Performance Date: 15 May 2026

Performance Date: 15 April 2026

Performance Date: 19 March 2026

Performance Date: 9 March 2026

Performance Date: 13 February 2026

Performance Date: 5 February 2026

Performance Date: 30 January 2026

Performance Date: 28 January 2026

Performance Date: 3 December 2025

Performance Date: 19 November 2025

A local string quartet that might not exist outside of the context of the show.

Program:

The “Candlelight” by Fever winter performance, featuring selections from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, holiday medleys including Christian and secular classics, Ma’oz Tzur, and more “wintry mix” such as Debussy’s “The Snow is Dancing” and Waldteufel’s “The Skaters’ Waltz.” A one-hour gently guided show designed to be more accessible than traditional symphony fare.

Position: A raised table (cabaret seating) to the front, righthand side of Bijou Theatre in Bridgeport

Purpose/Intent/Questions: In the interest of preventing my mother from becoming an absolute barnacle in her retirement, I try to schlep her out at least once a month. Last month was a bit strenuous, so this month we chose something a little easier. I’m also emotionally invested in the arts community of Bridgeport, home of the art gallery I grew up in.

How’d it go?

I’ll admit—this was much more enjoyable than I had anticipated it being. Does it feel weird to go to such a short concert? Yes, a bit. Is it strange to see a random quartet of local musicians who, hey, are happy to have another paid gig? That’s life, I’m glad they have work. Is it… a thing? Is it functional?

The zillion fake candles are part of the gimmick, setting the mood, and it is kind of nice. In a world of constant multisensory overstimulation, it actually does seem like a helpful visual aid for introducing people to live classical music. It’s not intellectually challenging. It’s relaxing. It’s not going to ruin the experience for anyone unless a snob who has to have good lighting to watch the violinists’ fingering like a hawk managed to sneak in. It makes it feel like more of an “event” than the presence of a quartet in the stark white light of modernity might come across. Less “we walked in on a bunch of kids practicing a ditty” and “oh, this was set up.” And it was. Even though the candles are electronic, placing and turning on well over a thousand wiggly flames does take time.

As far as the music, it was played competently and a nice variety. I’m glad that it didn’t digress into a singalong of the most elementary Christmas carols; there is so much great holiday and seasonal music that seems to escape our ears season after season because Mariah Carey made a contract with God, the devil, and Macy’s to have personal and direct access to the majority of Americans for one month each year. In particular, I was glad to hear Ma’oz Tzur rather than some of the more tragic, childish, contemporary Chanukah songs, and the Tchaikovsky and Waldteufel were different, equally appreciated treats.

I had a good time. Mom had a good time. The quartet, though students based out of New Haven, were quite professional and will hopefully get stable employment after graduation. Nobody stood out as section leader material, but nor was anyone treated to jeers of “learn to code.”

Pleasant.

Ensemble: New York Philharmonic
Conductor: Keri-Lynn Wilson
Soloist: Frank Huang (violin)

Program:

Shostakovich - Festive Overture, Op. 96
Prokofiev - Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 63
* * * intermission * * *
Shostakovich - Symphony No. 10 in E. minor, Op. 93, performed alongside screening of William Kentridge’s Oh To Believe in Another World

Position: Orchestra, very front, left-center

Purpose/Intent/Questions: Not part of my original subscription, I went back and forth on whether or not I wanted to see this concert. Visual components accompanying orchestral works are a pretty divisive subject in an already needlessly divided field. But between a good deal, good timing, and an inordinate amount of reading on the political history of classical music, including my beloved Shostakovich… I was willing to entertain the prospect.

How’d it go?

Black Friday “deals” can be so disappointing. This season, I witnessed everything from $5-off coupons for brands that don’t sell anything below the $300-mark, to free rolls of wrapping paper for items whose production I am familiar enough with to confidently say: their packaging ought to be gift-worthy by default. The symphonies and operas sent out their emails… hurry and get your branded keychains and odd books that have been canoodling with the dust in our shops while they’re still on sale…! And, also, here are a few concerts we’ve yet to sell out, featuring obscure conductors and soloists you’ve never heard of, programming that feels especially unsexy, and/or dates that are inconvenient or far-too-crowded in the local fine arts/cultural/entertainment market.

And then there’s the Phil. Coming in hot with $110 off a premium seat for a Saturday night Shostakovich 10 with accompanying film (and so much more!).

Ya got me. But only because a friend in the City agreed to lend me use of his apartment for a long weekend, so I could hear Laura’s amazing project, stare sidelong at the Shosta film, and maybe even enjoy the New York Jewish Book Festival without too much time on the train.

And… I might not have wanted to pay the extra $110, but for the price I did pay, I found it worthwhile. The Festive Overture is not in my top ten, but because it feels emotionally exceptional within Shostakovich’s body of work, hearing it live had some educational value on top of the musical enjoyment. Even though violin concerti sometimes feel a bit annoying to me because of their saturation in the market—if we get anyone other than a violinist or a pianist, it’s something to write home about—the second Prokofiev is complex, savory, mature in a way that I enjoy. It might be the case that I have some sort of a shoulder chip about Frank Huang, unrelated to him or his playing but sheerly because of the frequency with which he is mentioned as part of the extracurricular drama of the classical community… but he was not all deficient stepping in as soloist.

The pièce de résistance and the real concern for the evening: this film and the symphony that came along with it. Artistically, there is a lot more merit in Oh To Believe in Another World than there was in the background footage put together for the Fleming show earlier in the season, but that’s a small bar to step over. The animation style is jarring, a little unhinged, but not gratuitously so in the contexts Shostakovich existed in. While different from the Henry Selick films of my youth on several counts, there was a sort of inner aesthetic that felt common with them. Importantly, the film did not distract from the music, nor did the music render the film entirely superfluous. It’s another form of commentary—colorful, darkly whimsical, frighteningly symbolic. Without some grounding in Shostakovich’s music and biography, it might have seemed confusing or even disturbing. While there was obvious, unavoidable political commentary, it felt neither definite nor forced. A curl of music would be picked up and examined in a scene, “perhaps it means this?” While musical interpretation is an artform of its own, this felt more successful as a “multimedia” event than many I’ve witnessed before. Kentridge selected his thesis and lifted up the evidence from within the symphony. Ultimately, it was a believable if not convincing artistic argument.

Vocal Soloists; Elza van den Heever (as the Empress), Lise Lindstrom (as the Dyer’s Wife), Nina Stemme (as the Nurse), Issachah Savage (as the Emperor), Michael Volle (as Barak, the Dyer), Ryan Speedo Green (as Spirit Messenger)

Other Contributors; Yannick Nézet-Séguin (conductor), Herbert Wernicke (production/designer), J. Knighten Smit (stage director), Scott Weber (dancing a mime of the Falcon)

Program: Strauss’ Die Frau ohne Schatten (libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal), performed by the Metropolitan Opera and their ensembles.

Position: Family Circle, utmost left seat a couple of rows up.

Purpose/Intent/Questions: This is one of my favorite operas, conceptually, and it is certainly not in last place musically. I’d never seen this production and figured I might as well give it a shot seeing as I was in town.

How’d it go?

Buckle up, friends. These are not my typical show notes. I’ve never been to an opera before where there was so much distracting from the opera, both within and beyond the production.

The first matter is that while I understand the idea between setting the world of the Empress (i.e. “the woman without a shadow”) in… a fully mirrored landscape, with mirrored costumes, and light bouncing off of anything or anyone who might otherwise cast a shadow… this is one of the unfortunately many examples of design that is considering the viewer on the other side of a camera and screen than the viewer who paid to be in the opera house. This is a recurring theme at the Met, but this production was especially blinding. Many in the audience were shielding their caption screens, if not their eyes, through much of the performance, making it difficult to following anything other than the music. And because the music was simply fine, not especially riveting, not justifying the cost of a trip to the theatre rather than simply listening at home, it felt all the more damning. Is this a production, or is it a new version of the “visualizer” in the complimentary music player that comes with one’s computer of choice?

I like sparkles. I love shiny stuff. I want for this sort of thing to work. But it was forced in a way that compromised the focus, the tension, the drama, shoving the story into the background—a mere shadow beyond the lightplay.

Because of this Scott Weber, dancing the falcon, was able to stand out as exceptional. It’s uncomfortable when choreography and dance execution are the highlight of an opera, but credit where it’s due. An athletic, graceful bird dressed in red, Weber was an enchanting dancer in the middle of a production that seemed set on shaking off my attention.

Fortunately, my attention found other outlets.

On rare occasion, you can seemingly hear the SlippeDisc article1 being constructed around you:

Patrons seated in the Family Circle at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera were treated to more drama than they paid for during the second act of Die Frau ohne Schatten.

As has become more common in our times, a member of the audience thought it might be alright to photograph the performance—with flash on, during an opera where light is a pretty obviously significant symbol and used to construct the story. As is typical in such situations, the flasher was met with many death stares in the dark and variously verbalized tutting.

What was beyond the norm was that another patron simply grabbed the offending phone and chucked it down the stairs! This was responded to with indignation from the flasher, who got up to argue with the chucker, demanding retrieval. Calls for an usher were eventually heeded, with security joining in to help the flasher leave.

During the second intermission, the chucker was complimented for his action, with many of those seated in the area suggesting that the Met should apologize to him and tighten their policies; others simply said they wish they had the nerve to do what he did.

Honestly, I’m not sure what she managed to photograph. Or why she thought that the flash might help.

Somehow, this was not the greatest distraction of the performance. Beyond the mirrors and the unsolicited photography, there was something on stage that took me far, far out of the story. Beyond the realm of the shadowless Empress, beyond the home of the Dyer and his wife, all the way down to the Southern Cone, back to my graduate studies…

Who… who are those lovely folks in the back, the ones with the torches?

Oh, they’re “the spirits of the unborn!” That makes sense. Let’s get a better look. Some traditions believe that even our souls have a likeness to our parents, so maybe we can see…

Hm. I’m starting to think that those aren’t actually the spirits of the unborn “in zebra stripes.” I’m actually pretty sure that’s… Ulen.

If you’ve been to my place in the past decade, you probably recognize him. If you’ve been to Chile or Argentina, he might be a bit familiar. Sometimes he’s depicted in red, rather than black and white. That’s his true form. It’s just that the people he belongs to were genocided before color photography was widely available to anthropologists, so his natural coloration has been distorted by his image on postcards.

Ulen, one of the Selk’nam spirits, a shoort to be precise, was invoked in their spiritual ceremony, the Hain—which had developed into a culturally oriented (as opposed to religious) large-scale social theatre by the time Europeans arrived to Tierra del Fuego—and is a bit like a jester. Ulen’s role was to entertain people, often by scaring or bringing some amount of pleasure to women in the community.

Maybe he is an unborn spirit!

Maybe there is some great metaphysical connection between indigenous theatre traditions and productions at the Met. Maybe all of the peoples destroyed by Europeans’ arrival in the New World have found their afterlives in opera.

But he is what and who he is.

I even checked with the one person in the world most eager to disagree with me: my brother, my only brother, whom I love, Michael. He agrees that these costumes are absolutely little Ulens running about on stage, not a spontaneous aesthetic invention of Wernicke.

But No’a, you might protest, this is so obscure. The Selk’nam might as well be a non-people, at this point.

I actually do not believe that I’m the only Met Opera attendee who has been to Chile for a long enough period to register the absolutely striking aesthetics of the Selk’nam. I might be the only one who keeps up with Keyuk Yantén’s language revival project, but even this I doubt.

Whether this is blatant and irrelevant cultural appropriation or something condoned by one of the now-gone elders of the tribe with a real meaning, I cannot know. But it reinforces to me that art and knowledge need to be sensible dance partners. It’s a shame to know too much to appreciate an aspect of a work of art, to not know enough to find a way to appreciate its place within the whole.

In the words of the Sages, ay mio.

Ensemble: Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
Conductor: Klaus Mäkelä

Program:

Schoenberg - Verklärte Nacht
* * * intermission * * *
Mahler - Symphony No. 1

Position: Front center of Stern (Carnegie main stage)

Purpose/Intent/Questions: In trying to complete a Carnegie subscription for the season, I’m always happy for more Mahler, but of even greater significance… “Verklärte Nacht” is one of my study pieces. I have a tolerance for listening to it time and again, not because I enjoy it, not because I agree with it, but because it comments on a matter I work on academically… in a way that feels perversely foreign to me. Every twist and turn promises to be informative of broader projects. Easy enough selection.

How’d it go?

I’d like to say that it isn’t a harbinger of the show to come when someone is sitting in your seat and very “you’d better call an usher” adamant that your ticket is incorrect. These things happen. If you know me, you know that I tend to be pretty chill about them. I’ve sat my tush down in the wrong seat on occasion, so I can understand and empathize with these exceedingly small dramas of humanity. (In this case, the gentleman had clearly remembered that he was seated on the aisle seat of the center section in the first row. He just happened to forget that there were two seats that fit this description; he was needlessly apologetic when he quickly relocated himself to the other end of the row, having realized his mistake.)

For shows like this, it might be part and parcel. A portion of what agitates “hype” in the classical world is that hype doesn’t really happen. No matter how many people on SlippeDisc1 try to make comparisons between phenomena in classical music and Taylor Swift—the world’s most famous pop star, and the only one who a substantial portion of classical devotees know the name of—art music is, by definition, not popular music and vice versa.2

So, the Beatles-level frenzy around figures like Klaus Mäkelä is at least as much about the will to be drunk on an implied personality as it is about anything the individual has actually done for the genre. That Carnegie Hall might feel like a Black Friday at Walmart is surely an offensive thought to many subscription holders—but that’s what it felt like. People were rushing and running amuck, seeking the most satisfying selfies, dressed in their best and strangest. For Mahler? For Schoenberg? No, my friends. For a well-publicized young Finn.

Granted, while I’m not as much of a curmudgeon as I once was—I did offer to help one gentleman take his “in the crowd at Carnegie” photo after witnessing someone step in front of his timed picture… twice—some part of the experience is spoiled for me by the hullaballoo. It wasn’t Shostakovich. It wasn’t Rite of Spring. There’s some unhealthy projection happening when people are expressing riotous energy over pieces that, while not lullabies, are squarely on the more subdued end of the spectrum.

Nonetheless, I’m not opposed to pockets of hype helping to keep the industry afloat. Maybe I have some concerns or preferences as relate to programming—I wouldn’t want Mäkelä’s Mahler being the one that the majority of listeners have imprinted upon them, a prospect both supported and potentially disrupted in the age of plentiful digital recordings. But if other people screaming their heads off over mediocre renditions of a symphony makes it financially viable for me to hear some juicy weird stuff, have at it!

Oh no, did I do a spoiler?

I know Verklärte Night quite well, both from scores and recordings. While saying that I know any of the Mahler symphonies well sounds hubristic, I am certainly well acquainted with the first—from scores, from recordings, and from lore and the larger culture around the work.

It’s an immense privilege that a few good notes justify the cost of a ticket to me, and I cherish my tastes enough to not try to convince myself that I enjoyed something as a way to self-soothe around the investment. Moreover, as I view my position, my relationship with classical performances as part of “thinking with the music,” rather than simple entertainment, and certainly not something with a load-bearing function within my self-concept, delighting in a performance is a bonus—developing a new question about a piece or the substance of life that it engages with… that’s the real victory. And that can come from interpretations I don’t particularly like, interpretations that stand unarmed before toweringly great and seemingly impenetrable traditions, and even flagrant misinterpretations.

There were some wonderful pieces to this evening, and I think that I will describe it as pieces because even though both of these works have strong arcs, a whole did not seem to register in the presentation of either.3

While I tend to be pretty good at creating a little divisi in my mind between what I want to pay attention to and what I’d rather not, I felt that I had to remove my glasses so as to ignore at least some of the Maestro’s… more interesting dance moves. I don’t know if it’s the natural consequence of decades of boys crying wolf, useless gesticulations increasing musicians’ tolerance, necessitating moonshine-level theatrics to get the slightest buzz on, but it remains incredibly hard for me to believe that professional musicians at the level of the RCO need—or want—such robust physical encouragement or direction. It seemed, at least in terms of the volume of the conductors motions, to have little to no meaningful effect on what was being played or how.

My vision being less focused than usual, I enjoyed watching the light hopping off the metallic frogs and polished bodies of violins. And because the music was taken and given so piecemeal, I found myself focusing on particular players. As if it were a series of individual recitals, rather than an orchestral performance. I enjoyed, in particular, Mirelys Morgan Verdecia, first violin, Santa Vizine, first solo viola—one of the most musically charming parts of VN is the space it gives to viola, and Tatjana Vassiljeva-Monnier, first solo cello.

I have never heard Mahler’s first started at such a breakneck tempo. I’d venture to say that it might even qualify as a poor or incorrect interpretation. The work is supposed to open in a way that feels perhaps painfully slow to an adult. God takes God’s sweet time in creation. The Eternal, even if acting instantaneously, is unrushed in a world beyond human inhales and exhales, sunrises and sunsets. For me, it’s one of the more beautiful parts of the repertoire because it asks us—perhaps forces us, a little bit—to contemplate the ways in which the biblical Divine is like the human child. “Five minutes” is easily wasted throughout the course of a day, loose change that falls into the cracks between couch cushions, not missed save for the moments when we are asked to scrape it all together and consider the total sum. To the young, the ones who have not yet been curated into schedules and taught to rush between one non-event and the next, “five minutes” is a veritable fortune, is time enough to create and destroy multiple worlds, to become absorbed—utterly lost, utterly found—in the wiles and whimsy of this one.

I’d prefer that we don’t prematurely truncate childhood, particularly not its warm wonder.

In what felt to be an odd contrast, Transfigured Night was, for much of the performance, too slow. I’ve heard versions that were probably similar in length, but the question is about whether or not all of the texture from the page is coming through, unfolding in that time, or if the curls have been ironed out.

As one of Schoenberg’s final works of romanticism, it’s understandable to hear a sort of operatic quality to the voices of the strings. When they represent human voices, are they speaking quickly, with nervous hearts, or are they struggling to get the words out? When they are ambient voices, of moonlight and forest shadows, are they catching the light breezes of the evening, the subtleties of walking through the woods, or have they flattened the scenery into something cartoonish?

VN is one of the most stereotypically, perhaps absurdly, “moviesque” works of romanticism. In most renditions, you can hear the hairstyle of the woman protagonist. You can watch the drama unfold in black and white, the film jumping on and off the reel. It’s actually quite easy to turn it into kitschy melodrama, and quite difficult to elevate it into something that works in the language of genuine human emotion, that is part of the same conversation as the Sotah Ritual and the Virgin Birth. Even its own music history, beginning as a piece for a string sextet—three doubled voices—inflated into an orchestral work, is reflective of its role in that conversation that starts between a man, a woman, and God, but suddenly becomes a matter of public, or even universal, existential importance.

I don’t feel that the orchestra succeeded in this piece. Much of it is likely a matter of opinion, and most of it was about tempi and dynamics. But much of music is. Additionally, portions towards the end of Transfigured Night can turn into a bit of a clusterfuck4, which one could interpret as either deliberately chaotic or simply an overwhelming number of layers—I think both options meaningfully reflect the emotional experience being suggested. There’s a fine line between complexity and chaos, which comes down to a likely fragile sense of control. And it didn’t feel, in this performance, that there was commitment to one or the other. I’d imagine that the Dutch would favor steering away from chaos, but that fine line will descend whether you want it to or not if order is not held perfectly. They are by and large a very neat band, so for them to sound so far off the same page from one another during these passages was unpleasantly jarring.

Within the Mahler, I found myself needing to force active listening for the most part. There were almost no moments that felt spellbinding. If one was to be found, it would be in the voice of an exceedingly perfect cuckoo. I caught myself wondering, were a real cuckoo to be released in Carnegie Hall, where he might station himself—he might not articulate his song so beautifully as a competent classical musician, and he might shriek something terrible beneath the strangely lowered, ivory sky. But other than that moment—which I would have been happy to bathe in for days—the interpretation was not terribly profound.

While I won’t say this was the worst part, I will say that it personally doesn’t work for me whatsoever for an ensemble to smooth out the folks segments of the symphony to the extent that people not knowing any better might mistake it for civilized Christian music.5 Maybe I was feeling a little sensitive, given how soon after the anti-Jewish riots in Amsterdam this concert took place, and the strong association of those passages with the klezmer6 tradition. But I think that in reality, I’m sensitive to such a gross misunderstanding of Mahler and the complex relationship he had with the contexts he grew up in. Composers are at their leisure to mock, but it’s more common for their work to be the result of love. Mahler’s quoting of the local “unrefined” musicians, whether sporting klezmer or gentile folk tunes, was done so lovingly.7 If you can’t also find love for that tradition—in all its jagged glory—I’d hazard that you might do better to elect a different symphony to perform.

If this program did nothing else for me, it at least convinced me to finally give in and purchase a ticket to The Hester.

Another note on cultural simpatico: those who know me and tend to think that I find the Finns flawless, might register this as an overcorrection for the a-Finn-ity I’m schlepping about. No. There are Finnish conductors whose work I am excited about, whose strong suits I acknowledge and admire, who I am downright befuddled by, who aren’t my hay, and who I am sure evidence some sort of breech in the time-space continuum. If ever I am more minutely critical of Klaus Mäkelä, it is due to the fact that he is the maestro-in-waiting for one of the ensembles I hold a subscription with. I clearly don’t suffer for other options, and would not suffer even if I felt the need to avoid the sixty weeks over a five-season term that his baton is slated to be raised up above the heads of the Chicago band.

Having missed the train by all of two minutes—that’s how the cookie crumbles, is it not—I took some time to check in on friends in Amsterdam, having last touched base during the peak of the anti-Jewish riots. Most of my Dutch friends have at least cursory interest in classical music, so I mentioned that I’d just seen their hometown ensemble and asked if they had any thoughts on the future of the orchestra. Conversation quickly turned to government cuts, a plague on all our houses. Fine arts finance is markedly different in the United States than in much of Europe, but we’re all headed in the same dismal direction. If the terrifying and questionable enthusiasm folks have for Klaus Mäkelä helps keep more niche music programs afloat, then I won’t be the one to scuttle his ship. Especially not when Carnegie has three halls, Manhattan has several performance venues geared towards art music, and I have the ability to get in and out of town at my leisure.

Will travel for good music.

Even to Brooklyn.

Cast; Kate Johnson (as Shprintse and Rose), Jennifer Zetlan (as Tseytl and young Tseytl), Heather Johnson (as Khave and young Khave), Megan Moore (as Beylke and young Beylke), Indira Mahajan (as Golde), Gideon Dabi (as Tevye), Ryan Lustgarten (as Arontshik)

Orchestra+; Kelly Kuo (conductor), Shaleah Feinstein (Violin), Tia Allen (Viola), Mitchell Lyon (Cello 1), Yana Levin (Cello 2), Valeriya Sholokhova (Cello 3), Pawel Knapik (Bass), Pascal Archer (Clarinet 1), Nuno Antunes (Clarinet 2 and Bass Clarinet), Justine Hines (Percussion), Jason Wirth (Pianist and Coach), Lorin Sklamberg (Yiddish Coach)

Program:

An Opera Concert/Orchestral Workshop for the in-development production, TEVYE’S DAUGHTERS, by Alex Weiser (Composer) and Stephanie Fleischmann (Librettist), commissioned by the American Lyric Theater. (For more information on how this performance differs from other types of performances, please see the show notes from last month’s InsightALT.)

Position: Front righthand seat; the basement of the DiMenna Center is small, so even the seats in the rear provide good sight and sound lines.

Purpose/Intent/Questions: Having had such a great time at the previous month’s InsightALT workshop, it was the only natural ending to a day spent in the City with my mother.

How’d it go?

To start with, I have to say that I was bringing a lot of biases into the opera concert for Tevye’s Daughters. And, frankly, a lot of future audiences likely will do the same. While I’m not a Yiddishist—I hire Yiddishists—I am familiar enough with the ecosystem of Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman that I don’t treat the 1971 film production of Fiddler on the Roof as comprehensive gospel, even if I admit that my internal image of Tevye may never be de-Topolized. This is to say: the portion of the plot that this opera borrows from the story of “Shprintse,” which might come across as dramatic and maybe beyond the bounds of artistic license to those who only know Tevye and his beautiful daughters from Fiddler, didn’t irk me. That doesn’t mean that I thought all of the liberties taken were in line with Aleichem’s universe—this is a modernized engagement with the work, after all—nor that this work will necessarily make Yiddishists, religious or secular, feel that the story of the family has been meaningfully continued. This work is walking, perhaps quite precariously, uphill in its choices, great and small.

My mother, who only knows Topol’s Tevye, accompanied me for the performance. Her remarks were positive, though she limited them almost exclusively to compliments on the singers—which I will echo and amplify below. Part of my feelings about the work might also stem from my mother’s presence, coupled with the sense that last month’s workshop presented a work far more complete and artistically compelling. This was the end of a long day in the City together, including a trip to one of the best museums1 on offer, the spectacle of Luna Luna, and an absolutely tremendous dinner2. Perhaps the show would have shone more brightly were it the only star in the sky. But who is promising that future audiences will arrived fully starved of art, of story, of things worth loving? Not I.

A quick, no-spoilers overview of the plot: picking up with the famous family from Fiddler, we meet up with the aged, surviving sisters for an 80th birthday party in the Catskills. Their young granddaughter has failed to show up to the festivities, only arriving later, full of shame and embarrassment over a major life decision she has made, worried sick that telling the truth might cause exile from the family—or worse! The opera alternates between the Catskills setting and the horrific tale of Shprintse, back in the alterheim. An effort is made to draw comparison between Rose, the young college-aged woman struggling with an aspect of her love life, and Shprintse, whose own trouble in love is ultimately why she is not present with the celebrating sisters. Rose’s internal work is done in tandem with the revelations about the missing sister.

We’ll start with the good and great parts: I absolutely think that people should try to do this. It’s “brave” art, in the sense that taking something so beloved—and so narrowly ingrained in such a large subset of the population—as the Fiddler universe and seeking to expand upon it is artistically dangerous territory. The source material is so sacred to some people, that it’s impossible for a contemporary artist to do right by it. But Yiddish literature, like the rest of Jewish life, is a conversation between generations. To not engage with it, to not find a way for it to continue into modernity, is a cultural failure. We must find ways to keep our languages, our stories, our flawed heroes, our struggles, our victories, alongside us as we move through time—as we live. Even if I did not find this work entirely “successful,” it is much more meaningful to witness the attempt than to see another regurgitated “safe” production. As an aspiring librettist whose source material is even more centrally sacred to a larger portion of Jews as is Yiddish literature, I feel that this is a shared pursuit. Fleischmann and Weiser are my colleagues at least twofold. We are engaged in the same work, and I will endeavor to learn from their challenges, but I will also do my best to be present for every crumb of success they muster up.

The greatest of kudos go to the effort, to the willingness to rise up and attempt the impossible. Of the central stories of our people, there is of course the struggle of Jacob3 with the mysterious entity that bestows upon him both a permanent limp and a new name. The entity says, in blessing Jacob with the name Israel, that the origin of the name is that Jacob has fought with the Divine and with man and has prevailed—but we know from the past few lines that neither party “prevailed” over the other. The fight was a draw. But winning—for a Jew, for a human—is to refuse to give up, to stay engaged in our struggles. That’s what it means to prevail.

(Pontification over… back to the show!)

The next greatest praise goes to Lorin Sklamberg, the Yiddish Coach, who succeeded in rendering a group of contemporary opera singers into shtetl-dwelling, feh-slinging, evil-eye-averse Jews from times long past. In particular, Indira Mahajan was the most compelling—and most intriguing—Golde who I have heard across many productions.

Gideon Dabi, our Tevye, seemed cognizant of the massive footprints created not just by Topol, but by generations of men seeking to tread his same path and reinforce his version of the character. A strong, beautiful voice, Dabi seems to know all of who Tevye has been, and made him his own without straying far from the path of tradition.

Ryan Lustgarten—wow. Wow. The whole story of Arontshik and Shprintse is easily thought of as more melodramatic than can be countenanced by reality—far less the realities of a rural, Jewish Europe many yesteryears ago. But if a man started singing to me the way that Lustgarten sings his part as Arontshik… I don’t need to apologize to my mother because she was likewise impressed with him.

This production featured a lot of visuals that were not present for the workshop, and I do have a bias against operas that necessitate “seeing” something with our physical eyes rather than understanding it with the eyes of the heart. The music and libretto did not feel confident in and of themselves, but I also am not certain that full staging would have convinced me otherwise. While the libretto had moments of great beauty, it also seemed a bit too deep into its own navel.

Some people won’t like the “woke” (i.e. realistic) angle that the later portion of the story takes.4 My only issue with it is that it was drawn out to an extent that seemed a bit ham-fisted. I can’t imagine an adult who enjoys opera—or even one who is merely opera-curious and able to follow painfully mundane conversations in English—not “getting” the alluded-to matter long before it is spelled out on stage. Dramatic irony is great in a comedy, when we’re invited to laugh at these dumb characters who can’t see the obvious. In a drama? It’s paternalistic. I don’t think this show is meant for very young children, but the puzzle has one and a half pieces, at most.

The music set me ill at ease, and not in a constructive way. In prose, we routinely harp on the maxim, “Show, don’t tell!” Opera is not quite the same creature. Weiser’s work, for whatever reason, seemed unwilling to make a contribution in its own voice, constantly relying on auditory “pointing,” letting the audience know “something dramatic is about to happen over there, on stage, with the singers or the set,” rather than participating individually, telling us very little and instead insisting that it would be shown elsewhere. This is an area where, again, I feel that my expectations might have been warped by the previous month’s workshop, by Barnes’ absolutely unhinged level of skill and talent when it comes to making instruments speak, joke, and cry as unnamed characters alongside the singers. Weiser clearly knows how to write music, but the music for this show came across as quite flat, not providing sufficient counter to elevate tension in the libretto, not creating images where the variously stipulated bodies of water and forests and Shabbat tables were lacking.

My impulse, and my hope, is that this piece is simply a longer way’s off from debut than the previous month’s work. As opening night approaches, I think that some of the kinks will be worked out to create something that only offends half of the cult of Topol’s Tevye.

Ensemble: New York Philharmonic
Conductor: Susanna Mälkki
Soloist: Leila Josefowicz. (violin)

Program:

Luca Francesconi - Duende: The Dark Notes (New York Premiere)
* * * intermission * * *
Strauss - Metamorphosen
Ravel - La Valse

Position: Way up in the rafters (stage left), in one of those weird forward-facing single seats.

Purpose/Intent/Questions: My main draw to the program was wanting to see Mälkki conduct. Simple!

How’d it go?

On the tail of a New Music program, this concert seems to prove all the unsavory points I raised. Admittedly, I missed entry for the first part of the program—they’re pretty tight in David Geffen Hall. I was there before the concertmaster called for tuning, and I absolutely could’ve made it to my seat! But part of me didn’t want to. I’d heard a recording of “Duende” beforehand, as seemed to have been the case for a number of folks cozily camped out at the bar, waiting for intermission to come. I didn’t consciously decide to show up late, but I did stack up a bunch of errands right beforehand… like finally getting my ear piercing redone1 a decade after it closed up, and dropping in on a friend on the Lower East Side.

Francesconi’s idea of duende is not my idea of duende. And I do have a fairly significant idea of duende.2 Lorca asserted, among other things, that duende cannot be summoned. After a substantial amount of time in different religious, spiritual, and creative communities, I think that it can be summoned. But it doesn’t always come when called. It’s probably not Josefowicz’s playing that’s at fault. Watching her on the Hauser Digital Wall, she seemed to be at least as competent of a player as most who stroll through Lincoln Center. It’s the spell.

The cante was not jondo, to put it lightly.

When those of us dwelling in the lobby were permitted to ascend to our seats for the Strauss and Ravel that titled the evening, I was quite struck by Mälkki’s conducting. Less for any particular aspect of interpretation and more for the almost unbelievable control she has over each of her hands. A lot of people underestimate the difficulty of training your hands to function independently. Many folks who take the podium do so with the awful habit of muddy double-fisted conducting, using both hands to gesture towards the same thing, whatever that thing might be. If there’s one clear factor common to the majority of Finnish conductors, they at least take it as a minimum that you have to keep your tempi hand clean, if not sacred.

But Mälkki is on another level, almost mechanical, a self-adjusting human metronome. In the 3D chart that exists in my brain (and only there… for now) where I plot out conductors on various axes, she is holding the far corner of precision, accuracy (this is different from precision—one can be very precise about her mistakes, but Mälkki clearly knows the score and how it billows over the orchestra in time), and consistency. That hand just does not stop. As an audience member, it might start to feel a bit annoying. But even the best musician can appreciate it, like a clock and compass on constant display. And her left hand was free to move around for entries and exits, for emotion and dynamic emphasis.

Both pieces were beautifully played. Flawless, but not groundbreaking. It left me curious to see Mälkki conduct something larger, more complex, unwieldy by nature.

Ensemble: American Composers Orchestra
Conductor: Mei-Ann Chen

Program:

New York Premiere of Michael Abels’ “Borders,” with Mak Grgić as soloist (Guitar)

World Premiere of Paul Novak’s “forest migrations”

World Premiere of Kebra-Seyoun Charles’ Bass Concerto, “Nightlife,” featuring the composer as soloist (Bass)

* * * intermission * * *

New York Premiere of Victoria Polevá’s “The Bell,” with Inbal Segev as soloist (Cello)

Curtis Stewart’s “Embrace,” the composer as soloist (Violin)

Position: Front row, far right (Zankel Hall)

Purpose/Intent/Questions: I’m always curious about new music, even knowing that I don’t always adore it. Already having a new opera on the schedule for this stay in the City, this seemed like a thematically appropriate addition to the week’s adventures.

How’d it go?

What is it about human psychology that makes so many of us love a “mystery bag?” Yes, of course there’s the prospect of finding something uniquely valuable, but even beyond that, quite a few of us like this sort of… controlled surprise. If you give me meaningful bounds for a set of possibilities, say, “gluten-free cupcakes,” the majority of the time I’ll be more excited by an unknown flavor than by the opportunity to choose for myself. What could it be? Chocolate? Sharp cheese and quince? Virgin mojito? Vanilla? Corn? The thrill of not knowing, perhaps coupled with the avoidance of unnecessary decision fatigue, is a delight to consider. Even the folly of an under-spiced snickerdoodle with too-sweet buttercream gets a boost to its joy factor when it’s a matter of chance, rather than the consequence of my silly non-chocolate choice.

New Music is not gluten-free cupcakes. In the classical world, contemporary composition has a reputation that leaves many happy to wait for others to sample start-up symphonies or up-and-coming chamber pieces, letting the poison pill of bad music cripple the over-eager rather than the patient, sensible patrons who hold off until a piece has lasted a few concerts, beyond its debut season, before purchasing a ticket to hear it performed.

Sometimes I identify with those folks. As much as I wish to be supportive of those who are trying to join the conversation, we’re often force-fed subpar commissions, sandwiched between the ancient, inviolate pieces of repertoire. Sometimes I hear a recording of a premiere, only to wish that I hadn’t. Because its name is new, I forget it quickly, I don’t know to avoid it when programs are published. It feels like if we aren’t wary, we will be made to endure a music that we certainly didn’t commission, that we didn’t ask for.

But that’s all the more reason that nights like this with the American Composers Orchestra are important. I’d never heard any of it before. It was all new to me, some of it new to everyone. I could go into it with the same attitude as sitting down for a set course menu at a restaurant I’ve never tried, featuring some alien cuisine. Even if I despised all of it, it was still part of the fun of trying something new.

Plus, if one of my favorite cellists is slated as a soloist, it can’t be a fully intolerable evening.

Can it…?

Let’s take it course by course, piece by piece.

Abels’ Borders:
If you’ve never heard of Michael Abels, that doesn’t mean you haven’t heard his music. He’s responsible for the scores of many films, including of major note, Jordan Peele’s horror-psychological-thriller-social-commentary-beyond-genre trifecta: Get Out, Us, and Nope. And I think this is where his skill truly lies, at present.
There were about five minutes of “Borders” that were gripping, dazzling, viscerally real to me. And then it went on for another twelve minutes, seemingly having lost the plot line.
Some of this was probably different for other audience members based on such small factors as our ages—when the first movement created a picture, in Abels’ own words, of “the guitar [as] a protagonist that is repeatedly confined by sonic bars or walls created by the orchestra,” causing the soloist’s voice to “struggle to find its spirit and expression between these sonic bars,” it’s understandable that the image that came to me—strongly, beautifully, resolutely—was that of the Teeter-Totter art project along the US-Mexican border.
In writing music for film, Abels is clearly practiced and gifted in the art of using sound to anchor an impression, whether visual or emotional. But with “Borders,” I wasn’t hearing what he was trying to show us with the second movement. My references for the Bosnian War are fragmented, given that I was a small child who could understand something about the refugees who made it into my mother’s classroom—less so what they left behind, even less so what their kin were living with in Denmark. Even looking at pictures of the “Sahara” refugee camp that was the basis for the museum exhibit that inspired this symphonic work, I can’t erase the clear image of the hot pink seesaws bobbing between the giant metal bars separating us from our southern neighbors.
This isn’t a failure of art.
If anything, if the first movement is so universal that I can feel sure it’s about a border conflict that is here and now, rather than far away and in my early childhood, that’s a different sort of success. Frankly, I’d love to hear the first movement performed again. If that comes at the cost of also hearing the second movement, which feels perhaps intentionally disorienting, meaning to depict “a child running, sometimes joyfully, but also sometimes in fear,” I might endure. I might get better at listening to the second part of it.
But I feel that the story was told poetically and poignantly within the first few minutes. Yet, with guitar not being a standard member of most orchestras, it seems unlikely that a soloist would be hired for anything less than the whole—it seems silly that structural demands would potentially have an impact on doing art “the right way” or “the best way,” but who hasn’t been required to produce more words than it took to effectively say what needed to be said in a term paper? Même combat.

Novak’s forest migrations:
I want to be friends with this dude. Like, legit, let’s grab a cuppa and chat at Grounds of Being or something. Where do these people come from? How do we get more of them?
This work is perhaps the most decidedly academic piece of art music I have ever heard. I enjoyed it, but I don’t want to hear it again as part of regular symphony programming.1 I would, however, love a recording of it. I would definitely assign a recording of it to students in environmental humanities classes. I could imagine that Dr. Mayes might ask those of us in the Nahara Kollel to give it a dedicated, thoughtful, focused listen between sessions about forest communities or models of resilience in the face of environmental catastrophe.
With a straight face and all seriousness—I do think we need more academic music. People need to hear science, among other things. And there’s room to evaluate perceived accuracy, to propose alternative ways of hearing the same process, to argue at length about whether the trees can actually say it better, themselves.
Absurdly ambitious, the ten-minute piece takes up the phenomenon that gives it its name: forest migration, when a forest “moves” its boundaries over time2 to areas that best support the growth of its community, elder trees being left to live out the last years of old edges while young upstarts gain strength in a part of the environment, a part of the world, that is more hospitable, undergrowth flocking to the Joshua trees as the original leaders of the community surrender their bodies to the soil. As if that weren’t enough, Novak attempts to include the alternative “migration” of forests into memory as they are destroyed by the direct activities and downstream effects of mankind’s ways of being. And yet a third migration enters into the conversation, paying homage to the way that trees are “migrated” into afterlives as orchestral instruments, sighing out the Loraxian thoughts of one Chicago composer.
And you know, I think he did a damn good job of it. The timescale of a forest, or even a single tree, can’t fit into a symphony3. But Novak created this fantastic, eerie sense of the slow creaking and creeping of a forest’s movements. If you’ve listened to the weird recordings of all the sounds plants make when we’re not listening, the tiny ticks and pops that drive house cats crazy, you’ll likely recognize that in Novak’s work. It felt, at times, like the violins and cellos were vocalizing remembrances, folktales, a cultural history of their own. Because he layered the physical story of forest migration with emotional and symbolic stories, it’s dense—like a lot of academic writing, or luscious creative writing. It requires slower listening, highlighting, replays of moments and sections and wholes. In ten minutes, you can get a step of the forest, but you’ll miss out on the beetles and mushrooms and trees. From this first experience with his work, it seems to me that what a Loren Eiseley essay is in the world of essays, a Paul Novak composition is in music.
Were this the only worthwhile piece, it would have been more than enough for me.

Charles’ Nightlife:
First, the obvious complaint: it feels sinful to call Kebra-Seyoun Charles just “Charles” for the sake of consistency between composers when that gorgeous Ethiopian name is right there, shining gloriously.4 Mea culpa.
I’ll start with the conclusion: “Nightlife” is the piece I would most like to hear performed again. Preferably by an ensemble that is willing to be playful and really be lit up by Charles’ work and vision, which in my estimation requires a lot more intimacy or personal musical confession than most professional symphony musicians are used to performing with—often it’s seemingly accepted that if you’re not a featured soloist, you can play without revealing a personality, or without revealing your own. Charles’ work calls for individuals to exist within the collective, for the organic to emerge from within a rehearsed environment. That’s not comfortable for a lot of folks. But I’d love to see and hear the results with a group who have all surrendered into themselves.
While this work is certainly not academic, it is robustly educated, smart, and cheeky. While Novak created something not far from a symphonic science fair presentation, Charles rightly gave the knowledge in “Nightlife” the go ahead to bump and grind things out. Clever, fun, both danceable and savory, plucking sounds from off the streets of New York City and emulating all the vibrancy of a nightclub, this piece is dense the way that Manhattan is dense, rather than the way that a term paper is. There’s a lot going on—most of it is recognizable—and you might not have time to respond to everything that happens, as it happens. Such is the reality of a night out on the town. I felt like I was witnessing the resident weird of the neighborhood, I felt like I was at a party, I felt like I was doing shots with a stranger at the bar, I felt like I was having a good time. I was having a good time.
And I had a good time despite—or because of—the complexity of Charles’ musical idiom. I had a good time because instruments were behaving in ways I don’t always expect them to. I had a good time because the bassists—all of them—were having an abnormally good time. I had a good time because there were lots of tapping feet. I had a good time because I’m getting used to dancing in the seats at Zankel.
I had a good time because it was good music. It was good music not just because it sounded good, not just because it balanced the familiar and the novel, not just because it expanded—gracefully and successfully—the range of what I thought a symphonic composition might comment on. It was all of that and more.

Polevá’s The Bell:
I wish I had more to say about this piece. Inbal Segev’s playing was beautiful, as it always seems to be, but I think what lacked for me was a real sense of movement between each movement. It’s difficult to comment on a war that’s still ongoing, and naturally my experience of it all is quite different and obviously more distant—practically and emotionally—than the composer’s. It felt like a few minutes that had been stretched out to over twenty—and that might very well be true to the realities of war. I’d be curious to see and hear what Polevá might compose about the same matter when Ukraine is again safe and at peace.

Stewart’s Embrace:
This didn’t do it for me. And that’s fine. I’m not opposed to electronic or hybrid music, or work that includes visuals, but stylistically this composition wasn’t something I would want to experience again, nor did I particularly enjoy it nor get other personal value from it the first time. It’s a piece that is clearly part of the musician’s process of grieving his mother’s death, and I can value it for however it’s helping him.

Was this a good way to spend the evening? Absolutely. There were some metaphorical cupcakes that I wouldn’t want another bite of, but there were others that I might just put in a catering order for—for a class, or for a party. I’m glad that I tried them all, and I’m glad that Carnegie and other performance venues give space for events where we can “sample” New Music.

Cast; Chabrelle Williams (as Claudette Colvin), Jacqueline Echols McCarley (as Rosa Parks, Ms. Nesbitt, and the Prosecution Attorney), Jazmine Olwalia (as Jo Ann Robinson, and Fred Gray), Cierra Byrd (as Jeanetta Reese, Classmate 1, Policeman, and Judge), Adrienne Danrich (as Susie “Mamma Sue” McDonald), Maya Davis (as Aurelia Browder), Melissa Joseph (as Mary Louise Smith, and Classmate 2)

Orchestra; Kelly Kuo (conductor), Qianwen Shen (Violin 1), Julia Choi (Violin 2), Nicolas Mirabile (Viola), Mitchell Lyon (Cello 1), Georgia Bourderionnet (Cello 2), Pawel Knapik (Bass), Meghan Bennett (Flute), Yasmina Spiegelberg (Clarinet), Patricia Wang (Bassoon), Matt Ward (Percussion), Justine Hines (Percussion), Jason Wirth (Pianist and Coach)

Program:

An Opera Concert/Orchestral Workshop for the in-development production, SHE WHO DARED, by Jasmine Arielle Barnes (Composer) and Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton (Librettist), commissioned by the American Lyric Theater.

Position: Orchestra side, front; the basement of the DiMenna Center is small, so even the seats in the rear provide good sight and sound lines.

Purpose/Intent/Questions: Like more folks than one might imagine, I love opera, and I am rarely satisfied with opera. InsightALT engages the community in witnessing and contributing feedback to operas currently being developed by up-and-coming composer-librettist teams. Because I was going to be in the City, it was an obvious choice for me to come and see if this story–about the women of the Montgomery bus boycott movement–might come to life in a way that many of the “tried and tested” operas refuse to on contemporary stages.

How’d it go?

Wow.

It’s already clear that I’m not going to shut up about this one for a while–possibly not ever. Remember the names Mouton and Barnes. Remember their names. I’ll remind you if you ever happen to forget; they’ve earned an instant evangelist for their work.

First, I should mention what exactly an “opera workshop” is and how it differs from a fully staged production, as one would get with a ticket to a show at the Met.

Because a full production of an opera is astronomically expensive, it isn’t uncommon to hear “opera concerts,” or excerpts from operas, performed by symphonies with hired soloists. As with these more familiar opera concerts, singers for a workshop dress nicely, though not necessarily as their characters–certainly not in the case where one singer is voicing multiple roles–and they perform in a fixed position without “acting” or otherwise moving about a set that simply isn’t present. It’s just the musicians, the lyrics, and the instrumentation, the meat and potatoes, or the integral core of what an opera needs in order to establish itself as an entity within the genre. It’s my assumption that when this opera debuts in Chicago in June, costuming and set will be realistic and period appropriate. At some point in the future, someone might create radically different staging that takes the story of SHE WHO DARED, set in Alabama during the Civil Rights Movement, and sticks it up in space, making it about an interplanetary bus boycott and dressing everyone up in silver lamé–stranger things have happened in opera. I feel in my gut of guts that She Who Dared will survive long enough to see the good, the bad, and the ugly of full operatic collaboration.

In a professional opera concert at a symphony, singers will typically have their pieces memorized, but it’s not unheard of to see printed lyrics–they often come in the program book so the audience can follow along. In the workshop, it’s understood that the work isn’t even finalized in the minds of the creators, so printed materials for the performers are a given. These are all professionally, classically trained singers–no randoms pulled off the street with the hope that they might be able to carry a tune. While the orchestra is small, they are also professionals.

After the performance, which includes a screen for supertitles (captions and translations as pertinent, including staging notes and similar that would be found in the libretto or score), InsightALT engages the audience in a guided feedback session so that the librettist and composer can have their questions about their own work answered, giving them the opportunity to consider and reconsider aspects of the opera before it is born, delivered in its fully staged debut, with members of the press ready to review.

When something is as gripping, as beautifully done, as perfect as this when it’s still in the “drafts” folder, it’s almost impossible to consider that it won’t utterly rock the opera world.

I laughed. I cried. I prattled on to my mother–the person who gave me my real civil rights education, despite it being part of the curriculum at the “good” public schools I attended.

While it isn’t expected that the singers “act” at this point–they are, again, limited to a fixed position on the stage, standing to sing and sitting back down when it’s their turn to listen… some folks can’t help but bring excellence into everything they do. Aside from deliriously wonderful voices, each singer present embodied the character or characters she was assigned with so much conviction that it was not only easy to keep track of who everyone was, even when shifting between multiple roles assigned to a single singer, but it was difficult to separate the voices of the historic characters from their respective performers. Intellectually, I know that Rosa Parks probably didn't have that precise gorgeous silky long-line top that Jacqueline Echols McCarley wore. I know that there weren’t any buses in the basement of the DiMenna Center. I knew that even though Chabrelle Williams is young, she’s not as young as Claudette Colvin was at the start of the story. But good art manifests a world within the world we exist in. Sometimes we forget that anything exists beyond the story.

That happened for me.

The work is concerned with opening up some of the asterisks scattered throughout the lackluster curriculum, not to deny Rosa Parks her significance, but to tell the whole story.

“She wasn’t even the first to do it. It was planned!” Why is it that whenever I hear that, it’s in a snide voice, rather than an enthusiastic one?

As if that made it less brave, less of a story worth telling, less consequential for Rosa, less terrifying. As if an organized movement of resistance to social injustice was in some way less meaningful, less deserving of attention, than one magical Black woman somehow ending segregation by refusing to stand up.1

But Mouton and Barnes don’t just take up the story of Colvin, the original Black woman–Black girl–who was arrested2 for her refusal to give up her seat on the bus, though her story is multitudinous enough to stand alone. Her voice could fly solo any day, her voice that crafted such powerful remarks as “History kept me stuck to my seat. I felt the hand of Harriet Tubman pushing down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth pushing down on the other.” Instead, they start with Colvin’s spark and cover the slow beginnings and eventual raging wildfire of the bus boycotts, looking into the lives of the women involved, the difficult decisions they had to make individually and collectively, and the interplay between the deeply personal and the unavoidably political.

They didn’t pull punches, speaking to violence committed by the police against these women and girls, putting the whole of the disgusting legal drama on display, delving into the complicated emotions of a dark-skinned pregnant teenager being usurped by a more sympathetic victim, invoking the bombing of churches and King’s home. There was one rather young girl present with her mother in the audience, but I don’t think she came away traumatized. Because all of this material was handled with deep care and respect for the dignity of the greater human story.

In the brief break between the performance and the feedback session, my mind became fixated on scenes of buses. Not city buses, but yellow school buses. Not just in Alabama, but across the nation. It was all too easy to imagine them… busloads of high schoolers, pulling up to the opera house for what had surely become a rite of passage in their school, their district, their state, their country: the tenth-grade field trip to see She Who Dared. A first opera for many, if not most, they file in… joking, as folks always will, but quickly find themselves spellbound by a performance they can understand, both in terms of the language of the libretto, its articulation, the musical sense of the score, and a subject matter they have at least dabbled with before. When they exit, it seems quickly forgotten. But not by all of them. Bits of songs appear and reappear in classroom conversations. Students are caught humming in the hallways. It might not ever be “cool” to have an opera stuck to your ribs. But some kids will remember it, and think with it. This is one of those formative memories, something that changes something, something that starts something.

Various opera companies have programs to expose underserved youth, even elementary school students, to this odd artform of artforms. But there are dozens of reasons it doesn’t seem to have a lasting impact on individuals. Opera is demanding to experience, even when you’re in a cushy seat the entire time. I have seen many excited newcomers–relatively cultured, educated adults–slink away during intermission, frustrated by their inability to keep up with something that everyone else appeared to just “get” through weird opera osmosis that had passed over them.

“Accessible” is considered by many to be a diss when describing an opera. But all of the best operas are accessible, or at least they were born that way. Maybe you don’t know French, but Bizet certainly expected that his fellow countrymen, attending Carmen, most likely would.3 Beyond that, despite the totally “unrelatable” aspects4 of the story, it’s fundamentally about something even toddlers have lived experience with: wanting something, badly, and not getting it because we live in a world where other people also want things and we lack the decency of hermit crabs, especially when it comes to romantic love.5

If anything, on these grounds She Who Dared is slightly inaccessible in that it requires at least a base level of American history knowledge that I’d imagine is scarce beyond the United States, while sadly not even being unanimously present within the country. But I’d also imagine that someone visiting from Germany could read the libretto or a plot summary beforehand and then follow along far better than the average first-timer can handle Die Frau Ohne Schatten.

What I’m saying is, I feel like I have finally witnessed the murmurings–the spark–of a real culture of American Opera, all of the stories that started here and haven’t been told with all the glory, investment, detail, and demands that opera requires. I wouldn’t have expected this to be the piece, but in retrospect, I’m not surprised. Even though it is absurdly difficult for new operas to succeed and find champions beyond their debut, I am convinced.

But is it good art? Is it engaging for adults?

That one child in the audience was the only person present who couldn’t legally buy Barnes and Mouton a bottle to pop and toast to their coup, and yet I wasn’t the only person who laughed, who cried, who stayed for the feedback session with nothing more productive to contribute than boundless praise.6

In particular, I was struck by Barnes’ gift-cum-skill in articulating crisp emotion through the instrumentation. It’s rare that I witness musical comedy–even in pieces that I know are supposed to produce a chuckle at certain points, it’s not uncommon for professional ensembles to play past the joke. Similarly, Mouton has a tremendous sense of how to texture the story within the soundscape, alternating between levity and gravity as naturally as a buoy rides a wave. It’s heavy subject matter, and plenty would argue that she has every right to bludgeon the audience with it. But the reality is that people only survive things of this sort with the bit of breathing room provided by a joke or a song.

I can’t wait to see and hear the full production of She Who Dared–I’ve been doing all sorts of schedule-yoga to see if I might make it to Chicago early enough this summer to offer my witness–and I can’t wait to see and hear what Barnes and Mouton create next, once the wheels of this opera are set in motion, rolling onward towards a place in the new repertoire.

Ndlovu Youth Choir; Lwandile Shabalala, Nonhlanhla Somo, Tshegofatso Mtshali, Lethabo Mamphela, Lungelo Masango, Busisiwe Mathibela, Madoda Moshoane, Kgaugelo Tau, Thato Magamba, Eric Somagaca, Siyabonga Mahlangu, Thabang Sikoe

Accompaniment; Ralf Schmitt (conductor, piano), Ishmael Ndlovu (bass guitar), Peter Djamba (drums)

Program:

A mystery. Announced from the stage. A mixture of the choir’s previous and forthcoming pop covers, originals, and traditional music.

Position: Front row, far right (Zankel Hall)

Purpose/Intent/Questions: Having already committed to attending the Selaocoe performance the evening before, and being due in Brooklyn for a class at Raaka that same morning, it was an easy “add on” program. I wasn’t familiar with the choir beforehand, but I’m always eager to clap for young folks, and I love to “turn it and turn it,” exploring ostensibly related items (both of these performances being part of Carnegie’s South Africa spotlight/celebration).

How’d it go?

First, the obvious: I understand that not every choir is “classical,” and this one is not! But the experience of being in formal and informal choirs throughout my own youth is linked to my understanding of not just classical music, but of religion and spirituality. Even though much of Ndlovu’s repertoire is built off of popular or once-popular music, their genre in an American context certainly isn’t “pop.” These show notes are here because this show will inevitably become part of the conversation in ways that the set lists of Radio 104 Fests past certainly will not.

One thing I’m always curious about—those who make the questionable decision to attend artistic productions with me can attest to this, if nothing else—is how many kids are in any given audience. Because this wasn’t the main stage at Carnegie, it wasn’t a ridiculously expensive event to attend. But it was also a Sunday evening that might push past a responsible bedtime, or at least past a reasonable “stop time” for exciting activities so that the little folks could get settled down and sleep well before school in the morning. It’s also been a number of years since Ndlovu hit it big with their America’s Got Talent streak. Nonetheless, there were a handful of kids in attendance, including some still elementary-aged… including some down front and center! The bliss of a childhood lived close to art.

Even though the performers are young, the majority of the audience were definitely adults, unaccompanied by minors. Program organizers all too often claim that young acts are necessary to bring in a young audience—as if fantasy and emotional resonance weren’t the basis for at least as much artistic connection as shared lived experience. It was interesting to watch the kids react to different parts of the program than adults did. At turns touching, at others… mildly beguiling. Crafting multilayered “family entertainment” is no small task.1

That said, there was an odd feeling in the room. It wasn’t the fault of the choir: they are definitely skilled, vibrant singers, who double as near-acrobatic, terrifyingly athletic dancers, capable of moving across genres, emotions, and the stage with ease.

As with the Selaocoe show, a large portion of the audience were either South Africans visiting or living in New York City, or other members of the African diaspora interested in connecting with the people and art of the mother continent. And here they were met with the tension between that meaningful desire, realized in these talented, fearless, committed young people, and a caricature of African experience that falls below flat.

I loved the choir’s performance. And I’ve seldom been so pissed off about something so enjoyable.

Yes, they had a variety of costumes that borrowed from traditional dress. This isn’t a problem. FIT is running a show of African diaspora fashion, and even a quick perusal of what African and African-hyphen designers are developing to engage and comment on the past, present, and future produces enough diversity that accusations that the choir’s attire is only Africanish dissolve.

The one white guy on the stage happened to be both “in charge” and the person who did the most talking—too much talking. One of the great things about music is that it doesn’t need half the explanation it’s given. A generous read is that, yes, perhaps he is the most qualified guy for the job. But that doesn’t excuse the narrative about the choir that has been harped on since that first AGT appearance—I am cautious of any story about any African group or institution that remains static over more than a decade. Africa progresses quickly. The original members of the choir have aged out. There should be more to the story than what they started with, otherwise something isn’t adding up.

The group performed a variety of music, but they still lean on a heavy-handed cartoon (sometimes literally) version of Africana that is approved for American consumption. Of course they gave their rendition of Toto’s “Africa,” as well as “The Circle of Life.”

Those of you who know me might have heard the story about the first song I heard in Subsaharan Africa. Fortunate to get to study abroad when I was twenty, a few days in Ghana went every which way but according to plan and changed my heart in a profound way. Sitting in a Trotro—a local van with more passengers than legally allowed and a set route, but no set schedule—the driver turned on some music once we finally got on our way out of the port city and towards… well, the address I was seeking didn’t seem to exist, but I had a great time with dozens of folks all keen on helping me find that place of nonexistence. In any event. My travel companion for this adventure somehow looked even more conspicuously non-Ghanaian than myself, and all we could do was turn to each other and smile when the speaker let out, of all things, that perfectly recognizable bit of Zulu that Americans know anywhere: “Nansi Bhe! Inyama Bakithi Baba!”2

Was it for us? Was it actually enjoyed locally? Was it supposed to be a welcome? Was it a joke? Did we like the prospect of being the butt of such a joke? (We liked it just fine.)

But there is discomfort in the idea that Africa should “be” or “become” what non-Africans have decided it is or should be. Original work and traditional work deserve to be elevated above a “comfortable, palatable” McDonald’s Happy Meal toy version of Africana. It seemed—and it seemed that it didn’t just seem this way to me—that it was a bit insulting for the choir to be contained to this gimmicky approach, that perhaps their music director was not simply talking over them on stage, but in the grand scheme of things, as well. They made it this far, and it would be a shame if it’s the same folks who helped them forward who are also the ones holding them back.

In all of the gabbing, Schmitt did bring up an interesting bit of discussion about expanding their repertoire. He mentioned that they had at one time floated the idea of opera. There was quite a positive audible response from the audience on this, with the dominant sound being “proud auntie,” that harmonic expression of nachat that seems to transcend cultures, when we know that the kids are alright and reaching for the top shelf version of their lives.

Naturally, the idea of opera was a fugacious distraction, not to grace this stage. Instead, we were told to prepare for a notoriously difficult song from an African composer—oh God, please tell me he’s not talking about Bohemian Rhapsody—reimagined as if the composer had stayed in Africa, rather than moving to England—damn it, he’s talking about Freddie, they’re going to do Bohemian Rhapsody—a musician from Tanzania…

I think the hardest part of that for me was watching the woman seated to my left get her hopes up with each turn, wracking her brain, growing increasingly excited around the thought that she was going to learn about an African composer she’d never heard of before, rather than learning that Queen’s frontman was born in Zanzibar.

That’s the gimmick, though.

Let me be clear: I love “Bohemian Rhapsody” and have more than once been caught making a puppet show of it when I was supposed to be doing homework. And yet… the song’s reputation for difficulty is tied to the condition of having one person sing all of Freddie’s part. It is also challenging for three drunk college girls who are a few vodka crans past any awareness of what their respective vocal ranges are and can’t quite figure out how to share the microphone at karaoke. The thought that it would be an issue for a professional choir who have arrived at a reasonable arrangement is frankly pretty silly. It felt, to me, like a slap in the face of these remarkable young peoples’ demonstrated talent.

And “Africanizing” the song of a man who was from an English-speaking Parsi family, whose father worked for the British Colonial government, who attended a British-style boarding school in Bombay, whose family fled to England due to a revolution which saw native Black Africans attacking Arabs and Indians associated with said government…

That’s the gimmick.

I get it. I think the kids deserve better. I know they can do better. Judging by their facial expressions during some of Schmitt’s pontification, I’d imagine that at least a few of them want something better than translating parts of a—stunning as it is—mock opera into Zulu.

The previous night’s performance had me excited to see Abel Selaocoe conduct a large professional ensemble one day, but I think I might have been hoping too small with a symphony. Here’s a brilliant choir, and they’re horrifically talented dancers, serious about their work even in their youth, entertaining multiple costume changes throughout the course of a physically demanding show.

Why not opera?

America’s Got Talent might have seemed too high a bar for some, but maybe it’s simply the wrong one to jump. Selaocoe has managed to set and reset his own bar—I’d imagine that would be possible for at least some of these young singers, as well. While the choir as it stands may indeed have a meaningful “rags to riches” function, however unfortunate the racial optics, that doesn’t mean that the musicians in the choir can’t “graduate” into international arts careers that perhaps have a more authentic relationship to their own souls than a repertoire of Africanized American rock hits from the 80’s.

I wish the young folks in Limpopo the privilege I had in school at their age: two choirs, one that you sing in, and one that you never set foot in. Given how many of us opted for Mrs. Friedman’s traditional “art music” choir over the other teacher’s pops chorus, it isn’t difficult for me to imagine that there are also children in South Africa who want to sing other worlds into being—if not through an Italian aria, then maybe in that one part-Swahili, part-English banger3 that seemingly every 90’s choir kid has lovingly stitched into her internal songbook. Pazeni sauti ili nasi mwimbe!

And I wish for each of these kids what Abel Selaocoe has: the opportunity to develop and display his full musical self, unfiltered, untranslated, undiminished, unabashedly African in ways that were not granted prior approval by arbiters of Anglo-Western media.

Abel Selaocoe; cello, vocals, wisdom, dance
The Bantu Ensemble; Fred Thomas (piano, vocals, percussion); Alan Keary (bass, vocals); Dudù Kouaté (percussion, other things that might defy musical classification and are as such referred to as percussion)

Program:

A mystery. Announced from the stage. A mixture of Selaocoe’s available music, yet-released music, and improvisation.

Position: Front row, far right (Zankel Hall)

Purpose/Intent/Questions: I’ve adored Abel Selaocoe from the first listen, so his performance is really what earned Carnegie my subscription this year. I wasn’t aware of whether or how accompaniment from his Bantu Ensemble would impact my impression of his work, but he’s one of the few musicians I trust enough, musically, that I’d buy a ticket to any show with his name on it. Even if he were playing the spoons.

How’d it go?

I’m not sure if I’d like to call Abel Selaocoe a “once in a generation” artist. At this point, it feels most prudent to think of him as a “once.” Folks make a big deal in the classical music space–as in many spaces these days–about the question of “diversity” and whether or not there’s value or meaning in appealing to a broader audience, innovating within and at the edges of the genre, forcing or allowing classical music to evolve into something beyond an ossified caricature of itself. For people who want to uphold a needlessly narrow and conservative view of classical music, Selaocoe is an absolute nightmare. For the rest of us, he’s a gift, a gem, and a joy.

The horror and delight of the man is that he is a decidedly qualified, thoroughly skilled, and classically trained cellist. He can Bach with the best of ‘em. But he also brings African cultures into his music, through Xhosa-style throat singing, his language, his content, and more broadly into his performance through his dress, his dance, his ensemble, and his overall person. In my audio library, his work is classified as “Classical Crossover.” I’d typically feel leery about something like this, as if the “Crossover” designation merely exists to put an asterisk on things that keeps the decidedly Black elements of his work from “tainting” the “pure” genre1 of Classical-with-no-Qualifiers. In his case, as with the handful of other truly talented professional musicians who have mastered their individual idiom, I feel OK with a cross-genre or “genre expansive” classification. Is his music classical? “Yes, and!” He is bringing something new to the table, not a “lesser” form of classical, not something that has been “dumbed down” to attract people to the concert hall who “can’t understand” the warhorses of the repertoire, but a classical that is alive and moving, dancing around with itself, rethinking its sounds, not forgetting its lineage, but espousing and reveling in the joy of a family being enlarged through marriage, new customs being created from the merging of traditions, new voices being brought into the world to giggle and sing and cry along with many ancestors.

It is rare to witness a musician so unafraid to fully inhabit multiple traditions without reducing them to gimmick–which is what “purists” hope for and rely on. Selaocoe’s classical phrasing is not in conflict with his improvisation. It is all one language to him, and he speaks it fluently. His surety is contagious enough not merely to support his work with his cello and his voice, but to create substantial enough buy-in for others to grant him temporary use of their instruments and voices in pursuit of the greater musical project.

It doesn’t typically seem to be in good taste to lead off notes on a show with a brief love letter about the artist of interest, but Mr. Selaocoe has earned a lot of exceptions.

Not only did I enjoy the show, but–here comes the controversial part–I had fun. How uncouth.

While the man has been gathering his flowers since coming to the UK on an “exceptional talent”2 visa, performing with bands of renown, including the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, painting the gilded walls of the Wiener Konzerthaus with his impressive, expressive, unique colors, and having Yo-Yo Ma sit to record a song on his debut album, there will still be resistance to his work. Having the audience dancing in our seats? In our nice little velvet prisons designed for uncomfortable, focused stillness? What a profound abandonment of decorum! Oh, how the mighty have fallen! That our symphony halls should be filled with music suitable for dance other than ballet3, that patrons might cheer or respond to music with something other than dainty claps and raspy coughs… if you want to up-end tradition so badly, why not allow people to bring in their cell phones and interrupt performances with ringto–oh. The world of classical music has been changing all along, will continue to change, and must continue to change. Selaocoe said it well, himself, during the performance: “Tradition is progressive.” The creature of tradition cannot continue to live without adaptation. There are people who insist that “fun” music has no place in any room that might have had the seemingly sacred works of Tchaikovsky on the same stage. If you never have fun with Tchaikovsky4, you might want to sit in the front row for this one. Have your pencils ready.

From the moment Selaocoe and his ensemble stepped on stage, it was clear that it was not merely so that he might play some cello. He was there to make music. The music will expand to fill the container provided for it, and Selaocoe will test for potential openings, ways to make more space, ways to make more, richer, higher, better music throughout the performance. This necessitates that he get to know his audience–surely, some of this trust in this performance came from the riotous support of the many South Africans in attendance, celebrating with Selaocoe and Carnegie the anniversary of democracy in the country. But with each additional layer of musical trust he established, he surely earned more and more investment from his audience-cum-instrument.

Enraptured from the start, I loved watching him transform his primary instrument through six distinct modes of play, half of which I don’t recall ever having seen on a stage before, one or two perhaps being entirely new to my sense of how the cello might sing. Seeing someone so creative and enthusiastic about the outer edges of the instrument’s potential is exciting. The other side of witnessing that which is so exceptional is the subjective sense of dullness that is then cast over instrumentalists who do not fully explore, experiment with, and develop a relationship with different aspects and modes of the individual instrument beyond what common repertoire demands.5 Fortunately, I had a couple of days before needing to see or hear any other cellists, giving me a bit of time to regain perspective.

A robustly developed performer, Selaocoe also invoked different worlds with his own voice, set his own music-making down for a brief moment of exuberant dance, and shared small, precious bits of wisdom between songs and improvisations throughout the set.

While his renditions of classical works are flavorful and easily situate him as one of my top five cellists–I’ll choose his interpretation of a Platti sonata over most anyone else’s–the virtuosity still shines radiantly in works informed by African traditions, whether his vibrant take on the hymn that begins, “Ba mitsa ka mabitso, Emmanuele6,” or the original “Ka bohaleng7 / On the Sharp Side,” expanding on a phrase used by Setswana people to comment on women’s ability and willingness to wield the good of the world, regardless of the often great cost to their own wellbeing. Those two, in particular, were truly savory delights to hear–and move to–at Carnegie, and continue to rise as frequently visited friends in my music library.

It feels wrong to describe it as humility, even though I can understand the argument for it. A musician as profoundly gifted and vision-secure as Selaocoe might seem difficult for other musicians to work with. There is a level where too many grand talents on stage, too many cooks in the kitchen, can lead to what is often referred to as “personality conflict.” It seems to me that Selaocoe is above and beyond that level–he articulates a sense of the “big picture” of the music so well that others can figure out where they fit within it, enjoy it, and happily meld and mesh into the beauty of an ensemble.

He had no problem giving space to Thomas, Keary, and especially Kouaté to let the musical experience expand through them, their credited instruments, their own voices, and other supplementary instruments not listed on the program.

Kouaté walked right up to the line–though he stayed seated on the stage for nearly all of the performance–of seeming to show off, using such a variety of familiar and novel percussion instruments that he almost came across as an alchemist or foley artist, creating sonic experiences that didn’t always seem possible given the materials physically present.

Everyone was heard, deeply, and in a significant way. No note was out of place.

Not satisfied to leave the music at a fraction of its full realization, Selaocoe eagerly conducted the audience, his bow becoming baton, directing a more complex divisi than most would have the courage–the absolute assurance of musical vision and spect-actor buy-in–to attempt. But even I sang, quite enthusiastically. I can understand why it would make people feel uncomfortable–he’s the sort of musician who it makes sense to pay good money for a ticket that grants you the right to shut yourself up and listen to him. But listening to him involves some amount of surrender, not to passive listening, but to active listening and possibly a bit of participation. All of us have participatory music as part of our heritage. All of us. Each morning, the birds find their place in the symphony of the sunrise. Many of us have forgotten how to participate, we might even feel embarrassed about singing in public. But you don’t have to trust yourself. Just trust Selaocoe’s vision. If you truly are more Screaming Piha8 than he’s looking for–he’ll pivot, gracefully.

He’d make a great cult leader. Hopefully he’ll stay in music and fill out the full figure of what he knows to be waiting–for our sake, for his sake, for music’s sake.

I left the show satisfied and ready for more, wondering in every corner of myself what he might do with command of a full orchestra. He’s played with some of the greats, and as a soloist he has of course served to co-conduct, if not taking the helm proper. But I don’t think there’s a floor or a ceiling to what he’s capable of, musically. However much of it I am privileged to witness will be enough to keep me curious and in love with the world.

Do I have anything bad to say about the show? Not really, no. Maybe I could have chosen a different seat to have had a better view of all of the percussion work. Maybe next time, Carnegie will trust Selaocoe to sell out Stern rather than just Zankel. Maybe next time, he will have a Leningrader-sized orchestra to conduct. The closest thing I have to a complaint is that it only happened once. But it was a tremendous once. And I look forward to once more, wherever and however it manifests.