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Peter Sellars Is Still Living His Life Through Art

Peter Sellars Is Still Living His Life Through Art

New York Times5 days ago
Peter Sellars watched the rehearsal and wept in the dark.
It was a recent afternoon at Purchase College, north of New York City, and an ensemble was going over a soft yet cataclysmic passage in Matthew Aucoin's 'Music for New Bodies.'
A group of singers was almost wailing the word 'down,' over and over, as an instrumental undertow seemed to stretch time into a yawning void. The music made plain the terror in the text — Jorie Graham's poetry of cancer treatments and climate change — and the cheeks of Sellars, the production's director and one of the most revered figures in the performing arts, grew wet with tears.
Among his collaborators, Sellars is cherished for this openness with his feelings. He wraps anyone and everyone in a bear hug. He releases sudden honks of laughter. He cries.
'He allows himself to be impacted,' said the soprano Julia Bullock, 'and releases his emotions very easily.'
'Music for New Bodies' arrives at David Geffen Hall on Thursday as part of the American Modern Opera Company's summer residency at Lincoln Center. Sellars's production is in the pared-down, nearly ritualistic style for which he's become known. With barely any set or props, the singers and instrumentalists are the focus, onstage together under moody lighting, in shifting formations that have the charged drama of Baroque paintings.
'I made the staging, but staging is too fancy a word,' he said in an interview. 'It's just — you can see the music.'
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Set chiefly in the Bohemia, an exclusive New York apartment building, Chris Pavone's novel is both a thriller and an adventure in social observation. The many characters, who come from a variety of socioeconomic, racial and ethnic scales, are all captured convincingly by narrator Edoardo Ballerini. Chief among them is Chicky Diaz, a veteran doorman who is widowed and deeply in debt to some very bad actors; Emily Longworth, who married for money but has come to hate her husband for his lack of business ethics and infidelity; and Julian Sonnenberg, a melancholy art gallerist with a deteriorating marriage, dismissive children and a failing heart valve. Meanwhile, in the streets, a protest march against a recent police killing of an unarmed Black man has spawned a counterprotest, and the combination threatens a riot. 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Meanwhile the plot begins to zoom back and forth between Galway and Dublin: A family is being terrorized by the mother's ex-husband; Detective Sargeant Cormac Reilly's former girlfriend needs his help to find her missing husband; and — no rest for the listener — back in Dublin, a sinister operator has figured out how to game the Irish Lottery out of millions, this caper producing another couple of corpses. McMahon does us a favor in narrating this excellently tangled book at a mercifully slow pace. (Bolinda, Unabridged, 12 hours) After a six-year hiatus, Stuart MacBride has turned again to Aberdeen's Logan McRae, of Police Scotland. Though part of a series, this novel stands successfully on its own, its characters fleshed out and in full possession of their idiosyncrasies — all magnificently conveyed by narrator Steve Worsley, who hails from Aberdeen. 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