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Boston Globe
31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Already at the top of the opera world, Matthew Aucoin has composed his most audacious piece yet
Now, at 35, Aucoin has produced a singular musical work that is being hailed as revolutionary, an uncategorizable vocal symphony that represents a major departure — not just for Aucoin, but perhaps for operatic music more broadly. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Aucoin will conduct the 70-minute piece, 'Music for New Bodies,' with players from the company he cofounded, the American Modern Opera Company, at Tanglewood on Aug. 7. Advertisement Matthew Aucoin (conducting, bottom center), led instrumentalists and vocalists during the New York premiere of "Music for New Bodies" at the Lincoln Center. Lawrence Sumulong/Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts Sellars, who is staging the work at Tanglewood, said Aucoin's composition is closely attuned to the current cultural moment, as many people are distracted, overwhelmed, and apprehensive in their personal lives, while also coping with the existential upheaval brought on by generational challenges such as climate change or artificial intelligence. He compared 'New Bodies' to the work of Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi, a pivotal figure in the creation of what is today called 'opera.' Advertisement 'In the history of music, there's this moment where music has to step in for things that we are still not able to describe because they're too new,' said Sellars, who called it an emergent consciousness. 'Matt's piece is one of those turning-point pieces, which just begins to look forward and resists looking backwards. It's trying to open into a way larger realm of experiences that we all know, and yet we have received inadequate language to describe.' Traveling between the personal, the commercial, the mythic, and the cosmological, 'New Bodies' is musically dense. It pushes performers to the edge of what's technically possible, while also drawing on a wide range of musical traditions, from Gustav Mahler to synth pop. The work grew out of a conversation Aucoin had with Sellars after the director saw a short piece by Aucoin that set to music a poem by Jorie Graham, a Pulitzer-winning poet at Harvard University and one of Aucoin's early mentors. Working without a traditional commission, Aucoin said he was free to develop 'New Bodies' without many of the logistical constraints that follow a commission, when music must carry the opera's narrative, scene changes, and other practical considerations. 'I think what defines this piece is creative freedom,' said Aucoin, who will conduct 'New Bodies' at Tanglewood. 'We basically just made the piece that we wanted to make, and then found people to present it.' Sellars called the creative process 'one of the things you dream of for a composer — not just write music to order, but really to explore with an open-ended sense of searching.' Opera director Peter Sellars, shown working with young musicians during a rehearsal of "Music for New Bodies" in 2024, called the work a "turning point." MERIDITH KOHUT/NYT 'Matt was on his own: He had no deadline, no assignment, and he could write something that was not following anybody's instructions or that needed to respond to anybody's programming needs,' he said. It's a 'piece of music that is appearing spontaneously from something that's on his mind and in his heart.' Advertisement The resulting work sets to music a number of Graham's poems from the past decade or so, when she underwent cancer treatment. Enlisting five singers, a chamber orchestra, and electronics, 'New Bodies' wrestles with questions of mortality, ecological devastation, technology, and the medical industrial complex. The singers frequently shift perspectives, alternately inhabiting the voice of a cancer patient, medical professionals, chatbots, the natural world, and even cancer-fighting pharmaceuticals as they make their way through her body. At a Lincoln Center performance earlier this month, varying hues of light raked the stage as Sellars had instrumentalists play alongside vocalists, forming and re-forming temporary musical clusters to create a dynamic soundscape. At the Lincoln Center performance, Sellars had instrumentalists play alongside vocalists, forming and re-forming temporary musical clusters to create a dynamic soundscape. CREDIT: Lawrence Sumulong/Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts Aucoin said one aim of the piece 'was to try to capture what it's like to be alive right now in all of its contradictory, overwhelming intensity.' 'It might feel like a total fever dream to some people because the music and the poetry are our guide,' he said. 'But that felt, in a way, more honest to being alive right now than telling a nice, neat story.' With no explicit plot, 'New Bodies' loosely follows a woman after she learns she has an aggressive form of cancer. It articulates the emotional chaos that follows the initial diagnosis, as the speaker considers nonreligious forms of immortality such as cryofreezing and grows anxious when she struggles to recognize what she sees in the mirror. Advertisement The piece then leaves the human realm, traveling to the bottom of the sea, where it sings of ecological degradation: 'There is nothing in particular you want—you just want.' When the music surfaces, the woman is undergoing a potentially life-saving (or ending) surgery. The score turns synthetic and cheery as she succumbs to the anesthesia, a trippy passage where the voice of the drugs seems to speak from inside her body. As she emerges from this journey, the protagonist can hear a calmer, more powerful voice: the Earth and the forces that created it. 'Our rule was: Let's follow the music,' said Aucoin. 'It felt exciting to locate that question through Jory Graham's poetry, because she's been writing from this predicament of having cancer and wondering what it means to have a body and to be mortal in a moment when we seem really interested as a species in living virtually and surpassing having a body.' Critics have compared 'New Bodies' to Mahler's sprawling 'Das Lied von der Erde' ('The song of the Earth'), but Aucoin, who once played keyboards in an indie band, has channeled a broad range of influences — jazz, percussion, even the quartz action of a clock — that goes far afield of traditional orchestral music. 'A lot of us today grew up playing jazz and improvised music,' said Aucoin, who, like other young composers, is seeking to push the boundaries of the art form. 'We have experience playing various kinds of pop, or at least hearing a huge range' of music. 'It's never made sense to me to say, 'Well, I must brand myself in a narrow way.' ' Aucoin, who is the son of Globe theater critic Don Aucoin, has been on Advertisement "New Bodies" grew out of a conversation Aucoin had with Sellars after the director heard an earlier piece by Aucoin that featured Graham's poetry. Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff He first got to know Graham when he took her poetry workshop at Harvard. (Both Sellars and Aucoin graduated from Harvard, and all three artists have received MacArthur 'genius' awards.) The poet gave Aucoin her blessing when he asked to set more of her work to music, giving him free rein to work with the material. 'My work of imagination was already done,' said Graham, who added that 'New Bodies' is a collage that combines portions of multiple poems and books. 'If my words inspire them, that's a contagion: I need them to do whatever they need to do.' Despite the work's range, Sellars said 'New Bodies' retains a feeling of human warmth. 'The beauty of what Matt and Jorie are doing is that it is personal, and it is intimate,' he said, calling it a balm in an era of 'giant, obnoxious public address.' 'It has this sense of a private and unique moment that turned into an immense project.' For Graham, who attended the Lincoln Center performance, the title of the work could not be more apt. 'It made every part of my body have to come into operation,' she recalled, adding the performance engaged not only her intellect, but also the part of the body 'that absorbs and distinguishes between shades of colors and all those instruments and voices.' Advertisement 'It's a music that will give you a new body,' she said, 'and certainly a body, I think, more capable of resistance to some of the ways in which our era wishes to shut it down.' Malcolm Gay can be reached at
New York Times
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Peter Sellars Is Still Living His Life Through Art
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.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Al Arabiya
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Al Arabiya
Nero's Ancient Rome and Jazz Age New York Meet in `The Comet/Poppea' at Lincoln Center
Nero's ancient Rome and Jazz Age New York were similar. That is the message of The Comet/Poppea, an intriguing combination of Monteverdi's 1643 opera L'incoronazione di Poppea and George E. Lewis' The Comet, a Pulitzer Prize finalist this year. The mashup, conceived by director Yuval Sharon, began a five-performance run at Lincoln Center's Summer for the City on Wednesday night. First seen in Los Angeles last year, the American Modern Opera Company production unfolds on a turntable that completes a spin each 2 minutes 8 seconds. An audience of 290 is split into sections on opposite sides of the set on stage at the David Koch Theater, while the venue's 2,586 auditorium seats remain empty. 'It's an unstable ride over the course of 90 minutes, and the power of the interpretation is up to each and every spectator,' Sharon said. 'Whether you're on one side of the seating bank or the other, you're going to have a totally different experience, and you may miss a really important piece of action that your imagination is going to have to fill.' In Monteverdi's final opera, created to Giovanni Francesco Busenello's libretto, Nero exiles his wife Ottavia, leaving him free to crown Poppea empress. Lewis composed The Comet to librettist Douglas Kearney's adaptation of W.E.B. Du Bois' dystopian eight-page 1920 short story, in which a working-class Black man, Jim (Davóne Tines), and a society white woman, Julia (Kiera Duffy), believe they are the only survivors of a comet and can join to form a prejudice-free society. Their aspirations collapse when they learn people outside New York remained alive and segregation was unconquerable. 'People can make the leap between the music they're hearing and the kinds of tensions that are inherent to modern life and the tensions that the opera presents and the text presents, particularly around the dystopian aspect of white supremacy,' Lewis said. 'White supremacy is a kind of dystopia, and it's a dystopia that we continue to live with today.' Different styles for different eras. Mimi Lien's two-sided set, illuminated strikingly by John Torres, is tiered with a bath at the top level on the Roman portion and a red Art Deco restaurant evoking the Rainbow Room on the other, where Jim and Julia find three dead bodies slumped. 'Jim is confronted with what it means to be the only man left alive, what it newly means to be a Black man allowed into spaces he wasn't before, but then have that dream crushed by the reality of Julia also inhabiting that space,' said Tines, a commanding presence as Jim and the smaller role of Mercury. The Comet/Poppea debuted at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA last June and also was performed with a student cast in Philadelphia in November. It is part of a Run AMOC* festival of 12 productions at Lincoln Center that include 10 New York premieres. Friday's performance can be viewed on a live stream on Lincoln Center's Facebook and YouTube channels. Planning, writing, and funding took years. Sharon first discussed the project in 2018 with countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, who sings Nero and Julia's father, a stuffed shirt dressed like Mr. Monopoly. 'It fell apart so many times,' Costanzo said. 'First the pandemic came, and so all of our plans we'd put together were dashed. Then we had one co-producer who was giving a lot of money, and they pulled out. Then we got another co-producer to put that much money in again, and they pulled out.' Sharon had met Lewis at a 2018 Columbia University conference and approached him with the idea of concentrating on Poppea's upward mobility and creating a secondary story 'to complicate and to make a mess of this idea of authoritarianism.' Sharon trimmed Poppea to its essence. Lewis' music, filled with dissonance and a snippet of jazz, mixes with the Monteverdi's baroque, which Jim first hears from the restaurant jukebox. 'The conception was one in which you knew from the beginning that there are moments of overlap, there are moments of exchange of sequentiality,' Lewis said. 'It could stand alone by itself, ' The Comet ' certainly.' Lincoln Center is presenting a more ambitious offering of classical events after drawing criticisms in the first three seasons of Summer for the City that emerged from the pandemic. There are 266 scheduled events from June 11 through Aug. 9. Programs are set to include jazz, Latin music, R&B, Broadway, pop, Caribbean dance, and more.
San Francisco Chronicle
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Nero's ancient Rome and Jazz Age New York meet in `The Comet/Poppea' at Lincoln Center
NEW YORK (AP) — Nero's ancient Rome and Jazz Age New York were similar. That is the message of 'The Comet/Poppea,' an intriguing combination of Monteverdi's 1643 opera 'L'incoronazione di Poppea' and George E. Lewis' 'The Comet,' a Pulitzer Prize finalist this year. The mashup conceived by director Yuval Sharon began a five-performance run at Lincoln Center's Summer for the City on Wednesday night. First seen in Los Angeles last year, the American Modern Opera Company production unfolds on a turntable that completes a spin each 2 minutes, 8 seconds. An audience of 380 is split into sections on opposite sides of the set on stage at the David Koch Theater while the venue's 2,586 auditorium seats remain empty. 'It's an unstable ride over the course of 90 minutes, and the power of the interpretation is up to each and every spectator,' Sharon said. 'Whether you're on one side of the seating bank or the other, you're going to have a totally different experience and you may miss a really important piece of action that your imagination is going to have to fill.' In Monteverdi's final opera, created to Giovanni Francesco Busenello's libretto, Nerone exiles his wife Ottavia, leaving him free to crown Poppea empress. Lewis composed 'The Comet' to librettist Douglas Kearney's adaption of W.E.B. Du Bois' dystopian eight-page 1920 short story in which a working-class Black man, Jim (Davóne Tines), and a society white woman, Julia (Kiera Duffy), believe they are the only survivors of a comet and can join to form a prejudice-free society. Their aspirations collapse when they learn people outside New York remained alive and segregation was unconquerable. 'People can make the leap between the music they're hearing and the kinds of tensions that are inherent to modern life and the tensions that the opera presents and the text presents, particularly around the dystopian aspect of white supremacy,' Lewis said. 'White supremacy is a kind of dystopia and it's a dystopia that we continue to live with today." Mimi Lien's two-sided set, illuminated strikingly by John Torres, is tiered with a bath at the top level on the Roman portion and a red Art Deco restaurant evoking the Rainbow Room on the other, where Jim and Julia find three dead bodies slumped. 'Jim is confronted with what it means to be the only man left alive, what it newly means to be a Black man allowed into spaces he wasn't before, but then have that dream crushed by the reality of Julia also inhabiting that space," said Tines, a commanding presence as Jim and the smaller role of Mercury. 'The Comet/Poppea' debuted at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA last June and also was performed with a student cast in Philadelphia in November. It is part of a Run AMOC* festival of 12 productions at Lincoln Center that include 10 New York premieres. Friday's performance can been viewed on a live stream on Lincoln Center's Facebook and YouTube channels. Planning, writing and funding took years Sharon first discussed the project in 2018 with countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, who sings Nerone and Julia's father, a stuffed shirt dressed like Mr. Monopoly. 'It fell apart so many times,' Constanzo said. 'First, the pandemic came, and so all of our plans we'd put together were dashed. Then we had one co-producer who was giving a lot of money and they pulled out. Then we got another co-producer to put that much money in again and they pulled out." Sharon had met Lewis at a 2018 Columbia University conference and approached him with the idea of concentrating on Poppea's upward mobility and creating 'a secondary story to complicate and to make a mess of this idea of authoritarianism.' Sharon trimmed 'Poppea' to its essence. Lewis' music, filled with dissonance and a snippet of jazz, mixes with the Monterverdi's baroque, which Jim first hears from the restaurant jukebox. 'The conception was one in which you knew from the beginning that there are moments of overlap, there are moments of exchange, of sequentiality,' Lewis said. 'It could stand alone by itself, `The Comet,' certainly." Lincoln Center is presenting a more ambitious offering of classical events after drawing criticisms in the first three seasons of Summer for the City that emerged from the pandemic. There are 266 scheduled events from June 11 through Aug. 9. Programs are set to include jazz, Latin music, R&B, Broadway, pop, Caribbean, dance and more.
Winnipeg Free Press
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Nero's ancient Rome and Jazz Age New York meet in `The Comet/Poppea' at Lincoln Center
NEW YORK (AP) — Nero's ancient Rome and Jazz Age New York were similar. That is the message of 'The Comet/Poppea,' an intriguing combination of Monteverdi's 1643 opera 'L'incoronazione di Poppea' and George E. Lewis' 'The Comet,' a Pulitzer Prize finalist this year. The mashup conceived by director Yuval Sharon began a five-performance run at Lincoln Center's Summer for the City on Wednesday night. First seen in Los Angeles last year, the American Modern Opera Company production unfolds on a turntable that completes a spin each 2 minutes, 8 seconds. An audience of 380 is split into sections on opposite sides of the set on stage at the David Koch Theater while the venue's 2,586 auditorium seats remain empty. 'It's an unstable ride over the course of 90 minutes, and the power of the interpretation is up to each and every spectator,' Sharon said. 'Whether you're on one side of the seating bank or the other, you're going to have a totally different experience and you may miss a really important piece of action that your imagination is going to have to fill.' In Monteverdi's final opera, created to Giovanni Francesco Busenello's libretto, Nerone exiles his wife Ottavia, leaving him free to crown Poppea empress. Lewis composed 'The Comet' to librettist Douglas Kearney's adaption of W.E.B. Du Bois' dystopian eight-page 1920 short story in which a working-class Black man, Jim (Davóne Tines), and a society white woman, Julia (Kiera Duffy), believe they are the only survivors of a comet and can join to form a prejudice-free society. Their aspirations collapse when they learn people outside New York remained alive and segregation was unconquerable. 'People can make the leap between the music they're hearing and the kinds of tensions that are inherent to modern life and the tensions that the opera presents and the text presents, particularly around the dystopian aspect of white supremacy,' Lewis said. 'White supremacy is a kind of dystopia and it's a dystopia that we continue to live with today.' Different styles for different eras Mimi Lien's two-sided set, illuminated strikingly by John Torres, is tiered with a bath at the top level on the Roman portion and a red Art Deco restaurant evoking the Rainbow Room on the other, where Jim and Julia find three dead bodies slumped. 'Jim is confronted with what it means to be the only man left alive, what it newly means to be a Black man allowed into spaces he wasn't before, but then have that dream crushed by the reality of Julia also inhabiting that space,' said Tines, a commanding presence as Jim and the smaller role of Mercury. 'The Comet/Poppea' debuted at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA last June and also was performed with a student cast in Philadelphia in November. It is part of a Run AMOC(asterisk) festival of 12 productions at Lincoln Center that include 10 New York premieres. Friday's performance can been viewed on a live stream on Lincoln Center's Facebook and YouTube channels. Planning, writing and funding took years Sharon first discussed the project in 2018 with countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, who sings Nerone and Julia's father, a stuffed shirt dressed like Mr. Monopoly. Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. 'It fell apart so many times,' Constanzo said. 'First, the pandemic came, and so all of our plans we'd put together were dashed. Then we had one co-producer who was giving a lot of money and they pulled out. Then we got another co-producer to put that much money in again and they pulled out.' Sharon had met Lewis at a 2018 Columbia University conference and approached him with the idea of concentrating on Poppea's upward mobility and creating 'a secondary story to complicate and to make a mess of this idea of authoritarianism.' Sharon trimmed 'Poppea' to its essence. Lewis' music, filled with dissonance and a snippet of jazz, mixes with the Monterverdi's baroque, which Jim first hears from the restaurant jukebox. 'The conception was one in which you knew from the beginning that there are moments of overlap, there are moments of exchange, of sequentiality,' Lewis said. 'It could stand alone by itself, `The Comet,' certainly.' Lincoln Center is presenting a more ambitious offering of classical events after drawing criticisms in the first three seasons of Summer for the City that emerged from the pandemic. There are 266 scheduled events from June 11 through Aug. 9. Programs are set to include jazz, Latin music, R&B, Broadway, pop, Caribbean, dance and more.
