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      Review: A Molten Song Recital, Without Comic Relief

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      The mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo doubled down on melancholy in a superb concert at the Park Avenue Armory.There wasn’t comic relief on offer at Emily D’Angelo’s recital on Friday at the Park Avenue Armory. Not a giggle, not a wink. Her rare smile during the performance was wistful. The subjects she sang about were, for the most part, longing, death and tears.Instead of leavening the gravity, D’Angelo, joined by the pianist Sophia Muñoz in the Armory’s Board of Officers Room, doubled down. Her program was like her mezzo-soprano voice: a flood of melancholy, molten but articulate.Rarely, though, is it so pleasurable to linger in so much pain. The event — D’Angelo’s first American solo appearance — gave a small audience the treat of an intimate encounter with one of the world’s special young singers.Still in her 20s, and emerging on the international scene just in the past few years, D’Angelo has a rich, mellow voice, an encompassing serenity and confidence. But with a slight press on the gas her tone turns stern and flashing, almost scary. In “I’ve Heard an Organ Talk Sometimes” — one of her three selections from Aaron Copland’s “12 Poems of Emily Dickinson” — her sound really did take on organlike amplitude.The first half of her program borrowed some numbers from her debut solo album, “Enargeia,” released last year — but now in new company, like the two austere songs by Schoenberg that followed Hildegard von Bingen’s “O frondens virga,” a sober introduction.But while on “Enargeia,” lush, woozy instrumental arrangements turned some of the tracks lugubrious, on Friday, with just Muñoz’s gentle, sensitive piano accompaniment, they felt both more restrained and more affecting, D’Angelo’s voice even more direct. Shorn of its new age-y trappings, Sarah Kirkland-Snider’s “Nausicaa” was a consolatory prayer, and two Missy Mazzoli pieces smoldered without being too heavy.There was nothing affected about her singing or her presence. D’Angelo wore a black vest over a sleeveless top with drawstring pants and a pixie haircut, looking a bit Peter Pan and a bit Joan of Arc. Her hand resting on the edge of the piano’s curve, gently leaning into the instrument, she had the casual assurance of an experienced cabaret artist.So it wasn’t surprising to find she also has a gift for pull-up-a-chair storytelling, whether in Randy Newman’s “Wandering Boy” or Rebecca Clarke’s “The Seal Man” — the words clear without being overenunciated, her manner patient, as if she had all the time in the world. She was superb in Cecilia Livingston’s monologue “Penelope,” in its 2020 version for mezzo, which starts with a watery tremble in the piano and moves to a series of slow-burning, sometimes fiery questions: “What is it to be waiting? What is it to be waiting for you?”Near the end came a series of nocturnes — here true premonitions of death — by Clarke, Fanny Mendelssohn and Florence Price. Before D’Angelo’s encore, a glowing account of the Dvorak chestnut “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” she closed the written program with Clara Schumann’s “Lorelei,” about that folkloric temptress.The Heinrich Heine poem that Schumann sets describes the Lorelei’s singing as “wundersame, gewalt’ge”: wondrous and powerful. D’Angelo’s is, too.Emily D’AngeloPerformed on Friday at the Park Avenue Armory. More

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      Review: Michael Spyres’s Immense Sound Engulfs a Recital Room

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      Michael Spyres made an overdue New York recital debut at the Park Avenue Armory, whose intimate space could not contain his voice.Some singers thrive in a recital room. A small space invites extremities of intimate expression; audiences can become the confidants of a lovelorn raconteur. Other voices, though, are better fit for an opera house — voluminous to the point of superhuman strength, thrilling for their athleticism as much their artistry.Michael Spyres — a baritenor, that rare breed of singers, more prevalent in Rossini’s time, who nimbly span the ranges of baritones and tenors — would best be described as an opera house vocalist. His heroic and agile sound, booming at the bottom and capable of an effortless leap to Italianate exclamation at the top, is almost comically uncontainable somewhere like the snug Board of Officers Room at the Park Avenue Armory, where Spyres appeared with the pianist Mathieu Pordoy on Wednesday night.For New Yorkers, though, this was a rare opportunity to hear Spyres in any kind of environment. American-born and a major performer in Europe, he didn’t make his way to the Metropolitan Opera until 2020. (Thankfully he will be back, in Mozart’s “Idomeneo,” later this month.) He gave a concert with the tenor Lawrence Brownlee last season, a sensational program based on their album “Amici e Rivali,” but made his solo recital debut here only this week.On offer were three sets of songs, in as many languages, that showcase Spyres’s vast range — vocally, though not necessarily interpretively. His approach to performance, which prioritizes beauty over character, suits him well in a work like “Idomeneo,” but less so in lieder, which on Wednesday took on a kind of flatness despite his Olympian power, a level path along a mountain’s ridge.You could hear him almost struggling to restrain himself in Beethoven’s pioneering cycle “An die Ferne Geliebte,” a work that can be quietly personal but here was more in the mighty vein of that composer’s opera, “Fidelio.” And when he did shift between registers of strength, it was with less comfort than, say, his gifted ease in shaping long melodic lines. In Berlioz’s “Les Nuits d’Éte,” he lingered in a soft, exquisite falsetto throughout the song “Au cimetière: clair de lune,” but in the work’s opening “Villanelle” the move from forte to piano was accompanied by a gravelly transition.Pordoy, to his credit, matched Spyres with lush and luxuriant playing that got its own moment under the spotlight with the Liszt solo “L’Idée Fixe,” based on the longing theme of Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique.” It was an ultra-Romantic appetizer ahead of Liszt’s “Tre Sonetti del Petrarca” — although a heavy one, foie gras before a fatty steak. In that trio of songs, Spyres the Bel Canto star was most in his element: his tenor both riveting and rending, his high notes both tossed off and made to bloom with long crescendos.It was the kind of music that can leave an audience begging for an encore, which Spyres was quick to offer, coyly holding up a finger as if to ask for one more song. He started with the Beethoven rarity “In questa tomba oscura,” somber and slowly flowing, then said, “We can’t leave you on a low note.” So the crowd-pleasing sound world of Liszt returned one last time with “Enfant, si j’étais roi.”At one point during that song, his voice rang out so powerfully that, at an abrupt pause, it continued to haunt the room in the silence. You could have mistaken the sound for the resonance of a grand concert hall.Michael Spyres and Mathieu PordoyThis program repeats on Friday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. More

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      A Rebound for a Summer Pairing of ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Oresteia’ at the Armory

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      Two Robert Icke productions have endured illnesses and last-minute casting changes. Now they have finally settled into a repertory groove.Perhaps more than any other production of this post-shutdown season, the Park Avenue Armory’s summer stagings of “Hamlet” and “Oresteia” — with their last-minute replacements and cast illnesses — have faced the most hurdles on their way to opening night.The productions, already delayed from their intended 2020 U.S. premieres, were dealt another blow this spring when, two days into tech rehearsals, Lia Williams (“The Crown”) tore her Achilles’ tendon. She was double booked to play Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude, and the husband-killing matriarch Klytemnestra in “Oresteia,” but recovery, though guaranteed, would not be quick. She was forced to drop out. Jennifer Ehle and Anastasia Hille quickly stepped in, with Ehle having only 10 days to settle into the role of Gertrude before the first “Hamlet” preview.“I had no idea what I was getting into, and I really didn’t care,” Ehle said during a recent video call. “It was one of those moments where you get a call on a Sunday morning, somebody asks if you want to take a challenge, and you have no choice but to take the leap and start planning in midair.”The plays, helmed by the English writer-director Robert Icke, are now being performed in repertory at the Armory, where they will run through mid-August. “Hamlet” opened in late June to mostly positive reviews. (Maya Phillips, in her review for The Times, wrote that Icke “brings a cinematic eye to the proceedings, using foreground and background to create dimension.”) “Oresteia” began previews July 10, and is set to open Tuesday. Once it does, this ambitious pairing of classics of the Western canon will conclude a nearly seven-year journey of starts and stops.“Everybody knew where they were going to stand and I had to upload that as quickly as possible,” Ehle (with Lawther) said of joining the cast of “Hamlet” during tech rehearsals.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow It All StartedThe plays had momentous premieres (“Oresteia” in 2015 and “Hamlet” in 2017) at London’s Almeida Theater, where Icke had been associate director, and successful West End runs followed. Writing from London in 2015, Ben Brantley said Icke’s “theatrical chutzpah pays dividends” in his drastically reimagined “Oresteia,” Aeschylus’ revenge-filled trilogy.That ancient Greek work and the surveillance-heavy “Hamlet,” with the actor Andrew Scott in the title role, cemented Icke’s status as an incisive editor and renovator of classics. Not that editing here means trimming down — each production clocks in at just under four hours — but Icke’s revisions bring the centuries-old plays’ essences to stark, ultramodern light.As planning began for the Shakespeare adaptation, he and Hildegard Bechtler, the set and costume designer, decided to reuse a frosted glass they had used in “Oresteia,” allowing them to achieve something like a cinematic jump cut. It’s what first led him to think of the two pieces as similar.“There was an acknowledgment that these two plays, though separated by many centuries, are in conversation with each other,” Icke explained during a recent video call, quarantining after testing positive for the coronavirus. “Those central questions about family and vengeance, and the obligations children have to their parents, and what it means if a family and a country are intertwined with each other, always felt like they were reflecting and refracting each other in really interesting ways.”Pierre Audi, the Armory’s artistic director and founder of the Almeida, suggested bringing a repertory pairing of the two works to Manhattan back in 2018. Having met the Armory team while in town in 2017 for the Broadway premiere of his and Duncan Macmillan’s “1984” adaptation, Icke said it felt like it could be “a fruitful collaboration,” and the productions were announced for 2020.Williams, who had played Klytemnestra to great acclaim in “Oresteia,” would reprise that role, and play opposite Alex Lawther in “Hamlet,” who was cast after Scott was unable to commit to the transfer. But then the pandemic shut down live theater in 2020 and many planned productions were canceled, though everyone wanted to keep these two afloat. (In the meantime, Icke collaborated with the actress Ann Dowd on a socially distanced adaptation of “Enemy of the People” at the Armory last summer.)Angus Wright, seated at the table and projected onto the screen, in “Oresteia” at the Armory. In the foreground, from left, are Wesley Holloway, Anastasia Hille and Elyana Faith Randolph.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesA Pairing With ‘Poetic Logic’In April 2022, the company finally reunited and began rehearsals. Because of the plays’ length and density, the focus on each alternated on a weekly basis. Lawther said he enjoyed the repertory setting and “the luxury of watching this amazing company switch and suddenly do this Greek tragedy.”“They speak to one another in incredibly moving and mysterious ways,” Lawther said on a video call. “Although ‘Oresteia’ is much older, Rob’s adaptation is full of modern language, and feels like a contemporary family drama, whereas this ‘Hamlet’ uses the original text, and feels of a different time. There’s a poetic logic that exists in putting these two together.”While the productions share a set and much of the same acting troupe, Icke said he did not go out of his way to heighten the two works’ similarities.“The attempt is not to direct them to point back to each other,” he said, “but almost to hang the two paintings next to each other in a gallery, so that if audiences choose to, they can move back and forth and think about the ways in which the two might relate.”Written nearly 2,000 years apart, the works deal with chaos unfolding in the private homes of high-powered political families. Almost entirely stripped of period or royal specificity, the modern-dress productions allow Icke to focus on contemporary parallels. With “Hamlet,” it’s the British royal family.“This time, we talked about Prince Philip’s death and what it’s like for an old guard to die,” he said. “But I’ve always felt like Hamlet and Princess Diana have got something in common. You’re told again and again that he is adored by the people, and that one of the reasons [the king] does not have him packed off to prison immediately is because of how much the people love him. That sense of somebody struggling to make sense of themselves, and what’s happening to them, while under constant observation always took my mind to Diana.”For “Oresteia,” he said the story’s setup, with Agamemnon coming back from war with a new woman, would have meant for ancient Greek audiences what the Kennedy and Clinton families might signify to contemporary viewers.“Audiences then would’ve known their Homer back-to-front, so it was probably similar to telling audiences back then that the Monica Lewinsky scandal has just broken,” Icke continued. “Here’s Hillary, and Bill is about to walk through the front door. A modern American audience feels that. In another thousand years, to tell the Clinton story, you probably will have to go back and fill in the Lewinsky part of the story to get it across.”Luke Treadaway as Orestes, Klytemnestra and Agamemnon’s traumatized son, in “Oresteia.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesA Necessary PivotAfter Williams’s injury, “Hamlet” performances were pushed back, giving Ehle a little over a week to learn the part of Queen Gertrude for the first time. But Hille, who is British, needed to secure a work visa, and that forced “Oresteia” to be delayed nearly a month.When she got the call, Ehle said, “I thought, if the Armory has brought this man here, with these people, to tell this story, it couldn’t be anything but interesting.”Ehle, a two-time Tony winner for her work in Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing” and “The Coast of Utopia,” described the process of situating herself within the production as “less rehearsing and more orienteering.”“Everybody knew where they were going to stand and I had to upload that as quickly as possible, and jump on a moving train,” she recalled. “My seat was there waiting, but I had to figure out where to put my luggage.”Many hours of last-minute rehearsals were required — Lawther called it a “baptism by fire” — with Hille, who was preparing with Icke via Zoom while awaiting her visa, only arriving in New York on July 3, just days before the first previews of “Oresteia.” Around that time, Ehle tested positive for coronavirus, and had to briefly retreat from “Hamlet.”“It’s pretty much impossible to do anything without everyone in the room,” Icke said, referring to absences resulting from Covid. “But this has been much easier because the big-picture decisions and structures had already been in place. We were able to focus on the details of the performances, rather than our sound design or choice of music.”Luke Treadaway, the British actor who plays Laertes in “Hamlet” and Orestes, Klytemnestra’s son, in “Oresteia,” had been preparing for the roles since 2020 and noted the effects of the changes on the ensemble. “The cast changes had a huge emotional impact on us all, because rehearsals become a world that you create with the people you create it with,” he explained. “We’ve had many understudies come on, because of Covid. It made us realize that it’s not just 10 actors in a cast, or however many, but a squad of people getting these two massive stories onstage every night, in any form we can.”Icke also acknowledged the resiliency of actors. “Anyone who has done much theater is very aware that everything can change in a second, particularly in Covid times,” he said. “It’s remarkable how adaptable everybody is, saying, ‘Well, this isn’t what we thought it was going to be, but it’s not the worst thing in the world. We’re really glad to be here and delighted to be presented with two productions.’ It all sort of just recalibrates itself.” More

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      ‘Oresteia’ Review: A Mother’s Grief, Underestimated

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      Anastasia Hille is riveting as Klytemnestra in Robert Icke’s production of “Oresteia” at the Park Avenue Armory.Before the first domino of their tragedies falls, before murder begets murder begets murder, they are an enchanting family: the mother, Klytemnestra, warm and easy with her two little ones gathered close around her; the father, Agamemnon, suave in public but playful the instant he walks through the door at the end of the day.In their cozy contemporary sanctuary of a home, they seem so absolutely normal. These people love one another. The boy, Orestes, has never been a good sleeper, but when his bad dreams come, his parents are there to comfort him. And Iphigenia, his sister, is a darling in a citrus-orange dress. Though she is young enough that she totes her long-eared plush bunny everywhere, she is old enough, and smart enough, that she’s already a moral thinker. When the family has venison for dinner, she cannot bear the thought of eating a deer.“It’s a little dead body,” she says.Is this the deer whose killing so angered the goddess Artemis that she stilled the winds on which Agamemnon’s warships depend? Robert Icke’s fraught and gripping “Oresteia,” an emotionally harrowing retelling of Aeschylus’ trilogy at the Park Avenue Armory, doesn’t get bogged down in such background details of ancient mythology.What matters is the excruciating ransom that Agamemnon, a military commander and a great believer in prophecies, thinks he has to pay to get the winds blowing again so he can be victorious in war. He must murder Iphigenia, his curious, trusting, doted-on daughter who wants nothing to do with killing deer and has nothing to do with waging war.“By his hand alone,” the prophecy reads. “The child is the price. Fair winds.”Her innocent life, ended irrevocably, in exchange for maybe — if her father’s faith in the gods and the counsel of serious men is not misplaced — achieving his political objectives. Not, of course, that her mother has been consulted in this, let alone Iphigenia herself.“If she doesn’t feel pain,” Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus, says, arguing in favor of snuffing out his niece, “and it is a civilized procedure, and it is the clear and greater good, then who are the victims?”What is the value of the life of a girl? What is the value of her mother’s clawing grief and bottomless rage at her child’s murder? And how, exactly, has Klytemnestra come off so badly through the ages for her revenge killing of Agamemnon — as if she were singularly evil and crazed while he was simply a decent guy in a difficult position, who’d made the tough call that his own daughter was expendable?Hille and Angus Wright in Robert Icke’s production, which originated at the Almeida Theater in London in 2015.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTold in four acts over three and a half hours, this “Oresteia” is about grief so deep it settles into the soul and metastasizes into a need for bloody vengeance, whose result in turn becomes a cause of more fresh grief. If you’d wondered what unites “Oresteia” thematically with “Hamlet,” Icke’s other thrilling production running in repertory at the Armory this summer, there it is — two plays in which murders leave survivors bereft and homicidal, and in which one generation of a family suffers the treachery of another. But whereas “Hamlet” centers the title character, this re-centered “Oresteia” is concerned principally not with Orestes, the son, but rather with Klytemnestra, his haunted mother.“This whole thing,” she tells Iphigenia’s ghost as it flits through the house, “this whole thing is about you.”When this production by the Armory and the Almeida Theater was first announced, it was meant to star Lia Williams as Klytemnestra, reprising the role she had played in London, but an injury forced her to leave the show before previews began.Anastasia Hille is the Armory’s Klytemnestra, and she is magnificent in an incandescent, utterly sympathetic interpretation so riveting that you would do well to spend the entire first intermission watching Klytemnestra simply sit onstage, in a stupor of grief that ages her by the next act. Hille will win plenty of partisans over to Team Klytemnestra — even as the play would also like to draw its audience’s attention to the needless, cyclical horror of murder and revenge, and the self-righteous delusion that just one more death will even the score for good.In the terrifyingly real depiction of a loving marriage that’s destroyed before our eyes, Hille is matched every inch by Angus Wright as Agamemnon. After Klytemnestra realizes that he plans to murder Iphigenia (beautifully played at the performance I saw by Alexis Rae Forlenza, one of two young actors who share the role), the fight they have is so brutal and raw that you may recall its dynamics from the most damaging domestic argument you’ve ever had.“This is about a person who came from us, who would never have lived if we hadn’t loved each other,” Klytemnestra says, pleading her daughter’s case in the hope that her husband will hear reason. “What you are destroying is us, doing something that will overwhelm our history, a single action which if you bring it down on us will obliterate the whole story which precedes it.”Tia Bannon, foreground left, and Luke Treadaway, with, background from left: Elyana Faith Randolph, Angus Wright and Hille.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBy the end of their fight, the current of intimacy that ran between them for years is shut off. They are for all intents and purposes exes, effective immediately, with any further emotional access denied. Which, in the bruised and intricate psychic honesty of this play, does not mean the love has entirely vanished.On a set by Hildegard Bechtler so chic it looks like what you’d get if Norman Foster and Richard Serra retrofitted an ancient castle, “Oresteia” seeks to implicate us in its patterns of needless destruction: Whenever the lights come up on the auditorium, we’re reflected in the set’s long glass wall.The show is peppered with tiny oddities and puzzlements that become clear, mostly, at the end. Slight spoiler: The reason that the grown-up Orestes (Luke Treadaway) watches much of the action from outside the periphery of the house is that he is immersed in a court proceeding, to determine his guilt in the murder of his mother. His memory is often uncertain. The woman questioning him (Kirsty Rider) doesn’t really buy that his other sister Electra (Tia Bannon), who conspired with him to kill Klytemnestra, even existed. The text hints that maybe she didn’t. There is a whiff of mystery about it all.But the tragedy of it is paramount — one set in motion by superstitious men who took it on faith that the life of a little girl didn’t matter, and who never stopped to think that her mother would counterattack.OresteiaThrough Aug. 13 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. Running time: 3 hours 30 minutes. More

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      A Behind-the-Scenes Eminence Shapes a Festival’s Future

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      Pierre Audi, the artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory, is coming into his own as the leader of the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France.AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — On a recent Monday afternoon, the Grand Théâtre de Provence here was almost empty, a few hours before a concert performance of Monteverdi’s opera “L’Orfeo.”An organ was being tuned onstage, letting out a fluteish wheeze. In the wings, someone was warming up with the dashing brass fanfares at the start of the score.And Pierre Audi, the general director of the Aix-en-Provence Festival, which runs this year through Saturday and presented the Monteverdi, was painstakingly adjusting the lighting.“Warmer; it’s very dead,” he said to members of the festival’s technical staff as he stared at the glow on the back wall of the stage. The first act of “L’Orfeo” takes place in a meadow, which the performance would suggest with some treelike blurs of green behind the musicians. Audi wanted the color to be ever so slightly subtler, paler, more delicate.As the ensemble started to rehearse, he stood and watched, hands intertwined across his belly. The playing was spirited, but some of the singers’ bits of acting felt a tad awkward.“I haven’t done the staging,” Audi, 64, said under his breath in an accent not quite British and not quite French, with a sly smirk and an apologetic shrug. “I’m just doing the lights.”For the production “Resurrection” this year, Audi pushed for the abandoned Stadium de Vitrolles to be refurbished.Monika RittershausTaking it upon himself to do the lights for a mere concert wasn’t out of character for Audi — also the artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory in New York, the founder of the Almeida Theater in London, for decades the head of the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam, and altogether one of the most eminent behind-the-scenes figures on the global performing arts scene.An experienced stage director as well as a renowned administrator, Audi doesn’t just work on grand strategy and schmooze with donors. He also gets into the details of craft, closely overseeing rehearsals. (The chatter this summer was that he particularly needed to help shape Satoshi Miyagi’s vaguely Kabuki production of Mozart’s “Idomeneo.”) Directors respect him because he’s one of them.After succeeding Bernard Foccroulle, who stepped down after 11 successful years at Aix, Audi was able to present just one iteration of this annual festival before the pandemic hit. But last summer, and this one, he delivered tenure-defining coups.In 2020, when all of Aix’s performances were canceled because of the pandemic, Audi managed to hold rehearsals for “Innocence,” a new work by Kaija Saariaho, with just a piano. And he was able to shift the premiere seamlessly to 2021, when it was acclaimed as one of the finest operas of the 21st century.This year, he opened the season at a new venue, which was also an old one: the Stadium de Vitrolles, a massive black concrete box built in the 1990s that had been sitting abandoned on a hilltop in an Aix suburb for over two decades.“When I arrived as director, I said to the technical people, ‘I want to see it,’” Audi recalled. “They kind of said it wasn’t possible — for a year and a half. And I had to be really tough: ‘If you don’t show it to me, I’ll stop being the director.’ It was the last day of my first festival, in 2019, and we went in with one lamp.”The premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s opera “Innocence” in 2021 was one of Audi’s tenure-defining coups at Aix.Jean-Louis Fernandez, via Festival d’Aix-en-ProvenceThe graffiti-strewn building was in sad shape, but Audi, who had transformed a former Salvation Army hall into the Almeida in 1980 and was used to programming a vast raw space in New York, realized its potential.“I saw the height of it,” he said, “and I immediately looked at the real estate being very similar to the Armory.”For two years, he courted the local government in Vitrolles, which would have to shoulder much of the cost of the refurbishment. Audi began to plan a daring premiere production for the stadium — “Resurrection,” Romeo Castellucci’s staging of Mahler’s Second Symphony as a 90-minute exhumation of a shallow mass grave — without knowing whether the renovation would be ready in time, and without doing an acoustic test in the space.“He called me,” said the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, “and I think he thought he would have to make a case, to somehow justify it to me: ‘We have a sort of outré idea that Castellucci will stage Mahler 2 in a half-derelict old building.’ And I just said, ‘Yeah, I’m in.’ I think he was disappointed it was so easy.”It wasn’t until last July that Vitrolles formally greenlighted the project. But Audi’s bet paid off: Work was completed on schedule, and while some debated Castellucci’s concept, “Resurrection” was generally applauded, a proof of concept at the start of a series of productions exploring the possibilities of the memorable, malleable space.“The stadium is the signature of Pierre Audi’s term,” said Timothée Picard, the festival’s dramaturg. “And it’s absolutely connected to everything he’s done from the beginning of his career. To imagine new relationships between works, space, stage directing, audience. Projects we couldn’t do in traditional venues.”Speaking to a small group of young artists during this year’s festival, Audi said, “I never looked at opera as something that had to deal with my trauma or my origins.” But he has linked his interest in repurposing unusual structures to growing up in Lebanon, a country that lacked theaters.At the Park Avenue Armory, Rashaad Newsome’s “Assembly” was “completely different than what you might think would be interesting to him,” the Armory’s president said.Mohamed Sadek for The New York Times“Opening the stadium, for me, it felt natural,” he said. “You have to take any building and make it a space.”Born into a wealthy family in Beirut, Audi was raised there and in Paris and was educated at Oxford University in Britain. He was in his early 20s when he founded the Almeida, turning it into a center of experimental theater and music. Starting in 1988, he served for 30 years as the leader of Dutch National Opera, a period during which he spent 10 years also in charge of the Holland Festival.“The thing about Pierre was, it wasn’t going to be traditional old-fashioned opera,” said the administrator and coach Matthew Epstein, who advised Audi during that early period. “It was the expanding of the repertoire — both backward, toward Handel and Monteverdi, which he directed and became famous for, and forward, toward so much contemporary opera. He’s a real impresario.”As the Foccroulle era moves further into the past, Audi’s Aix is coming into its own. He has added more productions to the three-week schedule and a denser lineup of concerts, expanding the budget to 27.5 million euros ($28.1 million) this year from 21.4 million euros in 2018, with plans for more, while maintaining the size of the staff; the increase is going into the art-making.He is presenting more Italian opera than had been the case here — “Tosca” in 2019; Rossini’s “Moïse et Pharaon” and a concert “Norma” this year; “Madama Butterfly” to come — and also more French works, including Meyerbeer’s “Le Prophète” next year. Aix’s vibrant commissioning program will continue, setting it apart from the Salzburg Festival, the grandest of European summer opera events, which has focused recently on revivals of rarely seen 20th-century pieces rather than new ones.Audi has “a never-ending curiosity,” said Nikolaus Bachler, another veteran artistic leader.Violette Franchi for The New York TimesA sustained relationship with Simon Rattle and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra will begin in a few summers. And Audi would like to convert the Château du Grand-Saint-Jean, just outside Aix, into a theater and a home for the festival’s young-artist program — but that project, unlike the Stadium de Vitrolles, would require an immense fund-raising effort, especially as public subsidies are a gradually ebbing percentage of the budget.As for the stadium, next summer it will be used for another ambitious project, but something completely different than “Resurrection”: a trio of films that will accompany Stravinsky’s epochal early ballets, played live by the Orchestre de Paris under Klaus Makela.“The important thing,” Audi said, “is not to imitate what we did this year.”This is in keeping with his general resistance to resting on his laurels, to doing what is expected of him. Nikolaus Bachler, another veteran artistic leader, said, “What I admire most about Pierre is he has a never-ending curiosity.” Rashaad Newsome’s “Assembly,” which Audi presented at the Armory earlier this year, was “completely different than what you might think would be interesting to him,” said Rebecca Robertson, the Armory’s president.But along with the curiosity comes a pragmatic side, a commitment to seeing those visions through. “He’s always anchored in some kind of technical reality,” Salonen said, adding, of “Resurrection”: “If he thought it could be done, I immediately thought this was something interesting.”“Honestly, this idea, coming from almost anyone, I would have said, ‘You’re out of your mind,’” Salonen said. “But when it came from him, I listened.” More

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      Review: In a Powerful ‘Hamlet,’ a Fragile Prince Faces His Foes

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      Alex Lawther makes for an especially riveting hero in Robert Icke’s chic if imperfect modern-dress production at the Park Avenue Armory.Many Hamlets I’ve seen are wily. Some kooky. Narcissistic, aloof, even pretentious. Less common is a Hamlet who is tender and romantic and achingly vulnerable, like a petal falling from the head of a flower at the end of its bloom.When Alex Lawther’s fragile Danish prince drags himself onstage in Robert Icke’s modern-dress production of “Hamlet,” which opened Tuesday night at the Park Avenue Armory, he recalls the 19th-century poets Arthur Rimbaud and Percy Shelley, a brilliant yet dejected young man who seems resolved to his sorrow — and to a tragic end.In the last decade, Icke has gained prominence for his heightened and contemporary-inflected adaptations of classics. This “Hamlet” played in the West End in 2017, with the hot-priest-sized package of magnetizing charisma known as Andrew Scott in the lead. He was one of the best Hamlets I’ve ever seen — though, as in so many other takes, the focus fell on his brooding and banter more than his emotional depth.Lawther, best known for his role in “The End of the __ing World,” doesn’t have Scott’s starry flair, but he possesses his own demure kind of charisma; he draws you in even as he withdraws into himself. As a result, this rendition honors Hamlet as not just self-indulgently melancholy, but as grappling with legitimate, heartbreaking loss.We begin at a swanky wedding party. (Hildegard Bechtler did the stylish sets and costumes.) Beyond a wall of sliding glass panels, we see Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude (Jennifer Ehle), and her new husband, his uncle Claudius (Angus Wright), dancing amid balloons and strings of lights. Dressed in a black suit, Lawther slowly shuffles across the stage and sits close to, but removed from, the action. He roughly rubs his palms against his thighs, as though to rub the fabric off his body.Throughout the hefty 3-hour-and-45 minute production, Lawther fully embodies Hamlet’s despondency, shuffling like a wayward toddler, with knees slightly bent and a constant sway that makes him appear near collapse. Planning to enact his vengeance on his scheming uncle, he holds a gun off at an angle, as though his arm is being puppeted by someone else pulling the strings above the stage.And when he speaks, it’s in a slow, warbling singsong, at once contemplative and idiosyncratic, especially when he pauses in the middle of sentences as though his mind is hiccuping with existential thoughts.Though the peculiar line readings sometimes turn monotonous, he snaps out of it, erupting into a surprising fit of mania. And Lawther threads the famed “What a piece of work is man!” monologue with poetic resonance, moving from wonder to despair through slow articulation and emphatic rhythm.From left: Lawther, Michael Abubakar, Hara Yannas, Angus Wright (as Claudius),Gilbert Kyem Jnr and Tia Bannon in the modern-dress production.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIcke, whose one-woman “Enemy of the People” played the Armory last year and whose “1984” had a brief Broadway run in 2017, brings a cinematic eye to the proceedings, using foreground and background to create dimension. In one clever bit of staging, Hamlet tarries in the forefront as the king and queen canoodle in back and guards race by mid-stage between them, fresh from sighting the former king’s ghost.At the same time, the director brings some curious adjustments to the characters, giving Polonius a touch of dementia and depicting Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as a couple clearly at odds about how they should respond to the royal request to monitor Hamlet.The women, in particular, get short shrift. Gertrude is unreadable, despite Ehle’s punchy line readings, and Ophelia’s descent into madness occurs faster than you can say “something rotten” — doing a disservice to Kirsty Rider’s perfectly matched delicate companion to Lawther’s Hamlet.As Claudius, Wright has the self-consciously composed air of a politician but misses some of the menace, while Peter Wight leans too heavily on the bumbling as Polonius. Luke Treadaway, however, makes the most of Laertes’s transformation: from refined gentleman and doting brother to unhinged revenge seeker, wildly swinging a gun at the news of his father’s murder and sister’s suicide.There are actual gunshots, too — ghastly pops and flashes of light that make the audience jump to attention. This is nowhere as gratuitous as, say, the 2019 DruidShakespeare production of “Richard III,” or even the current Broadway staging of “Macbeth,” with its severed limbs and crotch wounds. Still, the sight and sound of a gun onstage today, given our country’s despicable relationship to firearms, is unsettling.What’s most frustrating about Icke’s otherwise intriguing approach is the inessential, and, by now, highly unoriginal, incorporation of high tech. A grid of 12 screens hangs overhead, and two larger screens flank the stage, showing security footage from the castle and news reports about Denmark’s conflict with Norway.Clockwise, from lower right: Lawther (as Hamlet), Kirsty Rider (as Ophelia), Luke Treadaway (as her brother Laertes), Wright and Kyem.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe screens also flash “pause” and “stop” before the two intermissions and the final scene, mawkishly calling attention to the audience as spectators. The way Icke and the lighting designer Natasha Chivers handle several of Hamlet’s monologues is more effective; soft overhead light halos Lawther as he seems to addresses theatergoers directly from the edge of the stage, only to snap off when he’s done speaking.Tom Gibbons’s sound design envelops the proceedings in ominous atmospheric gloom:a distant howling wind; the cold, mechanical hum of static and feedback; and, finally, the thunderous exclamations of drums. Less fitting are the production’s folksy compositions (by Laura Marling) and use of Bob Dylan songs, which, even deployed ironically, are a bit too Midwest-porch-jam for this chic production.“Hamlet” is one of the Shakespeare plays that most suffers from diminishing returns — adaptations that try too hard to innovate, to render a classic modern and hip. Though Icke’s protracted production occasionally falls into that trap, ultimately the creative team’s visual and technical prowess — along with its provocative young lead — make this a tale of musing, mania and murder for our age.HamletThrough Aug. 13 at the Wade Thompson Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory; armoryonpark.org. Running time: 3 hours 45 minutes. More

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

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

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      The Antiquarian Book Fair: From Sondheim’s Letters to a Brontë Discovery

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      Among the rarities on view at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair are also a 1555 treatise on tennis and Amy Winehouse’s personal library.The New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, which returns to the Park Avenue Armory this weekend after a two-year pandemic hiatus, is one of the world’s leading gatherings of the rare book tribe. For more casual visitors, it can also be an experience of dizzying information overload.Yes, there are the museum-like displays of fine bindings, illuminated manuscripts and historic documents, with dramatic lighting (and eye-popping prices). But the fair, which runs from Thursday evening to Sunday, also features booths stuffed with pulp paperbacks, old advertisements, zines, board games, maps, photographs and all manner of accessibly priced ephemera that challenges any hidebound notions of “rare books.”Here is a sampling of offerings at the more than 200 booths, from carefully curated libraries to jotted notes that speak to the power of pen and paper to stop time and conjure vanished worlds.Send in the SondheimPart of an archive of 70 letters and postcards written by Stephen Sondheim over four decades to his close friend Larry Miller.via Schubertiade MusicAfter Stephen Sondheim’s death last November, social media was awash with images of the notes he regularly sent to theater colleagues famous and not, offering praise and encouragement. Schubertiade Music is offering range of Sondheimiana, including a collection of 70 letters and postcards ($20,000) written over four decades to his close friend Larry Miller. In one, Sondheim describes a 1969 trip to Europe: “In Vienna we were treated with the doubtful pleasure of one act of ‘West Side Story’ in German. Funnier than the original, anyway, even if it is billed as ‘Bernstein’s West Side Story.’” Also on offer are autographed programs, scores and a mid-1930s class photograph ($1,000) showing a young Sondheim dressed as a clown.Remembering Stephen SondheimThe revered and influential composer-lyricist died Nov. 26, 2021. He was 91. Obituary: A titan of the American musical, Sondheim was the driving force behind some of Broadway’s most beloved shows. Final Interview: Days before he died, he sat down with The Times for his final major interview. His Legacy: As a mentor, a letter writer and an audience regular, Sondheim nurtured generations of theater makers. ‘West Side Story’: Does the musical, which features some of the artist’s best-known lyrics, deserve a new hearing? ‘Company’: The revival of his 1970 musical features a gender swap.Atomic DawnPapers from the Manhattan Project’s Medical Group were buried in military archives at Lowry Air Force Base in Colorado until the 1960s.via Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps and Boston Rare Maps“Ball or mushroom rose slowly & majestically & ponderously & brilliantly — bright red purple [with] blue rim for a few seconds. So it towered up with streamers falling vertically in the stem & out of the cap.”So wrote a member of the Manhattan Project’s Medical Group on July 16, 1945, after watching the world’s first detonation of a nuclear weapon, in the New Mexican desert, known as the Trinity Test. Boston Rare Maps and Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps are jointly offering a trove of 300 pages of little-seen handwritten diagrams, memos, maps and notes generated by the medical group, which was charged with monitoring health and safety. The documents ($1.5 million) — which include what the sellers say is the first written use of the term “mushroom cloud” — were buried in military archives at Lowry Air Force Base in Colorado until the 1960s, when they were declassified and then sold to a private collector during the base’s decommissioning. The material reflects the tensions between preserving secrecy while protecting populations downwind from nuclear fallout, as well as the tension between dispassionate scientific observation and sheer awe.A Pioneering Black ShakespeareanAn autographed lithograph, circa 1857, of Ira Aldridge, the first actor of African descent known to play Othello.via Maggs Bros Ltd.The London dealer Maggs Bros is offering an autographed lithograph, circa 1857, of Ira Aldridge, the first actor of African descent known to play Othello ($13,500). Born in 1807, Aldridge attended the African Free School of New York City and acted in William Brown’s African Theater before emigrating to England to seek better prospects. At first, he played African roles, sometimes written expressly for him. His turn as Othello came in 1832, when he stepped in after the renowned Edmund Kean collapsed onstage and died. Audiences loved it, but the critics were outraged. Management closed the theater after two performances, and Aldridge did not appear on the mainstream London stage again for decades. The portrait, created during one of his triumphant tours of the European continent, “acknowledges his work as an artist rather than a mere curiosity,” according to the listing.Tennis, Anyone?Antonio Scaino’s 1555 treatise on tennis.via Jonathan Hill BooksellerJonathan Hill Bookseller of New York is offering a rare first edition of Antonio Scaino’s 1555 treatise on tennis ($45,000), said to be the first book on the game. By the mid-16th century, tennis was already a popular pastime among kings and commoners alike, though bitter disputes often broke out over the rules (plus ça change?). Scaino, a philosopher, apparently wrote the book after a debate with his patron, the duke of Ferrara (and the owner of as many as six courts), over how to award a point. It’s not clear who won that one, but scholars today still debate the validity of Scaino’s arcane theory of the origins of the game’s odd scoring system.This Girl’s LifeTwo volumes of diaries, from 1831-2, by the precocious 11-year-old Emily Shore, a contemporary of Charlotte Brontë.via Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers of LondonOne of the stars of the fair is a miniature book created in 1829 by 13-year-old Charlotte Brontë ($1.25 million), which recently surfaced after being considered lost for nearly a century. But Brontë and her siblings were hardly the only word-mad British children of the era. Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers of London is offering two volumes of diaries, from 1831-2, by 11-year-old Emily Shore. The precocious Emily, who died at age 19, wrote three volumes of poetry, three novels and several histories, which went unpublished. She is known today through her diaries, which were published by her sisters in 1891 in heavily edited form. Today, only a handful of the dozen notebooks she filled her with tiny, meticulous handwriting are known to survive. The two on sale here offer an unfiltered window into the domestic life of a period where children, especially girls, were seen but rarely heard.End-of-the-World Library?A 1554 first edition in Italian of Aristotle’s “Meteorology,” the oldest comprehensive treatise on the subject.via Peter HarringtonThe London dealer Peter Harrington spent a decade building One Hundred Seconds to Midnight, a collection of 800 works tracking more than 2,000 years of climate science and environmentalism, from Aristotle’s “Meteorology” and 19th-century weather records to NASA’s iconic “Earthrise” photograph and contemporary “cli-fi” novels. The dealer’s booth will feature highlights from the collection ($2.5 million), which tracks “both our recording of data and also our emotional response to it,” as a video tour of the collection puts it. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to the World Land Trust.Punk Lit!The safety-pin=pierced dustjacket of Sam Gideon’s “The Punk” (1977), said to be the first punk novel. It was supposedly written by a 14-year-old “closet punk” in London.via Type Punch MatrixType Punch Matrix, a Washington, D.C., bookseller that aims to make collecting more accessible and diverse, is known for edgy stock that pushes the boundaries of the rare books category. Their big-ticket offerings this year include a collection of more than 220 books that once belonged to the singer Amy Winehouse ($135,000), about 50 of which will be on display. (Among the sometimes heavily annotated titles is a marked-up script of “Little Shop of Horrors” from Winehouse’s theater-kid days, and a copy of Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita” described as looking “like it was dropped in the bath.”) On a tighter budget? The dealers are also offering a pristine copy of Gideon Sams’s “The Punk” (1977), often said to be first punk novel, written, the story goes, by a 14-year-old British “closet punk” as a school assignment, and published after his mother rescued it from the trash. It comes with the original dust jacket, featuring a real safety-pin piercing the nose of the image of Johnny Rotten ($500).New York International Antiquarian Book FairApril 21-24 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; nyantiquarianbookfair.com. More