Night After Night

Shake and bake.

As I stood tonight in Fat Cat, a seedy West Village jazz club that might be described as a Dazed and Confused den of slack with postmillennial Village Vanguard aspirations, I wondered if, 13 years ago, I might have been one of those 20-somethings who sprawled on couches and lounge chairs, feeling vaguely contemptuous toward the nearly-40s who more clearly felt discomfort at the vaguely stifling setting. Probably, I surmised, that was just a romanticized view of my younger years; it likely would have chafed just as much back then.

Still, it was worth spending an hour and change in a cavern that made the old Knitting Factory on Houston Street seem posh by comparison in order to catch tonight's opening set by the reunited Human Feel, a quartet that made some remarkable music during the first half of the '90s before dispersing in mostly different directions.

My preview in last week's issue of TONY provides a concise background for this group, which over the course of four albums rose from a handful of gifted and promising upstarts to a quartet of original thinkers with distinctive voices. To hear reedists Andrew D'Angelo and Chris Speed, guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel and drummer Jim Black play together again seemed unlikely at best, so far apart had their visions seemed to have grown by the band's dissolution in 1996. Speed and Black, whose then-concurrent tenure in saxophonist Tim Berne's epochal Bloodcount expired around the same time, continued to work in one another's bands as well as the Balkan-improv quartet Pachora. Rosenwinkel emerged as a post-bop bandleader with nascent hip-hop proclivities; D'Angelo swung with drummer Matt Wilson's quartet while experimenting elsewhere, and guested on Rosenwinkel's Heartcore, a 2003 release that presented a startlingly individual take on jazztronica.

But Human Feel had always been a band that thrived on musical clashes even at its peak, so there was no reason to suspect that the quartet's return would be anything but assured -- and perhaps even more colorful for all the territory the players had mapped since their premature farewell. And indeed, tonight's first set recaptured the livid sputter of the band's peak. Midway through the five-tune set, D'Angelo stated that Human Feel was playing a mix of old and new material; without a score card to double-check my reflexes, I can only suggest that the first and last pieces in the set could have been catalog items -- or at least spoke the same language -- while the middle trilogy marked new territory.

The signal addition to the mix, evident from the beginning, was Black's manipulation of electronics. As Speed's clarinet and D'Angelo's bass clarinet sang long tones over Rosenwinkel's fluttering strings (often doubled by his wordless vocalizing), Black filled an even lower depth of the band's sonic range with an organlike rumble that might well have been D'Angelo's own horn sampled live. Exploding into one of his trademark dry, frenetic avant-funk beats, Black drove D'Angelo's searing alto sax while Speed drilled holes in the floor. A heavy-metal plod led to a sudden release.

Black has fruitfully explored laptop electronics with his own band, Alas No Axis, and brought that more recently acquired facility to the second composition in tonight's set, which opened with Speed's clarinet plaintively navigating an aural hall of mirrors. A queasy melody shimmered and dispersed like a patch of oil spreading across the surface of a pond; when D'Angelo and Rosenwinkel locked into a raging duo passage, Black filled the remaining space with electronic swishes and slurps like Eno in early Roxy Music or Allen Ravenstine in Pere Ubu. Abruptly, the horns snapped into a surging line paced by Black's elusive pulse and Rosenwinkel's unperturbable cool.

The third selection, a D'Angelo tune, opened with a knotted head characteristic of this band, followed by a darting, squalling alto solo over Black's action-painted tumult. A collectively improvised passage that followed might best be described by the title of an earlier Speed composition, "Scribble Bliss," until Black's ponderous beat threatened an eruption of full-blown pomp; eventually, the whorl of furious activity passed like a hurricane petering out over land.

The solo guitar lines that opened Rosenwinkel's "Serenade" presented the evening's closest approximation of a standard jazz chord sequence, albeit an oblique one. It was hard to tell whether whiny sine-wave intrusions were contributed by Black or merely feedback in the sound system; less ambiguous were electronic samples that might well have been captured from Rosenwinkel on the fly, deployed behind and then replacing a stately theme on bass clarinet and tenor saxophone.

Closing the set was another tune built on angular unison lines; Rosenwinkel initially sat out as D'Angelo and Speed raced over a drum line so abtrusely animated as to suggests James Brown's funky drummer Clyde Stubblefield somehow possessed by Bill Bruford's passionate will to disrupt. I can think of no other drummer who can maintain so solid a pocket while running completely roughshod over barlines, nor one with a more sophisticated command of timbre using the basic resources of a standard drum kit. An airy, ungrounded collective blow on tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, pealing guitar and bowed cymbals maintained a dreamlike state of bliss for what felt like endless moments, only to be sundered by D'Angelo's most elephantine blowing. Thick, reverberent guitar lines tangled with Black's unhinged beat... and just like that, the set was over.

In the aftermath, my desire to hear more wrestled with my equally potent wish to escape the uncomfortable setting; in the end, the clock was the deciding factor. (Even officially sanctioned night owls have to maintain office hours.) Part of me wished that I'd changed course on Sunday night and heard Human Feel's earlier show at Tonic.

But that would have meant skipping a show by Napalm Death, the extreme-metal band that speaks to liberal rage like no other. A proud product of Margaret Thatcher's England, this Birmingham-fledged powerhouse has spoken truth to power for nearly two decades. Perhaps not surprisingly, an experimental patch-slash-identity crisis more or less coincided with the Clinton years. But now, with another Bush in office, Napalm Death has regained its footing; its two most recent albums (not counting a covers disc and a best-of anthology) can easily be counted among the band's strongest efforts.

Despite a lineup that doesn't contain a single member from the two separate lineups that recorded one side apiece of Scum, Napalm Death's 1987 debut album, the current combination of vocalist Mark "Barney" Greenway, guitarist Mitch Harris, bassist Shane Embury and drummer Danny Herrera is easily as potent and explosive a group to ever bear the name. To flog an old cliché, if the sheer energy Greenway expends stalking and shuddering onstage could somehow be harnessed and tapped, the world's dependency on fossil fuels could be eliminated overnight. His pleasantly Brummie between-song patter renders still more unbelievable the sheer intensity of his chthonic roar.

Despite a somewhat unhappy sound mix -- about which Herrera could be seen to complain throughout the set, and which robbed my all-time favorite ND song, "The World Keeps Turning" of its gale-force majesty -- Napalm Death delivered a tight set that touched on virtually every stage of the band's history, from early, seconds-long blurts through complex death-metal anthems and back to its most recent grindcore urgency. Harris's lacerating riffs and parched screeches delivered into an overhead microphone, Embury's elemental rumble and Herrera's inhuman blastbeats combined with awe-inspiring precision and power.

The headlining act, veteran German thrash band Kreator, demonstated a similar timeliness that can be chalked up to a thrash resurgence arguably fuelled by the same political unrest that called Napalm Death back to the frontlines. New songs from last year's impressive Enemy of God, including the title track, "Impossible Brutality" and "Suicide Terrorist," sat well next to old standards such as "Extreme Aggression," "Pleasure to Kill" and "Terrible Certainty."

Kreator's music, like that of Slayer, its closest American kin, sticks to a limited vein and mines it well. And like Slayer, Kreator went through an experimental phase that tilted slightly toward the hip-hop inspired grooves of nu-metal, eventually to right itself with the more sophisticated artillery it originally bore. With a lineup that couples original guitarist/vocalist Mille Petrozza and drummer Jurgen "Ventor" Reil with impressive additions in second guitarist Sami Yli-Sirniö and bassist Christian Geisler, a technically sophisticated style just feels more honest, anyway. Swathed in strobing lights and billowing dry-ice smoke, Kreator's set was executed with utter professionalism, although one could argue that only during the extremely early songs it performed during the encore ("Flag of Hate" and "Tormentor") did the band sound as feral and hungry as it always did during its original heyday.

Of the bands that preceded Napalm Death's support slot, Montreal-based quintet A Perfect Murder delivered a brief, well-paced set of groove-oriented thrash tunes blatantly beholden to Pantera and Exhorder, even with a fill-in singer and one of two guitarists sidelined by technical malfunctions. Opening act Undying, from Raleigh, North Carolina, offered up the metalcore quota of the bill with a twist in vocalist Logan White, a slim young woman whose voice was largely rendered an indistinct yelp. She stalked the stage like a caged cat, punctuating choruses with the sweeping karate chops and kicks of a latter-day hardcore kid in the pit, but only managed to express the band's agenda in between-song references to veganism, animal rights and tolerance -- y'know, the sort of thing of which metalheads are widely assumed to be unaware.

Oh, bugger... it's snowing. Time to set the alarm clock an hour earlier to allow for shoveling.

Napalm Death setlist: Instinct of Survival / Unchallenged Hate / Instruments of Persuasion / Continuing War on Stupidity / Narcoleptic / Taste the Poison / Next on the List / Vegetative State / Suffer the Children / Breed to Breathe / The Code Is Red... Long Live the Code / Lowlife / Silence Is Deafening / Right You Are / Diplomatic Immuinty / The World Keeps Turning / The Great and the Good / Scum / Life / The Kill / Deceiver / You Suffer / Nazi Punks Fu(# Off / Siege of Power

Playlist:

Chris Speed - Swell Henry (Squealer)

Kurt Rosenwinkel - Heartcore (Verve)

www.myspace.com/undying

Half-tones in half-dark.

At the end of Darkling -- a new opera-cum-multimedia music-theater work previewed in full for the first time by American Opera Projects on Sunday afternoon -- baritone Marcus DeLoach climbs to the rafters of a small, black-box in full Victorian kit, there to sing Lee Hoiby's richly chromatic setting of the Thomas Hardy poem, "The Darkling Thrush." Starting to think about the piece from its conclusion might seem peculiar, were it not for the fact that Darkling is in some sense as much a musical expansion of its final number as the book-length poem by Anna Rabinowitz on which this opera is based was built upon a skeleton provided by Hardy's poem.

Rabinowitz's book deals in fragmentary memories of family known and unknown -- specifically a Jewish family sundered by Nazi politics, reconstructed via letters found in a shoebox. Her poem is constructed as an acrostic, the first letter of each line combining to render Hardy's poem. Likewise, Stefan Weisman's dark, elusive score is an explosion of themes and motives extracted from the Hoiby song, stretched into an 80-minute progression of solo and ensemble numbers performed by a quartet of opera singers and a string quartet -- punctuated by interludes spoken by the poet and actors, as well as pre-recorded soundscapes by Tom Hamilton.

Apart from DeLoach's song, the whole of the work takes place within the boundaries of a box defined by translucent scrims, affording the audience an access held at some slight remove. Projected texts and manuscripts illuminate the walls of the enclosure; singers and dancers move within, presenting a non-narrative series of images describing Jewish life in Europe before and during the war, as well as the strained relations between those who escaped to America (including Rabinowitz's parents) and those who remained behind.

Director Michael Comlish, who conceived the dramatization of Rabinowitz's poem, intersperses scenes of operatic lyricism and gravitas with quirky, theatrical interludes -- one early scene in particular, which mingled black boots, bustiers and Orthodox garb with oblique blocking and abrupt sound effects, suggested a Richard Foreman-steered production of Cabaret. Strikingly kinetic enactments of old photographs and silent films evoke time and place.

Weisman's score is likewise shot through with an old-world melancholy, accentuated by Flux Quartet leader Tom Chiu's keening violin lines. The composer took full advantage of his operatic principals -- soprano Jody Scheinbaum, mezzo Hai-Ting Chinn, tenor Jon Garrison and bass-baritone Mark Uhlemann -- each of whom was afforded an opportunity to stand out. Chinn and Uhlemann commanded distinctive, replendent instruments. Scheinbaum, whose voice was smaller, projected with a winning charm and physical agility. Garrison's impassioned solo number, performed in beard and gown, summoned thoughts of Halévy's tortured Elezar.

But Darkling is a work of busy ensemble interaction, and non-singing actors played as great a role as the vocalists -- none more so than Sid Williams, who at one point transformed in the blink of an eye from a smiling, waving Fiorello LaGuardia into a Nazi mouthpiece who reported the final solution in the terminology of an art critic, even as the action onstage artfully rendered the unthinkable.

Since this afternoon's performance was a preview, my thoughts should be read as reflection rather than review. But really, productions like this remind you that all too much light is cast upon the Met and City Opera -- and even San Francisco and Houston -- to define what new opera is, or might be. Let Darkling serve as a reminder that opera can also be what and where it is found. This is a profound, provocative piece of musical theater -- one that I hope will occasion a great many opera lovers to stray from habitual paths. As specific as the context of Darkling may be, its message is ultimately universal.

Darkling runs at the East 13th Theatre in New York City through March 18.

Poptones.

I'd been planning for some time now to add a blogroll devoted to my favorite pop-music writers; honestly, the only thing that held me up was that pesky matter of categorization. Obviously, it wouldn't really help anyone if I lumped popblogs in with the current list of (mostly) classical blogs -- too hard to know what you're going to find, unless you're already familiar with a site. But does adding a pop list compel further stratification: i.e., the addition of a jazz-specific list and a relocation of Mwanji Ezana's excellent be.jazz, which quietly infiltrated the blogroll some time ago (and is at present the only dedicated jazz blog on the list)?

I don't know what the best solution is, but Marc Geelhoed finally forced me to make a move this morning by citing the arrival of Aurally Fixated, a new blog by Time Out Chicago pop-music editor Antonia Simiglis. Following on from her page, I discovered that my old friend Steve Dollar, a capable observer of pop, jazz, new music and other acoustic phenomena, is blogging at Dollarama! Since I was already on a roll, I finally hooked up with Sasha Frere-Jones's S/FJ (because it's de rigueur to do so, but also an excellent read), my TONY colleague Cristina Black's pithy Subnoto, and former Jazz Times editor Christopher Porter's wonderful, wide-ranging MP3 blog, The Suburbs Are Killing Us.

You'll find all of these marvels in a new category called "Poptones," located near the bottom right. There's more to come, certainly. Meanwhile, I could sit here and ponder genre stratification and blurring borders all day, but I've got an experimental opera and a death-metal blast to attend today. So explore, and enjoy!

Conflagration of the house.

The hardy Brooklyn Philharmonic, long an invaluable part of the New York City music scene, ushered in a new era on Saturday night with its inaugural concert under the direction of its recently appointed music director, the fresh-faced Michael Christie. Something of an antithesis to the New York Philharmonic -- where tonight, former BP music director Robert Spano once again guested with the program described yesterday -- the Brooklyn ensemble typically concentrates on new music, unusual repertoire and offbeat treatment of standard classics. Christie's bold debut incorporated all three elements.

Following an boisterous greeting from borough president Marty Markowitz (who alluded to the new conductor's relatively tender age, as we are all likely wont to do), Christie mounted the podium for a new, untitled welcoming fanfare by John Corigliano. Facing the brass players assembled onstage, at the downbeat Christie swiveled to direct choral groups located along the sides of the house, who gamely blew antiphonal riffs seemingly borrowed from the theme to TV western Bonanza on kazoos. The brass players joined them in the final bars, combining in a playfully irreverent manner that seemed entirely well suited to the Brooklyn ethos, not to mention the ritualistic fare on offer tonight.

Winds joined brass onstage for an introverted rendition of Stravinsky's austere, elusive Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Christie expertly balanced the ensemble's tones and timbres at a relatively low dynamic, compelling listeners to lean in close. Violas, cellos and basses replaced most of the wind complement in the "Hymn to Aten" from the opera Akhnaten, an aria that is arguably Philip Glass's loveliest creation. The celebrated Candian countertenor Daniel Taylor offered a gorgeous, rounded sound; still, reading from a score, he seldom seemed entirely comfortable. His performance was creditable, as was that of the orchestra, but his body language afterward suggested that even Taylor wasn't entirely happy with his performance. Even so, Glass's radiant paean came across well, the offstage chorus at the conclusion especially effective.

Following the break came the red meat of the program: Orff's Carmina burana, presented -- according to the composer's original conception -- as a multimedia theater piece with dancers and suggestive lighting. The combined forces of the New York Virtuoso Singers, the University at Buffalo Chorus and Choir, the Canticum Novum Singers and the Westchester Oratorio Society filled risers at the rear of the stage, with pianists and percussion arrayed before them; the rest of the orchestra filled the pit beneath the stage, affording ample room onstage for the graceful movements of choreographer Nicholas Leichter's company, nicholasleichterdance. The three vocalists -- Taylor, soprano Hannan Alattar and baritone Stephen Powell -- took the stage from the wings for their solo spots, Allatar accompanied by Dianne Berkun's well-drilled Brooklyn Youth Chorus.

Since dance is in no way my metier, I will for the most part leave analysis of the company's contributions to others. I initially felt some slight annoyance that the house lights were extinguished to the point that there was no possibility of following the libretto, and therefore no way to judge any relationship between lyrics and motion. It was probably an unwarranted reaction: In the program notes, Leichter states that he interpreted the work's themes of "earthly love, student life and ribald frivolity" only loosely. His brightly clad company provided a colorful deluge of motion that mostly seemed to gel with Orff's primal rhythms and sing-song melodies; Leichter's own solo during "Ego sum abbas" was a brilliant wedding of modernist gestures with locks and pops familiar from Michael Jackson videos.

Of the vocalists, Powell gave the most commanding performance, presenting a rich, ripe voice that remained secure in the trying falsetto stretches of "Dies, nox et omnia," and bringing a boldly dramatic flair to his every entrance -- right down to the nauseous swoon of "Ego sum abbas," which ended in a slapstick heaving dash from the stage. Taylor brought a similarly actorly quality to the lurching "Cignus ustus cantat." Allatar, reading from a score, didn't hold the stage as securely as had the other soloists, but sang "Stetit puella" with a bright, pealing tone and considerable agility. Her glorious "In trutina" was a show stopper, and she rendered the extremely high lines at the end of "Dulcissime" beautifully and securely.

Considering the obvious difficulty of steering a performance with performers so widely dispersed, Christie balanced his forces masterfully; despite the odd brass clam or insecure choral line, the massed ensemble performed admirably. Spoiled by lease-breaker Telarc recordings directed by Robert Shaw and Donald Runnicles, one might have wished for a bit more abandon in both the opening and closing "O Fortuna." But on the whole, tonight's concert was a remarkable achievement, and one that suggested Michael Christie's tenure with the Brooklyn Philharmonic will be one well worth watching.

Playlist:

Mark Adamo - Lysistrata - Houston Grand Opera/Patrick Summers (CD-R demo)

Philip Glass - "Hymn to Aten" from Akhnaten - Paul Esswood, Stuttgart State Opera/Dennis Russell Davies (CBS Masterworks)

Carl Orff - Carmina burana - Hei-Kyung Hong, Stanford Olsen, Earle Patriarco, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus / Donald Runnicles (Telarc)

Songs, and dances.

The New York Philharmonic gave John Harbison's Milosz Songs a second airing tonight, following Thursday night's world premiere. That event was well supported by The New York Times -- both with a nicely turned review by Tony Tommasini and a strong Anne Midgette think-piece on Dawn Upshaw, the longtime Harbison collaborator for whom these songs were written. I read neither article before attending tonight's performance, but I've always admired Harbison's work -- with one fairly strong exception -- so it comes as no surprise to report that this composition is a rich, strongly crafted piece delivered in what must be an ideal interpretation. (And how strange it seems that this is the 67-year-old composer's first commission for the Phil.)

The work, some 30 minutes in length, sets 10 poems by Czeslaw Milosz, whose words, the composer points out, contain a ripple of dissonance even in seemingly mundane observations. Harbison surrounds the singer with a concertino group of three flutes, vibraphone, harp and celesta, which imbues the work with a diaphanous shimmer. Those instruments act as something of a chorus, offering counterpoint to the vocal line. Harbison's orchestration here leans toward relatively light textures, including some gorgeous percussion writing all the more effective for its economy.

Tommasini singles out the instrumental shouts during "You Who Wronged" for special praise; this I will echo, and further praise Harbison's well-pointed tone painting -- the braying figures that accompanied the line, "You who wronged a simple man / Bursting into laughter at the crime" a particularly keen example.

Upshaw delivered a keenly insightful, beautifully varied reading of the work -- something that might well go without mention, had I not spun her Nonesuch debut CD when I came home tonight. While I still admire that disc wholeheartedly, I couldn't help but notice once more just how much she has grown, and continues to grow, since we first took stock of her. (As if her recording of Golijov's Ayre wasn't proof enough.) Upshaw sang tonight with a conversational ease that was only partially Harbison's doing. His score is full of syncopated rhythms that lent the vocal line a talky character; Upshaw took this quality still further, delivering the music with an almost casual insouciance that certainly speaks to the long collaboration between these two artists. This is a serious confluence on display: Harbison definitely knows how to write for the voice, and for this voice in particular; Upshaw, in turn, sounds as if she's making it up on the spot.

I confess that I spent the duration of the Harbison work with my nose plunged into his eminently readable score, which is probably why I can't add very much color commentary. When I hear this piece again at the Phil's second "Hear & Now" dissection on Tuesday, perhaps I'll leave the paperwork at home.

Conductor Robert Spano opened tonight's concert with an enveloping, mysterious reading of Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, and closed with a boisterous rendition of Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from West Side Story. No surprise that the conductor who shook his thang so effectively for Golijov's Pasión could also whip up a storm for this money-shot compilation. The orchestra met him move for move on the dance floor...but geez, would it hurt anyone to smile a bit? This music is fun to play, I know from firsthand experience, but apart from the beaming countenance of the second-chair cellist, you'd hardly have guessed it. Ladies and gentlemen, free your minds, and the audience will follow. And please, if you're going to do the "Mam-BO!" shout (which Bernstein's own troupe omitted in the classic 1961 recording), look like you mean it, or it just feels cheap.

Take a tip from the Bang on a Can All-Stars, who visibly had a gas delivering keen new scores from John Hollenbeck, Yoav Gal and Annie Gosfield during this year's People's Commissing Fund concert at Merkin Concert Hall on Wednesday night. Hollenbeck, a percussionist by trade, dealt mostly in complex stratifications of rhythm in his playful Rainbow Jimmies. Gal's Dr. King made canny use of rhythmic cadences provided by recordings of speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr.; his lovely music turned one happy phrase after another, but didn't dig especially deeply into the emotional core of what the words actually meant. Gosfield's Overvoltage Rumble was a serious art-rock gas, and a veritable concerto for keyboardist Lisa Moore, who drew upon a sampled vocabulary of sampled analog-synth smudges, smears and blurts.

As for the remaining pieces on the program, Ornette Coleman's Haven't Been Where I Left and Hermeto Pascoal's Arapua (the latter arranged by All-Star Evan Ziporyn) allowed the players to sound off virtuosically in pieces that neatly approximated the native strengths of these two unorthodox composer-performers, and proved that percussionist David Cossin commands a temporal flexibility seldom encountered on the concert stage -- i.e., he actually swings, right down to a convincingly Billy Higgins-esque ripple in the Coleman piece. Edward Ruchalski's Another Infinity, a reprise from the first People's Commissioning Fund concert in 2000, provided the evening's richest music: an ostinato figure on guitar underpinned gamelan-like phrases from vibraphone and piano, while clarinet and cello intertwined in long, loving lines of counterpoint. Interviewed on stage, Ruchalski admitted that if he had to do it all over again, he'd erase some of the notes; I agreed, but only insofar as to think that a slightly trimmed piece would have presented his seductive soundworld just as aptly.

Playlist:

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Mazeppa - Irina Loskutova, Larissa Diadkova, Viktor Lutsiuk, Nikolai Putilin, Sergei Alexashkin, Kirov Opera/Valery Gergiev (Philips)

King Crimson - Fillmore East, New York City, November 21, 1969 and StadtHalle, Cologne, October 14, 1981 (DGMLive.com authorized FLAC downloads)

Leonard Bernstein - Candide Overture; Symphonic Dances from West Side Story; Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront; Fancy Free - New York Philharmonic/Leonard Bernstein (Sony Classical)

Samuel Barber - Knoxville: Summer of 1915; Gian Carlo Menotti - "What a Curse for a Woman Is a Timid Man" (from The Old Maid and the Thief); John Harbison - Mirabai Songs; Igor Stravinsky - "No Word from Tom" (from The Rake's Progress) - Dawn Upshaw, Orchestra of St. Luke's/David Zinman (Nonesuch)

Once more, with Pasión.

Lincoln's Center's "The Passion of Osvaldo Golijov" festival -- one of the altogether more admirable productions Lincoln Center has mounted in recent years -- came to a rousing conclusion this evening with a second performance of the composer's La Pasión según San Marcos. Premiered in 2000, the work is well traveled enough now that I don't feel any pressing need to dwell on its provenance. For those seeking more detail, then, I'll turn you over to Alex Ross's New Yorker review of the 2001 American premiere at the Boston Symphony (which sets the work within multiple musical contexts with Ross's customary panache), and to Anastasia Tsioulcas's Classics Today report on the 2002 New York premiere at BAM, the latter of which I also attended.

Instead, I'd rather fixate on a handful of details. Like Ainadamar, Golijov's St. Mark Passion is a work that employs (rather than simply requires) amplification, and this was much better managed here than in the run of the opera a few weeks back. Every balance was expertly judged; trumpet fanfares electronically dispersed throughout Rose Theater had audience members craning their necks in search of invisible players in the balconies.

As has been reported elsewhere, Golijov fundamentally understands that popular idioms carry a great deal more sociopolitical weight in Latin American cultures than in North America and most of Europe (former Soviet states certainly excepted). That he sets some of the most dramatically painful segments of the Passion to boisterous dance music is as logical as it is bold, which didn't prevent my feeling a certain pang of uneasiness as I tapped my foot and swayed during Judas's betrayal and the march to Golgotha.

Unlike last night, a printed libretto was distributed this evening, and the house lights were kept up to allow audience members to follow the text should they choose to do so. As Anastasia reported today at Café Aman, the delectable Brazilian-American jazz singer Luciana Souza's performance in this work has grown almost incalculably richer; her rendition spanned a range that included a rich, café au lait lyricism, avian flights of seemingly spontaneous fancy and a demonic presence not so far removed from Diamanda Galás. Soprano (and personable blogger) Anne-Carolyn Bird fully assumed a role formerly occupied by Dawn Upshaw, and delivered an utterly wrenching "Lúa descolorida" -- Golijov's setting of a Galician poem by Rosalía de Castro, which stood in for Peter's thoughts at the moment of his betrayal of Jesus.

As had been the case at BAM, once again the unnamed singers of Venezuelan choir Scola Cantorum de Caracas offered deeply felt sentiments in plainspoken, occasionally rough-hewn tones. It was their work that made Golijov's Passion as much ritual as performance, their now searing, now soothing voices that constantly underscored the human element -- both mundane and sublime -- of this familar gospel. The versatile players of Orquesta la Pasión provided both fire and refinement; members of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra gamely provided a link, however tenuous, to the concert-platform tradition, with principal violinist Cecylia Arzewski contributing especially sweetly to "Lúa descolorida." Conductor Robert Spano, whose belief in this work has surely fostered its travels, led tonight's performance with utter conviction and fine attention to detail.

The term Gesamtkunstwerk, Richard Wagner's notion of a completely unified expression of art, isn't one that seeps into my conversation especially often. But tonight, more than had been the case at BAM, I found that word bubbling up again and again as I admired Golijov's deeply felt confluence of music, drama and choreography (most obviously in the dancing and acting of Reynaldo González Fernández and Deraldo Ferreira, but also in the effective blocking and gestures of the chorus), bolstered by subtle, mood-enhancing lighting. More than ever before, tonight I truly believed that Golijov's Pasión is a deeply significant creation -- a statement of principle as well as a gateway to opportunity. What's more, the composer's treatment of thrice-familiar human passions rendered them livid and new; caught live a second time, the experience was every bit as startling as the first, and still more moving.

One last note: Those who already follow Anne-Carolyn Bird's abovementioned blog have likely already seen her post that included a backstage photo with an appreciative David Bowie. Don't be surprised if a similar shot with Björk shows up tomorrow; the Icelandic innovator sat ramrod straight, and even scribbled a few notes, during tonight's performance. To me, this doesn't feel like simple celebrity trainspotting (as it would have been had I mentioned sighting Lou Reed in the bathroom queue at John Eliot Gardiner's recent concert of sacred works by Mozart); more like a brewing confluence in which a so-called serious music might overrun its limited purview, actually reaching the ears and touching the lives of sophisticated listeners whose habits aren't necessarily our own.

Playlist:

Album - Microbricolages (Delhotel)

Zebulon Pike - And Blood Was Passion (Unfortunate Music)

Celtic Frost - Monotheist (Century Media, due May 30)

Asha Bhosle - Love Supreme (Times Square)

Björk - Selmasongs (Elektra)

Radiohead - Amnesiac (Parlophone)

That's life.

You might well expect to hear all manner of unsavory words employed to describe the performance of this or that singer in a Verdi opera, but when's the last time you heard a profanity aimed at the composer himself? For me, it was tonight at the Metropolitan Opera, when during the second intermission a well dressed and clearly disgruntled woman snarled, "This is b______t!" -- the blanks occupied by a common euphemism for a certain bovine byproduct, one that I refrain from repeating only so as to make sure this posting is accessible to the kids in the library.

"It's just a bunch of people standing around, and nothing happens," said patron explained of her annoyance at tonight's offering, Verdi's La Forza del Destino. "It's like a director who can't cut his own film."

Even the most ardent Verdian might have a hard time convincing this particular audience member that Forza is one of the composer's most ambitious creations. Like pretty much everything to which Verdi laid his hand, Forza includes characters readily identifiable as heroes and villains. But here, nothing is particularly clear cut: The hero is an outcast by virtue of ethnicity; the heroine his lover, ready to disgrace the family honor by following her heart, and the villain is her brother, who doggedly pursues the man he believes to have killed his father in an attempt to spirit away his sister.

Complicating the audience's relationship to the piece is the fact that said heroine, the immediately sympathetic Leonora, anchors only the first act of a long opera made longer by extensive set changes; she makes a cameo appearance in the second act, doesn't appear at all in the third and turns up in the fourth just long enough to sing that she wishes she could die -- then promptly does so, at the hand of Don Carlo, her brother, who has been mortally wounded by Don Alvaro, the bosom buddy from the battlefield that turned out to be the half-breed who supposedly seduced his sister and murdered his father -- which, of course, really was an unlikely accident.

Moreover, Leonora, Alvaro and Carlo are only half the equation -- the dramatic trio counterbalanced by the comic trio of hapless peddler Trabuco, gypsy fortune teller Preziosilla and grumpy monk Fra Melitone, each of whom derails a scene or two. And ultimately, none of these characters can claim top billing; Verdi's interest is in the complex web of interconnections that intertwine the lives of these disparate characters and others still. The composer (and poet Francesco Maria Piave) may call it "fate" or "destiny," but in a more agnostic age, we could just as easily call the circumstances of the opera synchronicity. The events of Forza may initially seem like untenable coincidences, but taken in perspective, nothing is so far fetched. It's complicated, but no more so than everyday life -- and certainly less so than the average offering on daytime TV. (And the composer's depiction of racist sentiment -- in Melitone's jokey insinuations as much as Don Carlos's rage -- lends an all-too-current thread to this particular yarn.)

Verdi could certainly have tightened and tidied the sprawl of Forza into a more readily assimilable form, but that wasn't what he was after; instead, the composer wanted to depict the multifaceted stuff of life itself. Musically, moods shift drastically not from act to act but from scene to scene, and sometimes within a single tableau. It's a bold, groundbreaking gambit -- and one Verdi never quite attempted to repeat, although the attention to subtleties here would pay dividends in the masterpieces that followed.

A successful traversal of Forza requires a steady hand at the rudder, and the Met had one in conductor Gianandrea Noseda. Opening with a whirlwind take on the famous overture, Noseda maintained a taut, unindulgent performance -- which made felicities such as a magnificent lead clarinet and a breathtakingly ethereal conclusion stand out all the more. As Leonora, Deborah Voigt sang radiantly; if her voice, like her figure, has trimmed down a size or so, Voigt's physical inhabitation of the role (particularly as she dashed out across the stage at the beginning of Act Two) afforded a performance complete in every respect. Salvatore Licitra, uneven in previous Met encounters, satisfied on the whole tonight; the more tragic Don Alvaro's circumstance, the richer and more resplendent his voice became, with his "Le minaccie, i fieri accenti" in Act Four a particular triumph. Mark Delavan, a ebony-voiced Don Carlo, executed an Olympic-caliber swan dive from guarded anger to pointed suspicion and finally inchoate obsession, delivering the most unalloyed gold-medal performance of the evening.

As for the comic trio, Juan Pons was a charmingly belligerent, beleagured Fra Melitone. Ildikó Komlósi's Preziosilla, while not especially scene-stealing, cut through the massed voices in Acts Two and Three; Tony Stevenson's Trabuco -- a Tracey Walter role, for sure -- could have used more physical presence and vocal juice. And as Padre Guardiano, the holy man who arguably bridges the gaps between all of the other characters, a noble Samuel Ramey mustered a physical and vocal heft worthy of the composer's representative for the voice of God. Or fate, or destiny, or synchronicity. Take your pick.

Playlist:

King Crimson - Mirrors (Wild Bird bootleg, Rome 11/13/73)

King Crimson - The Return of the Crimson King (Chapter One bootleg, Frankfurt 11/3/73)

King Crimson - Trilogy, Parts 1 & 2 (Moonchild bootlegs, Paris 4/4/73)

Giuseppe Verdi - La Forza del Destino - Maria Callas, Richard Tucker, Carlo Tagliabue, La Scala Milan/Tullio Serafin (EMI Classics)

Album - Microbricolages (Delhotel)

King Crimson - Palazzo Della Sport, Brescia, March 20, 1974 and Jahnhalle, Pforzheim, March 31, 1974 (DGMLive.com authorized FLAC downloads)

Sound the alarm.

Composer-bandleader Darcy James Argue wrote up a detailed account of what appears to have been a fairly electrifying concert by Alarm Will Sound at Zankel Hall. Argue is insightful, evocative, entertaining and not uncritical when it seems to have been warranted. Don't miss it. Maury D'annato, of My Favorite Intermissions fame, offers another welcome perspective, that of the non-new-music specialist responding honestly and candidly to information received. Good stuff.

Enigma variations.

Saxophonist Bill McHenry is an utter mystery to me, in the best possible sense. He's a young jazz musician attempting to carve out a distinct identity for himself in a city that boasts innumerable fine players, and in a music that prizes individual identity, yet arguably has few stones left to overturn -- or so it might seem, anyway. And somehow, he's unarguably succeeding.

Ben Ratliff, the excellent and broadminded chief jazz critic at The New York Times, has been writing perceptively about McHenry for some years now, which made the saxophonist a player I'd long hoped to encounter live. And certainly, the quartet McHenry led at the Village Vanguard tonight was the band with which to hear him: Guitarist Ben Monder and bassist Reid Anderson have been among McHenry's foremost collaborators for a decade now, and the group was completed by the protean Paul Motian, a drummer for whom the overused adjective "legendary" seems entirely fitting.

Jazz is a music that eventually prizes iconoclasts, but positively reveres antecedents. Part of the game in evaluating a young player is figuring out where he or she came from, stylistically. And that's what makes McHenry so pleasantly perplexing. He partakes of the lineage, certainly: As a saxophonist, he's studied Sonny Rollins and Dewey Redman, but sounds like neither. His musical presence is more circumspect; his sound is smaller, but not at all ungenerous. McHenry's compositions in some respects recall those of Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman, but not entirely, and not slavishly.

To call McHenry's progress rapid is something of a gross understatement; listening to his 1998 CD, Rest Stop, and his 2003 release with tonight's band, Bill McHenry Quartet Featuring Paul Motian -- both on the invaluable and well-named Spanish label Fresh Sounds New Talent -- you're hard pressed to accept the fact that the same saxophonist made both records. (The same is true of Monder, who plays on both, and whose own latest release, Oceana, is an engrossing experience.)

If a single word can be used to describe McHenry's style, it would be patience. Even at quicker tempos, his conceptions spin out in their own time, often at peculiar angles with unexpected resolutions. Like Coleman, McHenry possesses a gift for unspooling elliptical melodies that nonetheless linger in the mind's ear, which are then wrapped in Monder's dense chords or caressed by his throaty lines. Anderson's reflexes are so sharp as to verge on prescience: He always seems to know where even the most seemingly wayward improvisation is headed, pacing it with a steady pulse or commenting upon it with a fluttering countermelody. Motian propels the group with constantly shifting patterns dependent more on touch and timbre than steady beat, broken up by sudden silences as startling as his rare outbursts.

Of the seven selections played in tonight's first set, six were new compositions. In the opener, provisionally titled "Roses," McHenry pushed a clean, unhurried melodic line through dusky clouds from Monder and Anderson, dragging wispy contrails in its wake. Still more tentatively titled, one suspects, was "Narcissism Has Entered My Subconscious, But It's Hooking Me Up," in which the melody seemed to pour out in a singular exhalation, set against the syncopations of an abstracted Latin pulse. Monder's liquid chords and punctuating twangs sometimes recalled the sound of Bill Frisell, but his tone and time were all his own.

McHenry's take on "I Can't Get Started" seemed shy, even diffident, his circumspect posture affording no schmaltz or posturing in the well-worn standard. The next tune, spontaneously dubbed "R.J." for a friend in the audience, featured a catchy theme built of Monkish ascents and bluesy tumbles, and elicited some of McHenry's most extrovert growls and slurs. "Taylor," named for another friend in the house, conjured the dreamlike reverie of Motian's trio with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano; a lyrical solo by Anderson, accompanied by a radiant, fluttering tonal wash from Monder and a timeless shimmer from Motian, provided the set's most exquisite moment.

Another ballad followed, "Stinky Cove" -- a perhaps-unfortunate name for an evocative vista from McHenry's Maine childhood. An old-fashioned, romantic melody not so far removed from "Body and Soul" could easily have lapsed into mannerism, were it not for the band's general understatement and the quiet intensity with which McHenry picked apart and thoroughly investigated isolated notes and patterns during his solo. Ending the set was an unnamed, propulsive number -- a severe, stormy whorl that served to encapsulate in miniature the remarkable sense of welcome disorientation that had marked the entire set.

After the set, I was energized, elated and gabby, to say the least. I still don't quite know where McHenry is to be classified in the standard jazz taxonomy -- but what a welcome surprise it is to be so flummoxed.

Playlist:

Anton Bruckner - Symphony No. 9 - Royal Scottish National Orchestra/Georg Tintner (via eMusic)

Michelle Makarski - To Be Sung on the Water (ECM New Series) - due in late March, a luminous collection of solo and duo pieces by Giuseppe Tartini and Donald Crockett

Napalm Death - Scum (Earache); Diatribes (Earache); Order of the Leech (Spitfire); The Code Is Red...Long Live the Code (Century Media)

Flook - Haven (World Village)

Album - Microbricolages (Delhotel)

Bill McHenry Quartet - Featuring Paul Motian (Fresh Sound New Talent)

Paul Motian Quintet - Misterioso (Soul Note)

Bill McHenry Quartet - Rest Stop (Fresh Sound New Talent)

House of pain.

There are mad scenes, and then there are mad scenes. Joyce DiDonato's third-act portrayal of Dejanira -- wife of the titular hero in Handel's Hercules, which opened tonight at the Brooklyn Academy of Music -- is a performance that crawls up under your clothing and itches relentlessly. She starts out the act ghoulish, shrunken, griefstruck at having unwittingly engineered her husband's demise, and it only gets worse. DiDonato completes florid lines in a near shriek, she lurches and crawls, she slaps her head and swats away imaginary demons. She's reckless, macabre and unhinged, completely batty and utterly riveting. Even when the action is elsewhere, you can't help but stare at DiDonato in dumbstruck amazement.

Of course, Dejanira isn't the most solid citizen from the onset. Handel's first act contains little action and lots of description; even so, DiDonato's long jumps from grief at the reported death in battle of her husband to elation at his triumphant return is compelling theater. In act two, she reacts to the presence of her supposed -- and judging by body language, perhaps likely -- amorous rival, the captured princess Iole, by hurling herself bodily at the younger girl. ("Hillary, this is my new intern, Monica.") Briefly convinced that her suspicions are misplaced, she maintains an edge of wariness as she makes amends with Iole. By the end of the act, in an action that sets up the tragedy of the finale, she's a desperate housewife who unknowingly uses a lethal weapon in order to get her man back.

The spellbinding DiDonato is surrounded by solid collaborators. William Shimell swaggers with the confidence of a man who knows the seductive nature of his power. The young Swedish soprano Ingela Bohlin portrays Iole with a fresh-faced innocence -- up until the moment in act three that she tenderly drapes herself across her dead captor's body, which suggests that either Dejanira was right all along, or this is a hostage with a seriously advanced case of Stockholm syndrome. As Hyllus, son of Hercules and Dejanira, Ed Lyon is sweet, well-meaning and mostly ineffectual -- he's Buffy the Vampire Slayer sidekick Xander Harris, physically and otherwise. [EDIT: By this, I definitely mean that Lyon sings an ineffectual character; his voice, on the other hand, is light and handsome.] Katija Dragojevic's Lichas is the drama's most unambiguous locus of duty, honor and genuine heart. The onstage chorus performed admirably throughout the evening, and provided director Luc Bondy with raw material for some striking visual effects, including the ebony wave of singers backed into a dark crease of curtain at the opening of act three.

Handel may not have written Hercules as an actual opera -- "music drama" was his chosen term -- but Bondy's effective directing rendered the work gripping rather than merely stageworthy. DiDonato's shocking abandon is perhaps the foremost example, but other, more subtle touches are everywhere in abundance. When unseen deity Jove commands the wedding of Iole and Hyllus at the conclusion, the uneasy mismatch is underscored by the physical distance the two maintain as they sing their hymn of praise; Iole had already rejected Hyllus's sincere advances, a fact neither could quite set aside even under holy order.

Bondy's stark staging was a modern update of a classical Greek amphitheatre, its sand-covered floor strewn with fragments of a monumental statue that suggests this particular royal couple's demise from the onset. Using minimal means and effective blocking, Bondy created one memorable stage picture after another while always advancing the drama. (I doubt that this is what the Met donors New York Times reporter Daniel Wakin interviewed would label "Eurotrash" -- but either way, bring it on!) In the pit, William Christie led his ensemble Les Arts Florissants in a stylish, superbly balanced and lovingly shaped performance of Handel's score, despite a few spots of notably wayward intonation.

Given the usual drawing power of Christie's presentations at BAM, I was genuinely surprised to see empty seats tonight. Granted, it was an early curtain, a long show and Valentine's Day, to boot. Still, the chance to see and hear musical drama rendered with such a high level of intelligence and imagination is more uncommon than non-New York City music bloggers might suspect. Add in Joyce DiDonato's star-confirming performance, and this seems fairly compulsory. The remaining performances are on Thursday, Feb. 16; Saturday, Feb. 18 and Sunday, Feb. 19.

There were plenty of empty seats at the Metropolitan Opera's Aida on Monday night, too, but that's far less surprising in a mostly B-cast performance of a well-trodden Sonja Frisell [EDIT: thanks for the correction, JSU] extravaganza, especially after a major snowstorm. That there were still newcomers in the crowd was confirmed by the gasps at every elevator move. And I'll also grant that the performance actually gained definition and momentum as the night wore on.

But -- and there's no pleasant way to say this -- Andrea Gruber had a bad first act. No, a BAD first act. Her voice was simply not there, and her acting was frequently painful, a catalog of lunges, swoons and puckers. She improved to some degree in each act; I've seen her do better, and I forgive easily, but still...

As Radames, Johann Botha gave a tremendously ardent, sweet performance. A large man, Botha's voice set the whole of the house ringing. Kwangchul Youn was a commanding Ramfis, Hao Jiang Tian a decent King. Juan Pons turned in a solid Amonasro; if he wasn't quite as scene-stealing as Lado Atanelli had been last fall, it was probably because of the towering presence that lifted the evening above routine: Olga Borodina's Amneris. Simply stated, Borodina owned this show. She was seductive, shrewd, domineering, nasty and ultimately heartbreaking. For her performance alone, this was time well spent.

The chorus had a strong night, and in the pit, James Conlon once again dug into the sheer genius to be found in one of Verdi's supposedly more foursquare scores. Heard through incessant coughs and chatter, the preludes to each act were genuine marvels of orchestral refinement. Still, in light of that afternoon's press conference on that very stage, during which I couldn't help occasionally looking up and staring at Frisell's imposing columns suspended overhead, I wondered when Peter Gelb might call James Cameron in to overhaul the production -- and whether that was really such a bad idea.