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Unmasking the Arts Episode 5: Yuval Sharon, Artistic Director of Michigan Opera Theatre

Our partners at Princeton University Concerts have created a new six-part series, Unmasking the Arts, with host Helga Davis and special guests in conversation about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the middle of lockdown, Yuval Sharon, MacArthur Genius Grant recipient and newly appointed Artistic Director of Michigan Opera Theatre, staged a drive-through experience of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung in a Detroit parking garage for his production Twighlight: Gods.

As the founder and Co-Artistic Director of The Industry, an LA-based experimental opera company that develops immersive musical experiences, Twilight: Gods was nothing out-of-the-ordinary for Sharon. He had already directed operas staged in moving vehicles, at a railway station, and at other untraditional venues. Yet during the pandemic, this creative approach to presenting music became all the more crucial. Sharon discusses this and more with Unmasking the Arts host Helga Davis.

“What we really need to cultivate in our lives more than anything is a sense of solidarity with each other…and I really do think that’s where the arts are going to be crucial when we come back: trying to rebuild that sense of solidarity.” – Yuval Sharon

Shared with kind permission of Princeton University Concerts.

On Saturday, September 25, Michigan Opera Theatre will present BLISS, Sharon’s recreation of Ragnar Kjartansson’s performance piece. The performance replays three sublime minutes of The Marriage of Figaro with the same cast and the same orchestra, without pause, for 12 hours. Get tickets and learn more about the performance.

Yuval Sharon – Unmasking the Arts: Playlist

For Princeton University Concerts’ Collective Listening Project, Yuval Sharon shared some of the tracks that resonated with him in the last year – ”as I weighed how my work and how art, in general, is required to drastically shift to accommodate new demands for social change, the wisdom of this music reminds me where a polemicist approach fails and true art begins…” Read more about Sharon’s selections.

About the Artists

Yuval Sharon

Yuval Sharon has amassed an unconventional body of work that expands the operatic form. He is founder and Artistic Director of The Industry in Los Angeles and the newly appointed Gary L. Wasserman Artistic Director of Detroit’s Michigan Opera Theatre.

With The Industry, Sharon has directed and produced new operas in moving vehicles, operating train stations, Hollywood sound stages, and various “non-spaces” such as warehouses, parking lots, and escalator corridors. From 2016-2019, Sharon was the first Artist-Collaborator at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, creating nine projects that included newly commissioned works, site-specific installations, and performances outside the hall. His residency culminated in a major revival of Meredith Monk’s opera ATLAS, making him the first director Monk entrusted with a new production of her work.

In 2017, Sharon was honored with a MacArthur Fellowship and a Foundation for Contemporary Art grant for theater.

Helga Davis

Helga Davis first appeared on UMS stages in our 2012 presentation of Philip Glass’s opera, Einstein on the Beach. We look forward to welcoming her back in the 2021/22 season as a featured performer in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower.

Davis is a vocalist and performance artist with feet planted on the most prestigious international stages and with firm roots in the realities and concerns of her local community whose work draws out insights that illuminate how artistic leaps for an individual can offer connection among audiences.

Listen to the new season of her podcast series, Helga: The Armory Conversations, co-produced by WNYC Studios and Park Avenue Armory.

Unmasking the Arts Episode 4: Critics Jason Farago, Maya Chung, and Anne Midgette

At the beginning of January 2021, Jason Farago, critic at large for The New York Times wrote an influential article titled “The Arts Are in Crisis. Here’s How Biden Can Help.” In the widely circulated op-ed, he described the state and effects of a cultural depression exacerbated by the pandemic, considering its social, economic, and political ramifications. He joins Unmasking the Arts host Helga Davis and fellow arts thinkers, associate editor Maya Chung of The New York Review of Books and former Washington Post music critic Anne Midgette to discuss these ideas further in a wonderfully extensive and inspiring conversation that considers the arts within the context of all of these societal impacts.

“Art, music, drama—here is a point worth recalling in a pandemic—are instruments of psychic and social health.” —Jason Farago

Shared with kind permission of Princeton University Concerts.

Jason Farago, Maya Chung, and Anne Midgette – Unmasking the Arts: Playlist

For Princeton University Concerts’ Collective Listening Project, Maya Chung, Jason Farago, and Anne Midgette shared some of the tracks that have formed their pandemic listening. Read more about each critics’ selections.

About the Participants

Helga Davis

Listen to the new season of her podcast series, Helga: The Armory Conversations, co-produced by WNYC Studios and Park Avenue Armory.

Jason Farago

Jason Farago, critic at large for The New York Times, writes about art and culture in the U.S. and abroad. In 2017 he was awarded the inaugural Rabkin Prize for art criticism.

Mr. Farago began writing about art for The Times in 2015, and since then he has reviewed exhibitions, conducted interviews, and reported features across the United States and in a dozen foreign countries. In 2020 he helped develop Close Read, a digital initiative that elaborates the meaning of a single work of art, detail by detail.

He previously wrote for the Guardian, serving as its first U.S. art critic and as an online opinion columnist. He has also been a regular contributor to the New Yorker, the BBC, NPR, the New York Review of Books, and Artforum.

Anne Midgette

Anne Midgette was the classical music critic of The Washington Post for 11 years, from 2008 to 2019. Before that, she was for seven years a regular contributor of classical music and theater reviews to The New York Times.

She has also written about music, the visual arts, dance, theater, and film for The Wall Street Journal, Opera News, The Los Angeles Times, Town & Country, and many other publications, reviewing and interviewing everyone from Spike Lee to Twyla Tharp, Marina Abramovic to Luciano Pavarotti.

At the Post, she oversaw every aspect of classical music coverage, offset her music writing with occasional visual art reviews, expanded the reach of the beat on social media as The Classical Beat, and ultimately became known for her work on the #MeToo problem in classical music.

Maya Chung

Maya Chung is the associate editor of The New York Review of Books.

Unmasking the Arts Episode 3: Wu Han, pianist

At the height of the pandemic, pianist Wu Han joined The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, where she serves as co-artistic director, for a surreal concert tour in Taiwan under strict quarantine conditions. A few months later, she no longer felt safe walking down the street in NYC after the recent wave of anti-Asian violence. Recorded during Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, she sits with host Helga Davis as part of Unmasking the Arts in a personal discussion about Wu Han’s relationship to music throughout this eventful year as together they look to the future.

“As artists, even in good times, we should always have a certain sense of emergency because our job is to push limits…” —Wu Han, piano

Shared with kind permission of Princeton University Concerts.

Wu Han – Unmasking the Arts: Playlist

During the conversation, pianist Wu Han noted that for her, “Schubert is the most perfect pandemic listening.” For Princeton University Concerts’ Collective Listening Project, Wu Han shared beloved tracks that have served as a bedrock throughout her long and celebrated career as the Co-Artistic Director of The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Listen on Spotify.

Schubert – String Quintet in C Major, D. 956, Op. 163
Mstislav Rostropovich, cello, and the Emerson String Quartet

The Schubert cello quintet is one of the greatest “desert island” pieces for any musician. Artistically, this recording is the highest achievement of this piece. And not to mention, I was at the recording session—witnessing this miracle happen in front of me.

Horowitz in Moscow
Vladimir Horowitz, piano

I love Vladimir Horowitz. He is the greatest pianist in the world. On this occasion when he returned to Moscow, there was so much emotion in his piano playing. This particular recording is just astonishing.

Brahms – Piano Trio No. 2 in C Major, Op. 87
Isaac Stern, violin, Eugene Istomin, piano, and Leonard Rose, cello

I worked right next to Mr. Stern for many years at his Chamber Music Encounters program. The integrity of this playing has completely set the industry standard for any piano trio.

Schubert – Winterreise, D. 911, Op. 89
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone

Any lieder recordings by Fischer-Dieskau are worth gold. Every time I listen to this great singer perform Winterreise, Dichterliebe, or any of the song cycles, I will always be brought to tears.

About the Artists

Helga Davis

Listen to the new season of her podcast series, Helga: The Armory Conversations, co-produced by WNYC Studios and Park Avenue Armory.

Wu Han

Named Musical America’s Musician of the Year, pianist Wu Han ranks among the most esteemed and influential classical musicians in the world today. Leading an unusually multifaceted artistic career, she has risen to international prominence as a concert performer, artistic director, recording artist, educator, and cultural entrepreneur. Wu Han appears annually at the world’s most prestigious concert series and venues, as both soloist and chamber musician.

Together with David Finckel, Wu Han serves as Co-Artistic Director of The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (CMS). Under her artistic leadership, CMS recently celebrated its 50th anniversary as the leading global chamber music institution She is the founding Co-Artistic Directors of Music@Menlo, the San Francisco Bay Area’s premier summer chamber music festival and institute. The Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts appointed Wu Han to serve as artistic advisor for its Chamber Music at The Barns series. In the Far East, Wu Han serves as founding Co-Artistic Director of Chamber Music Today, a festival in Seoul, South Korea.

Unmasking the Arts Episode 2: Patricia Kopatchinskaja

Patricia Kopatchinskaja is a trailblazing violinist, dedicating her unparalleled artistry to harnessing the fierce urgency of the present moment and championing the integral relationship between music and our humanity. She joins Helga Davis in the second episode of Unmasking the Arts: Looking to the Future in a personal discussion about the impact of the past year that reveals why her unorthodox approach to music-making is now more important than ever.

“This is a moment to understand that we are a part of nature…a continuation of this state of spirit is killing all of us. When I hear a bird outside who is not prohibited to twitter, I feel happy for him. We musicians are also a kind of bird, but we cannot twitter…” —Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violin

Shared with kind permission of Princeton University Concerts.

About the Artists

Helga Davis

Listen to the new season of her podcast series, Helga: The Armory Conversations, co-produced by WNYC Studios and Park Avenue Armory.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja

The Moldovan-born violinist brings a combination of depth, brilliance humour and theatrics to her music. Whether performing a violin concerto by Tchaikovsky, Ligeti, or Schoenberg or presenting an original staged project deconstructing Beethoven, Ustwolskaja, or Cage, her distinctive approach always conveys the core of the work. Kopatchinskaja often showcases the works of living composers such as Luca Francesconi, Michael Hersch, György Kurtág and Márton Illés.

Listen to Kopatchinskaja’s recording of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, which was released in April 2021 and listed as an essential album by Gramophone magazine.

Unmasking the Arts Episode 1: Anthony McGill

Episode 1 features clarinetist (and longtime friend of UMS) Anthony McGill, who spearheaded the #TakeTwoKnees movement last summer in his response to the death of George Floyd. He challenges fellow musicians and Americans to draw attention to the problem of racism in their own personal ways and to open the door for music to serve as a powerful voice within the fight for social justice. McGill shares what this past year has meant for him as a citizen, a musician, and a human being:

Shared with kind permission of Princeton University Concerts.

About the Artists

Helga Davis

Listen to the new season of her podcast series, Helga: The Armory Conversations, co-produced by WNYC Studios and Park Avenue Armory.

Anthony McGill

Anthony McGill’s appearances with UMS date back to 1996, including a trio recital with cellist Alisa Weilerstein and pianist Inon Barnaton, a recital with the Takács Quartet, and performances with the New York Philharmonic.

View programs on UMS R ewind

Clarinetist Anthony McGill is one of classical music’s most recognizable and brilliantly multifaceted figures. He serves as the principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic — that orchestra’s first African-American principal player — and maintains a dynamic international solo and chamber music career. Hailed for his “trademark brilliance, penetrating sound and rich character” (The New York Times), as well as for his “exquisite combination of technical refinement and expressive radiance” (The Baltimore Sun), McGill also serves as an ardent advocate for helping music education reach underserved communities and for addressing issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in classical music. He was honored to take part in the inauguration of President Barack Obama, premiering a piece written for the occasion by John Williams and performing alongside violinist Itzhak Perlman, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and pianist Gabriela Montero.

Learn more at anthonymcgill.com

McGill’s most recent recording features Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Clarinet Quintet in f-sharp minor with the Catalyst Quartet, who will perform in UMS’s 2021/22 season alongside Imani Winds.