Roulette (Brooklyn, NY, Performance Space)

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    The Man Who Made Roulette Into New York’s Music Lab

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    Jim Staley has led the experimental venue since it began as a concert in his TriBeCa loft. After 45 years, he’s stepping down and looking back.Saturated in sunlight on a recent afternoon, the spacious TriBeCa loft that once housed Roulette somehow feels smaller than it looms in memory. For nearly 25 years, a stellar array of established and emerging composers, improvisers, electronic producers and choreographers held court in the long, tall main room. Visitors had to pass through a kitchen: a reminder that the loft was also the home of Jim Staley, the trombonist and composer who was a founder of Roulette.Unlike many similar experimental arts venues now lost to time, Roulette has thrived and grown, now occupying a 14,000-square-foot space in Downtown Brooklyn. But Staley, 73, who still lives in the TriBeCa loft, has decided that after 45 years of leading Roulette, the time has come to step away. When this season ends in June, he will give up his role as artistic director.It’s another evolution for a vital institution that has seen many. Roulette was established in Chicago in 1978 as a way for five recent University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign graduates, including Staley, to produce their own work. But the collaborative changed course after Staley, a well-traveled Army veteran, moved to New York.Joined by two other Roulette founders, the graphic artist Laurie Szujewska and the composer David Weinstein, Staley hosted a modest five-concert series at his loft in 1980. After that, “We got a lot of proposals,” Staley said. “And we just decided, let’s do ’em all. We ended up doing about 30 concerts in the fall.”Pursuing an aesthetic guided as much by John Coltrane as by John Cage, Roulette became a crucial laboratory for the downtown-music scene, providing artists like John Zorn, Shelley Hirsch, George Lewis, Ikue Mori and many more with space, resources and recorded documentation of their work. Those artists still perform at Roulette, forming an enduring community with newer generations whose development they helped to nurture.Zeena Parkins, the estimable harpist and composer, recalled starting there as a fledgling sound engineer in 1986, soaking up all the sounds on offer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: Robert Ashley’s ‘Foreign Experiences’ Returns

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      Robert Ashley’s 1994 opera “Foreign Experiences,” a portrait of a paranoid mind in free fall, is part of a wave of revivals following his death.The makings of opera are quite simple. Strip away the clichés of an opulent art form populated by Viking helmets and powdered wigs (and more than 400 years of history), and you end up with DNA shared by Claudio Monteverdi, Richard Wagner and Meredith Monk across centuries: an artificial, elevated form of speech that reaches for the sublime.Few composers have tested the fundamental qualities of opera as much as Robert Ashley, who died a decade ago at 83. He stretched language and banality to operatic extremes, exalting discarded bits of life as if they were cosmic, in stylized declamation that is every bit as musical as Mozart.Hardly mainstream, Ashley’s works were often performed as he wrote them, then talked about more than staged. Since his death, though, there has been a wave of fresh recordings and revivals, the latest of which is “Foreign Experiences” (1994), now running at Roulette in Brooklyn. A portrait of a mind in free fall, red-pilled before we were talking about red-pilling, it is essential viewing for those interested in the possibilities of opera.Picture an opera made entirely of a mad scene, and you have “Foreign Experiences,” an installment in “Now Eleanor’s Idea,” Ashley’s tetralogy whose construction recalls another four-work saga, Wagner’s “Ring.” In “Experiences,” the protagonist, Don Jr., spirals in isolation after a move to California, and from his apartment he imagines paranoid adventures in esoterica, in search of truths about power and wealth. He comes to conclusions like, “‘If you have to ask, you can’t afford one,’ I always thought we ought to have that carved into that stupid mountain with the four guys’ heads.”Don Jr.’s thoughts come quickly; “Foreign Experiences,” alone in “Now Eleanor’s Idea,” is set to 90 beats per minute instead of Ashley’s usual 72. And those beats matter to each line of the opera’s 50-page libretto. This is a work of extreme mathematical precision that, in performance, shows no signs of being precise at all, with manic speech unfurling over ambient synth chords that reflect both the mood and sound world of “The X-Files.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      An Artist Embodies an Approach to Music Without Borders

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      Steve Lehman’s varied stylistic language draws from classical and jazz traditions as well as funk and hip-hop.On a recent afternoon at David Geffen Hall, the New York Philharmonic’s violins began to play an ensemble pizzicato pattern underneath a turntable-scratch solo by the artist DJ Logic. I couldn’t help but smile.That gratifying moment hit during jazz trumpeter Etienne Charles’s “San Juan Hill,” which Lincoln Center commissioned for the Philharmonic. It was a musical fusion, executed surprisingly well in a surprising space.But while it may have been unusual for Lincoln Center, it isn’t a shock for New York as a whole. In between Charles’s new piece and the Philharmonic’s 1997 performance of “Skies of America” — a collaboration with the composer-saxophonist Ornette Coleman and his Prime Time ensemble — a broad artistic network has cleared fresh paths for American composers, ones in which varied stylistic languages can draw energy from classical traditions, jazz-influenced improvisation and the beat-work of funk and hip-hop.And beyond large institutions like Lincoln Center, musicians have been making this happen in smaller spaces. To take one example, shortly before the Philharmonic premiere of “San Juan Hill,” Roulette, in Brooklyn, hosted a concert that brought together the saxophonist-composer Steve Lehman and the Orchestre National de Jazz with its artistic director, Frédéric Maurin.The compositions were by Lehman, who played in the ensemble, and Maurin, who conducted. In addition to the 15 acoustic players — members of Lehman’s regular ensembles, like the trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, and artists of Maurin’s group — both composers also employed another electronic musician, who manned a laptop that was running real-time interactive software developed by Ircam, the French electronic music center founded by Pierre Boulez in the 1970s.Ircam checked the box for cutting-edge classical music. The acoustic improvisers channeled the history of jazz performance. And the head-nodding sounds of experimental hip-hop came into view in the rhythms of the half-dozen scores that Lehman contributed to the concert.Roulette posted the concert on YouTube. And from the outset of Lehman’s music, beginning with “Los Angeles Imaginary,” about 11 minutes into the video, the keyboardist plays a complex ostinato pattern across two different manuals: one acoustic, one electronic. The riff is not an obviously danceable one. But after the percussionist comes in — offering a steady syncopation with the keyboard — the vibe of New York’s late 1990s underground hip-hop rears its head.Next comes the addition of the acoustic bass. But the piece really blooms when Lehman triggers the reeds and brasses — along with a granular, spectral wash of electronic sound that comes from the laptop artist embedded within the orchestra. A saxophone solo by Lehman, 44, adds textures that he’s honed on his alto instrument: slantwise methods that he developed in formal training and time on the New York scene. During his undergraduate years at Wesleyan, he studied with the saxophonists Anthony Braxton and Jackie McLean, while also learning from the avant-garde music of Iannis Xenakis. While working on his Ph.D. in composition at Columbia, he worked with the French spectral composer Tristan Murail and the American experimentalist George Lewis.In a recent interview, Lehman recalled studying with Murail and focusing on the limits of what listeners might grasp, in terms of complexity. Lehman obsessed over questions like: “When does a single note start sounding like chord, or vice versa? Or when does an electronic sound start sounding acoustic? Or when does something sound like it’s in a tempo versus out of tempo?”Lehman added that, ever since that time with Murail, he has always tried to “exploit those transitions to make music that’s meaningful or exciting to listen to.” He’s enjoyed wide-ranging success on that front, writing chamber music for Grossman Ensemble and a larger-scale work for the American Composers Orchestra.The show included real-time interactive software developed by Ircam, the French electronic music center founded by Pierre Boulez in the 1970s.Matt Mehlan, via Roulette IntermediumHe has also collaborated with the composer-performers Tyshawn Sorey and Vijay Iyer, and Lehman’s releases on the Pi Recordings imprint have proven broadly influential in jazz circles. Lehman’s latest album on that label, “Xaybu: The Unseen,” was produced with yet another group that he participates in: the international jazz-rap fusion ensemble Sélébéyone.In addition to Lehman, Sélébéyone includes the soprano saxophonist and composer Maciek Lasserre, the drummer Damion Reid, as well as two M.C.s: HPrizm, known to fans of Antipop Consortium as High Priest, and the Senegalese artist Gaston Bandimic, who raps in the Wolof language. (“Sélébéyone” is the Wolof word for “intersection” — befitting perhaps any Lehman ensemble, but particularly one that involves bilingual rhyming.)“Xaybu: The Unseen,” offers yet another way to hear the contemporary cross pollination of classical, rap and jazz. In Lehman’s work “Liminal,” you can hear the influence of spectral harmony on his electronic production. And toward the end of one verse from HPrizm, — after the rapper mentions “riding on bare rims” — Lehman’s polyrhythms pile up, making a wild ride even bumpier.

      Xaybu: The Unseen by Steve LehmanIn the interview, Lehman said that in his work with Sélébéyone, he often samples some of his classical music. “Any time you hear a harp or anything like that, or some kind of spectral, chamber music chord,” he said, it likely came from a piece like “Ten Threshold Studies,” which he wrote for the American Composers Orchestra.That work, which I heard at Zankel Hall in 2018, is ripe for consideration as Lincoln Center and New York Philharmonic branch out. (Sélébéyone would sound good in the newly renovated David Geffen Hall, too.)But regardless of whether Lehman is invited, his work is, thankfully, being well documented by Roulette, Pi Recordings and more.Whether considering large-ensemble jazz writing or experimental rap or orchestral music, Lehman said, “I’m trying to survey the landscape, and figure out: Where do I fit in? What am I sort of uniquely equipped to contribute? And, in a best-case scenario, kind of add on to these histories.” More

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      Review: Outshining a Premiere, a Group Announces Its Arrival

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      The ensemble Orlando Furioso was the highlight of a concert featuring Kate Soper’s new but brief work “HEX.”Kate Soper’s work, like that of so many other artists, was disrupted by the pandemic. But she weathered the moment with the same creative ingenuity she has brought to her music and dramatic projects in the past.When her hotly anticipated opera “The Romance of the Rose,” originally scheduled for April 2020, was canceled, Soper began to post spare yet smartly filmed excerpts online. And though the world premiere date for “Rose” still isn’t known, she has pressed forward on multiple fronts. Soper released an excellent album — “The Understanding of All Things” — while also sharing selections from “HARK,” a new play, on YouTube.She also contributed a work of short fiction, “ClearVoice,” to McSweeney’s for an “audio issue” of the literary journal last year. (That’s also available as a series of videos online, though fans should spring for the deluxe, print-plus-audio version that better suits her story’s witty-then-philosophical sendup of software installation manuals and commercial uses of classical music.)But now it’s 2022, and live performance is again the norm. What about a return to ambitious dramatic works onstage for Soper? The program for the season-opening concert from Wet Ink Ensemble — the pathbreaking group in which Soper plays a crucial role — held out precisely this promise. Presented by the ensemble at Roulette on Wednesday, the evening included the world premiere of Soper’s “HEX,” advertised as a “dramatic satire in which a new music ensemble inadvertently opens the gates of Hell.”“HEX,” though, ultimately proved to be a trifle. The 19-minute piece — really just an extended comedic sketch — starts in media res, with multiple classical pianists taking turns in the execution of a conceptual-art stunt. They must repeat a single, foreboding (and supposedly medieval) musical figure some 78,000 times, after which, it’s said, the Devil will be summoned.But this enticing setup drags on with little musical development. Eventually, the Devil — played with subtle menace by Rick Burkhardt — duly makes his appearance. He takes his turn at the piano, bringing with him some welcome musical embellishment of the oft-repeated material. But just as things are getting interesting, the curtain falls.In Soper’s script, the mortal musicians’ conceit is presented as a lazy effort from a group of busy artists who are having trouble making their schedules align. (They also need something suitably “flashy” yet easy to produce for a grant proposal.) This was self-awareness that sliced close to the bone, and that seemed to explain why Soper was the only member of Wet Ink performing on Wednesday.Supporting her, instead, was the chamber group Orlando Furioso, led by the Chilean drummer-composer Vicente H. Atria. These virtuosic musicians were the (ghostly) players onstage who were charged with responding vividly — if too briefly — to impromptu variations on the repetitive pianistic motif.In addition to bringing stray sparks of vibrancy to “HEX,” Atria’s group also helped to save the concert — and to make it, on balance, a success — with its own 40-minute set, which marked the release of its new, self-titled album on the Aguirre label.Making liberal use of microtonal harmony and hypnotic, ostinato rhythms — as well as the occasional stylistic smash-cut, reminiscent of John Zorn — Orlando Furioso announced itself on Wednesday as a punchy, creative force on the New York scene. The high point of its set was “Raso, Sarga, Tafetán,” an 11-minute composition by Atria. After the performance, he described it from the stage as a study in layered patterns; that was hardly necessary, however, since the piece’s swinging, sinuous interplay had spoken for itself.

      Orlando Furioso by Orlando FuriosoIn the early going, this work provided a delirious blend of material for the keyboardist Andrew Boudreau, the cellist Daniel Hass, the trumpeter David Acevedo and the woodwind specialist David Leon (who doubled on clarinet and saxophones throughout the concert).Atria’s rhythms had a welcoming, social propulsion, and the microtonality of his writing for keyboard proposed an individual — even insular — language. (Boudreau played on a synth setup that mimicked an atypically tuned harpsichord.) Atria’s other works on the program hit with a similar specificity, including the driving “Bootstrap Bernie”; and Soper guested with the group, too, lending crisply beaming vocals to the piece “En Tornasol.”Give credit where it’s due to Wet Ink Ensemble. Even when it couldn’t assemble for a focused display of its own prowess, the group was able to help shine a light on up-and-coming artists. On Wednesday, that was plenty — even revelatory.Kate Soper and Orlando FuriosoPerformed on Wednesday at Roulette, Brooklyn. More

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      Review: Henry Threadgill’s Music From Two Perspectives

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      At Roulette, the composer and his ensemble performed a pair of multimedia sets based on a single composition.The most reductive observation I can provide about the composer and improvising multi-instrumentalist Henry Threadgill’s activity at Roulette this weekend is that he debuted some truly exciting new chamber music. Because he offered a lot more, too.His multimedia programming stretched across Friday and Saturday, each evening running more than two hours. While the first set was titled “One” and the second — in playfully nonspecific fashion — was called “The Other One,” both contained takes on his composition “Of Valence,” for three saxophones, two bassoons, two cellos, along with a tuba, a violin, a viola, piano and percussion.Threadgill, 78, has long deployed playfulness, ambition and unusual configurations in his work. His 1979 album “X-75 Volume 1” engaged a nonet of four basses, four winds and one vocalist.In 2016 he won the Pulitzer Prize for music, for the double album “In for a Penny, in for a Pound,” which put the spotlight on Zooid — his late-career group that includes a tuba, acoustic guitar, cello, drums and Threadgill’s own flute and alto saxophone. Players in that ensemble improvise over quasi-serialized sequences of intervals (befitting a composer who in conversation is as likely to bring up Elliott Carter as Duke Ellington).

      In for a Penny, In for a Pound by Henry ThreadgillBut this weekend’s shows were something new. The tuba player Jose Davila, the cellist Christopher Hoffman and pianist David Virelles are some of Threadgill’s closest collaborators, and capable of lending marching-band panache to his most contrapuntally complex music. Joining a larger group, their sound drew directly on the Zooid language — and some of its freer applications, as heard in Ensemble Double Up — while the multimedia cast a new light on this composer’s late style.

      Double Up, Plays Double Up Plus by Henry ThreadgillThose multimedia elements included collaged photographs of street debris that Threadgill took during the mass exodus from New York at the beginning of the pandemic, projected onto a screen; live recitations of prose written to accompany the images; looping, pretaped vocal choirs, with all parts voiced by Threadgill; and video essays that cut between footage of yet more chamber music and the composer’s droll sermonizing about smartphones and distraction.Threadgill didn’t pick up an alto saxophone or a flute for live performance, though the video did feature him on bass flute. His instrumental contributions were limited to a pair of brief piano-plus-vocal moments, which were affecting in their vulnerability but a touch too tentative to come across as secure. (His pretaped choirs were more vocally assured.)Henry Threadgill conducting his ensemble.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOtherwise, he focused on conducting the 12-player ensemble. On Saturday, they sounded as though in lock-step with his every surprise rhythmic feint — producing an obliquely danceable, straightforwardly joyous Threadgillian energy.At one juncture, in the second hour of both nights, a string trio of the cellist Mariel Roberts, the violist Stephanie Griffin and the violinist Sara Caswell played staggered lines that seemed to tease traceable canonic patterning, but which remained melodically and rhythmically independent. It was tightly plotted, and resisted easy parsing; yet it didn’t sound much like Zooid’s zigzagging interplay.A new sheen came from electronically manipulated cymbal tones, courtesy of the drummer Craig Weinrib. (The transducers he used to manipulate those metallic timbres were a tribute to the late percussionist Milford Graves, to whom the music was dedicated. The performances as a whole were dedicated to the pioneering critic and musician Greg Tate, who died last year.)The ensemble at Roulette.Wolf DanielThese droning metallic timbres stood in subtle, ghostly contrast to the vibrato sound production of the string trio. Next, the tenor saxophonist Peyton Pleninger developed a solo from downward-plunging motifs in the strings. As he built up a frenetic, improvisatory energy from melodic cells, the string players began treading into extended technique, with scraping, at-the-bridge bowing and lightly plucked pizzicato.Alongside Weinrib at his drum kit, some crying alto sax figures from Noah Becker inspired beautiful portamento lines from Griffin’s viola, as well as the entry of both bassoonists playing brooding long tones at first, before turning to peppery, explosive bursts. The gradual swelling of instrumental forces continued; on Saturday, this section contained a galvanic sense of swing, even through Threadgill’s successive, minute changes in tempo.Sometimes, when you wanted the groove to keep going, a quickly arcing exclamation from the ensemble and surprise jolt in the rhythm would bring everything to a dramatic, unexpected finish — at which point Threadgill would, for example, go back to reciting sections of his prose against projections of paintings by his daughter, Nhumi Threadgill. Or he would sit near the stage while some video played, showing Henry Threadgill moving various talismans around a horizontally resting mirror. In tandem, a voice-over track delivered the composer’s observations about contemporary life.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIf Threadgill’s spoken or sung texts stopped short of narrative, they were by turns gripping or humorous as cultural criticism. One laugh-out-loud video involved him recalling both his and a barista’s annoyance at a coffee house customer who, immersed in texting, couldn’t manage to get out an order.But while the audience was invited to join the composer in grouchy irritation, this wasn’t the sole purpose of the vignette. Instead, this morsel harmonized thematically with Threadgill’s broader concerns about what we throw away too easily, including our attention. When his spoken text referred to rat populations and their proximity to outdoor diners, his pretaped vocal choir started to chant about something “crawling up my leg.” Such lighthearted moments had a way of balancing out the text’s more serious attributes — not least about the nature of inequality in New York, before and during the pandemic.While the precise placement of videos and spoken texts changed from night to night, the musical sequence was largely the same. The advantage of Saturday’s set was its increased tightness — in the ensemble as well as in the multimedia transitions. If some form of this vibrant chamber orchestra music makes it to a recording, it should be accompanied by documentation of the experience in the hall (similar to the way a studio recording of Anthony Braxton’s opera “Trillium J” contained a video of its semistaged premiere, also at Roulette).Threadgill thanks an appreciative audience with a broad grin.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“Of Valence” occasionally approached being too much to take in during a single sitting, so it was good that Roulette booked the show for two nights. This longstanding, farseeing venue in Brooklyn is the only place in the city with the chops to pull off a crisp presentation of Threadgill’s multimedia, as well as the willingness to let this composer go for it all.Henry ThreadgillPerformed on Friday and Saturday at Roulette, Brooklyn. More

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      A Musician’s Turn to Improvisation Bears Fruit

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      The pianist and composer Eric Wubbels’s work has achieved new heights in an album of collaborations with two younger artists.A few years ago, as his 40th birthday loomed, the pianist Eric Wubbels had reasons to be content. He had a steady career as a performer and composer in New York, where he gave frequent concerts with the Wet Ink Ensemble — the celebrated contemporary classical group he had directed with a close crew of collaborators for more than a decade. But he could also see another route for himself, one that led outside the city.What would it be like to have a grand piano at home? Getting off the treadmill of commissions and performances seemed worth considering, too. Still, he wasn’t looking for a holiday.“The idea I came to around that time is that this is the last moment to do the big growth,” Wubbels said in a recent interview. “Whatever growth is going to happen as a musician, as an artist — psychologically, like in my personality — better get started on it.”To many outside observers, Wubbels was in no need of a maturity makeover. Other musicians have described him as one of the most engaged and generous collaborators on the new music scene. In my experience as a listener, he conducts the complex orchestral music of composers like Ingrid Laubrock with the same care he devotes to his own scores.You can hear his fine-tuned attention to detail and expressive abandon in a work like “gretchen am spinnrade,” which he wrote for the cellist Mariel Roberts. After an opening of harshly repeating piano-and-cello oscillations, there’s a short window of escape, during which Wubbels’s piano part explodes beyond its initial, constricted range. But as burns go, this is a controlled one: Within a few seconds, more nuanced dynamics predominate, which in turn seed fresh articulations and motifs. The movement feels untamed and considered in equal measure.A major change came, though, with the pandemic in 2020 — around the time he was turning 40. Wubbels and his wife moved to western Massachusetts, where they had found an affordable place that was roomy enough for a grand piano. And while there, he began to deepen his engagement with improvisation.“It’s kind of a risky thing to do,” he said. “At a certain point, no one is interested in you being a beginner.”Two years later, some promising results have come into view. A new album on the Out of Your Head label, “Field of Action / contraposition,” documents complementary collaborations with two younger musicians.In “Field of Action” — an edited suite of Wubbels’s improvisations with Charmaine Lee, a vocalist who uses electronics and feedback — he used harsh synth textures and inside-the-piano scrapes to merge with her approach. And in Weston Olencki, a trombone player with an exceptional feel for extended technique and torrential riffing, he found a willing partner for a fixed composition, “contraposition.”These works reflect some of that growth Wubbels was after, and make for his most arresting album as a composer-performer yet. To celebrate the release, he appeared with Lee and Olencki at Roulette on Monday; the concert is streaming on the venue’s website and YouTube account.At Roulette, nothing from the album was performed per se. Even with snippets of notated material, Wubbels’s improvisations with Lee are all unique. And Olencki helped bring a new Wubbels piece into the world: “Beings (I.X.),” for brass quintet and piano — a tribute to Iannis Xenakis’s 1964 “Eonta” (which was written for similar forces).But whereas Xenakis was notably skeptical of John Cage’s “chance music” procedures, and improvisation generally, Wubbels is not. In this nearly hourlong piece — three times the length of the work that inspired it — Wubbels has reimagined the Xenakis for a group of leading light improvisers and new-music specialists, including the trumpeters Nate Wooley and Forbes Graham, as well as the tuba player Dan Peck, the horn player David Byrd-Marrow and Olencki.The result is both an encomium and an acknowledgment of music’s progress since the days of Xenakis. In an email after the concert, Wubbels said that his work was not a critique of prior strains in modernist thinking, but was instead “a celebration of the fact that things are so different now.” He added, “There are all of these amazing players now who are really fluent and expert in both performing highly detailed notated music and improvising creatively across a broad range of musical contexts.”“Beings (I.X.)” makes the most of that contemporary fluidity, shifting from breathy or noisy individual zones of exploration to sensitive group improvisation and dense passages of notation. As usual, Wubbels’s own playing is an eye-popping highlight: His brief piano solo, about 34 minutes into the piece, shows that he hasn’t been wasting time with his instrument up in Massachusetts. And his penchant for detuning or preparing only a few notes in the piano — and revealing them in dramatic moments — recalls prior works in his catalog, like “gretchen am spinnrade.”“I think of that stuff now as an orchestrational device,” Wubbels said of his prepared piano designs. “It’s just enough denaturing that you can put one prepared note in a chord, and it changes the timbre of the instrument in a way that’s really hard to define. Rather than it being a Cage ‘I want to sound like a gamelan’ thing.”Throughout “Beings (I.X.),” Wubbels fuses the contemplative, obsessive space of early American Minimalism and the vibrant complexity of the post-World War II European avant-garde; transitions clearly indebted to legacies of jazz-informed improvisation act as soldering material. It’s a bracing hour of music that, with references to many traditions, sounds like nothing by any other composer.Wubbels moved from New York to western Massachusetts, a life change that coincided with explorations in improvisation.Tony Luong for The New York TimesThe specificity of Wubbels’s vision is what attracted both Lee and Olencki. In separate interviews, they described finding early Wet Ink Ensemble records while in college. Lee said she “intellectually crushed on him” after finding scores in the library of the New England Conservatory, where she was studying jazz voice. After she moved to New York in 2016, Wet Ink commissioned a large ensemble piece from her, and she built a rapport with Wubbels from there.“He has spent the past couple of decades really homing in on this method, one that results in hyper articulation on the page, but also in the music — it’s a highly precise execution,” she said. She described the improvisational practice as similarly disciplined, but instead privileging “rigorous presence over rehearsed precision.”Olencki cold emailed Wubbels in 2014, when he was finishing up his classical trombone studies at Northwestern University. He asked for the hardest piece Wubbels might have for him. After the composer replied with a work by his colleague Alexandre Lunsqui, Olencki — in what he called “a very 21-year-old move” — devoured it, mocked up a recording, and sent it back the same day.“Collaboration is a buzzword that people love to use these days,” Olencki said. Yet he characterized the long-term engagement Wubbels offers as something appreciably different: “Let’s hang out and be human beings around each other and then work super hard.” He also noted that, as Wubbels was learning how to write for his approach to the trombone, he solicited Olencki’s views, asking, “How does this feel, to play this?”As Olencki was describing this, I felt I could say the same regarding some of my own reactions to Wubbels’s works as a listener. It’s “incredibly caring music,” Olencki said. “Every single bit of it is like: ‘I have thought and considered every facet of this, not for my own ego, but because I care about this music.’ It’s rarer than I would like. I find it to be really, really inspiring.” More

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      Review: An Espionage Opera Remains Enigmatic and Urgent

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      Robert Ashley’s “eL/Aficionado” is receiving a rare revival that is a testament to its vitality.You can’t help but feel some sympathy for the protagonist of Robert Ashley’s opera “eL/Aficionado” when she says, “The meaning of the scene is impossible to describe, if one looks for meaning in the ordinary sense.”It’s an evergreen sentiment when it comes to Ashley’s idiosyncratic and innovative works, atmospheric enigmas that stretch everyday spoken language to its extremes by elongating it and emphasizing its contours — elevating the ordinary to something, well, operatic.An avant-gardist who worked closely with a recurring set of collaborators to realize his vision — which generally involved a deceptively simple harmonic foundation under deceptively simple vocal technique — his work is difficult to revive, especially following his death in 2014.But in recent years his operas have begun to pass to a new generation, through the invaluable efforts of Mimi Johnson, his widow, and Tom Hamilton, a longtime colleague. The latest revival — of “eL/Aficionado,” from the early 1990s — opened Thursday at Roulette in Brooklyn; it joins its fellow presentations since his death in offering a testament to the work’s enduring vitality. (A new “eL/Aficionado” recording is also out from Johnson’s label, Lovely Music.)Ostensibly an espionage thriller told through the fragmented biography of an operative known only as the Agent, “eL/Aficionado” is the second installment in the tetralogy “Now Eleanor’s Idea.” But it stands alone as a subtle evocation of 20th-century politics and the paranoia of the Cold War. Like much of Ashley’s work, however, it defies simple description, with Dada-esque digressions and casual turns toward the cosmic.In the most explicit departure from the opera’s initial run and recording, the Agent, a role written for the baritone Thomas Buckner, is in this revival recast as a mezzo-soprano. Kayleigh Butcher, a contemporary music veteran making her Ashley debut, performs the part with technical assurance and commanding interpretive depth.Kayleigh Butcher (front, with McCorkle) plays the Agent, the opera’s protagonist and a role originally written for a baritone.Wolf DanielAs the Agent, she — a pronoun change that now extends through the libretto — recounts her career to a trio of interrogators (all of whom wear suits and sunglasses, with one, the most senior of the bunch, seated apart and elevated on a platform upstage). Butcher performs the closest thing to traditional singing, full-voiced and vibrato-rich — though crucially unassuming, never rising to true grandeur but nonetheless building tension through language: an emphasized syllable or a single letter deployed to dramatic effect.Over the opera’s 72 minutes, the interrogation becomes increasingly unreliable. It could be real; it might not be. There are clues, perhaps, in the surreally minimalistic set — by David Moodey, after Jacqueline Humbert’s designs from 1994 — which consists of just the Agent’s and interrogators’ desks, along with two Ionic columns and a free-standing window whose curtains blow gently and mysteriously. There are also suggestions in the libretto of dreams and analysis, and the slippery nature of memory. Nothing, it seems, is certain.The Agent’s tale moves with alluring and hypnotic momentum — at 72 beats per minute, to be exact, a common pace in Ashley’s music. The electronic score (designed and mixed live by Hamilton, the production’s music director) might seem a bit dated, its dreamy synths consistent with the era of “Twin Peaks” or “The X-Files.” But consider how Ashley’s influence, long pervasive in the work of artists like Laurie Anderson, reaches operas of today, such as “Sun & Sea,” which with a similar soundscape won the top prize at the Venice Biennale and is currently selling out on tour.The minimalistic set by David Moodey (after Jacqueline Humbert’s designs from 1994) consists of the Agent’s and her interrogators’ desks, along with two Ionic columns and a free-standing window whose curtains blow gently.Wolf DanielAnd like “Sun & Sea,” a disarmingly relaxed collection of dispatches from a world in climate crisis, “eL/Aficionado” operates on different registers. Personal ads, recited throughout, are peppered with comedy; the cast comes together as a chorus for manic real estate advertisements. These asides might mean everything, or nothing at all.Personals, with their economical writing, are by their nature poetic, and rise to the operatic in the rhythmic and lyrical speech of the junior interrogators. As one of them, Bonnie Lander relishes the percussiveness of “Passion for Piero, Palladio, Puccini, pasta”; the other, Paul Pinto, gets his turn with the staccato phrasing of “Successful. Super-smart. Sensuous. Sensitive. Cuddly. Affectionate.”The senior interrogator (Brian McCorkle) also blurs the line between speaking and singing, prolonging phrases and, later, pre-empting the Agent’s lines with identical ones, whispered as if fed to her. He provides a preamble for each scene, beginning with “My Brother Called.” (“He is not my brother in the ordinary sense,” the Agent explains. “It is a word we use in the department. It means someone you can count on.”) Subsequent set pieces recount tests and assignments, with interjections of the bizarre and unbelievable — things that the Agent is told to take to her grave.For patient listeners, there are revelations. Those ads, it turns out, are code. “The person described as ‘sought’ is the same person in a different code,” we are told. “I believe it is a kind of confirmation, both for the listener — whoever that was — and for the speaker. A double-check against the memory.”But it’s possible that this code was just another test for the Agent, who, disenchanted, left “the department” at some point before the interrogation. “Most of what happened makes no sense to me,” she admits in the penultimate scene.Jaded and distrustful, she gave up on looking for meaning long ago and suggests the interrogators do the same. That is what pervasive uncertainty does to the mind — a life of never knowing what is a test and what an assignment, what is code and what is simply language.This deeply unsettled feeling might have been endemic during the Cold War. But it has never really left us. Confusion to the point of exasperated resignation, we’ve seen, can be weaponized to influence elections. It can turn a public health crisis into a deadly mess. With “eL/Aficionado,” Ashley achieved what opera — or all art, for that matter — is at its most vital: urgent and, for better and worse, timeless.eL/AficionadoThrough Saturday at Roulette, Brooklyn; roulette.org. More

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      A Spy Opera (or Is It?) Returns to the Stage

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      Robert Ashley’s enigmatic “eL/Aficionado” is being revived to prove it can live on beyond his close collaborators.It was February 2020, and Mimi Johnson was pouring afternoon tea in the TriBeCa loft she once shared with her husband, the composer Robert Ashley.Johnson was reflecting on what was then the recent revival of “Improvement (Don Leaves Linda),” by Ashley, who died in 2014 and whose innovative operas generally involved the blurry boundary of speech and singing, smooth electronic accompaniment, and enigmatic, witty storytelling.Another revival, of Ashley’s early 1990s work “eL/Aficionado,” was supposed to follow shortly after. But because of the pandemic, Johnson was forced to shelf the nearly completed project, until Roulette in Brooklyn, on whose board she sits, approached her this year about reviving the revival; “eL/Aficionado” will run for three performances at Roulette, Thursday through Saturday.Mimi Johnson, left, and Tom Hamilton have been integral in recent revival of Ashley’s innovative, enigmatic operas.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesThese Ashley productions are designed not only to allow New Yorkers to see these rarely presented works again, but also to ensure they can live on once their composer’s close circle of collaborators has passed. For “Improvement,” Johnson and Tom Hamilton, a longtime creative partner of Ashley, painstakingly combed through Ashley’s archives to produce a new electronic score for the work, which was conceived as a recording and whose existing version thus contained vocals inextricable from the accompaniment.“If we don’t get these scores organized and the tapes updated and available, Tom or I might die,” Johnson said. “And it would be a whole lot harder for someone else to do these operas.”A simple way to convey their belief that the works can and should be performed more widely is to put them on with new talent. The original “eL/Aficionado” featured the baritone Thomas Buckner, a veteran Ashley performer, in the central role of the Agent. But Hamilton, the revival’s music director, was curious to hear the role sung by a mezzo-soprano.He and Johnson sought out Kayleigh Butcher, who has performed in opera companies and with new-music ensembles but has never before done Ashley. She is joined by another newcomer, Bonnie Lander, as well as Paul Pinto and Brian McCorkle, who have both performed in numerous Ashley works, including “Improvement,” “Perfect Lives” and “Crash.”Johnson still lives in the TriBeCa loft she once shared with Ashley, her husband, who died in 2014.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesHamilton, who collaborated often with Ashley, is the revival’s music director.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesAs with that 2019 production of “Improvement,” the revival of “eL/Aficionado” accompanies a new recording, to be released on Friday by Lovely Music, the influential new-music label that Johnson has run since the late 1970s. Hamilton, who also produced the album, believes that having two recorded versions available will serve both to guide future performers and to illustrate the potential for expressive freedom.“I think Kayleigh’s performance speaks to the viability of the work itself, and how it can change and grow in someone else’s hands,” he said. “And I suspect that in the future, groups will rely more on the recorded material than on the score to catch the style of the piece.”The opera features a spy, named simply the Agent, who has done a career’s worth of work for an unnamed organization and is now on trial facing three interrogators, one superior and two more junior. Through a series of obscure responses to them, sometimes resembling personal or real estate advertisements and sometimes psychoanalytic sessions, the Agent relates four stages of her biography in reverse chronological order, seemingly revealing what led her to a life of espionage.The taut braiding of speech and singing in “eL/Aficionado,” often performed in double time over the 72-beats-per-minute pulse of the accompaniment, would seem to allow for little creative variation. But while Thomas Buckner portrayed the Agent as a sullen figure expressing an almost ghostly contrition for his deeds, Butcher’s interpretation adds a defiant tone, as if the Agent is as confused as the audience as to why her work should be subject to scrutiny. A line like “Can you blame me for being skeptical? A mere boy. I don’t think he was 10 years old” turns from Buckner’s desperate appeal into a confident avowal.From left, Robert Ashley, Humbert, Sam Ashley and Buckner performing “eL/Aficionado” in Berlin in 1992.Giacomo OteriAshley was a fan of spy novels, particularly those of John le Carré, but he notes in the libretto that “eL/Aficionado” is “not a spy story” and that the audience should be aware that, as the Agent’s story unfolds, the events acquire an increasing air of unreality.Even so, the espionage trappings are significant in a work that makes up a quarter of Ashley’s tetralogy “Now Eleanor’s Idea,” which in its entirety is an allegory for American westward expansion. Johnson recalled that when she first came to know him, in the mid-1970s, Ashley was fascinated and troubled by the C.I.A.-orchestrated Chilean coup of 1973, which brought about the installation of Augusto Pinochet. She believes that the Spanish title of “eL/Aficionado,” which translates to “amateur” or “hobbyist,” is a nod to those events.One of the work’s four sections, “My Brother Called” — “brother” is a tradecraft term for a dependable operative — is an extension of an installation piece that Ashley had produced for a 1977 show at New York University. It consisted of stacks of Spanish-language newspapers arranged in a grid resembling city blocks, with a spot-lit telephone in the center. Ashley periodically called the phone, which filled the room with a mixture of his own indecipherable speech, Latin American music and sounds from a television.In “eL/Aficionado,” the Agent describes that piece and claims that “the meaning of the scene is impossible to describe” — as if to suggest that Ashley himself was unsure exactly what role he and other artists played in the country’s broader Cold War project.That ambiguity is one of many; the enveloping aura of mystery is the opera’s real achievement. Devoid of chase scenes, dead drops, tidy resolutions and most other familiar tropes of espionage narrative, the Agent’s swirling relation of images and memories — whose relevance even she is unable to gauge — creates an atmosphere of pure paranoia. In our age of fractured reality, mass surveillance and shocking regime changes, that quintessential 20th-century feeling, and the opera that makes use of it, are ripe for reappraisal. More

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      10 Classical Concerts to Stream in May

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      A fast-rising young conductor, a 90th birthday celebration and a starry trio are among the highlights.With in-person performances not yet quite widespread, here are 10 highlights from the flood of online music content coming in May. (Times listed are Eastern.)Diderot String QuartetMay 2 at 4 p.m.; mb1800.org; available through July 15.The invaluable New York concert series Music Before 1800 is back with a series of streams, including this period-instrument group’s program of music written for the court of Catherine the Great. One of the pieces may well be familiar: Haydn’s Quartet in E flat, “the Joke.” The other will be a rarity, by Anton Ferdinand Titz. (The harpsichordist Aya Hamada’s recital follows on May 23.) ZACHARY WOOLFEKarl LarsonMay 6 at 8 p.m.; roulette.org; available indefinitely.Roulette, in Brooklyn, one of the best places to hear music in New York, is allowing limited audiences into its space for performances this spring. But those shows will still be livestreamed, too. No matter how you attend, any gig featuring Karl Larson, known as the pianist of the trio Bearthoven, is worth it. Here, he celebrates “Dark Days,” his new solo recording of music by Scott Wollschleger. Wollschleger’s generally soft dynamics may lull you into thinking he’s primarily meditative, but part of the fun involves staying alert for the alterations of attack and twists of mood that Larson highlights. SETH COLTER WALLSPhiladelphia OrchestraMay 6 at 8 p.m.; philorch.org; available through May 13.This program, led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and featuring the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, opens with a triptych. First is the propulsive “Shake the Heavens,” from John Adams’s “El Niño,” followed by “Vigil,” a subdued and affecting song in memory of Breonna Taylor, by Igee Dieudonné and Tines. (You can stream that now, from Lincoln Center at Home.) Then Tines gives a preview of Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” which he will star in at Michigan Opera Theater next year. The second half of the concert features Mozart’s Symphony No. 25 in G minor, which fans of “Amadeus” will recognize immediately. JOSHUA BARONESusanna Malkki will conduct the Berlin Philharmonic in a streamed concert starting May 22.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times92nd Street YMay 11 at 7:30 p.m.; 92y.org; available through May 18.Schubert’s “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen” (“The Shepherd on the Rock”), thought to be the last of his 600 songs, is an extraordinary piece for soprano, clarinet and piano. Susanna Phillips, a frequent presence at the Metropolitan Opera, will sing it in a recital livestreamed by the 92nd Street Y, joined by the clarinetist Anthony McGill and the pianist Myra Huang. The program also includes a premiere by James Lee III — a setting of a poem by Lou Ella Hickman written for this trio combination — a work by William Grant Still and Schubert’s popular “Arpeggione” Sonata, here adapted for clarinet and piano. ANTHONY TOMMASINIAlvin Lucier at 90May 13 at 8 p.m. through May 14 at midnight; issueprojectroom.org; available indefinitely.For the 90th birthday of this experimental-music icon, over seven dozen colleagues will join him for 28 hours of performances of “I Am Sitting in a Room,” his signature work, from 1969. The piece consists of a few sentences that are recorded as they’re spoken; the recording is then played and rerecorded, and the process continues as the clashing frequencies of the different recordings begin to dominate and the words become unintelligible. After a year of isolation, what could be a more poignant artistic celebration? ZACHARY WOOLFEConcertgebouw OrchestraMay 14 at 2 p.m.; concertgebouworkest.nl; available through May 21.The coronavirus pandemic has upended the orchestral world, including separating ensembles from their music directors, sometimes by thousands of miles. This has provided an opportunity for conductors closer to home to fill in, sometimes even multiple times. It’s a slightly different situation with this superb Amsterdam orchestra, which has been searching for a new podium leader for the past few years — but the opportunity is still there. After making his debut in September, Klaus Makela, a 25-year-old Finn recently appointed music director of the Orchestre de Paris, returned to the Concertgebouw in December and will now be back yet again, an almost unthinkable frequency in normal times. His program includes Messiaen’s “Les Offrandes Oubliées” and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, with its grandly brooding opening. ZACHARY WOOLFEA concert by the cellist Seth Parker Woods, second from right, will stream starting May 25.James Holt/Seattle SymphonyJoshua Bell, Steven Isserlis and Evgeny KissinMay 21 at 8 p.m.; washingtonperformingarts.org; available through May 27.When three star performers come together, it is often the occasion for canonical standards. This violin-cello-piano recital, though, goes a more idiosyncratic route, attempting to evoke Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the world wars. Works by Solomon Rosowsky and Ernest Bloch conjure that scene, as will Kissin’s recitation of Yiddish poetry. Then the cataclysm of the Holocaust will be represented by Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2, written in 1944. ZACHARY WOOLFE‘Albert Herring’May 22 at 1 a.m.; mnopera.org; available through June 5.Britten’s chamber opera “Albert Herring” is like a wistfully comic alternative to his “Peter Grimes”; it’s the story of an awkward, shy, innocent boy who doesn’t fit in with the expectations of the people in his small market town in England, but goes on to be improbably crowned the town’s May King. This Minnesota Opera production, directed by Doug Scholz-Carlson, features the tenor David Portillo as Albert, with the insightful conductor Jane Glover leading Britten’s subtly complex, whimsical score. ANTHONY TOMMASINIBerlin PhilharmonicMay 22 at 1 p.m.; digitalconcerthall.com; available indefinitely.What will come of the premieres that were canceled during the pandemic? Thankfully, two by the composer Kaija Saariaho are happening sooner rather than later. The Aix Festival in France is planning to present her new opera “Innocence” in July, conducted by Susanna Malkki. And the Berlin Philharmonic is livestreaming the belated premiere of Saariaho’s 25-minute “Vista” — also led by Malkki, to whom the piece is dedicated. Filling out the program is “Bluebeard’s Castle,” the chilling Bartok one-act, of which Malkki recently released a wonderfully textured recording with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. JOSHUA BARONESeth Parker WoodsMay 25 at 7 p.m.; kaufmanmusiccenter.org; available through June 1.This cellist burst onto the scene with a 2016 recording that featured his stellar acoustic playing, often in works that also incorporated electronics. He’ll play one of those pieces — Pierre Alexandre Tremblay’s “asinglewordisnotenough3 (invariant)” — in this virtual concert for the Ecstatic Music series. The rest of the program, including a composition by Nathalie Joachim, emerges from Woods’s solo show, “Difficult Grace,” inspired in part by the Great Migration. SETH COLTER WALLS More