NEW YORK — New York City’s 2025 summer festival season is proving to be the most exciting in quite a few years. Since the 2020 hiatus, a number of presenting organizations have upped their game in the city, which is teeming with high-quality musical events. Repertoire tends to be on the experimental side, often theatrical, and prices encourage accessibility to audiences that normally might not be able to afford a night at a professional theater or concert hall.
For its first 50 years, Lincoln Center dominated the summer-music scene with the Mostly Mozart Festival and, for 21 years, the broader Lincoln Center Festival, featuring imported large scale presentations like opera and epic theater. By 2017, the Lincoln Center Festival was gone, and Mostly Mozart, though it had expanded from its original programming, was faltering. Lockdown in 2020 offered an opportunity to pause and reset, and summer activities at New York’s flagship arts campus were reborn as “Summer for the City,” integrating a wide array of performing disciplines into a dozen mini-festivals featuring mostly home-grown talent instead of costly international stars.
Tickets are free or pay-what-you-like, with a suggested $35 price — a bargain no New Yorker could resist. Offerings include stand-up comedy in a parking garage, social dancing to live music on the plaza under a 10-foot disco ball, large outdoor pop concerts in the Damrosch Park Bandshell, classical dance at the David H. Koch Theater (home to New York City Ballet), and the Festival Orchestra, heir to the Mostly Mozart orchestra, in Wu Tsai Theater in Geffen Hall (home to the New York Philharmonic).
One of the most intriguing series has been the month-long “Run AMOC*” festival, a showcase of new work presented by the American Modern Opera Company. Co-founded by composer Matthew Aucoin and director-performer Zack Winokur, AMOC* is a 17-member collective of performers and creators dedicated to “collective creation,” with many names familiar to fans of new classical music, dance, and opera. The company’s festival programming included a dozen commissioned works, most new to New York.
I watched the series’ first event via live stream on June 27 (another Lincoln Center Festival first). The Comet/Poppea was the unlikely mashup of a setting by George Lewis of W. E. B. Du Bois’ 1920 short story, “The Comet,” and a condensed version of Monteverdi’s 1642 opera The Coronation of Poppea, accompanied by period instruments. The two works played simultaneously on a split turntable that rotated continuously on the stage of the 2,600-seat Koch Theater; seating for 300 surrounded the set, while the auditorium seats remained empty.
Director Yuval Sharon played up the musical contrasts with a dark setting for the apocalyptic modern work and a blinding white set for the deceptively brutal Baroque opera. At the end, the two casts sang Monteverdi’s final gorgeous duet in an English version full of hope for the future. The camera-directed streaming point of view was surely more conventional than the experience of watching the sets spin by at a pace different from the music, but in-theater reports described an interestingly surreal but not disconcerting experience.
Music for New Bodies, seen July 11, was another thing altogether. Presented in traditional concert format in Wu Tsai Theater, Aucoin’s “vocal symphony” for five singers and 18 instruments explores questions of mortality and existence on both individual and global scales. The ambitious text is based on the poetry of Jorie Graham, for whom a grave cancer diagnosis led to new questions about life, and new ways of writing about it.
Aucoin’s program note asked, ”To be alive today is to be overwhelmed…how can we let ourselves feel everything we know without simply giving in to despair?” The five movements covered (very roughly) the shock after diagnosis, the sense of alienation and unreality, an attempt to find perspective, and then surgery, and finally transcendence. The language was beautiful but fragmentary and abstract. Without a literal narrative and conventional grammar, I found that the effort to make sense of the words sometimes distracted from the music, which had many compelling moments of great power.
Fortunately, director Peter Sellars applied his inimitable sense of drama to give sensory presence and a sense of direction to the sometimes enigmatic poetry. He used light and color to lead the eye and sent both singers and players around the stage in different formations. Neon tubes suspended overhead played the rainbow, and an overhead screen carried both the text and occasional silhouettes of the singers. The direction provided shape and brought out the emotional contours of the journey.
The stellar vocal quintet (Song Hee Lee, Meryl Dominguez, Megan Moore, Paul Appleby, and Evan Hughes) ranged from high soprano to deep bass-baritone. Their focus, precision, and timbral beauty were breathtaking. Oboist Joe Jordan was a remarkable companion to Moore, who seemed to embody the cancer patient, and Sandbox Percussion brought both gravity and sparkle to the score. At the podium, Aucoin maintained a sense of pulse like a heartbeat anchoring the work.
Ultimately, I found myself a bit lost (I checked the time twice over the 80 minutes), but I came away with admiration and appreciation for the music’s beauty, along with the sense of having witnessed something mysterious and profound.
The next evening, I ventured downtown to the amphitheater of Little Island, the unlikely man-made park built in the Hudson River, grown lush in its fourth year. The event was The Gospel at Colonus, the second major production of AMOC* co-founder Winokur’s second season as Little Island’s artistic director. This revival of Lee Breuer and Bob Telson’s groundbreaking 1983 musical cast Sophocles’ second Theban tragedy in the form of a Pentacostal church service, with a praise band, a 16-member gospel choir, a fluid cast of characters, and a charismatic preacher.
The mood was set in the moments before the first lines, as organist Butch Heyward improvised while the singers gradually entered to take their places on the bench ringing the stage, like congregants greeting one another before church. Center stage were an organ, keyboard (played by co-music director Dionne McClain-Freeney), drums, and two electric guitars, with sax and horns perched in towers flanking the stage.
From her pulpit, a raised platform bordered with flower beds, the Preacher (Stephanie Berry) announced the sermon based on the text of the Book of Oedipus. She recounted the grim facts: Oedipus, son of King Laius, had fulfilled a cruel divine prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his own mother. On discovering the ghastly truth, his mother-turned-wife, Jocasta, hanged herself, while Oedipus gouged out his eyes and left the city to wander in exile. The play follows Oedipus (played by Frank Senior and Davóne Tines) to Colonus, where he sought sanctuary, saw his daughters kidnapped by their uncle, reconciled with his daughters, and begged for divine mercy and a peaceful end to his life. Twenty musical numbers, solo and choral, reinforced the spoken texts that preceded them — mourning, comforting, urging, praising.
There was a kind of communal anonymity in the casting, as various characters were played by one or more singer-actors, all clad in lavender and gray; in the original 1983 run, Oedipus was played by a Gospel quintet. Star power was provided by gospel luminary Kim Burrell (Theseus) and bass-baritone Tines (Oedipus), but compelling solo turns were taken by multiple ensemble members, either as named characters or anonymous singers and actors, sometimes crossing genders. Focus remained on the text, the story, and above all, the emotions invoked. The choir functioned both as Greek chorus, confirming and commenting on the narrative, and as modern Gospel choir exhorting the faithful, with the rhythmic moves of a Motown backup band.
Sophocles can be heavy going, but director Shayok Misha Chowdhury introduced plenty of movement, sometimes moving the action into the aisles of the theater to draw in the audience. If one’s attention drifted from the narrative, music inevitably pulled a listener back into the fold. Attendees’ focus and energy were paced by the musical ebb and flow, and the superb chorus exerted an irresistible force field that left the audience cheering.
The Gospel at Colonus was last seen on a main New York stage in 2018. Perhaps it’s time for another major revival.
The Gospel at Colonus continues through July 26. For information and tickets, go here.
