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    At the Met Opera, ‘Tannhäuser’ Is Halted by Climate Protests

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    A revival of Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” was notable for the arrival of Christian Gerhaher. But with an abrupt protest, the performance took a turn.“Wolfram, wake up!” came a shout from the highest box seats of the Metropolitan Opera. “The spring is polluted!”At first, it seemed like an odd thing to throw at the character of Wolfram in Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” which returned to the Met on Thursday night, with that role sung by the great baritone Christian Gerhaher in his company debut. (Indeed, his arrival was what made the night notable to begin with.) But that cry was the start of an unbroken stream of climate grievances, designed to coincide with Wolfram’s description, during the singing contest midway through Act II, of love as a miraculous spring.“The spring is tainted!” the protester up in the Family Circle continued, then dropped a banner that said, “No Opera on a Dead Planet.”Several more protesting voices emerged, from the group Extinction Rebellion. Onstage, performers froze in place until the Met’s golden curtain came down around its gilded proscenium. Demonstrators and booing audience members began to roar at each other across the vast auditorium.“Shame!” a person near me yelled in the general direction of the protests. Others howled “Go away!” and “Go home!” As a performatively bothered couple walked out, one of them, a man dressed in black tie, said, “Is there no security here?”People had questions. One person asked an usher, “Are the police here?,” while another usher asked no one in particular, “Where’s Gelb?” — referring to Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager.Another banner unfurled from a box seat across the hall, saying “Extinction Rebellion,” accompanied by the group’s logo of a circle with an hourglass inside it. Someone in the box below immediately tried to pull the banner down, obscuring the text, and the woman who had dropped it was suddenly removed from her perch. Security had arrived.Gelb stepped onstage and told the audience: “We’re very sorry for the disturbance. We’re going to be starting in about one minute.”When the performance did restart, though, it didn’t last one minute before another protester rose to shout from the rear of the Orchestra section, holding a square banner of the Extinction Rebellion logo. The curtain came down again.A man near the protester ripped the banner from her hands. Another threw a playbill at her face. Two rows in front of me, someone, seemingly unfazed, started to read on a Kindle.After 20-some minutes of delays, Gelb returned to the stage and told the audience that the performance would continue, but with the house lights on, “so our security personnel in the building can remove any protesters who wish to protest and be arrested.” (The New York City Police Department later said that no arrests had been reported.) Then, he added with a strangely martial tone, “We are not going to be defeated by them.”By that point, the theater was visibly emptier — not just because of the protesters who had been taken out, but also because of the many audience members who simply gave up. Still, the show went on.Here is where I have to offer a necessary disclosure. As a critic, I’m comfortable thinking and writing about the performance up to this point. But, while I have a general sense of what followed — and what followed was excellent — I never felt fully engaged with the show again. There was the visual distraction of vigilant security, and of the police officers in the aisles. And there was the nervous anticipation of the protest’s return: Would it come back in the famed Pilgrims’ Chorus? In the “Song to the Evening Star”?It was understandable that some in the audience had been dismayed by the disruption of their night out, but it was difficult to shake the angrily bothered, even violent response from others toward the protesters. Did they consider that “Tannhäuser” comes from the most politically active time in Wagner’s life, his years in Dresden, Germany, which ended with his fleeing after the May Uprising in 1849? Did they clock that when the performance resumed, it was with the scene of a whole hall turning against Tannhäuser for an ode that to him rings of truth, and to them of heresy?The rest of the evening — which because of the protests stretched until midnight — unfolded without any disturbance beyond the usual chime of a cellphone ring. There was no more news, at least beyond the original headline of Gerhaher’s debut.And his performance is reason alone to return to this “Tannhäuser,” in Otto Schenk’s dusty and unfashionable, but utterly lovable, production from the 1970s. Gerhaher is one of our finest living lieder singers, a raconteur and a chameleon, a perceptive and persuasive interpreter whose approach to text shines in the recital hall. But he has also appeared on Europe’s opera stages; his “Wozzeck” at the Aix Festival in France this summer, performed without ever leaving the stage, was a Kafkaesque descent into torment and tragedy.The Met’s immensity can be unkind to singers with Gerhaher’s size and attention to detail. But on Thursday, he filled the hall with ease, drowned out only by the protests. He was slightly strained at his loudest, but more human for it. His “Song to the Evening Star” was not comforting or buttery, like Peter Mattei’s when this production was last revived, in 2015; a brittle solace, it ached, and felt like a true farewell.Gerhaher was surrounded by seasoned Wagnerian singers: Ekaterina Gubanova as a lush Venus; Georg Zeppenfeld as a stentorian Landgraf Hermann; Elza van den Heever as an Elisabeth more affecting in her prayerful “Allmächt’ge Jungfrau” than in the exuberant “Dich, teure Halle.” Andreas Schager’s tenor has bright power but the irrepressibility of a fire hose, which suits roles of heroic bumbling naïveté like Siegfried and Parsifal, and not so much the anguished and multidimensional Tannhäuser. His Rome Narrative in Act III was bluntly angry where it should have been shattering.In the orchestra pit, Donald Runnicles led the opera at first slowly, but with shape, the opening more spiritual than stately. That built toward orgiastic music for the Venusberg that may have been as PG-rated as the staging that followed, but it also had remarkable clarity — in phrasing and in balance. Throughout the night, Runnicles was in full control of the score, even if he could stand to relinquish a bit of his grip.With such an approach, though, the orchestra resisted the invitation for a saccharine opening to the third act, which instead took on a heart-rending holiness as it prefigured Elisabeth’s resigned prayer for death. While Runnicles gestured at the podium, security and police stalked the aisles, as if to preserve the music’s beauty by force. Not for the first or last time that evening, it made a good moment feel bad.TannhäuserThrough Dec. 23 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      10 Hours Gives Us (Almost) All of Schumann’s Songs

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      Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber, peerless in lieder, have released an 11-disc set of Robert Schumann’s songs, many overlooked.Back in 1988, it was hearing the lieder of Robert Schumann that convinced Christian Gerhaher, then a philosophy student in Munich, to ask a pianist he knew from school, Gerold Huber, whether they might start playing some songs together.Three decades later, Gerhaher and Huber have long since become the greatest partnership in singing, and they come full circle this month with the release of an 11-disc box set of Schumann on Sony. As its cover announces, it contains “All the Songs.”“Gerold and I have worked on singing Schumann for 33 years,” Gerhaher, 52, said in an interview. “He composed nearly 300 songs, but what is astonishing is that every song is amazing, a revelation of possibilities, of thoughts, of beauty. There is maybe only one song I don’t like so much.” (It’s “Der Handschuh.”)Schumann has had an uncertain presence in the art song repertoire. While cycles like “Dichterliebe” are touchstones, much of his output remains overlooked. Gerhaher can cite only two prior attempts at anything comparable to a complete set, neither of them as cohesive as his new release.The baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, among the leading lieder advocates of the 20th century, taped about half the songs in the 1970s. Graham Johnson, an accompanist with encyclopedic tastes, compiled a very full set on Hyperion from 1996 to 2009. But he split the songs among different vocalists.That makes Gerhaher the first singer to finish a complete survey of his own (albeit with the help of colleagues in works written for the female voice or for groups). Huber is at the piano throughout, and the goal is finally to give Schumann his due as a connoisseur of lyrics — according to Gerhaher, “one of the best-read composers that there has ever been.”Gerhaher believes that Schumann took a far more literary approach to songs than, say, Schubert — an approach that was intended “to make these poems even more complicated than they are.” He did this not just in introducing tensions between text and music (and vocalist and pianist), but also by writing almost exclusively in cycles, combining disparate poems into coherent sets.That has always been obvious with cycles like the Eichendorff “Liederkreis” (Op. 39), or the “Kerner Lieder” (Op. 35). But it is true, too, Gerhaher said, of less monumental groupings with innocuous titles like “Three Songs” (Op. 83) or “Six Songs” (Op. 107) — their texts (sometimes by the same poet, sometimes drawn from different ones) freighted with deeper, often darker meaning when set together.Gerhaher is the first singer to finish a complete survey of his own (albeit with the help of colleagues in works written for the female voice or for groups).Daniel Etter for The New York Times“He doesn’t want to finish thinking about a poem,” Gerhaher said. “By putting them into music and then combining them into cycles, he stretches the semantic nature of a poem, in order to create something very different and new. This is what I love.”Schumann composed his songs in two spells. The first period, from 1840, has been seen as the epitome of Romanticism. The second has been heard skeptically, if at all, but Gerhaher has increasingly found it the richer. Schumann wrote these songs from 1849 to 1852, not long before he jumped into the Rhine in 1854 and died in a psychiatric asylum two years later. Like most of his later works, the late songs have been lesser to some ears, as antiquated prejudices about mental health have led to misunderstandings of their experimental tone.Gerhaher dissents, citing the Violin Concerto and the “Ghost Variations” as further evidence that this view is wrong. “Saying that the late Schumann was a sick Schumann, mentally and spiritually weak, is an assumption which is dangerous,” he said. “The assumption that we understand something as being weak is always combined with the assumption that we understand something else very well. Both are wrong, I think.”With that in mind, Gerhaher chose five late songs to introduce his new recording. Here are edited excerpts from his comments.‘Schneeglöckchen’ (Op. 96, No. 2)In Op. 96, you have five songs. Two and four are very disturbing, about human sorrow. The third, in the middle, is an August von Platen poem that explains that words can’t convey what they try to convey. These three describe humanity’s horrible situation: being thrown into the world and not even being able to talk to each other properly.There is another “Schneeglöckchen” (“Snowdrops”) in the “Liederalbum für die Jügend” (Op. 79), where it means something nice, because it’s a sign of the end of winter. But the anonymous poem Schumann sets here in Op. 96 is harder to understand. A voice comes to a snowdrop and says, you have to leave, a storm is coming. But why? It’s the end of winter; the flower has nothing to fear. The voice answers that the snowdrop’s “Liverei” — its uniform — is white, with a green trim.Why does it talk about a uniform? I looked through some uniform books, and found a similar one for a cavalry called the Scheither Corps, part of the Hanover regiment in the Seven Years’ War. There was a battle at Moys, near Görlitz, where the corps was defeated by Austria. There was one snowdrop rider left hurt, who couldn’t get home. And in the poem the voice says you have to go home. This is so disturbing, even if I can’t prove the connection.‘Himmel und Erde’ (Op. 96, No. 5)This last song, “Heaven and Earth,” is a resolution for the Op. 96 cycle. The first song is Goethe’s “Nachtlied”; it starts with the two nouns “Gipfel” (“hills”) and “Wipfel” (“treetops”). This last one, by Wilfried von der Neun, starts with the reverse, with “Wipfel” then “Gipfel.” You are confronted with these opposites, then you are confronted with heaven, and you see that these oppositions are not important anymore; they come together. It reminds me of the medieval German philosopher Nicholas von Kues, who wrote about the “coincidentia oppositorum” — the falling together of opposites.‘An den Mond’ (Op. 95, No. 2)At first you can’t understand this cycle at all. You see number one, “Die Tochter Jephtas” (“Jephthah’s Daughter”), and number three, “Dem Helden” (“To the Hero”). All three are Byron texts. What does it mean?In 1847, Fanny Mendelssohn died, and Felix Mendelssohn shortly after, and Schumann wrote some Byron into his book of poems. The first song is a memorial to Fanny. Jephthah’s daughter was this warrior without a name; she fought for her father, the king, but she didn’t get a name. This was Fanny’s fate: She was a composer, but she didn’t make a name as one. “To the Hero” is about Felix’s role in these years, especially to Schumann: the splendid hero of music.In the middle is “To the Moon.” It says, look, moon, you are kind of a star, but you are a cold star, because you reflect warm light from the sun — you are only a memory, sad, cold, hard memory. This is how Schumann combined the deaths of his two friends.‘Die Blume der Ergebung’ (Op. 83, No. 2)This cycle so abstract. You have three songs, and they represent three ways to set a poem. The first song, “Resignation,” is the most advanced and through-composed; the second is a varied strophic song; the third, “Der Einsiedler” (“The Hermit”), is a perfect strophic song. In “The Flower of Resignation,” you have five strophes, and in the middle of the third strophe, you see this word “Liebesschalen” (literally “love bowls”). This is the center of the middle strophe of these three songs, the creation of a third person by a couple. It can’t be an ongoing error that Schumann had this maniacal tendency to conceive of combinations.“Requiem” (Op. 90, No. 7)Op. 90 is maybe my favorite cycle overall. There is a downward spiral. It’s very dark, about accepting the vanity of the world and the sadness of being alone. We start with a framing song again, the song of a blacksmith who is helping Faust on his travels, naïvely unaware that Faust is seducing his wife. In the middle you have two song couples, which are examples of losing faith in life. The fourth is a wonderful song about love vanishing and death taking over.Then Schumann added this “Requiem” as a requiem for the poet, Nikolaus Lenau, whom he thought was dead but in fact only died around the day of the first performance of these songs. You have these illusions of eternity, of never-ending life. It’s so full of feeling, a coming-together of spirituality and sensuality. More

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      10 Classical Concerts to Stream in January

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story10 Classical Concerts to Stream in JanuaryA Verdi opera from the Met and composers on the border of classical and pop are among the highlights.Luciano Pavarotti and Aprile Millo in Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera,” which will be streamed by the Metropolitan Opera.Credit…Met Opera ArchivesDec. 31, 2020, 8:00 a.m. ETAs the live performing arts still reel from the coronavirus pandemic, here are 10 highlights from the flood of online music content coming in January. (Times listed are Eastern.)‘Lonely House’Available now until Jan. 22; operavision.eu and on YouTube.This winter, Katharine Merhling was scheduled to reprise her Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady” at the Komische Oper in Berlin. The pandemic got in the way, but the company’s devoted audience need not spend the season without this singer’s gifts. This performance (first streamed live late in December) offers a fresh look at Kurt Weill, focusing on that composer’s years in Paris and New York. Devotees know many of these songs. But Ms. Mehrling’s energy — aided by Barrie Kosky, the Komische Oper’s artistic director, on piano — gives a saucy charge to a medley from the rarely staged “Lady in the Dark.” SETH COLTER WALLS‘Un Ballo in Maschera’Jan. 2 at 7:30 p.m.; metopera.org; available until Jan. 3 at 6:30 p.m.In case you missed it in August, this 1991 Metropolitan Opera performance of Verdi’s dark tale of love, betrayal, friendship and regicide returns to the company’s series of nightly streams from its archives. “Ballo” is part of a week centered on Luciano Pavarotti, Met star supreme, but is also a showcase for the passionate artistry of the soprano Aprile Millo, whose career burned bright in the 1980s and ’90s, a throwback to divas of yore. James Levine conducts a cast that also includes Leo Nucci, Florence Quivar and Harolyn Blackwell. ZACHARY WOOLFEThe soprano Julia Bullock’s recital will be streamed by Cal Perfomances.Credit…Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesJulia BullockJan. 14 at 10 p.m.; calperformances.org; available until April 14.Kurt Weill isn’t just coming from the Komische Oper. One of our most luminous singers has four Weill numbers of her own to offer in a recital for Cal Performances that swings, in characteristic Bullock style, from the classical canon to contemporary work by way of golden age musical theater. Pieces by William Grant Still and Margaret Bonds are at the core of a program that also includes songs by Wolf and Schumann (selections from “Dichterliebe”), a set from “The Sound of Music,” and material from John Adams’s recent opera “Girls of the Golden West,” composed with Ms. Bullock in mind. Laura Poe is the pianist. ZACHARY WOOLFEEve EgoyanJan. 16 at 5 p.m.; rcmusic.com; available until Jan. 23.This Canadian pianist, who specializes in contemporary music, will perform the premiere of her Seven Studies for Augmented Piano. This is a series of works she created for a Yamaha Disklavier — an acoustic piano with a computer interface, coupled with software that allows her “to augment and extend the sonic range of the piano,” as she writes in a program note. The program, part of the 21C Music Festival presented by the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, includes a short video exploring Ms. Egoyan’s creative process. ANTHONY TOMMASINIWild UpJan. 17 at 9:58 a.m.; patreon.com/wildup; available indefinitely.Artists from the Wild Up collective, including its conductor and artistic director, Christopher Rountree, are familiar to Los Angeles audiences. But for the group’s coming monthlong project, “Darkness Sounding,” listeners around the world are invited. Some concerts will be available as livestreams, then archived, through Wild Up’s Patreon page. At five dollars for the month, you can access shows like this one on Jan. 17, “simple lines/quiet music/silent songs,” featuring the pianist Richard Valitutto. A daylong “house concert,” it’s organized around largely soft, contemplative works by the likes of Ann Southam and Alvin Curran. SETH COLTER WALLS‘Soldier Songs’Jan. 22 at 8 p.m.; operaphila.org; available until May 31.David T. Little’s “Soldier Songs,” for baritone and small ensemble, was born of the American invasion of Iraq. But, based on interviews with veterans of five wars, it speaks to conflict more generally and abstractly. And like the most satisfying politically minded art, it’s rife with complication — not just in the score’s uninhibited blending of genres, but also in the treatment of its subject, defying stereotypes and hagiographies. “Soldier Songs” puts you off as it draws you in, and it will haunt audiences anew in a virtual production presented by Opera Philadelphia, directed by and starring the baritone Johnathan McCullough. JOSHUA BARONEThe baritone Christian Gerhaher, standing, and the pianist Gerold Huber performing in September at Wigmore Hall, which will stream their recital on Jan. 27.Credit…Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesChristian Gerhaher and Gerold HuberJan. 27 at 2:30 p.m.; wigmore-hall.org.uk; available until Feb. 26.As concerts have moved online during the pandemic, many have also gotten shorter. Thus “Schwanengesang,” the shattering collection of Schubert’s final songs, can more easily stand alone on a program — as it does in this Wigmore Hall stream from the baritone Christian Gerhaher and the pianist Gerold Huber, one of the great musical partnerships of our time. The duo also appear earlier in Wigmore’s richly scheduled January, presenting works by Schumann and Debussy (Jan. 25). Other hall highlights include the soprano Lise Davidsen, singing Grieg, Sibelius and more (Jan. 17), and the pianist Igor Levit, playing Hindemith, Schoenberg and Busoni (Jan. 29). JOSHUA BARONEBaltimore Symphony OrchestraJan. 27 at 8 p.m.; offstage.bsomusic.org; available until June 30.This ensemble has been offering a series of documentary-style, hourlong discussion and performance programs called BSO Sessions. “Twelve” looks at composers who have bridged contemporary classical music and pop. There will be performances of a suite by Jonny Greenwood, of Radiohead, from his score for the film “There Will Be Blood”; Bryce Dessner’s “Lachrimae”; and Caroline Shaw’s “Entr’acte.” Steve Hackman, a composer and arranger skilled at this crossover, discusses the music and the stylistic overlaps with musicians from the orchestra. Nicholas Hersh conducts. ANTHONY TOMMASINIThe pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason will appear with the Hallé Orchestra.Credit…Matt Crossick/PA Images, via Getty ImagesHallé OrchestraJan. 28 at 6 a.m.; halle.co.uk; available until April 28.This orchestra, which has been streaming performances filmed at its Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, England, has an intriguing program coming up featuring the pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason, the eldest of the seven young, gifted members of a British musical family that has been gaining international attention. She plays Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 on the program, conducted by Mark Elder, which opens with Richard Strauss’s Serenade for winds (written when its composer was 17) and ends with Sibelius’s Third Symphony. ANTHONY TOMMASINIPeter Evans EnsembleJan. 28 at 8 p.m.; roulette.org; available indefinitely.The trumpeter Peter Evans is a reliable source of thrilling virtuosity. That’s true when he’s working with the Wet Ink Ensemble or International Contemporary Ensemble, as well as when he’s leading his own groups. This quartet, with the electronics and percussion specialist Levy Lorenzo, the violinist and vocalist Mazz Swift and the pianist Ron Stabinsky, recently celebrated the release of a blazing album, “Horizons.” But this livestream won’t be a victory lap; it promises a fresh slate of compositions by Mr. Evans. SETH COLTER WALLSAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More