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    Review: John Adams’s ‘El Niño’ Arrives at the Met in Lush Glory

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    The opera-oratorio, an alternate Nativity story, featured a flurry of Met debuts, including the director Lileana Blain-Cruz and the conductor Marin Alsop.On Tuesday night, the Metropolitan Opera continued to play a bit of catch-up with the American composer John Adams.As a Minimalist of striking imagination and moral probity, Adams has developed a distinct musical style and point of view that have earned him a firm place in the pantheon of American art music over the past 40 years or so. His operas, though, didn’t make it to the Met stage until 2008, when “Doctor Atomic” had its East Coast premiere. “Nixon in China” followed in 2011 and “The Death of Klinghoffer” in 2014, decades after they were written. These are Adams’s so-called CNN operas, with subject matter ripped from headlines and history books. But “El Niño,” a hybrid opera-oratorio from 2000 that had its Met premiere on Tuesday, is a different animal.Created with the librettist and director Peter Sellars, a frequent collaborator, “El Niño” is an alternative Nativity story, drawing its Spanish, Latin and English texts from the Apocrypha, 20th-century Mexican and South American poetry, a medieval mystery play and, of course, the New Testament. The gospels of James and Pseudo-Matthew, which didn’t make it into the codified Bible, provide some of the most characterful scenes, as when Joseph comes home to find Mary six months pregnant and exclaims irately, “Who did this evil thing in my house and defiled her?”The air of triumph as the curtain came down on Tuesday night owed as much to the piece as to the director Lileana Blain-Cruz’s vibrant and infectiously exultant production. It was almost as inspiring to see as it was to hear Adams’s marvelous work on the Met’s stage.It was an evening of firsts. The trailblazing conductor Marin Alsop made her long overdue Met debut to much applause. The singers Julia Bullock and Davóne Tines and most of the creative team also made their first appearances.Taking a cue from the piece’s Latin flavor, Blain-Cruz trades the Middle Eastern climate of standard biblical depictions for a lushly tropical realm. The set designer Adam Rigg’s storybook framework, with rolling hills and broad-leaved plants that look like cardboard cutouts, achieves grandeur without aloofness. Montana Levi Blanco’s moss-green costumes for the chorus amplify the sense of a thriving natural world, but shocks of hot pink and aquatic blue, particularly in Yi Zhao’s hallucinogenic lighting design for “Shake the Heavens,” recall the iridescent striations of a Mexican serape. The puppet designer James Ortiz’s contributions reach a captivating zenith in the “Christmas Star” finale of Part 1.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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      A Pathbreaking Singer Arrives at the Met, With Pearls and Tattoos

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      Dav­óne Tines, who stars in the oratorio “El Niño,” is challenging traditions in classical music and using art to confront social problems.The bass-baritone Dav­óne Tines, wearing Dr. Martens boots, a sleeveless black shirt and six vintage pearl rings, stood on a rehearsal stage at the Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan the other day and began to sing.“My soul’s above the sea and whistling a dream,” he sang, a passage from the Nativity oratorio “El Niño” by John Adams, in which Tines makes his Met debut this month. “Tell the shepherds the wind is saddling its horse.”Tines, 37, known for his raw intensity and thundering voice, has quickly become one of classical music’s brightest stars. He has won acclaim for performances of Bach, Handel and Stravinsky, and he has helped champion new music, originating roles in operas like Adams’s “Girls of the Golden West” and Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.”Tines has also used his art to confront social problems, including racism and police brutality. In 2018, he was a creator of and starred in “The Black Clown,” a searing rumination on Black history and identity inspired by a Langston Hughes poem. In 2020, he released a music video after the police killing of Breonna Taylor, calling for empathy and action.During a rehearsal break at the Met, he described his art as cathartic, saying his aim was to “pick apart the complicated, contentious existence that is knit into the American landscape.”“It’s a blessing to be a performing artist because you get an explicit place to put your feelings,” he said. “It’s the blessing of having a channel.”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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      ‘As Living as Opera Can Get’: John Cage’s Anarchic Anti-Canon

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      In his “Europeras,” Cage dismantled centuries of tradition and expectations, for musicians and audiences alike. A rare revival is coming to Detroit.The start was typical: Oper Frankfurt in Germany asked John Cage to write an opera.But the premiere, in 1987, was unlike anything in opera up to that point. Cage, an American maverick whose philosophical, socially conscious works at the time were based on chance, mapped out an elaborate scheme for a show that would bring the entirety of European opera onto the same stage — at the same time.It was called “Europeras 1 & 2,” an enormous undertaking of controlled chaos, engineered with an eye toward history and populist reclamation, hence the title that implies both “Euro operas” and “your operas.” Each element, its rollout determined by the I Ching, unfolded independently from all others: Singers performed arias unrelated to the instrumental accompaniment, which was unrelated to the scenic and lighting design, as well as stage directions. (Audience members also received varied plot synopses that read like opera Mad Libs.)The public wasn’t exactly equipped to receive what Cage had served them. Laura Kuhn, who runs the John Cage Trust and worked with him as he prepared “Europeras 1 & 2,” wrote in her dissertation on the piece that the reception in Frankfurt varied from “overt enthusiasm to no less overt bewilderment or disdain.”But Cage kept going. At the Almeida Festival in 1990, he premiered “Europeras 3 & 4,” which will receive a rare revival this week at Detroit Opera, in a production directed by Yuval Sharon. In Cage’s series of works, which concluded with “Europera 5” in 1991, the whole became greater than its parts, with affection alongside the anarchy, and the feeling, Sharon said, that “this is as living as opera can get.”Yuval Sharon, left, the director of “Europeras 3 & 4” in Detroit, with the associate director, Alexander Gedeon.Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesIn Cage’s time, there were those who appreciated what Cage was doing. As “Europeras 1 & 2” was arriving in the United States, the artist and critic Richard Kostelanetz wrote that “by running innocently amok in European culture, Cage has come as close as anyone to writing the Great American Opera, which is to say, a great opera that only an American could make.”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: The New York Philharmonic’s ‘St. Matthew Passion’ Is a Surprising Achievement

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      Jaap van Zweden is not known for Bach. But the “St. Matthew Passion” made for one of his finest New York Philharmonic concerts this season.You could be forgiven, recently, for not remembering that Jaap van Zweden is the music director of the New York Philharmonic.After he inaugurated the renovated David Geffen Hall in October, he disappeared from the orchestra’s performance calendar until a week ago. During that absence, the orchestra announced his successor, Gustavo Dudamel — whose visit to New York in February, to do little more than smile for the cameras and sign a piece of paper, was organized with so much fanfare, you almost felt bad for van Zweden, still the music director for one more season, as he quietly returned to the podium last Friday.His current residency, though, while just two weeks, is hardly modest. On Tuesday, the Philharmonic announced his final season, in which he will lead eight subscription programs, including, as his farewell, Mahler’s colossal “Resurrection” Symphony. And for his concerts this time around — part of a barely advertised mini festival called “Spirit” — he has taken up a pair of monumental works: Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-Symphonie” and Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion.”The Messiaen, sprawling and operatically excessive, would seem the better fit for van Zweden, who revels in enormity. But last week, it was mostly flattened and impatient, loud but not powerful.And the Bach didn’t hold out much promise. Van Zweden has never had a true grasp of the fleet litheness of the Classical repertoire, almost never touches Baroque music with the Philharmonic. His performance of the “St. Matthew Passion” at Geffen Hall on Thursday, however, proved a pleasant surprise — perhaps his finest appearance this season.After the thick bombast of the Messiaen, it was disorienting to hear van Zweden lead a “St. Matthew Passion” of wise, often deferential restraint and transparent, balanced counterpoint. The score’s nearly three hours of music moved along at a mostly unhurried pace, a calmly flowing mood set from the start: the opening chorus gently pulsating, the layers of sound smoothly accumulating.Not that it was a consistently clean evening. The “Passion,” typically performed during the Lenten season but not limited to it, is a mammoth undertaking for double choir, double orchestra and soloists to recount the betrayal, death and burial of Christ. On Thursday, the Philharmonic — joined by Musica Sacra and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus — didn’t seem to have had enough time to prepare it.Some sections unfurled without a fault; others were messy. Arias struggled to gain traction, and at times solo instrumentalists weren’t properly integrated with the larger ensemble. What’s lost, during lapses like that, are the moments that inspire awe, replaced by a kind of white-knuckle anxiety in, for example, the grand chorus that closes the oratorio’s first part.But more memorable than those imperfections was van Zweden’s refreshingly measured treatment of the orchestra, particularly in its support for the vocal soloists.And what soloists! The tenor Nicholas Phan was a lyrical, actorly guide through the story as the Evangelist, standing alongside the bass-baritone Davóne Tines’s Jesus, sung with a rich, creamy tone that, in Christ’s final words on the cross, turned compellingly momentous. The soprano Amanda Forsythe, her sound soaring and pure, shone in the longer, abstracted lines of the aria “Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben.” Tamara Mumford’s penetrating mezzo-soprano was well shaped in “Buss und Reu” and “Erbarme dich,” even at a nervously rushed tempo.Each appearance by the tender, earnest tenor Paul Appleby felt too brief. In “Geduld,” as he sang alongside the viola da gamba player Matt Zucker — who, like the organist Kent Tritle, offered a dose of historically informed performance style — he spun trickily long melodic lines of complex rhythms so precisely articulated and elegant, you wished he would return to this piece as the Evangelist.The standout was Philippe Sly, in his Philharmonic debut. This bass-baritone has a robust opera career — assured as either Leporello or the title character in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” — and sang Jesus in a “St. Matthew Passion” with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Carnegie Hall last season. Commandingly resonant, but also sweetly warm in his upper range, he was more satisfying as a chameleonic soloist on Thursday: bringing dramatic color to the few lines of Judas, a desperate sadness to Peter and sensitivity to arias like “Komm, süsses Kreuz.”His “Mache dich, mein Herze, rein,” already a high point of the score, was the high point of the concert, while also standing in for the evening as a whole. It had an unsteady start and could have been slower, yet once it found its footing, the aria was serene, balanced and — regardless of your faith or the time of year — profoundly moving.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Quinta Brunson, Jack Harlow and More Breakout Stars of 2022

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      Here are the actors, pop stars, dancers and artists who broke away from the pack this year, delighting us and making us think.For many of us, 2022 was the year we emerged more fully from our pandemic cocoons, venturing out to movie theaters, museums, concerts — exploring our entertainment with eager, if weary, hearts and eyes before returning home to our TVs. Along the way, artists and performers across the world of the arts had, for the first time in years, the chance to connect more closely and fully with audiences, and deliver big. Here are seven stars who captured our attention in this moment and gave us a fresh perspective.TelevisionQuinta BrunsonIn 2014, Quinta Brunson had a viral Instagram hit on her hands: a series of videos called “The Girl Who’s Never Been on a Nice Date.” At BuzzFeed, where she was first paid for taste-testing Doritos, she made popular comedic videos for the site and then sold the streaming series “Broke” to YouTube Red. In 2019, she starred in and wrote for the debut season of HBO’s “A Black Lady Sketch Show.”That trajectory set her up to deliver a rare feat: a warmhearted but not saccharine network sitcom with a pitch-perfect ensemble cast that has managed to delight critics and audiences — all while illuminating the problems of underfunded public schools. The mockumentary-style comedy, “Abbott Elementary,” which she created and stars in, debuted on ABC in December 2021 and was nominated for seven Emmy Awards this year, of which it won three.“I think a lot of people are enjoying having something that is light and nuanced,” Brunson, 32, told The New York Times Magazine earlier this year. “‘Abbott’ came at the right time.”MoviesStephanie HsuIn “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” Stephanie Hsu plays a despairing daughter named Joy and the chaos-inducing villain Jobu Tupaki.A24When Stephanie Hsu was a child, she told her mother that she wanted to be an actor. Her mother “pointed at a TV screen and said, ‘There’s nobody that looks like you — that seems impossible,’” Hsu, 32, told Variety this year. Turns out, her presence onscreen was both possible and unforgettable, particularly her jaw-dropping performance in this year’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a mind-twisting acid trip through the multiverse (and the human condition) that was a box-office hit and had critics raving.In “Everything,” her first feature film, Hsu nailed the complex role of both a depressed, despairing daughter (opposite Michelle Yeoh as her mother) and the maniacally evil, chaos-inducing villain Jobu Tupaki.“I think it’s so rare that you get to experience the scope of range within one character in one movie,” Hsu told The Times.Next up for the actress is a role in the Disney+ action-comedy series “American Born Chinese”; in Rian Johnson’s Peacock series, “Poker Face,” alongside Natasha Lyonne; and in “The Fall Guy,” an action movie starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt.Pop MusicJack HarlowThe rapper Jack Harlow, who released the album “Come Home the Kids Miss You” in May, earned three Grammy nominations in November.Eduardo Munoz/ReutersThose on TikTok probably first caught wind of the rapper Jack Harlow in 2020 with his viral track “Whats Poppin.” But it wasn’t until his verse on Lil Nas X’s “Industry Baby” last year — the song topped the Billboard Hot 100 — that his star really began its ascent.The Highlights of 2022, According to Our CriticsCard 1 of 3Salamishah Tillet. More

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      The Breakout Stars of 2022

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      Here are the actors, pop stars, dancers and artists who broke away from the pack this year, delighting us and making us think.For many of us, 2022 was the year we emerged more fully from our pandemic cocoons, venturing out to movie theaters, museums, concerts — exploring our entertainment with eager, if weary, hearts and eyes before returning home to our TVs. Along the way, artists and performers across the world of the arts had, for the first time in years, the chance to connect more closely and fully with audiences, and deliver big. Here are seven stars who captured our attention in this moment and gave us a fresh perspective.TelevisionQuinta BrunsonIn 2014, Quinta Brunson had a viral Instagram hit on her hands: a series of videos called “The Girl Who’s Never Been on a Nice Date.” At Buzzfeed, where she was first paid for taste-testing Doritos, she made popular comedic videos for the site and then sold the streaming series “Broke” to YouTube Red. In 2019, she starred in and wrote for the debut season of HBO’s “A Black Lady Sketch Show.”That trajectory set her up to deliver a rare feat: a warmhearted but not saccharine network sitcom with a pitch-perfect ensemble cast that has managed to delight critics and audiences — all while illuminating the problems of underfunded public schools. The mockumentary-style comedy, “Abbott Elementary,” which she created and stars in, debuted on ABC in December 2021 and was nominated for seven Emmy Awards this year, of which it won three.“I think a lot of people are enjoying having something that is light and nuanced,” Brunson, 32, told The New York Times Magazine earlier this year. “‘Abbott’ came at the right time.”MoviesStephanie HsuIn “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” Stephanie Hsu plays a despairing daughter named Joy and the chaos-inducing villain Jobu Tupaki.A24When Stephanie Hsu was a child, she told her mother that she wanted to be an actor. Her mother “pointed at a TV screen and said, ‘There’s nobody that looks like you — that seems impossible,’” Hsu, 32, told Variety this year. Turns out, her presence onscreen was both possible and unforgettable, particularly her jaw-dropping performance in this year’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a mind-twisting acid trip through the multiverse (and the human condition) that was a box-office hit and had critics raving.In “Everything,” her first feature film, Hsu nailed the complex role of both a depressed, despairing daughter (opposite Michelle Yeoh as her mother) and the maniacally evil, chaos-inducing villain Jobu Tupaki.“I think it’s so rare that you get to experience the scope of range within one character in one movie,” Hsu told The Times.Next up for the actress is a role in the Disney+ action-comedy series “American Born Chinese”; in Rian Johnson’s Peacock series, “Poker Face,” alongside Natasha Lyonne; and in “The Fall Guy,” an action movie starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt.Pop MusicJack HarlowThe rapper Jack Harlow, who released the album “Come Home the Kids Miss You” in May, earned three Grammy nominations in November.Eduardo Munoz/ReutersThose on TikTok probably first caught wind of the rapper Jack Harlow in 2020 with his viral track “Whats Poppin.” But it wasn’t until his verse on Lil Nas X’s “Industry Baby” last year — the song topped the Billboard Hot 100 — that his star really began its ascent.Now, the laid-back Harlow, 24 and a Kentucky native, had his first solo No. 1 hit, the Fergie-sampling “First Class,” from his second major-label album, “Come Home the Kids Miss You,” which dropped in May. In November, he earned three Grammy nominations, including for best rap album. And in October, he served as both host and musical guest on “Saturday Night Live.”“I’m looking to get away from rapping in a way where people can marvel at it and more something we can all enjoy together,” he told The Times this year.Soon, Harlow will star in a remake of the 1992 film “White Men Can’t Jump.”ArtTiona Nekkia McCloddenThe artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden in her studio; she had three major presentations of her work in New York this year.Hannah Price for The New York TimesOver the last few years, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, 41, “has emerged as one of the most singular artists of our aesthetically rich, free-range time,” Roberta Smith, co-chief art critic of The Times, wrote in her review of McClodden’s exhibition “Mask/Conceal/Carry,” a meditation on guns shown at 52 Walker in TriBeCa this year. Smith called it a “brooding beast of an exhibition, bathed in blue light.”And that was only one of three major presentations of McClodden’s work in New York in 2022. At the Museum of Modern Art, she presented a room-size fetish-themed tribute to Brad Johnson, a Black gay poet who died in 2011. At the Shed, she celebrated the groundbreaking 1983 festival Dance Black America with a program that included custom dance floors and video portraits of dancers.McClodden, who was a star of the 2019 Whitney Biennial (she won the Bucksbaum Award), emerged as a filmmaker before expanding to boundary-pushing art installations.Amid the pandemic and the George Floyd protests and counter protests, she decided to learn how to shoot guns, an activity that bore “Mask/Conceal/Carry.” “The statement is that I’m in the world, I didn’t try to run away from my position in this world, and I wanted to be able to defend myself,” she told The Times this summer.TheaterJulie BenkoA scene from the Broadway musical “Funny Girl” with Jared Grimes, left, as Eddie Ryan and Julie Benko as Fanny Brice.Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade, 2022Few can say they’ve seized an opportunity like Julie Benko, whose monthlong summer run as Fanny Brice in the Broadway revival of “Funny Girl” changed a lot for the actress-soprano who stepped into the role full-time between Beanie Feldstein and Lea Michele in the highly talked-about production. But even that degree of pressure didn’t weigh her down.“When you get the chance to play such an amazing role, there’s no need to take it too seriously,” Benko told the Times. “You just have to enjoy it.” Now, Benko has the title of “alternate” in “Funny Girl,” not “understudy,” performing the lead in most Thursday night shows (with an extra performance on Monday, Dec. 26, and for a full week in late February).Benko, 33, had understudied several roles before “Funny Girl,” including in the national “Spring Awakening” tour in 2008, and later in the “Les Misérables” tour, where she worked her way up to Cosette, the protagonist, from roles like “innkeeper’s wife.”In December, she will be performing at 54 Below in New York alongside her husband, the pianist Jason Yeager.Classical MusicDavóne TinesThe bass-baritone Davóne Tines performs a scene in “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)” by Tyshawn Sorey at the Park Avenue Armory.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“No one could accuse Davóne Tines of lacking ambition,” Oussama Zahr, a classical music critic, wrote recently in The Times when reviewing “Recital No. 1: MASS,” the bass-baritone’s personal and thoughtfully arranged Carnegie Hall debut“I really like structures,” Tines, who is in his mid-30s, told The New Yorker of “MASS” last year. “The ritualistic template of the Mass is a proven structure — centuries of culture have upheld it. Anything that I put into it will assume a certain shape. And what I put into it is my own lived experience.”Accolades for Tines have been mounting, including for, this fall, his performance in a staged version of Tyshawn Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” at the Park Avenue Armory; and for “Everything Rises,” his collaboration with the violinist Jennifer Koh, which opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.In the work, Tines and Koh recount their complicated relationships with classical music as people of color. “I was the moth, lured by your flame,” Tines sings. “I hated myself for needing you, dear white people: money, access and fame.”DanceCatherine HurlinThe ballerina Catherine Hurlin, who was recently promoted to principal dancer at American Ballet Theater, in “Of Love and Rage,” by Alexei Ratmansky at the Metropolitan Opera House.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesShe may only be 26, but the ballerina Catherine Hurlin has been ascending for more than half of her life. As a girl, she secured a full scholarship to the American Ballet Theater’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School. Not long after, she became an apprentice with the A.B.T., then a member of the corps de ballet and eventually a soloist in 2018.Then this summer, she was one of three dancers promoted to the role of principal.“The simple serenity of Hurlin’s face, framed by cascading curls, is riveting, as is the daring amplitude of her expressive, singular dancing,” Gia Kourlas, the dance critic of The Times, wrote in June of Hurlin’s performance in Alexei Ratmansky’s “Of Love and Rage.”And in July, when Hurlin made her debut in the double role of Odette-Odile in “Swan Lake,” Kourlas called her “the future of Ballet Theater, the kind of dancer who has a fresh take on story ballets.”Her nickname? Hurricane. More

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      Review: Davóne Tines Hones the Recital Form to a Fine Point

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      This bass-baritone made his Carnegie Hall debut with his carefully curated, personal “Recital No. 1: MASS.”No one could accuse Davóne Tines of lacking ambition.On Thursday night, this bass-baritone made his Carnegie Hall debut in the intimate Weill Recital Hall, presenting a highly personal, carefully curated program with the pianist Adam Nielsen called “Recital No. 1: MASS.”Touching on Bach, spirituals and contemporary art music, the concert was a compelling reconceptualization of the recital format from an artist who molded his warm, strong voice like clay in a bracingly vulnerable, honest performance.In 2019, Tines’s “The Black Clown” landed in New York’s classical music scene like a fireball. Created with the composer Michael Schachter, that show traced the social, political and musical histories of Black Americans with grace, wit, resilience and ferocity. It took them seven years to develop it, and it remains one of my favorite theatrical experiences of the past decade.My subsequent live encounters with Tines have been comparatively disappointing. “Eastman,” at Little Island in 2021, felt impenetrable and unfinished. In September, Tines starred in Peter Sellars’s production of Tyshawn Sorey’s inert chamber work “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)” at Park Avenue Armory, and in October, the Brooklyn Academy of Music presented “Everything Rises,” in which he and the violinist Jennifer Koh shared their experiences as people of color in the classical industry. Their grievances, sincerely felt but guardedly expressed, couldn’t compete with the genuineness of Tines’s grandmother and Koh’s mother, who stole the show in filmed oral histories projected above the stage.“Recital No. 1: MASS,” which Tines has toured before its arrival in New York, demonstrates what happens when he hones a concept to a fine point. He starts with the idea that religious faith has common impetuses — a plea for mercy, a call to praise, a desire for salvation — that have found expression in various musical traditions across centuries.Tines restructured the Latin mass familiar from Bach and Haydn, beginning, as usual, with the Kyrie but ending with the Benedictus. Caroline Shaw set the Latin text for each movement in brief, deferential ways that clearly signposted each section. Filling that framework, Tines elided spirituals, Bach arias and pieces by 20th-century Black composers into an hourlong monologue. Throughout, soul-searching questions were projected on the wall behind him.The uninterrupted format may have frayed his voice, and a stubborn nasality crept into his otherwise handsome, hearty sound, but the program nevertheless accumulated in power.Sorey’s rewritings of the spirituals “Were You There?” (a slow, dark, pained sequence of chords) and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (a minor-key, pessimistic realization) echoed Tines’s observation in the program book that many spirituals are about suicide or a will to death. Sorey’s pieces gave new context to a traditional arrangement of “Give Me Jesus,” revealing worlds of hurt and hope in its seemingly simple repetitions. Uplifting and glorious, with bittersweet blue notes and a swing buoyed by faith alone, Tines took us to church with it, prompting at least one “Hallelujah” from the audience.Tines’s personal way with a Bach cantata existed somewhere between stately Baroque chromaticism and churning gospel melisma, but it was a distinct pleasure to hear such a rich voice nestle into the bass writing for “Mache dich, mein Herze, rein” from Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” despite Nielsen’s pedal-heavy, bizarrely Chopinesque accompaniment.The program closed with bravura improvisation: Julius Eastman’s Prelude to “The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc” and “Vigil,” a piece Tines wrote with Igee Dieudonné then transformed into an extemporaneous Baptist sermon. He commanded attention in Prelude, a modern affirmation of faith written by a gay Black man in 1981 about a 15th-century martyr, after including it in “Eastman” last year.At Weill, it emerged with earth-rumbling intensity, as Tines wrapped his luscious voice around its punishing declamations with athletic fervor. Tines’s artistic process may be a personal one, but it is already reverberating through at least one of classical music’s hallowed halls.Recital No. 1: MASSPerformed on Thursday at Weill Recital Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: Musicians of Color Reclaim Control in a White Space

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      In “Everything Rises,” the violinist Jennifer Koh and the bass-baritone Davóne Tines recount their complicated relationships with classical music.Not long into “Everything Rises,” which opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday night, the bass-baritone Davóne Tines confronts the audience with an uncomfortable declaration.“I was the moth, lured by your flame,” Tines, who is Black, sings with disdain. “I hated myself for needing you, dear white people: money, access and fame.”“Everything Rises” is a timely collaboration, created by the Korean American violinist Jennifer Koh and Tines, that interrogates what it means to be a classical musician of color — to have chosen to make a creative life and professional career in a medium and a milieu that are overwhelmingly white, and to have tucked away fundamental elements of their identities in the process. The result of those inquiries is a compact, affecting and meditative multimedia work made entirely by people of color, including the composer and librettist Ken Ueno, the director Alexander Gedeon and the dramaturg Kee-Yoon Nahm.Koh and Tines conceived this show several years ago. Its debut was originally scheduled for spring 2020, but because of the pandemic it instead premiered this April at the University of California, Santa Barbara. What happened across the United States between those two dates — particularly in terms of racial violence perpetrated against Black and Asian Americans — made the enterprise seem even more pressing.The work begins with Koh and Tines dressed in typical concert dress: she in a wine-colored gown, crowned with demure dark hair, and he in a tuxedo. But he is also wearing a black blindfold, which leaves him feeling his way across the expanse of the Fishman Space stage at BAM. Early on, the audience sees a video clip of Koh’s winning performance as a 17-year-old at the 1994 Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow, an early highlight of what could have been a traditional career.Soon enough, however, Koh reveals her true, hot pink hair. Tines puts his customary earrings on. The duo wear fitted black tank tops with voluminous black skirts — a coming into their full selves, and a recognition of the parallels of their individual paths.Musically and narratively, “Everything Rises” underlines the fact that Koh and Tines, as well as their creative partners, are constantly code switching, depending on where they are and whom they are with. Ueno imaginatively expresses those frequent alternations between ways of being, drawing texts from their experiences and sampling audio recordings of interviews with the matriarchs of their respective families: Koh’s mother, Gertrude Soonja Lee Koh, who fled the Korean War to the U.S., and Tines’s grandmother, Alma Lee Gibbs Tines, a descendant of enslaved people.Ueno weaves clips of these women recounting chilling, graphic stories. Alma recalls the lynching of one of her relatives — “they killed him and hung him, cut his head off and they kicked his head down the streets” — while Soonja remembers, “I saw people being tortured and people on the trees, bodies hanging on the trees.”There are also moments of melancholic tenderness in “Everything Rises,” such as in the lullaby-like “Fluttering Heart,” and testaments to enduring resilience. Over the course of the show, Tines and Koh hold each other up literally and figuratively: hearing, acknowledging and amplifying each other’s stories.Ueno’s score nods to 19th-century Western idioms, traditional Korean music and shimmering contemporary electronica. The effect is not a pastiche, but a sonic code switching. He also allows Tines and Koh — exemplary technicians and artists of profound intensity — to explore their full tonal and textural ranges. Moments of racial violence are evoked by Koh playing growling, guttural scratch tones, often on her open G string, while Tines cycles from his rich basso profundo to an ethereal falsetto. (The day before “Everything Rises” opened, BAM named Tines as its next artist in residence, beginning in January.)The piece ends with a hopeful original song, “Better Angels,” which is preceded by a particularly haunting sequence. Ueno writes a new setting of “Strange Fruit,” the powerful song, made famous by Billie Holiday, that portrays violence against Black Americans and that, in part, led to Holiday’s prosecution by the U.S. government. It’s impossible not to imagine Holiday’s ancestral shadow as part of this work: Alongside Alma and Soonja, she becomes its third matriarch.Everything RisesThrough Oct. 15 at BAM Fisher, Brooklyn; bam.org. More

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      Review: In ‘Monochromatic Light,’ Artists Saturate and Vacate Space

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      Tyshawn Sorey’s music, initially written with Mark Rothko’s abstractions in mind, comes to the Park Avenue Armory with art by Julie Mehretu.If you write a musical composition in homage to Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel,” and if you premiere it in the actual Rothko Chapel in Houston, you’d seem to be anchoring its meaning and context in rather firm ground. But the American composer and percussionist Tyshawn Sorey is a more restive and conjectural artist than that; and his “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” which commemorated the 50th anniversary of the chapel earlier this year, has come to New York rewritten, reorganized and reinvigorated.This latest, and now staged, version of “Monochromatic Light” premiered at the Park Avenue Armory on Tuesday, and it retains the spare and ritualistic tenor of Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel,” with long rests between its inquiring viola phrases and soft rumbles of the timpani. Here in New York, though, Sorey’s music is heard in the company not of Rothko but of another American painter: the contemporary artist Julie Mehretu, whose dense and digitally conversant abstractions flow and swarm where Rothko’s brooded. The production, by the avant-garde journeyman Peter Sellars, has been souped up for the Armory’s cavernous drill hall and augmented with young dancers. The running time has ballooned, too, from under an hour to a good 90 minutes.In scaling up, Sorey may have sacrificed the ecclesiastical concentration that both he and Feldman before him had found in Houston. The night has its longueurs. But this rethought and more antagonistic “Monochromatic Light” strikes a new richness in New York, and it affirms how abstraction can give form to suffering and freedom in ways more straightforward expression so often cannot.At the Armory, “Monochromatic Light” is staged in the round. Sorey, at center, conducts an ensemble of just three musicians, playing viola, keyboards and percussion: nearly the same instrumentation as Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel.” Singers from the Choir of Trinity Wall Street sit at a distance, and behind the audience is an octagonal gangway, with one massive reproduction of a Mehretu painting hanging above each side. Three of the eight abstractions were seen in her 2020 exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery; one appeared this year at David Zwirner in a group show devoted to Toni Morrison; and four are new, incorporating dense layers of halftone dots, sprayed clouds of bright yellow or green and seething black squiggles.The staging echoes Philip Johnson’s octagonal nave of the Houston chapel, but from the opening moments of gently struck tubular bells, it’s clear that Rothko’s dark reticence is being left behind. For Mehretu’s works here are not paintings but blowups on translucent screens, lit from front and back by colored spots. (The lighting designer, James F. Ingalls, a longtime Sellars collaborator, synchronizes the color adjustments across all eight paintings so that, at a given moment in the score, their backgrounds will all glow purple or aquamarine and their tremulous blacks will emerge or recede.)Deidra “Dayntee” Braz, one of the eight dancers who performed in the Brooklyn-born style known as flex.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesUp on the gangway are eight dancers, one per painting, who bend and writhe throughout in a Brooklyn-born style of dancing known as flex. The performers are athletic, the men among them perform shirtless, but choreographed by Reggie Gray (also known as Regg Roc) they appear vulnerable, fragile, under threat; they contort their arms as if they’re fractured or disjointed and draw in their stomachs as if taking a punch.The score is rangy and spatial, the tempo largo to larghissimo. (There’s no beat as such; Sorey marked time with strokes of his baton lasting a second or longer.) Its opening minutes are especially minimal. Against a long and attenuated trill of the viola, Mehretu’s backgrounds become a lurid green or mysterious blue and the black lines of the paintings start to look more querulous. The dancers moonwalk and roll their necks; their motions are smooth and spasmodic by turns, and several of them present bulging eyes and pained expressions that recall the existential intensity of butoh.The dancers’ broken movements, and Mehretu’s colliding layers and shaking lines, bring out an anxiety in Sorey’s score that probably did not come through in front of Rothko’s hushed paintings in Houston. There’s an angst and frailty in the scattered notes Kim Kashkashian brings from her viola, while the percussionist Steven Schick bows between the bars of a marimba to produce a spooky, theremin-like keening. The silky ah-ah-ah choral lines, a Feldman quotation that I imagine worked better amid the Rothkos, feel out of place against Mehretu’s unsettled paintings, though there is sharper accompaniment from Davóne Tines, the solo bass-baritone, walking through the audience and later circumnavigating the gangway. As he wrenches forth fragments from the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” the words octaves apart and isolated by long silences, the evening takes on the tone of a funeral march.The solo bass-baritone Davóne Tines singing in front of an enlarged reproduction of a painting by Julie Mehretu, with the flex dancer Jeremy “Opt” Perez lying on the gangway below.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesSorey’s interpolation of a spiritual into “Monochromatic Light,” as well as the dancers’ channeling of Jamaican vernacular movements and the violent news imagery that Mehretu abstracts into her churning backgrounds, all imbue this threnody with the particularities of Black grief. But it resists resolution throughout. This is a work of Blackness (or blackness) in abstraction — one that defies the supposed blankness of nonobjective painting or art music on the one hand, and current market demands for social advocacy on the other. Blackness in abstraction, as the curator Adrienne Edwards has written, is a more capacious and immanent model of artistic creation than many of our institutions can handle. It requires a dual engagement with form and identity, which, in Edwards’s words, “shifts analysis away from the Black artist as subject and instead emphasizes blackness as material, method and mode.” It can draw as much from Rothko, whose murals in Houston are black with purplish-blue undertones, as from Du Bois or Eastman or O’Grady. It pushes past biography or storytelling, and enters the realms of the psychic, the global, the cosmic.What I most admired about Mehretu’s midcareer retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art last year was how she used magnitude to defy the diminishment and simplifications that even our “diversified” cultural institutions still assign to artists outside the dominant representation. Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light,” for all its spareness, does the same. Where Mehretu saturates space, Sorey vacates it, yet both painter and composer offer vital examples of how to create at full scale when the times impel others to reduce their ambition. This is how you speak to some and to all at once; this is how you mourn and stay free.Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)Through Oct. 8 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. More