Being a massive opera star is only a narrow slice of Costanzo’s purview: not only is he a tireless campaigner on behalf of the art form itself, enchanting school children in the Bronx and helping to coordinate Orfeo-spinoff mini-operas in a school in Brooklyn, he has joyously commandeered the project of becoming the historian of his singing genre.
There’s a marked element of excess thought surrounding this adventurous ten-day Berlin festival of “moderne” composition. Its schedule is loaded with afternoon discussions, panels, laboratories, and general conceptual wrangling, but much of the evening performances are emphatically visceral, jagged, unpredictable, and disobedient toward implied traditional staging requirements of new works.