The New York Times’s classical music and opera critics see and hear much more than they review. Here is what hooked them during the past month. Leave your own favorites in the comments.
Davóne Tines
Andrew Carnegie’s 1902 mansion on Fifth Avenue, a Georgian homage on an immense, Gilded-Age scale, is currently the home of a more modest domestic scene: the bass-baritone Davóne Tines’s childhood living room.
As part of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s triennial exhibition, “Making Home,” Tines has worked with the director Zack Winokur and the artist Hugh Hayden to create “Living Room, Orlean, Virginia,” an uncanny, poignant replica of the house of Tines’s grandparents, who raised him.
The “Living Room” tableau, arranged on an enormous rocker, is a meditation on “home” as something soothing yet precarious for a musician like Tines, who spends much of his year on the road. On closer inspection, this installation, with its cozy arrangement of furniture, an upright piano and even a rug over carpeted flooring, has a dreaminess to it: Eerily, the photo frames are empty.
Enveloping all this is a mesmerizing soundscape of quotidian noise like passing cars, clock chimes and sizzling food. (Tines is heard answering a call with “Hello?” then saying, “Grandma, Mom’s on the phone.”) There is also instrumental droning, and humming, along with vocal practice and communal songs at the piano. Tender and haunting, “Living Room” is the latest example of Tines’s thinking beyond a traditional singer’s career, with expansive, ambitious and truly meaningful artistry. JOSHUA BARONE
Lise Davidsen
JOSHUA BARONE Zack, you and I were at the Metropolitan Opera for one of the biggest nights of its season: the soprano Lise Davidsen’s first performance there as Tosca. With the pairing of a great singer and a great role, there was a lot of anticipation, but you rightfully wrote in your review that Davidsen seemed to still be figuring out her interpretation. Then we went back.
ZACHARY WOOLFE I felt that at the second performance, a few days after the premiere, Davidsen already seemed to be warming up and she had begun to more fully inhabit Tosca’s varied moods, from coy to agonized. This brings up something we critics think about a lot: Operas, especially revivals like this one, have a short rehearsal period, no previews and just a handful of performances. So they tend to vary more over the run, though not necessarily in a steady, getting-better trajectory. What was your sense of the change?
BARONE Each performance, in this case, felt like an improvement. But I would limit that to her musical interpretation. She sounded like Tosca as she should be: at first optimistic, even naïve, then distressed and desperate. Davidsen’s “Vissi d’arte” was one of the most moving things I’ve heard at the Met so far this season. Physically, though, she has a nobility that doesn’t necessarily suit the character. Which is fine! Not every role is meant for every singer.
WOOLFE Davidsen’s Tosca hasn’t shifted my sense that she is at her best when her huge voice is sailing through the long lines of Wagner and Strauss. But this experience was a good reminder for us critics — and readers — that we’re usually writing reviews based on a snapshot. A different day could result in a different judgment.
George Crumb
For much of music history, composers evoked echoes through repetition: A motif would be presented first in full-bodied form and then again faintly, as if heard from a distance.
In his “Eleven Echoes of Autumn, 1965 (Echoes I),” the American composer George Crumb expanded the compositional techniques for representing resonance and the psychological affects it can render, including inner dialogue, memories and auditory hallucinations. On Nov. 14, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center presented Crumb’s work in a spellbinding performance by the pianist Gilbert Kalish, the clarinetist Jose Franch-Ballester, the flutist Tara Helen O’Connor and the violinist Bella Hristova. These players honored both the poetry and the enigmatic prickliness of Crumb’s musical language.
“Eleven Echoes” grows out of an unassuming, five-note chime that is repeated in different registers on the piano. So far, so traditional. But before long, sounds develop ghostly shadows: A feathery violin line is doubled by soft whistling; sympathetic resonance clouds gather around thunderclaps in the piano; wind players lean into the open Steinway so that echoes of their phrases float up from its strings. When O’Connor mouthed a Federico García Lorca poem fragment into her instrument, the resulting amalgam of words, breath and flutiness seemed to melt physical reality and memory into one. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM
Ethan Iverson
This year has offered a welcome stream of fully notated music by the jazz pianist and composer Ethan Iverson. His first piano sonata was issued by Blue Note in January, and recently, the Urlicht label has brought the double-disc set “Playfair Sonatas,” which contains a half-dozen additional items for assorted instruments and his own piano.
The new album’s release was celebrated with a concert at the Yamaha Artist Services space in Manhattan, where Iverson told the audience that the microtones in the second movement of his Trombone Sonata should not be taken for intonation mistakes coming from the soloist, Mike Lormand; instead, Iverson said, they are best heard as a tribute to the late New York Art Quartet member Roswell Rudd. Those tart harmonies lent a quasi-comic quality to what is otherwise labeled “Hymn.”
Even better was the Clarinet Sonata, which Iverson performed with Carol McGonnell. In his commentary about this piece, Iverson has noted its minor key setting, deeming its first three movements “rather driving and dour” ahead of a “joyous” finale. I’m afraid I can’t quite agree: To my delighted ear, his opening movement’s pianism works as a burr under the saddle of the high-riding, mellifluous riffs in the clarinet. I’ve been singing some of the motifs ever since. SETH COLTER WALLS
I think I’m in love with Quinn Kelsey’s Scarpia in Puccini’s hair-raiser “Tosca” at the Metropolitan Opera. Which is a problem because Scarpia, no run-of-the-mill, soprano-stealing villain, is sort of a sadist.
Scarpia’s theme, which opens the opera, sows harmonic chaos. His torture of Tosca’s lover turns the screws on him in music of unremorseful intensity. He thrills at the idea of taking Tosca unwillingly. Baritones, especially those confronted with the challenge of filling the Met’s cavernous auditorium, tend to bark, sneer and blow their way through the role.
But not Kelsey. His Scarpia, filled with romance, transported himself to some Dionysian plane at the thought of a beautiful woman and savored the lusciousness of his blackmail. His paeans to desire sounded steamy rather than perverse, and his tone, warm and dense, swooned and rose to brightly resonant climaxes that unlocked a repressed vulnerability. With the power of opposing poles, a magnetism drew Tosca and him together.
Kelsey’s voice has a distinctive grain that feels deeply human. It’s part of what makes his Rigoletto an effortlessly dimensional antihero. Where that court jester suffers from a broken moral compass, though, Scarpia is a total nut job, and Kelsey commits so resolutely to his twisted worldview that he makes it exquisite, and even beautiful. OUSSAMA ZAHR