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    This ‘Magic Flute’ Has Ringtones, Bird Tracks and a Foley Artist

    Supernatural happenings, curses and romances, heartbreaking arias and vocal fireworks — what’s not to love?Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” (“The Magic Flute”), a wildly popular gateway opera, has been a frequent presence on stages since its premiere in 1791. It’s a fair bet, though, that Simon McBurney’s production, which opens at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, is the first to feature a ringtone duplicating the bird catcher Papageno’s five-note musical trademark. Or to use about 100 speakers strategically placed all over the house.Morley (Pamina) and Brownlee (Tamino) rehearsing “Die Zauberflöte.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesThe tenor Brenton Ryan, as Monostatos, in the production.Lila Barth for The New York TimesFor McBurney, the use of technology is less about embracing the present than about nodding to the creation of “Zauberflöte.” That was at Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna, which was run by the multitasking Emanuel Schikaneder, the opera’s librettist and originator of the role of Papageno.“Schikaneder had the latest ways of making thunder, he had machines make the sound of rain, he had bird calls, he had people making the sound of horses’ hooves,” McBurney said in an interview. “The use of sound creates a magical world, and yet at the same time at the heart of ‘The Magic Flute’ are real human concerns.”The juxtapositions of intimacy and cosmic scale, simplicity and complexity, low and high technology have long been emblematic of McBurney’s work as a founder and artistic director of the London-based theater company Complicité. Audience members at his solo show “The Encounter” (which had a Broadway run in 2016) experienced the production through earphones, immersing them in sophisticated soundscapes. Something that could have added distance between performer and theatergoer brought them closer.Morley rehearsing with the orchestra, which is raised almost to the level of the stage.Lila Barth for The New York TimesMcBurney experimented with sound again for “Zauberflöte,” which was first staged in 2012 at the Dutch National Opera and has been presented around Europe. (It replaces the 19-year-old Julie Taymor production at the Met; her abridged, English-language version for families remains in the repertory.) A distinctive trait of McBurney’s “Zauberflöte” is the importance of the sonic environment.“For a forest scene I have five or six bird tracks that I can send out, a running brook that I’m going to put in a speaker in the far right side of the stage, two tracks of wind blowing in trees,” Matthieu Maurice, a sound designer, said at a recent rehearsal.The singers are amplified through body microphones, though only for the spoken sections — plentiful in “Zauberflöte,” which is a singspiel, a numbers show with dialogue between arias. The mics are turned off for the sung parts, requiring constant adjustments by two sound mixers.“There’s so much more I can do with the dialogue with a mic,” said the soprano Erin Morley, who plays the pure-hearted princess Pamina. “I can face upstage, I can whisper something. I’m sure there will be some purists out there who will hate this, but the important thing is that we are not singing with mics.”The director Simon McBurney at the Met. “The use of sound creates a magical world,” he said, “and yet at the same time at the heart of ‘The Magic Flute’ are real human concerns.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesNathalie Stutzmann, this production’s conductor, was also on board. “In a house as big as this one, it is obvious to me that we need to use modern technology,” she said. “The Met is huge. It’s a lack of intelligence not to adapt to a space. It’s normal to help the singers fill the space when they are speaking. It’s also important that the volume of the spoken parts match the volume of the sung parts in an opera like this one, otherwise it feels like two different works.”Amplification also allows the integration of a live Foley artist, Ruth Sullivan, who operates out of a self-contained space, visible stage left, that looks like a zany inventor’s laboratory. “Her relationship with the actors is a musical one, essentially,” McBurney said of Sullivan. “They know the sounds she is going to make, and so it is a dance in the same way Nathalie Stutzmann is dancing with the singers, trying to make the cellos and the voices work together.”The artist Blake Habermann contributes drawings and ingenious effects to live projections.Lila Barth for The New York TimesHabermann’s drawing adds to the projections.Lila Barth for The New York TimesStutzmann works as closely with Maurice as she does with the musicians and singers. (The associate sound designer, he has been implementing Gareth Fry’s original vision for the past eight years, while adding flourishes of his own, including the ringtone.) The sound effects are indicated on the sheet music, so she knows exactly what to expect and when.Adding to the increased interconnection among the opera’s moving parts, the pit is almost level with the stage.“We decided, ‘Let’s raise the orchestra, let’s make people aware of the players,’” said Michael Levine, the set designer. “Because we’re so used to the players being hidden, and they weren’t in the 18th century.”From left, Luka Zylik, Deven Agge and Julian Knopf as the three spirits that guide Tamino and Papageno.Lila Barth for The New York TimesDuring the spoken sections at rehearsal, players in the orchestra turned toward the stage like flowers to the sun. They could watch the action for a change.“There’s nothing more boring than being an orchestra musician and being in the back of a cave with no idea of what’s happening on the stage,” Stutzmann said. “Can you imagine spending three or four hours, five for Wagner, at the bottom of a pit and have no idea what’s happening above you?” Not only can the musicians see this “Zauberflöte”; some also become part of the action.Being positioned higher creates a challenge, though. “We have to be careful not to cover up the singers,” Stutzmann said. “The sound balance is changed because we’re up and above, so we’re louder. You have to be vigilant while avoiding being bland.”Ruth Sullivan, the production’s live Foley artist. “Her relationship with the actors is a musical one, essentially,” McBurney said. “They know the sounds she is going to make, and so it is a dance.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesMuch of the production’s visuals are also created in plain view. The artist Blake Habermann contributes drawings and ingenious effects — watch how he renders a starry sky — to live projections. “I show all my tricks and then they become doubly magical,” McBurney said with an impish grin.For Levine, making the entire house part of one organism reminds everybody that the artificiality and evanescence of the art form constitute its strength. “What we wanted to do is to bring the audience into the fallibility of theater,” he said. “Things are being made before your eyes, and it’s live, and it’s not going to happen again. And the people that are constructing it are here with you in the same room, and we’re all doing it together.”A scene from the production at the Met.Lila Barth for The New York TimesIf the projections are the modern equivalent of the magic lanterns developed in the 17th century, McBurney and Levine also came up with a contemporary version of a magic carpet: a central square platform that can transport the characters, but that also suggests the instability they experience. It can go up and down, and it can be inclined as various angles; the singers can scamper on top or scurry below. “It is much more secure when you’re on it,” Morley said. “From afar, it looks terrifying.” Laughing, she allowed that “when we go underneath the platform, there were a few moments in rehearsal when I said, ‘You want me to do what?’”Some modern directors have been criticized for overemphasizing an opera’s staging over its music, and forcing interpretations that depart from the familiar. But McBurney’s North Star remains the music, and trying to stay faithful to what it meant for its creator.“I think that for Mozart, if you can make music so beautiful, people will come out changed,” he said. “We can debate whether he was right or not well, but it’s called ‘The Magic Flute.’ The flute changes the way that people behave.”Mozart, he added, had confidence in his music: “He knew that it could move people in a way that might alter their lives.” More

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    Classical Music to See and Hear in Spring 2023

    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