Manhattan Music

The Park Avenue Armory, that massive Victorian hulk situated between 66th and 67th streets, is well known for hosting the Annual Winter Antiques Show, where a well-heeled crowd enjoys its elegant preview parties, Young Collectors’ nights, and other pleasant rituals. Earlier this month, however, its cavernous Drill Hall was transformed for an event that demanded a rather different sort of ambiance—more like a Dantean circle of hell: The Lincoln Center Festival used it to present five performances of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s 1965 opera Die Soldaten (The Soldiers).

If you haven’t heard of this opera, then you haven’t heard of its composer, either.  read more »

Last week in this newspaper, Rex Reed wrote, “The music scene has been more interesting lately than the movies, and that’s a fact.” I’ll drink to that—and did, at Minetta Tavern, just after attending the first session (on May 10) of “VOX 2008: Showcasing American Composers,” held at N.Y.U.’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts.

Four days later, the venerable Minetta Tavern went out of business. VOX, however, is stronger than ever in its ninth year. What began as a kind of operatic quilting bee, with New York City Opera acting as an umbrella for a collection of small, intrepid New York ensembles, has become a streamlined two-day festival firmly under the company’s control, drawing a substantial audience and a cloud of friendly buzz.

George Manahan, the company’s music director, led two of the Saturday session’s five pieces with his typically unflappable command. Throughout the day, the City Opera Orchestra and a collection of young singers performed with an abundance of professionalism and aplomb.

The selection of excerpts from new works was wonderfully varied, though the quality varied, too. Cary Ratcliff’s Eleni, with a libretto by Robert Koch based on Nicholas Gage’s book about his family’s brutal experiences during the Greek Civil War, boasted City Opera diva Emily Pulley in its title role. But it was hobbled by inept word setting and a risibly overblown Hollywood-style score.

Another star soprano, Lauren Flanigan, was similarly wasted in Veronika Krausas’ trivial and disorganized The Mortal Thoughts of Lady Macbeth. Steve Potter’s The Officers was a noble try at experimental opera, a critique of the creepily homogenized language used in advertising, airport signage and political discourse—but the intellectual invention could not hide the lack of musical nourishment.

Yet the day opened well and ended even better. Our Giraffe, by the composer Sorrel Hays and the librettist Charles Flowers, was a deft and humorous study of a little-known historical episode: the gift of a giraffe from Ottoman Egypt to King Charles X of France in 1826. As the French—being French—argue decorously over the political, commercial and sexual ramifications of the giraffe’s arrival, Ms. Hays gives them music of a simplicity and charm happily reminiscent of Virgil Thomson.

John King’s Dice Thrown, a fantasia on a grand and intoxicating late poem by Mallarmé, was more like a revelation. Mr. King is an esteemed downtown veteran who has composed two scores for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; like Mr. Cunningham’s partner, John Cage, he composes using chance operations, creating music that eschews any resemblance to traditional tonality or syntax.

And yet, in a performance by the stunningly accurate soprano Melissa Fogarty, the piece became a dazzling coloratura solo of compelling dramatic urgency. The soprano and the orchestral players (conducted ably by Marc Lowenstein) have considerable freedom in interpreting the “materials” of Mr. King’s fragmentary score: Each performance makes for a unique, unrepeatable composition.

Nothing’s easier than to write bad music this way—and as the second of two 15-minute versions began its run, I was not hopeful.

But about five minutes in, wonderful things started happening. The English horn player intoned his phrases with an ear-catching lyrical arc; the strings responded in kind, and Ms. Fogarty starting creating a character, not just a “part.” A musical country you could call Mallarmé Land cohered into being: We could picture its mountains, its cities, its fretting housewives, its squabbling politicians.

Perhaps it’s the listener, ultimately, who breathes life into Mr. King’s piece, or pieces. But it’s the composer’s invention that makes that possible, and Mr. King’s is of a rare kind.

TO THE DISTINGUISHED Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink I owe one of the most powerful musical experiences of my life: his Carnegie Hall performance of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande in 2003, a magnificent collaborative effort that featured not only the Boston Symphony Orchestra but also such singers as Lorriane Hunt Lieberson and Simon Keenlyside. And to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra I owe my first experience of Shostakovich’s titanic Fourth Symphony, from their thrilling recording of the work under André Previn.

But when Mr. Haitink, the Chicago Symphony’s principal conductor, and the Fourth Symphony came together at Carnegie Hall last Friday night (in the second program of a two-concert CSO residency), the performance, while admirable and secure, was far less than I’d hoped for.

It was announced early this month that Riccardo Muti, having twice spurned the New York Philharmonic, will take up the music directorship of the CSO in 2010. Mr. Muti will inherit from Mr. Haitink an ensemble that, in its carefully blended sound and seamless unity of purpose, can perform at the exalted level of the Cleveland Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic.

Mr. Haitink’s great gift as a conductor is to make musicians know, in his firm but collegial style, that only their best efforts will do; his weakness is that he sometimes does so little with what he elicits.

From his rendering of Haydn’s Symphony No. 101 (“The Clock”), which began the program, you would have detected the composer’s genius as a master craftsman, but not the magical mixture of wit, poetry, humor and melancholy that makes his music live.

Go to the recordings. In the hands of a Pierre Monteux, a Haydn symphony is an opera buffa; under Leonard Bernstein, it’s a jazz improvisation; under Antal Dorati, it’s Romantic poetry read with the detachment of a gentleman scholar. The gold-plated competence offered by a man like Bernard Haitink is a great thing—indeed, the world can’t get along without it. But it lacks the touch of the divine.

Russell Platt is a composer and a music editor at The New Yorker. He can be reached at rplatt@observer.com.

Compared to the publicity blowout that preceded the season-opening production of Lucia di Lammermoor—a wild-eyed Natalie Dessay plastered over dozens of city buses—the Metropolitan Opera’s promotion of the company’s first production of Philip Glass’ 1980 opera, Satyagraha, which opened April 11, was almost restrained.

“Could an opera make us stand up for the truth?” asked one poster. “Could an opera make us warriors for peace?” asked another. (The outdoor campaign was underwritten by Met patron Agnes Varis, a devoted political activist and philanthropist.) If Giuseppe Verdi were around, he would have asked, “Can this opera make money?”—a philosophy that brought forth such trivial entertainments as La Traviata, Aida and Otello, not to mention a piece of fluff called Tristan und Isolde.

I don’t doubt for a moment Mr. Glass’ commitment to the ideals that his opera promotes—it’s an heroic portrait of Mahatma Gandhi in his first years as a defender of the Indian people—but he’s just as much a man of the theater as old Verdi.

Satyagraha (which means “Truth Force” in Sanskrit) has been making money for the same reasons those other operas have: It has something to say, and mostly says it well. Mr. Glass’ brand of minimalism can be maddeningly plain, yet it’s the product of a transformative genius. The operatic creations of John Adams, which the Met will present in future seasons, may be more subtle and dramatically varied, but they’re built on Mr. Glass’ template.

The composer and his librettist, Constance DeJong, adapted a sequence of texts from the Bhagavad Gita into a series of tableaux that depict Gandhi’s struggle to organize oppressed Indian workers in South Africa in the years before the First World War. The action is often static, but then so was Gandhi’s method: his philosophy of nonviolent resistance, which inspired Martin Luther King Jr.

A sumptuous staging would have gone against everything Gandhi stood for. The production team of Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch—who first crafted their version for English National Opera—therefore made their simple sets out of corrugated metal, with reams of newsprint used as props and bits of décor. (Corrugated metal was used by the colonial powers to build fences and basic structures; Gandhi’s newspaper Indian Opinion helped build support for his cause.) The contributions of a “Skills Ensemble” of aerialists and puppeteers maximized the mythic wonder inherent in the story.

If economy and invention went hand in hand, it was often to the benefit of Mr. Glass, whose music was sometimes too spacious for its own good. (Let’s just say that Act II could use a hefty 10-minute cut.) Perhaps Act III—a tragic tone poem built largely on the alternation of two chords—was the most effective. Dr. King motioned silently from on high; blocks of newsprint, affixed like funeral plaques to a massive wall, were stripped off to reveal television screens showing footage from Bloody Sunday and the March on Washington.

Act III is also largely a duet for tenor and conductor, and it profited from the solid musicality and poignant phrasing of Richard Croft (singing the role of Gandhi) and Dante Anzolini (in his podium debut). In the roles of Miss Schlesen and Mr. Kallenbach, two of Gandhi’s European followers, Rachelle Durkin and Earle Patriarco provided sterling support. The Met Orchestra, used to the subtleties and complexities of Mozart and Wagner, cranked out Mr. Glass’ endless arpeggios with professional dispatch.

ONE OF MR. Glass’ biggest fans is the pianist Bruce Levingston, who gathered a glittering audience for his solo recital at Zankel Hall on April 14. Among the crowd, one could spot the distinguished composers Charles Wuorinen and Sebastian Currier, there to hear their music world-premiered; the pianist’s pianists Ursula Oppens and Jerome Lowenthal; the actor Andrew McCarthy; the writer Dana Vachon; and Michael Stipe and David Rockefeller, who need no introduction.

Not everyone had a Platinum card, of course. But what all these boldface names have in common (like the composers Mr. Levingston has championed over the years, a list that includes David Del Tredici, Milton Babbitt, William Bolcom, Lisa Bielawa and Mr. Glass) is that they’re among the best at what they do. It would be a mistake to see Mr. Levingston’s nearly decade-long series of Premiere Commission concerts as fancy social occasions: They’re serious events in which both new and familiar works are presented with a singular combination of challenge and delight.

Mr. Levingston picked pieces that speak to his strengths, which are considerable, and performed on the same carefully voiced Steinway that Alfred Brendel used for his farewell New York recital. The columnar chords of Arvo Pärt’s Für Alina, a seminal work of Baltic minimalism, came through with a remarkable radiance and calm, as did the liquid sequences of a Debussy étude. Mr. Levingston’s New York-premiere performance of the prominent German composer Wolfgang Rihm’s Brahmsliebewalzer, a surreal though loving tribute to the master, allowed his rendition of Brahms’ late Intermezzo in E Major, which immediately followed, to strike our ears with refreshment and wonder.

Both Liszt’s daunting Vallée d’Obermann and Mr. Currier’s absorbing and exquisitely crafted Departures and Arrivals seemed not only played but lived through, musical diaries that seamlessly mixed the composers’ thoughts with those of their interpreter. Composers cherish these kinds of concerts; the Premiere Commission series should go on forever.

Russell Platt is a composer and a music editor at The New Yorker. He can be reached at rplatt@observer.com.

In 1992, Moby was among the bristling avant garde of dance music, at a time when that genre seemed poised to break through to the mainstream in a big way. It was with him that it did break, just a few years later. 1999’s Play, mainly a roster of scratchy blues and gospel samples layered over languid, housey tracks, sold nine million copies worldwide, spawned a series of hits, and introduced us to the ubiquity principle, whereby artists and their albums’ success can be measured by the fact that you hear them everywhere. He was Feist before Feist, “Young Folks” and “Crazy” all rolled into one, somehow pumping out of speakers at the Gap, the Duane Reade, your doctor’s office, your best friend’s cocktail party, and all those Silicon Alley startup parties. Every single track on Play was licensed for commercial use. The future was then.

Like the era of "irrational exuberance" that produced it, that album is likely to be the achievement for which Moby is best remembered, though he recently remarked that “in hindsight, it wasn't fun being the crucified poster child for selling out.”  read more »

So there's no way Adam Green could have known that, when asked by director Jason Reitman what music her character ought to listen to, Juno star Ellen Page would reply "The Moldy Peaches" faster than you can say "homeskillet."

And there's no way Mr. Green could have known the film would become such a runaway success, or that a tune by his old band, the Moldy Peaches, featured prominently therein would become one of iTunes' hottest downloads, or that the soundtrack would rocket to the top of the Billboard 200, or that he'd end up reuniting with ex-band mate Kimya Dawson after a four-year hiatus to perform their old songs in front of the ladies on The View, or that thousands of teens across the country would record their own cover versions of Juno's unofficial theme "Anyone Else But You," and then load them up on YouTube.  read more »

As this decade wanes, some of the chaos in the world of music seems to be settling, as those looking for new sounds grow tired of bottomless discovery. It’s exhausting, really, this omnivorous accumulation of songs. How many albums have been downloaded only to languish somewhere in the catacombs of sprawling hard drives? Yet everything hasn’t devolved into ringtones and novelty singles. The furious dismantling of the pillars of corporate greed (so long, $18.99 CD!) hasn’t hurt enduring grass-roots indie musicians like John Darnielle, who records under the moniker the Mountain Goats. In fact Darnielle’s work, idiosyncratic and acquired-taste though it may be, is more popular than ever, and his latest, perhaps most welcoming album sees him poised to break through to even more new listeners. It’s notable, especially given that he’s been making his music for more than 17 years.  read more »

Nobody who heard Karita Mattila sing the title role of Strauss’s Salome on the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2004 production will ever forget it. That she stripped (briefly) nude at the climax of the Dance of the Seven Veils surely helped fuel the fire, but mainly it was stuff of the performance itself, a heady mixture of fearless vocal fireworks and a daringly sexualized dramatic presence. When Ms. Mattila took her bow, a frenzy erupted: Students, scenesters, stockbrokers and socialites were all on their feet, screaming in amazement and delight.

Ms. Mattila was warmly received after the first night of the revival of the Met’s 1980 production of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut (1893) on Jan. 29, but I doubt that her performance will inspire fevered memories. It has been widely reported that the Met is making a new production of Tosca for the magnificent Finnish soprano in the 2009-10 season, and I think she’ll fit the role of the great diva—from the beginning, a petulant and tempestuous character—better than she did the doe-eyed Manon, the pretty, middle-class French teenager who, brought into a life of luxury in pre-revolutionary Paris, cannot help but destroy Des Grieux, the young student who’s besotted with her.

Her beautifully “cool” Nordic sound may be a detriment in shaping a role that demands warm-blooded Italianate tone color and legato, but there’s no reason why a non-Italian singer can’t make a splash as Manon. To my eyes and ears, Ms. Mattila barely registered dramatically in Act I (the superb Dale Travis, as the old roué Geronte, acted rings around her) and gave a rather tarty and brazen Lulu-type characterization—more redolent of Weimar Germany than the ancien régime—in Act II. Only in the two final, tragic acts was the 47-year-old soprano truly convincing, seeming to bring her own experience as an older and wiser woman to the fore.

Her Des Grieux was Marcello Giordani. When he’s good, this tenor is a kind of latter-day Carlo Bergonzi, a singer whose timbre isn’t memorable but whose style and professionalism are an anchor for any production. The Met is asking a lot of him this year: Not only did he sing Edgardo to Natalie Dessay’s Lucia on the season’s opening night, but the house is bringing him back in March to sing the title role in Verdi’s powerful Ernani, which once belonged to Luciano Pavarotti.

I was looking forward to hearing Mr. Giordani sing at the New Year’s Eve Concert at La Fenice in Venice, but he pleaded illness (and was replaced by the sturdier, no-nonsense tenor Walter Fraccaro). During Act I of Manon Lescaut, I feared that Mr. Giordani still had the same Euro-bug in his throat: His singing was messy and frequently off pitch. But in Act II he somehow got hold of his instrument and used it well for the rest of the night.

This opera, so flawed and yet so thrilling, needs younger singers and a fresh production that will get rid of the kitschy early-80’s glamour of the Met’s current staging and burrow down to the fervid passion of the score. If there was a true streak of giovinezza in the performance, it came from James Levine and his wonderful orchestra, who offered sharp rhythms, sinuous phrases and cashmere textures that maximized the ardor of Puccini’s post-Wagnerian idiom.

ITALIAN MUSIC IN the 20th century was inevitably altered by the irresistible wave of modernism, but the lyric warmth and theatrical verve of the Italian tradition survived within it, as the long career of Luciano Berio (1925-2003) shows.

It was the New York Philharmonic that premiered Berio’s most famous work, Sinfonia, in 1968. The once-famous Swingle Singers—the smooth, scat-driven a cappella group that helped provide the soundtrack to the Age of Aquarius—took on the eight amplified vocal parts at the premiere. Last week it was the turn of the frighteningly competent Synergy Vocals group from London. Lorin Maazel, seemingly a little weary from all the Wagner he’s been conducting over at the Met recently, led a firm but dispassionate performance on the night I attended (Jan. 31).

Sinfonia, a work that not only uses texts by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Samuel Beckett but that was shaped by contemporary streams of structuralist and semiotic theory, escapes the expressive prison that enclosed so much music of its time—but only just. Johannes Brahms was also a deeply intellectual composer, but in his eloquent Fourth Symphony, which Maazel conducted smartly after intermission, he never let it show. That’s not so easy anymore.

The composer Steven Stucky, who introduced the performances of Sinfonia, maintains that listeners don’t need a special background “to enjoy it.” I disagree: I think you need a background in the late 1960’s, a vital, destructive and fractured time that helped create an atmosphere for a music that shared the same attributes. To enjoy Berio’s collection of 14 Sequenzas for solo instruments, however, you need only have a love of music, a love that a marathon concert at the Rose Theatre on Feb. 2—by Philharmonic musicians and guest artists—would have extravagantly confirmed.

In a style that dispensed with the comforts of regular phrases and tonal centers, Berio offered up music of coloristic variety, polyphonic brilliance and technical innovations that challenge the most virtuosic of performers—and created the finest suite of unaccompanied pieces since Bach. Among the fine performances I was able to hear, I especially enjoyed the ravishing feast of subtle detail that the flutist Robert Langevin brought out in Sequenza I; the cool mastery and charcoal timbre of the pianist Amy Briggs Dissanayake in Sequenza IV; and the sheer endurance in Sequenza XII of the bassoonist Martin Kuuskmann, who gave a sleek and unruffled cohesion to an unruly bear of a piece.

Russell Platt is a composer and a music editor at The New Yorker. He can be reached at rplatt@observer.com.

Everybody needs to stop complaining about Chan Marshall. If I hear another person talk about how she has smoothed over the rough edges that made her so great and eradicated all the warts-and-all charm from her repertoire, I'm going to spit.

Just a year ago, after releasing the strongest album by far of her career, Ms. Marshall, or Cat Power as she's known, cancelled a tour due to a breakdown. Plenty reacted with smug I-coulda-called-it satisfaction given her reputation for stagefright and worse. Then, a few months later, Ms. Marshall emerged stronger, leaner, and meaner than ever, and has since been treating audiences (ever larger, ever more thrilled audiences) to some of the best performances of her life. One review of her new album actually praised her former "paranoid-but-pretty" style in contrast to the strength and poise she now exhibits. You'd think people wanted this woman dead.  read more »

January may be a dead time for the movie business, but in New York, at least, classical music snaps back with a vengeance. Last week brought an exceptional head rush, as fond returns and new beginnings crowded the calendar.

At the center of it was Lorin Maazel, who, despite his advanced age—and the critical drubbing he regularly endures—remains the most resilient conductor on the American scene. On Jan. 7, after an absence of 45 years, he returned to the Metropolitan Opera to lead a triumphant revival of Die Walküre.

Three days later, his full-time employer, the New York Philharmonic, announced what promised to be an especially engaging final season for Mr. Maazel, who has been the orchestra’s music director since 2002 and is due to retire in June of 2009. One of the last tasks of Mr. Maazel’s tenure will be to conduct Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, the so-called “Symphony of a Thousand”—the kind of late-Romantic bombast that he revels in.

Last week’s triumph was of a quieter kind—a performance of impressive subtlety and understanding. New York Wagnerites have become used to the James Levine style, an endlessly flowing sound, almost wanton in its luxury, that radiates from deep within the orchestra and can occasionally overwhelm the singers. But Mr. Maazel, whose knowledge of this music matches Mr. Levine’s, immediately put his own stamp on the piece, crafting a sound that was drier and more restrained, gaining in clarity what it lost in color.

With the singers Adrianne Pieczonka, Clifton Forbis and Mikhail Petrenko all excellent and free from strain, Act I became like chamber theater, though of an exceptionally muscular kind. The whole thing made such sense that even the longtime production’s cartoonish sets and costumes lost their tackiness. And in the few moments when Mr. Maazel really let the orchestra go—as in Hunding’s angry condemnation of his dangerous house guest, Siegmund—the effect was all the more powerful for its rarity.

Mr. Maazel’s deliberative approach took some of the excitement out of Acts II and III, but he provided a clear sonic platform on which James Morris (at 61, a remarkably strong Wotan), Lisa Gasteen (Brünnhilde) and Stephanie Blythe (Fricka) could work their magic. The big nonsurprise surprise was Ms. Blythe, in her first Wagner performance at the Met, once again walking away with the show: the Fricka-Wotan Act II confrontation was actually funny. This woman can do no wrong.

ALSO AT THE Met is a new production of Hansel and Gretel, which has been running since Christmas Eve. Instead of Maazelian wisdom and a traditional staging, we have a sleek new production (by Richard Jones, originally for the Welsh National Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago) and a young (and sleek) conductor, Vladimir Jurowski.

I wish Alan Gilbert all the best as Lorin Maazel’s replacement, but watching Mr. Jurowski put the Met Orchestra through its paces, I couldn’t help but wonder if the New York Phil’s administrators considered hiring this young thoroughbred, who at 36 is the newly appointed principal conductor of the London Philharmonic. Some of the Levine-style luxury came back to the Met ensemble, along with a shimmering palette of woodwind sound—and an inexorable, Tchaikovskian languor—that seemed of Mr. Jurowski’s own conjuring.

If you can have an adult production of Humperdinck’s perennial family favorite, Mr. Jones’ is almost it. Gertrude—Hansel and Gretel’s despairing mother—plays with overdosing on pills; the Sandman (sung with gentleness and poise by a newcomer, the American mezzo Sasha Cooke) is an ugly old crone in a brown raincoat; and John Macfarlane’s curtain drops (a white plate with a smear of blood, a lurid red mouth with a swirl of white teeth about to crunch) aim for the putrescence of a Francis Bacon.

As the starving scamps, the athletic Alice Coote and the lissome Christine Schäfer sang with plenty of personality but consistently mangled their words. Only the great veteran English tenor Philip Langridge, sporting an outrageous fat suit as the Witch, managed to do justice to the King’s English, even when his mouth was full of chocolate and flour.

I SHLEPPED ALL the way to Merkin Concert Hall, and all I got was this fancy new lobby. Surely I wasn’t the only member of the city’s classical cognoscenti who muttered those words after being summoned for the cute little gala on Jan. 8 celebrating the hall’s reopening: The auditorium itself, apart from the reupholstered seats, seemed little changed. (In fact, improvements have been made to the mechanical systems, the restrooms and backstage areas.)

The architect, Robert A. M. Stern, New York’s current master of luxe, has given the Kaufman Center a great prow of a marquee jutting on to West 67th Street, and has replaced the cluttered and charmless lobby with something bigger and more glamorous. At least his changes did no harm: The hall’s sound, in a concert ably led by Aaron Jay Kernis—which featured a chamber orchestra and the soprano Esther Heideman performing music by Mr. Kernis and by Aaron Copland—seemed even brighter and more crisp than a year ago.

Time was when Merkin Concert Hall was a place where cutting-edge classical groups performed and ambitious young musicians came to make the scene. The auditorium still hosts a fair number of concerts, but with the ascendancy of Miller Theatre and the arrival of Zankel Hall, it would seem that Merkin’s days as a programming powerhouse are unlikely to return. Yet given the Kaufman Center’s broad cultural mission, that may be no great loss: Places for young people are coveted in the center’s music schools, and as the gala concert closed with a performance by Face the Music, its eager new-music group, we heard that they have plenty of talent of their own.

Russell Platt is a composer and a music editor at The New Yorker. He can be reached at rplatt@observer.com.

There are two people's voices I can impersonate well: that of Magnetic Fields frontman Stephin Merritt and Project Runway frontman Tim Gunn. It seems Merritt is forever impersonating as well, or perhaps just exploring the many forms of his beloved pop and rock songcraft. (Alas, Mr. Gunn specializes in another kind of craft, one that falls outside the purview of this review.) Of course this diversity was most prominent on the Magnetic Fields' 1999 compendium 69 Love Songs, for which he and the band ran through nearly every permutation of the love-song conceit, and came to rest on the lucky number.

Yet, while the band has always been a sucker for a blunt conceit, the years since the release of 69 have seen the very bluntness become esoteric. 2004's i was a string-laden soft-pop ode to melodrama where all the songs began with the prime pronoun and were arranged alphabetically. Then there's the string of Mr. Merritt's side-projects, from the guest-vocalist-heavy 6ths to the Gothic Archies' morose children's songs, an accompaniment to the Lemony Snicket Series of Unfortunate Events books. Showtunes was a 2006 collection of Mr. Merritt's work for Chinese theater director Chen Shi-Zeng. Recently Mr. Merritt's voice even graced a Volvo commercial.  read more »

The most unpleasant experience of modern opera that I’ve ever had came last May at the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, N.C., which presented the American premiere of the French composer Pascal Dusapin’s opera Faustus, the Last Night. What plot the opera had was contained in its title: Amid waves of static, senseless music, the knowledge-hoarding ex-philosopher learns from a Beckett-esque character named Togod that, when it comes to all those big questions—the existence of God, the fate of the universe, et al.—the answer is that there is no answer. “There is … NOTHING,” Togod says to us, and in case Faust and the audience don’t get it, he says it very slowly, again and again.

Compared to that, Elliott Carter’s one-act opera, What Next?, which had its New York stage premiere at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre last weekend, was a great improvement, not least because it seems to have an actual story line. It’s just that none of the characters can decide what it should be.

If this vague, postmodern setup, in addition to Mr. Carter’s reputation as a fearsomely intellectual composer, keeps American opera companies from embracing the piece, it would be a shame. Not only is What Next?—by the evidence of Christopher Alden’s light-footed production, and the performance of the assembled cast and of the Juilliard School’s superb Axiom ensemble—actually funny, but it offers some of Mr. Carter’s loveliest and most gracious music. Comparisons to the opera buffas of Mozart would not be inappropriate.

Mr. Carter, whose 99th birthday fell on Dec. 11, writes music that, at its best, balances deep, modernist sophistication with easy, neoclassical lightness. Along with “European” erudition, there’s an “American” intuition, ornery, playful or melancholy by turns—as authentically homegrown as Walt Whitman’s barbaric yawp and Jackson Pollock’s action painting.

What Next? has at least some specifics. (Paul Griffiths, the noted music critic and longtime Carter partisan, wrote the libretto.) Six characters, male and female, adult and child, are reeling from an auto accident, though all seem to be physically unscathed. None can remember how they came to be there, or where they are supposed to be going, and it is from these psychic dislocations that the existential, conversational action of the opera unfolds.

Road workers eventually arrive to clear the scene, but they ignore the other characters—which leads this listener to believe that we’re not at a tight bend in the Lincoln Tunnel (as Andrew Cavanaugh Holland’s set implies) but rather in an eddy of the River Styx.

Even when the music is at its most brittle and violent, Mr. Carter’s vocal lines are limpid, agreeable and elegantly plotted. And they were beautifully sung. Susan Narucki, an experienced soprano who has retained her agile voice and gamine stage presence, led a young cast that included the soprano Amanda Squitieri (who offered some dazzling coloratura singing), the mezzo Katherine Rohrer, the tenor Matthew Garrett and the baritone Morgan Smith—all in strapping vocal health. (The boy alto Jonathan Makepeace gave a knowing and fine performance in his small but crucial role.) Jeffrey Milarsky, an invaluable new-music conductor, led an engaging performance that seemed flawless and firmly expressive.

THE STUNNING DISJUNCTION between Mr. Carter’s advanced age and the astonishing youthful vigor of his music was not the only telling contrast on the music scene lately. The New York Philharmonic, long attacked for its stodgy programming and the conservative, veteran conductors it usually employs, got with the program when it brought Gustavo Dudamel—at 26, the most celebrated young conductor in the world, and the new music-director designate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic—onto its podium on Nov. 29.

Tongues have wagged, chiding our orchestra (and the Chicago Symphony) for not snapping up this wunderkind before L.A. did. But a Dudamel regime in New York would amount to a dose of shock therapy that our Philharmonic musicians probably wouldn’t tolerate.

What Mr. Dudamel has to offer in these early days is mostly excitement, but it’s an excitement that comes from living inside the music, not just riding on top of it. And he knows what he wants: a rhythmically explosive sound, fulsomely lyrical but without the caloric richness that Lorin Maazel typically coaxes out of these players.

As the performances of Chávez’s Sinfonía India and Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony showed, Mr. Dudamel has yet to comprehend the mysteries of musical form—he wouldn’t know a dying fall if it hit him in the head. It was, however, a sign of incipient maturity that he managed to retain his individual leadership style in Dvořák’s Violin Concerto, even while reining it in to accompany the estimable soloist, Gil Shaham—who seemed, by the way, to be having a ball. There’s plenty of time for this conductor to get “interesting”; what’s important is that his talent is true.

Russell Platt is a composer and a music editor at The New Yorker. He can be reached at rplatt@observer.com.

It was almost a disaster. Ghostface Killah's new album "The Big Doe Rehab" was slated for release today, and by chance so was the latest from Wu-Tang Clan (of which he is a member).

What a pickle! Ghost was upset. The rest of the group was upset. The fans... well they were just excited about the new music. After a few tense days things were set right, so we'll have to wait another week for that Wu-Tang album, but Ghost stands alone, and thank goodness.  read more »

That this event came off at all—and it did, with joy and skill and dedication—is a tribute to the hard work and imagination of Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, and his indefatigable colleagues.  read more »

The novelist is in the house! He applauds as his words are married to music.  read more »

Margaret Garner is the best new opera that Lincoln Center has heard in quite a while.  read more »

As you may have noticed, Mostly Mozart isn’t mostly Mozart anymore. If one of the other composers reigns above the rest, it’s Osvaldo Golijov, who manages to generate something like rock-star excitement.
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There’s a great reason to keep the very conservative “Summertime” series going: butts on seats.  read more »

Richard Goode, Alfred Brendel, Maurizio Pollini—a parade of eminent pianists has marched through Carnegie Hall in the last few weeks. But other events this spring remind us that successors to these grand old men are growing up fast.  read more »

On Sky Blue Sky, Wilco’s frontman shows the soft side of his ever-expanding rock band.  read more »

For many, the operas of Richard Wagner can be a hard slog: The philosophical conundrums of the librettos, the grating consonants of the German language, and the sheer sitzfleisch needed to get through a five-hour show can make a night with Netflix seem suddenly appealing.  read more »

On Volta, signature wails collide with Timbaland beats Iceland’s coolest: Björk at Coachella.  read more »

In an age in which a listener can access a thousand years of music with the click of a mouse, and in which living classical composers, no matter how worthy, are unlikely to regain a place at the top of the cultural food chain, just what is “new music” anyway?  read more »