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    Review: Lise Davidsen Cements Her Stardom in Met Opera’s ‘Forza’

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    Lise Davidsen, entering the Italian repertoire at the company, was part of a superb cast as Verdi’s opera returned for the first time since 2006.As dramatic music swirled late Monday evening, the woman trudged a few steps pushing a filthy shopping cart — so hunched and bedraggled that she seemed like an extra, sent onstage to set the scene before the star entered.Then she opened her mouth, and a note emerged so pure and clear, widening into a cry before narrowing back into a murmur, that it could only be the soprano Lise Davidsen, cementing her stardom in a new production of Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” at the Metropolitan Opera.In her still-young Met career, Davidsen has triumphed in works by Tchaikovsky, Wagner and especially Strauss. She has quickly become the rare singer you want to hear in everything. But Verdi and the Italian repertoire traditionally belong to voices more velvety and warm than hers, which has the coolly powerful authority of an ivory sword, particularly in flooding high notes.There were moments on Monday that wanted a soprano more fiery than ivory. Davidsen is statuesque, and her sound is too: grand and decorous. There were moments when the anguish of Leonora, the heroine of “Forza,” would have been more crushing if her lower notes had earthier fervor.But come on. Quibbles aside, there are vanishingly few artists in the world singing with such generosity, sensitivity and visceral impact.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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      Lise Davidsen Stars in ‘Forza’ at the Met Opera

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      The singer, best known in the works of Wagner and Strauss, is starring in the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino.”Lise Davidsen, who grew up in Norway playing sports and considering a future in songwriting, didn’t see Italian opera onstage until she was working on her master’s degree as a budding soprano in Copenhagen.During her studies at the Royal Opera Academy a decade ago, she took in the classics: Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” and “Tosca,” Verdi’s “Macbeth.” But she watched them without any thought that she would one day sing their famous roles.They were still not on her mind when, after skyrocketing to stardom with a lightning-bright sound and power perfectly suited for the works of Wagner and Strauss, she debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in 2019, in Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades.”On Monday, though, Davidsen, 37, will star in the Met’s new production of Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino.” And next season, she will sing the title role in “Tosca.” Suddenly, she has entered the world of Italian opera, taking on vastly different roles by two of its greatest composers.“I had to work harder to convince the houses that I could even do Verdi and the Italian repertoire,” Davidsen said in an interview. “But vocally, I am quite ready.”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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      Two Concerts Reveal a Dramatic Shift Between Mahler Symphonies

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      Over consecutive evenings, the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra performed Mahler’s works on programs with star sopranos.Gustav Mahler had a near-death experience between the composition of his Fourth and Fifth symphonies. They were separated by a gulf that listeners could plunge into this week in consecutive concerts by the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.The Fourth was the third in a trilogy of symphonies that featured vocal settings of poetry from “Des Knaben Wunderhorn,” a folk collection that inspired Mahler, and it ends with a vision of heaven articulated by a soprano with childlike purity. The Fifth — which followed a hemorrhage that left Mahler bleeding out and on the verge of death — is a huge, bifurcated work, magnificently twisted in the Funeral March that opens it and cosmically buoyant in the finale.At David Geffen Hall on Wednesday, Gianandrea Noseda led the Philharmonic in a performance of the Fourth that sidestepped its intriguing, hectoring mystery and embraced the more conventional aspects of its Romanticism. The cellos were broad and sinuous, and the violins sighed and shone in big, roomy gestures. The abrasive sound of a scordatura violin colors the second movement, but the concertmaster, Frank Huang, slyly played it straight, letting the instrument’s fiendish, squirrelly sound speak for itself.The work’s emotional catharsis comes in the second half, and here Noseda jarred his audience awake with the Mahlerian climaxes that have a way of shaking listeners out of a daze — a shock, but an affirming one. Golda Schultz’s sparkly soprano was beautifully suited to the vocal solo in the final movement. Her absolute optimism was seemingly untouched by earthly matters. Noseda didn’t exactly reconcile the solo and the jangly orchestral interludes that separate its verses, but the Fourth can be impenetrable in that way.Golda Schultz, left, as the soprano soloist with the New York Philharmonic and the conductor Gianandrea Noseda.Chris LeeDespite its elaborate structure of five movements in three sections and its prodigious length of 70 minutes, the Fifth is in some ways the more accessible piece, with its subjects of mortality and the good pain that comes with making oneself vulnerable to love. With the Fifth, Mahler moved away from programmatic or narrative conceptions of his work, but it’s incredibly tempting to map his autobiography to the piece: a macabre dream of his own death in the funeral march, and a love letter to his future wife, Alma, in the aching loveliness of the slow movement, the famous Adagietto.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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      Lise Davidsen Is an Opera Star Worth Traveling For

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      Her high notes emerging like shafts of sunlight, Davidsen is playing the title role in Janacek’s “Jenufa” at the struggling Lyric Opera of Chicago.A new pop song is the same streamed anywhere. And if you wanted to see Beyoncé this year, she likely came to a town not far from you, giving pretty much the same show in Barcelona as she did in Detroit.But an opera star doing a role in Berlin or London doesn’t mean she’ll bring it to New York. When it comes to the art form’s greatest singers, there are things you simply can’t hear by staying put. And Lise Davidsen is worth traveling for.Davidsen, the statuesque 36-year-old soprano with a flooding voice of old-school amplitude, has been singing the title character in Janacek’s crushing “Jenufa” at Lyric Opera of Chicago this month. Though she has been a regular presence at the Metropolitan Opera — where she will star in a new production of Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” in winter — there’s no promise she’ll ever perform Jenufa there.So for those of us who hear in Davidsen’s rich, free tone the kind of golden-age instrument we otherwise know mostly through glimpses on old recordings, it was a privilege to be in Chicago.The added incentive was that the redoubtable soprano Nina Stemme would be onstage with her. At 60, Stemme is stepping away from the kind of dramatic touchstones, like Isolde and Brünnhilde, that Davidsen is gradually stepping into.Pavel Cernoch and Nina Stemme in “Jenufa,” directed by Claus Guth.Michael BrosilowDavidsen and Stemme in “Jenufa,” conducted by Jakub Hrusa, the young conductor recently appointed music director of the Royal Opera in London, in a grimly spare staging by Claus Guth: This was a coup for Lyric, especially since the Janacek has been running alongside a winning cast in Donizetti’s “La Fille du Régiment,” as fizzily charming as “Jenufa” is desperately sad.Seen over the course of 24 hours this weekend, the pairing shows off the best of a venerable company that has been struggling in the pandemic’s aftermath, along with much of the American performing arts scene. Its chief executive, Anthony Freud, announced in September that he would step down this coming summer, two years before the end of his contract.Freud, 66, is retiring as the gap between opera’s costs and the demand for tickets grows ever wider. Financial pressures have prompted the company to pare back its performances; Lyric’s current season features just six mainstage productions, compared to eight in the last full season before the pandemic.But this was a weekend Freud could be proud of. The title character of “Jenufa,” set amid tangled romantic and familial relationships in a Moravian village in the 19th century, is secretly pregnant by a man who refuses to marry her. Her stepmother, a civic figurehead known as the Kostelnicka, desperate to keep the family from disgrace, kills the baby, a crime whose discovery leads to a stunned, sublime gesture of forgiveness.For this raw, agonized story, Janacek wrote tangy, lush yet sharply angled music, with unsettled rhythms and roiling depths; obsessively repeated motifs, as anxious as the characters; passages of folk-like sweetness; vocal lines modeled on spoken Czech for uncanny naturalness even in lyrical flight and emotional extremity; and radiant climaxes.Davidsen’s upper voice is her glory: steely in impact but never hard or forced, emanating like focused shafts of sunlight. (In Janacek’s fast, talky music, the middle of her voice didn’t project as clearly, but this is a quibble.)For a singer of such commanding capacity, she is remarkably beautiful in floating quiet. She played the character with prayerful dignity, reminiscent of Desdemona in Verdi’s “Otello”; at the beginning of the third act, when Jenufa starts to think her suffering might finally be behind her, Davidsen registered on her face and in her freshening tone a cautious but real happiness. This is a singer who acts with her voice.I’ve always thought of Jenufa and the Kostelnicka as antagonists — a spirited youngster facing a repressive older generation — but this performance movingly suggested they are more alike than different: two independent-minded women, both isolated from the village mainstream. And Stemme’s voice remains strong and even; this is not your standard acid-tone Kostelnicka; in soft duet at the start of Act II, she and Davidsen made a combination that evoked “Norma”-like bel canto.Hrusa supported that sensitivity on the podium. His vision of the score emphasizes its sheer beauty, encouraging smooth lyricism and a kind of musical patience, letting the drama unfold rather than spurring it on. Sometimes this feels like mildness, at the expense of spiky intensity. But that this “Jenufa” is played something like a sustained hymn often heightens the aching tragedy.Guth’s production emphasizes the uniformity and repetition that define this small town’s small-mindedness. A prisonlike atmosphere prevails in Michael Levine’s airy yet forbidding set, Gesine Völlm’s constricting costumes and James Farncombe’s lighting, all leached of color.Metal bed frames that line the walls in the first act are arranged, in the second, to form an eerie enclosure, reminiscent of a refugee camp, in which Jenufa has been hidden to give birth. An ominous crowd of women in “Handmaid’s Tale”-style bonnets lurks on the sidelines; a dancer is dressed as a slow-stalking raven. The folk-wedding dresses that finally add brightness in Act III convey genuine joy after so much ashy heartbreak.Fizzy joy: Lisette Oropesa in Laurent Pelly’s production of “La Fille du Régiment” at Lyric Opera.Michael BrosilowThat kind of joy permeates “La Fille du Régiment,” one of the repertory’s most delightful comedies, presented in Chicago in the winkingly stylized Laurent Pelly production that has been at the Met since 2008. (The mountain range made of old maps is still superbly silly.)Lisette Oropesa and Lawrence Brownlee are both sprightly in Donizetti’s stratosphere-touching coloratura; this opera is famous for a tenor aria with nine high Cs, and after an ovation Brownlee repeated it with flair. But the pair are even better in the score’s slower-burning, longer-arching passages of tenderness.Lyric Opera of Chicago may be in serious trouble; its chief may be taking an early exit. But, having attracted Oropesa and, especially, Davidsen to the company for these memorable debuts, Freud is leaving on a high note. More

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      Lise Davidsen Shows Her Vocal and Theatrical Power in Recital Debut

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      Davidsen, a true dramatic soprano, was the rare singer whose first New York recital came at the Metropolitan Opera House.When Lise Davidsen sang the first four notes of Elisabeth’s aria “Dich, teure Halle,” from Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” at the Metropolitan Opera last night, all I could think to write down in my notebook was “holy” — and remembering to mind my manners — “cow.”That opening salvo was magnificent — an ideal balance of warmth, penetration and power that didn’t seem to strain her one bit.It’s rare for the Met to invite an artist for a solo concert in its 3,800-seat auditorium. And it’s rarer still for that singer to be making her New York City recital debut.But Davidsen is another rare thing: a true dramatic soprano. Originally trained as a mezzo, she possesses a fully resonant lower register that passes through a dark, capacious middle into a blazing, seraphic top. When her voice really starts flowing, its legato is molten, and the sonic boom of her high notes can cause a mild ringing in the ears. Davidsen’s timbre is also lovely in its shapeliness, metal wrapped in layers of velvet.Her rangy program with the pianist James Baillieu covered improbable distances — Verdi’s delicate Desdemona from “Otello,” Wagner’s ecstatic Elisabeth and Tchaikovsky’s shattered Lisa from “Queen of Spades”; Schubert’s gracious songs and Richard Strauss’s rhapsodic ones; silver-age operetta and golden-age musical theater.Rather than open the first half with Elisabeth’s rapturous greeting to the Hall of Song — too obvious — Davidsen chose three placid Edvard Grieg songs in her native Norwegian and three more in German. By the fifth song, “Zur Rosenzeit,” she was fully invested, adding a drop of ink to her pooling tone and bringing herself to the verge of tears amid the narrator’s grief-stricken desire. Baillieu also dodged expectations, exploring degrees of quiet from the Met’s vast stage.Sensitive and theatrically engaged, Davidsen doesn’t merely ply audiences with lots of high-decibel singing. In the long introduction to Lisa’s suicide scene, she swayed back and forth, almost unconsciously, as her character waits impatiently for a lover on a riverbank, unfurling a splendid sound shot through with a chilly gust. No sets, no costumes, no orchestra: But the whole opera was there.Using a microphone to talk to the audience between numbers, Davidsen, a witty, soft-spoken presence, explained the program’s personal bent. She wanted to bring her “home composer,” Grieg, to the Met stage; she had avoided Schubert for so long because she didn’t think dramatic voices were supposed to sing him; the “Queen of Spades” aria was a memento of her 2019 Met debut, and “Dich, teure Halle,” of her days as a voice student.She needn’t have worried about Schubert. Her tone in “An die musik” and “Litanei auf das Fest Aller Seelen” was voluminous, clean and gently applied, and she made a compellingly operatic scene out of “Gretchen am Spinnrade.”Perhaps there are times, though, when a voice is simply too big. The hushed, focused line of Strauss’s “Morgen” eluded her, and her tonal opacity, perfect for Wagner, sometimes obscured the vulnerability of an aria from Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera.” But the arching exclamations of Strauss’s “Zueignung” and Sibelius’s “Den första kyssen” sounded tailor-made for her.In a winking final set, Davidsen playfully enjoyed her own vocal glamour in an Emmerich Kalman operetta aria and slid languidly into Lerner and Loewe’s “I Could Have Danced All Night” in an apparent nod to the great Birgit Nilsson, who capped her famous recording of it with a missile-like high C.Davidsen may have been acknowledging that audiences are eager for her to pick up Nilsson’s mantle. But she had also spent an evening inviting them to get to know her own story and artistry first. More

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

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      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

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      Review: Lise Davidsen Shines, and Evolves, in ‘Der Rosenkavalier’

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      The radiant young soprano returned to the Metropolitan Opera to star as the Marschallin in a revival of Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier.”When the luminous soprano Lise Davidsen released her first solo album several years ago, she faced criticism over her repertoire.Chiefly, that while she was just in her early 30s she had chosen to record Strauss’s autumnal “Four Last Songs.” In an interview then, her characteristic geniality gave way to exasperation. “It pisses me off a little bit that you have to be a certain age to feel certain feelings,” she said. “Teenagers have all those feelings, and more, in a day.”With more measured calm, she added: “But I do believe that I’m entitled to take on those feelings, to take on the difficulties in life. That’s our job in opera.”She challenged doubters again on Monday when Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” returned to the Metropolitan Opera with Davidsen, 36, making her role debut as the Marschallin — a character more typically portrayed by seasoned grandes dames. So much so that this production, by Robert Carsen, opened in 2017 as a vehicle for Renée Fleming’s farewell to the role.Never mind that in the libretto, the Marschallin is in her early 30s. Or that Fleming was around Davidsen’s age when she first sang the part at Houston Grand Opera. But as Davidsen said of the “Four Last Songs,” a performer has every right to a role if she can persuasively “take on those feelings,” not to mention the notes. And Davidsen can, on both fronts.Davidsen excels in repertoire — mostly Wagner and Strauss — somewhere between the achingly human and the otherworldly: the saintly Elisabeth in “Tannhäuser,” the mythical title character in “Ariadne auf Naxos,” the forlorn Sieglinde in “Die Walküre.” The Marschallin, however, is entirely earthbound. In conflict with neither God nor the gods, she is simply staring down middle age and the inevitability of change.That said, the Marschallin is a woman of stature: influential, composed and well connected. Davidsen captures this naturally, exuding confidence more than wisdom, and behaving with discretion in public while reserving playfulness for the intimacy of her bedroom.When we meet the Marschallin, she has just spent the night with her 17-year-old lover, Octavian; over the course of the first act, her amorous bliss gives way to solemnity as she explains that their affair has an expiration date — “today or tomorrow, or the day after next.” When Fleming sang that line, it was with the authority of experience. But where her Marschallin looked back, Davidsen’s seems to look forward; she’s keeping it together while aware of the anxiety that sets in whenever she looks in the mirror.Throughout, Davidsen alternates between conversational restraint — enunciating each syllable of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s talky libretto with penetrating focus — and white-hot radiance. Her terms of endearment for Octavian emerge like a rising sun. And in the final trio, her sustained high A on the word “glücklich” (“happy”) soars and crescendos to a glowing benediction for her lover’s new life with Sophie.“Der Rosenkavalier” is an ensemble opera in which it can be difficult to call anyone a protagonist, but Davidsen’s Marschallin leaves the stage the most evolved. Among the lines that landed freshly on Monday was her last. With Sophie’s father, Faninal, she passes by the happy new couple. He sings, “Young people are always the same”; and she responds, “Yes, yes,” with a D sharp falling nearly an octave below to an E, as if sighing.On Monday, that moment was a reminder that while the opera often seems like the story of two generations, it is more like a tale of three: Octavian’s, the Marschallin’s and Faninal’s. With that “yes, yes,” Davidsen’s Marschallin suddenly matures, shedding the anxiety of wrinkles and lovers lost to enter the next phase of her life.Also remarkable on Monday was the mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey, singing the role of Octavian at the Met for the first time. She made even bigger the mighty yet smooth sound, as well as the tireless energy and dramatic skill, that she brought to her performances last year in a “Rosenkavalier” at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. With a cherubic face she looked every bit the part of a young lover, and, with a touch of careless manspreading while lighting a cigarette, very much a boy.The baritone Brian Mulligan made a role debut, as well, as Faninal, with commanding ease and entertaining comedic instinct. And veterans of the production returned: the soprano Erin Morley, still a bright, elegant presence as Sophie; and the bass Günther Groissböck, still a dangerously handsome Baron Ochs, though more strained in this revival, his gravely low notes and declamatory articulation characterful but not always assured.Under Simone Young’s baton, the Met Orchestra improved as the evening progressed. The opening, a kind of pornography in music, was romantic where it should have been ecstatic, and a Mozartean interlude in the first act wasn’t scaled back to match the style; the dreamily glinting rose motif was more legato than lustrous. But Young effectively conjured the romping chaos of Ochs’s cohort in the second act, along with his famous waltz and the darker, “Salome”-like dancing rhythms of the third act.Carsen’s production remains the textbook-perfect staging of modern Met history: elegant and satisfyingly grand, smart but not daring. His major intervention — moving the opera’s setting from the 18th century to the year in which it premiered, 1911, from the cusp of revolutionary Europe to the brink of World War I — also remains eerily evocative.The Marschallin’s bedroom is covered in large canvases: portraits of great men, scenes from battle and court. It seems as though the walls can barely support the weight of history. In the first act, her life is saturated at a tipping point of decadence; a parade of visitors and excess — needy orphans, salespeople with the latest fashions, an attention-hungry tenor — overwhelm her, the score and the stage. By the end, the set opens up around Octavian and Sophie as they rejoice in their future together, revealing a line of soldiers charging into battle, and stumbling as they die.When the production opened in 2017, its depiction of a society blissfully unaware of the transformation ahead recalled the recent, surprise election of President Donald J. Trump. Since then, it has been redolent of much else in our time of too-muchness: the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, climate disaster.If Carsen’s “Rosenkavalier” has staying power, it is because of this chameleonic resonance. As the Marschallin well knows, the only constant, in a forward-spinning world, is change.Der RosenkavalierThrough April 20 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Carnegie Hall Announces Its 2023-24 Season

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      We choose highlights from events featuring Mitsuko Uchida and Franz Welser-Möst as Perspectives artists, and the composer Tania León in residence.The threats facing democracy will be a central focus of Carnegie Hall’s coming season, the presenter announced on Tuesday, with a festival devoted to the flourishing cultural scene in Germany between the two world wars.From January to May, Carnegie will host “Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice,” an exploration of creative expression during the fragile democracy in Germany from 1919 to 1933. The festival will feature ensembles such as the Vienna Philharmonic and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s performing works by composers of the time, including Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill.“We’re seeing the challenges to democracy more and more clearly, and it’s all the more reason we have to treasure it,” Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said in an interview. “We want people to ask questions and contemplate why democracy matters, and what the threats are in our day.”The 2023-24 season, which begins in October, will feature some 170 performances, beginning with two concerts by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of its outgoing music director, Riccardo Muti. The pianist Mitsuko Uchida and the conductor Franz Welser-Möst, the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, will each organize a series of Perspectives concerts.The composer Tania León, who won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2021, will lead a season-long residency; in January, the Boston Symphony Orchestra will offer the New York premiere of a new piece by her.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.Here are a dozen highlights of the coming season, chosen by critics for The New York Times. JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZEnglish Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir, Oct. 25You can safely bet on a few things whenever the conductor John Eliot Gardiner comes to town: agile, historically informed performance; obsessively precise articulation; and virtually ideal readings of beloved repertoire. In early 2020, he led his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique in just about as good a Beethoven symphony cycle as you could imagine. And now he brings the English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir to Carnegie for Bach’s Mass in B minor and, on Oct. 26, Handel’s “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato.” JOSHUA BARONEThe mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre will appear at Weill Recital Hall with the lutenist Thomas Dunford.Joel Saget/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLea Desandre and Thomas Dunford, Nov. 2These two artists — Desandre, a clarinet-mellow mezzo-soprano who can burst with bright agility, and Dunford, an eloquent lutenist — are among the brightest lights of a young generation of early-music specialists. They join in Weill Recital Hall, ideally intimate for this repertory, for “Lettera Amorosa,” a program of love-focused Baroque works by Monteverdi, Frescobaldi and Handel, alongside names like Tarquinio Merula (his songs exquisite) and Giovanni Girolamo Kapsperger (a specialist in music for lute). ZACHARY WOOLFEAmerican Composers Orchestra, Nov. 9This essential organization has brought music by George Lewis to Carnegie’s various spaces before — the most notable instance being his Virtual Concerto (for a “computer-driven” piano soloist) back in 2004. The orchestra will continue its productive relationship with the composer to perform one of his latest orchestral works. No title for the piece is available yet; the same goes for a few other new works on the bill (including those from the likes of Guillermo Klein and Augusta Read Thomas). We do have one title: “Out of whose womb came the ice,” by the up-and-coming composer Nina C. Young, whose premiere was co-commissioned by Carnegie. SETH COLTER WALLSStaatskapelle Berlin, Nov. 30When the Staatskapelle Berlin and its longtime music director, Daniel Barenboim, last appeared at Carnegie, in 2017, it was an epic nine-performance stand that paired Mozart piano concertos and Bruckner symphonies. A lot has happened since then; most recently, in January, Barenboim stepped down from the orchestra’s podium because of health problems. So their return will be poignant: just two nights, and the four symphonies of Brahms, a composer Barenboim performed as a pianist in this space in 1962. ZACHARY WOOLFEEnglish Concert, Dec. 10The British soprano Lucy Crowe’s expertise and imagination in Baroque music gives her the freedom to turn da capo arias into feats of feeling. That exhilarating sense of spontaneity uplifted the English Concert’s performance of Handel’s “Serse” at Carnegie last year, and it will be exciting to hear Crowe apply her gifts to more dramatic material when she takes the title role in “Rodelinda.” OUSSAMA ZAHRThe pianist Daniil Trifonov will appear on Carnegie’s main stage to perform Beethoven’s mighty “Hammerklavier” Sonata.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesDaniil Trifonov, Dec. 12Arguably the mightiest of the under-40 generation of superstar pianists meets the mightiest of repertoire in this recital, as Daniil Trifonov takes on Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata. It’s a banner year for youngish soloists in ambitious repertoire, in fact: Vikingur Olafsson plays the “Goldberg” Variations (Feb. 7); Beatrice Rana does the Liszt Sonata (Feb. 28); and Seong-Jin Cho journeys through the second book of the same composer’s “Années de Pèlerinage” (May 17). DAVID ALLENMet Orchestra, Feb. 1Yannick Nézet-Séguin has decided not to share next season. Rather than engage a guest conductor, he helms all three of the Met Orchestra’s concerts himself, embracing opportunities to bask in the tonal floodgates of Lise Davidsen’s soprano in Wagner’s “Wesendonck Lieder” and, later, the heavenliness of Lisette Oropesa’s Mozart arias (June 11), and the intense standoff of Bartók’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” with Elina Garanca and Christian Van Horn (June 14). OUSSAMA ZAHRYunchan Lim, Feb. 21This precociously mature pianist, still in his teens, played Liszt’s deliriously difficult “Transcendental Études” on the way to becoming the youngest-ever winner of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition last year. He’ll reprise the Liszt as part of his recital introduction on Carnegie’s main stage. By this point, another pianist, the spectacularly creative Igor Levit, needs no introduction at this point to this hall’s audience; on Jan. 20, he’ll play two symphony transcriptions (Liszt’s of Beethoven’s Third and Ronald Stevenson’s of Mahler’s 10th) alongside Hindemith’s Suite “1922,” raucous and very Roaring Twenties. ZACHARY WOOLFEVienna Philharmonic, March 1Most of the five concerts in Welser-Möst’s Perspectives series — Jan. 20 and 21 with the Cleveland Orchestra, March 1-3 with Vienna — are emblematic of his thoughtful, idiosyncratic, ultimately endearing approach to programming, but the March 1 performance looks especially constructive, full of connections and contrasts to draw: Hindemith’s Konzertmusik for Wind Orchestra, Strauss’s Symphonic Fantasy from “Die Frau Ohne Schatten,” Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra and, as if to bid farewell to a whole world of music, Ravel’s “La Valse.” DAVID ALLENJason Moran will return to Carnegie with a tribute to the pioneering jazz musician James Reese Europe.Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York TimesJason Moran, March 9In addition to being an elite improvising pianist, Jason Moran is a keen programmer; his Carnegie survey of Black American music from the Great Migration was a well-attended success. You can all but bank on the same when Moran brings his latest concert concept to Zankel Hall. This time, the focus will be on the music of the early 20th-century American original James Reese Europe. You might expect some of the same expert arrangements heard on Moran’s latest album, “From the Dancehall to the Battlefield.” But prepare also for some surprises; this restless innovator rarely does anything the same way twice. SETH COLTER WALLSEnsemble Modern, April 12Much of the festival “Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice” is more confusing than informative. This period in history produced so much excellent and overlooked music; why are we seeing Beethoven, Wagner and Mahler (among other head-scratchers)? At least there are engagements like that of Ensemble Modern, which will perform works including a lithe but still barbed smaller arrangement of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “The Seven Deadly Sins,” led by HK Gruber, one of our greatest living Weill interpreters. The group returns April 13 as part of León’s residency, playing her “Indígena” and “Rítmicas” alongside pieces by Conlon Nancarrow and others. JOSHUA BARONEDanish String Quartet, April 18A highlight of Carnegie’s spring months in recent seasons has been the Danish String Quartet’s Doppelgänger project, which juxtaposes Schubert quartets with premieres. Coming this April: a new work by Anna Thorvaldsdottir. And, for the fourth installment next year, the group is adding the cellist Johannes Rostamo to perform Schubert’s endlessly moving, even sublime String Quintet in C, paired with a commission from Thomas Adès. JOSHUA BARONE More

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      Review: A New ‘Ring’ at Bayreuth Does Wagner Without Magic

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      Valentin Schwarz’s production of the four-opera epic presents human characters with relations even more tangled than usual.BAYREUTH, Germany — About 150 years ago, in a megalomaniac’s coup, Richard Wagner built a theater on a hilltop here in northern Bavaria.His immense, complex, innovative operas had never been presented as he imagined them. If he wanted them done right, he concluded, he would have to do them himself.But when the Bayreuth Festival Theater opened in 1876, with the premiere of his full “Ring of the Nibelung” — a four-opera, 15-hour mythic tale about nature and power with a cast of gods, warriors, dwarves, giants, talking birds and spitting dragons — Wagner was still unsatisfied.Among the most intractable (and inadvertently laugh-inducing) problems were the magical effects he called for: girls frolicking in the depths of a river; transformations into serpents; Valkyries riding through the air on horseback. Even now, with 21st-century stage technology, what Wagner makes musically persuasive has struggled to be visually and dramatically so.In his intriguing, insightful new production of the “Ring” at the Bayreuth Festival, the young director Valentin Schwarz has dealt with those problems by sidestepping them entirely.Schwarz’s acidic, passionately performed, contemporary-dress version is a “Ring” without magic or nature, in which all the characters are human, their relations even more tangled than usual, and all the events take place on a single estate.While in the libretto, the dwarf Alberich briefly turns himself into a lowly toad, that is here just a metaphor; it’s mentioned in the text, but nothing happens. The mighty Valkyries don’t fly through the sky, but bray around a waiting room in spike heels, flame-colored nouveau riche outfits and cosmetic surgery bandages. Siegfried, the flawed hero, is given a sword — or at least a shard that resembles one — but it does nothing supernatural. (The weapons here are mostly handguns.)In Valentin Schwarz’s staging of “Die Walküre,” the mythic Valkyries are instead women in spike heels, nouveau riche outfits and cosmetic surgery bandages.Enrico NawrathThis is all of a piece with the demythologizing trend in Wagner stagings over the past 50 years, especially in Europe. The most influential ones over that period have been made in the shadow of George Bernard Shaw’s interpretation of the “Ring” as an allegory of anticapitalism, with the action set more or less in the present and the gods depicted as members of the modern upper classes, the characters’ nobility and valor as mostly sham.That was also the case with the last Bayreuth “Ring,” by Frank Castorf, which ran from 2013 to 2017. But compared with Castorf’s gleefully baffling staging, which often abandoned coherent storytelling altogether, Schwarz’s is fairly straightforward in its account of the codependence and acrimony running through a family. There are whiffs of daytime soaps in the harsh vividness of the visuals and acting, and a bit of “Succession,” too.If the “Ring” is an allegory — a reach for some conservative operagoers, but a given for many directors — the conceptual anchor of a production is the nature of the gold, the theft of which from the Rhine, in the opening minutes, is the sin that sets the epic plot in motion.The gold — and the powerful, toxic ring it’s molded into — symbolizes the commodity that the onstage world values most. For Castorf, it was oil, corroding political and social relations as it circulated through the globalized economy. For Schwarz, picking up on the magic apples the libretto says the gods require to retain their freshness, it is youth, innocence, children.His “Ring” is full of adults obsessed with appearing younger — through exercise, plastic surgery, absurd attempts at hip clothing — even as, more than in most stagings, they visibly age over the cycle.In Schwarz’s most original and inspired idea, the stolen gold is a young boy (Erik Scheele) whose abduction by Alberich (Olafur Sigurdarson) embodies a society curdled by its attempts to outrun death.Enrico NawrathThis obsession tips over into ominous hints of child trafficking and abuse; the slaves of Nibelheim are here a roomful of identically dressed blonde girls drawing at tables. (The girls aren’t overtly hurt, but they’re clearly being hoarded.) The dwarf Mime’s workshop is a creepy tea party and puppet theater for raggedy homemade dolls. And in Schwarz’s most original and inspired idea, the gold is not a bit of metal, but an actual young boy whose abduction embodies a society curdled by its attempts to outrun death.The life cycle is the focus from the beginning. The libretto sets the start of the “Ring” beneath the flowing waters of the Rhine, but Schwarz instead shows us an animated projection of a womb, in which twin fetuses are frozen in a gesture somewhere between love and combat.That image of a family’s foundational claustrophobia is a key to all that follows, as the action plays out in and around the gods’ home, Valhalla. (The forbiddingly sleek, spare sets are by Andrea Cozzi, the evocatively changing light by Reinhard Traub, and the fiercely trashy costumes by Andy Besuch.) The giants who, in the libretto, have been conned into constructing the lair are here chic architects of a glassy expansion. Alberich now isn’t of a different race than Wotan, the king of the gods, but is his less successful brother.Michael Kupfer-Radecky, left, and Stephen Gould (who was replaced last week by Clay Hilley) in “Götterdämmerung,” in which the family property is now inhabited by even more depraved people.Enrico NawrathThe all-knowing Erda and the brutal Hunding are part of the estate’s omnipresent, watchful servant underclass, which shines the silver as the main characters suffer. Later, Mime and the dissipated Gibichungs, Gutrune and Gunther, are ever more depraved inhabitants of parts of the property, long after the gods have passed on.The role of Wotan, his hands ever pawing at women at their most vulnerable, is shared by the sturdy Egils Silins (in “Das Rheingold”) and the brooding Tomasz Konieczny (“Die Walküre” and “Siegfried”). In the second act of “Walküre” last week, Konieczny had an appropriately bourgeois accident — the back of his Eames lounge chair broke off, and he tumbled to the floor — so he sat out the third act, giving Michael Kupfer-Radecky the opportunity to jump in, superbly, a few nights before his manic turn as Gunther.In “Siegfried,” the title character was sung by the tirelessly secure Andreas Schager, subtly unfolding the lovable side of a drunken degenerate. In “Götterdämmerung,” Clay Hilley was a last-minute replacement as Siegfried, and he would have been impressive even under less dramatic circumstances.“Die Walküre” was notable for Klaus Florian Vogt’s pure, rapt Siegmund and Lise Davidsen’s tender, surging Sieglinde, by far the most vocally resplendent performance of the week. Daniela Köhler sang brightly in the short but daunting Brünnhilde part in “Siegfried”; in the much longer “Walküre” and “Götterdämmerung,” Iréne Theorin acted with intense commitment to the staging, but her sizable voice wobbled under pressure.Lise Davidsen, left, gave the most vocally resplendent performance of the week alongside Klaus Florian Vogt in “Die Walküre.”Enrico NawrathStepping into the production just a few weeks ago to replace a sick colleague, the conductor Cornelius Meister led a solid, sensibly paced, somewhat faceless reading of the sprawling score.For all that is clear, even blatant, about Schwarz’s staging, there is much that is memorably, lyrically ambiguous. Appearing periodically throughout his “Ring” is a small, glowing white pyramid in a glass cube. Characters occasionally carry it, and it sometimes sits next to furniture or in the corner, but it’s never explained or dwelled on. It is whatever you think it is: a model of the pyramidal addition to Valhalla; a stylized sword or spear tip; purity; energy; antiquity; aspirations before and beyond the complications of reality. It is, in essence, a line of poetry, enigmatic and evocative.Similarly, drawings of stereotypically Wagnerian faces with winged helmets keep popping up — they’re what the girls are making in Nibelheim — before taking form as the red masks carried by the sinister crowd of vassals in “Götterdämmerung.” Do they represent the stultifying weight of tradition in presenting the “Ring”? The dark side of German nationalism?Thankfully, it’s not specified — nor is the meaning of the omnipresent horse figurines and toys. The most important horse in the cycle, Brünnhilde’s Grane, is, like the gold, here a real person: a tall, dependable, silent aide with an equine mane and beard.Enigmatic images abound in the staging, including red masks with stereotypically Wagnerian faces.Enrico NawrathThere were indelible images throughout the week: the giant Fafner (Wilhelm Schwinghammer) moldering at home on his deathbed; Alberich (Olafur Sigurdarson) and Hagen (Albert Dohmen) confronting each other on a palely lit stage, empty but for a punching bag that Hagen attacks, then forlornly embraces; Hagen’s slow, mournful dance as he leaves, waving Alberich’s leather jacket like a bullfighter.And at the end of “Die Walküre,” we don’t see Brünnhilde asleep in a ring of fire, but rather the final attempt of Fricka (Christa Mayer) to reconcile with Wotan, her husband. He walks away, leaving a single candle burning as the curtain closes, a nod toward the libretto’s fire that captures the emotions of the music and the moment in a fresh light.But while the abandonment of enchantment is often illuminating, occasionally it ties Schwarz in knots. Since there is no potion to cause Siegfried to forget — and cruelly betray — his love for Brünnhilde, their ecstatic duet earlier in “Götterdämmerung” needs to be staged, unconvincingly, as a fight to give motivation for his bitterness. And both Theorin and the staging run a bit out of steam in the closing, apocalyptic Immolation Scene, with Brünnhilde wandering aimlessly, then cradling Grane’s decapitated head as she lies down next to the murdered Siegfried at the bottom of the estate’s drained, dirty pool.Instead, the real coup of “Götterdämmerung” is the realization, earlier on, that the kidnapped Rheingold-boy has grown up to become the embittered, ambivalent Hagen. Painfully, in Schwarz’s staging, we see him treat Brünnhilde and Siegfried’s young child (an addition to the libretto) as callously as he was — the wheel of fear and abuse continuing to turn.And the production’s final image is a reprise of its first: again, twin fetuses, but this time in seemingly peaceful embrace. Is that peace lasting? Or will birth inevitably bring about a renewal of resentment, betrayal and violence? With admirable restraint, Schwarz doesn’t define whether he thinks a sick world is capable of change.Der Ring des NibelungenThrough Aug. 30 at the Bayreuth Festival, Germany; bayreuther-festspiele.de. More