In collaboration with chemist, linguist, and artist Sissel Tolaas, countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo delves into both the wide-ranging cultural and an intimate personal history of falsetto. Through the use of smell, collective memories are created during the performance, activated in tandem with the sound of the voice. This live, 75-minute show features an evocative musical program, carefully woven together using abstract smell molecules to encode distinct aspects of the COUNTERTENOR.

Costanzo is joined by an ensemble of 15 musicians, performing a program spanning over 400 years of music from the late Renaissance to the present, including pieces by John Dowland, Philip Glass, Osvaldo Golijov, Claudio Monteverdi, Thomas Morley, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Klaus Nomi, Frankie
Valli, Antonio Vivaldi, and more, with arrangements by Dan Schlosberg.

This performance contains smell experiences.

FEATURING
Anthony Roth Costanzo*, countertenor & creator
Sissel Tolaas, SMELL RE_searcher & artist
Dan Schlosberg, music director
Landon Wilson, curator & producer
Brandon Stirling Baker, lighting designer
‍
Amir Farsi, flute
Paul Wonjin Cho, clarinet/bass clarinet/basset horn
Yasmina Spiegelberg, clarinet/bass clarinet
Alex Bender, trumpet
Nicolee Kuester, horn
Burt Mason, trombone
David Cossin, percussion
Chelsea Lane, harp
Dan Schlosberg, keyboards and direction
Landon Wilson, keyboards
Dušan Balarin, theorbo/lute/electric guitar
Keir GoGwilt*, violin
Miranda Cuckson*, violin/viola
Colin Brookes, viola
Coleman Itzkoff*, cello
Eleonore Oppenheim, contrabass
‍
Jacob Mallinson Bird, dramaturg
Ibrahim Kombarji, design & installation support
Emmy Skensved, SMELL RE_searchLab assistant
T.J. Keanu Tariom, Hawaiian diction coach
Yanyi Wang, neuroart researcher
Yvonne Lian & Zhonghao Wang, neuroart research assistants
‍
*denotes member of AMOC
‍

The world premiere of COUNTERTENOR is developed and presented with National Sawdust, in celebration of their 10th Anniversary Season. Created in partnership with Bayer/Kultur and SMELL RE_searchLab Berlin, this project is generously funded by Barbara Walkowski and Rachel & Daniel Widawsky, with additional sponsorship from the AMOC* Creative Development Fund.

SMELL development supported by Symrise NY.

Special thanks to Mauro Hertig and Józefina Chętko.

The creative team gratefully acknowledges the participants of the cognitive neuroscience study, which was specifically designed to research, measure, and analyze brain activity while listening to the music for COUNTERTENOR, helping to fine-tune the audience's engagement with smell.

/// This is a seated performance.

Countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo began performing professionally at the age of 11 and has since appeared in opera, concert, recital, film, and on Broadway. As of June 2024, he is the General Director and President of Opera Philadelphia, where he has just implemented a revolutionary ticket program
called Pick Your Price. Costanzo has with appeared many of the world’s most prestigious companies including The Metropolitan Opera, PAC NYC, Versailles, Madison Square Garden, The Guggenheim, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, Opera National de Paris, Teatro Real, New York Philharmonic The Cleveland Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Met Orchestra Chamber Ensemble, Berlin Philharmonic, NDR at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, and the London Symphony Orchestra, among others. He stars in the Metropolitan Opera’s recording and DVD of Akhnaten which won him a GRAMMY Award. As a producer, he has created projects for The New York Philharmonic (including their Bandwagon Initiative), The BBC Proms, WQXR, and St. Ann’s Warehouse, Kabuki-za Tokyo among others. Costanzo was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for his performance in a Merchant Ivory film and graduated with honors from Princeton University, and Manhattan School of Music, where he is now on the board of trustees along with being on the board of National Black Theater. Costanzo also has an Honorary Doctorate from Manhattan School of Music, a History Makers Award from the New York Historical Society, and has been a visiting fellow at Oxford University and a distinguished visiting scholar at Harvard University.

‍
‍Sissel Tolaas (born in Norway, based in Berlin) has been working, researching, and experimenting intensively with the topic of smell since 1990. She is a pioneer and very unique in her approach to smells. She has developed a wide range of revolutionary interdisciplinary projects worldwide with smells based upon her own knowledge –– forensic chemistry, chemical communication, sensory ecology, linguistics, and visual art. Tolaas established the SMELL RE_searchLab Berlin in January 2004.

Tolaas has unique skills in smell recognition, analysis, and reproduction. She has developed notable methods for coding abstract smell molecules and tracking linguistic reactions to individual smell molecules and smells in general. She has researched and experienced smells in many ways and in
multiple diverse contexts and for multiple purposes & formats.
‍
Her research and projects have won recognition through numerous national and international scholarships, honours, and prizes. She is very capable at collaborating intensively with those of other disciplines across the globe.
‍
Tolaas has shown her projects in many museums and institutions including MoMA, New York; NGV Melbourne; DIA Foundation, New York; CCA Singapore, Tate Modern London; Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai; Mori Museum, Tokyo. She has worked with universities such as MIT, Nanyang Technical, Tsinghua, Harvard, and Oxford. She has built up several types of smell archives such as: Smell & Communication / Language; Smell & Coding, Smell & Anthropocene; Smell & Extinction; Smell & Sensory Ecology; Functional Smell Molecules. She is currently working on smell-molecule preservation and conservation archives such as: the Cristobal Balenciaga Legacy; the World’s Oceans and World’s Forests; smell geofacts / artefacts / archives at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; smell heritage archive for the Pompeii Ruins; the Bahrain Pearling Path & UNESCO. Tolaas’ collections of smell molecules and smell complex structures from 1990 to the present include 20,000 smell recording samples and formulas. @SSSL_BERLIN

‍

Brooklyn-based composer, pianist, music director, and arranger Dan Schlosberg’s music has been performed by the Dover Quartet, Choir of Trinity Wall Street, Minnesota Orchestra, Nashville Symphony, Albany Symphony, Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, and Lorelei Ensemble, at venues including Carnegie Hall, (le) poisson rouge, The Kennedy Center, Royal Albert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Beijing Modern Music Festival, and David Lynch’s Festival of Disruption. Current projects include music direction and orchestrations of Show/Boat: A River (2025); music direction and orchestrations of Fake Friends’ The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse (2025); new orchestration of Poul Ruders’ The Handmaid’s Tale (2025); and composition / music direction for Jeremy O. Harris’ A Boy’s Company Presents. Schlosberg arranged and music directed Little Island’s first full-length opera production, Anthony Roth Costanzo is The Marriage of Figaro (2024); music directed the month-long run of Justin Vivian Bond and Anthony Roth Costanzo’s Only an Octave Apart at the Dublin Fringe Festival (2023) and performed as the piano soloist with the New York Philharmonic at the show’s Lincoln Center remount (2022). In 2021, Schlosberg was the audition, rehearsal, and soundtrack pianist for Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. As Heartbeat Opera’s music director, Schlosberg has garnered national acclaim for his love-in-the-time-of climate-apocalypse opera The Extinctionist (2024), as well as re-orchestrations of opera classics; as a performer, Schlosberg has collaborated with Angel Blue, Ani Kavafian, Anthony and Demarre McGill, David Shifrin, and the Imani Winds in major US music festivals. Schlosberg is a principal pianist with NOVUS NY, and made his orchestral conducting debut with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2023, leading an all-Maria Callas program.

Schlosberg has received the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and two ASCAP Morton Gould Awards; in 2023, he was nominated for a Drama Desk award for Outstanding Music in a Play for original music in Kate Tarker’s Montag (Soho Rep). Schlosberg‘s work has been described as “mercurial”, “with the vision of a master sculptor”, “richly detailed yet delicate” and “flat-out brilliant” by the New York Times; “surprisingly illuminating”, “a work of remarkable impact” by Opera News; and “witty”, “ingenious” by the Wall Street Journal. He received his DMA in Composition from the Yale School of Music, and is currently on the composition faculty at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

‍

AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company) is broadly recognized as one of the most consequential companies, producing and presenting some of the most significant interdisciplinary art. Founded in 2017 by composer Matthew Aucoin and director, choreographer, and dancer Zack Winokur, AMOC* was
established with the mission of building and sharing a body of collaborative work. The company comprises 17 of today’s most sought-after composers, choreographers, directors, vocalists, instrumentalists, dancers, writers, and producers, all united by a commitment to collective authorship and long-term, generative relationships with other creators. Frequent collaborations with guest artists and partner organizations are also essential to the development of AMOC*’s productions, enriching the company’s core artistic vision.