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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

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      With Her First Opera, Rhiannon Giddens Returns to Her Roots

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      “Omar,” composed by Giddens and Michael Abels, and based on the life of a Muslim scholar sold into slavery, premieres at the Spoleto Festival USA.CHARLESTON, S.C. — Five years ago, the directors of Spoleto Festival USA here asked the musician Rhiannon Giddens two questions.The first: Had she heard of Omar ibn Said?Said was a man from what is now Senegal who was sold into slavery in 1807 and forced across the ocean to Charleston. That made him one of many, since some 40 percent of Africans brought to the United States as slaves arrived at this Southern city’s harbor, the numbers increasing before the trans-Atlantic trade was outlawed a year later.Yet Said was also distinct. Thirty-seven when he was captured, he was a Muslim who had been studying Islam most of his life. Bought by a cruel master in Charleston, he escaped but was captured again in North Carolina, where he lived enslaved for more than 50 years, was baptized and wrote several works in Arabic, including an autobiographical essay that would win him some posthumous fame.Giddens had not heard of Said, and because she was born and raised in North Carolina and is a serious student of slavery’s history, she was a little surprised. Not as surprised, though, as she was by the next question: Would she like to write an opera about him?Omar ibn Said, the Muslim scholar who was sold into slavery in the early 19th century.Randolph Linsly Simpson African-American Collection; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript LibraryKnown principally as a banjo-playing folk singer and songwriter, Giddens is an artist of many accomplishments that include winning Grammy Awards and a MacArthur “genius” grant. At the time, though, writing operas was not one of them. Now, it is. “Omar,” composed with Michael Abels, will have its pandemic-delayed premiere at the festival on May 27 before it travels to Los Angeles Opera and Boston Lyric Opera next season.“I’m one of those say yes now, and figure out how to do it later types,” Giddens said after a recent rehearsal. “But then I immediately thought, ‘What have I done?’”It wasn’t that Giddens had no experience in opera. She trained as an opera singer at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. But after she graduated in 2000 her interests shifted.Once she moved back to North Carolina, she got into string band music, the genre of square dances and hoedowns. As the child of a white father and a Black mother, she felt at first like an interloper, like “the other,” as she explained in a 2017 keynote address for the International Bluegrass Music Association.But she discovered that the roots of the music were cross-cultural, at least as Black as they were white. It was only in the early 20th century that the music became exclusively associated with rural whiteness, “which led to me feeling like an alien in what I find out is my own cultural tradition,” she said in the speech.She took up the banjo, another symbol of hillbilly whiteness that actually has Black and African roots. Learning from the octogenarian Black fiddler Joe Thompson, she and two friends formed the Carolina Chocolate Drops, helping to reclaim the string band tradition for Black artists.As she turned solo, around 2015, the cultural tradition that she claimed and extended grew broader, encompassing Dolly Parton and Nina Simone songs alongside her own, which sometimes drew on slave narratives. Most recently, with the Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, who is also her romantic partner, she has been connecting that American music to the music of Africa, the Mediterranean and the Islamic world. (They perform at Spoleto on May 28.)Along the way, Giddens acquired what she calls her mission: “uncovering and highlighting parts of our history that have been suppressed to tell a false narrative that is tearing us apart.” Her music expresses an idea about deeply tangled cultural roots, an ethos encapsulated in the title of her 2019 album: “There Is No Other.”She never lost her love of opera, though. “I kept my oar in a little bit,” she said, by singing arias with orchestras and hosting the podcast “Aria Code.” She also starred in a Greensboro Opera production of “Porgy and Bess” earlier this year. But “Omar” was “an opportunity to be back in the world of opera in the way I was needed,” she said. “It’s a return to opera, but on my own terms.”Originally, Spoleto proposed that Giddens bring on a librettist, but she soon decided that she could handle the libretto herself; what she needed was another composer as collaborator, one with more knowledge of the orchestra. Remembering Abels’s score for the Jordan Peele horror film “Get Out,” she got the composer’s email address from a colleague and wrote to him: “You don’t know me, but would you like to write an opera with me?”“What she didn’t know,” Abels said in an interview, “was that it had always been a dream of mine to write an opera.” He immediately said yes.The next challenge was to shape the story. Said’s brief autobiographical essay provides some basic facts, though much of it is quotations from the Quran. “We know so little about his life,” Giddens said, “and the story has to come from what he’s left us, which is his spiritual journey.” Although she consulted with scholars, she feared writing about a Muslim culture that wasn’t hers. “I had to fight a lot of impostor syndrome,” she said, “but a friend told me, ‘They hired you, so just be you.’”“I was really guided by instinct,” she continued. Scenes came to her nearly full-fledged, as “deep ancestral memory moments.” She imagined Omar’s journey across the Atlantic, the Middle Passage, and was struck by the overwhelming smell. “I wanted the everyday stuff that is actually the most devastating thing about slavery,” she said.Models and concept art for the “Omar” production,” which opens Friday before traveling widely.Elizabeth Bick for The New York TimesShe also imagined fictional characters. Julie, an enslaved woman whom Omar meets at the Charleston slave market and who helps him get to North Carolina, “just walked into the story,” Giddens said. In a photograph of Said, he wears a head wrap that Giddens turned into a metaphor for how he holds on to his faith and a connection between the characters. The first line of Julie’s aria, which Giddens said “just came to her,” is “My daddy had a cap like yours.”After Omar arrives in America, much of the opera’s drama is channeled through what the production’s director, Kaneza Schaal, called “a contest of languages,” involving much translation and mistranslation. When other enslaved people sing “Oh, Lord, how long,” Omar hears “Allah.” When a slave owner asks Omar to write the “Lord is my shepherd” in Arabic, what he actually writes (in a script the owner can’t read) is “I want to go home.” Omar’s journey, translated into opera, becomes about finding a language to hold together all that he experiences.Giddens knows about that search. If writing about Senegal was a stretch for her, several of the scenes were familiar territory. When Omar arrives at a North Carolina plantation, there’s a frolic, complete with a caller telling the dancers when to promenade. It’s like a corn-shucking, a barn dance — an earlier iteration of the tradition Giddens learned from Thompson.The sound of “Omar,” however, is always that of an orchestra. “I wrote a lot of it on banjo, but nobody’s playing banjo in it,” Giddens said. “The orchestra becomes a banjo, and that’s the most radical move.”While composing, Giddens recorded tracks, singing and accompanying herself, that she sent to Abels. “She has a wonderful gift for melody, but what people may not know is how great she is at creating character with her voice,” he said. “She would sing Omar or Julie or the auctioneer, and the personality was clear in the music.”Abels then took those themes and orchestrated them, sometimes making the harmonic language more complex and applying the sense of pacing he’s developed writing for film. The result was a blend of their voices, and, Giddens said, “the genius of Michael is figuring out where the lines blur.”From left, the conductors John Kennedy and Kellen Gray, as well as Giddens and the singers Cheryse McLeod Lewis and Jamez McCorkle, rehearsing “Omar.”Elizabeth Bick for The New York TimesIt was important to both composers that the opera be composed for a conventional orchestra. One reason was aesthetic, Abels said: “It pulls on so many diverse genres of music” — of the Muslim diaspora, spirituals, bluegrass, Wagner and that other opera set in Charleston, “Porgy.” “The traditional orchestra unifies them.”Another motivation was practical, if political. “The subject matter is extremely not traditional, so we want the opera to feel traditional,” Abels said. An opera company producing “Omar” is already likely to have to recruit Black cast members. A standard orchestra helps make the work, as Giddens put it, “replicable.” In other words, there are fewer excuses not to program it.For now, that strategy seems to be working. In addition to runs in Los Angeles and Boston, “Omar” is due at the houses of its other co-commissioners, the Lyric Opera of Chicago and San Francisco Opera. Giddens and Abels said that they are excited to be part of a wave of Black composers whose operas are now being produced — such as Terence Blanchard, whose “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” opened the Metropolitan Opera’s season in New York, becoming the first work by a Black composer in that company’s repertory.Giddens said that she wrote arias that are “nice for the voice” in part so young Black singers could use them in recitals. “I wanted to write for me at 18,” she said.Having the composers in the rehearsal room also makes a difference. As the cast worked on one of the early Africa scenes, Giddens suggested to Jamez McCorkle, who plays Omar, how his vocal line, “like a river on top of the rhythm,” should “weave the spell of how beautiful Omar’s spirituality is.” McCorkle took the note like a revelation. “Can you not leave?” he asked her half-jokingly. (Busy with her solo career, leading the Silkroad Ensemble and raising her children in Ireland, where she lives, Giddens can’t attend all rehearsals.)“It matters so much that she’s a singer,” McCorkle said afterward. “The music is so easy on the voice, and the opera is a chance for us to be represented, for our history not to be erased.”Giddens, reflecting on the rehearsal process, said that she was newly impressed “by the amount of brainpower, creativity and collaboration it takes to put on something like this.” She marveled at how opera is “such a powerful, transcendent art form,” but also one that has been “trapped.”In that 2017 speech, Giddens said, “The question is not how do we get diversity into bluegrass, but how do we get diversity back into bluegrass?” Opera is no different, she said in Charleston. Echoing a point Schaal made about how opera is a form built on hundreds of years of cultural exchange, Giddens spoke of how “every person puts their imprint on tradition” and how “we can look at music and see where we have come together.”“Omar” is just a start. “Opera is for everybody, so how do we reach more people?” she asked, listing all the areas — accessibility, audience development, community work — that need more creativity and commitment. “I’m starting,” she said, “to learn to ask for that at the beginning.”The mission continues. More

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      Review: Grammy-Winning ‘Akhnaten’ Returns to the Met Opera

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      Philip Glass’s portrait of a pathbreaking pharaoh returns to the Metropolitan Opera for the first time since its hit debut there in 2019.It wasn’t so long ago this season — just January — that the Metropolitan Opera’s programming was about as classic as it gets: tried-and-true works by Verdi, Puccini and Mozart.But scan the coming weeks, and you’ll find what looks like a better, more adventurous company. On Thursday, Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” returned for the first time since its Met debut, in 2019, joining the American premiere last week of Brett Dean’s “Hamlet.” Next to open, on May 30, is a revival of Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress,” in a staging by Jonathan Miller that is older but more stylish than many at the house. By June, “Rigoletto” will stand alone as a holdout of the core repertory.While a break from the Met’s standard programming, “Akhnaten” — the final installment, from 1984, in Glass’s trilogy of “portrait” operas, after the pathbreaking “Einstein on the Beach” and “Satyagraha,” a meditation on Gandhi’s nonviolent movement — may be a surer bet than, say, “Tosca.” When “Akhnaten” belatedly arrived there a few years ago, it was a critical and box office success, one that attracted a visibly younger audience.That run eventually made its way onto a recording that recently won a Grammy Award. This revival is something of a victory lap, with the same conductor and nearly the same cast. Even Thursday’s audience seemed transported from those earlier days. With artists like Erin Markey and Justin Vivian Bond mingling on the theater’s promenade, the scene was more Joe’s Pub than Lincoln Center.There were, though, some crucial differences from 2019. Phelim McDermott’s production, now more lived-in, unfolded with elegant inevitability rather than effort; the score was executed with a clarity and drive absent on the often slack album. And while “Akhnaten” may be one of Glass’s tributes to great men who changed the world — through science, politics and faith — Thursday’s performance of it made a persuasive argument for where the real power lies: with the women.For example, the mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb, the cast’s newcomer, as Nefertiti, Akhnaten’s wife. Long presented at the Met in operas from the 18th and 19th centuries, she was singing a new kind of role on Thursday, one she seized with assurance and ringing might. As a partner for Anthony Roth Costanzo, the countertenor who has a virtual monopoly on the title role in this production, her lush, vibrato-rich sound was a productive contrast to his ethereal purity — she grounded and he celestial, they met somewhere in the middle for their long, hypnotically sensual love duet.More powerful yet was the soprano Disella Larusdottir as Queen Tye, Akhnaten’s mother. Penetrating and resonant, she shot out burst-like phrases with nearly mechanical exactitude and endurance, but was also expressive within the discipline. It’s Akhnaten, pioneering a kind of monotheism in his worship of the sun god Aten, who banishes the priests from the temple in Act II. On Thursday, though, the attack seemed to come from Queen Tye, so frightening and forceful was Larusdottir in her delivery.The conductor Karen Kamensek held together what can be an unwieldy production and led a Met Orchestra much more reliably capable than in 2019. She and the ensemble set the tone with the opera’s mood-altering, time-bending prelude. On the recording, propulsive, shifting arpeggios come off as sluggish, with lapses of legato phrasing. Returned to with more experience, along with noticeably more control, the score moved along with crisp transparency and a tense momentum that didn’t let up in the first act. The instrumentalists still have work to do, though. As the show went on, the strings occasionally slid into soft articulation; and the brasses suffered from clumsiness and imprecision, mistakes that can’t be hidden in music that lives or dies on accuracy.McDermott’s production similarly exposes its performers: not only the singers but also a dozen jugglers in catsuits, including Sean Gandini, the show’s choreographer. As scrappy as it is ornate, the staging — with imaginative, thrift-store-find costumes by Kevin Pollard and sets to match by Tom Pye, and artful lighting by Bruno Poet — demands the patience and steadiness of yoga in its movement, as well as an active eye for anyone watching. (At one point, one of Gandini’s people balances atop a large rolling wheel while, on scaffolding above, jugglers toss balls as the chorus does a version of the same thing; playing out amid the spectacle is the funeral of Akhnaten’s father.)It can be a lot to take in, and the metaphor of juggling — its spheres redolent of Akhnaten’s precious sun, their constant and unpredictable motion as precarious as his reign — proves its point too quickly to go on for as long as it does. As ritual, it doesn’t achieve the transcendence of McDermott’s “Satyagraha,” one of the Met’s finest productions, a staging whose visual diversity and inventiveness give way to sublime austerity.Zachary James, left, with Costanzo and members of the juggling ensemble led by Sean Gandini.Ken HowardThe choreography, though, does have its awe-inspiring moments, such as when juggling pins fly around Aaron Blake, as the High Priest of Amon, who — despite the risk of being hit by one — doesn’t even suggest a flinch while singing with a full-bodied tenor sound. Blake’s character is joined by Aye (the bass Richard Bernstein) and General Horemhab (the baritone Will Liverman) to form a tripartite resistance to Akhnaten’s rule, inciting the revolt that ends it and restores the old religious order. The arc of the pharaoh’s reign is recounted in spoken passages by Zachary James, whose towering presence and booming declamations feel thrillingly neither of this time nor world.James assumes the role of a lecturing professor near the opera’s ending, while Costanzo’s Akhnaten appears as a museum display. This is how we remember, McDermott is saying: through history, through exhibition, through the pageantry of opera performance. Glass makes his own version of that point with the centerpiece aria, “Hymn to the Sun,” a setting of a prayer to Aten that ends with an offstage chorus singing the text of Psalm 104 — tracing a direct line from Akhnaten to the monotheism that dominates today.As if that weren’t enough to place Akhnaten in the pantheon of great innovators, the final scene’s music introduces a subtle quotation from “Einstein on the Beach.” Here, Glass doesn’t tidily package his “portraits” trilogy as much as acknowledge it. On Thursday, though, that intrusion was also a reminder: After the triumphs of “Satyagraha” and “Akhnaten,” when will the Met and McDermott give Einstein his due with a production of his own?AkhnatenThrough June 10 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Combing the Beach, and the Archives, to Revive ‘The Wreckers’

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      In the early 20th century, Smyth was probably the most famous female composer of her generation, but her music fell out of the repertoire. Glyndebourne Festival Opera is bringing back her 1906 maritime opera.LEWES, England — Late last fall, there was an unusual sight on a beach in southern England: a team of staff members from Glyndebourne Festival Opera combing the shingle for flotsam and jetsam, then carting it off in wheelbarrows for use onstage.It is an unusually true-to-life approach for one of Glyndebourne’s productions this season — “The Wreckers,” by the British composer Ethel Smyth. The action is set among an impoverished seaside community in 18th-century England, whose inhabitants make their living from scavenging the wreckage of ships they have driven ashore (as many did, historically).Glyndebourne staff members have combed a nearby beach in southern England for flotsam and jetsam to use onstage.Sam StephensonGlyndebourne is lavishing a lot of effort on “The Wreckers,” which, despite premiering in 1906, has been staged professionally only a handful of times. For nearly three years, Glyndebourne’s archivist has been combing through documents and old musical scores to assemble a new performing edition that matches the composer’s intentions as closely as possible. A production of this news restored version, which runs Saturday through June 24, will be sung in French, as the original was.A chorus of over 50, a team of dancers and a 75-piece orchestra have been hired to give the production some oomph. And, as a mark of respect, “The Wreckers” has been placed in pole position as the summer festival’s opening show, displacing the operatic big-hitters that generally take up this spot.“We’re trying to do Ethel justice,” Robin Ticciati, Glyndebourne’s music director, said in an interview. “Quite honestly, it’s about time someone did.”Robin Ticciati, Glyndebourne’s music director. Ethel Smyth is “someone who has a ferocious sense of what she believed in,” he said, “and that comes through in the drama.”James BelloriniIn the first decades of the 20th century, Smyth was probably the most famous female composer of her generation, but now her work is almost never heard. She was championed by Mahler and by the conductor Thomas Beecham, who proclaimed “The Wreckers” a masterpiece and put it on at the Royal Opera House in London. In 1903, Smyth became the first woman to have a work staged at the Metropolitan Opera (and, astonishingly, remained the only one until 2016).Yet after her death in 1944, Smyth’s music gradually faded from the repertoire. There were fewer and fewer outings for her symphonies, choral works or chamber pieces, and even fewer stagings of her six operas. Only a handful of recordings exist: The sole version of “The Wreckers” currently available is from a 1994 live performance.Patient advocacy by the American conductor Leon Botstein yielded a production of “The Wreckers” at the Bard SummerScape Festival in 2015 at Bard College in New York, and there have been scattered performances of Smyth’s other works since. In November, the Houston Opera will also put on “The Wreckers” in its own new staging.Smyth might have arched an eyebrow: near nothing for decades, then two new shows at once.Leah Broad, a music historian at Oxford University who is writing a group biography that includes Smyth, said “gender prejudice” was one of the chief reasons Smyth’s music was so little performed.“There are other issues, but that’s a lot to do with it,” Broad said. “She’s a really significant historical composer.”Smyth in 1943. In the first decades of the 20th century, she was probably the most famous female composer of her generation, but now her work is almost never heard. Kurt Hutton/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesSmyth also has one of the great life stories in musical history. Brought up in a military household, she was initially forbidden from studying music by her father, but she eventually won out and attended the Leipzig Conservatory in Germany in 1887.Although she dropped out after a year, unimpressed by the teaching, while she was there she met Dvorak, Grieg and Tchaikovsky — who wrote in his diary that Smyth was “one of the few women composers whom one can seriously consider to be achieving something valuable.”A formidable networker, Symth later befriended many well-known people, including George Bernard Shaw and Empress Eugenie of France, and she had much-gossiped-about romantic affairs with both men and women.Smyth got many of her works performed and won a degree of acceptance, but always battled the assumption that what she was doing was essentially second-rate. Writing in The Times of London in 1893, a critic praised her “virile” compositions and commended “the entire absence of the qualities that are usually associated with feminine productions.”More humiliatingly, Smyth was often treated as the butt of a joke — as famous for her forceful personality, many dogs and penchant for wearing men’s suits as anything she had written. Virginia Woolf, who carried on an intimate correspondence with the much-older Smyth, nonetheless complained in her diary that becoming the subject of Smyth’s affections was like being “caught by a giant crab.”In 1910, Smyth became involved with the women’s suffrage movement. Two years later, she was sent to Holloway prison in London for several months after throwing a rock through the window of a government office. When Beecham visited her in jail, he later recalled, he was astonished to see Smyth conducting an exercise-yard performance of her rousing “March of the Women” from a cell window “in almost Bacchic frenzy, with a toothbrush.”“The Wreckers” stage at Glyndebourne. The show starts on Saturday and runs through late June.James BelloriniLike much of Smyth’s music, “The Wreckers” is an intense experience. Inspired by visits the composer made to remote coastal villages in Cornwall, in southwest England, it centers on a local preacher’s wife, Thirza, who is torn between her sense of duty to her puritanical husband and her love for a kindhearted fisherman.Not incidentally, Smyth was herself involved in a romantic triangle with the opera’s librettist, the married American poet Henry Brewster, and his wife, Julia. “There’s such passion in the love music,” said Karis Tucker, who sings Thirza at Glyndebourne. “She knew what she was writing about.”Ticciati said the score had both power and remarkable range, sounding “sometimes like Brahms, then Mendelssohn, then French exoticism, even late Debussy.” He added: “You think: ‘What is this?’ And then you realize that this is Ethel Smyth; this is what she sounds like.”As well as conjuring a fogbound maritime atmosphere, infused with snatches of folk song and sea shanties, Smyth seems to find particular relish in crowd scenes, as her supposedly God-fearing villagers prepare to lynch shipwrecked sailors before turning on each other.Tucker and the chorus of “The Wreckers” rehearsing last month.Richard Hubert SmithThere’s more than a hint of “The Crucible” about “The Wreckers,” and as Broad, the music historian, pointed out, the pre-echoes of another seafaring work, Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes” (1945), are even stronger. “Britten owned a score of ‘The Wreckers’; it’s right there in his library,” Broad said. “He was never polite about Ethel Smyth’s music, but he was clearly influenced by it.”Finally, more of us will get the opportunity to make up our own minds. In addition to the Houston production, Glyndebourne will take a semistaged version of its “Wreckers” to the BBC Proms festival this July. The Proms is making Smyth a major focus and spotlighting other works of hers, including Mass in D and Concerto for Violin and Horn.“She’s so overdue her moment,” Broad said. “When you hear her, it’s like a gap in music suddenly gets filled.”Fearlessly inventive, sensuous and sometimes shocking, “The Wreckers” is a fine testament to the woman who created it, Ticciati said. “She’s someone who has a ferocious sense of what she believed in, and that comes through in the drama,” he argued.“I don’t want to say Ethel was larger than life,” Ticciati added, “because I think that was her life.”The WreckersMay 21 through June 24 at the Glyndebourne Festival in Lewes, England; glyndebourne.com. More