Performance

Odes

1 upcoming performance in New York

*Odes* takes its title from Horace’s Latin lyric cycle, poems arranged in four books that helped define the ode as a durable form in Western literature. Here, that source becomes a contemporary concert work heard in New York at Roulette, performed by New York–based vocalist and bandleader Yvonne Rogers. Rogers, a familiar presence in the city’s club circuit, approaches the material with a jazz musician’s attention to line, rhythm, and ensemble flexibility. The result reads less as adaptation than as a study in how ancient texts keep generating new performance languages.