bit of coloratura. In the score, Cherubino is a soprano role, but today it’s for mezzo-sopranos and their male-ish colors. If you talk to any mezzo, they will tell you it’s very hard to sing Cherubino, because it’s quite high — not super high notes, but sitting all the time in a high tessitura. Cherubino is a young teenager, and I do him as a boy who is innocent and confused. It’s a totally different vision of how the role can be sung.Offstage, you often mix and match traditional male and female clothes. Are you aiming for something similar as a singer?I am not transitioning; I’m just a man who likes to wear skirts. I have thousands of jeans, thousands of sneakers — and thousands of heels. On the cover of my new album, I’m wearing Vivienne Westwood. I’m trying to expand my bubble, change my technique, mix genders. I have sung male roles all my life, but I hope this is going to change. There are macho castrato roles — Handel’s Giulio Cesare or Teseo — but I don’t like them that much. I would love to sing Lucia di Lammermoor.How did you discover the aria by Joseph Boulogne?I first learned about him because of a scene in Sofia Coppola’s film “Marie Antoinette,” where Kirsten Dunst is sitting at the piano with this Afro-Caribbean teacher. Guadeloupe is just around the corner from Venezuela, and I got interested in him as a historical person. I found out about the opera online, and then I found the score online. My generation is lucky to have this; you make two clicks, and that’s it.Other than Lucia, are there other traditional female roles that you would like to try? What about the Queen of the Night or Carmen?Technically speaking, I can sing the Queen of the Night, but I don’t have the dramatic voice. So it would be like a kid singing. And I cannot sing Carmen, which is not about the voice, but the personality. I would love to sing a soprano part in a Mahler symphony. Barbara always told me: “Darling, you can sing that. You have a bigger voice than I do.” More

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      Review: A Big Baritone Sound at Play in an Intimate Setting

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      Justin Austin’s program in the Board of Officers Room at the Armory included three cycles of Langston Hughes poems.In a program of songs highlighting a broad range of American compositional voices — Black, gay, female, old, new — the baritone Justin Austin showed off a mighty lyric voice with dramatic flair at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan on Tuesday evening.Austin’s tone is deep and earthy, with a firmly stitched timbre that withstands some high-octane singing. At the Armory, he found operatic climaxes in most songs — his high notes were strong, shattering, indefatigable. And as he warmed up, his breathy soft singing began to convey feeling too, though there was little color in his treatment of texts. (Suffering from allergies, he turned upstage to blow his nose between most songs.)This has been a busy time in New York for Austin. Earlier this year, he sang the lead role of the rough laborer George in Ricky Ian Gordon’s opera “Intimate Apparel” at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, where his big, hard-edge sound overwhelmed the microphone he didn’t need. In May, he made his Metropolitan Opera debut as Marcellus in Brett Dean’s “Hamlet,” projecting into that capacious house with youthful vigor.But in the intimate recital setting of the Board of Officers Room at the Armory, his built-for-power voice tended to run roughshod over poetry, as in the opening group of nine Gordon settings of poems by Langston Hughes. Gordon’s rushing, exuberant melodies suit a supple voice that soars, but Austin’s swings like a hammer. At times it worked: He rode a path to glory in the punishing conclusion of “Harlem Night Song,” with its ecstatic series of high notes.He connected more profoundly with Hughes cycles by the Black composers Margaret Bonds (“Three Dream Portraits”) and Robert Owens (“Mortal Storm”). Bonds’s “Minstrel Man,” about a performer whose humanity is invisible to his audience, stirred a wry, subversive spirit in Austin. In “Dream Variation,” his voice flowed naturally, and “I, Too” was defiant — the sound of someone no longer willing to wait for his moment in the sun when he has the strength to seize it for himself.There are times when Owens’s “Mortal Storm,” which featured the evening’s most pessimistic poems, sounds like a dense piano reduction of an opera score. “Jaime” is a 40-second tempest, and “Faithful One” is thick with bass chords. The pounding triplets of “Genius Child” recall Schubert’s “Erlkönig,” both of them harrowing fantasies of a murdered boy. It’s not a cycle for the faint of voice, and Austin excelled in it, even finding rhythmic playfulness and a touch of sensual romance. “Genius Child” ended with a devil’s ride into the bracing line “Kill him — and let his soul run wild!”Then, in a breath-catching turn, came Aaron Copland’s lullaby to a crying baby, “The Little Horses,” sung in hushed, consoling tones. Its simple starlight inspired the prettiest playing of the night from the pianist Howard Watkins, who often made the program’s wide-ranging styles sound homogeneous and unsubtle.Toward the end, Austin sang spirituals and gospel with an unforced expressivity that sustained each piece’s mood. His single encore, “I Want Jesus to Walk With Me,” was delivered a cappella. Without a piano at his back, he rose to the occasion. There were highs and lows, thunder and cries — and beauty, too.Justin AustinPerformed Tuesday at the Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. More

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      Robert Ainsley Is Named Glimmerglass Festival Director

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      Robert Ainsley, a champion of new American opera, takes the reins from Francesca Zambello. He said the festival would continue to showcase work that tells “everyone’s story.”The Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, N.Y., announced on Wednesday that it has named Robert Ainsley as it next artistic and general director, giving the festival a new leader as it moves toward its 50th season, in 2025.Ainsley most recently served as the director of the Cafritz Young Artists program at the Washington National Opera and of the American Opera Initiative where, over a span of six years, he commissioned, developed and premiered more than 30 new operas and other works. He has also held leadership positions at the Portland Opera, Minnesota Opera and Opera Theater of Saint Louis and has worked at other summer music festivals.He succeeds Francesca Zambello, who led Glimmerglass, a summer festival of opera and theater, for more than a decade. In an interview, Ainsley said he was committed to building on Zambello’s efforts to “make this an art form for everyone — telling everyone’s story and trying to ensure everyone has agency in how those stories are told.”“She’s really built something that is inclusive and representative of the diversity of America today,” Ainsley said. “And that’s something I really want to carry on and make a central part of our mission.”Robert Ainsley, the new artistic and general director of the Glimmerglass Festival.Arielle DonesonHe also said he was dedicated to ensuring that the festival has a balance of everything from 17th-century opera to musical theater to the kinds of new works and formats he has championed in previous jobs.Glimmerglass has offered new productions and other stagings of opera and musical theater in Cooperstown every summer since 1975.“The intense experience of drawing so many people together from all over the country and all over the world is what makes a festival very special,” Ainsley said. “But what Glimmerglass has is the best bits of all of the summer programs.”In a news release, Zambello called Ainsley “a wonderful artist” who will bring “excellent vision and leadership” to a time of transition for the company. Robert Nelson, the chair of the Glimmerglass Festival board of trustees, said Ainsley “is perfectly poised to lead the Glimmerglass Festival into its next era.”Ainsley said he was eager to get to Cooperstown to become part of the community there.“When an institution gets me, they get all of me,” he said. “Bringing people together of all backgrounds and creating something wonderful is what has made Glimmerglass special, and that’s definitely what I want to do with it.” More

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      An Opera About Harvey Milk Finally Finds Itself

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      The composer Stewart Wallace has overhauled his 1990s score and says “the music is freer now, and more organic, and yet completely recognizable.”When he composed “Harvey Milk,” in the early 1990s, Stewart Wallace was adding to a string of much discussed “biopic” operas based on recent history. Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha,” about Gandhi; Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X”; and John Adams’s “Nixon in China” were still fresh in people’s ears.But in telling the story of the gay activist and politician who was killed in 1978 by a fellow member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Wallace introduced a twist. Gay men, long a fervent segment of opera’s audience, had rarely, if ever, been the subject of an opera.When “Harvey Milk” premiered in Houston in 1995, Edward Rothstein’s review in The New York Times called it “a rambunctious combination of banality and effective drama, posturing, playfulness and polemics.” Before it went to San Francisco, the following year, Wallace and the librettist, Michael Korie, made some revisions, adding arias for the title character, adjusting some orchestrations, and paring down the whole thing.A scene from the work when it premiered at Houston Grand Opera in 1995.Jim CaldwellBut the work remained sprawling — in its length and its dozens of tiny characters. “It’s this monster piece,” Wallace said in a recent phone interview. “But we were young and ambitious and hungry, and we did what we wanted to do.”Putting on a monster, however, is hard. The work has barely been performed in the more than 25 years since its premiere, but the opportunity for a fresh hearing motivated Wallace to make an even more drastic overhaul. His new version, conceived for the San Francisco company Opera Parallèle but delayed by the pandemic, will premiere instead at Opera Theater of St. Louis on June 11.“I literally started on an empty page from bar one,” Wallace said in the interview. “So there’s not a single bar that’s the same, even though it’s definitely the same opera.”Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.How did this new version come about?A long while ago, I called David Gockley [who commissioned the work at Houston Grand Opera and led San Francisco Opera from 2006-16] with my idea for the visionary Italian director Romeo Castellucci to direct a revised edition of “Harvey Milk.” Just to see it from a completely different angle.But David said that if we wanted to do it soon, we should go to Opera Parallèle. And so I went to them, and we decided to do it. They called me and said: “What about all these smaller roles? Would you take a look at them?” I said sure, and the next day I called them and said, “They’re all gone.”It had the advantage of clearing out the weeds and focusing on the narrative and the spirit of the piece. When we wrote it, we were concerned that people didn’t know who Harvey Milk was — not many, anyway. So I considered it an obligation to educate, which can be a little anti-art. So there are things in there that are no longer necessary. We now have what we originally hoped for, which is a kind of mythic interpretation of his life and his evolution into an activist.From left, Nathan Stark, Mack Wolz, Thomas Glass, Colter Schoenfish, Jonathan Johnson and Seán Curran rehearse for premiere of the new version, on June 11 at Opera Theatre of St. Louis.Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesObviously Gus Van Sant’s 2008 film “Milk” exposed the story to many more people.Gus actually came to “Harvey Milk” in San Francisco, and he borrowed a few things from us, like “Tosca.” Which was in there because the night before Harvey Milk was murdered, he went to San Francisco Opera, and what was performed? “Tosca.” It was a very literal thing. But we turned the opera into a place of pilgrimage and revelation for him. So that and some other things we did are in the film.What exactly has changed about the opera?I started to look at it with all these years of experience in between — not trying to make it more refined or sophisticated, just thinking about how to deploy the resources, and not waste any time. I think the running time of the music is now an hour and 50 minutes, and it was an almost three-hour evening when we did it in the first run. At San Francisco Opera there were something like 80 or 85 players, and in St. Louis there will be about 66; and at Opera Parallèle, about 31. It can now be done by small or large companies.The music is freer now, and more organic, and yet completely recognizable as what we wrote. The bones are the same, but the meat is different; it’s leaner and more fluid and more direct, with more rhythmic clarity. There’s nothing to take you away from the thrust of the narrative and the music.What I wanted to do was not rewrite it from the vantage point of what I would do now; I wanted to fulfill what my intention was then. For example, when young Harvey goes to Central Park — he follows this man who he’s going to have sex with, and there’s sex going on all around him — the music was always driven by this very aggressive figure, pounding away. Originally, I won’t say I tarted it up, but I made it more elegant than it should have been, and also more complicated. And now it’s just this thing that hammers at you, and it’s much more effective. So in a way it’s rawer now than I had the confidence to do then.Archival images posted in the rehearsal room for the new production.Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesHas it been fulfilling to return to something you did so long ago?I had a traumatic brain injury in 2010. I was on a bike, and then I woke up in an ambulance and had no idea how I’d gotten there. For about five years I couldn’t write music, which is something I’d done since I was a child. So it was devastating.I tried a bunch of things to try and ameliorate it, and the doctors were completely useless. I had to start these experiments on myself. So when we had the opportunity to do “Harvey Milk” again, and it was clear that I would actually rewrite the whole opera, I wasn’t sure I could do it.When you write music it’s like a bag of memories of the time you wrote it; it’s like a diary, but it’s abstract. And I hoped that if I dug back into this piece — I was in my 30s then, and I’m turning 62 this year — I would be able to find those memories that would reignite my compositional life fully. And the experiment worked. I’ve been on fire. I think I’m doing the best work I’ve ever done. So it’s very important to me, this moment. It’s not just about reviving the opera. More

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      ‘A Vocal Figure Skater’ Makes His Mark as an Operatic Hamlet

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      The British tenor Allan Clayton’s portrayal of the title role in Brett Dean’s opera is personal, emotional — and a breakthrough.The tenor Allan Clayton was in near-constant motion and almost always onstage. At a dress rehearsal of Brett Dean’s “Hamlet” at the Metropolitan Opera a few weeks ago, he staggered, capered, fell to his knees, leaped into a grave and dueled to the death — all while singing Dean’s difficult, vocally shimmering, emotionally shifting music. Taking a bow afterward, alone on the huge stage, Clayton looked slightly dazed, drenched in sweat and understandably exhausted.“Hamlet,” which runs through June 9 at the Met, was a breakthrough for the British-born Clayton when the opera premiered at the Glyndebourne Festival in 2017.Writing in The New York Times, the music critic Zachary Woolfe said Clayton was even better at the Met. “His tone is sometimes plangently lyrical, sometimes sarcastically sharp,” Woolfe wrote. “Without losing the character’s desperation, Clayton now makes Hamlet more persuasively antic and wry — more real.”In an interview a few days before the May 13 Met premiere, Clayton said he was both “a more canny singer” and more stable than when he first sang Hamlet. “It is a wonderful role,” he said. “But emotionally it’s very hard. It dredges up issues in my personal life which were true in 2017 and are still true now, and completely inform what I do onstage.”His father, he explained, died when he was in his 20s; his relationship with his mother is difficult; he went through a traumatic breakup with a girlfriend during the rehearsal period for the opera. In short, his life had some eerie parallels with that of Hamlet. As he told The Telegraph in 2018, “an awful lot of difficult stuff got drawn on and dredged up.”Now, he said, he is “better able to distinguish between the character and my reality.”Clayton’s Hamlet with, from left, Sarah Connolly as Gertrude and Rod Gilfry as Claudius.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesClayton offstage looks very much like his Hamlet onstage: bearded, slightly rumpled, in jeans and a loose T-shirt. Friendly and funny, he takes the British art of self-deprecation to Olympic levels and is clearly prone to excessive self-doubt. Just two months ago, he said, he had to lecture himself sternly when a dress rehearsal of Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes” had gone poorly in his view (his description is colorfully unprintable) a day before its Royal Opera House premiere.“I often go through, I can’t do this, it’s too hard, too stressful, and I’m not doing anything useful, like being a doctor or nurse or teacher,” he said. “But I sat in my flat on that day and thought, If I am not going to enjoy myself, why do this job?”His performance was acclaimed by the British press. “His tenor has gained heft,” said John Allison, the editor of Opera Magazine, in a telephone interview. “And he had the lyricism and the power, and a rawness and vulnerability that made his portrayal of the character as an oddball dreamer so affecting.” (Clayton is scheduled to perform the role again, at the Metropolitan Opera House, in October.)Clayton, who grew up in Malvern in the southwest of England, began to sing at 8, in his school choir, led by a teacher who followed the Vienna Boys Choir model, and had the students do both concerts and tours. At 10, he won a choral scholarship to the Worcester Cathedral School, founded by Henry VIII. “We sang everything,” he said. “Carols by Britten, work by George Benjamin, as well as the older things.”Although Clayton modestly said he “wasn’t particularly talented at anything,” he was encouraged to apply to Cambridge University. “No one in my family had even been to university,” he said. He was accepted as a choral scholar, and began to learn about opera and lieder while studying archaeology and anthropology. “Something just clicked in the second year,” he said of his singing. “I thought maybe I could do this.”After earning a postgraduate degree at the Royal Academy of Music, work came steadily. Pivotal experiences, he said, included several roles with the Leeds-based Opera North and his first title role, in Britten’s “Albert Herring” at Glyndebourne in 2008.But performing Castor in Barrie Kosky’s 2011 production of Rameau’s “Castor and Pollux” proved “a game-changer,” Clayton said. “I realized I wasn’t a particular ‘type’ of tenor, neither Italianate or ‘English.’ I just sing like I sing.”“I realized I wasn’t a particular ‘type’ of tenor, neither Italianate or ‘English.’ I just sing like I sing,” Clayton said.Tonje Thilesen for The New York TimesKosky, who has directed Clayton in six operas, called him his “tenor muse” in an interview. “He has the openness and ability to access his inner emotional landscape that you more usually find with actors,” he said, “but with a distinctive and beautiful voice.”A small role in George Benjamin’s “Written on Skin” (2012) was Clayton’s first experience of having a part written for him. “To have someone write something for you, do an almost forensic investigation into your vocal ability, was thrilling,” he said.Working with Dean on “Hamlet” was even more intense. First, Dean said, he recorded Clayton delivering several of the character’s soliloquies, “to hear where his voice sat, and his natural rhythms.” In workshops, Dean could “see and hear how he used the words and that influenced how the rest of the piece unfolded.”By the time he finished writing the second act, he added, “Allan’s ease at singing high without having to belt it out, the flexibility and ease in his voice, were very much in my head.”Matthew Jocelyn, whose libretto boldly cuts and reweaves different folio versions of Shakespeare’s text, said hearing Clayton in the workshops was useful in both practical and intuitive ways. “He is a vocal figure skater,” he said, and “has that mobility that allows him to twirl and to land, to go to the extremes, both emotionally and vocally. Basically, he showed us we didn’t need to be afraid of anything.”Clayton said he read and researched the play, but he felt he had to be as truthful and personal as possible in the part. It felt natural, he added, to explore Hamlet’s darkness and imbue him with a febrile physicality. “I move easily, have always liked sport, and it seemed like a natural extension of Hamlet’s character,” he said. “He is light on his feet both mentally and physically.”The director of the opera, Neil Armfield, said that Clayton’s freedom as a performer made many of the staging ideas come to life. “He is a beautiful physical performer, has the freedom of a ballet dancer without any self-consciousness,” he said. “That fueled a physical sense of something adolescent about Hamlet, his attachment to grief, his breaking of the social rules, his mischievousness and hyperactive glee.”Clayton is at an important moment in his career, said the conductor Mark Elder, who has worked with him on several occasions, most recently on “Peter Grimes.” Clayton’s voice has filled out, Elder said, “but the strength and passion in his singing has not obscured its delicacy and gentle expressiveness.” The roles he chooses in the next years, Elder added, “are going to be crucial for him.”Asked about this, Clayton hesitated. “Casting directors don’t know what to do with me, and I don’t know what to do with myself,” he said. “But as long as I am working with interesting people and trying new things, I think I’ll be happy.” More

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      In Cleveland, Schubert Outsings Even the Mighty ‘Otello’

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      After playing Schubert’s Ninth Symphony just before the pandemic lockdown, the Cleveland Orchestra shone in its return to the sprawling work.CLEVELAND — On the morning of Friday, March 13, 2020, the Cleveland Orchestra played Schubert’s Ninth Symphony. The musicians were in concert dress, but just a handful of people were in the seats of Severance Hall. Pandemic bans on public gatherings were going into effect, and this would be the last concert here before the long lockdown.A section of the symphony was released a few weeks later, as part of the premiere episode of a new podcast from the ensemble. By way of introduction, its longtime music director, Franz Welser-Möst, spoke about what he’d felt as he led the second movement: “I thought, all of a sudden, this might be the last time I ever conduct this orchestra again.”Amid the anxiety and uncertainty of early April 2020 in New York, I remember listening to him say that, and bursting into tears. So I have rarely had a sweeter experience with music than returning to Severance on Friday morning and listening to the Clevelanders and Welser-Möst play, yes, Schubert’s Ninth.This is music of stark shifts between celebration and melancholy, ballroom grandeur and drawing-room wistfulness, between forcefulness and expansiveness. It is a sprawling work that nevertheless, when done well, unfolds with a sense of inevitability through all its changes.Welser-Möst said on the podcast that the performance for the near-empty hall — with everyone “calm but extremely, extremely focused” — was “as close to perfection” as he’d ever heard the orchestra sound. That this wasn’t hyperbole became clear when the full symphony was released on the in-house record label that the ensemble started during the pandemic.On Friday, too, the notion of perfection came to mind. The Clevelanders played, as usual, with clarity, poise and adroit balances among the sections, elegance without reticence, urgency without pressure, airiness without weightlessness. But while descriptions of their precision and transparency sometimes make them seem cool, even chilly, this was poignant, humane, truly warm music-making.The first movement was brisk — as is Welser-Möst’s wont — but easygoing in its phrasing, without exaggeration, even in emphasis. As I felt when I heard this ensemble play Dvorak’s Fifth Symphony here in 2015, there was one foot in aristocratic Vienna, the other in a country meadow; I don’t know another American orchestra that lilts with such unforced gracefulness.Heat radiated off the high strings in the second movement, before softening to a gentleness that surpassed that of the recent recording. The passing of a line among different instruments — cello, flute, clarinet, oboe — was an understated layering of liquidities of different densities.The Scherzo was lushly garrulous until it relaxed into spacious calm; the fourth movement had the panache of bursts of golden powder. Throughout, Schubert’s huge section repeats weren’t drudgery, but displays of quietly accumulated power, of material subtly yet thoroughly transformed.From left on platform, Raymond Aceto, Pene Pati, Tamara Wilson, Welser-Möst, Limmie Pulliam, Christopher Maltman, Jennifer Johnson Cano, Owen McCausland and Kidon Choi, with the Cleveland Orchestra, after Verdi’s “Otello.”Roger Mastroianni/Cleveland OrchestraSuch was the quality of the symphony, and the intensity of the emotions it conjured, that it slightly overshadowed the main event of the weekend: Verdi’s opera “Otello,” which was given as a semi-staged concert on Saturday (and will be repeated this Thursday and Sunday).The operatic repertory has been a glory of Welser-Möst’s tenure here. The pandemic sadly spiked a run of Berg’s “Lulu,” but “Otello” is a sweeping orchestral showcase. (I won’t soon forget the Chicago Symphony’s ferocious rendition under Riccardo Muti at Carnegie Hall in 2011.)And the playing was excellent, with attention to detail in moments like the slight wooziness that enters the rhythms as the first-act drinking song grows drunker. The third act progressed toward a finale of controlled nobility; the opening of the fourth was an elegy of mellow, mournful winds, their music seeming to exhale into being taken up by the low strings.But overall Welser-Möst flew through the score at a clip; coupled with this ensemble’s lithe textures, even at its loudest and most powerful, there was sometimes a sense of skating atop the music. The opera impressed; it didn’t shock or wound.In the title role, the tenor Limmie Pulliam had a healthy, attractively grainy tone, with a hint of weeping in it. Once he got past some dropped high notes in “Ora e per sempre,” he sang with burnished security, and acted — even in this semi-staged setting — with moving sobriety.The soprano Tamara Wilson, as Desdemona, gained authority and tonal richness as the performance went on, her high notes strong and clear. But from the start, the baritone Christopher Maltman oozed juicy seductiveness as an imposing Iago.Jennifer Johnson Cano’s mezzo-soprano was smoothly plangent as Emilia; the tenor Pene Pati was a sweetly ingenuous Cassio. The chorus, directed by Lisa Wong, was far more nuanced than usual in this piece, even while wearing face masks; I heard harmonies in the opening scene that were new to me.Whatever the quibbles, few ensembles are ready to do Schubert’s Ninth and “Otello” back-to-back with such accomplishment. Part of it is doubtless the enchanted, silvery atmosphere of Severance, but there is always a sense of occasion when this orchestra performs.Not that everything is perfect. Attendance has been down this season from prepandemic averages, as it has been for many arts institutions; the question is whether those numbers will rebound or settle into a disconcerting new normal.And while Welser-Möst has filled many important positions over the past few years, there are still a handful of openings, none more conspicuous than the concertmaster seat that has been vacant since William Preucil was fired in 2018 after an investigation revealed he had engaged in sexual misconduct and harassment. The orchestra’s principal trombonist was also fired then, for the same reason; that chair remains empty, too.But there was nothing to fear this weekend from either of those corners of the ensemble. Peter Otto, the first associate concertmaster, gave a solo in Berg’s “Lyric Suite” — which preceded the Schubert on Friday — that had the self-effacing eloquence for which Cleveland is justly renowned. (Solos from this orchestra often, in the best way, don’t feel like solos at all.) And in the first movement of the Schubert, the trombones played with an uncanny evocation of doleful distance, as if they were on a nearby hilltop rather than right in front of us.It speaks to the depth of this extraordinary ensemble’s roster that what should have been its weaknesses ended up as particular strengths. And it was so, so good to be back here.OtelloThrough May 29 at the Severance Music Center, Cleveland; clevelandorchestra.com. More