Maya Lahyani, the Israeli mezzo-soprano who made her lush voice known to Bay Area audiences as an Adler Fellow at the San Francisco Opera in 2010 and now sings with some regularity at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, flies in from the East Coast this week to prepare for the premiere of a work by ace hometown choreographer Alonzo King for his Lines Ballet.

Lahyani sang and danced with other Adler Fellows in King’s 2010 piece “Wheel in the Middle of the Field” and sang classical songs and improvised a Hebrew chant in his 2012 piece “Constellation.” She knows the four pieces she’s singing in this new unnamed opus — a Schumann song, arias by Handel and Purcell, the “Erbarme dich (Have mercy)” lament from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion — but knows zip about what King is cooking up or where she fits into it.

"I don’t have a clue, and that’s the fun part,” says Lahyani, whose natural terpsichorean urges, restrained by vocal coaches who advised her to stand still and sing, were set loose and nurtured by the choreographer."

“I don’t know what it’s going to look like, and I can’t wait to get into the studio and see the dancers get inspired, see how we collaborate to make this piece whole.”

Coming from the more structured world of classical music “where you usually know what’s going to happen,” Lahyani found King’s intuitive, improvisatory approach “extremely liberating and exciting.

“Alonzo is amazing,” she says. “You don’t really know what the piece will be until the last minute; he keeps playing with it and adjusting it until we hit the stage. I love that.”

Lines premieres this new work Wednesday, Nov. 2-Nov. 6 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, with Meredith Webster, a former and favorite member of the company, dancing a solo. The season-opening program also features King’s “Meyer,” set to a recorded score by bass virtuoso and composer Edgar Meyer.

The singer and choreographer began this collaboration by suggesting music to each other. He sent her the aria “Dove sei? (Where are you?)” from Handel’s “Rodelinda” and asked if it were something she’d want to sing.

“We brainstormed for a long time, sending each other links and listening to stuff,” says Lahyani, 34, the first Israeli to sing at the Met and the mezzo who sang the demanding role of the veiled Palestinian woman — a particularly daunting task for an Israeli, who was criticized at home for it — in the Met’s controversy-stirring 2014 production of John Adams’ “The Death of Klinghoffer.”

“We talked about what I felt like singing and what spoke to him as a choreographer, and what would work together,” she says. “After two collaborations, I kind of know where he naturally goes, where he leans toward musically. After he sent me the Handel, we took it from there.”

Lahyani suggested the Bach, and they agreed on another Baroque piece, Dido’s Lament from Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas,” as well Schumann’s “Stille Tränen (Silent Tears),” composed 160 years later.

“The Schumann is from a completely different era in music, but somehow it works with the others. They’re all very human in their texts,” Lahyani says. “You don’t have to know where they come from to make sense of the text and the emotion. One of the wonderful things about Alonzo is that his pieces really touch on and explore the human condition, layer by layer.”

She was startled when King asked the singers to dance when they auditioned for him at the Opera House in 2010.

“He asked us to describe things with movement, and it was so revelatory and joyous,” she says. “I felt like a kid again.”

Jesse Hamlin, San Francisco Chronicle 

October 26th, 2016