The Shed, located at the Hudson Yards development in Manhattan.
"Experience Verdi’s Messa da Requiem, one of classical music’s most virtuosic and transcendent works, in concert and in film. Electrifying conductor Teodor Currentzis and the 100-member orchestra and 80-member chorus musicAeterna from Russia will take the stage in The Shed’s McCourt to perform Requiem. Following rapturous reviews at this summer’s Salzburg Festival, the performances mark Currentzis and musicAeterna’s North American debut.
A new cinematic artwork set to Verdi’s score by late, beloved filmmaker Jonas Mekas, and co-commissioned by The Shed and Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, will accompany the performances of Requiem. From November 1 – 10, the film screened separately in the Level 4 Gallery."
Teodor Currentzis has been described as an anarchist and a guru as he’s swept from the periphery of the music world to its most prestigious stages.Credit...James Hill for The New York Times
PERM, Russia — It was after midnight when the maestro — wearing a black motorcycle jacket, skinny jeans and boots — strode into a cavernous old factory in this industrial city 700 miles east of Moscow. He made his way through the crowd as something between an avant-garde happening and a classical-music rave unfolded.
“Come,” the conductor, Teodor Currentzis, who will make his American debut in November leading Verdi’s Requiem at the Shed in New York, told a reporter. “I want to show you something amazing.”
Soon the room exploded with propulsive percussion works by Iannis Xenakis. When the drums grew quiet, Mr. Currentzis — who had conducted Mahler’s sprawling Ninth Symphony the night before and had spent all day rehearsing Mozart’s opera “Idomeneo” — followed the crowd out into the moonlight to an even older part of the plant with creaky wooden floors, where a puzzling blend of modern dance; a stage buried in laundry; long Russian monologues; and a Dr. Seuss-like wind instrument stretched into the wee hours.
It was a night that embodied the status of Mr. Currentzis, 47, as the rebel maestro of classical music. Tall, lanky and boyish, with pierced ears and dark hair, he looks more CBGB than Carnegie Hall. He has been described as a punk, a goth, an anarchist and a guru — all of which have elements of truth, but fail to convey the blend of talent, charisma and energy that has swept him from the periphery of the music world to its most prestigious stages.
He began that journey out in Siberia, as music director of the Novosibirsk State Opera. Disenchanted with the music establishment, he formed his own orchestra and chorus there, which he called MusicAeterna and which became known for electrically charged performances. He forged such tight bonds with its players that many followed him here when he was appointed the artistic director of the Perm State Opera in 2011.
He has an almost messianic side: A brash claim in a 2005 interview that “I will save classical music” ruffled some feathers. His emo earnestness — “You can cry alone in front of your turntable to this music. You can close your eyes and scream at the top of your lungs to this music,” he wrote in liner notes for a Rameau recording — rubs some people the wrong way. His general flamboyance still arouses suspicions in some quarters that he might be a charlatan.
But now, in spite of — or because of — his iconoclastic approach to music, he is in high demand everywhere, with a series of important debuts and a steady stream of painstakingly detailed studio recordings for Sony.
Markus Hinterhäuser, the artistic director of the Salzburg Festival, said that if there had been “light skepticism” before his debut there in 2017, now “everybody’s waiting for Currentzis to appear.” At Mozart’s “Idomeneo” in Salzburg this summer, the loudest cheers by far were for him; Zachary Woolfe wrote in The New York Times that he led the opera with “irresistible intensity.”
His unorthodox style was on vivid display here this spring at the annual Diaghilev Festival, which celebrates Sergei Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes, who grew up in Perm. There were performances around the clock — including 3:30 a.m. concerts featuring the ondes martenot, an eerie early electronic instrument, in a museum full of religious sculptures, and 11 p.m. chamber performances in the house Diaghilev grew up in.
Mr. Currentzis, the festival’s artistic director, was never far from the center of things. Before opening the festival — with a double bill of Mahler’s Ninth and a work featuring typewriters as instruments by the Swedish composer Malin Bang — he held a news conference.
The smell of incense filled the room as Mr. Currentzis entered. He paused. He saw that half a dozen video cameras were arrayed in the front, blocking the seats, and waited with a smile until the bewildered videographers were cleared to the sides.
“Art is only possible,” he said, “when you see the eyes of the people in front of you.”
Musicians say that his uncompromising approach to music — he is famous for marathon rehearsals and recording sessions, and for late-night salons where guests recite poetry, play music and talk until all hours — has almost mystical effects.
“Before I do something surprising, something which surprises even me — he knows already, before me,” the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, a frequent collaborator, said in an interview. “He’s so in touch with your soul that you really feel together as one with him. There is no distance at all.”
Mr. Currentzis was born in Athens in 1972; his father was a police officer, and his mother taught piano. In his house, he recalled, the piano was “kind of part of the family.” But he fell in love with the sound of orchestras, and decided to start playing the violin — not yet realizing that the sound he craved was the whole string section.
“This thick, beautiful sound,” he said. “I wanted to be a part of this sound.”
By the time he was a teenager studying music, he knew he would conduct, but he and his brother still enjoyed listening to obscure, psychedelic 1960s music, too. Mr. Currentzis eventually went to St. Petersburg to study with Ilya Musin, a renowned pedagogue who taught Valery Gergiev and Semyon Bychkov. After what he described as his “punk attitude” caused difficulties there, he left for Moscow, where he conducted for a small opera company. That led to guest appearances in Novosibirsk, one of the major Russian houses, where he became music director in 2004.
As he started in Siberia, he founded MusicAeterna, which began as a period instrument orchestra — something still rare in Russia.
“He was so disenchanted early on with the whole official music scene, and the orchestral scene in particular — he just didn’t want to play that game at all,” recalled the arts administrator Marc de Mauny, who met him at the conservatory in St. Petersburg and has worked with him for years. “He said, ‘I’m in this for the music, to make music with like-minded people and musicians who are not going to look at their watches during rehearsal, who really want to explore repertoire.’”
Artemy Savchenko, a violinist, first performed Tchaikovsky with Mr. Currentzis in Moscow 12 years ago and decided to join MusicAeterna. “It made the biggest impression of my whole musical life,’’ he said. “I decided: If you do music, it should be this way. Otherwise, there is no point. Teodor always tried to find in the music something very, very deep that is connected with ritual and mystery.”
Unlike most American orchestras, whose contracts are exacting about rehearsal lengths and which have been known to break off midphrase rather than incur costly overtime, the MusicAeterna players tend to play for as long as Mr. Currentzis needs or wants them.
“Can you imagine Leonardo da Vinci saying, ‘O.K., I will make this machine, but only in seven hours?’” he said one evening after a rehearsal of “Idomeneo” had run, yes, long.
Sitting on a velvet sofa in his opulent studio at the Perm opera house, adorned with richly patterned crimson wallpaper, an Ezra Pound quotation and a gilded Orthodox icon, he continued: “It will take as long as it will take.”
As MusicAeterna began to flourish, Mr. Currentzis began attracting attention. In 2009, he began a cinematic odyssey: He landed the lead in “DAU,” Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s insanely ambitious (or perhaps just insane), still not-quite-finished epic film that has been described as the “Stalinist Truman Show.” Mr. Currentzis and a cast of hundreds were filmed on and off for three years living in character in a replica of Soviet Russia.
“I thought I was hard-core before that,” he said of the experience.
And he attracted the attention of Sony. Bogdan Roscic, the president of the label’s classical division, remembered him as a well-kept secret in those days, but said that buzz was already building. Mr. Roscic was so impressed by some of Mr. Currentzis’s early recordings, and the support of people like the adventurous impresario Gerard Mortier, who had hired Mr. Currentzis in Paris and Madrid, that he decided to sign him in 2011.
“Others who today pretend they invented him either told me I should stop bothering them with this guy or completely ignored us,” Mr. Roscic said in an email. “It’s funny how that goes.”
While his live performances were galvanizing, Mr. Currentzis didn’t just want his recordings to echo them, and he pushed for intricate studio work.
“Music is not created for the concert hall,” Mr. Currentzis said. “It’s a very intimate thing that you have to feel. If you listen to a symphony of Mahler in the concert hall, and then lie down in an open field and listen with your headphones, you have completely different feelings.”
Mr. Roscic said that this approach was similar to that of the pianist Glenn Gould: “He doesn’t consider recordings souvenirs of live performances, but, rather, a separate art form altogether.”
Mr. Currentzis spent hundreds of hours recording the three Mozart-Da Ponte operas for Sony. Sessions lasted from noon until after midnight here in Perm for up to two weeks straight — a grueling schedule, and one that would be ruinously expensive with a traditional orchestra. But his players were willing. And when he was unsatisfied with the “Don Giovanni,” he persuaded the label to rerecord it.
“It’s a ‘whatever it takes’ ethos,” said Mr. Roscic. “The latest post-session dinner I had with him was in his dacha at 4 a.m.”
Perm, located on the eastern edge of Europe in the foothills of the Urals, was an unlikely staging area for storming the classical music world. It is generally believed to be the provincial city that Chekhov’s three sisters long to leave for Moscow, and it was given a new literary name, Yuriatin, by Boris Pasternak, who set parts of “Doctor Zhivago” there. It was the gateway to an infamous gulag, and during the Cold War, when it produced arms, was closed to foreigners.
Mr. Currentzis was brought here in 2011 during a brief attempt to make the city a destination for cutting-edge art. He said he would only take the post if Perm officials agreed to let him bring MusicAeterna with him, and help him expand the ensemble. To his surprise, they agreed.
But it was not easy: Perm already had an opera orchestra, and no one warned them that a second group would be arriving. Its opera house had an illustrious history; during World War II the Kirov Opera and Ballet were evacuated there, and they left behind a robust ballet school with a tradition that continues to this day. But the company had to adapt to Mr. Currentzis’s new visions.
Memorable performances followed, but also difficulties. Local conservatives began to voice objections about both the art and the expense; Perm’s cultural expansion plan soon ran afoul of the Kremlin, and was dismantled. Mr. Currentzis, whose work in the opera house was so good that he drew critics here from Moscow and St. Petersburg, was the last man standing.
But as this spring’s festival unspooled, there were signs that his days, too, were numbered here. And a few weeks after the Diaghilev Festival ended, the rumored news became official: Mr. Currentzis would step down from the Perm Opera in September, though he would continue to lead the Diaghilev Festival, with an eye toward bringing some of its programming to Paris in the coming years. MusicAeterna would move on with him.
Now the test will be whether Mr. Currentzis can retain his outsider approach as he leaves Perm for a more cosmopolitan base in St. Petersburg.
“He found this place in Siberia, and then in Perm, where he had the freedom to develop,” said Michael Haefliger, the intendant of the Lucerne Festival, where Mr. Currentzis is leading MusicAeterna in several Mozart operas this month.
He has already been trying new things. He recently became chief conductor of the SWR Symphony Orchestra, a German radio orchestra based in Stuttgart. He writes poetry and wants to spend more time composing. And he said that while he had demurred when approached about conducting Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Bayreuth Festival — he was booked — he hoped to tackle the work at some point, if he could get a year to prepare. (“A Wagner sabbatical,” he said.)
Change was already in the air the night he conducted “Idomeneo” at the opera house in Perm in May.
After the crowds left the theater, the house lights were turned off, candles were lit, and tables were set out with bottles of wine and vodka for a party with the orchestra. Musicians who had just performed played chamber music. Some recited poetry. After midnight, the sci-fi sounds of the ondes martenot wafted down from a balcony.
Near the end of the party, Mr. Currentzis rose to make what sounded like a farewell toast.
“The musical world doesn’t develop as it could,” he said. “We ask, for example, where are the soloists that were around in the ’20s and ’30s? The fantastic composers of the 19th century, where are they now? What’s happened to mankind? The truth is they’re all here. But the system is such that they cannot appear.”
And he spoke passionately of the need to do things differently.
“This is what we do here in Perm: We open up a new space,” he said. “We open these gates, and that’s a reason, maybe, people come here now — not to visit the monuments or museums, but because they know there’s a space where they can maybe discover themselves and what they’re capable of. And we will do this every day, until the very last day that we are here.”
Then more late-night music filled the darkened opera house.
Teodor Currentzis, leading his musicAeterna orchestra and chorus in their North American debut, delivered a revelatory performance of Verdi’s work.
By
Heidi Waleson
Teodor Currentzis and musicAeterna with soloists Zarina Abaeva, Clémentine Margaine, René Barbera and Evgeny StavinskyPhoto: Alexandra Muravyeva/The Shed
New York
The Shed, the new performance space at Hudson Yards, professes to be dedicated to collaborations between creative partners that result in original works of art. This week’s Verdi “Requiem” was indeed revelatory, but it was thanks to the musical performance by conductor Teodor Currentzis, leading his splendid musicAeterna orchestra and chorus, not the accompanying “cinematic artwork” by Jonas Mekas. The conductor and ensemble, joined by an excellent quartet of soloists, were making their North American debut.
Born in Greece, Mr. Currentzis, age 47, built musicAeterna in remote areas of Russia, founding it in Novosibirsk in 2004, and moving it to Perm as the resident ensemble of the opera house from 2011 to 2019. They made their international mark with vivid recordings of a trio of Mozart operas, released on Sony Classical beginning in 2014, which combined the scholarship of the historical performance movement with a near-fanatical attention to musical detail, honed in marathon rehearsals.
The environment of the Shed signaled that this would not be a typical classical concert. The vast, soaring space of the McCourt had steep, bleacher-style seating, similar to the setup of the Park Avenue Armory. The orchestra and chorus entered as a group, wearing black cassock-like garments; the violinists and violists stood throughout the performance, and the wind and brass players, on tiered risers, stood when they played, giving them additional presence in the aural and visual texture. The music began in darkness; Aaron Copp’s subtle lighting changes, sometimes spotlighting particular players or singers, helped shape the 90-minute piece without calling attention to itself.
These extramusical touches backed up a consistently absorbing musical performance. Mr. Currentzis likes extremes: The melting, pianissimo tenderness of the chorus and orchestra in the opening passages made the explosive fortissimo of the “Dies irae” even more startling than usual. His choices always felt organic, from the grandest statements to the most intimate moments, and the consistent crispness of articulation from both singers and instruments—and the precision of attack and cutoff, regardless of volume—meant that details were never smeared into sheer noise. The McCourt’s acoustics seemed remarkably clear rather than reverberant; there was some light sound enhancement and acoustic paneling was installed for the performance.
The soloists— Zarina Abaeva, soprano; René Barbera, tenor; Clémentine Margaine, mezzo-soprano; and Evgeny Stavinsky, bass—were similarly distinctive, managing to serve as part of the overall texture rather than a series of star turns. All displayed rock-solid pitch and buoyant sound; their textual clarity and sparing use of vibrato helped them meld with each other in their ensemble sections, such as the quartet “Rex tremendae majestatis,” while shining in their individual pleas for salvation. These were not operatic characters, but Everyman representatives. That point was made particularly clear by Ms. Abaeva, whose pure, silvery soprano often floated above everything else. For the concluding “Libera me,” she moved from the front of the stage to stand with the chorus at the rear, where she seemed like the leader of a congregation. The instrumental soloists were similarly skilled, from the antiphonal trumpets of the “Dies irae” to the jubilant piccolo in the “Sanctus.”
Mr. Mekas’s film, shown in tandem on two screens behind the performers, was pretty but inscrutable. It began with news footage of a fire in Queens, and then settled into a sequence that was mostly shots of flowers (including gardens, house plants and wildflowers in fields) with the occasional archival photograph of a starving child or a war atrocity, or television footage of a natural disaster, dropped in. Once in a while, a bit of text translation appeared. The film was hand-held and shaky, giving it a homemade effect. It was apparently meant to serve as “an ecstatic eulogy for the natural world,” but the connection felt remote and finally, distracting. Mr. Currentzis and his band didn’t need it.
Teodor Currentzis leads vocal soloists and his MusicAeterna chorus and orchestra in “Requiem” at the Shed, with film overhead by Jonas Mekas.Credit...Kate Glicksberg/The Shed
In the early days of MusicAeterna, the orchestra and chorus he founded 15 years ago in Siberia, the conductor Teodor Currentzis worked in relative obscurity.
But word began to spread about the intensely exciting performances he was creating. A recording contract with Sony sent the message out even farther, and Mr. Currentzis became one of the most in-demand conductors in the world.
For his American debut with MusicAeterna, he could likely have chosen any prestigious hall in the country. It says something about the flux in the classical music business, and the slow, encouraging breakdown of the traditional gatekeepers, that Mr. Currentzis landed not at, say, Carnegie Hall but at the Shed, the new, giant-black-box performance space in Hudson Yards. There, they are performing “Requiem,” a take on Verdi’s Requiem that adds to the music a film by the avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, who died in January at 96.
Mr. Currentzis’s charismatic performances are as much rituals as concerts. Dramatically lit, with twin screens projecting Mekas’s film above the players, the 90-minute “Requiem” certainly came across this way.
The film is a metaphoric reflection of the ecological and sectarian threats posed to the natural world. A montage shows shaky close-ups of flowers, parks, open fields, murky ponds, city streets, archival imagery of concentration camps and children suffering from famine, polluted waters, fires and floods. For me, it did not add much to the musical experience.
But that musical experience was absorbing, insightful and, given the size of the space, remarkably transparent. Some light amplification was required, even with an orchestra of 100 and a chorus of 80, since the space is not a concert hall with natural acoustics. The sound might otherwise have been impossibly reverberant and muddy. And Mr. Currentzis and his ensemble worked hard to get the balances right — especially to allow subdued stretches of the piece to come through clearly.
Verdi’s Requiem begins with a soft, forlorn descending line for cellos that is picked up by the other strings and turned into a sighing series of chords, as the chorus in sotto voce sings the single word: “Requiem.” Here, the string playing was so hushed and tender that, in near darkness, you were almost unsure you were hearing anything at all. Yet every note of each aching string sonority came through. When the individual sections of the chorus broke into the weighty contrapuntal “Te decet hymnus” passage, Mr. Currentzis drew emphatic singing from the chorus and crisp, charged playing from the orchestra — almost like the work of a period-instrument ensemble, which was how this orchestra began.
The “Dies Irae” section, in which the chorus and orchestra evoke the “day of wrath” when judgment will come and the world will be consumed by ashes, had the hellish fervor and pummeling intensity any performance must summon. Yet even here, Mr. Currentzis kept the tempo restrained, in comparison with many other conductors I’ve heard, and emphasized exacting articulation, slashing brass sounds and choral singing of depth and bite, without harshness.
The entire performance demonstrated that Mr. Currentzis believes that electrifying music-making doesn’t come just by playing with more sound, more speed, more fervor. Telling details, precise execution and the expressive freedom that comes from constant practice all also help create intensity.
The amplification, though sensitively done, tended to equalize the sound somewhat, giving soft passages more presence and taking the edge off fortissimo outbursts. And it was hard to fully discern the qualities of the four admirable soloists: The soprano Zarina Abaeva sang with focused, radiant tone that sometimes seemed thin, or was that impression enhanced by the amplification?
The mezzo-soprano Clémentine Margaine brought a dusky voice and cool intensity to her solos. The tenor René Barbera sounded clarion and youthful in the soaring “Ingemisco” section, a de facto opera aria. And the bass Evgeny Stavinsky had aptly stentorian gravity.
Still, I longed to hear all these artists in a real concert hall. For Mr. Currentzis and MusicAeterna’s next trip to New York, how about Carnegie?
Requiem
Through Sunday at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org.
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