Critics 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. The event expands the staging of a previous Johnsons concert, “The Crying Light,” performed at the Manchester International Festival in 2009, to fill Radio City Music Hall’s dramatic, 6,000-seat room. (The 60-piece orchestra, joining Antony in material from each of his four albums, should do much of the heavy lifting.)
The germ of the presentation came from Antony’s friend Marina Abramovic, the celebrated performance artist, who “was encouraging me to pursue a less typical approach to lighting a concert,” Antony said. “She was talking about creating a longer arc. Usually when you want to light a concert, you go from song to song, and each song is kind of a reset, and she was suggesting, ‘Why don’t you create an arc in the lights that has a longer forward trajectory.’ And the piece — it became something more contemplative and more theatrical.” For both the 2009 and 2012 performances, Antony says he looked to Bauhaus lighting design and brought in the artist Chris Levine, who creates intricate and cerebral laser-light installations. Pulsing, geometric set pieces suggest a living structure of crystal. One BBC notice awarded the Manchester performance an 11 out of 10. (Other collaborators include the lighting designer Paul Normandale and the set designer Carl Robertshaw. The orchestral arrangements are by Nico Muhly, Rob Moose and Maxim Moston.)
Antony, who is transgender, was born in England in 1971 and spent much of his childhood in the San Francisco Bay Area. He came to New York in the early 1990s and began performing experimental theater in East Village clubs like the Pyramid. In a sense, his staged concerts mark a spiritual return to those earlier days, before Antony became best known for his musical recordings. For starters, they require a larger degree of formal consideration than the more casual rock-club performances that followed Antony and the Johnsons’s 2005 breakthrough, “I Am a Bird Now.” When I saw the group perform in Boston that year, Antony bantered playfully about Whitney Houston and sprinkled the stage with petals after an audience member handed him a rose. But at Radio City, don’t expect Antony to speak between songs — that would break the spell. “It’s a different kind of experience for the audience, like seeing a movie,” said Antony, who has largely performed with orchestral groups in recent years.
Thursday’s concert also has a more sentimental link to Antony’s early years in New York. “I’m really proud when I see the word ‘Johnsons’ ” — for Marsha P. Johnson, the New York transgender activist — “next to the words ‘Radio City,’” he said. “To me, it seems like bringing that electricity from downtown with me in a way.”
In the last few years, Antony has become more visible in the worlds of fine art and high fashion. An exhibition of his collages, drawings and sculptures opened this month at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. And he wrote music for and performed in the theatrical piece “The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic,” which premiered at the Manchester International Festival last summer. For the “Swanlights” concert, he’ll be costumed by the designers of Ohne Titel.
And he’s begun putting the themes of his work — environmental destruction, gender and spirituality, an embrace of beauty and hope — in plainer terms. “A starving woman will metabolize her own muscles to continue to produce milk for her newborn baby, really until she has nothing left in her own body. And I feel that’s sort of where we’re at with the earth,” he said. If there’s a worldview to be glimpsed in “The Crying Light” and “Swanlights,” it’s an argument for connecting a more hopeful, feminine, earthbound spirituality with the idea of environmental salvation. “I know my ideas probably seem very eccentric, and I’m totally fine with that,” Antony said.
Our interview ended a few minutes later. “You think I’m totally nuts, don’t you?” Antony asked his publicist, who’d been listening in on the conference call.
“No, I think it’s great!” she said. “Someone should be saying these things.”