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      Why Isn’t My Favorite Composer More Popular?

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      I love the operas of Leos Janacek. So do audiences — when they go to see them. But the works remain stubbornly on the outskirts of the repertory.When I was just getting started as an operagoer, I went to see “The Makropulos Case,” the Czech composer Leos Janacek’s tale of a woman desperate to elongate a life that has already lasted three centuries.It left me exhilarated, dazed and with only one thing on my mind: buying a ticket to return the next weekend.I’m not the only one to have this reaction. “People felt they had to come back,” Yuval Sharon said recently about the audiences when he directed “The Cunning Little Vixen,” another thrilling, heart-rending Janacek opera. “It was unlike any piece they’d experienced. It just seizes you.”That’s still my feeling about Janacek’s operas. On Sunday, when the Cleveland Orchestra finished an elegant but crushing concert version of “Jenufa,” which ends with a vision of forgiveness and reconciliation after extraordinary suffering, I would have happily sat through it again, right then and there.The end of ‘Jenufa’Elisabeth Söderström and Wieslaw Ochman; Vienna Philharmonic; Charles Mackerras, conductor (Decca)For this brutal account of small-town woe, Janacek wrote earthy, lush yet sharply angled music, with unsettled rhythms and roiling depths. There are obsessively repeated motifs, as anxious as the characters, as well as passages of folk-inspired sweetness.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Dudamel and the New York Philharmonic Play Philip Glass

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      Kate Soper’s tender, whimsical “Orpheus Orchestra Opus Onus,” a tribute to the orchestra, had its premiere on Thursday with its composer as soloist.“Is there anything like that first strike of the bow?” Kate Soper asks at the start of her new piece for the New York Philharmonic. “A hundred players moving as one! All that splendor, all that might!”She is describing the wonders of an orchestra, and you don’t have to take her word for it. In Soper’s sweet, clever “Orpheus Orchestra Opus Onus,” which had its premiere at David Geffen Hall on Thursday under Gustavo Dudamel’s baton, the ensemble illustrates her words as she says them, “Peter and the Wolf” style.“The highs got higher, the lows got lower,” she says, explaining the development of instruments, and we hear ethereal pitches, then loud rumbles. “Wood was lacquered,” she goes on, to delight in the oboe and clarinet. “Metal bent” elicits a horn fanfare and trombone slide.Soper soon proclaims, with disarming plainness, “That’s right everyone: I’m Orpheus!” In this half-hour monodrama for a mostly speaking, sometimes singing soprano, she offers a tender retelling of the legend of the great musician of Greek mythology. Her story blends into a poetic reflection on music’s meaning, what it can do (offer glimpses of the sublime) and what it can’t (most anything else).Soper does all this in quirkily postmodern style. Her eclectic, quick-shifting sounds, including touches of memorably ancient-feeling bass flute, are woven into a quilt of quotations from famous settings of the Orpheus myth by Monteverdi and Gluck, as well as lesser-heard ones by Sartorio, Landi, Campra and others. There are also flashes of Bach, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Mozart and Grieg in the mix, and the text, mostly original, interpolates passages from Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus.”Modern music lovers may be reminded of Luciano Berio’s more chaotic collage “Sinfonia.” For fans of Soper, especially in her composer-performer mode, “Orpheus Orchestra Opus Onus” will recall brainy, winsome works like “Ipsa Dixit” (2016), which she began by posing the spoken question, “What is art?” and attempted to answer through snippets of writers like Aristotle, Lydia Davis and Freud.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Santa Fe Opera Continues to Draw Performers From Across the Globe

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      Nearly 70 years old, the Santa Fe Opera and its summer season draw singers, directors, designers, conductors and apprentices from across the globe.In 1956, in the high desert just north of Santa Fe, N.M., a young New York conductor had a vision to build an outdoor opera house. Many scoffed at such an idea in the Southwest, but John Crosby persisted. He had fallen in love with opera as a young man attending the Metropolitan Opera.Nearly 70 years later, the Santa Fe Opera, which opens its annual two-month season on June 27, attracts singers, directors, stage designers and conductors from across the globe. In many ways it has a sort of operatic pipeline to New York and the Metropolitan Opera.“There’s this wonderful legacy of artists who have had their debut here and gone onto the Met and other houses,” Robert K. Meya, general director of the Santa Fe Opera, said during a recent phone interview. “And John Crosby’s vision was very tied to the Metropolitan Opera. He first heard Richard Strauss at the Met, and he moved very quickly to bring many of Strauss’s first operas to Santa Fe years later.”That early vision of championing Strauss’s lesser-known works defined the company — six of his operas had their professional U.S. debuts in Santa Fe, including “Capriccio” in 1958 and “Intermezzo” in 1984 — in the decades after his death in 1949.Crosby’s vision to stage a world premiere or a U.S. premiere almost every season among its five annual productions has also distinguished the company.The conductor John Crosby wanted to bring opera to Santa Fe, so built an outdoor opera house and started the company in 1956.Santa Fe Opera ArchivesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Soprano Sonya Yoncheva Has Many Roles, On and Off the Stage

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      Sonya Yoncheva discusses her turn as Lisa in “The Queen of Spades” at the Metropolitan Opera, her summer concerts, her production company and more.The soprano Sonya Yoncheva has established herself as one of today’s most versatile opera stars.Just over a decade ago, in 2014, she caused a splash after jumping in on short notice as Mimi in her first staged performance of Puccini’s “La Bohème” at the Metropolitan Opera. When the Bulgarian native appears as Lisa in Tchaikovsky’s tragic love story “The Queen of Spades,” from Friday through June 7, it will be her sixth role debut at the house.Yoncheva, 43, maintains a busy schedule that includes a recent gala at the Opéra Garnier in Paris and her third production as the title character in “Iolanta,” also by Tchaikovsky, at the Vienna State Opera. In Europe this summer, she will perform Handel, Bellini and more.Yoncheva performing in “Iolanta” at the Vienna State Opera.Vienna State Opera / Michael PöhnUnder the auspices of her production company, SY11 Events, she will also appear in August in Sofia, Bulgaria, for outdoor concerts alongside the tenors Vittorio Grigolo, José Carreras and Plácido Domingo. Started in 2020, the enterprise joined forces with the label Naïve for her most recent album, “George,” inspired by the life and work of the French writer George Sand (born Aurore Dupin, she is known in the music world for her tumultuous relationship with Frédéric Chopin).An even less conventional project is the 2023 book “Fifteen Mirrors,” combining personal confessions about select characters and portraits in which Yoncheva poses in different guises.“I understand my work as a process,” she said by phone from outside Geneva, where she lives with her husband, the conductor Domingo Hindoyan, and their two children. “The interpretation takes up maybe an even bigger part than the singing.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: New York Philharmonic, Renée Fleming and a Sub Conductor

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      Brett Mitchell led the New York Philharmonic in the local premiere of a song cycle by Kevin Puts, featuring the soprano Renée Fleming.The final weeks of an orchestra’s season can feel like the end of school: Everyone’s worn down and summer is beckoning. Last week’s program at the New York Philharmonic had that mood even before a late-breaking curveball that tested the orchestra further.The Spanish conductor Juanjo Mena was to be on the podium for the New York debut of Kevin Puts’s “The Brightness of Light,” an orchestral song cycle featuring the soprano Renée Fleming and the baritone Rod Gilfry, along with Ravel’s rapturous “Daphnis et Chloé.”But the Philharmonic announced on Thursday afternoon — just a day before the concerts — that Mena would not be conducting. No reason was provided, and his management did not respond to inquiries. (In January, Mena disclosed his diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.)Instead, the conductor Brett Mitchell, the music director of California’s Pasadena Symphony and a newcomer to the Philharmonic, stepped in. Mitchell possesses the right credentials, having led “The Brightness of Light” at the Colorado Symphony with Fleming and Gilfry in 2019. Still, this was no easy task given his truncated rehearsal time and lack of familiarity with the players.“The Brightness of Light” is a portrait of the artist Georgia O’Keeffe and her husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. For the libretto, Puts uses selections from their correspondence — from the heady rush of their early relationship through its souring and O’Keeffe’s deepening romance with the landscape of New Mexico. (This work expands on an earlier piece with Fleming, “Letters,” that relies solely on O’Keeffe’s perspective.)Puts, who also wrote the opera “The Hours” with Fleming in mind, adores her voice’s glowing luminosity; his orchestral writing often bathes her in shining halos of sound, and on Friday she returned the favor. Gilfry, who was also making his New York Philharmonic debut, handled Stieglitz with polish, though the role functions as little more than a foil for O’Keeffe’s personal and artistic evolution.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      JJ hits some high notes for Austria.

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      JJ rehearsing “Wasted Love,” which makes full use of his classical training as a singer.Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOperatic voices don’t usually feature at Eurovision, but JJ, taking the stage to represent Austria, is an exception.In “Wasted Love,” JJ, 24, gently coos about a recent heartbreak until he hits the chorus, and his voice soars in volume and pitch, making full use of his classical training.JJ, whose real name is Johannes Pietsch, is a countertenor, meaning his vocal range most closely matches a female mezzo-soprano. He is in the choir at the Opera School of the Vienna State Opera. In recent months, he has appeared in the company’s productions of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” and Benjamin Britten’s “Billy Budd.”JJ said that he hoped his performance would “awaken interest in classical music” among Eurovision’s viewers, but that he also wanted to make the case for greater use of operatic vocals in pop music. Putting them together could create fun “popera” songs, JJ said.After spending most of his childhood in Dubai, JJ started classical singing at 15 when he moved to Austria. His father, noting JJ’s high singing voice, asked him to try belting out the “Queen of the Night” aria from “The Magic Flute,” JJ recalled. Soon, JJ said, he was watching YouTube videos of Maria Callas and Montserrat Caballé performances, then imitating those renowned sopranos.Key figures in Vienna’s opera scene have wished JJ luck at Eurovision, including Bogdan Roscic, the general director of the Vienna State Opera. “He’s excited and happy for me,” JJ said, “but he said he will not watch.” Eurovision is still too much of a silly spectacle for some, even with JJ in it. More

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      Michael Flynn, a Trump Ally, Sponsors Beethoven at the Kennedy Center

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      Following the president’s overhaul of the center, Mr. Flynn, the former national security adviser, has made a substantial gift to the National Symphony Orchestra.The list of donors to the National Symphony Orchestra, one of the Kennedy Center’s flagship ensembles, is usually filled with financiers, socialites, corporations and foundations.But the name of a sponsor of this week’s performances of Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis” stood out. It was Michael T. Flynn, the general and former national security adviser during President Trump’s first term. He was listed, along with his nonprofit, America’s Future Inc., as “performance sponsors” for the National Symphony Orchestra’s concerts from May 15 to 17.Mr. Flynn said on social media that his nonprofit was “thrilled to sponsor a spectacular three-night performance at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts!”“This performance is filled with a vibrant celebration of music, culture, and the unyielding spirit uniting all Americans,” he wrote in a post on X. “The Kennedy Center shines as a proud symbol of our nation’s legacy!”Mr. Flynn’s gift to the National Symphony Orchestra totaled $300,000, according to two people familiar with the donation who were granted anonymity because details of the gift were not publicized.Officials at the Kennedy Center said they did not have details of the gift.“We didn’t know how much but we welcome all sponsorships,” the center said in a statement.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      John Adams’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ Sags at the Metropolitan Opera

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      John Adams’s Shakespeare adaptation has been trimmed since its premiere, but still struggles with setting a flood of dense Elizabethan verse.“Antony and Cleopatra” played a crucial role in the history of the Metropolitan Opera. In 1966, Samuel Barber’s new adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy opened the company’s Lincoln Center home — back when the Met barely did anything from the 20th century, let alone world premieres.Things could hardly be more different now. John Adams’s version of “Antony and Cleopatra” arrived at the Met on Monday at a time when new and recent pieces are frequently on offer, a shock for an art form in which the standard repertory pretty much ended with Puccini. This is the fifth Adams title the company has presented, the kind of sustained commitment to a living composer that would have once been unthinkable.Barber’s “Antony” was a notorious fiasco. Even with Leontyne Price as Cleopatra, the opera was buried beneath a lavish staging, designed to give the theater’s new machinery a workout. Deeply wounded by the blowback, Barber eventually revised the work.Adams, too, has futzed with his “Antony” since its premiere in San Francisco in 2022 and a later production in Barcelona. By now, some 20 minutes have been trimmed from a score that ran nearly three hours at the premiere.But the opera still slumps and sags, for all of the music’s nervously chugging energy and despite an excellent cast led by the eloquently weary Gerald Finley and a bristling Julia Bullock.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More