Antony Sees the Light
By JONATHAN L. FISCHER
| January 25, 2012, 6:00 pm
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/25/antony-sees-the-light/?ref=t-magazineCritics like to describe Antony Hegarty, the silken-voiced leader of Antony and the Johnsons, as "otherworldly." In recent years, the singer's music has grown from pop, cabaret and soul signifiers to include characteristics of art song and sounds stranger still. Certainly, each of his acclaimed, prismatic albums seems to float in its own haunted universe.
Antony will conjure up more strange worlds this Thursday, when he performs with an orchestra and an elaborate staging at Radio City Music Hall. Still, "Swanlights" will be an earthly affair in its way. "The idea for the piece was to imagine a quartz crystal," he said in a recent telephone interview. "We retrieve it from the center of a pitch-black mountain, and yet it has luminosity. That is the inspiration for the concert in a way, to suggest light and its relationship to darkness."
Named after the Antony and the Johnsons 2010 album of the same name, "Swanlights" is a one-off commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art's chief curator at large, Klaus Biesenbach. You could call the presentation — described as "a meditation on light, nature and femininity" — part pop spectacle, part performance piece.
