The Ages of Man: Carter, the Gracious Veteran; Dudamel, the Brash Youthman

The most unpleasant experience of modern opera that I’ve ever had came last May at the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, N.C., which presented the American premiere of the French composer Pascal Dusapin’s opera Faustus, the Last Night. What plot the opera had was contained in its title: Amid waves of static, senseless music, the knowledge-hoarding ex-philosopher learns from a Beckett-esque character named Togod that, when it comes to all those big questions—the existence of God, the fate of the universe, et al.—the answer is that there is no answer. “There is … NOTHING,” Togod says to us, and in case Faust and the audience don’t get it, he says it very slowly, again and again.

Compared to that, Elliott Carter’s one-act opera, What Next?, which had its New York stage premiere at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre last weekend, was a great improvement, not least because it seems to have an actual story line. It’s just that none of the characters can decide what it should be.

If this vague, postmodern setup, in addition to Mr. Carter’s reputation as a fearsomely intellectual composer, keeps American opera companies from embracing the piece, it would be a shame. Not only is What Next?—by the evidence of Christopher Alden’s light-footed production, and the performance of the assembled cast and of the Juilliard School’s superb Axiom ensemble—actually funny, but it offers some of Mr. Carter’s loveliest and most gracious music. Comparisons to the opera buffas of Mozart would not be inappropriate.

Mr. Carter, whose 99th birthday fell on Dec. 11, writes music that, at its best, balances deep, modernist sophistication with easy, neoclassical lightness. Along with “European” erudition, there’s an “American” intuition, ornery, playful or melancholy by turns—as authentically homegrown as Walt Whitman’s barbaric yawp and Jackson Pollock’s action painting.

What Next? has at least some specifics. (Paul Griffiths, the noted music critic and longtime Carter partisan, wrote the libretto.) Six characters, male and female, adult and child, are reeling from an auto accident, though all seem to be physically unscathed. None can remember how they came to be there, or where they are supposed to be going, and it is from these psychic dislocations that the existential, conversational action of the opera unfolds.

Road workers eventually arrive to clear the scene, but they ignore the other characters—which leads this listener to believe that we’re not at a tight bend in the Lincoln Tunnel (as Andrew Cavanaugh Holland’s set implies) but rather in an eddy of the River Styx.

Even when the music is at its most brittle and violent, Mr. Carter’s vocal lines are limpid, agreeable and elegantly plotted. And they were beautifully sung. Susan Narucki, an experienced soprano who has retained her agile voice and gamine stage presence, led a young cast that included the soprano Amanda Squitieri (who offered some dazzling coloratura singing), the mezzo Katherine Rohrer, the tenor Matthew Garrett and the baritone Morgan Smith—all in strapping vocal health. (The boy alto Jonathan Makepeace gave a knowing and fine performance in his small but crucial role.) Jeffrey Milarsky, an invaluable new-music conductor, led an engaging performance that seemed flawless and firmly expressive.

THE STUNNING DISJUNCTION between Mr. Carter’s advanced age and the astonishing youthful vigor of his music was not the only telling contrast on the music scene lately. The New York Philharmonic, long attacked for its stodgy programming and the conservative, veteran conductors it usually employs, got with the program when it brought Gustavo Dudamel—at 26, the most celebrated young conductor in the world, and the new music-director designate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic—onto its podium on Nov. 29.

Tongues have wagged, chiding our orchestra (and the Chicago Symphony) for not snapping up this wunderkind before L.A. did. But a Dudamel regime in New York would amount to a dose of shock therapy that our Philharmonic musicians probably wouldn’t tolerate.

What Mr. Dudamel has to offer in these early days is mostly excitement, but it’s an excitement that comes from living inside the music, not just riding on top of it. And he knows what he wants: a rhythmically explosive sound, fulsomely lyrical but without the caloric richness that Lorin Maazel typically coaxes out of these players.

As the performances of Chávez’s Sinfonía India and Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony showed, Mr. Dudamel has yet to comprehend the mysteries of musical form—he wouldn’t know a dying fall if it hit him in the head. It was, however, a sign of incipient maturity that he managed to retain his individual leadership style in Dvořák’s Violin Concerto, even while reining it in to accompany the estimable soloist, Gil Shaham—who seemed, by the way, to be having a ball. There’s plenty of time for this conductor to get “interesting”; what’s important is that his talent is true.

Russell Platt is a composer and a music editor at The New Yorker. He can be reached at rplatt@observer.com.