Champion (Opera)

Subterms

    Latest story

    138 Shares169 Views

    North Carolina Radio Station Won’t Ban Met Opera Broadcasts After All

    by

    The station, which had called the Met’s newer operas unsuitable because of their “difficult music” and “adult themes and harsh language,” reversed course.The music director of a nonprofit North Carolina classical radio station said on Thursday that the station would reverse course and air several contemporary operas being performed by the Metropolitan Opera this season that the station had originally said were unsuitable for broadcast, citing their “adult themes and harsh language.”“It was a very hard decision,” Emily Moss, the music director of WCPE, a nonprofit station based in Wake Forest, said in an interview. “It’s been a hard day and a hard week.”The reversal came after the station faced widespread criticism.The Met, the nation’s leading opera company, has been staging more contemporary work in recent seasons as part of a push to attract new and more diverse audiences; the company has found that these newer works draw more first-time ticket buyers than the classics do.But Deborah S. Proctor, the general manager of WCPE, took issue with new works planned for the current season in a survey she sent to listeners on Aug. 31.“This coming season, the Metropolitan Opera has chosen several operas which are written in a nonclassical music style, have adult themes and language, and are in English,” she wrote. “I feel they aren’t suitable for broadcast on our station.”In the survey, Proctor cited her problems with several of the Met’s offerings this season.She described the violence in Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking,” the death row opera that opened the season. She cited the “non-Biblical” sources of the libretto of John Adams’s “El Niño,” and the suicidal themes in Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” which is based on the Michael Cunningham novel and the Oscar-winning film it inspired. She wrote that “Florencia en el Amazona,” by the Mexican composer Daniel Catán, was “simply outside of the bounds of our musical format guidelines.” And she said that both Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” and Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” contain “offensive language plainly audible to everyone.”“We want parents to know that they can leave our station playing for their children because our broadcasts are without mature themes or foul language,” she wrote in the letter. “We must maintain the trust of listeners.”The station decided last season not to broadcast Blanchard’s “Champion.”The Met, which has said it follows Federal Communications Commission guidelines regarding profanity and language, said it was happy with the change of course. “We’re pleased that opera fans in North Carolina will be able to hear all 27 of our scheduled broadcasts this season,” the Met said in a statement.The station’s letter, and the survey attached to it, received scant attention before reaching social media last week. Rhiannon Giddens, a North Carolina native who shared the Pulitzer Prize this year with Michael Abels for their opera “Omar,” wrote an open letter voicing her displeasure over the station’s stance and noted that challenging adult themes are staples of many of the most popular operas of the past.“The Met broadcasts are the only way many people get to hear the productions, which are situated in New York and priced way out of many people’s budgets,” Giddens wrote. “Radio is supposed to be egalitarian and an equalizer, not used as a weapon, as you are doing.”The station reversed course after receiving feedback from the public and holding internal conversations.“We really value being safe for a general audience, especially children,” Moss said in the interview. “But one of our core values is that we are a refuge from the political and troubles of the world and we are returning to that value.” More

    More stories

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Putting the Brutality of a Prize Fight on the Met Opera Stage

      by

      Terence Blanchard’s “Champion,” about the fighter Emile Griffith, is the rare opera to engage with sports. A boxing consultant helped keep it gritty.Emile Griffith fought Benny Paret on March 24, 1962, in a highly anticipated welterweight championship bout at Madison Square Garden.In the 12th round, Griffith knocked Paret into the ropes and pounded him with more than a dozen unanswered blows. As The New York Times put it the next day, “The only reason Paret still was on his feet was that Griffith’s pile-driving fists were keeping him there, pinned against the post.”Paret never regained consciousness and died 10 days later. The fight and its terrible aftermath were high drama. One might even call the story operatic.There has been little overlap between the high drama of sports and the high drama of opera, beyond the bullfighting in “Carmen” or perhaps that odd singing competition in “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.” But in telling Griffith’s story, Terence Blanchard and Michael Cristofer’s 2013 opera “Champion,” which opened earlier this month at the Metropolitan Opera and streams live in movie theaters on Saturday, brings together the brutality of boxing with the soaring passions of opera.It helps that “Champion” is not just a tale of boxing, but also of Griffith’s life as a closeted gay man, an immigrant with a tough childhood and complicated relationship with his mother, and later an old age troubled by dementia and regret.But boxing is the catalyst for the story. The 1962 bout was the third between Griffith and Paret, who had split their first two fights. (Those earlier contests are omitted from the opera, keeping the focus on the fateful third.)Ryan Speedo Green, center, as Griffith after winning the fight against Paret (Eric Greene) in “Champion.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt was a time when big boxing matches were big news. Pre-fight hype was everywhere, with all aspects of the fighters’ preparations scrutinized. The Times marveled at Griffith’s “$130 a day suite with two television sets and a closet the size of a Y.M.C.A. room” in Monticello, N.Y., as well as the “turtleneck sweaters, seal coats and Ottoman club chairs” that surrounded the ring as he sparred.The terrible aftermath of the fight brought even more intense coverage. News of Paret’s serious condition made the front page of The Times, days after the fight, with the headline “Paret, Hurt in Ring, Given Little Chance.”At the time, the biggest controversy was the referee’s delay in stopping the contest. “Many in the crowd of 7,500 were begging” the referee to intervene, The Times reported. The referee, Ruby Goldstein, was later exonerated by the State Athletic Commission.But there was more to the story. Though Griffith said he was “sorry it happened,” he added, “You know, he called me bad names during the weigh-in” and during the fight, “He did it again, and I was burning mad.”“Bad names” was how Griffith, The Times and other newspapers described Paret’s taunts. The true nature of those words was not widely known at the time. But in the mid-2000s Griffith revealed the full story. Paret had called Griffith “maricón,” a Spanish slur for a gay man. Griffith was secretly bisexual.The opera’s second act deals with the fallout from the fatal punches, and Griffith’s later life, including a brutal beating he received outside a gay bar. Griffith died in 2013 at 75.The Met worked hard to get the details and the atmosphere of a prize fight right: the ring announcer (who acts here as a Greek chorus of sorts), the sound of the bell, the trophies and championship belts, a “ring girl” signaling the changing of the rounds and the macho posturing of the weigh-in. (The conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin emerges in the pit for the second act in a boxer’s hooded robe.)Helping to make it look accurate was Michael Bentt, a former professional world champion who served as the opera’s boxing consultant. “I’m not an expert on opera,” he said. “But I’m an expert on rhythm. And boxing is rhythm.”Bentt told the production team that there should be no stool in the ring before the first round, only between later rounds. And he thought that the boxing mitts, used by a trainer to block a fighter’s punches, looked too clean. “I said: ‘Make them look gritty. Rub them on the concrete to get them nasty looking.’ There’s nothing clean about the world of boxing.”The Met’s fight director, Chris Dumont, is used to working out sword fights. But for “Champion,” he had to choreograph fisticuffs and make them look convincing without anyone getting hurt.Champion. Griffith after winning the middleweight title in 1966.Larry Morris/The New York Times“For the body shots, they might make some contact with each other,” he said. “But you don’t want someone to get hit in the face. Even if it’s light, it won’t feel too good.”There are several ways to depict boxing: One is to simulate it as closely as possible, as some boxing movies do, by showing powerful punching and splattering blood. A more apt choice for the stage is stylization.“Since they have to sing, actually boxing through those scenes would wind them,” Dumont said of Ryan Speedo Green, who portrays the younger Griffith, and Eric Greene, who plays Paret. Most of the time, when a blow lands, the singers freeze, as if in a snapshot. Some parts are performed in slow motion.The show reaches its sporting peak with the re-creation of the 1962 fight, which ends the first act. The tension and anticipation operagoers may feel as the ring appears onstage is not all that different from the mood among fight fans or sportswriters in the moments before a big bout. All sports have some atmosphere of pregame expectation. But when the sport involves two combatants trying to hurt each other with repeated blows to the head, there is an added frisson of fear, or even dread.In “Champion,” Griffith goes down in the sixth round, and the shouts of a boisterous onstage crowd add to the tension. Then comes the fatal moment.Although the boxers’ blows onstage do not land, that does little to temper the grim moment when a flurry of unanswered shots floor Paret. “I watched the actual fight and tried to keep it as real as possible,” Dumont said. “The 17 blows are fairly close to what it was, in real time. We are not actually landing blows, but moving fast enough so the audience is tricked. It moves back to slow motion as he is falling to the mat.”And in the orchestra pit, the snare drummer looks up at the stage. Each time a blow falls, he raps a synced snare shot.A night at the opera can bring murder or war or bloodshed. But the historically and sportingly accurate depiction of a prize fight that ended with a man’s death has an unsettling quality all its own. As Goldstein, the referee, testified: “It’s the type of sport it is. Death is a tragedy that occasionally will happen.” Or, as Bentt said of “Champion,” “We can’t tiptoe around that it’s violence.” More

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      The Maestro Wore Blue: Bringing Pizazz to the Pit at the Met

      by

      Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Metropolitan Opera’s music director, dressed in a blazing sapphire jacket and trim black pants, stood before a mirror backstage on a recent afternoon and smiled.“Oh my God, it’s so good,” he said, waving his baton. “I love it so much.”There were three days until the opening of Puccini’s “La Bohème,” and Nézet-Séguin, surrounded by a small team of tailors, designers and assistants, was offering feedback on his attire, which had been designed by the Met’s costume shop.His outfit was modeled on one worn onstage by a band leader in Franco Zeffirelli’s classic production. Could the golden braid that dangled from his right shoulder be fastened, so it did not create a distraction in the pit? Was the jacket comfortable enough to accommodate the sweeping gestures that the music demanded? And should there be more red, or maybe gold?The Met’s costume shop has designed outfits for Nézet-Séguin for eight productions, including this jacket for “Bohème.”“The more unusual elements,” he said, “the more fun for the audience.”Since the Met returned from the long pandemic shutdown, in the fall of 2021, Nézet-Séguin has been on a mission to challenge sartorial conventions, wearing eye-catching outfits designed by the Met’s costume shop in eight productions. There is limited space to make a statement; the designers focus on his back, since that is what most audience members will see.“We want to get some attention but not be too distracting,” said Robert Bulla, the Met’s assistant head costumer. “Nothing too obnoxious, but something that occasionally catches the light.”A conductor’s look book: clockwise from top left, “Champion,” “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” “The Hours” and “Lohengrin.”Nézet-Séguin sports a black-and-white hooded jacket modeled on a vintage Everlast boxing robe for Terence Blanchard’s “Champion,” an opera about the boxer Emile Griffith that had its Met premiere this month. (At the start of the second act, he enters the pit wearing the hood and boxing gloves, but removing both to conduct.)For “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the season in 2021, Nézet-Séguin wanted to wear something special. The opera’s costume designer, Paul Tazewell, suggested this fireworks pattern.Rose Callahan/Metropolitan OperaHe wore a stained-glass pattern on his jacket for a 2021 revival of Puccini’s “Tosca,” which opens in the Church of Sant’Andrea della Valle in Rome. And he switched from green to red to white shirts in Wagner’s “Lohengrin” this season, mimicking the look of the choristers, whose robes changed colors throughout the show.Nézet-Séguin said his outfits helped strengthen the bond between the pit and the stage.“You don’t want to ignore the orchestra,” he said. “If the conductor is there and seen, I think that helps the connection. It’s much more integrated.”At work in the costume shop. The jacket being constructed echoes one worn by a band leader onstage in the production.The costumes are also part of his efforts to make opera, which has long had a reputation for conservatism, more exciting and accessible.“We have to be more modern and approachable,” he said. “We want to welcome everybody.”While earlier music directors at the Met, all men, favored white tie and tails, Nézet-Séguin, who has held the post since 2018, has long had a more eclectic style, both in his clothes and appearance. He has bleached-blond hair and wears a diamond earring and several gold rings. He is fond of performing in clothes by designers like the Canadian Marie Saint Pierre and can be seen onstage in red-soled Christian Louboutin shoes.“The more unusual elements,” Nézet-Séguin said, “the more fun for the audience.”As the Met prepared to reopen its doors to the public after the pandemic shutdown in 2021, Nézet-Séguin felt it was time for a change.The Met was preparing to open the season with Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the first work by a Black composer in the company’s history. Nézet-Séguin wanted to wear something to reflect the importance of the moment. The costume designer for “Fire,” Paul Tazewell, suggested a fireworks pattern, with flashes of red, indigo, teal and orange.“To be plain dressed — it just felt wrong to me,” Nézet-Séguin said.Beyond white tie and tails. “We want to get some attention but not be too distracting,” Robert Bulla, an assistant head costumer at the Met, said.Landon Nordeman for The New York TimesThe designs often riff on an opera’s central themes. For Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” based on the 1998 novel and the 2002 film it inspired, he wore a floral pattern, a nod to the work’s many references to flowers.Comfort is a priority — the designers want to ensure that he feels unhindered, and they use lightweight and stretchable fabric for flexibility and to absorb sweat. The costume shop often produces several of each jacket so he can change into a fresh one between acts.Some operas are more challenging than others. The team struggled to come up with an idea for “Bohème” before recalling that the production includes a scene in which a band leader guides a procession of soldiers across the stage.Nézet-Séguin, who painted his nails fuchsia for “Champion,” sometimes adds his own touches.“It’s good to be breaking this mold of what everyone thinks classical music and opera is,” Bulla said. “Some people say it’s taken a long time to start this evolution process. But at least it’s evolving.”Nézet-Séguin sometimes adds his own touches. He painted his nails fuchsia for “Champion,” to match the purple robe worn onstage by Ryan Speedo Green, who plays Griffith. And he said he was eager for a day when the Met orchestra musicians would be allowed to dress with more variety. (The dress code demands tuxedos or long, flowing black clothes for evening performances.)“It’s baby steps,” he said. “When I make statements like this, mentalities can evolve. We have to think more creatively and ergonomically. This is only the beginning.” More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      ‘Hey, Mr. Living Composer’: ‘Champion’ Takes Shape at the Met

      by

      Terence Blanchard has been in rehearsals, with pencil and paper at the ready, as he tailors his opera ahead of its New York premiere.A basement rehearsal room at the Metropolitan Opera was so packed recently that it began to resemble a sweltering boxing gym.In one corner, members of the Met’s music staff were grouped together like judges tallying punches as they looked down at their scores. Nearby, a drummer and pianist locked into a syncopated groove, following the beat of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who was conducting while seated on an elevated platform.A phalanx of dancers rushed in to evoke an intense, collective workout regimen filled with balletic grace and pugilistic intensity. Those moves were choreographed by Camille A. Brown, who was close by, keeping an eye on every acrobatic feint. A former World Boxing Organization heavyweight champion paced the room, offering exhortations and encouragement.Supervising all this was the composer and trumpeter Terence Blanchard. He watched as his first opera, “Champion,” took shape ahead of its Met debut on Monday. (A Live in HD simulcast is planned for April 29.)After premiering at Opera Theater of St. Louis in 2013, “Champion” has played at the Washington National Opera‌ ‌and, scaled to a chamber-size orchestration, at SFJazz in San Francisco. But when this work — modeled on the life of the boxer Emile Griffith, and following Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which arrived triumphantly at the Met in 2021 — opens in New York this week, it will be thoroughly revised and expanded to embody the composer’s recent thoughts about opera, as a form. To wit: in this latest version of “Champion” there are not only new arias (and new lines for supporting characters); what will be heard in New York this season also reflects Blanchard’s latest work when it comes to orchestral complexity and vocal elegance.Performers in “Champion” evoke the world of boxing in choreography by Camille A. Brown.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesBlanchard has been in “Champion” rehearsals, at the ready to revise his score as needed.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesThe opera tells the life story of Emile Griffith, who is depicted in two roles sung by Ryan Speedo Green and Eric Owens.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesFor example, during the rehearsal last month, the soprano Latonia Moore, as Griffith’s mother, was singing a rhythmically bumptious riff from the first act when she and Blanchard noticed that the phrase, as written, wasn’t sitting in the most powerful part of her range. “Hey, Mr. Living Composer,” she called out, in a teasing tone. “Could you rewrite this for me?”Blanchard got to work immediately, composing a new vocal part on a blank page of staff paper: a melodic line that could work atop the existing orchestral harmony. He took a photograph of the revision before passing it along.“I couldn’t believe that he just sat there right in the room and wrote it,” Moore said later. “I expected he would come in with it a few days later, OK? It was like, ‘No, here it is.’ Oh my God! And it was really good.”In an interview after a rehearsal, Blanchard explained how his flexibility — unusual in the world of opera, in which scores, like schedules, are set far in advance — was the result of some early, on-the-job training in his career as a jazz performer.“Art Blakey taught me years ago: The easiest thing to do is to write something nobody can play,” Blanchard recalled. “The magic comes in not just through the melody and the harmony, but who’s playing it.”“You can see she has a powerful voice,” he said of Moore. To him, the calculation was simple: He wanted to feature that voice in the strongest possible way. “So that’s what it’s gonna be changed to.”Blanchard, right, with Joshua Balan, a cast member.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesMoore’s role, as that of Griffith’s manipulative and sometimes absent mother, is hardly the only one to be subjected to extensive revisions. The bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green — a standout in “Fire” and the star of “Champion” — said that when he first discussed this opera with Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, he felt that the role was a touch high for him.Gelb told him, “Speedo, That’s the beauty of having a living composer: Things can change,” Green recalled.“CHAMPION,” WITH A LIBRETTO BY MICHAEL CRISTOFER, TELLS Griffith’s tabloid-ready life story. Green sings Young Emile, while the veteran bass-baritone Eric Owens is cast as Old Emile, who lives in a nursing home on Long Island in the early 2000s. The boxer leaves the Virgin Islands for New York, then works in a hat factory before becoming a welterweight champ in the 1960s. In the ring with Benny Paret, Griffith unintentionally delivers blows that prove to be fatal, leaving Griffith anguished for years.“There’s this dream state that Emile is in,” Blanchard said, “because he’s dealing with dementia. There’s a combination of that harmony and that voicing, versus when it’s younger Emile. And chords moving; it goes back and forth. But it’s all story-driven, and it’s story-driven inside my language that I grew up listening to, as a jazz musician.”There is another thread in the opera, of Griffith’s journey from a straight-coded world to one of queerness. As a young man, in New York, he is drawn to gay bars and men while also excelling in the “man’s world” of boxing. The sports universe either doesn’t want to hear about queerness, or openly derides him for his sexual orientation.Just as Griffith navigates dramatic contrasts, so too does Blanchard’s score.The composer likes to talk about his love for Puccini — and you can hear some of that in Young Emile’s Act I aria “What Makes a Man a Man?” But in the boxing sequences, there’s a driving sense of muscular, post-bop jazz tumult. (As in “Fire,” the drummer Jeff Watts, known as Tain, leads a jazz combo embedded within the orchestra.) And there are some moments in which the fusion is well blended enough that no stylistic input seems to have the upper hand.Blanchard said that from his first visits to New York, starting in the spring of 1980, he took in a wide range of music. Although he was associated with traditionalist-minded players of New Orleans, he made a point of hearing the trio Air, which included the cutting-edge music of composer Henry Threadgill.“People were like, ‘Why are you going to that?’” Blanchard said. “And I’m like: ‘Bruh, because I’m trying to figure out what fits for me. I want to experience it all. Why limit myself, because you think I shouldn’t like this? Let me find out for myself.’”Those experiences pay off in “Champion.” In one of the early scenes at a gay bar, Blanchard writes sumptuous orchestral music — a cousin of sorts to the bluesy music heard in a club that figures in the story of “Fire,” but with the string section, not the jazz combo, taking center stage during the bacchanal. “It’s the sexiest sound those Met strings will ever make,” Moore said after a rehearsal. “You could see that they were feeling it!”In an interview, Blanchard tipped his hat to an early teacher, the composer Roger Dickerson, who used timbres and modes from American jazz when writing classical works like the New Orleans Concerto. (The pianist, composer and critic Ethan Iverson recently lavished praise on that rarely heard piece, describing its finale as “boogie-woogie gone surreal, the kind of thing Louis Andriessen tried to write over and over again, but better.”)When Blanchard started working with classical musicians, as he has done in his long partnership with Spike Lee as the composer of his soundtracks — Dickerson informed him that he had a unique opportunity, and a responsibility.“‘You have to keep in mind, the library of music for orchestral music has been limited,’” Blanchard recalled his teacher as saying. “‘There needs to be an expansion of it, through jazz — and maybe you’re the person to do that.’ He put that in my mind way back when.”Blanchard’s score for “Champion” synthesizes the varied musical genres he has taken in during his career as a composer and performer.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesBlanchard, who in 2021 became the first Black composer to have his work staged at the Met, has moved opera forward in exactly that way with his latest revisions to “Champion,” Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, said.Even as the conductor has offered small suggestions in rehearsals — like proposing a bit of bowed, marcato playing for the strings instead of pizzicato that could get lost in the Met’s grand auditorium — he has also deferred to Blanchard, who he said has been “much more hands on” about fine-tuning the orchestration.“I think he’s using the orchestra not to amplify his thoughts,” Nézet-Séguin said. “It’s more: How can I use it as a vehicle, the same way I would use a band? It doesn’t replace anything; it becomes its own thing.”Looking up at the stage after a recent run-through of “Champion,” Nézet-Séguin added of Blanchard, with a touch of pride in the musicians: “I’m pretty sure that in his next ventures — whether it’s film music, or whatever it is — he’s going to miss all that.” More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Classical Music to See and Hear in Spring 2023

      by

      This spring, Gustavo Dudamel, the Philharmonic’s next music director, conducts the big deal symphony, the Met Opera stages Terence Blanchard’s “Champion”; and in Chicago, Riccardo Muti says farewell.It was a hint about as subtle as a siren when the New York Philharmonic announced its current season a year ago: Gustavo Dudamel, the superstar conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, would be coming to New York as a guest in May 2023 to lead Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.One of the repertory’s most sprawling and profound works, Mahler’s Ninth has been played by the Philharmonic almost exclusively under the batons of its music directors. It’s not an assignment the orchestra gives rising hotshots or conductors it sees once a decade. It’s the kind of musically knotty, deeply emotional score you want led by the artists closest to you.That was just one of many suggestions that Dudamel, 42, would, before too long, join the ranks of New York music directors, a group that has included eminences like Mahler, Toscanini, Bernstein and Boulez. And so it came to pass: Earlier this month, the Philharmonic said that he would succeed Jaap van Zweden in the position, for a five-year term beginning — because of classical music’s oddly glacial planning cycles — in the 2026-27 season.But before all that comes Mahler’s Ninth, which Dudamel has convincingly, with tenderness and naturally unfolding intensity, recorded with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The three New York performances, May 19-21, were already sure to be well attended, given the famous conductor and the beloved piece. Now, since the concerts will be Dudamel’s first appearances on the Philharmonic’s podium since the announcement, these will be some of the hottest tickets in town this spring.When Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” opened the Metropolitan Opera’s 2021–22 season, in a run that sold out several performances, it was a landmark: the first time the company had put on the work of a Black composer. Now Blanchard’s earlier opera, “Champion,” from 2013, is coming to the house, beginning April 10.As in “Fire,” themes of identity, sexuality and the negotiation of traumatic memories dominate. “Champion” tells the true story of the closeted gay boxer Emile Griffith, who knocked out his opponent, Benny Paret, during a 1962 title bout; Paret never recovered consciousness and died 10 days later. At the Met, two bass-baritones share the role of Griffith: Ryan Speedo Green plays him as a young athlete in his prime, and Eric Owens, as an aging man looking back on his complicated past.A scene from Terence Blanchard’s “Champion,” in James Robinson’s production at Opera Theater of Saint Louis.Ken Howard/Opera Theatre of Saint LouisIn the wake of the box-office success of “Fire,” the Met — which has been struggling with ticket sales and said in December that it would withdraw $30 million from its endowment to cover costs — rushed “Champion” into production, part of a coming burst of contemporary operas aimed at broadening the audience. The staging reunites members of the team that helped make “Fire” vivid: the director James Robinson, the choreographer Camille A. Brown — the step dance routine that she conceived for “Fire” stopped the show — and the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Three veterans, Latonia Moore, Stephanie Blythe and Paul Groves, round out the cast.It is unusual for the Met (or any company) to unveil two new productions of Mozart operas back to back. And even rarer for both to be led by one conductor: in this case, Nathalie Stutzmann, a former mezzo-soprano turned maestro making her Met debut on the podium for “Don Giovanni” and “Die Zauberflöte.”Replacing a dreary, unilluminating Michael Grandage production on May 5, the new “Giovanni” is an import from the Paris Opera, where the much-discussed Dutch director Ivo van Hove and his colleagues put onstage what Joshua Barone described in The New York Times as “a de Chirico-like set populated by handsomely dressed people in a state of sexy desperation.” (It can hardly help but be an improvement on the Grandage.)Stutzmann, who started at the Atlanta Symphony this season — the only female music director leading one of the 25 largest American orchestras — conducts a promising cast, including Peter Mattei, a star in the title role at the Met for the past 20 years, as well as Adam Plachetka, Federica Lombardi, Ana María Martínez, Ying Fang and Ben Bliss.The situation with “Die Zauberflöte,” opening on May 19, is slightly complicated. The Met is planning to retain its existing production — which the director Julie Taymor and the designer George Tsypin filled with plexiglass and fanciful puppets — in its abridged, English-language, family-friendly form as “The Magic Flute,” now a holiday-season tradition.Performed in full and in German, the new-to-the-company “Die Zauberflöte,” a much-traveled staging directed by Simon McBurney, has the orchestra spilling over onto risers placed onstage and contemporary-style costumes. Stutzmann’s cast here includes Erin Morley, Lawrence Brownlee, Thomas Oliemans, Kathryn Lewek and Stephen Milling.Dudamel’s appointment is perhaps the biggest news in music this season: a new beginning. But the other crucial conductor move in America this spring signals the end of an era.Riccardo Muti is bringing his 13 years leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to a close in June.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesAt 81, Riccardo Muti — a fixture on the country’s major podiums since the 1970s and the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra during the ’80s — is bringing to a close a 13-year tenure at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with performances of Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis,” June 23-25.Despite being an experienced Beethoven interpreter and a specialist in huge choral works, Muti stayed away from the notoriously thorny “Missa Solemnis” for decades, until he led it — with radiant dignity and grandeur — at the Salzburg Festival in 2021.“I always felt too small,” he said in an interview last year on Chicago radio, “never I felt ready to perform this huge monument, because it’s so deep, so vast.” Muti and other great conductors are not known for this kind of humility or patience, so these performances will be the fruit of uncommonly many years of study and thought.Given that the Chicago Symphony has not yet appointed his replacement, Muti will remain a crucial presence next season, and possibly beyond. But this “Missa Solemnis” — with the chorus coached by a distinguished guest, Donald Palumbo, the chorus master at the Met — is nevertheless sure to be a love fest between a superb orchestra and a conductor it has revered. More