“Gelb is telegraphing to composers that stylistic conformity within the boundaries of a populist musical means is the only possible route to success in New York, offering rewards in exchange for lack of risk. This mindset would be unthinkable in any other discipline: imagine a museum saying they’ll only hang “the right contemporary art,” or a cinema playing only “the right contemporary cinema”: but opera, so long in bondage to a bourgeois class comfort, seems to think it can get away with it.”

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“But the issue is more acute with Saariaho for how deeply disrespectful it is to a radical woman to drop her in a line of dead men like some genetic inevitability, as if her historical value depends on her work’s conformity with an established, ongoing tradition. Refusing the lineage does not strip her work of its power; it restores its integrity. “L’amour” deals with opera only on the terms which Saariaho set out from the beginning of her career. If we are to locate “opera” within the work—which is to say, within our own time—we must be prepared to meet it there.”

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A pair of translations from the German of interviews given by Chaya Czernowin before the premiere of her opera Pnima… ins innere.

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Liner notes for HCR’s release of Bryn Harrison’s Three Descriptions of Place and Movement, with the Bozzinis

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Program note for Clara Iannotta’s “Troglodyte Angels Clank By” (2015)

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Liner notes for Huddersfield Contemporary Record’s “Singing in Tongues,” a two-disc album of the operas and vocal works of Australian composer Liza Lim.

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Program notes written for Boston Conservatory’s contraBAND concert, November 2021

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