Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Advisory

The new season of The Wire begins on Sunday night. Alongside old themes of street crime, police work, and city politics, the greatest TV show in history introduces a new subject: education.

More: Jacob Weisberg writes a spot-on paean to the show.

Don't be too hard on yourself

The New York Times Magazine is publishing excerpts from Susan Sontag's diaries. Here is an entry for April 20, 1965:

another project: Webern, Boulez, Stockhausen. Buy records, read, do some work. I've been very lazy.

As all-devouring as Sontag's intellect was, this project apparently defeated her in the end.

Agenda

With clear skies prevailing, downtown New Yorkers should check out a Sound Art concert in Washington Square Park today at 3PM. The impressive lineup includes sampling virtuoso Carl Stone, dissonant-chromatic rock band Jerseyband, the hypnotically inventive composer-vocalist Joan La Barbara, the crack young percussion ensemble So Percussion, electronic composers Luke DuBois and Daedelus, and Princeton professor Paul Lansky, one of the reigning geniuses of electronic music.

Update: Steve Smith has a report on the event, and Darcy James Argue has a photojournal. I caught an early portion of the proceedings, enjoying the combination of experimental sound and summer sun on a patch of grass nearby. Lansky's Ride, with speaking voices and nature murmurs bubbling up from a molten flow of electronic sound, was mesmerizing. Read to the end of Steve's post for news of another sound-art event — in a Starbucks, of all places. I also recommend an upcoming S.E.M. Ensemble concert at the Spiegeltent downtown, although I won't be able to attend, because it's opening night at the Met.

What are you playing?

I've had this bee in my bonnet for a while, but why in God's name is it so difficult for orchestras to put complete season schedules on their websites? I am looking in every corner of the Montreal Symphony site for a chronological listing of what Kent Nagano is doing in his inaugural season, et je ne trouve rien. Contrast the fast-rising Nashville Symphony, which has a link on its front page to "entire 2006 / 07 season." Thank yew! ... Addendum: Paul Wells has a report on Nagano's opening concert in Montreal, for which bells were rung in churches across the city. Nagano likes the Ustvolskaya-Beethoven combination; I heard him do almost the same program with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester in Berlin in 2002 (with Ligeti's Lux aeterna in place of The Unanswered Question).

Barge of the future

On October 7, in the gently rocking confines of BargeMusic (not pictured), I will host Composers on the Edge, a New Yorker Festival event. The concept is to round up some inventive young artists who are airing out the definition of what it means to be a composer in this frazzled day and age. The panel includes Mason Bates, who divides his time between composing and DJing; Corey Dargel, whose work hovers on the border between art song and art rock; Nico Muhly, steeped in Renaissance polyphony, minimalism, and Björk; and Joanna Newsom, a harpist-songwriter who absorbed twentieth-century repertory at Mills College. I fear that Prof. Heebie McJeebie will have a heart attack if he ever hears about the manifest aesthetic impurity of these young people's efforts, but for most others it ought to be a lively evening — more like a concert with intermittent talk than a panel discussion. Tickets go on sale at noon today.

Update: As of 2:30PM, it's sold out.

Post-hiatus miscellany

1) In the Kooky Klassical department, a man on the David Letterman show plays Mozart's Symphony No. 40 by rollerblading past rows of wine bottles. (Courtesy of Pierre Ruhe.) [Update: John Burke plays the perfect-pitch card and points out that it's been transposed to C minor.] 2) Charles Downey at ionarts has put together an excellent fall opera preview, with emphasis on novel repertory and premieres. I'd suggest adding John Adams's A Flowering Tree in Vienna. 3) Steve Smith disintegrates Paul McCartney's new "classical" album in Time Out NY: "An hour of singing boys is something only Michael Jackson could love." 4) Various new blogs have been added to the Music Blogs list.

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson discography

Recordings by the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.

Mozart, Don Giovanni (DVD, rec. 1990 / released 2005)
Handel, Giulio Cesare in Egitto (DVD, rec. 1990 / released 2006)
Fauré, Pelléas et Mélisande (DG, 1990)
Handel, Messiah (Harmonia Mundi, 1991)
Motets of Heinrich Schütz (Koch, 1991)
Schumann, Mignon Lieder, Kerner Lieder (Koch, 1992)
Bach, Anna Magdalena Notebook (Harmonia Mundi, 1993)
Monteverdi, Il Ritorno d’Ulisse (Harmonia Mundi, 1993)
Purcell, The Fairy Queen (Virgin Classics, 1993)
Purcell, Dido and Aeneas (Harmonia Mundi, 1993)
Handel Arias (Harmonia Mundi, 1994)
Handel, Susanna (Harmonia Mundi, 1995)
Charpentier, Médée (Erato, 1995)
Handel, Ariodante (Harmonia Mundi, 1996)
Handel, Theodora (Harmonia Mundi, 1996)
Handel, Theodora (Glyndebourne DVD, 1996)
Handel, Arias for Durastanti, etc. (Harmonia Mundi, 1996)
Respighi, Il Tramanto, with the Australian Chamber Orchestra (Sony, 1996)
Rameau, Hippolyte et Aricie (Erato, 1996)
Britten, Phaedra (Erato, 1996)
Songs of Mahler and Delage (Moab Music Festival, 1997)
Handel, Clori, Tirsi e Fileno (Harmonia Mundi, 1998)
Harbison, At First Light (Archetype, 1998)
Live from Wigmore Hall (BBC, 2000)
Adams, El Niño (Nonesuch, 2001 + DVD)
Mozart, Idomeneo (EMI, 2001)
Bach Cantatas (Nonesuch, 2003)
Mahler, Symphony No. 2 (San Francisco Symphony, 2004)
Handel Arias (Avie, 2004)
Lieberson, Rilke Songs etc. (Bridge, 2006)
Harbison, North and South, etc. (Naxos, 2006)
Peter Lieberson, Neruda Songs (Nonesuch, 2006/7)
Songs by Mahler, Handel, and Peter Lieberson (Wigmore Hall Live, 2007)
Spanish Love Songs (Bridge, 2007)
Brahms and Schumann Lieder (Wigmore Hall Live, 2008)
Lorraine at Emmanuel: Music of Bach and Handel (Avie, 2008)
Recital at Ravinia Festival (Harmonia Mundi, 2009)

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in memoriam

"Fervor"

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, Sept. 25, 2006.

On the day before the Fourth of July, the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson died of complications from breast cancer, at the age of fifty-two. News of her passing aroused little interest outside the classical-music world, since she was hardly a household name, and lacked even the intermittently twinkling, Sunday-morning-television stardom achieved by the likes of Renée Fleming and Yo-Yo Ma. She recorded infrequently in later years; she was shy about being interviewed; she had no press agent. Her fame consisted of an ever-widening swath of ardor and awe that she left in her wake whenever she sang. Among those who had been strongly affected by her work, there was a peculiarly intense kind of grief.

I was one of those people. In recent years, I found it hard to assume a pose of critical distance from this artist, even though I never got closer to her than Row H. In the days after she died, I tried to write about her, and failed. It felt wrong to call her “great” and “extraordinary,” or to throw around diva-worship words like “goddess” and “immortal,” because those words placed her on a pedestal, whereas the warmth in her voice always brought her close. Nonetheless, empty superlatives will have to do. She was the most remarkable singer I ever heard. She was incapable of giving a routine performance—I saw her twelve times, and each appearance had something explosively distinctive about it—and her career took the form of a continuous ascent. New Yorkers saw her for the final time last November, when she came to town with the Boston Symphony to perform “Neruda Songs,” composed by her husband, Peter Lieberson. She sang that night with such undiminished power that it seemed as though she would be around forever. Then she was gone, leaving the apex vacant.

She was born Lorraine Hunt, in San Francisco, the daughter of two exacting Bay Area music teachers. She grew up studying piano, violin, and viola, settling on the viola as her main instrument. She made relatively few public appearances as a singer in her youth, but when she did she invariably caught people’s attention. At a concert by the Oakland Youth Orchestra, in 1972, she stepped forward to deliver an aria from Saint-Saëns’s “Samson and Delilah,” and Charles Shere, in a perceptive review for the Oakland Tribune, described a now familiar spell being cast for perhaps the first time: “She simply stood there and sang, hardly even opening her mouth, with an even range, secure high notes, and marvelous control of dynamics in the swells.”

By 1979, she was the principal violist of the Berkeley Symphony. When the orchestra decided to mount a production of “Hansel and Gretel” at San Quentin State Prison, she volunteered for the role of Hansel. Under these fittingly unconventional circumstances she made her operatic début. She took up singing full time while studying in Boston in the early eighties, drawing notice first for her precisely expressive accounts of Bach cantatas at Emmanuel Church and then for her work in radical opera productions, by Peter Sellars, of Handel’s “Giulio Cesare in Egitto” and Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” She rose to fame in Europe in the mid-nineties, mainly on the strength of an instantly legendary performance in Sellars’s production of Handel’s “Theodora” at the Glyndebourne Festival, in 1996. She made a belated Metropolitan Opera début in 1999, in John Harbison’s “The Great Gatsby.” The ovations that greeted her Dido in “Les Troyens” at the Met, in 2003, signified her assumption of diva status.

“Lorraine’s a bit of a nut,” people in the music business used to say. They were referring to her Northern California nature—her spiritual pursuits, her interest in astrology, her enthusiasm for alternative medicine. She sometimes unnerved her colleagues with her raucous sense of humor and her braying laugh. In retrospect, her alleged eccentricities seem essential to the evolution of her art. She broke through the façade of cool professionalism that too often prevails in the classical world, showing the kind of unchecked fervor that is more often associated with the greatest pop, jazz, and gospel singers. She was often compared to Maria Callas, but she might have been a shade closer to Mahalia Jackson.

The voice was primally beautiful, rich in tone and true in pitch. It had a wonderful way of materializing from the instrumental background, as if from the ether. In “Ombra mai fù,” from Handel’s “Xerxes,” the first note begins like an extra resonance around the strings. There was something calming and consoling about the mere fact of that sound. “Time itself stopped to listen,” Richard Dyer wrote in his obituary for the Boston Globe. Central to the singer’s repertory was a group of arias that I think of as her benedictions, her laying on of hands: “Ombra mai fù,” with which she made an overpowering first impression on New York operagoers in City Opera’s 1997 production of “Xerxes”; “As with rosy steps the morn,” from “Theodora,” which she made into an anthem of beatitude; Bach’s “Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen,” which, in an uncomfortably haunting Sellars staging, she sang while attired in a hospital gown; and the African-American spiritual “Deep River,” her signature encore. Listening closely, you could hear how immaculately crafted these performances were. Their emotional transparency was rooted in the fact that each expressive inflection was joined seamlessly to the next.

Loveliness was only the point of departure. She could also communicate passion and pain and a fearsome kind of anger. Her Xerxes whipped around to deliver an up-against-the-wall tirade in “You are spiteful, perverse, and insulting.” There was an apocalyptic quality to her rendition of “La Anunciación,” her centerpiece aria in John Adams’s Christmas oratorio, “El Niño.” When she sang Britten’s cantata “Phaedra” at the New York Philharmonic, she froze listeners in their seats with her high monotone chant of the words “I stand alone.” And as Irene, a spiritual leader of the martyrdom-bound Christians in “Theodora,” she made her voice into a kind of moral weapon. There is a DVD of the Glyndebourne “Theodora”—it is one of three essential recordings, the others being the Nonesuch CD of two Bach cantatas and the Avie CD of Handel arias—and the pivotal moment comes in the air “Bane of virtue, nurse of passions . . . Such is, prosperity, thy name.” In other words, money kills the soul. The phrase “thy name” is sung eighteen times, and by the end the voice is seared around the edges, raised up like a flaming sword. Deployed in the right way, this sound could bring down a government.

Having run the gamut from angelic serenity to angelic wrath, this most complete of singers concluded her career with a very human demonstration of love. She met Peter Lieberson in the summer of 1997, on the occasion of the première of his opera “Ashoka’s Dream,” in Santa Fe. They fell in love and eventually married, and Lieberson began to write with his wife’s voice in mind. By reputation a brilliant practitioner of twelve-tone technique, he had always had a secret yen for sensuous, late-Romantic harmony, and in “Neruda Songs" that desire came rushing to the surface. This is some of the most unabashedly lyrical music that any American composer has produced since Gershwin. It is also courageously personal music, the choice of Neruda poems seeming to acknowledge the fragility of Lorraine’s health. The final song, “Sonnet XCII,” begins, heartbreakingly, with the words “My love, if I die and you don’t—” The music is centered on a lullaby-like melody in G major, and it has the atmosphere of a motionless summer day. The vocal line ends on a B, and afterward the same note is held for two slow beats by the violas, as if they were holding the hand of the singer who came from their ranks. The composer is holding her hand, too. The last word is “Amor.”

Personal announcement

Malcolm and Daphne Ross, without whom Noise would scarcely have been possible, celebrate fifty years of marriage today.

Unbelievable

Robert Christgau, the man who co-invented serious writing on rock and pop, has been fired from the Village Voice. (For more, read Jody Rosen, who plausibly compares Christgau's influence to that of Pauline Kael.)

Bob and Cecil (and Sir Edward)

Looking over Bob Dylan's Chronicles again, I'm nonplussed by the story of Dylan singing "The Water Is Wide" one night in the Village with ... Cecil Taylor at the piano. I don't suppose there's any tape of this? Better that there isn't, so the imagination can run free.  "Cecil could play regular piano if he wanted to," Dylan laconically observes (p. 74).... Herb Levy writes in to point out that Tom Wilson, Dylan's producer in 1964 and 1965, also produced Taylor's debut album, Jazz Advance (not to mention Sun Ra, Frank Zappa, and the Velvet Underground). Levy provides a link to a Nat Hentoff piece on Chronicles, which highlights another excellent jazz moment in the book — Dylan meets Thelonious Monk and identifies himself as a folksinger, to which Monk repies, "We all play folk music." Which reminds me of what Edward Elgar said when the likes of Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams started insisting that English composers should use native folk tunes: "I am folk music."

A happy noise

In The New Yorker this week, but not online, is "Learning the Score," a long-gestating article on the state of music education. Above is a picture of Hassan Ralph Williams's locally legendary Malcolm X Shabazz High School Marching Band, playing at the Memorial Day Parade in Nutley, NJ last year. The website for the remarkable Community MusicWorks organization in Rhode Island can be found here. The Music for All Foundation has much useful information at its site; Music for All's alarming report on the drastic decline of music education in California seems to have spurred new investment in music and arts programs there, to the tune of $500 million.

Tenney

The restlessly inventive American composer James Tenney has died at the age of seventy-two. Kyle Gann has an appreciation of his achievements, which ranged from mind-altering experiments in electronic and computer music to precisely imagined instrumental works in just-intonation tuning. Both John Cage and György Ligeti considered him one of the most powerful minds in American music. Not long ago New World Records reissued the Frog Peak compilation of Tenney's sixties-era electronic works, including two wildly original pieces from 1961: Collage #1, aka Blue Suede, which pulverizes the voice of Elvis singing "Blue Suede Shoes"; and Analog #1, an oceanic surge of sound inspired by traffic in Holland Tunnel.

Elvis on language

The nonsensical phrase "can't help but" has become standard in various publications, including, it would seem, the New York Times. What gives? Elvis did not die for our sins in order to sing "I can't help but fall in love with you." The two correct options are "I cannot but fall in love with you" and "I can't help falling in love with you." Fortunately, Elvis chose the latter.

Wounded flowers dangling from the vine

Hats off to Jonathan Lethem for eliciting a brilliant monologue from Bob Dylan and arranging it sinuously in the pages of Rolling Stone. Two quotations jumped out at me. One is: "Let's face it, you're either serious about what you're doing or you're not serious about what you're doing. And you can't mix the two. And life is short." The other is: "More people have seen the Mona Lisa than ever listened to Michael Jackson. And only three people can see it at once. Talk about impact." Of course, every once in a while someone figures out how to broadcast the Mona Lisa on the radio. Next Wednesday I'll be doing another Dylan Night at KGB Bar, with Ben Hedin (editor of Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader), Bob Levinson, Mary Lee Kortes, Robert Polito, and boss David Remnick. We will be discussing the new album Modern Times, which is playing on the stereo now, and sounding darkly fine.

Hartke, Rorem, Goldenthal

"What Next?"

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, Aug. 21, 2006.

July was New American Opera Month in the purple hills of upstate New York and western Massachusetts. You could hardly drive your Smart car from the lesbian bed-and-breakfast to the organic farm stand without running over an adaptation of a literary property. Stephen Hartke’s “The Greater Good” made its début at the Glimmerglass Opera, in Cooperstown. The Lake George Opera, in Saratoga Springs, presented Ned Rorem’s “Our Town,” which had its première in Indiana earlier this year. Elliott Carter’s opera “What Next?” (1999) belatedly had its first American staging, at Tanglewood. Back in New York, Elliot Goldenthal’s “Grendel” was the centerpiece of the Lincoln Center Festival, in a Julie Taymor extravaganza. These performances, all well attended, came at the end of a musical season that brought John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic” to the San Francisco Opera, Tobias Picker’s “An American Tragedy” to the Met, and Lowell Liebermann’s “Miss Lonelyhearts” to Juilliard.

Are any of these new operas towering masterworks that will alter the course of music history while winning the hearts of millions? People have been asking that loaded question of American opera for a hundred years, and the way they phrase it almost demands a negative answer. Better to ask whether a new work is strong enough to hold the stage. If it does, it has a future, and the masterpiece-sorting can be done by later generations. “The Greater Good,” “Our Town,” and “Grendel” passed this test: lustily, wistfully, and by a hair.

Hartke’s “The Greater Good” is a tightly constructed, vividly imagined piece that may mark the emergence of a major opera composer. The excellent libretto, by Philip Littell, is based on Maupassant’s story “Boule de Suif,” which tells of the misadventures of a menagerie of bourgeois and aristocratic types who are travelling by coach in the middle of the Franco-Prussian War. A Prussian commandant stops the coach and lets them know that they can proceed only if Boule de Suif, a bighearted, big-boned prostitute who is on board, services his needs. She patriotically refuses. The others play elaborate psychological games to make her give in. They are greater whores than she. The challenge of this scathing little tale is that not a lot actually happens. Hartke seizes control with a subtle riot of sprung rhythms, colliding tunes, jazzy rave-ups, onomatopoeia (cat lovers will want a forthcoming Naxos recording if only for the Comtesse de Breville’s mewling, chirruping aria, “I miss my cat”), musical in-jokes (listen for the would-be-transcendent “Rosenkavalier” trio that never gets off the ground), and, at the end, a delicately shattering anthem of despair. Hartke is celebrated for his orchestral music, which mixes Stravinskyan neoclassicism, minimalism, jazz, and Balinese gamelan. The dazzle of his orchestration was no surprise; the sizzle of his theatre sense was big news.

The melancholy Americana of Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town” has long fascinated American composers. Aaron Copland, who wrote music for the 1940 film adaptation, wanted to make an opera out of it, but Wilder did not coöperate. Ned Rorem, who has written only one other evening-length opera in his eighty-two years, eventually received permission from the playwright’s estate. The drama plays to his strengths. Its mundane scenes of all-American life—baseball, drunkenness, gossip, marriage—elicit from Rorem the clean-lined, crisp-figured style that typified American music before the Cold War, and to which he has stayed uncompromisingly true. The unsettling transformation of the third act, in which we see the world through the eyes of the dead, makes him go deeper; at times, the music becomes uncharacteristically turbulent and grand. (Rorem has always prided himself on his Francophile restraint.) Wilder’s ghosts remind us that we never appreciate the transient glories of daily existence until it is too late. The very fabric of the score—its luminous orchestration, its pearly vocal lines, its gently pulsing rhythms, its celestially circling song of young love—evokes the mundane beauty that we overlook.

J. D. McClatchy, who sleekly adapted “Our Town” for Rorem, is the librettist of the moment; somehow, he also found time to write “Miss Lonelyhearts” for Liebermann (unfortunately, not a success), and to collaborate with Taymor on “Grendel.” The original source for the latter is John Gardner’s sardonic, poetic 1971 novel, a postmodern masterpiece in which the monster whom Beowulf slew strikes back with a tell-all memoir. The New York State Theatre was packed with spectators who were eager to see what new wonders Taymor had wrought, and they were not cheated: her staging included a decadent, stage-spanning Dragon, figures dancing in midair in strobe light, decomposing puppet beasts and beastly machines, and comically preening heroes who appeared to have studied the production numbers in “Showgirls” for choreographic inspiration. Goldenthal kept pace with the images, deploying a meta-Wagnerian, bass-heavy orchestration, semi-improvised episodes with a hard-rock tinge, thumping bacchanalia in the manner of Carl Orff, and spells of post-minimalist lyricism along the lines of recent John Adams. The trouble was that he merely kept pace; the score followed the action rather than drove it. Still, it had a certain mythic weight, and the show was a wow.

Glimmerglass, Lake George, and the Lincoln Center Festival all fielded mostly young, mostly unknown casts for their productions, proving that celebrity singers aren’t needed to attract audiences to new opera. True, Denyce Graves played the Dragon in “Grendel” (in woefully ragged voice), but the main attraction was the little-known but very fast-rising bass Eric Owens, in the title role. His hefty, tonally focussed, richly colored voice cut through the tumult of Goldenthal’s score, and his vital, naturalistic acting gave heart to a high-tech spectacle. Steven Sloane authoritatively marshalled the orchestra. In “Our Town,” which was directed by Nelson Sheeley and conducted by Mark Flint, the vocal standout was Sarah Paige Hagstrom, passionately engaged as Emily. At Glimmerglass, where David Schweizer put together a sharply humorous staging of “The Greater Good” and Stewart Robertson led a spot-on orchestral performance, Caroline Worra created a radiant and heartbreaking Boule de Suif.

At the Tanglewood festival, everyone was dumbstruck by the work ethic of James Levine. Sidelined in the spring with a rotator-cuff injury, the grand Pooh-Bah of the Met and the Boston Symphony has shed several dozen pounds and, if possible, seems more unstoppably dynamic than before. One weekend, he conducted three different all-Mozart programs, including all of “Don Giovanni.” Another weekend, he led, on consecutive nights, Schoenberg’s “Gurre-Lieder” and Strauss’s “Elektra,” which require orchestras of a hundred and forty and a hundred and fifteen players, respectively. I caught Levine’s last Tanglewood feat of the summer, in which he dissolved the difficulties of Carter’s “What Next?” The piece appeared on a program of short operas, alongside Hindemith’s “There and Back” and Stravinsky’s “Mavra.” The director Doug Fitch deftly tied the three works together with Dali-meets-Warhol imagery. The singers were Tanglewood students; the gleaming soprano voices of Chanel Marie Wood and Kiera Duffy, and the commanding contralto of Christin-Marie Hill, stood out.

“What Next?” is an anti-opera that pointedly avoids conventional narrative. Paul Griffiths’s libretto describes, in knotty, jokey, Samuel Beckett-like style, the aftermath of a highway accident. The characters may or may not be dead, and are trying to figure out what world they belong to. Carter’s hyper-complex musical language is fit for the subject, effortlessly summoning a hectic, rush-hour atmosphere. The various characters are assigned governing intervals—perfect fifths, minor and major seconds, tritones, and so on—and if two notes are insufficient to define a personality, that may be the point; at the border of death, the precious illusion of individuality disintegrates. This is the same disenchanting wisdom that Rorem imparts in the final act of “Our Town.” The overlap is ironic, because, for fifty years, Rorem and Carter have been considered polar opposites in American music, the one defending tonality and the other rejecting it. In their late operas, they are seeing humanity with almost the same eyes, as a frantic dance to a misheard tune.

Frantic August

I will be away this month, and out of e-mail / Internet contact. Please visit music blogs, and keep the dream alive.

London 1995

The Opera in England: Vigorous But Spiky

by Alex Ross

New York Times, June 24, 1995

 

"It looks as if the old spell on English opera may be broken at last," Benjamin Britten wrote in the summer of 1945, savoring the triumph of his "Peter Grimes." Purcell, the last English composer to gain anything more than fleeting operatic success, had died 250 years before. Britten's swift tale of crime and vengeance prompted a burst of operatic activity in England that has hardly let up for five decades.

Although Covent Garden's Verdi Festival occupies center stage here this month, operas by Britten and various successors have stolen a share of the limelight. New productions of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Billy Budd" have arrived at the English National Opera and Covent Garden, and "Grimes" was given a concert performance on Tuesday at the City of London Festival. Britten's own Aldeburgh Festival honored "Grimes" with an orchestral concert and also presented a new opera by Nicola LeFanu. The Glyndebourne Festival, meanwhile, mounted the latest Harrison Birtwistle opus, "The Second Mrs. Kong."

So is English opera alive and well? There is room for doubt, particularly concerning the repertory's international appeal. A recent Metropolitan Opera production of "Death in Venice" drew thin crowds; Michael Tippett's operas remain an acquired taste, and Mr. Birtwistle's thorny creations have yet to prove exportable. At the same time, opera seems in better shape here than elsewhere. All the younger composers are trying their hand at it, and audiences at least give them a hearing before moving on to the next phenomenon.

Mr. Birtwistle has held his ground against younger trends and become the unlikely doyen of English opera. His grim, raw, amorphous soundscapes make few concessions to narrow ears; he seems almost deliberately at odds with Britten's lucid play of styles. Yet he got his operatic start under Aldeburgh's auspices in 1968, with his knife-edged "Punch and Judy." Britten disliked the piece to the point of walking out, but the composer drew an avid following, particularly in European avant-garde circles.

While previous Birtwistle operas have adapted ancient or medieval myth, "The Second Mrs. Kong" looks obliquely on modern life. Russell Hoban's libretto is a hallucinatory colloquy of underworld voices, mythic apparitions, the ghost of Vermeer and a man who fancies himself King Kong. The murky scenario miraculously came to life in a dazzling multimedia staging by Tom Cairns, neatly tailored to Glyndebourne's new hall.

Amid pseudo-Joycean obscurities and cyberspace fireworks, the composer makes his formidable presence felt. He is a master of grinding, groaning sonorities, submerged pulses, spasms of frenzied gesturing, extra dimensions of electronic tone. "So the world turns" goes a line in his previous opera, "Gawain"; he likes a deep, axial rumble. But he is not a man of quick dramatic instincts. He seems strangely uninvolved in his librettist's breathless satire, borrowing outdated parodistic devices from Berg. Ancient subjects suit him better.

Ms. LeFanu's "Wildman" positions itself very differently in the Britten line. Like "Grimes," it is set on the somber coast of East Anglia, loosely adapting the local legend of a Wildman or merman who was caught at sea and held in the dungeon of Orford Castle. Kevin Crossley-Holland's poetic libretto plays again on Britten's favorite theme of the outcast, although the title character here is a perfect innocent. Mastering human speech, the Wildman upsets human convention and liberates a hidebound family.

What "The Wildman" lacked, to say the least, was the galloping force of "Grimes." Ms. LeFanu's score was seductively beautiful, an elegant flow of impressionistic chamber textures, tautly lyrical woodwind lines and microtonal shadings. But its mystery did not blossom into drama. Despite a sensational lead performance by Gwiom Thomas, this opera seemed more a conversation piece than living theater. It was drenched in caution.

Britten's operas are notable above all for their fearless, single-minded concentration on closely matched physical settings and pyschological states. Directors wishing to update them tread on risky terrain. Covent Garden's "Billy Budd," directed by Francesca Zambello, abandoned Britten's fanatical realism. Maritime atmosphere gave way to modern, monochrome surfaces; the Indomitable's mast and rigging became something like a telephone pole, and the captain's cabin resembled a concrete bunker.

Without its detailed period context, Britten's surging score seemed lost. Ms. Zambello's abstract play of colors and forms, while often arresting to the eye, hemmed in both the characters and the music. The casting caused further confusion: John Tomlinson's imposing, stentorian Claggart curiously upstaged Peter Coleman-Wright's bland Billy and Graham Clark's reedy Vere.

"A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the English National Opera initially threatened to go in the same over-conceptual direction. Robert Carsen's production made much of the color green and filled the stage with beds of various sizes. But as the faeries unfurled giant bedsheets in Act I, the production evinced a bright, prankish spirit, wedding Surrealism to low comedy. While missing deeper subtexts, it moved with assurance toward the unashamedly slapstick finale.

The ever-regal Lillian Watson excepted, the cast on Friday night lacked first-class voices, but it overflowed with deft comedians. Britten might have frowned on the outright vulgarity, but he could hardly have scorned a production that drew steadily increasing laughter and enthusiasm from a capacity audience. This "Dream" played to the crowd without losing its sense of self.

Both "Billy Budd" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" were expertly conducted, by Robert Spano and Steuart Bedford, respectively. Richard Hickox, leading the City of London's "Peter Grimes," seemed less sure of himself. The onstage masses and the peculiar acoustics of Barbican Hall worked against him. Britten's masterpiece made an immense impact, all the same. The excellent cast was led by Philip Langridge, who tore through the title role with a striking balance of violence and lament.

W. H. Auden once urged Britten to find a balance between bohemianism and bourgeois convention. Britten complied; he wrote for a wide audience but employed a radically individual language. For a time he was out of fashion; lately, British composers have again used him as a model. From him can be traced Oliver Knussen's sophisticated miniatures, Judith Weir's layered simplicities, the brilliant montages of the young Thomas Ades. In English opera, the night is still young.

Essay on the weather

Who left the oven on?

Hiatus interruptus 2

1) This essay by Robert Christgau is a work of critical genius. 2) Josh Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle succumbs to blogging. 3) Mostly Mozart's Enlightenment installation has a website. 4) Please welcome Dean. 5) Amazing YouTube video of Alvin Lucier's Music for Solo Performer (via Rambler). 5) Kyle Gann, talking to a young conductor: "He made the remark that he had never seen an orchestra that showed a strong commitment to new music run into financial trouble." 6) Robert Hilferty chats with Schoenberg's anagrammatic grandson Randol about how he worked to win back Klimt's painting of Adele Bloch-Bauer for her family. I mentioned Randol in my 2002 article about the composer. 7) Obituary for the remarkable Dika Newlin, a Schoenberg protégé. Her book Schoenberg Remembered is a treasure. 8) Remembrances of Ligeti. 9) Tony Tommasini is posting daily reports from Bayreuth. Alas, I did not make it to the Green Hill this year. 10) Young composers, heed the wisdom of Prof. Heebie McJeebie: "No creative artist has made worthwhile art without at least one doctorate." The Professor is the sardonic alter ego of Corey Dargel.