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      Visconti’s Operatic Autopsy of German History, Restored Anew

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      The trilogy of “The Damned,” “Death in Venice” and “Ludwig” is whole again, in editions that freshly reveal their conflicted queerness.The revered Italian director Luchino Visconti was openly gay yet devoutly Catholic, ostensibly Communist yet unyieldingly aristocratic. In short, he embodied contradictions that haunt many of his films, in which criticism can sometimes be confused with reverence, or obsessive detail with tasteless excess.Nowhere is this more evident, to sometimes frustrating and other times awe-inspiring effect, than in his so-called German trilogy of “The Damned” (1969), “Death in Venice” (1971) and “Ludwig” (1973). These films are hard to love and not as widely adored as his earlier masterpieces, like “Rocco and His Brothers” and “The Leopard,” but they are a culmination of his preoccupations and paradoxes: Visconti at his most operatic, confessionally queer and questioning of the present through meticulous reconstructions of the past.In this triptych, that past is the history of Germany, recounted in what amounts to an autopsy that traces the apocalyptic 1930s back to the Romantic 19th century. And now, with the Criterion Collection’s recent release of “The Damned,” the three films are all available again, in new restorations that not only improve picture and sound quality, but also hew more closely to Visconti’s controversial intent.His earlier films — even his first, “Ossessione,” from 1943 — hint at a queer sensibility; and he had already begun to develop ever-lavish, operatic set pieces with historical sweep, such as in “Senso” and “The Leopard.” But with “The Damned,” Visconti embarked on a series of films that quietly wrestled with his own conflicted feelings about sexuality and class, and at the same time illustrated the twilight of the monarchy, of the aristocracy and, eventually, of Germany itself.But in reverse: He begins at the end, as if the trilogy were a whodunit, influenced throughout by Thomas Mann and Richard Wagner. (Not for nothing is the Italian title of “The Damned” “La Caduta degli Dei” — “Twilight of the Gods,” the same name given to the finale of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle.) The gods here are the members of the von Essenbeck family, industrialists whose decline simultaneously paves the way for World War II.They are introduced — after a credits sequence of brassy melodrama and imagery reminiscent of Wagner’s fiery Nibelheim, where the ruinous gold ring is forged — in 1933 during a birthday party for the patriarch at their ornate and expansive family home, first shown through the eyes of the lower-class people who make it run.Berger as Martin von Essenbeck, a villainously ambitious young man scheming to rule his family’s business in “The Damned.”The Criterion CollectionBetween the scenery and the sounds of Bach wafting from a distant room, an older way of German life is established, then followed by a drag performance in which a grandson, the young Martin (Helmut Berger, Visconti’s lover), channels Marlene Dietrich in “The Blue Angel,” much to the family’s disgust. But he is interrupted by the announcement that the Reichstag is burning. Selfishly and obliviously, he continues until he is again cut off. “They could have chosen a better day to burn the Reichstag, right, Grandfather?” he responds.That grandfather is murdered the same evening, and what follows is a “Macbeth”-like melodrama of opportunism, murderous scheming and sexual deviancy; Martin, though coded as gay, also molests young girls and, in the film’s appalling climax, rapes his mother into a catatonic state. By the end, the von Essenbeck company’s leadership falls to Martin, who is all too ready to cooperate with the Nazi regime, while his mother and her lover marry then take cyanide together — a scene that recalls the deaths of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun.But among those horrors is a sequence that ended up censored and is presented in its original form in the Criterion release: a dreamy and homoerotic recounting of the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler’s purge of the paramilitary brownshirts. At a Bavarian lake hotel, they pass an orgiastic evening of folk songs, beer and increasing nudity before retreating to rooms for gay sex, but only deep into the night — as if they were Wagner’s lovers Tristan and Isolde. Indeed, the camera cuts to one of the von Essenbecks, Konstantin, barking through that opera’s “Liebestod” (“love-death”) at a piano. When they are all massacred in the morning, a member of the SS remarks “Alles tot,” or “all dead,” a line that also appears in the final scene of “Tristan.”A kind of liebestod ends “Death in Venice” (also available from Criterion), an adaptation of Mann’s novella that makes more literal its forbidden desire. Visconti changed the protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde), from a writer to a composer resembling Mahler. That composer’s Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony is the film’s musical soul: “Death in Venice” is virtually a silent movie, an opera of facial expressions by Aschenbach and coy returned looks from the boy he obsesses over as beauty personified, Tadzio. (He’s played by Bjorn Andresen, a Swedish teenager handpicked by Visconti in a disturbing audition shown in the recent documentary “The Most Beautiful Boy in the World”).Dirk Bogarde as Gustav von Aschenbach in “Death in Venice,” an opera in facial expressions set to Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.The Criterion Collection“Death in Venice” both satirizes and relishes upper-class Venetian tourism of the early 20th century, with a patient camera that settles, uncomfortably if nauseatingly, on an overdecorated hotel and its overdressed guests. Yet sequences there also carry a trace of elegy for a world soon to be erased by World War I, the kind of nostalgia of Wes Anderson’s “Grand Budapest Hotel.”Aschenbach’s desire, like all homosexuality in the German trilogy, is doomed. In something of an operatic mad scene, he visits a barber who dyes his hair, powders him with ghost-white makeup and rouges his cheeks. His unrestrained passion compels him to follow Tadzio to his death, of cholera, as he watches the boy from his lounge chair on the beach, black dye streaming down his cheek in the heat. But it’s an ecstatic death, that of Isolde, unconsummated yet transfigured.Wagner’s influence on “Ludwig” is even more explicit. He is a character in this sprawling psychodrama-as-biography about King Ludwig II of Bavaria (Helmut Berger again) — a movie presented in various cuts over the years, and in the restoration released a few years ago by Arrow Academy more complete than ever, running over four hours. The imagery of night versus day in “Tristan” also runs through the reign of Ludwig, who made that opera possible while also bankrolling Wagner’s spendthrift habits and extravagant ambition.Ludwig appears to behave with childish petulance — hiding, after Wagner is expelled from Munich, in a dark room with a toy that projects rotating stars on the ceiling to a music-box rendition of the “Song to the Evening Star” from “Tannhäuser.” But he is more like Tristan, hiding in the world of night from what is expected of him in reality: monarchical duties, the expectation to marry.Visconti’s film is primarily nocturnal, or shot in rooms with closed curtains and, in one case, an artificial grotto inspired by the “Tannhäuser” Venusberg. Instrumental arrangements from that opera follow Ludwig, like Mahler with Aschenbach, until the music fades, tellingly, after the death of his beloved Wagner.The king becomes increasingly isolated, eating from a table in his bedroom that is raised and lowered through the floor so he doesn’t have to see his staff members, even though they are also the outlet for his gay longing. In a scene that echoes “The Damned,” Ludwig’s men gather for folk-fueled debauchery inside a hut modeled on the “Ring.”Again, the sequence is long: elegiac, immersive and ultimately tragic. It is in scenes like this that Visconti is at his most brazenly queer. But he also relegates gay desire to that realm of night, and inextricably links it to Romanticism and decadence — the same kind that, the three films’ autopsy shows, put Germany on its inevitable path to destruction. More

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      Review: The Met’s ‘Turandot,’ Strongly Sung, Garishly Staged

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      Christine Goerke and Yusif Eyvazov star in a revival of Franco Zeffirelli’s production, which adds gaudiness to Puccini’s sophisticated score.By opening its season a few weeks ago with Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the first work by a Black composer in its history, the Metropolitan Opera was attempting to engage with the present moment, in all its roiling complexities.But on Tuesday the old Met, a company of grand tradition and unabashed spectacle, returned with a revival of Puccini’s “Turandot” in Franco Zeffirelli’s glittering, gaudy, opulent, tacky and overwhelmingly popular 1987 production.When this production was last mounted, in the fall of 2019, the lead roles of Turandot, an icy Chinese princess, and Calàf, the prince who seeks to win her love, were sung splendidly by the soprano Christine Goerke and the tenor Yusif Eyvazov. Assuming these demanding parts again on Tuesday, they were even better.But 2019 seems a long time ago. Much has changed since the pandemic forced the closure of cultural institutions around the world, including a wave of anti-Asian hostility that has compelled the arts to re-examine lingering prejudices and racist stereotypes. For some, “Turandot” — not just Zeffirelli’s extravagant production, but the opera itself, set in the fantastical Peking of legend — is an example of the problem. As much as I love the music, and as often as I’ve seen (or put up with) this staging, it was impossible not to view it this time in this context.To hear Puccini’s score as rife with awkward evocations of Asian exotica and stereotypes is, to me, unfair. The story of “Turandot,” which is based on a fairy tale by the 18th-century Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi, prodded Puccini, who had already absorbed elements of Asian music, to explore those sources even further. In the score, he incorporates several Chinese melodies. Like Debussy, who had an epiphany when he attended an 1889 exposition of Asian arts and culture in Paris, Puccini was genuinely excited by Chinese culture. He doesn’t just drop these tunes into this score, but blends them — with nuance and respect — into his own Italianate, 20th-century harmonic language.Goerke sang the daunting aria “In questa reggia” with steely sound and thrilling intensity.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStill, the characters can come off as clichéd or worse. And it’s too easy to dismiss concerns by saying the opera is just a fairy tale, or that Zeffirelli’s production is just an over-the-top costume epic that shouldn’t be taken too seriously.Perhaps the most problematic characters — at least in Zeffirelli’s interpretation — are the trio of royal ministers with names that can make today’s audiences cringe: Ping, Pang and Pong (in this revival, Hyung Yun, Tony Stevenson and Eric Ferring). True to Gozzi, Puccini was evoking stock types out of commedia dell’arte. As the ministers bicker, chatter and fret over the deadly riddles Turandot puts her suitors through, he gives the three ministers much bustling, comedic music to sing. Yet the orchestra keeps needling the vocal lines with jabbing dissonances and modernist harmonic twists, so a sober subtext comes through.And there are stretches when the ministers pine for their homes in the country and yearn for the old times that are some of the most beguiling music in the opera. These ravishing episodes are lush with Impressionist-like harmonic writing and hazy colorings. (You almost hear Puccini saying, “Take that, Debussy!”) The issue is less the score than the production: The Met could rid Zeffirelli’s staging of the mincing, fan-waving antics, allowing the ministers to appear as the sage observers they are.Goerke and Eyvazov sang so well that I was swept up in Puccini’s music during their scenes, despite the silvery extravagance of the imperial palace, here so bright you almost squint. Goerke sang the daunting aria “In questa reggia” with steely sound and thrilling intensity, and, later, soared impressively over the full chorus and orchestra. Eyvazov, an athletic-looking Calàf, had beefy sound and clarion top notes, getting a big ovation for his “Nessun dorma.”Puccini’s score blends Chinese melodies into his Italianate, 20th-century harmonic language, but Zeffirelli’s 1987 staging can feel over-the-top.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe soprano Gabriella Reyes, her voice radiant and rich in vibrato, was an uncommonly strong Liù, the servant in love with Calàf; Timur, Calàf’s father, was the stalwart bass-baritone James Morris, appearing 50 years after his Met debut. The superb Met chorus has Puccini’s score and Zeffirelli’s staging down pat; the singing in the big ensemble scenes was glorious. The conductor Marco Armiliato led a sure-paced and colorful performance.But what is the Met to do with this production, which seems increasingly anachronistic? Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, got burned in 2009 when he replaced Zeffirelli’s grandly realistic production of “Tosca” with a sparer, grimmer staging that was booed at its premiere and, in time, cast aside. This “Turandot” has drawn audiences for decades. But the time may have come for a more probing and restrained take on what is — for me and many others — Puccini’s great final opera.TurandotThrough Nov. 16 (and in the spring with a different cast) at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Jazz and Opera Come Together in ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones’

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      Two critics discuss Terence Blanchard’s “Fire,” the Metropolitan Opera’s first work by a Black composer.“Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the Metropolitan Opera’s season last week, was a milestone: the company’s first work by a Black composer. The music, by Terence Blanchard —  a jazz trumpeter also known for his scores for Spike Lee films — has earned praise from both classical and jazz critics.The New York Times’s chief classical critic Anthony Tommasini described “a compositional voice dominated by lushly chromatic and modal harmonic writing, spiked with jagged rhythms and tart dissonance.” The jazz writer Nate Chinen wrote for NPR that “the smooth deployment of extended jazz harmony, often in breathing, fleeting passages, marks the piece as modern — as does the work of a rhythm section nestled within the orchestra.”The Times sent two more critics to the second performance on Friday. Seth Colter Walls, based on the classical desk, and Giovanni Russonello, who specializes in jazz, have both covered figures who cross with ease between concert halls and jazz clubs. But “Fire,” based on a 2014 memoir by the Times columnist Charles M. Blow, was their first night at the opera together, the spur to an extended discussion.SETH COLTER WALLS As we walked into the Met, you described yourself as an opera neophyte. But as Duke Ellington said, good music is good music. And from our intermission chats, I know we agree that this was a richly enjoyable work. How do you place it within Blanchard’s career?GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO We knew going in that Blanchard’s body of work is one of the broadest and most imposing of any living jazz musician. But I was struck by how many aspects of his past output seemed to come together in “Fire.” He’s one of the rare jazz composers who can load up a piece with rich harmony and real rhythmic pleasure, without feeling the need to tie things up neatly or deliver a clean payoff. That style fed perfectly into the emotional ambivalence that gives this opera its power.WALLS I find that quality to be one of the weapons he offers Spike Lee, who in his films tends to delight in keeping alive ambiguous tension. Blanchard can suture small wings of hope to what otherwise seems a rock of despair, and keep you wondering whether the whole assemblage will rise or fall.Will Liverman, left, and Angel Blue star in “Fire” at the Met.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRUSSONELLO From the opening scene of “Fire,” his diverse palette was put in the service of narrative nuance. As Charles, the main character, speeds down the highway, holding a pistol and a fatal decision in his hands, a distant swing feel wafted up from the pit, propelled by the bassist Matt Brewer and the drummer Jeff Watts, who’s known in jazz circles as Tain. It had the same restless, pushing-forward feeling as many of Blanchard’s small-group jazz compositions. But a drape of violins also hung above, moving in unison with the baritone Will Liverman’s vocal lines — and calling to mind some of those sweeping film scores.WALLS True, though Liverman also sounded a bit swamped by some of that opening brass-and-percussion-heavy writing. But soon after, the subtlety of his singing impressed me. Flintier aspects of his tone dominated during the first act, but then fell away as the night wore on. Even by the time of the “golden buttons” melody in the first act, I think we both were moved by the warmth in his voice.RUSSONELLO And by the gravitas of his duet on that melody with the soprano Angel Blue, who plays three characters: the half-menacing Destiny; the all-too-sympathetic Loneliness; and Greta, with whom he falls in love.Which leads me to another successful element of “Fire” that reflects Blanchard’s roots in the Black musical tradition: the interplay between vocalists, in duets and ensembles. Some of the most rousing moments were not solos but shared performances: When Charles’s mother, Billie (Latonia Moore), sings about her frustrated dreams early in the opera, the chorus is behind her describing the tough conditions of their town, giving her struggles texture and weight. Charles’s brothers’s recurring taunt — “Charles baby, youngest of five” — becomes one of the opera’s most memorable refrains.From left, Blue, Walter Russell III, Latonia Moore and Liverman. One of the opera’s strengths is in the interplay between vocalists in duets and ensembles.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWALLS Following Billie to her job at the meat-preparation plant also turns into a fine group number. And, crucially, there are laugh lines in these and other scenes.RUSSONELLO Group dance performances stood out, too. Act II’s opening ballet sequence and the step-team number in Act III were probably the clearest examples of African diasporic tradition meeting opera convention; in both moments, something sparked.Blanchard has said that, like his first opera, “Champion” (2013), “Fire” is an “opera in jazz.” But like any postmodernist, his understanding of what constitutes jazz is quite open. It can mean wildly extended harmony, blues inflections, odd-metered cadences, unconventional instrumental pairings. With “Fire,” the blueprint was classic Italian opera, but the furniture was these other elements. And magnetic rhythm was a constant throughout.WALLS The cast clearly loved sliding bluesy figurations between passages delivered with operatic vibrato.At the start of Act III, when Charles pledges the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, the step routine drew the night’s longest and most vigorous applause.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRUSSONELLO Blanchard has such a knack for counterintuition: A consequential scene at a blues club begins with the orchestra playing some straightforward blues in the background, but when the bandleader character (Spinner, Charles’s scalawag father, played by Chauncey Packer) gets onstage, he sings something more operatic and complex.WALLS I loved that head-fake from Blanchard. (I also wanted to attend a full set of Spinner’s at that club.)RUSSONELLO Spinner’s “Lord Love the Sinner” is a rapscallion anthem that harks back to Sportin’ Life’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So” in “Porgy and Bess.” Which brings up the question of how “Fire” relates to other works in the American canon that toe the line between blues, jazz and opera — including works by William Grant Still (a favorite composer of yours, Seth) or Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. (What powerful work might they have made with a Met commission?) Were there any major touchstones that jumped out as we took in “Fire”?WALLS Blanchard sounds like Blanchard, which is key. He’s coming out of a folk tradition, like Still. He’s adding ringers from his jazz career to the opera pit, like Anthony Davis and Leroy Jenkins have done. But he’s his own composer. Some piano-led moments made me think of what Jelly Roll Morton, known to riff on Verdi’s “Il Trovatore,” would have done if given a chance to let his New Orleans aesthetic shine forth from the Met stage.Blanchard, holding up his finger, rehearses the jazz ensemble that is embedded in the “Fire” orchestra.Simbarashe Cha for The New York TimesRUSSONELLO It bears noting that New Orleans — Blanchard’s hometown, too — has its own rich (though badly forgotten) history of Black opera. The first opera in the United States was staged there, and in the years between Reconstruction and Jim Crow a number of opera houses featured casts of color. Blanchard’s father, an amateur opera singer, was an inheritor of that tradition; this, in turn, became part of his son’s musical DNA.WALLS That second-act dream-ballet music — perfect for the languid, suggestive dancing that it was paired with — was but one passage suggesting Blanchard’s love for the standard repertory. Yet we haven’t had anything quite like “Fire.” Leonard Bernstein looked at intergenerational trauma amid a distinctly American sound world in “A Quiet Place” — and while I love it, it’s also a notorious problem piece. And “Porgy and Bess” has never really worked as an evening of theater for me. (Great tunes, though.)So my response to this big-budget production was: Finally! Real classical music resources are being used here, for a real exploration of American musical culture. I feel like there’s a huge potential audience for this material — even for people who may not think of themselves as operagoers. (“Fire” will be simulcast to movie theaters on Oct. 23 as part of the Met’s Live in HD program.)RUSSONELLO At the start of Act III, when Charles pledges the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, the step routine drew the night’s longest and most vigorous applause. It tapped into a dance tradition that’s basically unrelated to opera, but was accorded a different kind of power appearing at the Met.WALLS One of the virtues of Kasi Lemmons’s libretto — and what Blanchard does with it — is that we get these sequences that are at are both encomiums to bulwarks of Black life and critiques. Charles’s extended family, his church and his fraternity each play a part in keeping him from telling the truth about being molested by his cousin. The drama and the music keep braiding together pride and frustration, in a way that makes the opera’s conclusion and Charles’s self-acceptance feel truly momentous. More

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      Carlisle Floyd: Artists Share Memories of a Composer

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      The writer of “Susannah” and other operas is remembered by a tenor, a conductor and an impresario who worked closely with him.The career of the American composer Carlisle Floyd, who died on Thursday at 95, spanned nearly 70 years and the heydays of a host of musical styles. But through them all, Floyd stayed stubbornly true to himself and his vision: creating operas with clear, strong narratives — often about intolerance and social outcasts — and scores grounded in tonality.While some academics and critics who favored a thornier modernism found Floyd’s works simplistic, artists and audiences embraced his compelling characters and passionate music.Here are edited excerpts from interviews about him with the tenor Anthony Dean Griffey, famed as Lennie in Floyd’s adaptation of “Of Mice and Men”; the conductor Patrick Summers, a frequent collaborator and Houston Grand Opera’s music director since 1998; and David Gockley, who as general director of the Houston company from 1972 to 2005 presented six of Floyd’s works.Anthony Dean Griffey, left, as Lennie, one of his signature roles, and Elizabeth Futral as Curley’s Wife in “Of Mice and Men” at Houston Grand Opera in 2002.George Hixson/Houston Grand OperaAnthony Dean GriffeyWhen I started singing, I had a close connection to outsider characters, because I felt a bit like an outsider when I was growing up in North Carolina. I’m a large guy, and that got pointed out.In 1997, Glimmerglass Opera in upstate New York contacted the Metropolitan Opera, where I was in the young artists program, and said they were auditioning for Lennie in “Of Mice and Men.” I had worked every summer with special needs children and adults, so I really knew the character. The audition was the next day, so I learned the “mice aria” overnight. And I was cast, and my life changed forever. Carlisle’s music gave me a place in the opera world that I didn’t think I could have.After Glimmerglass, it took off and went to New York City Opera, and then I sang it at one opera house after another. I was concerned about being typecast, and maybe I was, but I didn’t mind that. I’d rather at the end of my career and life be known for a role that really made a difference, rather than 120 roles and no one knew what I did.I felt that Carlisle captured Lennie perfectly. The part is quite rangy, and for me the challenge was keeping his innocence while singing a very wide range in terms of the tessitura. Lennie has different emotions, very sporadically. He can turn on a dime. He’s lyrical when he dreams about his future with George and the rabbits and chickens, but his outbursts are dramatic and heavy. I’ve always thought of myself as an actor who sings and a singer who acts. So I made sounds that were not always beautiful tones, but they were what Lennie would have done.Carlisle was hands-off. I’ve done a lot of new music and sometimes composers have very specific ideas and get in the way of your interpretation. But he gave me the license to almost recreate the role. He was always complimentary, kind and generous. And always thanked me. I felt like I should be the one to thank him. I grew up very poor, and being able to buy my mother a house she could call her own — that was like Lennie’s dream. I call my mom’s house The House That Lennie Built.The conductor Patrick Summers, left, Houston Grand Opera’s music director, and Floyd during rehearsals for “Cold Sassy Tree” in 2000.George Hixson/Houston Grand OperaPatrick SummersWhen we did “Of Mice and Men” at the Bregenz Festival in Austria, I was the one — not Carlisle — worried that his musical idiom might not totally translate into the land of Schubert and Strauss and European modernism. He had none of those worries. And the Austrian audiences reacted so well to that opera because it’s great. Audiences don’t care about theory; the idea that musical language has to be somehow dumbed down to be accessible is very much a construct of criticism and academia. And though he was an academician himself his whole life, Carlisle never wrote in that world. He stuck to his guns, and his guns just happened to be in G minor. The subject of a great many of his operas is hypocrisy, and the effect of a crowd on an individual. That was the dominant theme of his life: how to be true to yourself.He never wrote outside his own voice. I had so many conversations with him about various composers — Pierre Boulez and Elliott Carter and John Adams — whom Carlisle loved. But it just wasn’t how he wrote. Most of his subjects were American, but not all. He did a gorgeous “Wuthering Heights,” and his last opera, “Prince of Players,” was British-set. But largely he was attracted to American stories, and writing in the American vernacular was as natural to him as anything, though he didn’t like the term “folk opera,” which he was branded with because of “Susannah.” And that was kind of an anomaly; it’s the only really folkish work that he wrote, even with the Americana, Copland feel in “Of Mice and Men.” In general he assimilated all kinds of traditions and made them his own. That’s what this country does.He thought in terms of big orchestras; he was very much of that era. And the psychological world of his operas is in the orchestra. But he was a story person, a narrative person. If the story required a great and memorable tune, he provided it. If the story needed very thorny dissonance, he provided that. He was a servant of the narrative.Carlisle absolutely loved what he did. He loved going to performances; he loved his fellow composers; he loved their success. This was a great, grand gentleman. He didn’t play all those games that so many people play. And I think one hears that honesty and that geniality in his music.David Gockley, right, the general director of Houston Grand Opera from 1972 to 2005, presented six operas by Floyd, left. They are shown in 1991, during preparations for “The Passion of Jonathan Wade.”Ava Jean Mears/Houston Grand OperaDavid GockleyIn the late 1960s, my wife at the time, a soprano named Patricia Wise, had sheet music for the two arias from “Susannah.” I was really impressed: Here was modern opera that was beautiful, touching and — I hate to say it — listenable.Soon after, I got the job in Houston, and just after I did I went to Cincinnati Opera to hear “Of Mice and Men,” which is when I first met Carlisle. Having heard that opera, I told him that during my first season as general director I was going to program it in Houston, and I offered to commission a work that turned out to be “Bilby’s Doll,” the start of a series of new operas he did there. He was also offered a position at the University of Houston, so he and his wife, Kay, made the move. Our relationship began to flower, and we became tennis buddies. Looking back, he is — was — my best friend.I left the subject of his operas to him, but virtually all of his ideas were brought to life. My favorites, I think, are “Susannah,” “Of Mice and Men” and, I would say, “Cold Sassy Tree.” He brought that book to me as an idea; I read it and I thought it was charming and folksy, bringing forth characters that were familiar from his previous works but taking them further. It came out of a period in his life when he was suffering from serious depression. He always had his demons, but he said my encouragement of “Cold Sassy Tree” brought him through a really terrible period, and got him to the other side. Obviously I was glad to have played that part.We very seldom were at odds. I felt that my job was to facilitate getting the operas from his head to the stage, and getting co-producers involved. That meant that the works would get automatic revivals in different cities. It was a great formula.He and I developed the Houston Grand Opera Studio in the late ’70s because both of us were very interested in providing opportunities for young artists. In the ’50s, rising Americans had to go to Europe, so this was an alternative. We wanted to use the opportunity of Carlisle’s appointment at the University of Houston to bring the university into partnership with us. And they put forward a good deal of money over a period of time to provide fellowships to engage faculty, and we had studio productions that were given on the campus.I think his legacy is probably six significant works that are worthy of the repertoire. I think that if you talk to someone like Jake Heggie, there’s a whole generation of composers who look to Carlisle like a godfather. He and his work gave them the confidence to have their own voices and to have those voices be loved by contemporary audiences. More

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      Review: In ‘Upload,’ Do Blockchains Dream of Electric Lizards?

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      Michel van der Aa’s new opera weaves technology into a traditional form with masterly restraint for a sci-fi spin on a fundamentally human tale.AMSTERDAM — “I’m here, that’s for sure!” the digital facsimile of a father tells his daughter early in Michel van der Aa’s new opera, “Upload.”What exactly it means to be “here” — particularly when someone exists only as consciousness stored on blockchain data spread across thousands of servers — is up for debate, and guides the drama in “Upload,” a masterly weaving of music, film and motion-capture technology that opened at the Dutch National Opera here on Friday, ahead of a run at the Park Avenue Armory in New York next spring.But that sci-fi premise is little more than a veneer. Not for nothing did Mary Shelley give “Frankenstein” the subtitle “The Modern Prometheus”; the finest genre fiction has always examined humanity through allegory. So, too, does van der Aa’s spare yet richly complicated work, which is preoccupied less with futuristic speculation than timeless matters of the heart and mind, whether corporeal or in the cloud.Which is not to say that van der Aa is uninterested in the bleeding edge. Rather, for decades, and with mixed success, he has been at the fore of marrying traditional forms with new media — inventing software and putting his film degree to regular use — through, for example, 3-D technology in the opera “Sunken Garden” and virtual reality in the poetic installation “Eight.”The challenge, always, is in making sure the shiny new thing doesn’t overtake the music, but instead is gracefully incorporated into a balanced whole. Van der Aa achieved something like that in “Eight,” complementing the immersion of VR with a score of poplike directness. And “Upload” is the work of an artist in absolute command of his toolkit, employing a restraint that makes for smooth shifts between acoustic and electric, live performance and film, without any one thing drawing attention to itself throughout the opera’s brisk 80 minutes.Most important, van der Aa — who not only composed “Upload,” but also wrote the libretto, staged it and directed a film version streaming on medici.tv — tightly binds technology and dramaturgy. No deployment of theatrical magic is extraneous. Its transparent presence even enhances the drama, such as when the Father, at one end of the stage, sings into motion-capture cameras while the Daughter interacts with his digital avatar mere feet away in a paradox of proximity and unbridgeable distance.That father, the libretto slowly reveals, recently lost his wife. In a state of unbearable grief, made worse by thoughts of his own mortality and what it would mean for their adult daughter, he secretly undergoes a procedure to upload his consciousness — and in the process end his physical existence. It’s technology so new that, despite its thorny implications, has yet to be regulated. He then returns to his daughter, granted virtual immortality but unable to, say, give her a hug on the way in.We’ve seen this before, in fact and fiction — real-life chatbots imitating departed love ones or, on “Black Mirror,” given android form. “Years and Years,” Russell T Davies’s mini-series of our near future, ends with a terminally ill woman becoming the first person to live on as an uploaded consciousness that can speak through Alexa-like devices. If the technology isn’t inevitable, at least the aspiration to it is. As a scientist says in “Upload”: “Every piece of information in the world has been copied and backed up. Except the human mind. It’s the last analog device in the digital world. Until now.”Van der Aa’s take on this subject is not a cautionary tale — despite his gentle satirizing of the hubris of Silicon Valley culture in his treatment of the upload company’s chief executive (Ashley Zukerman of “Succession”) — but a focused study of an emerging technology and the questions it raises about what constitutes life, through one family’s story.As if to keep the piece rooted in its humanity, van der Aa begins with only a voice in the dark: the Daughter, sung by the soprano Julia Bullock with subtle longing as she lists bodily word associations like “expand — lungs,” “support — bones” and “pull — muscle.” The electronics track slyly enters, atmospheric, and she is joined by the Father (the baritone Roderick Williams, whose warm tone and charisma create a wellspring of sympathy for his character).The Father ends that poetic list with “weight — less,” which cues skittering sounds of the lively and nimble players of Ensemble Musikfabrik, under the assured baton of Otto Tausk. Van der Aa’s score here provides a tense transition, one of many to come, including a glitchy hybrid of acoustic and electronic music that introduces the first filmed sequence, establishing a parallel track to the Father and Daughter’s interactions.These scenes, spoken and performed by actors (among them Katja Herbers of “Westworld” and “Evil”), take place starting three months earlier, at the bucolic facility where uploads take place. They at first seem to tell more than show, explaining the procedure by way of a tour for prospective clients. But in also tracing the Father’s experience there, a complex portrait of him emerges as he undergoes the creation of a so-called Mindfile based on interviews with friends and family — pointedly, not the Daughter. He also develops a Memory Anchor, a crucial tool that keeps a digital brain from, as it’s described, “drifting off into open space like an astronaut”; his is of a place he used to visit with his parents as a child, where birds chirped as he tried to catch lizards along a stone wall that was hot to the touch in the summer sun.Williams in the opera, whose staging employs transparent, moving screens to smoothly incorporate live action, film and motion capture technology.Marco Borggreve/Dutch National OperaOccasionally, the spoken films overlap with live performance. Williams, in one moment, is shown singing words like “sheep” and “ship” into a machine to teach it the contours of his speech. But otherwise the singing is limited to the Father and Daughter’s scenes together; van der Aa’s musical writing for their exchanges follows the natural rhythms of the English language. But in their monologues, melodies take flight: long, lyrical lines — lushly delivered by Bullock with rending emotion — that are amplified, complicated and contradicted by orchestral undercurrents.When briefly in a “paused state,” the Father realizes that something failed in the upload; it should have suppressed the trauma of his wife’s death but didn’t, dooming him to grieve her for eternity. He wants to be terminated, an irreversible action that can only be carried out by his daughter.If that dilemma doesn’t feel entirely compelling or earned, it’s because the Daughter is never properly developed. She is introduced as curious about her father’s new form, but it’s difficult to imagine anyone feeling more than shock or anger in her place. Instead, she is shown only in various states of mourning. (And this might be too New York-centric a fixation, but how on earth can this young woman afford to live in an airy TriBeCa penthouse with a garden terrace?)Maybe it’s for the best, then, that we never see her decision. The parallel stories arrive at parallel endings: the past, the night before the Father’s upload, and the present, the night before his likely termination. In a stunning coup de théâtre, a white curtain springs out, suspended over the audience. On it are the Father and Daughter projected in split screen. Although at opposite ends of the stage, even different planes of existence, they are presented as if lying head-to-head.As they drift into sleep, we are left with the Father’s Memory Anchor, a dream rendered digitally — the green of the earth too green, the blue of the sky too blue. Everything we’ve heard about is there: the stone, hot to the touch, a lizard at rest. But the image occasionally flickers, defaulting to the 3-D line drawings of drafting software, until the resolution degrades into soft fields of color. Only the sounds of breeze and birdsong remain.It’s a mysterious final scene, but not one that requires any answers. Regardless of what happens next, someone will be forced to live with the pain of loss. And no technology, it seems, can spare us that fundamentally human experience.UploadThrough Oct. 8 at the Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam; operaballet.nl. More

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      Carlisle Floyd, Whose Operas Spun Fables of the South, Dies at 95

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      His celebrated works drew from the musical traditions of revival meetings and country hoedowns, telling stories of intolerance.Carlisle Floyd, the composer-librettist whose operas explored the passions and prejudices of the South in lyrical tales that drew on rural fundamentalism, the Great Depression, the aftermath of the Civil War and other regional themes, died on Thursday in Tallahassee, Fla. He was 95. His death was announced by his publisher, Boosey & Hawkes.Among the leading 20th-century American opera composers, Mr. Floyd is often cited with Ned Rorem, Philip Glass, John Coolidge Adams, the Italian-American Gian Carlo Menotti, Samuel Barber and others whose works have joined the standard repertory, including George Gershwin, who called his “Porgy and Bess” a folk opera, and Leonard Bernstein, whose “Candide” was an operetta.The son of an itinerant South Carolina preacher, Mr. Floyd grew up with the music of the South: revival meeting hymns, square dance fiddlers, rollicking country hoedowns and folk songs. He wrote them into many of his operas, whose plots were largely derived from classics of literature, featuring social outcasts and narrow-minded neighbors who ostracized them.Mr. Floyd said his exposure to religious bigotry early in life had shaped his operatic themes. “The thing that horrified me already as a child about revival meetings,” he told The New York Times in 1998, “was mass coercion, people being forced to conform to something against their will without ever knowing what they were being asked to confess or receive.”His best-known opera was “Susannah,” based on the Apocrypha story of Susanna and the Elders. Taken from the Book of Daniel to the Tennessee hills and rendered in Smoky Mountain dialect, it portrays a young woman wrongly accused of promiscuity and a traveling preacher who incites a mob, then seduces her. The preacher is slain by her brother, and Susannah stands defiant, holding off the mob with a shotgun.With hymns, square dances and arias simulating folk songs, “Susannah” leapt to national renown at the New York City Opera under Erich Leinsdorf in 1956. It won the New York Music Critics’ Circle Award, was entered at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958 as an outstanding example of American opera, and over the years became a favorite of regional companies, one of the most performed operas of the American musical stage.Other notable Floyd operas included “Of Mice and Men,” his adaptation of John Steinbeck’s story of two tragic migrant farm workers in the Dust Bowl; “Willie Stark,” his treatment of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” about a ruthless politician modeled on Louisiana’s Huey P. Long; and “The Passion of Jonathan Wade,” about a Reconstruction-era love affair destroyed by intolerance and hate.American audiences flocked to regional performances of Mr. Floyd’s work, especially “Susannah” and “Of Mice and Men.” But New York critics were negative about his music, if not his storytelling. In 1999, four decades and some 800 regional performances after it opened, “Susannah” was finally performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Valhalla of grand opera in America.Renee Fleming as Susannah Polk and Samuel Ramey as Olin Blitch in the Met Opera’s 1999 production of “Susannah,” composer Carlisle Floyd’s best-known work.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Amiable, direct, wholly without guile, Carlisle Floyd’s American heroine and the work that bears her name arrived at the halls of grand opera on Wednesday night, looking like some lonely tourist lost in the vastness of Grand Central Terminal,” Bernard Holland wrote in The Times.He added: “The piece is perfect in size and difficulty for the regional opera house or the amateur production, but lesser singing, I suspect, reveals its thinness even more. Mr. Floyd has a nice way with hoedowns, countrified modal melody and drumroll crescendos, but there is amazingly little going on at the musical end of this opera.”Other critics disparaged his operas as narrowly drawn. But Mr. Floyd insisted that his stories reflected larger realities and that his characters — insular people fearful of outsiders and anyone different — were universal. And he scoffed at perceptions of his music as folk opera, implying that its tonal country sounds were naïve.“A lot of critics don’t like to acknowledge that there are no absolutes in taste, which is intensely personal and which governs a composer’s choice of idiom,” he told Opera News in 1999.Mr. Floyd’s “Of Mice and Men,” based on the John Steinbeck novel, at the New York City Opera in 2003. From left: Rod Nelman as George Milton, Anthony Dean Griffey as Lennie Small and Peter Strummer as Candy.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Floyd never sought to join the New York-Northeast musical establishment. He devoted much of his life to teaching, starting at Florida State University in 1947, and over 30 years wrote most of his operas in Tallahassee. From 1976 to 1996, he was a professor at the University of Houston, where he wrote several of his last operas, including “Cold Sassy Tree,” based on a novel by Olive Ann Burns about the romance between an aging widower and a young northerner that scandalizes a small Georgia town.His last opera, “Prince of Players,” was premiered by the Houston Grand Opera in March 2016, months before his 90th birthday, and was performed by the Little Opera Theater of New York at Hunter College in February 2017.Adapted from a Jeffrey Hatcher play (and subsequent 2004 film) about Edward Kynaston, one of the last actors of Restoration England to play female roles, “Prince of Players” centers on Kynaston’s crisis in 1661, when Charles II declares that all female roles on London stages must be played by women.Reviewing the Houston production, Opera News said it revealed “Floyd’s deep understanding and sympathy for issues that pervade our culture today — the complexities and subtleties of gender identity, sexual preference and their social consequences — played out in a story from 17th-century England.”Anthony Tommasini, in a review of the New York production for The Times, said: “It’s miraculous that a composer whose reputation dates to his 1955 ‘Susannah,’ one of the most performed American operas, is still working with assurance and skill.”Carlisle Sessions Floyd was born in Latta, S.C., on June 11, 1926, one of two children of Carlisle and Ida (Fenegan) Floyd. He and his sister, Ermine, were schooled in a succession of South Carolina towns where their father was a Methodist preacher. Their mother nurtured Carlisle’s creative instincts, giving him piano lessons and encouraging him to write short stories.After graduating from high school in North, S.C., he entered Converse College in Spartanburg in 1943. He studied music and piano under the composer Ernst Bacon. In 1945, when Mr. Bacon became director of the music school at Syracuse University, Mr. Floyd followed him there and earned a bachelor’s degree in music in 1946.He began teaching at Florida State and was soon composing. In 1949, he earned a master’s degree at Syracuse. His first two operas sputtered, but “Susannah,” his third, thrived. It opened at Florida State in 1955, and its New York City Opera premiere was hailed a year later. Ronald Eyer, in Tempo, called it an “unadorned story of malice, hypocrisy and tragedy of almost scriptural simplicity.”In 1957, Mr. Floyd married Margery Kay Reeder. She died in 2010. No immediate family members survive.Mr. Floyd’s only non-American subject, an interpretation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” premiered at the Santa Fe Opera in 1958.After a long gestation, “Of Mice and Men” opened at the Seattle Opera in 1970. It was widely performed by regional repertory companies. But when it finally landed at the New York City Opera in 1983, Donal Henahan of The Times said it “failed ultimately because it is a feeble score too dependent on gray declamatory lines and melodramatic clichés of the sort that no longer turn up even in television serials.”Composer/librettist Carlisle Floyd, right, talks with conductor Patrick Summers about the music for Floyd’s upcoming opera “Cold Sassy Tree” during rehearsals Thursday, April 6, 2000, in Houston. “Cold Sassy Tree,” set to open Friday, April 14 in Houston, is Floyd’s latest and perhaps final opera.BRETT COOMER/Associated PressIn 1999, David Gockley, then general director of the Houston Grand Opera and a longtime admirer of Mr. Floyd’s work, told Opera News that New York reviewers were unfair to composers like Mr. Floyd.“Carlisle Floyd is America’s foremost opera composer,” Mr. Gockley was quoted as saying. “If you’re not part of the Northeastern establishment, specifically the New York scene, you have no status. Because Floyd always lived and taught in Florida or Houston, he has been regarded as a regional figure, when in fact he is a national one.”Mr. Floyd, who lived in Tallahassee, received the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush at the White House in 2004. In 2008 he was named, along with the conductor James Levine and the soprano Leontyne Price, as among the first honorees of the National Endowment for the Arts for lifetime achievement in opera.“Falling Up: The Days and Nights of Carlisle Floyd, the Authorized Biography” by Thomas Holliday, was published in 2013. More

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      Review: After a Met Opera Milestone, ‘Boris’ Brings Another

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      The company is performing the terse, original 1869 version of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” for the first time.You may have heard about the widely publicized landmark with which the Metropolitan Opera opened its season on Monday: Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” its first work by a Black composer. Flying under the radar is the less momentous but still significant milestone that followed on Tuesday, when the company finally performed the original 1869 version of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov.”Opera is littered with competing editions and unclear authorial intentions. Does the Giulietta act go before or after the Antonia act in “Les Contes d’Hoffmann”? Do you sing Verdi’s masterpiece in Italian as “Don Carlo,” or — as the Met will do for the first time in its history late this winter — in the original French, as “Don Carlos”?But probably no major work is as vexed as “Boris Godunov.” Mussorgsky had never written an opera when he created this often brusque, raw, darkly sober, oddly spare score about a troubled czar and his troubled country. We’re not entirely sure why it was rejected by the imperial theater directorate, but the main reason may have been a banal one: The piece lacked a major female character.The scene of Boris’s coronation as czar in this revival of the Met’s spare production, new in 2010.Richard Termine for The New York TimesSo Mussorgsky gamely (perhaps even happily) revised, adding material — including Marina, a leading lady of sorts — and taking chunks out; a version of that version premiered in 1874. Then, after Mussorgsky’s death, his friend Rimsky-Korsakov took it upon himself to reorchestrate, rejigger and sometimes recompose the work to make it more colorful and less idiosyncratic. This seems scandalous to us, but without Rimsky “Boris” would never have entered the international repertory early in the 20th century.Over the past 50 years or so, as part of a general vogue for presenting art as its creators envisioned, Rimsky’s glittering interventions fell from grace in favor of Mussorgsky’s starker orchestrations. But his revised, post-1869 version has remained the norm. Or, more precisely, an amalgam: The available options have served as a kind of grab bag, with scenes and passages kept or left out at will, and ordered in various sequences. (That all this is possible speaks to how strange and episodic the work is, as well as to how compelling it remains in almost any form.)It was therefore not unusual that, when the Met’s current production premiered in 2010, it could contain, among other choices, both the act set in Poland (from Mussorgsky’s revised version) and the scene at the Cathedral of St. Basil, which had been cut after 1869. This was a sprawling, two-intermission affair of almost four and a half hours.Maxim Paster, center, and Aleksey Bogdanov, just left behind him, are two of several singers making their Met debuts in this production.Richard Termine for The New York TimesThe 1869 version, still a rarity, runs about half that, in a single act of seven scenes presented at the Met without intermission. (The edition being performed is by Michael Rot.) This is by no means an abbreviated “Boris.” But conducted with cool, efficient clarity and seriousness by Sebastian Weigle, it is certainly a lithe evening, a sour shot of a demanding, easily manipulated populace and the leader that the crowd alternately acclaims and reviles: the title character, privately tormented by guilt at having come to power by murdering the 8-year-old heir to the throne.Lithe, too, is the Met’s nearly set-less staging, which the director, Stephen Wadsworth, took on at the last minute back in 2010 and which works well in this version, allowing for fluid scene changes and reflecting the austerity of Mussorgsky’s original vision. His orchestra acts not as a Wagner-style character in its own right, nor as an melodic interlocutor. (There aren’t many melodies.) Instead, it serves as a propelling undercurrent and atmosphere for exposed vocal lines tailored to the rhythms of Russian speech — anticipating Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” which borrows audibly from “Boris,” and Janacek. Adroitly handled, the technique allows the opera to be talky while flowing ever forward.And this was a cast of sonorous, articulate singing talkers, led by the production’s star from 2010, the bass René Pape, his voice as burnished and secure as ever as Boris. If Pape’s tonal pleasures have often seemed to come at the expense of vivid characterizations — as in his beautiful, bland Gurnemanz in Wagner’s “Parsifal” — he fits the restraint of this conductor, chorus and production.This staging is the occasion for several accomplished Met debuts: the bass Ain Anger, commanding as the monk Pimen, who predicts Boris’s downfall; the tenor David Butt Philip, bright yet brooding as Grigory, who proclaims himself Dmitry, the believed-to-have-been-killed rightful heir to the throne; the baritone Aleksey Bogdanov, firm and forthright as the nobleman Shchelkalov; and the tenor Maxim Paster, bronze-toned and cynical as Prince Shuisky.David Butt Philip (left, against wall) plays a monk pretending to be the heir to the Russian throne who falls in with Varlaam (Ryan Speedo Green, arm raised), a vagrant monk.Richard Termine for The New York TimesThe bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green, the best singer in “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” has equally rich, unforced power here as the drunken monk Varlaam. The mezzo-soprano Tichina Vaughn, as a piquant inn hostess, and the tenor Miles Mykkanen, as the plangent Holy Fool who haunts Boris, are both excellent.Should we prefer the 1869 original? I actually find the revised version’s ending — the angry mob, bent on revolution, is yet again flipped into cowed fervor, this time by the false Dmitry — to be more effective and haunting than the curtain falling on Boris’s death, particularly in Pape’s all too mellow performance here. But I don’t miss the Polish act, which has always seemed a bit out of place in its deployment of operatic conventions. And the work’s general pessimism seems better suited to its original terseness than to more epic scale.My answer — today, at least — is yes.Boris GodunovThrough Oct. 17 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Review: Sounds and Styles Playfully Collide in ‘Only an Octave Apart’

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      This show brings together two convention-inverting artists: the cabaret star Justin Vivian Bond and the opera singer Anthony Roth Costanzo.“Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be normal?” Justin Vivian Bond, the doyenne of downtown cabaret, asks the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo a few songs into their show, “Only an Octave Apart,” at St. Ann’s Warehouse.The gag, of course, is that both Bond and Costanzo — whose pristine and ethereal voice has been heard at venues like the Metropolitan Opera and the Palace of Versailles — are utterly singular artists.Bond, 58, is a veteran and pioneer of alternative live performance, polished in appearance but satisfyingly rough in voice and manner, a diva whose response to having seen it all is both a yawn and a wink. Costanzo, 39, who will return to the title role in Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” at the Met this season, has demonstrated a voracious appetite for mashing up disciplines. Perhaps that is in response to the limited countertenor repertoire, “music written before 1750 or after 1950,” as he has said.Their teaming up came about by chance and circumstance, they banter in “Only an Octave Apart.” Costanzo recalls seeing one of Bond’s shows at Joe’s Pub and professing instant fandom; Bond remembers thinking Costanzo was hot. They became fast friends, and their relationship led to the St. Ann’s performance, which takes its name from a TV special the soprano Beverly Sills and the actress Carol Burnett recorded at the Met in 1976, in a campy meeting of so-called high and low culture.Conceived with and directed by Zack Winokur, “Only an Octave Apart” feels like something between “Honey, I Shrunk the Opera” and oversized cabaret. Or an operatic highlight reel wedged into a freewheeling stage revue. Or an improvised set of concept singles. Or maybe it doesn’t matter. The uneasiness of its hybrid form is part of the point, and reflective of its stars’ convention-inverting talents.Costanzo, left, and Bond in the show, which teases out the obvious humor and dissonant beauty in their sounds.Nina WesterveltA ventriloquist-style number inspired by “Singin’ in the Rain,” for example, plays off their bucking of gendered expectations: Costanzo sings from behind the curtain while Bond lip-syncs, aligning his countertenor with Bond’s high-feminine presentation. Then they switch. (“Act butcher!” Bond barks.)The show finds both obvious humor and a dissonant beauty in combining sounds. Under Thomas Bartlett’s brilliantly agile music direction, nimble arrangements by Nico Muhly and Daniel Schlosberg flit seamlessly from plucked strings to erotic disco beats. The stars’ voices at times collide to strange, glorious effect (as in a languid take on Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Waters of March”); or they playfully intersect in ways that throw their differences into sharp relief.Bond thrills most in haunting ballads that animate the eerie exigencies of isolation (“Me and My Shadow”) and the melancholy in holding onto hope (“I’m Always Chasing Rainbows”). Cutting a glamorous figure beneath worshipful lighting by John Torres, Bond issues an enchanting warble, its gravelly depths echoing with comfortable wisdom.Costanzo also dazzles in solos that showcase his rich yet delicate voice, which glints and swoops like intricately painted blown glass. Before performing Lizst’s arresting art song “Über allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh,” Costanzo explains that it’s about despair, from poetry that Goethe is said to have carved into stone as he died alone.If the show speaks to the moment, it does not seem by design. The organizing principle of non sequiturs (“We’ve sung about flowers and water, now how about leaves?”) is charming to a point, though ultimately comes at the expense of assurance and momentum.Bond, a seasoned stage personality, is at ease riffing off the cuff and ribbing an insider crowd — but feels rather far away peering over the nine-piece orchestra, with a hand shielding the glare. Costanzo’s element is vocal storytelling; he’s less at ease, however, as a co-host, even though he’s clearly game.Their self-mythologizing repartee (an avant-garde legend and an opera star walk into a bar …) keeps the audience at a guarded remove, while the songs yearn for connection. It’s a paradox starkly rendered in fabric by the first of Jonathan Anderson’s costumes, velvety-soft, floor-length gowns that jut out at harsh angles, like front-turned bustles whose bell curves have been replaced by blunt machetes.Bond and Costanzo are extraordinary artists, though it’s not until the night is nearly over that they allow us to see them as vulnerable ones, too. “Only an Octave Apart” was meant to be a live show, then an album; the pandemic forced them to work in reverse. They poured themselves into creating this odd and beguiling record, they say, over the worst of the past year.Now onstage, they seem electrified, their nerves raw and frayed, dazed to be in communion again — in other words, more like the rest of us than they’d dare to let on.Only an Octave ApartThrough Oct. 3 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; 718-254-8779, stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 90 minutes. More