Park Avenue Armory (Manhattan, NY)

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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

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      Review: ‘Ten Thousand Birds’ Turns the Armory Into an Aviary

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      The ensemble Alarm Will Sound spread throughout the Park Avenue Armory’s drill hall for the installation-like music of John Luther Adams.By now, the Park Avenue Armory’s Recital Series concerts are a known quantity: art song and chamber music in ornate, intimate spaces.Whether the programming is classic or contemporary, the packaging is the same, with only a few surprises — as when the soprano Barbara Hannigan turned Erik Satie’s music into semi-staged monodrama. But there hasn’t been a performance quite like the one by the ensemble Alarm Will Sound on Thursday.Abandoning the traditional Recital Series rooms, the group’s members spread throughout the Armory’s capacious drill hall for John Luther Adams’s characterful and moving “Ten Thousand Birds,” an installation-like project that’s as much environmental — in presentation, but also in its preoccupations — as it is musical.Brandon Patrick George played flute and, here, piccolo.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesAdams, our reigning musical ambassador of the natural world, hasn’t written a score here in the usual sense. It is an Audubon book in translation: each page, the portrait of a bird in sound. Together the sketches form an open-ended and modular folio, with minimal guidance. “The size of the ensemble and the duration of a performance may be tailored to the specific site and occasion,” Adams writes in a note for the published version. “It is not necessary to play all the pieces in this collection. It’s not even necessary to play all the musical material within a particular piece.”He also calls for “the largest possible physical space”; the drill hall is about 55,000 square feet, which Alarm Will Sound occupied with both freedom and precision in a staging by Alan Pierson, the group’s artistic director, and the percussionist Peter Ferry, its assistant artistic director. (Early in the pandemic, Pierson and these players made a short video adaptation called “Ten Thousand Birds / Ten Thousand Screens”; imaginative and often funny, it remains a high point of a low moment in classical music.)At the Armory, Alarm Will Sound arranged “Ten Thousand Birds” into a roughly 70-minute experience that follows the cycle of the day: Beginning with a gentle breeze, it traces the awakening accumulation of morning, the liveliness of afternoon and the long pauses of night before returning to that peaceful wind. Overhead the lights gradually dimmed, and on the floor, the audience was invited to move among the musicians. Just as there is no one way to present this work, there are no rules for how to hear it.The horn player Laura Weiner among audience members, who were free to move among the musicians throughout the work.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesOn Thursday, people weren’t entirely prepared for the piece to begin, with some preshow chatter lingering alongside the wind. But it’s difficult to miss a breathy bassoon being waved around, and audience members more clearly understood what was happening as other musicians took their places. A flute, hazy and lightly arpeggiated, introduced melody to the mix, which grew richer: percussion in the familiar falling interval of bird song in classical music, and harmonic runs in the strings.Adams has in the past evoked immense natural forces — such as in his “Become” trilogy, which includes the Pulitzer Prize- and Grammy Award-winning “Become Ocean” — and here he balances both abstraction and transcription. For every passage of lyricism that emerges from instrumental dialogue, there is a phrase with the uncanny exactitude of Messiaen: a piccolo call, an agitated piano flutter.And, as staged at the Armory, there was a subtle sense of drama. Zoomorphic in their movement, the players shifted throughout the space less like musicians and more like characters. A timpani rumble dispersed a small ensemble that had been crowded around it. Some performers were elusive or difficult to place, perched in the mezzanine or in the frame of a Juliet balcony but obscured by darkness. Strings zipped through listeners in a buzzing swarm. By the time the work reached its nocturnal scenes, though, that kind of levity gave way to serene patience — long silences punctuated by passing song.Some in the audience lay as if in meditation while others paced around the drill hall. Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesAs in “Inuksuit,” another of Adams’s installation works, the audience’s engagement varied. Curiosity kept me in constant motion; some people stayed in chairs, or sat in groups on the ground like picnickers. A few lay flat, eyes closed, as if in meditation. David Byrne strolled with a bicycle helmet in hand, scrutinizing unattended percussion instruments. One man knitted, while another played Scrabble. Many — too many — pulled out their phones to take photos or record, their flashes distracting in the dark.Which is unfortunate because what “Ten Thousand Birds” offers, above all, is an opportunity to marvel, not document. If I were to attend again, I would be in the camp of those who rested in one place and let sounds come to them, the way they might during a day at the park. Regardless, focus is all it takes for this piece, and Alarm Will Sound’s thoughtful realization of it, to achieve its aim: a heightened aestheticization of nature, and perhaps a renewed connection with it.Whether Adams accomplishes something more with this work — whether its spirit of appreciation rises to the level of advocacy — is, like the experience of the music itself, up to the audience.Alarm Will SoundRepeats on Friday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. More

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      Review: Michel van der Aa’s ‘Upload’ Asks Old Questions With New Technology

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      Michel van der Aa’s work, a seamless interweaving of opera, film and motion-capture performance, arrives at the Park Avenue Armory.“I am certain that you exist,” a daughter tells her father, only to reconsider: “I am certain that you do not exist.”Her ambivalence is understandable. The question of what it means to be human — to exist — is an old one, and, arguing with her father, this woman is not about to find an answer. Only more questions, which accumulate at a breakneck pace in Michel van der Aa’s “Upload,” a seamless interweaving of opera, film and high technology that had its American premiere at the Park Avenue Armory on Tuesday.This work would seem to contain more than it possibly could in its 85 minutes: a tutorial-like explanation of how a clinic offers immortality by backing up consciousness to the cloud, one man’s journey through that process and his daughter’s conflicted response as he returns to her — no longer alive but, well, not dead. Throughout, the score shifts among electronic and acoustic sounds, just as the production moves between — and occasionally collides — live performance, prerecorded scenes and motion-capture technology.But van der Aa, an artist of big swings, operates here as composer, librettist and director with the restraint of a confident master. In a way that hasn’t always been the case with his works marrying novelty and tradition, there is no dazzle in “Upload” that isn’t closely tied to the dramaturgy.Bullock plays a daughter coping with her father’s new life as consciousness uploaded to the cloud, over scenes that shift between film and live performance.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThis is the third version I’ve seen, starting with a solely cinematic one that premiered online last summer. European audiences can stream it at medici.tv; Americans will be able to do the same starting April 1.The “Upload” film made trims to the score that focused its storytelling and had editing that more clearly separated the piece’s use of different media. It’s effective, though much less affecting than the proscenium presentation at the Dutch National Opera last fall, which restored the introduction — poetic fragments of phrases about the body, sung like plainchant in the dark — and an intimate coup de théâtre at the climax.Van der Aa’s creative team has been a constant, among them the dramaturgs Madelon Kooijman and Niels Nuijten, and Theun Mosk, who designed the smoothly integrated set and lighting; Tom Gelissen and Paul Jeukendrup, the nimble sound; and Darien Brito and Julius Horsthuis, the Hollywood-level special effects.Further tweaks have been made for the Armory’s capacious drill hall. Particularly striking now is that climactic move, an audience-spanning screen that was closer than in Amsterdam — a low ceiling — and more immersive. (But from Row G, it also made my craning neck hurt.)Williams, left, in a scene that blends live performance with film, featuring Ashley Zukerman as a Silicon Valley-like chief executive.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThat moment delivers a wash of patient quiet and humanity after 80 minutes of brisk drama. “Upload” has elements of the darkly speculative series “Black Mirror” and the comparatively hopeful “Years and Years,” but its preoccupations are as timeless as they are the finest genre fiction.Not that “uploading” is fully fictional. It is our future and present: an already stated ambition to upload consciousness to a decentralized blockchain, prefigured by the traces of ourselves we already deposit throughout the internet — our images and inner thoughts slowly building what the clinic of “Upload” (shot at the modernist Zonnestraal sanitarium in the Netherlands) would call a Mind File for our digital afterlife.How that file is created is detailed in filmed sequences starring Ashley Zukerman (“Succession”) as a stereotypical Silicon Valley type, hubristically enthusiastic and uninterested in waiting for government regulation, and Katja Herbers (“Evil”), as an empathetic psychiatrist who also has a streak of overconfidence. The technology is available only to a privileged few, the kind of people who would fly to space recreationally. Or, here, buy eternal life at the cost of death — to avoid the complications, both ethical and ecological, of multiple uploads.For these scenes, van der Aa writes less of an opera score and more of a soundtrack, uneasy yet excited, with jittery strings, chaotic percussion and electronics that warp into crackling white noise — all played, with propulsive momentum, by Ensemble Musikfabrik, under Otto Tausk’s committed and commanding baton. Van der Aa’s music takes on a different style, though, for scenes featuring the work’s two singing roles: the unnamed father and daughter.We meet them — the baritone Roderick Williams, delicate and ever sympathetic, and the soprano Julia Bullock, silvery at the top of her range, equally at ease in pop directness and lush lyricism — after he has been uploaded, without her knowledge. Their interactions have the naturally rhythmic vocal writing of Janacek or Debussy. Left alone, she tends to be accompanied by more traditional sounds, such as a piano or strings, while the father’s musical vocabulary is firmly, irreversibly electronic.Bullock with Williams, who, as an uploaded consciousness, is shown onstage through motion-capture technology.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTheir thread of the plot has a short story’s simplicity: She scrutinizes his new self, with constantly changing feelings, then has to decide whether to terminate him, to let him die again. That is because something went wrong in the upload process, which ordinarily buries trauma — in this father’s case, the recent, debilitating, loss of his wife.Briefly paused for the first time as an Upload, the father realizes that his grief is still agonizingly present, and that he’s doomed to endure it forever unless he is, well, deleted, which only his daughter can do. The opera leaves them on the night before her fateful decision. When that curtain shoots out over the audience, it shows them in split-screen projection — as if lying together while on separate planes of existence, singing the poetic fragments of the opening, now more pained.The curtain then lifts, revealing a stage from which the orchestra is gone, but electronic music lingers. A video shows the father’s memory anchor, meant to keep an Upload from drifting, unmoored, into digital space. It’s a virtual rendering of a childhood scene, chasing lizards around a stone wall in the countryside, that begins to glitch and degrade, leaving only a white expanse.Is the continuing score, in the absence of an orchestra, a triumph of technology? Does the conclusion depict the father’s deletion — or even the inevitable decay of all digital files? There are no answers here. If van der Aa offers anything, it is a guarantee of death, and of the unavoidably human response: to grieve.UploadThrough March 30 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. More

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      50 Years Later, the Rothko Chapel Meets a New Musical Match

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      Tyshawn Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” written for the chapel’s anniversary, is a tribute to the first music performed in the space.Before Tyshawn Sorey composed a note of his latest work, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, he spent hours inside its octagonal temple containing more than a dozen dark canvases.Immersing himself in Mark Rothko’s fields of seeming black, Sorey noticed that the paintings shifted subtly over time — and that time itself appeared to dissolve. The colors changed to match the sun coming through the chapel’s skylight. When he would go outside and return, his adjusting eyes made it feel as though the works were coming to life.Few people can give Rothko the time or space to perceive what Sorey saw. But “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” something of a sonic distillation of what he experienced, might give them an idea. Written for the chapel’s 50th anniversary — and delayed a year because of the pandemic — his new work will premiere there on Saturday, ahead of a staged presentation at the Park Avenue Armory in New York this fall.The piece is in part a tribute to one of Sorey’s heroes, the composer Morton Feldman, whose “Rothko Chapel” was written in 1971 for the building, a project by the arts philanthropists Dominique and John de Menil. Feldman’s piece — scored for percussion, celesta, viola, choir and soprano — was an abstract analogue to Rothko’s canvases. Deceptively formless, it is music to be inhabited. But near the end, the viola plays what Feldman called a “quasi-Hebraic melody” that he composed as a teenager, an invocation of and memorial to his (and Rothko’s) heritage.The Feldman is “a special piece,” said Sarah Rothenberg, the artistic director of the presenting organization DaCamera, which, with the chapel, commissioned Sorey’s premiere. “It’s a remarkable synergy between space and music that has become a kind of ambassador.”In conceiving a 50th-anniversary commission, a new ambassador was desired. Sorey came to mind, Rothenberg said, because of how he engages with the history of Black Americans — a parallel to the chapel’s civil rights-minded mission. And his style, she knew, had been shaped by Feldman.Sorey, 41, was first exposed to Feldman’s music in college, when he heard his teacher Anton Vishio practicing “Piano.” “It was just beautiful,” Sorey said, adding that the music, its sonorities and its patience “really spoke to me more than anything else I was listening to at the time. Pretty much any composition I’ve written is in some ways inspired by Morton Feldman. It’s hard to shake off such an influence.”Maurice Peress conducting the premiere of Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel” in 1972.Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Hickey-Roberston, via Rothko Chapel ArchivesAlong with other influences, including Roscoe Mitchell, Feldman taught Sorey the goal of reaching a place in music where time no longer seems to exist and a listener can become truly present in the moment. “Every sound has its own world at that point,” Sorey said. “You could talk about the technical parts, but the quality that I want to get out of it is presentness.”For “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” he chose virtually the same instrumentation as “Rothko Chapel” — in a way that the director Peter Sellars, who will stage the piece at the Armory, said reflects lineage in music, “how your granddaughter has your grandmother’s eyes.” But in lieu of the quasi-Hebraic melody, Sorey quotes, in his refracted style, the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” He added a piano (played by Rothenberg, doubling on celesta) and changed the soprano soloist to a bass, which he felt better matched the tone of the paintings.Sellars recalled that when he went over the score with Sorey for the first time, they looked at the part and, more or less at the same time, said who they wanted to sing it: the bass-baritone Davóne Tines. Sorey has contributed treatments of spirituals to Tines’s “Mass” recital program, a collaboration that began after Tines first heard what would become “Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine,” Sorey’s evening-length work inspired by the life of Josephine Baker, written for the soprano Julia Bullock.“I realized he was able to open meaning in text by recreating it in his voice,” Tines said. Together he and Sorey have revisited the catalog of spirituals, because, Tines said, “Tyshawn is able to reveal the truer psychology of what those songs mean.”The Rothko canvases, Sorey said, change color with the sun coming through the skylight.Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Michael Starghill Jr. for The New York TimesFeldman referred to “Rothko Chapel” as a “secular service.” While Sorey emphasized that Feldman is just one of the influences on “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” the idea of a secular service is what he aims for; it’s why he prefers to call his performances rituals. And it permeates this work, beginning with the first measure: Lasting indefinitely, it is a dissolution of time in which tubular bells resonate at near silence, with pitches of two chords struck at random as the other performers enter the space.“It’s kind of a similar feeling to when I first walked into the chapel,” Sorey said. “It’s almost this cathartic sort of emotion, the moment you get when you walk in there; it’s like a religious experience. So by having the resonant sound happening, and you’re not sure what to make of it — it’s almost a ceremonial, spiritual thing going on. You’re eliminating any sort of external obstacles, for that type of clarity that I think Rothko was always going for in his art.”Once the choir joins later, its members sing without vibrato, staggering their breaths to create seamlessly suspended streams of sound that, Sorey said, are not unlike the paintings surrounding them.“To me, the voices are like these panels,” he added. “The sonorities are expressive, expressing a certain type of emotion, like tragedy or grief. So like Rothko, my sonorities and the way I choose to use these voices is not so much about being abstract as much as expressing this feelingful experience. And I’m seeing the listener being surrounded by these ever-changing emotions.”“Like Rothko, my sonorities and the way I choose to use these voices is not so much about being abstract as much as expressing this feelingful experience.”Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Michael Starghill Jr. for The New York TimesFew people — about 300 people over two performances — will get to experience the premiere this weekend. But there are plans to release an album of the work on the ECM label, as a follow-up to its 2015 release of “Rothko Chapel,” which featured artists, including Rothenberg, who return for “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife).”Then, in late September, the piece will travel to the Armory, where the audience will be immersed in panels by Julie Mehretu, an artist whose abstractions share preoccupations with Sorey and Rothko. On the surface, this cavernous space could not be more different from the intimate chapel. But, Sellars said, “what’s beautiful about the Armory is, it can create the occasion for something.”He continued: “What Tyshawn is creating is memorial space. Rothko and Feldman created memorial space from silence, from grief, from darkness, where you could feel the presence of erased histories and erased lives that are nonetheless present and moving and speaking within these fields of darkness. ­Feldman and Rothko brought their histories to that space. And I think this group of artists will, too.”Details are still being worked out — such as whether to hide the choir — but at the very least, Sorey said, it will “become more intensified” than the presentation in Houston.“How can we make it more of a ritualistic or ceremonial event?” he added. “How can we intensify the spiritual, metaphysical matter in which the piece is received? That’s what I want: to really magnify that experience.” More

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      Park Avenue Armory Announces Futuristic New Season

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      Highlights include the North American premieres of Michel van der Aa’s opera “Upload” and Robert Icke’s production of “Hamlet.”The Park Avenue Armory is taking a forward-looking approach in its 2022 season.“The current that runs through this season is technology and futuristic outlooks on the world,” Rebecca Robertson, the Armory’s president and executive producer, said in an interview on Tuesday.A highlight of the season, announced on Wednesday, is the North American premiere of the Dutch composer Michel van der Aa’s 80-minute opera “Upload,” about a man who uploads a digital version of his consciousness to achieve virtual immortality (March 22-30, 2022). In a review of the production at the Dutch National Opera, The New York Times’s Joshua Barone called the piece, which combines film, motion capture and live performance and stars the soprano Julia Bullock and the baritone Roderick Williams, “a sci-fi spin on a fundamentally human tale.”Next up, the British director Robert Icke presents a surveillance-focused staging of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” which will make its North American premiere after sold-out runs at London’s Almeida Theater and the West End in 2017 (May 31-Aug. 13, 2022). Alex Lawther (“The Imitation Game”) will take on the titular role, which Andrew Scott played to critical acclaim in London.“Hamlet” will play in repertory with Icke’s adaptation of Aeschylus’ “Oresteia” (June 9-Aug. 13, 2022) — for which he won the Olivier Award for best director in 2016. Originally a trilogy of Greek tragedies, the three plays have been condensed into a single family drama that follows a succession of brutal family murders and runs just over three and a half hours. Lia Williams, who was nominated for an Olivier for best actress in the 2015 production, is set to return in the role of Klytemnestra.Other highlights of the new season include “Assembly,” an exhibition featuring the second generation of Rashaad Newsome’s artificial-intelligence-powered creation “Being,” whose voice acts as the installation’s soundscape (Feb. 16-March 6, 2022); “Rothko Chapel,” a new commission by the composer and MacArthur fellow Tyshawn Sorey, based on Morton Feldman’s composition for the dedication of the chapel in 1971 and directed by Peter Sellars (Sept. 27-Oct. 8, 2022); and “Euphoria,” an immersive film installation by the German video and film artist Julian Rosefeldt that is a commentary on money, greed and consumption (Nov. 30, 2022-Jan. 1, 2023).A full season lineup is available at armoryonpark.org. More

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      Two Singers Reveal the Core of Art Song, on Stages Big and Small

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      This weekend, Jonas Kaufmann gave a recital at the vast Carnegie Hall, while Will Liverman appeared at the intimate Park Avenue Armory.Two recitals over the weekend in New York might have seemed, at first, to inhabit very different realms of art song.On Saturday evening at Carnegie Hall, Jonas Kaufmann, one of the world’s leading tenors, presented a program of songs in German. Then on Sunday afternoon at the Park Avenue Armory, the rising baritone Will Liverman, currently at the Metropolitan Opera in the lead role of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” gave a varied recital that included works by four Black composers he champions.The Armory’s recital space — the roughly 100-seat Board of Officers Room — is close to the salons and living rooms where Schubert and other composers of his time essentially created the lieder concert. Carnegie Hall, which sold out nearly all of its 2,800 seats for Kaufmann’s engagement, is massively bigger than anything the progenitors of lieder could have imagined.Yet at its core, art song is a genre in which music is put, sensitively and compellingly, at the service of poetic texts. And though the stages Kaufmann and Liverman performed from could not have been more different, both artists proved themselves singers who put words first.Kaufmann, who has been frustratingly elusive in New York in recent years, appeared with his regular recital partner, the fine pianist Helmut Deutsch. They began with nine works that can be heard on their recent recording of lieder by Liszt, whose roughly 90 songs remain somewhat overlooked. In “Vergiftet sind meine Lieder,” an impassioned setting of a Heine poem, Kaufmann was almost in Wagnerian mode, like a despairing Tristan, singing with burnished top notes, yet shaping aching phrases tenderly.Now and then, in the Liszt songs and elsewhere, his voice had its rough patches. (A week earlier, he had canceled some performances in Munich because of a tracheal infection.) But he mostly rallied, and sounded at his clarion-voiced best as the program went on. These Liszt works are marvelous, full of musical-poetic flights, alternately epic and ruminative. The piano parts, not surprisingly for this composer, are often elaborate, with daring chromatic harmonies and wondrous colorings. I was most impressed, however, when Kaufmann lifted melting phrases with focused and floating sound, like the pianissimo moments of “Die Loreley.”Helmut Deutsch, left, with Jonas Kaufmann at Carnegie Hall on Saturday.Jennifer TaylorHe then sang 13 songs by Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Zemlinsky and others, ending with Mahler’s profound “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” (from “Rückert-Lieder”), in an effectively restrained performance. That was supposed to have ended the recital, after 75 minutes with no intermission. But the enthusiastic audience had other ideas, and Kaufmann complied, with six encores. During the last one, Strauss’s “Cäcilie,” Kaufmann, visibly annoyed, stopped after a couple phrases. “I do everything for you,” he told the audience, “but please respect the rules and don’t film!” People applauded in support, then he started over — and sang vibrantly.Though Liverman has been rightly praised for his wrenching performance in “Fire,” he did sometimes have trouble being heard over the orchestra at the Met. Yet at the Armory, joined by the excellent pianist Myra Huang, his sound almost overwhelmed the space. It was exciting to hear his fearsome account of Loewe’s “Erlkönig” (Goethe’s chilling poem, best known from Schubert’s setting). And he balanced forceful intensity with winningly intimate singing in songs by Strauss, Ravel and Rachmaninoff, all played with taste and flair by Huang.Then, turning to the works by Black composers, Liverman brought affecting directness to Margaret Bonds’s “Three Dream Portraits” (to texts by Langston Hughes), which can be heard on his recent album “Dreams of a New Day: Songs by Black Composers.” Songs by H. Leslie Adams and Damien Sneed were also special, coming across like an elegant stylistic meeting place between art song and American standards. I was moved, and impressed, when Liverman performed his own arrangement of a medley of music by Brian McKnight — a favorite R&B artist of his, he explained — singing with lovely casualness while accompanying himself deftly on the piano.Not many opera singers have that skill, let alone the courage. And along the way, he had explored an overlooked legacy of American artists whose work speaks to him personally. More

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      in Music

      Review: For Armory Recitals, a Modest but Memorable Return

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      Paul Appleby and Conor Hanick presented a song program focused on cycles by Beethoven and Berg.The past few weeks have brought heartening signs that classical music is coming back to New York after the devastating pandemic closures of the past year and a half. The Metropolitan Opera reopened the doors for an inspiring performance of Verdi’s Requiem on Sept. 11. The New York Philharmonic inaugurated its new season last week.On Monday evening a much more modest, but no less meaningful, return took place when the tenor Paul Appleby and the pianist Conor Hanick presented a song recital in the elegantly intimate Board of Officers Room at the Park Avenue Armory.Just over 90 people, a near-capacity crowd for the salon-like space, attended this intelligent and beautifully performed program of German lieder — lasting two hours, with an intermission, just as concerts generally used to before everything stopped. The program repeats on Wednesday, and two more artist pairs fill out the fall in the space: Will Liverman and Myra Huang next month, and Jamie Barton and Warren Jones in November.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesAppleby is best known for opera, including the title role in Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” and David in Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” which he sings next month at the Met. Yet he has long been devoted to the song literature, including many new and recent works.This Armory program arose from his desire to pair two song cycles, Beethoven’s “An die ferne Geliebte” and Berg’s “Altenberg Lieder” — both of which, as he wrote in program notes, “address ways of coping with unfulfilled wishes, with dreams that did not come true.” To place these cycles in context, he performed selected songs by Schumann and Schubert that also grapple with loss and pain and offer coping mechanisms — including, as Appleby put it, “numb nihilism.”Both cycles were historically momentous. Beethoven’s set of six songs, from 1816, offered a template for the 19th-century German song cycle. The poems, by Alois Jeitteles, present a protagonist thinking of his lost home, his distant beloved, his unfulfilled love. The songs flow from one to the next, giving the cycle the sense of a unified, if episodic, narrative. Appleby sang the tender pieces with warmth and heartache, and brought almost eerie vitality to moments of heady nostalgia. Hanick, a brilliant pianist more often heard in thorny contemporary scores, played with crispness, nuance and grace.Berg’s 1912 work, which sets five short texts by the German writer Peter Altenberg, was originally written for mezzo-soprano and lush orchestra. The public reaction when two of the songs were introduced at a concert in Vienna was so hostile that their aggrieved composer never had them performed again. But the work pointed the way to a new 20th-century musical language. Appleby and Hanick performed a version with a piano reduction that allowed the tenor — with a relatively lighter, lyric voice — to bring out subtleties in the vocal lines. And Hanick’s playing was a revelation of clarity and bite.There were lovely accounts of all the Schubert and Schumann works. I was especially gratified to hear these artists call attention to little-heard songs from Schumann’s later years, like the dreamy “An den Mond,” which opened the wonderful program, and the autumnal, harmonically tart “Abendlied,” which ended it.Paul Appleby and Conor HanickRepeats Wednesday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.com. More

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      in Theater

      Broadway Audiences Will Need Proof of Vaccination and Masks

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      Children under 12, who cannot be vaccinated, can show a negative test to attend. But the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall plan to bar them for now.Broadway’s theater owners and operators, citing the ongoing dangers of the coronavirus pandemic, said Friday that they have decided to require that theatergoers be vaccinated against Covid-19 and wear masks in order to attend performances.The policy, announced just days before the first Broadway play in more than 16 months is to start performances, allows children ineligible for vaccination to attend shows if tested for the virus. Some performing arts venues in New York say they will go even further: the Metropolitan Opera, which hopes to reopen in late September, and Carnegie Hall, which is planning to reopen in October, are not only planning to require vaccinations, but also to bar children under 12 who are not yet eligible to be vaccinated.The new vaccination requirements for visitors to New York’s most prominent performing arts venues were imposed as the highly contagious Delta variant has caused Covid-19 cases to rise, leading the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend that vaccinated Americans in virus hot spots resume wearing masks indoors. Several major businesses, local governments and the federal government have recently decided to require their employees to get vaccinated or submit to frequent testing.The safety protocols come at a fraught time for Broadway, which is attempting to rebound after the longest shutdown in its history. Because tourism, which traditionally accounts for about two-thirds of the Broadway audience, remains down, it was already unclear whether there would be sufficient demand to support the 45 shows that plan to start performances on Broadway this season. Now the industry is hoping that there will be more people comforted than put off by the vaccination and masking measures. “We have said from Day 1 that we want our casts, our crews and our audiences to be safe, and we believe that this is a precaution to ensure that,” said Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League. “We’re doing everything we can to open safely and protect everyone.”The rules, which will be in place at least through October, apply to all 41 Broadway theaters, and require that audiences wear masks except when eating or drinking in designated areas.The Broadway vaccination mandate will apply not only to audiences, but also to performers, backstage crew and theater staff. There will be limited exceptions: “people with a medical condition or closely held religious belief that prevents vaccination,” as well as children under 12, can attend with proof of a recent negative coronavirus test.A vaccine mandate is already in place for Bruce Springsteen’s concert show, which began performances in June, and for “Pass Over,” the play that aims to start performances on Aug. 4. The latest rules will mean that they will now require masks as well, and will govern all of the shows that follow: Twenty-seven, including many of the blockbuster musicals, intend to get underway in September and October, starting with “Hadestown” and “Waitress” on Sept. 2, followed by “Chicago,” “Hamilton,” “The Lion King,” “Wicked” and the play “Lackawanna Blues” on Sept. 14.“I am overjoyed that the theater owners and the Broadway League have made the decision that is best for the community at large,” said Brian Moreland, the lead producer of “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” a play that is to start performances in October. “We committed to doing what the science told us to do, and this is what the science tells us.”Deciding what to do about young children has proved particularly vexing, given that no vaccine has yet been approved for pediatric use. Although Broadway, which has a number of shows that depend on ticket buying by families with children, has decided to allow those under 12 to attend if tested, the Met Opera, which draws fewer young children to most of its productions, is taking a more restrictive approach.“Children under the age of 12, for whom there is no currently available vaccine, are not permitted to enter the Met regardless of the vaccination status of their guardian,” the company declares on its website.“Obviously, it’s painful to me personally and to the company not to have young people coming into the theater,” said Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met, who said that the company’s vaccination policies were designed to protect its roughly 3,000 employees and to make audiences feel comfortable about coming back and sitting in close quarters. The Met is also requiring all visiting artists and the members of its orchestra and chorus, as well as its staff, to be vaccinated.Barring children under 12 for now had been a difficult decision, Gelb said: “They are our future audience.”Gelb said that he hoped children would become eligible for vaccines by December, when the Met has two holiday presentations aimed at families and children: the company’s shortened, English-language version of “The Magic Flute,” and “Cinderella,” an English-language adaptation of Massenet’s “Cendrillon.”Both Broadway and the Met say they will open at full capacity, meaning no social distancing. The Met, unlike Broadway, says that masks will be optional. Broadway theaters range in size from 600 to 1,900 seats, while the Met can seat 3,800..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Broadway will provide additional safety measures backstage: An agreement announced Thursday between the Broadway League, a trade association representing producers as well as theater owners, and Actors’ Equity Association, the labor union representing performers and stage managers, requires weekly testing for employees, as well as the vaccine mandate.The Metropolitan Opera will not initially allow children 12 and under, since they are not eligible to be vaccinated. But the company hopes that vaccines will be approved for them by December, when it is planning several operas aimed at families. Vincent Tullo for The New York Times There are some venues staging work in New York without requiring vaccinations, but others have implemented mandates, including Madison Square Garden, which in June required vaccination for patrons at a Foo Fighters concert. The Park Avenue Armory, which had accepted proof of vaccination or a recent negative test for its first dance show this summer, has been getting stricter; all attendees must be fully vaccinated for its next show, a work by the choreographer Bill T. Jones called “Deep Blue Sea” that is scheduled to start performances in September.There are also performing arts vaccine mandates emerging beyond New York: The San Francisco Opera announced Wednesday that it will require proof of vaccination for all patrons ages 12 and up, and on Friday the Hollywood Pantages Theater in Los Angeles, where a tour of “Hamilton” is set to begin Aug. 17, said it would require ticket holders to be fully vaccinated.Broadway theaters are especially high visibility, and especially challenging, since they draw audiences of all ages and from all over to sit side-by-side in tightly packed buildings with small lobbies and bathrooms and cramped backstage areas. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York had suggested in May that Broadway should consider a vaccination mandate, but some producers were worried that such a step could dampen attendance at a time when consumer readiness to return to theatergoing remains uncertain. The recent rise in cases persuaded the industry’s leadership to set aside those concerns and embrace the vaccination mandate, at least for the next few months.The details of how the new Broadway policies will be implemented are up to individual theater owners, and are still being worked out, but ticket holders will be expected to present proof of vaccination when they arrive at a theater. Among the forms of proof that have been accepted at “Springsteen on Broadway” are vaccination cards, images of those cards stored on a phone, and, for New York residents and others vaccinated in New York, the state’s Excelsior Pass.For those who have already purchased tickets and are unwilling or unable to comply with the new policies, there are likely to be options: most shows have adopted liberal refund and exchange policies for the fall.The League said that in September it would reassess safety protocols for performances in November and beyond.Javier C. Hernández contributed reporting. More