Night After Night

NPR: "Olga Neuwirth's bold gender-bending opera has won the Grawemeyer Award"

"Olga Neuwirth's bold gender-bending opera has won the Grawemeyer Award"
NPR
December 6, 2021

Goings On About Town, November 29, 2021.

The Goings On About Town section in The New Yorker has begun a gradual return to its conventional format, with live, in-person events taking greater precedence among the album reviews and online events that replaced them throughout pandemic quarantine months. (Click on the image to enlarge it, or hit the link to read the text on the New Yorker website.)

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Goings On About Town, June 29, 2020.

The Goings On About Town section in The New Yorker remains suspended indefinitely in its conventional format, replaced with a mix of album reviews and listings for events taking place online—some live, others pre-recorded. (Click on the image to enlarge it, or hit the link to read the text on the New Yorker website.)

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Goings On About Town, June 22, 2020.

The Goings On About Town section in The New Yorker remains suspended indefinitely in its conventional format, replaced with a mix of album reviews and listings for events taking place online—some live, others pre-recorded. (Click on the image to enlarge it, or hit the link to read the text on the New Yorker website.)

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Musicking in Quarantine: May 16-17, 2020.

May 16, 6pm EDT

Satie Pandémie: Collective Vexation
A 20-hour livestream honoring Erik Satie's birthday
Produced by Teatro Miela Bonawentura, Trieste, Italy
More details and playback here.

Dipping into the livestream and out again, I watched and listened to some or all of these contributions…

Alvin Curran

Stephen Drury

Petra Persolja

Kathleen Supové

8:30pm EDT

Katherine Young
Solo set for The Quarantine Concerts, produced by Experimental Sound Studio
More details and playback here.

Arrived in time to catch the last 10 minutes of a moody, effective 18-minute performance involving bassoon and electronics.

8:50pm EDT

Object Collection: You Are Under Our Space Control
Abridged/socially isolated adaptation presented for Indexical
More details and playback here.

Here again, caught the last 10 minutes or so—just enough to address my curiosity about whether this troupe could adjust its idiosyncratic vision and expression to livestreaming. The result was weirdly compelling, which I guess means "yes."

9pm EDT

Satie Pandémie: Collective Vexation

Returned to the livestream for a bit, mainly to watch some friends and favorites.

Gloria Cheng

Sarah Gibson

Thomas Kotcheff

Vicky Ray

Corey Hamm

Richard Valitutto

Lorenzo Marasso

 

May 17, from around 1:30pm EDT

Satie Pandémie: Collective Vexation

Returned to the livestream once again, trying to catch some friends and favorites. Not everything went according to plan, and not every segment sounded good. But the performances were lovely, and some – Burleson, Distler, and Guneyman in particular – were quite daring, approaching their assignments with flashes of individualism.

Geoffrey Burleson

Hiroko Sakurazawa

Jed Distler

Sarah Bob

Meral Guneyman

Goings On About Town, May 4, 2020.

The Goings On About Town section in The New Yorker remains suspended indefinitely in its conventional format, and album reviews linger. But with a marked uptick lately in the number of live online events planned and announced well in advance, the possibility of "events listings" has resumed. For the May 4 issue, I've written about two streaming events: a week-long replay of Angel's Bone, the arresting opera by Du Yun and Royce Vavrek, streamed as "Opera of the Week" on the Beth Morrison Projects website; and the first-ever wholly online Bang on a Can Marathon. (Click on the image to enlarge it, or hit the link to read the text on the New Yorker website.)

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Welcome (Back) to Night After Night.

Change is upon us once again, and with it a fresh start for Night After Night—elsewhere. As of Thursday, April 23, the primary focus of my work has shifted over to a newly launched Substack newsletter, also called Night After Night. That title has provided my online identity – my "brand" – for more than two decades; no reason I would change that now.

From the new site, my explanatory preamble:

As in all of my previous ventures – from blogging and freelancing through stints with Time Out New York, The New York Times, the Boston Globe, and National Sawdust Log – I’ll be covering music in its infinite richness and variety, emphasizing what’s happening here and now. I’ll interview composers and performers about their newest projects, as well as bigger, broader ideas. I’ll review current recordings… and concerts, too, when the opportunity returns. I’ll direct your attention toward pertinent news and reviews published elsewhere, too.

I plan to post twice a week, and some posts will be available to everyone. But paying subscribers will have access to premium content now in planning stages… stay tuned.

Following that preamble, the first real entry – a biographical prelude, an extensive interview with Quince Ensemble and composer David Lang, and a postlude to my New York Times obituary of Richard Teitelbaum – was sent out on April 23. You can read it now, for free.

You'll notice that subscriptions are available, and at some point soon I'll start to roll out features meant exclusively for those who subscribe. That said, I completely recognize that this is a difficult time, and I intend to keep a substantial portion of my work freely accessible to all.

As for this long-serving Typepad blog, well, it's staying right where it is, and shifting to serve, even more than it does already, as an archive for past writings—both my original posts and the work I make for others. The playlists will stay here, too, and I'll try to be diligent about them.

I'll continue to add more past content when I find time (ha!). But for now, the Substack newsletter is where I'll be moving forward.

I hope that you'll join me…

Goings On About Town, April 27, 2020.

The Goings On About Town section in The New Yorker remains suspended indefinitely in its conventional format, and album reviews linger. But with a marked uptick lately in the number of live online events planned and announced well in advance, the possibility of "events listings" has resumed. For the April 27 issue, I've written up a brief preview of subtracTTTTTTTTT, a new web-native opera by the music-theater performance-art troupe thingNY, which treats glitch, echo, connection issues, and so on not as a bug, but as a feature. (Click on the image to enlarge it, or hit the link to read the text on the New Yorker website.)

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You can watch the world premiere performance on Friday evening, April 24 at 6pm (EDT), on the thingNY website. It will repeat in the same place at the same time on Saturday and Sunday.

Happy Birthday, Philip Glass.

A warning, in advance, that what follows is a sentimental wallow.

I first came to know the music of Philip Glass in 1983, when – as an ambitious 17-year-old autodidact subscriber to the classical-music division of the RCA Music Club – I forgot to send back the "ship nothing" reply card one fateful month, and thus found myself in possession of the newest album by a living composer I'd never heard of. Truthfully, I doubt that I could have named another living composer then, let alone one whose idiom was so far afield of the Copland, Stravinsky, and Varèse I was devouring at the time.

Which is how I acquired my first Glass recording: The Photographer. On cassette.

I found the music instantly fascinating – the two longer pieces, Act II and Act III, especially – even if I lacked the technical acumen to explain how and why they worked. The response was visceral… it quite simply was.

But I can't say I fell deeply in love with Glass's music until a month or so later, when I ventured to acquire another tape…

Glassworks was a nakedly commercial venture: a set of appealing pieces, and succinct ones by Glass's standard, intended to introduce lay listeners to his language gently. It worked. And to this day, I pull Glassworks out (or, more likely, stream it somewhere) on a regular basis.

And then came the plunge into the Real Deal…

I still recall the pride I felt in using Christmas money from my grandparents to purchase a recording of A Complete Opera—and a weird contemporary one, to boot. (For some reason I was oddly certain they'd be impressed; I don't know that they were, actually.) This was the original Tomato version of Einstein on the Beach, re-pressed on four vinyl LPs by CBS Masterworks.

Truthfully, I'd had a taste of Einstein already: an absolutely roof-raising live recording of "Building" was included on The Nova Convention, a two-cassette release from Giorno Poetry Systems, which I'd acquired principally because it featured Frank Zappa (forgive me) and William S. Burroughs. This would have been one of my earliest encounters with Laurie Anderson, too.

Sadly, the Nova Convention "Building" hasn't been ripped and posted, near as I can tell. But the original one is fierce, too, and it paved my way toward Glass's more conventional subsequent operas.

I can't and won't claim to have heard every single note that Glass has composed or recorded—I mean, who has, apart from Glass himself? But I've heard a lot, and I continue to listen… and I still believe that "Hymn to the Aten" (or "Hymn to the Sun," if you prefer) from Akhnaten is the single most beautiful thing Glass has composed, to date.

Having waited for decades, I finally heard Akhnaten and the "Hymn" performed live on opening night of the Metropolitan Opera run last year. To be perfectly honest, I had serious reservations about aspects of the production; maybe you noticed I never reviewed it formally, or even posted much about it on social media. But the performance was magnificent, convincing me that Akhnaten actually is a better piece than I'd thought it was, these past 30-plus years… and time stood still when Anthony Roth Costanzo sang the "Hymn."

Glass turns 83 today, and he's still going strong: writing new music, touring the world, earning standing ovations in Big Cultural Institutions that once shunned him. (The ovation he received at Akhnaten was thunderous.) In the coming weeks here in New York City, the current manifestation of his long-running Philip Glass Ensemble will play the watershed composition Music in 12 Parts at Le Poisson Rouge – without Glass – spread across two nights and four sets on Feb. 16 and 17, while his newest music-theater project, Mud/Drowning, a collaboration with director JoAnne Akalaitis, opens on Feb. 21 at Mabou Mines, running through March 7.

But for the record, Glass remains worthy of more and better attention. His symphonies are solid pieces, deserving wider circulation; at least a few merit repertory status. And while it's been wonderful to experience Glass's great "Portrait Trilogy" operas among audibly appreciative sold-out crowds in New York over the last decade and change, I'd still love to see some of his stronger subsequent operas mounted here. I surmise that the revised Appomattox suits that description, to read my friend and colleague Anne Midgette's review, and I strongly believe that Waiting for the Barbarians – which I reviewed for The New York Times in its U.S. premiere at Austin Lyric Opera – also merits production—especially in the present political moment.

I'm grateful to have lived with Glass's music all these years, and glad as well to have had numerous professional intersections with him over the decades. Glass actually was one of my first-ever interviews, back when I was a undergraduate reporter writing for the campus newspaper. (Some day I'll locate that article and decide whether it's worth scanning or transcribing.) Twenty years later, I had the distinct pleasure – and challenge! – of tailing Glass, tape recorder in hand, while he chased his two youngest sons, then aged 5 and 3, around a Houston Street playground, and documenting his impressively composed train of thought for a New York Times feature about having old and new operas appearing on both coasts, more or less at once.

A decade after that, I shared the National Sawdust stage with Glass, John Zorn, and my present employer, Paola Prestini, leading a conversation about influence, lineage, and legacy. However calm and professional I might have appeared on that occasion, inner me was utter Wayne and Garth.

Happy birthday, Mr. Glass. And for all these decades of inspiration and joy: profound thanks.

Break on through: The Met to play Mazzoli at BAM.

Missy Mazzoli
(Photograph: Marylene Mey)

A little more than a decade ago, when I was at the Metropolitan Opera to see Leoš Janáček's From the House of the Dead, I spotted the composer Missy Mazzoli passing by in the outer lobby. We'd known each other for a few years by then, and waved to one another from a distance. Then I pulled out my phone and posted a tweet: "I've spotted Missy Mazzoli at the Met for House of the Dead. One day I'll be here to hear her. Bank on it." I doubled down on that prognostication a few weeks later in The New York Times, recounting that tweet at the start of a year-end essay in which her work – and that of a few other composers of her generation, who were starting to achieve success in major mainstream institutions – was called out for attention and celebration.

If you'd like to check my work, I posted my receipts in the blog post I wrote on Sept. 24, 2018: the day an article by Michael Cooper in The New York Times revealed that Mazzoli was one of two composers commissioned to create new works for the Metropolitan Opera under the leadership of its new music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Mazzoli and Jeanine Tesori also had the distinction of being the only women composers commissioned by the Met in the company's history.

What prompts me to bring this all up yet again is because when all this buzz was transpiring to make me look insightful in 2018, I ventured one more opinion, posted in conjunction with the New York City premiere of Proving Up, the most recent opera Mazzoli had created with her gifted librettist partner, Royce Vavrek:

 

One, as of this minute there are 14 tickets remaining for tomorrow night, and one of them OUGHT to have your name on it. Two, the @MetOpera, having announced a future @missymazzoli commission, should fast-track 'Breaking the Waves' into its 2019-20 season. That is all.

— Steve Smith (@nightafternight) September 27, 2018

Granted, Cooper's article about Mazzoli's Met commission stipulated that, in the words of general manager Peter Gelb, "the Met Orchestra would perform a Mazzoli chamber opera at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with Mr. Nézet-Séguin conducting." Anyone who knows Breaking the Waves knows that it is no chamber opera, but a full-blown stage drama, for a sizeable cast and a substantial orchestra.

But lo and behold: late today, BAM announced a substantial new festival titled Yours Theirs Ours—including three performances of Breaking the Waves. The production is one by Opera Ventures and Scottish Opera, introduced to widespread acclaim at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival. (The same two producers previously brought Mark-Anthony Turnage's Greek to BAM in 2018.) The director is Tom Morris, who helmed the Edinburgh presentation; Nézet-Séguin will conduct the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra together with the Scottish Opera Chorus. As yet, no casting has been announced.

Tickets for Breaking the Waves – and all other Yours Theirs Ours events – go on sale to BAM patrons on January 28, to BAM members on February 4, and to the general public on February 11.

I'm tempted, naturally, to make some bold claim about my powers of perception… but really, this was a no-brainer, even a decade ago.