A Pulitzer-Winning Composer Puts His Operatic Spin on Edith Wharton
The composer and pianist Anthony Davis is known for drawing inspiration from real-world figures in his operas.
“X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” — recently mounted by the Metropolitan Opera — and “The Central Park Five,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, are both grave, ripped-from-the-headlines stories about well-known people.
But Davis has also written rollicking adaptations of literary material. Less frequently produced but no less interesting are chamber operas like “Lilith” — a saucy and inventive take on the story of Adam’s first wife that features a divorce court in the Garden of Eden. Similarly, “Lear on the 2nd Floor” is a riff on Shakespeare that brings “King Lear” into contemporary discussions about medicine and Alzheimer’s disease.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Seth Colter Walls
The composer and pianist Anthony Davis is known for drawing inspiration from real-world figures in his operas.
“X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” — recently mounted by the Metropolitan Opera — and “The Central Park Five,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, are both grave, ripped-from-the-headlines stories about well-known people.
But Davis has also written rollicking adaptations of literary material. Less frequently produced but no less interesting are chamber operas like “Lilith” — a saucy and inventive take on the story of Adam’s first wife that features a divorce court in the Garden of Eden. Similarly, “Lear on the 2nd Floor” is a riff on Shakespeare that brings “King Lear” into contemporary discussions about medicine and Alzheimer’s disease.
The New York Times: What to Do in New York City in December
What’s the link between the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, who died in June, and the early-20th-century titans Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Darius Milhaud? A mutual flair for the theatrical, which is reflected in the title of Parlando’s concert on Sunday: “Melodrama.”
While all three artists wrote operas, this chamber orchestra will focus on some smaller yet substantial works: Milhaud’s “Le Bœuf sur le toit,” Saariaho’s “Graal théâtre” (featuring the violinist Geneva Lewis), and Korngold’s “Much Ado About Nothing” Suite. By giving short spoken introductions to each piece from the stage, the orchestra’s conductor and founder, Ian Niederhoffer, makes good on its motto: “Every concert tells a story.” But smart, unusual programming on this level fosters a gripping narrative of its own, too.
The New York Times
What’s the link between the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, who died in June, and the early-20th-century titans Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Darius Milhaud? A mutual flair for the theatrical, which is reflected in the title of Parlando’s concert on Sunday: “Melodrama.”
While all three artists wrote operas, this chamber orchestra will focus on some smaller yet substantial works: Milhaud’s “Le Bœuf sur le toit,” Saariaho’s “Graal théâtre” (featuring the violinist Geneva Lewis), and Korngold’s “Much Ado About Nothing” Suite. By giving short spoken introductions to each piece from the stage, the orchestra’s conductor and founder, Ian Niederhoffer, makes good on its motto: “Every concert tells a story.” But smart, unusual programming on this level fosters a gripping narrative of its own, too.
The New York Times: An Oratorio About Shanghai’s Jews Opens in China at a Difficult Time
“Émigré,” a new oratorio about Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany for Shanghai in the late 1930s, begins with a song by two brothers, Josef and Otto, as their steamship approaches a Chinese harbor.
“Shanghai, beacon of light on a silent shore,” they sing. “Shanghai, answer these desperate cries.”
The emigration of thousands of Central European and Eastern European Jews to China in the late 1930s and early 1940s — and their survival of the Holocaust — is one of World War II’s most dramatic but little-known chapters.
In “Émigré,” a 90-minute oratorio that premiered this month in Shanghai and will come to the New York Philharmonic in February 2024, the stories of these refugees and their attempts to build new lives in war-torn China are front and center.
The New York Times
By Keith Bradsher and Javier C. Hernández
“Émigré,” a new oratorio about Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany for Shanghai in the late 1930s, begins with a song by two brothers, Josef and Otto, as their steamship approaches a Chinese harbor.
“Shanghai, beacon of light on a silent shore,” they sing. “Shanghai, answer these desperate cries.”
The emigration of thousands of Central European and Eastern European Jews to China in the late 1930s and early 1940s — and their survival of the Holocaust — is one of World War II’s most dramatic but little-known chapters.
In “Émigré,” a 90-minute oratorio that premiered this month in Shanghai and will come to the New York Philharmonic in February 2024, the stories of these refugees and their attempts to build new lives in war-torn China are front and center.
Read more here.
The New York Times: Making Sweet, and Bittersweet, Music Together
A bite of bruschetta helped lay the foundation for the relationship between the conductor Michael Repper and Vanessa Moody. That honesty served them well when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
Michael Eric Repper’s history of unflagging devotion to a narrow set of passions dates back to the early 1990s when, as a 3-year-old, he snapped to attention the moment the orchestra kicked in at a classical music concert. By the time he had reached his early 20s, another of his select few passions was consuming him: his relationship with his girlfriend, Vanessa Rodrigues Moody.
Dr. Repper, now 33, became the youngest American to win a Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance this year, and Ms. Moody, 31, a lawyer with the global law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, met and began dating in April 2013 as students at Stanford.
Six months later, when she was a senior and he had graduated and moved to Baltimore to start a doctoral degree in music, neither was sure what would become of their budding romance. But on April 14, 2014, she called to tell him she had been diagnosed with a rare brain tumor the size of a tangerine and asked whether he wanted out of the relationship. Both knew then it was built to last.
“I was terrified,” Dr. Repper said. “But I was also all in.”
The New York Times
By Tammy LaGorce
A bite of bruschetta helped lay the foundation for the relationship between the conductor Michael Repper and Vanessa Moody. That honesty served them well when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
Michael Eric Repper’s history of unflagging devotion to a narrow set of passions dates back to the early 1990s when, as a 3-year-old, he snapped to attention the moment the orchestra kicked in at a classical music concert. By the time he had reached his early 20s, another of his select few passions was consuming him: his relationship with his girlfriend, Vanessa Rodrigues Moody.
Dr. Repper, now 33, became the youngest American to win a Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance this year, and Ms. Moody, 31, a lawyer with the global law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, met and began dating in April 2013 as students at Stanford.
Six months later, when she was a senior and he had graduated and moved to Baltimore to start a doctoral degree in music, neither was sure what would become of their budding romance. But on April 14, 2014, she called to tell him she had been diagnosed with a rare brain tumor the size of a tangerine and asked whether he wanted out of the relationship. Both knew then it was built to last.
“I was terrified,” Dr. Repper said. “But I was also all in.”
Read more here.
The New York Times: Anthony Davis’s Malcolm X Opera Finally Arrives at the Met
The epigraph of Anthony Davis’s opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” is a quote from an interview in which, asked about the cost of freedom, Malcolm responds, “The cost of freedom is death.”
That tension — between hope and reality, between liberation and limitation — courses through a new production of “X” that opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, in the work’s company premiere. This staging dreams of a better future, with a towering Afrofuturist spaceship that, at the beginning, appears to be calling Malcolm X home. But the beam-me-up rays of light are pulled away to reveal a floating proscenium, gilded at the edges and decorated with a landscape mural. It is a replica of the podium at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan, where he was assassinated on Feb. 21, 1965.
The New York Times
By Joshua Barone
The epigraph of Anthony Davis’s opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” is a quote from an interview in which, asked about the cost of freedom, Malcolm responds, “The cost of freedom is death.”
That tension — between hope and reality, between liberation and limitation — courses through a new production of “X” that opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, in the work’s company premiere. This staging dreams of a better future, with a towering Afrofuturist spaceship that, at the beginning, appears to be calling Malcolm X home. But the beam-me-up rays of light are pulled away to reveal a floating proscenium, gilded at the edges and decorated with a landscape mural. It is a replica of the podium at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan, where he was assassinated on Feb. 21, 1965.
Read more here.
The New York Times: The Family That Turned Malcolm X’s Life Into Opera
“X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” which arrives at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, was a family affair. The meditative yet dramatic work has a score by Anthony Davis to a scenario by his younger brother, Christopher Davis, and a libretto by their cousin Thulani Davis.
When they were working on the opera, in the early 1980s, the three were living in New York. Christopher appeared as Malcolm X in a play in Jamaica, Queens, and Anthony was playing experimental, improvised music in ensembles alongside Thulani’s poetry in productions downtown.
“There was a lot of energy in the air,” Christopher, 70, said in a recent interview at the Met alongside Anthony, 72 — with Thulani, 74, joining by video from her home in Madison, Wis.
The New York Times
By Zachary Woolfe
“X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” which arrives at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, was a family affair. The meditative yet dramatic work has a score by Anthony Davis to a scenario by his younger brother, Christopher Davis, and a libretto by their cousin Thulani Davis.
When they were working on the opera, in the early 1980s, the three were living in New York. Christopher appeared as Malcolm X in a play in Jamaica, Queens, and Anthony was playing experimental, improvised music in ensembles alongside Thulani’s poetry in productions downtown.
…
ANTHONY DAVIS When we moved to New York, Thulani and I were part of this scene of music and poetry, what were called choreopoems; Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls” was the most famous. And Thulani and I worked with Ntozake and Jessica Hagedorn on “Where the Mississippi Meets the Amazon.” We ran at the Public Theater for several months.
Read more here.
The New York Times: Review: Yunchan Lim, Teenage Piano Star, Arrives in New York
The 19-year-old musician made his New York Philharmonic debut with a powerful yet poetic performance of Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto.
“He plays like a dream,” we say about musicians we like, meaning simply that they’re very good.
But when I say that Yunchan Lim, the 19-year-old pianist who made a galvanizing debut with the New York Philharmonic at David Geffen Hall on Wednesday, played like a dream, I mean something more literal.
I mean that there was, in his performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, the juxtaposition of precise clarity and expansive reverie; the vivid scenes and bursts of wit; the sense of contrasting yet organically developing moods; the endless and persuasive bendings of time — the qualities that tend to characterize nighttime wanderings of the mind.
The New York Times
By Zachary Woolfe
The 19-year-old musician made his New York Philharmonic debut with a powerful yet poetic performance of Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto.
“He plays like a dream,” we say about musicians we like, meaning simply that they’re very good.
But when I say that Yunchan Lim, the 19-year-old pianist who made a galvanizing debut with the New York Philharmonic at David Geffen Hall on Wednesday, played like a dream, I mean something more literal.
I mean that there was, in his performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, the juxtaposition of precise clarity and expansive reverie; the vivid scenes and bursts of wit; the sense of contrasting yet organically developing moods; the endless and persuasive bendings of time — the qualities that tend to characterize nighttime wanderings of the mind.
This dreamy concert was among Lim’s first major professional performances outside his native South Korea, though he is already world-famous for this concerto. His blazing account of it secured his victory last June as the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition’s youngest-ever winner, and the video of that appearance has been viewed millions of times on YouTube.
Read more here.
Photo Credit: Chris Lee
The New York Times: Illuminating Rachmaninoff’s Vespers, a Pinnacle of Russian Sacred Rep
In a classical music world obsessed with anniversaries, be they grand or modest, the 150th birthday of the Russian émigré composer Sergei Rachmaninoff has inevitably drawn notice. Just as inevitably, commemorations have tended to focus on his war horses: the symphonies, piano concertos and solo piano works.
It seems to have fallen to Steven Fox and his excellent choirs to tend to Rachmaninoff’s motley but treasurable body of choral works. The sacred ones, particularly — with their flowing yet restrained lyricism and none of the bombast or sentimentality often associated with the composer — represent the very best of Rachmaninoff.
The New York Times
By James R. Oestreich
Steven Fox and the Clarion Choir are tending to a less well-known part of the composer’s canon for his 150th birthday: His choral works.
In a classical music world obsessed with anniversaries, be they grand or modest, the 150th birthday of the Russian émigré composer Sergei Rachmaninoff has inevitably drawn notice. Just as inevitably, commemorations have tended to focus on his war horses: the symphonies, piano concertos and solo piano works.
It seems to have fallen to Steven Fox and his excellent choirs to tend to Rachmaninoff’s motley but treasurable body of choral works. The sacred ones, particularly — with their flowing yet restrained lyricism and none of the bombast or sentimentality often associated with the composer — represent the very best of Rachmaninoff.
On Wednesday, Fox, the artistic director of the New York-based Clarion Music Society, will return to his alma mater — Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H. — to lead the Clarion Choir in Rachmaninoff’s exquisite All-Night Vigil, a pinnacle of the rich Russian Orthodox repertory. They will repeat the performance on Friday at Carnegie Hall.
Read more here.
The New York Times: 5 Classical Music Albums You Can Listen to Right Now
In this program — of works by Tania León, Alvin Singleton, Julia Wolfe, David Sanford, Allison Loggins-Hull and Valerie Coleman — none of the music is on autopilot.
Singleton, born in 1940, is the oldest composer represented; his music should be heard in concert halls more frequently. Jennifer Grim’s take on “Argoru III,” for solo flute, digs in to his melodic gifts, as well as his feel for textural variation within five concise minutes. Similarly wide-ranging is León’s “Alma” — the lyrical opening of which follows a winding, entertaining path toward the bumptious rhythmic fillips of its central section. And in Coleman’s “Wish Sonatine,” a work inspired by a Fred D’Aguiar poem about the Middle Passage, the composer navigates between episodes of horror and moments of communal purpose with narrative drive.
The New York Times
‘Through Broken Time’
Jennifer Grim, flute; Michael Sheppard, piano (New Focus)
In this program — of works by Tania León, Alvin Singleton, Julia Wolfe, David Sanford, Allison Loggins-Hull and Valerie Coleman — none of the music is on autopilot.
Singleton, born in 1940, is the oldest composer represented; his music should be heard in concert halls more frequently. Jennifer Grim’s take on “Argoru III,” for solo flute, digs in to his melodic gifts, as well as his feel for textural variation within five concise minutes. Similarly wide-ranging is León’s “Alma” — the lyrical opening of which follows a winding, entertaining path toward the bumptious rhythmic fillips of its central section. And in Coleman’s “Wish Sonatine,” a work inspired by a Fred D’Aguiar poem about the Middle Passage, the composer navigates between episodes of horror and moments of communal purpose with narrative drive.
Read more here.
The New York Times: A Road Trip to Sample America’s Many, Many Music Festivals
My family and I — including children aged 6, 3 and not quite 1 — started with the up-and-coming Colorado Music Festival in Boulder, which is within easy reach of Rocky Mountain National Park. Then it made sense to a climb up to the ski resorts west of Denver — first to Bravo! Vail, then to the next valley for the Aspen Music Festival and School. Jackson Hole, Wyo., didn’t look all that far away, really. There, the Grand Teton Music Festival plays just outside the park of the same name, with Yellowstone National Park an hour to the north. Why not?
The New York Times
By David Allen
With a minivan and a three small children in tow, a critic spent 12 days discovering classical music offerings among the Rocky Mountains.
Four classical music festivals. Three children. Two exhausted parents, with a brave grandfather in tow. One bedraggled minivan.
It’ll be fun, my wife promised me. Surprisingly, it was.
…
My family and I — including children aged 6, 3 and not quite 1 — started with the up-and-coming Colorado Music Festival in Boulder, which is within easy reach of Rocky Mountain National Park. Then it made sense to a climb up to the ski resorts west of Denver — first to Bravo! Vail, then to the next valley for the Aspen Music Festival and School. Jackson Hole, Wyo., didn’t look all that far away, really. There, the Grand Teton Music Festival plays just outside the park of the same name, with Yellowstone National Park an hour to the north. Why not?
Read more here.
Photo Credit (right): Andrew Miller for The New York Times