‘It’s Anthony’s Time’: A Composer Gets His Due

With a new production of Anthony Davis’s pathbreaking Malcolm X opera opening in Detroit, we are on the cusp of a broader reappraisal of his work.

As the orchestra of the Detroit Opera tuned itself for a recent rehearsal, the outline of a vast spacecraft loomed over the pit.

Underneath that ship, you could see a contrasting image: a pastoral painting, of a mountain range, with a river slicing a path between peaks, redolent of the backdrop behind Malcolm X as he spoke at the Audubon Ballroom in New York on Feb. 21, 1965 — moments before his assassination.

Already, before a single note had been drilled of Anthony Davis’s opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” — which opens on Saturday at the Detroit Opera House here and will travel to the Metropolitan Opera in 2023 — a conversation was in progress between imaginative and historical modes of thought.

Read the article at The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/12/arts/music/anthony-davis-x-detroit-opera.html