Composer Bryce Dessner (one of the twins in indie-rock group the National) brings together vocal geniuses Roomful of Teeth, librettist Korde Arrington Tuttle, and a chamber orchestra to interrogate three of Robert Mapplethorpe's portfolios. Those portfolios—X, Y, Z, which take as their subjects gay S&M figures, flowers, and nude black men, respectively—sparked an obscenity trial in Ohio in the early 1990s, because self-delusion in Ohio runs deep. While you could hardly ask for a more fascinating array of talent here, the New York Times could barely hide its disdain for Dessner's "meager" tribute, calling it "a blandly brooding, affectlessly luminous score." The shade is so thick in that review that this thing might be worth a fact-check, if not a hate-watch. by Rich Smith