Aurelia Butler

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    An Opera Partnership’s Next Step: A Fable About Happiness

    George Benjamin and Martin Crimp, who collaborated on modern successes including “Written on Skin,” return with the one-act “Picture a Day Like This.”In one scene of George Benjamin’s new opera “Picture a Day Like This,” which premieres on Wednesday at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, a composer and her assistant cut off an interviewer midsentence. The composer asks whether there’s space in her schedule to speak; “five minutes,” the assistant replies.Thankfully, Benjamin had considerably more time to talk when he met with a journalist at his West London home on a sunny Monday in May.If the premiere of “Picture a Day Like This,” written with the playwright Martin Crimp, is highly anticipated, that is because anticipation has long accompanied new works by Benjamin, 63. Initially, for their infrequency — creative block in his early career meant that he produced only a few minutes of music each year — but lately for their critical acclaim.Earlier stage works with Crimp, “Written on Skin” (2012) and “Lessons in Love and Violence” (2018), have quickly entered the repertory of major European opera houses. But it is their first opera, the one-act “Into the Little Hill,” from 2006, that most resembles “Picture a Day Like This,” in its size, duration and subject matter.Indeed, “Picture,” also a one-act, could be paired with “Into the Little Hill,” a retelling of the Pied Piper fairy tale, for a future double bill. Still, “Picture” stands alone, an operatic fable about the pursuit of happiness. It combines two plots, Crimp said in an interview. The first, “The Happy Man’s Shirt,” is an ancient European satire in which a ruler nearing death is told he will be cured if he finds the shirt of a happy man; the only truly happy person he finds, though, is a man too poor to own one. And the second is based a Buddhist story in which a woman goes in search of a miracle to return her infant child from the dead.The hourlong opera, for chamber orchestra and a cast of five, “is a quest, like ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ or Voltaire’s ‘Candide,’” Crimp said. “But it’s a learning structure, if you like, which follows one character from beginning to end, where the encounters are with a variety of new people.”Marianne Crebassa, left, and John Brancy in a rehearsal for the new opera, a fablelike one-act.Jean-Louis FernandezCompared with their previous operas, which have rotated around a fixed point or situation, “Picture,” Crimp said, has “a kind of linear, sequential propulsion.” It follows a mother, whose child has died, on a quest to find the button from the sleeve of a happy person’s shirt (which will secure the child’s return); along the way, she meets a variety of flawed characters.“Within a structure like that, variety is very important,” Crimp said, adding that early discussions with Benjamin about the opera “gave him the license to experiment with very different tones and moods through the different encounters.”Accordingly, Benjamin said, the work “is like a series of bubbles” that the woman walks through. With no precedent or consequence to each moment, and without cumulative material to refer to or push forward, every scene change left him feeling like he “was starting a new piece almost entirely.”A solution was inspired by Vladimir Nabokov — whose writing fixated Benjamin as he composed “Picture” — and his mosaic-like approach. An idea would arrive fully formed in Nabokov’s head, but realizing it on paper would involve jumping around the structure of the piece. “He would write something that ended up on page 238, followed by something for page 5, something for page 15,” Benjamin said. “Bit by bit, these things would fuse from different angles, and suddenly the seamless text would be written at the end, but it wasn’t composed like that.”Benjamin’s opera was written with Martin Crimp, whose texts he likes to be challenged by.Violette Franchi for The New York Times“My experience with myself,” he added, “is that it would be a big mistake to start at the beginning.”Benjamin and Crimp are one of the most successful opera partnerships of our time. They were introduced through the musicologist Laurence Dreyfus in 2005, after Benjamin had met dozens of playwrights and film directors with a view toward writing an opera, including Arthur Miller and David Lynch. The composer Harrison Birtwistle encouraged Benjamin to “find the one person with whom it really works, and stick with them.”Crimp, Benjamin said, writes “terrifying, unflinching, and uncompromising plays” that contrast with a man who, when they first met, he found “gentle of nature.” Crimp said that their relationship has continued because they both have “a special respect for the work of the other.” The lines are drawn precisely in their collaboration; they decide on a story, structure and general trajectory, then leave each other to get to it. Benjamin said that Crimp doesn’t email him any drafts; “they just arrive,” he added, “in a brown, A4 envelope suddenly one morning.”At the Aix Festival, “Picture” will be directed by Daniel Jeanneteau and Marie-Christine Soma, who staged the premiere of “Into the Little Hill” in Paris. In their treatment of the story, the woman is trapped in what they called a “mental prison,” in which the characters she meets — two lovers, an artisan and a collector — float in and out of her life.“It’s an adventure of a soul,” Jeanneteau said, adding that the key to the piece is its simplicity.Through simplicity comes banality, a consideration rich with possibility in playwriting but much more difficult in opera. When writing “Into the Little Hill,” Crimp had, at the back of his mind, the idea of incorporating banal language from everyday life, words like electricity, concrete and refrigerator. “Picture,” with its characters’ distinctly contemporary concerns — topics include mattresses, chlorpromazine and lakeside Austrian retreats — steps closer to his goal.“You can flirt with the banal on the edges of a musical work” like “Picture,” Crimp said, “but ultimately, that’s done to prepare the ground to enter into a much deeper metaphysical space.”Benjamin said that he has “always thought of orchestral pieces, even chamber music as a theatrical thing.” Even so, the drastic changes of tone in Crimp’s libretto for “Picture” have brought a new, dramatic volatility to his operatic writing.“I think he enjoys challenging me, you know: ‘You haven’t done this before, this will be hard, let’s see what you can do,’” Benjamin said of Crimp. “And I like that.” More

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    Morgan Wallen Tops the Album Chart for a 15th Time

    Young Thug opens at No. 2 and Peso Pluma at No. 3 as the country superstar continues to dominate the Billboard 200.A month ago, the country superstar Morgan Wallen seemed sidelined. A vocal cord injury had benched him from his arena and stadium tour, and after a 12-week perch atop the Billboard album chart he had ceded No. 1 to Taylor Swift and the K-pop group Stray Kids.But Wallen didn’t stay down for long.He returned to the stage in late June, and “One Thing at a Time,” Wallen’s latest streaming blockbuster, came back to No. 1 after two weeks in second place, and it has stayed on top. This week, “One Thing” notches its 15th week at No. 1. Watch out, Adele, whose “21” was No. 1 for a total of 24 weeks in 2011 and 2012.In its latest week, “One Thing” had the equivalent of 110,500 sales in the United States, up slightly from the week before. That total includes 140 million streams and 4,500 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate. Since its release in March, Wallen’s album has racked up the equivalent of just under three million sales, and been streamed 3.5 billion times.The list of artists whom Wallen has blocked from No. 1 — among them Metallica, Ed Sheeran, Niall Horan, Lana Del Rey and the K-pop acts Ateez, Seventeen, Agust D and Jimin — now includes Young Thug and Peso Pluma, who released new albums last week.Young Thug, the veteran Atlanta rapper, opens at No. 2 with “Business Is Business,” which had the equivalent of 89,000 sales, including 106 million streams. (He remains incarcerated in Georgia on racketeering charges in a wide-ranging RICO case.)Peso Pluma, a 24-year-old songwriter and performer from Mexico, starts at No. 3 with “Génesis,” which had the equivalent of 73,000 sales, and 101 million streams. According to Billboard, “Génesis” reached the highest-ever chart position for an album of regional Mexican music, which has lately been on a winning streak online and on tour.Also this week, Swift’s “Midnights” holds at No. 4 and Gunna’s “A Gift & a Curse” falls two spots to No. 5. Kelly Clarkson’s latest, “Chemistry,” arrives at No. 6. More

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    With Indiana Jones’s Return, Looking Back at the Opening Scene of ‘Raiders’

    A shot-by-shot breakdown of the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” sequence that became a defining one in adventure movies.“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” (now in theaters) is the first film in that franchise not directed by Steven Spielberg, who developed the character all those years ago with George Lucas and Philip Kaufman, as well as the screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan. Yet the handoff of directorial duties to James Mangold doesn’t feel like a strain, because Spielberg established the character of the globe-trotting archaeologist and the style of his cinematic escapades so adroitly over the first four films.In fact, he set them in stone in the very first sequence of the very first movie — as we can see in a shot-by-shot look that classic sequence today.We first see Indiana Jones less than 30 seconds into 1981’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark” — but it’s a carefully prepared hero entrance, holding back Harrison Ford’s distinctive visage as long as possible. Instead, we first see him from the back, in a frame that nevertheless introduces the character and his distinctive iconography (his hat, bullwhip and jacket).Paramount PicturesThis continues for a few minutes; we only see Indiana Jones from behind, in shadow or in disembodied close-ups, like when he uses his bullwhip to snatch a pistol from the local who is about to betray him. “That’s when you first see him with the bullwhip,” Lucas explained in a 1978 story conference that was tape-recorded, transcribed and made available a few years ago. “That’s where the plot comes alive.” After that move, we finally see his face as he steps into the light.By Paramount PicturesOur first look inside the cave is creepily atmospheric — dark and torchlit, with our view of our hero initially blocked by cobwebs. “This is the first scene in the movie,” Spielberg, at the time still best known as the director of “Jaws,” strategized. “This scene should get at least four major screams.”Paramount PicturesPart of the M.O. of the Jones movies is how sequences constantly top themselves. We get a prime early example of that here, when Satipo (future “Doc Ock” Alfred Molina) is alarmed by a sprinkling of spiders on Indy’s back — only to turn and reveal his own back covered in spiders.Paramount PicturesFew filmmakers are as aware of their audience as Spielberg, and he uses Satipo as an audience surrogate; he reacts as we do, registering shock and fear at the various dangers, booby traps, and skeletons they encounter along their way.Paramount PicturesYet the director always plays fair. We see all of the dangers of the cave, at normal speed, on their way in — so we’re prepared for Indy and Satipo to face them, at top speed, on the way out.Paramount PicturesWith both his good looks and lightning-fast reflexes established, we also quickly get a sense of Dr. Jones’s intelligence. He sees every potential trap and carefully sidesteps it: where he walks, the light his body crosses, the careful replacement of the idol with the sand bag.Paramount PicturesSpielberg cuts tautly, back and forth, between Indy attempting the switch and Satipo watching in fear (again, the audience surrogate), building tension that seems to deflate when he successfully manipulates the swap.By Paramount PicturesAnd then all bets are off.In their breakdown of the sequence, Spielberg voiced three different variations of one idea: “What we’re just doing here, really, is designing a ride at Disneyland.” (There would, subsequently, be an immensely popular Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland.) And that’s what they do, creating a lightning-fast, whiplash-inducing series of ascents and dips, traps and saves, fake-outs and tight squeezes. Indy finally seems home free … and then comes the topper.Paramount PicturesThe most memorable image in a scene full of them plays out just as Lucas described it in 1978. “There is a 65-foot boulder that’s form- fitted to only roll down the corridor coming right at him,” he explained. “And it’s a race. He gets to outrun the boulder. “Paramount PicturesAnd shockingly, he does. He ends up covered in cobwebs and escaping empty-handed, but at least he escapes …Paramount Pictures… using a conveniently-placed vine to make a skin-of-his-teeth getaway, accompanied by, for the first time, John Williams’s unforgettable main theme. And then, once in the plane, we find out that (the previous sequence notwithstanding) there is one thing Indiana Jones is afraid of: snakes.Paramount Pictures“In the end all it is a teaser,“ Lucas said of this opening, as they mapped it out years in advance. And he’s right; it’s a marvelous preview of the thrills, chills and laughs of the film that will follow. But the “Raiders” opening did more than that: it set a template for the “Indiana Jones” series — and for the thrill-ride blockbusters of the 1980s and beyond. More

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    Robert Sherman, WQXR Host of Classical and Folk Music Shows, Dies at 90

    For more than five decades, he brought together emerging classical and folk performers as well as established stars for interviews and live performances.Robert Sherman interviewing the flutist Marina Piccinini at the studios of WQXR-FM in 1991. He had been on the radio in New York since 1969.Steve J. ShermanRobert Sherman, a charming, easygoing radio personality who hosted three long-running shows over more than a half-century on the New York classical music station WQXR-FM, died on Tuesday at his home in Ossining, N.Y., in Westchester County. He was 90.His son Steve said the cause was a stroke, the fourth Mr. Sherman had had since 2021.Mr. Sherman had been working behind the scenes at WQXR for more than a decade before he began hosting “Woody’s Children,” a weekly folk music program, in 1969. A year later, he began “The Listening Room,” a daily program on which both established and emerging musicians were interviewed and played live music for 23 years. His guests included Jessye Norman, Itzhak Perlman, Robert Merrill and Leopold Stokowski.And in 1978, he started “Young Artists Showcase,” a weekly show that offered a prestigious platform for up-and-coming musicians to perform. That program is still on the air.“Bob, in many ways, embodied everything WQXR tried to be,” Ed Yim, the station’s chief content officer, said in a phone interview. “He was a guiding spirit. He supported young artists and approached classical music as being for everyone. He’s someone we all turned to when we wanted to know the history of something, or why we did things a certain way.”Mr. Sherman, whose mother was the concert pianist and teacher Nadia Reisenberg, wanted to conduct interviews that took flight as friendly conversations, rather than limiting his guests to answering prepared questions.In 1974, for example, he was speaking off the air to the contralto Marian Anderson during a news break on “The Listening Room” when, he later recalled, she said it had been many years since she heard one of the recordings he had just played. Back on the air, he asked her if she listened much to her own music.“When there’s listening time for our records, very often we make the choice to take the other things,” she said. But, she added after discussing some of her musical preferences, “music, in any case, gives one a great sense of quiet, and that is the kind I like rather than that which is discordant.”Mr. Sherman interviewing Leonard Bernstein in 1984. He wanted the interviews he conducted to take flight as friendly conversations.Steve J. ShermanThe pianist Emanuel Ax was on “The Listening Room” several times in his 20s, before he became famous. He recalled how welcoming Mr. Sherman had been.“For someone so young, it was a big deal,” he said by phone, adding that he took easily to being on the radio. “The thing he let me do, which I flipped for, is he used to let me read some of the ads on the show. Each time I’d come on, he let me say, ‘And now, Emanuel Ax is going to read the following ad.’”Mr. Ax was among the performers at a concert celebrating Mr. Sherman’s 90th birthday last year, which Mr. Sherman himself hosted, as were the violinists Chee-Yun Kim, Joshua Bell and Ani Kavafian and the Emerson String Quartet. Ms. Kim, who also spoke, discussed her first appearance on “Young Artists Showcase,” when she was a teenager.“I never spoke on a radio station ever, not even in Korea,” she said. “And I said to you, ‘I am so nervous, but it’s a live show — what if I make a mistake?’ And you told me, do you remember what you told me, you said: ‘Just talk to the microphone as you’re talking to me and people happen to listen in. That’s it. It’s just us two.’ And I was like, OK.”Robert Sherman was born on July 23, 1932, in Manhattan. His parents were immigrants: His father, Isaac, who ran an import-export business and other companies, was from Ukraine. His mother, Ms. Reisenberg, was Lithuanian.She taught Robert to play piano — with limited success.“I had a certain talent for it and lacked the discipline to do anything,” Mr. Sherman said in an interview in 2019 for the Avery Fisher Artist Program oral history project. “Mother always told me, ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t tell anybody you study with me, because you’re not typical of my class.’”He joked that he chose to attend the academically rigorous Stuyvesant High School, where he figured he would be the best pianist, rather than a performing arts school, where he assumed he would be the worst.After graduating from New York University with a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1952, he earned a master’s degree in music from Teachers College, Columbia University. He then entered the Army, where he played piano in a band that toured in U.S.O. shows.He joined WQXR — which until 2009 was owned by The New York Times — in the mid-1950s as a clerk and typist. He gradually moved up to director of recorded music and then music director; by 1969, he was program director. He also wrote scripts for a show called “Folk Music of the World,” but he wanted to create a different type of program that was more connected to the contemporary surge in folk music’s popularity.His proposal was approved, but the station interviewed other potential hosts, including Pete Seeger, before choosing Mr. Sherman. The show was called “Woody’s Children,” after a reference by Mr. Seeger, on the first episode, to the singer-songwriters who followed Woody Guthrie. WQXR canceled the program in 1999, saying it no longer fit the station’s format. But it was picked up by the Fordham University station WFUV, where it ran until earlier this year.Mr. Sherman’s guests on “Woody’s Children” over the years included Judy Collins, Odetta, Tom Paxton and Peter, Paul and Mary.“After nearly 55 years on the radio dial,” Rich McLaughlin, WFUV’s program director, said in a statement after Mr. Sherman’s death, “‘Woody’ is as much Sherman as he is Guthrie.”Mr. Sherman hosted the 1,800th installment of “Young Artists Showcase” in 2012.Steve J. ShermanMr. Sherman hosted “The Listening Room” until WQXR canceled it in 1993. “Young Artists Showcase,” which he hosted for 45 years, has continued with guest hosts.Mr. Sherman also wrote music criticism for The New York Times; hosted “Vibrations,” a short-lived music show on the New York public television station WNET, in 1972; and collaborated with Victor Borge, the comic piano virtuoso, on two books, “My Favorite Intermissions: Lives of the Musical Greats and Other Facts You Never Knew You Were Missing” (1971) and a sequel, “My Favorite Comedies in Music” (1980).With his brother, Alexander (who died in 2013), Mr. Sherman compiled a book about their mother, “Nadia Reisenberg: A Musician’s Scrapbook” (1986), which used interviews, letters, photographs and newspaper clippings to tell her story.“I really didn’t want to do the typical artist’s biography, which is that she played here, she played there, and everybody loved her,” Mr. Sherman told The Standard-Star of New Rochelle, N.Y. “I wanted to make it more personal and at the same time more documentary.”In addition to his son Steve, a performing arts photographer, Mr. Sherman is survived by his partner, Jill Bloom; another son, Peter; and four grandchildren. His marriage to Ruth Gershuni ended in divorce; his marriage to Veronica Bravo ended with her death in 2012.At Mr. Sherman’s 90th-birthday concert, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma remembered being invited to the WQXR studio at the Times building for an interview when he was 15. He was so anxious, he said, that he steeled himself by drinking several gin and tonics in a nearby bar. (He had an ID from the Juilliard School that said he was 23.)“I bumped into you the next day,” he recalled to Mr. Sherman, “and you said, ‘Yo-Yo, I just want you to know I spent all last night splicing’ — this was in the days of tape — ‘this interview from completely unintelligible sentences, and I turned it into something that made even a tiny bit of sense.’” More

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    Inside the Shed’s Sonic Sphere

    A hanging concert hall at the Shed in Manhattan purports to offer something “experimental, experiential and communal.” Our critic climbs the stairs.“Whoa,” a man near me said as the curtains swept open.He, I and a couple of hundred other people had been waiting in a large room at the Shed, the arts center at Hudson Yards in Manhattan. Portentous, woozy background music was playing, as if an alien encounter was imminent.Then those curtains parted, and a much larger room was revealed: the Shed’s vast McCourt space, in which a sphere, 65 feet in diameter and pocked like Swiss cheese, had been suspended from the faraway ceiling and bathed in red light.This arresting — indeed, “whoa”-inducing — sight was the Sonic Sphere, a realization of a concert hall design by the brilliant, peerlessly loopy composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007), who inspired Germany to build the first one for the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka, Japan.Stockhausen, an impresario of electroacoustic experimentation and far-out notions like a string quartet playing inside a helicopter, imagined the audiences for his “Kugelauditorium” sitting on a sound-permeable level within the sphere, so that speakers could be placed under, as well as around and over, them.During the six months that the Osaka exposition was open, hundreds of thousands of people came and heard taped music adapted for the in-the-round playback possibilities, as well as live performances. Then, for the next half century, the idea lay dormant; Carnegie Hall and Vienna’s Musikverein remained intact, having not been replaced by giant spheres.Enter, a few years ago, a team led by Ed Cooke (whose biography calls him “a multidisciplinary explorer of consciousness”), the sound designer Merijn Royaards and Nicholas Christie, the project’s engineering director.They have built Sonic Spheres in France, Britain, Mexico and the United States. Each time, like the plant in “Little Shop of Horrors,” the contraption has grown. The Shed iteration, open through the end of July, is the first to hang in midair, at a cost of more than $2 million.As in Osaka, some of the presentations offer taped music; some, live. On Saturday, I climbed the many steps to the sphere’s entrance and reclined, like everyone else, in a comfortable hammock-like seat, listening to the seductively sullen 2009 debut album by the British band the xx. Forty-five minutes after that was over, the pianist Igor Levit appeared in person to perform, for a fresh audience, Morton Feldman’s “Palais de Mari,” from 1986.Colors and configurations of lights on the fabric skin of the Sphere tended to shift with the music’s beat as Levit performed.James Estrin/The New York TimesLights, in colors and configurations that tended to shift with the music’s beat, played on the fabric skin of this big Wiffle ball. But for an audience that could be seeing the high-definition stadium shows of Beyoncé or Taylor Swift this summer, the visuals were blurry, rudimentary stuff; this was the aspect of the presentation that felt most trapped in 1970.And the audio experience that emerged from the 124 speakers was unremarkable at best. The xx remix did nicely separate the bass, coming up palpably but not too heavily out of the bottom of the sphere, from the voices around and above. To no compelling end, though, and the album’s whispery intimacy was supersized into a much blander grandeur.The situation was more distressing for Levit. While the spare, spacious chords of “Palais de Mari” registered more or less cleanly, with only slight fuzz, the sound was muddy for the Bach chorale he played as a prelude; it was the perennial challenge of amplifying acoustic instruments, times 124. And the jittery lighting, a collaboration between Levit and the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, could hardly have been more uncomprehending of Feldman’s glacial austerity.For all the souped-up spiffiness of the Sonic Sphere, the programming on Saturday felt like a retread of artists who were more interesting when Alex Poots, the Shed’s artistic director, presented them during his stint at the Park Avenue Armory uptown.There, in 2014, the xx did a celebrated (live) residency in front of only a few dozen people per show. Levit, the following year, played Bach as part of an ornate concentration exercise orchestrated by Marina Abramovic. (Will he, now a fixture of New York’s more unconventional spaces, end up hanging upside-down at the piano once the Perelman Performing Arts Center opens this fall?)Those Armory shows were more memorable than either Shed set. Both of them on Saturday were under 40 minutes, but I found myself getting antsy well before time was up. Perhaps the audiences at Burning Man, the techno-hippie hedonist bonanza in the Nevada desert where a Sonic Sphere was built last year, were more engrossed, experiencing it on harder drugs than the Coke Zero I’d had with dinner.Sober, none of the music was more interesting, effective, illuminated or illuminating in this space than it would have been elsewhere. It was clear that the main point was that first reveal, as the curtains opened and everyone’s phones came out, ready to post images of something big and glamorous on social media.So, millions of dollars for Instagram bait — but fine, if its creators didn’t also hype it as “an unlimited instrument of empathy” that’s “experimental, experiential and communal.” I felt, in fact, more distant from my fellow audience members in the Sonic Sphere, even the ones reclining next to me, than I have at most any traditional concert hall.In this, the sphere is of a piece with the other current offering at the Shed: a weird virtual-reality simulacrum of a solo piano concert by the composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died in March.The Sonic Sphere was billed as “an unlimited instrument of empathy” that’s “experimental, experiential and communal.”James Estrin/The New York TimesEmpathy? Communal experience? No, the hologram-like specter of Sakamoto was more vivid and substantial than the other people watching with me, who, while I wore the VR glasses, faded into transparent ghostliness.The wall text in the holding room for the Sonic Sphere acknowledges that technology can isolate us from each other, but adds that mustn’t necessarily be the case: “We need it to delight and inspire us, not just passively, but in ways that provoke action.”But, as with so much ambitious, empty-headed, underwhelming, ultimately depressing tech, the action that’s provoked by this expensive spectacle is merely a passing moment of “whoa.” More

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    Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Great ‘Indiana Jones’ Adventure

    There’s a photo of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, taken at an Emmys afterparty in 2019, that captures, better than any other contemporary celebrity photo I’ve seen, the enduring allure and glamour of Hollywood success. In it, the British writer-actress is wearing a glittering low-cut dress, sitting in a high-back chair, a cigarette in one hand, a vodka […] More

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    Jakub Hrusa, the Royal Opera’s Next Leader, Keeps Quality in Mind

    “I don’t want to exclude anything,” says the Czech conductor Jakub Hrusa, who plans to present Czech music alongside mainstream repertoire in London.For the next music director of the Royal Opera House, Jakub Hrusa, one main thing defines the theater’s activities: “Quality.”“It’s the quality of human relationships and sensitivity to the genre so that it can be done really well,” he said. “There is an environment which is cultivating, not killing, creativity and the individual voice.”An authoritative, elegant but humble presence on the podium, Mr. Hrusa, a Czech native, has become one of today’s most sought conductors. At the end of the 2024-25 season, he will succeed Antonio Pappano, who became music director at the Royal Opera in 2002.Mr. Hrusa, 41, already resides with his family in London while serving as chief conductor of the Bamberg Symphony and principal guest conductor of both the Czech Philharmonic and the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. In November, he will make his U.S. operatic debut with a production of Janacek’s “Jenufa” at Lyric Opera of Chicago.A passionate advocate of his country’s composers, Mr. Hrusa has penned his own suite based on another Janacek opera, “The Cunning Little Vixen”; championed the symphonies of the little-performed Miloslav Kabelac; and written a book of essays about Bohuslav Martinu.But he of course embraces a range of mainstream repertoire. As a regular guest with the Glyndebourne Festival, Mr. Hrusa conducted works by Mozart, Puccini and many more. In 2018 at the Royal Opera, he led Bizet’s “Carmen” in a production by Barrie Kosky, a director he will rejoin for a cycle of Wagner’s “Ring” after his tenure begins in Covent Garden. (Mr. Pappano will kick off the project this September with “Das Rheingold.”)In a recent interview, Mr. Hrusa discussed his anticipation about becoming music director and some of his repertoire choices, including Czech music. The following conversation has been edited and condensed.You must be looking forward to making the Royal Opera your artistic home.Opera is kind of a pinnacle of what is possible to achieve in music. But it’s a genre which, in practice, demands an incredible amount of compromise. Covent Garden is a fantastic exception because it maintains basic principles for what opera needs to shine. So they care about the rehearsal process. The stage management is better quality than anywhere. The orchestra is motivated to play on the best possible level every night.Of course, opera is occasionally criticized for being elitist. But what I sense is that the house really matters to the local community. And yet the profile is very international, including with running streams worldwide.You’ll be working alongside Antonio Pappano for the next two seasons — how does the house bear his handwriting, and what can we expect you to bring to the table?I’m a huge believer in natural transitions rather than radical changes. The house is very harmonious. After those over 20 years of Tony Pappano’s tenure, it’s achieved an incredible amount.Covent Garden has the broadest possible ambition to embrace opera as a genre internationally, and rightly so. That said, Italian repertoire is and must remain an integral part of any house’s curriculum.It will only be a slight shift in focus. I will do Italian masters such as Puccini and Verdi. The house has appointed Speranza Scappucci as principal guest conductor, which I’m very happy about because she is an extremely inspiring artist, and her focus is much more like Tony’s.Jakub Hrusa leading the New York Philharmonic in 2019. In November, he will make his U.S. operatic debut with a production of Janacek’s “Jenufa” at Lyric Opera of Chicago.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesI would very naturally want to embrace a bit more Czech music, which I think everyone expects because there’s so much to offer there, and why not do it with the love and conviction of a Czech conductor? Janacek will be in a central point because he is arguably the best Czech composer of opera, and one of the best composers of opera of all time.But I don’t want to exclude anything. I will do German opera, Russian opera, French opera.Has Janacek succeeded at entering the operatic repertoire?I think he’s made it. Of course, Janacek will never be Giuseppe Verdi or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. His music is too specifically urgent and emotionally charged.He will always be a little bit more the performer’s hero than the general public’s hero. But I haven’t yet met anyone who would stay indifferent to Janacek’s music. You can’t. It’s too powerful.There is, of course, a wonderful tradition of presenting Czech music in London.It would be very difficult to find another country apart from Britain which has taken so much care about our traditions. Of course, Czech music is by far not the only segment they are passionate about. There is a huge sense of openness to other music cultures. And they’re always embraced with respect and curiosity and quality.Are there any contemporary composers whom you’d like to champion?I’m rather eclectic in that field. I would love that to be more of a team decision because it’s a huge enterprise to make a contemporary opera alive onstage. It’s a huge investment of creative power and finances. I’d like to have this be thoroughly discussed and know, institutionally, that we’re doing something which we all want. More

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    Female Singers Shine in Royal Opera’s ‘Don Carlo’

    In a Verdi revival at the Royal Opera, two top female singers are discovering, and rediscovering, characters from a real-life royal love triangle.Across the monumental, hourslong opera “Don Carlo,” two female characters take a journey unparalleled in Verdi’s canon of 28 operas. No witches here. No coughing courtesans. Just two real-life characters from history caught in a love triangle that rocked 16th-century Spain.And for the Royal Opera’s revival of Nicholas Hytner’s 2008 production (running for six performances from June 30 to July 15), two of the world’s top female singers are onboard: the Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen making her role debut as Elisabeth of Valois. For her and Yulia Matochkina, a Russian mezzo-soprano, it’s a chance to delve into two of Verdi’s most complicated and fully realized female characters.“Don Carlo” is based on the play by Friedrich Schiller. It portrays a real-life Spanish prince, Don Carlo, and Elisabeth of Valois, a French princess, who are secretly in love, although she is betrothed to his father, King Philip II of Spain. Princess Eboli, also in love with Carlo, threatens to expose the affair. And Carlo’s dearest friend, Rodrigo, has maneuvers of his own. It all plays out against the grim backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition.The male characters often dominate the sprawling story, from the duet between Carlo and Rodrigo (one of the rare tenor-baritone duets in opera) to the Grand Inquisitor’s famous bass aria, which brings the opera’s menacing tone to a crescendo. But for many, it’s the women who move the story forward and offer perhaps the richest characterizations in Verdi’s repertoire.“One thing to remember with all of Verdi’s operas is what he learned from Victor Hugo, which is that conflict is at the heart to characterization,” Susan Rutherford, the author of the 2013 book “Verdi, Opera, Women,” said in a phone interview. “That idea really governs most of his output. I think in both ‘Aida’ and ‘Don Carlo,’ the women are very well rounded. It’s not melodramatic, like one is good and the other is evil.”Verdi’s interpretation of a Hugo piece —“Rigoletto” is based on Hugo’s 1832 play “Le roi s’amuse,” or “The King Amuses Himself” — and his works inspired by other writers of the 18th and 19th centuries may be part of the reason for such rich characterizations. It’s something that both Ms. Davidsen and Ms. Matochkina are aware of in their respective characters, which they discussed in interviews at the Royal Opera during the first week of rehearsals in early June.“Schiller’s drama deals with political and social conflicts and with numerous palace intrigues, but the opera is focused primarily on the characters,” said Ms. Matochkina, who has sung the role in several major opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera. “Enchanting women use their beauty and charm to influence politics. It’s a rumor reflected in the opera that Princess Eboli had a love affair with the king and betrayed his trust, and she paid and suffered for it in every sense.”Yulia Matochkina as Princess Eboli. Ms. Matochkina has previously sung the role in several major opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera.Bill Cooper/ROHThat sense of portraying a moment in history — no matter how fictionalized Schiller and Verdi and his librettist made it — is part of the excitement for both singers. Ms. Davidsen said she had empathy for Elisabeth’s predicament of being torn between the prince she loves and the king she must marry.“Forced marriage is not something most of us know up close, but we know that it exists, and we certainly know about royal families here in this country and also where I come from,” she said, referring to England and her native Norway. “We are not the royals, but we see it from outside: what it takes to be an official person, and how it is controlled by so many others.”That control — and the control of the Catholic Church during one of its darkest periods — is at the heart of “Don Carlo,” and the female characters react accordingly.“Both women cross boundaries of what are expected of nice girls, shall we say, but ultimately both of them find a more generous sense of their rivals,” Ms. Rutherford said. “Verdi’s female characters are in some ways stronger than their male counterparts.”“Don Carlo,” written by Verdi in 1867, preceded his astonishing output that included “Aida,” “Otello,” and his final opera, “Falstaff,” a life-affirming comedy at the end of a prolific career defined almost entirely by tragic operas.For Ms. Rutherford, the female characters in “Don Carlo” are not merely products of the machinations of men in past centuries.“I think it’s important not to look at them simply from our eyes,” she said. “We can look back at these operas and wring our hands, but their initial audiences saw these women as having different strengths and weaknesses.”Lise Davidsen, who plays Elisabeth of Valois, said she feels empathy for the 16th-century princess. “We are not the royals, but we see it from outside: what it takes to be an official person, and how it is controlled by so many others.”Bill Cooper/ROHMs. Davidsen is making her debut not only in the role of Elisabeth but also in a Verdi opera. She covered the role of Desdemona in “Otello” when she was studying at the Opera Academy at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen and was going to sing “Un Ballo in Maschera” in Oslo in 2021, but that production was canceled because of Covid. She has sung the famous “Don Carlo” aria “Tu che le vanità” in concert several times, but it was still a slightly intimidating prospect to jump into Elisabeth’s shoes. Part of the lure for the Royal Opera production, sung in Italian, was that it would be the five-act, four-plus-hour version (Verdi and his librettists wrote several versions, in French and Italian, and at least one skips part of the first act, where Elisabeth is hunting in the forest and has a bit of time to frolic before the palace intrigue kicks off).“I like that we’re doing five acts, so that we start at Fontainebleau in the forest,” she said. “It’s much lighter. You see the love and joy and all of the positive things instead of starting when she’s miserable. You need the happy Elisabeth. You see that she’s young and curious. She grows up so quickly.”Princess Eboli also can be seen as a reflection of Verdi’s commitment to his characters — particularly the female ones — and Ms. Matochkina sees the role as the ultimate vehicle for her voice and acting ability.“Almost all of Verdi’s roles, especially for mezzo-sopranos, are contradictory and bright,” she said. “Eboli contains everything — love, jealousy, agony over unrequited love, a fierce desire for revenge and attempts to influence politics — and a huge range of feelings and situations, all with great energy.”In the end, “Don Carlo” is about love and the boundaries of commitment to God and to the crown. It’s about a continuum of history, rather than what could feel like a stodgy story from nearly half a millennium ago.“Even if it’s about royals, or an old story, these are things we know from our lives now,” Ms. Davidsen said. “Do I trust you? Do I dare to live with you? Do I dare to give myself to you? What do I do with these emotions? All of these things are what we recognize, and it’s all told in such a brilliantly written opera.” More