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    Review: Renée Fleming Stars in ‘The Hours’ at the Met Opera

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    Kevin Puts and Greg Pierce’s new opera, conceived as a vehicle for the star soprano Renée Fleming, has its staged premiere at the Metropolitan Opera.“The Hours” — a new opera based on the 1998 novel and the 2002 film it inspired — features a redoubtable trio of prima donnas. And it was conceived as a vehicle for one of them, the soprano Renée Fleming, who is using it as her return to the Metropolitan Opera after five years.But on Tuesday, when the Met gave “The Hours” its staged premiere, only one of this trio of stars really shone: the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, sounding as confident and fresh, as sonorous and subtle, as she ever has in this theater.In this achingly — almost painfully — pretty, relentlessly stirring opera, with a score by Kevin Puts and a libretto by Greg Pierce, DiDonato plays Virginia Woolf, battling depression as she writes her novel “Mrs. Dalloway” in the early 1920s.The two other main characters illustrate the impact of that book through the decades. In 1949, Laura Brown (the Broadway veteran Kelli O’Hara), a pregnant Los Angeles homemaker, is reading it as she suffers Woolfian waves of despair. Fifty years after that, the sophisticated Manhattanite book editor Clarissa Vaughan (Fleming), who shares a first name with Woolf’s protagonist, is, like Clarissa Dalloway, preparing a party — this one for her onetime lover and longtime best friend, a renowned poet dying of AIDS.Michael Cunningham’s novel, Stephen Daldry’s film and the new opera all take us through one modest yet momentous day in the lives of these three women. Cunningham’s deft construction, with its precious pseudo-Woolf prose, discreetly highlights the threads of connection — flashes of the color yellow, degrees of same-sex desire — weaving the stories together.The film — which starred Meryl Streep as Clarissa, Julianne Moore as Laura, and, in a putty-nosed, Academy Award-winning turn, Nicole Kidman as Virginia — upped the portentousness, not least through Philip Glass’s soundtrack. Gravely impassioned and endlessly undulating, Glass’s score is so closely associated with this material that writing new “Hours” music is, as Puts said in a recent interview in The New York Times, something like writing a “Star Wars” opera without anything by John Williams.In Tom Pye’s scenic design, the three stories are presented on realistic islands that float around a bare stage.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThere are streaks of Minimalism in Puts’s watery rippling, as there are throughout his body of work. But though he repeats rhythmic and melodic motifs, the effect is gentler and less chugging than Glass, and — as in “Silent Night” (2012), Puts’s Pulitzer Prize-winning opera about a Christmas cease-fire during World War I — all else is pushed into the background by surging, strings-forward lyricism.Early in “The Hours,” Puts introduces passing hints of distinctions between the women’s worlds: for 1923, austere piano and a curdled atmosphere of syncopated winds and eerie pricks of strings; for 1949, some period light swing and echoes of the style of cheerful ad jingles. But nearly every scene in the opera eventually gets to the same place musically and dramatically, whipped into soaring emotion. The tear-jerking gets tiring.Pierce’s libretto artfully brings the women into even closer proximity than in the novel or film, enabling Puts to create, for example, gorgeous close-harmony duets for Virginia and Laura. But an awkward scene with Clarissa at the florist — Mrs. Dalloway, per Woolf’s classic opening line, is buying the flowers herself — doesn’t seem sure whether it is, or should be, comic relief. A late trio for Clarissa; her dying friend, Richard; and Louis, with whom they were enmeshed in a youthful love triangle, goes on far too long.The choral writing, which starts the opera pretty clearly representing the voices in the characters’ heads, gradually dissolves into a vaguer, more all-purpose texture — and occasionally into stentorian wails, like the villagers’ music in “Peter Grimes.” A vocalizing countertenor (John Holiday), mystifyingly called the Man Under the Arch in the cast list, hovers around, faintly suggesting the angelic.Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, gave the work its premiere in March in concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra, which he also leads, and whose strings blossom in a way that sumptuously rewarded Puts’s score.But on Tuesday — with Nézet-Séguin making his first appearance at the opera house this season, nearly two months in — the Met’s orchestra brought muscular energy to what could easily turn turgid and syrupy. (The most risible part in Philadelphia, in which a contemporary novelist named, yes, Michael arrives onstage to swear his devotion to Woolf, has thankfully been excised.)In Tom Pye’s set, the three women’s domestic spaces are realistic islands floating around a bare stage, an efficient solution to a fast-flowing drama. But Phelim McDermott’s production clutters the smooth action with choristers, actors and dancers who, in Annie-B Parson’s dull choreography, sleepwalk, slouch, wield flowers like cheerleader pom-poms, wave pots and pans, slump atop chairs and sprawl over floors.Fleming, center, among flowers held by dancers in Annie-B Parson’s choreography.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDenyce Graves, Sean Panikkar and Brandon Cedel bring dignity to the protagonists’ romantic partners; Kathleen Kim has a piquant cameo as the coloratura-wielding florist; and, best of all, Kyle Ketelsen sings the strong-willed, delusional Richard with haunting authority.O’Hara, her classical technique secure enough to have brought her success at the Met in “The Merry Widow” and “Così Fan Tutte,” is a focused actress — watch the quiet terror of her slow walk back toward her son from center stage — even if her bright, silvery soprano takes on a slight edge at full cry.But it is hard to focus on anyone else when DiDonato is onstage, often standing magnetically still. Her voice is clear in fast conversation, as she darkly relishes the words. Then, as the lines slow and expand, her tone grows smoky yet grounded, mellow yet potent. She plays Virginia as solemn and severe, but with a dry wit; if anything, she comes off as almost too robust to make paralyzing depression entirely plausible.DiDonato is a commanding enough singer and presence to render persuasive what had seemed in Philadelphia like bombastic overkill: a booming fantasy of London, a crashing evocation of incapacitating headaches. It’s only at the very top of its range that her voice tightens a bit; all in all, though, she gives a generous, noble portrayal, at its peak in her crushing delivery of lines from Woolf’s suicide note.The poignancy of the plot is amplified by Fleming, who has returned to the Met’s stage sounding pale: not frail or ugly, but at first almost inaudible and by the end underpowered, a pencil sketch of her former plushness. Having bid farewell to the standard repertory, this diva never wanted to age into opera’s supporting mother characters, and she has the influence to commission works like this, in which she can still be cast as the lead.But just as Clarissa Vaughan throbs with nostalgia for her life a few decades before, so we listen to Fleming at this point in her career and hear, deep in our ears, her supreme nights in this theater in the 1990s and early 2000s: as Mozart’s Countess, Verdi’s Desdemona, Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, Tchaikovsky’s Tatyana.And as Strauss’s Marschallin in “Der Rosenkavalier,” in which she made her last staged appearance here in 2017, and whose sublime final trio is rendingly recalled in “The Hours,” as Clarissa, Laura and Virginia at last acknowledge one another, joining in sober then swelling harmony. It’s a superb sequence, a nod to Strauss that has a sweet longing all its own.“I wanted to make something good, something true,” Richard tells Clarissa near the end of the opera. “It didn’t have to be great.”That’s a reasonable standard. And, measured against it, Puts and Pierce have succeeded.The HoursThrough Dec. 15 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Review: A Tenor Claims His Place Among the Met Opera’s Stars

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      Allan Clayton brings pathos and terror, along with energy where it’s often missing, to a revival of Britten’s “Peter Grimes.”Benjamin Britten’s first, masterly opera “Peter Grimes” thrives on ambiguity — about the nature of abusive behavior, the sources of compassion, the chicken-and-egg relationship between a tortured psyche and a small town’s small-mindedness.But one thing, at least, was clear when this work returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Sunday afternoon: The company has a star on its hands in the tenor Allan Clayton.An established singer abroad, Clayton made his Met debut just this year, tireless and tormented in the title role of Brett Dean’s “Hamlet.” Back several months later, he is by far the high point of the company’s “Grimes” revival. Nimble, with a repertory that includes Handel alongside Kurt Weill’s “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,” he is bound for a rich future at the house if it will have him.Clayton’s Grimes stands apart not only in his appearance — unkempt, with windswept hair and a wiry beard, where his fellow inhabitants of the Borough look uniformly tidy, as though following a dress code — but also in his actions. He whips his head around with widened, piercing eyes, never at peace and paranoid about how others perceive him. Audibly and visibly doomed, his tone conveys bitterness and pain within the same melodic line as his face betrays fits of rage and shock at his own behavior. By the climactic third act, his voice exemplifies the essence of opera as a theatrical extremity of expression: His mad scene, a patchwork monologue of chest-pounding and stylized ugliness, is a thing of terror and wonder.His performance, reminiscent of Jon Vickers’s fearless benchmark recording from the 1970s, is nearly enough to breathe sustainable life into a production that often lacks it. John Doyle’s staging, from 2008 — which unfolds on a unit set of towering, shabby wooden walls and windows — is showing its age as it creakily moves forward and backward throughout the opera’s two and a half hours.Doyle’s signature approach — what has been called minimalist, though he prefers “essentialist” — was born in modest black box spaces, and eventually scaled to Tony Award-winning takes on Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” and “Company” on Broadway. His “Grimes” is a relic of that time but not as successful in 2022. His stripped-down aesthetic can reveal the heart of a work, but it relies on the detailed, well-rehearsed performances you won’t get with the short turnaround of a Met revival. So cast members tend to sing with little nuance at the audience, rather than to one another, and mostly while standing in place as they would in concert.Still, Clayton wasn’t alone in transcending the production. Nicholas Carter, who also made his Met debut conducting “Hamlet,” here led “Grimes” with drive, precision and a painterliness that lends the work the cohesive shape of a tone poem. His interludes evoked dark, oceanic immensity; violent swerves and surges; and the emerging promise of a dawning sun. They were a source of theater where the staging came up short.Dynamic, too, was Nicole Car as the widowed schoolmistress with hopeless belief in Grimes’s salvation. Car’s soprano, with lyrical grace at the top of her range and grave urgency at the bottom, was on Sunday a wellspring of calm and pathos. In the Prologue, her tone blended with Clayton’s gruff beauty for a duet of unsettling harmony.And, despite moving as a unit, then remaining static for long stretches, the Met’s chorus was compelling as the chattering, destructive residents of the Borough. Its members gave horrifying voice to mob mentality, complementing Clayton’s unraveling in Act III with a chilling climax of their own. Occasionally emerging from the crowd were other standouts: Justin Austin’s lively Ned Keene; Patrick Carfizzi’s authoritative Swallow; Michaela Martens’s wickedly comical Mrs. Sedley.Less persuasive were the mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves as Auntie, in a performance more straightforwardly musical than characterful; and the bass-baritone Adam Plachetka as Balstrode, a major, complicated role that didn’t make much of an impression on Sunday. His voice beautiful but consistently bland, Plachetka gave his fateful directions to Grimes at the end of Act III — to take his boat out to sea and sink it — with a woodenness that threatened to flatten the moment.That is, if it weren’t for Clayton’s response. Silent, he simply accepted his sentence with one last look back over his shoulder: an aching final aria performed with only his eyes.Peter GrimesThrough Nov. 12 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Carnegie Hall Will Host Concert in Support of Ukraine

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      Carnegie Hall said on Tuesday that it would host a concert in support of Ukraine later this month, to show solidarity with the Ukrainian people, express opposition to the Russian invasion and raise relief funds.The benefit, “Concert for Ukraine,” is to take place on May 23 at 8 p.m., and will feature more than a dozen artists and ensembles, including the Russian-born pianist Evgeny Kissin, the violinist Itzhak Perlman, the jazz vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant and the singer Michael Feinstein.The Ukrainian Chorus Dumka of New York, an amateur ensemble that specializes in secular and sacred music from Ukraine, will also perform.“Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it has been heartbreaking to witness the devastation that has been wrought there over the last two months,” Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said in a statement. “In this time of crisis, it is important to remember that there are active ways that we can all play a part in helping those who are suffering and under attack.”Several benefits have been held by New York arts groups in support of Ukraine since the start of the invasion. In March, the Metropolitan Opera staged a concert featuring Ukraine’s national anthem and a piece by the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov, among others.Carnegie’s leaders have used the hall’s platform to defend Ukraine. Last week, in announcing its 2022-23 season, the hall said it would host the Lviv National Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine in February. The ensemble will play Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, featuring the Ukrainian American pianist Stanislav Khristenko, Brahms’s “Tragic Overture” and Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, as part of a tour led by the Ukrainian American conductor Theodore Kuchar.“This is a turning point in history,” Gillinson said in announcing the season. “It’s really, really important that a dictator does not win. We felt we needed to very overtly support Ukraine.”Carnegie was among the first cultural institutions to fire artists with ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia after his order to invade Ukraine. In February, the hall canceled appearances by the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, a longtime supporter of Putin, and the Russian pianist Denis Matsuev, who also has ties to Putin.At the same time, Gillinson has warned that arts groups should not discriminate against Russian performers on the basis of nationality and should be careful to avoid penalizing performers who are reluctant to publicize their views on the war.The benefit will feature a number of opera stars, including the soprano Angel Blue and the mezzo-sopranos Denyce Graves and Isabel Leonard; the violinist Midori; the mandolinist Chris Thile; the Broadway singers Jessica Vosk and Adrienne Warren; and musicians from Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect, a group of young artists.Carnegie said proceeds would go to Direct Relief, a humanitarian aid group that supports relief efforts in Ukraine. More

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      Review: ‘Porgy and Bess’ Returns to a New Opera Landscape

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      The Metropolitan Opera’s revival boasts strong performances but raises difficult questions about race and American music.George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” is both easy and impossible to love.Its contradictions may have been captured best in Truman Capote’s “The Muses Are Heard,” his 1956 dispatch from a touring company’s historic stop in the Soviet Union. “Porgy,” he wrote, was like an allergen to Russian officials — its characters erotic, God-fearing and superstitious.But its reflection of America was a different story. “An exploited race at the mercy of Southern whites, poverty-pinched and segregated in the ghetto of Catfish Row,” Capote said, “could not be more agreeably imagined if the Ministry of Culture had assigned one of their own writers to the job.”“Porgy” — which returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Sunday after two years, its performances still exhilarating but its staging still blandly naturalistic — keeps raising questions over its three hours. And after a long pandemic closure, during which the Met, like the rest of the country, took a fresh look at racial inequities, those questions are increasingly difficult to sit with.Just a couple: Does “Porgy,” a leading contender for the Great American Opera, fulfill Antonin Dvorak’s prophecy that this country’s homegrown music would be founded on Black melodies? If so, did the work’s all-white creative team achieve that by exploiting stereotypes?Opera is rife with troubled histories and receptions. Of two works now playing at the Met, Puccini’s “Turandot” is set in a fairy-tale China out of late Romantic Orientalism; Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” ends with a startling paean to German nationalism. Classics like those tend to be defended with a logic that some have applied to “Porgy”: This is an art form that deals in broad strokes and the mythic. Who, then, are Porgy and Bess if not just another pair of star-crossed lovers?The soprano Angel Blue, left, as Bess and the bass-baritone Alfred Walker as a mighty and menacing Crown.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut that argument is on shakier ground with “Porgy” than “Turandot”; Gershwin’s work inevitably carries the baggage of American history. And its characters, mythic or not, can feel like cartoons of Black pain, violence and poverty. Black artists have had vastly divergent responses to the piece, but what James Baldwin called “a white man’s vision of Negro life” has remained ensconced in the repertory, held up by the same institutions that have long overlooked the work of Black composers.There’s no clear resolution to any of the problems that have dogged “Porgy” since its premiere, in 1935. But it is here to stay — a discomfort to be experienced, pondered and managed, not removed. It’s no coincidence that the Met accompanied this production’s debut two years ago with face-saving initiatives like talks, an album celebrating Black artists of its past and an exhibition to match, and the announcement that it would present its first opera by a Black composer. (That work, Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” opened the season in September.)If “Porgy” is the Great American Opera, it is more for its score — an innovative and seamless blend of grand opera, Broadway, and invented spirituals and folk melodies — than for its subject matter. (For that, we have the melting pot milieu of Kurt Weill’s “Street Scene,” the original sin of American greed in Marc Blitzstein’s “Regina” or stateside verismo in William Grant Still’s “Highway 1, U.S.A.,” to name just a few.)And at the Met, James Robinson’s production — a mostly timid, literal presentation of the libretto, by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward and Ira Gershwin — undercuts the defense of “Porgy” as timelessly mythic with its realistic direction and designs (by Michael Yeargan and Catherine Zuber). Even the preshow curtain, a towering photograph of Catfish Row, suggests something documentary. At odds with all this is the stylized and thoroughly modern choreography of Camille A. Brown.Much of the 2019 cast remains intact, including, from left: Latonia Moore as Serena, Eric Owens as Porgy and Denyce Graves as Maria.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut in the pit, the conductor David Robertson made an argument for the triumphs of Gershwin’s score, with stylistic shifts fluid and distinctly articulated. “Porgy” is also one of the great operatic portraits of a community; as such, its true stars are the chorus singers, matching the instrumentalists with vigor and richly textured delivery.As Porgy, the bass-baritone Eric Owens sang with limited power, but imbued each line with dramatic consideration. The soprano Angel Blue’s Bess was one of tragic juxtapositions: luminous in “Oh, the train is at the station” and shattering in the conflicted Act III reprise of “Summertime.” (That standard was first heard, lush and stylishly ornamented, at the start of the opera, sung by Janai Brugger as Clara).Much of the cast remains intact from 2019: Denyce Graves’s caring and comical Maria; Ryan Speedo Green’s mighty Jake; Alfred Walker’s similarly mighty but menacing Crown; Frederick Ballentine’s flamboyant Sportin’ Life; and Latonia Moore’s Serena, this production’s finest pairing of artist and aria in the showstopping “My man’s gone now,” and a commanding comfort in the later “Oh, Doctor Jesus.”Moore, Green and Blue — all Met regulars — come to this revival fresh from “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” As recently as last year, the idea of two operas with exclusively Black ensembles running at the company in the same month would have been fantastical. Thankfully, that’s no longer the case.Porgy and BessThrough Dec. 12 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Review: The Met Opera Reunites, With Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’

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      After a year and a half, the company’s forces came together for an outdoor performance of the sprawling, ecstatic symphony.The Metropolitan Opera hardly ever plays concerts at home at Lincoln Center. But before Saturday evening, the company had opened its season with Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, the “Resurrection,” once before.In 1980, a bitter labor battle kept the Met closed more than two months into the fall. When peace was re-established, Mahler’s sprawling journey of a soul, ending in ecstatic renewal, seemed just the thing — and the symphony, with its enormous orchestral and choral forces working in intricate lock step, is nothing if not a paean to cohesion.“The ‘Resurrection’ Symphony almost chose itself,” James Levine, then the Met’s music director, said at the time. It was, he added, “a way for the company to get in touch with itself again.”If there has ever been another time this company needed to get in touch with itself, it is now. That two-month hiatus four decades ago seems like child’s play compared with the situation today.Twenty twenty-one has, like 1980, brought contentious labor struggles — on top of a pandemic that has threatened the core conditions of live performance and kept the Met closed for an almost unthinkable 18 months. Its orchestra and chorus, as good as any in the world, were furloughed in March 2020 and went unpaid for nearly a year as the financially wounded company and its unions warred over how deep and lasting any pay cuts should be.The “Resurrection” Symphony brought the full company and its audience back together in grand style: 90 minutes; an orchestra of 116; a chorus of 100; and 2,500 attending in the park.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesJeenah Moon for The New York TimesJeenah Moon for The New York TimesJeenah Moon for The New York TimesInstituting a vaccine mandate and gradually coming to terms with the unions, the Met inched closer to reopening as the summer dragged on. And on Aug. 24, it removed the final barrier by striking a deal with the orchestra, paving the way for a resurrection — and a “Resurrection.”The company scheduled a pair of free Mahler performances outdoors at Damrosch Park, in the shadow of its theater, on Labor Day weekend, at the start of what has become an opening month. On Saturday, the Met will return indoors for Verdi’s Requiem, in honor of the 20th anniversary of 9/11. And on Sept. 27 the opera season begins in earnest with the company premiere of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” its first work by a Black composer, and, the following evening, a revival of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov.”Led by the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the “Resurrection” Symphony brought the full company and its audience back together in grand style: 90 minutes; an orchestra of 116; a chorus of 100; and 2,500 attending in the park, as well as hundreds more listening from the street. The mood was a blend of parks concert — one woman tried to muffle the crinkling of her bag of potato chips — and serious focus; a man sitting on the aisle followed along with the score, brightly lit on his tablet.With so much to celebrate, this was indeed a celebratory, smiling reading: Punchy and taut at the start, yes, but without the neurotic, feverish quality that some conductors sustain throughout. There was an overall sense of gentleness and soft-grained textures. The second movement was more sly than sardonic; the climactic burst of dissonance in the third movement was beautiful, not brutal. The chorus, facing the audience in front of the stage and getting its cues from screens, sang with mellow sweetness.It goes without saying that outdoor classical performance is never ideal. (Speaking from the stage, Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, claimed, tongue perhaps in cheek, that Lincoln Center’s president had promised no helicopters in the area for the duration of the symphony. Well. …)Ying Fang, the soprano soloist, is a symbol of the company’s present and future.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAmplified violin sections are inevitably harsh; woodwinds tend to get swamped by the strings and brasses, even more than usual in Mahler’s dense orchestration. And so much of this and every symphony’s power depends on musicians massed in a room together with their audience. Under the open sky, even on a gorgeous, mild evening like Saturday, the visceral and emotional impact of the music is diffused.But the offstage percussion and brasses finally sounded like they were coming from a real distance, as they rarely do in a concert hall. And there is special resonance in a great opera company performing this score, so redolent of the music-theater repertory, especially Mahler’s beloved Wagner. The stormy start of “Die Walküre”; the motif of the sleeping Brünnhilde from the end of that work; the mystically stentorian choruses of “Parsifal”; the sighing winds as Verdi’s Otello dies — all echo through the visionary excess of the “Resurrection.”It was moving to see Denyce Graves, a classic Carmen and Dalila at the Met 20 or 25 years ago, onstage and dignified in the great alto solos, even if her voice is a shadow of its former plush velvet. The soprano soloist, Ying Fang, a radiant Mozartian, was a symbol of the company’s present and future.While no one is ever hoping for distractions during Mahler, there was something heartwarming about the siren wailing down 62nd Street and tearing into the symphony’s majestic final minutes. What would a New York homecoming be without noise, and more noise? More

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      Glimmerglass Creates Magic in Its Own Backyard

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      The pandemic forced the company outdoors and to trim staples by Verdi and Mozart. Our critic found the experience to be ripe with potential for drawing in new audiences.COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — The Glimmerglass Festival has long boasted two features that made it a magnet for opera lovers during summer seasons: A bucolic setting in upstate New York, and the acoustically splendid, ideally intimate Alice Busch Opera Theater, which has a sizable stage and just 914 seats.That very intimacy has made this theater an especially challenging space to present works during the pandemic, and like most performing arts institutions, Glimmerglass was closed last summer, though there was some online programming. But in July live opera came back: the company hosted a monthlong outdoor season — at least it could make the most of its environment.Under the adventurous leadership of Francesca Zambello, the Glimmerglass Festival built a temporary stage on the grassy grounds of the campus. Audience members either sit on the lawn in socially distanced squares, or purchase one of 14 wood sheds, seating six. Of course amplification was necessary. The singers wear microphones; the Glimmerglass Festival orchestra performed from the stage of the opera house, with its sound channeled into the general amplification. (Singers watch the conductor via video monitors.)Natural sound has been the glory of opera for centuries. It’s always hard to fully assess amplified voices. Yet, for the four rewarding programs I took in recently, the sound came across with resonance (sometimes too much) and clarity. The lawn theater, created by the set designer Peter J. Davison, served its function: the raised wood stage is framed by a network of black steel beams, with colored light bulbs dangling on cords from above. A group of tree trunks off to one side provided a permanent feature of scenic designs and blended in magically with the forest background.Raehann Bryce-Davis, a mezzo-soprano with a burnished voice and dramatic fervor, as Azucena in “Il Trovatore.”Karli Cadel/Glimmerglass FestivalThe ongoing challenges of Covid-19 compelled the company to keep performances to 90 minutes or less, with no intermissions. That meant making considerable trims to staples like Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” and Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” For some devotees this might seem sacrilegious. But during earlier golden eras of opera works were routinely cut. I found the experience fascinating, and rich with potential for drawing in new audiences. Zambello said in an interview that with the informal outdoor setting and intermission-less programs, the festival attracted many people attending for the first time. The crowds have averaged about 700 per performance, she said. The audiences I saw — beginning on Thursday morning with “Il Trovatore” — were eager, despite some steamy weather.The core of the “Trovatore” story might seem the ill-fated love between Leonora, a lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Aragon, and Manrico, the troubadour of the title, an officer in the forces of a rival prince at time of civil war. But the opera is driven by Azucena, supposedly the mother of Manrico, who is consumed with fulfilling her mother’s dying command to “Avenge me,” after the woman was accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake.Zambello, who directed the production with Eric Sean Fogel, decided to make Azucena the focus. This adaptation, set in contemporary times, opened with Part 2 of Verdi’s work, which the composer subtitled “The Gypsy.” Here, Azucena (Raehann Bryce-Davis, a mezzo-soprano with a burnished voice and dramatic fervor) sang the character’s gloomy, haunting aria, when she recalls her mother’s dying words, while looking at a steel container emitting smoke from burning refuse. Then, we were taken back to the actual start of the work, the scene with Ferrando (Peter Morgan) and his band of soldiers, here presented as scrappy militia forces of the count.In an opera with a plot as convoluted as this one, it was hard to complain that the reordering of scenes made a hash of the story. Dramatically, the reframing certainly gave a central place to the obsessed Azucena. The bright-voiced veteran tenor Gregory Kunde was a volatile Manrico; the soprano Latonia Moore, the Leonora of this production, was ill on Thursday and replaced by Alexandria Shiner, who displayed a gleaming, powerful voice. The young baritone Michael Mayes was a compelling Count di Luna. Joseph Colaneri conducted a sure-paced account of the abbreviated score.Eric Owens and Lisa Marie Rogali in “The Magic Flute.”Karli Cadel/Glimmerglass FestivalThat evening came Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” performed in an English adaptation and translation by Kelley Rourke, directed by NJ Agwuna, and conducted by Colaneri. This trimmed version introduced Sarastro, the priest who heads a temple of wisdom, as the narrator of Mozart’s fairy-tale opera. We first saw him (the formidable bass-baritone Eric Owens) reading the tale from a huge story book.The concept allowed the creative team to do away with whole chunks of spoken dialogue in Mozart’s work, which, truth to tell, there’s too much of. The other leads, mostly younger artists, were all impressive: the tenor Aaron Crouch as the questing Tamino; the soprano Helen Zhibing Huang as the tender Pamina; Emily Misch as the fearsome Queen of the Night; Michael Pandolfo as a wonderfully hardy Papageno.Concerns during a pandemic about casting three children in the roles of the three boys led to a bold decision: The three ladies who serve the queen see the light, turn against her, and eventually side with Sarastro! So they become the guiding spirits who help bring the opera to its joyous end. And why not? The relative goodness and badness of the characters in this opera is an open question.On Friday morning, the festival presented the final performance of a new play with music, “The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson,” which tells the story of the pioneering founder of the National Negro Opera Company in the early 1940s. Sandra Seaton wrote the play, which loosely focuses on an incident in 1943, when Dawson, who had been presenting opera performances on a floating barge on the Potomac River, tried to book a hall in Washington, D.C., for a performance of “Carmen.” But she was met with Jim Crow policies that would have entailed playing before a segregated audience, which she refuses here to do.Denyce Graves, center, with, to her left, Mia Athey, Victoria Lawal and Jonathan Pierce Rhodes in the world premiere of “The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson.” The play by Sandra Seaton has music by Carlos Simon. Karli Cadel/Glimmerglass Festival“Passion,” directed by Kimille Howard, was conceived as a vehicle for the mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves, who was glamorous, gritty and poignant in the title role. We see her rehearsing three young singers (Victoria Lawal, Mia Athey, Jonathan Pierce Rhodes) for the “Carmen” she hopes to present, while taking infuriating calls from the renter of the hall. Dawson’s story is little-known and this work is an important step in telling it. In a revealing moment for Dawson, we hear Graves sing a melting, wistful song, “Free,” by the composer Carlos Simon, with words by Seaton. But this 70-minute play could benefit by being a little longer and having more of Simon’s music. Zambello, in the interview, said she hopes to develop the work further with Graves in mind.Weather, of course, is always a factor in outdoor opera, and rain and lightning forced the cancellation of Friday evening’s performance of “Songbird,” an adaptation of Offenbach’s “La Périchole.” (It was only the second cancellation, so far, of a 28-performance season.)“Gods and Mortals,” on Saturday morning, was a 90-minute program of excerpts from Wagner operas, directed by Zambello (with Foley as associate) and led by Colaneri. The work came across not just as a staged concert, but also as a dramatic entity on its own terms. Selections from “Tannhäuser,” the “Ring” operas, “Der Fliegende Holländer” and, a rarity, “Die Feen,” Wagner’s first completed opera, were presented in a manner that invited you to simply follow the themes of fate, love, mortality and the supernatural that run through Wagner’s works.The singers were excellent. Shiner, so good in “Trovatore,” was the star here, singing several excerpts thrillingly. Ian Koziara proved a youthful, exciting Wagner tenor. Owens gave a solemnly expressive account of Wotan’s farewell from “Die Walküre.” There was even a feisty performance, with six female singers wearing jeans and forest-green T-shirts, of the “Ride of the Valkyries” ensemble, against a dream-come-true Wagnerian backdrop: a real forest.From left: Mia Athey, Emily Misch, Alexandria Shiner, Stephanie Sanchez and Lisa Marie Rogali in “Gods and Mortals” at the Glimmerglass Festival.Karli Cadel/Glimmerglass FestivalI found the baritone Mark Delavan’s brooding, powerful account of the Dutchman’s monologue from “Holländer” especially moving. He sang this role memorably in 2001, when, four days after the Sept. 11 attacks, New York City Opera returned with a new production of this opera, signaling a first step back to normalcy. The 20th anniversary of that horrific event is coming up, even as New York, the performing arts, and the entire world continue to grapple with a very different kind of crisis. “Glimmerglass on the Grass,” as this summer’s festival was called, provided rewarding signs of renewal.Glimmerglass FestivalThrough Aug. 17; glimmerglass.org. More

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      Glimmerglass Festival to Stage Its Operas Outdoors This Summer

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyGlimmerglass Festival to Stage Its Operas Outdoors This SummerThe festival, in Cooperstown, N.Y., plans to resume performances this summer in “the most ventilated area we could find: the great outdoors.”A rendering of the stage that will be built for summer. The lawn will be transformed into socially distanced areas for four to six people.Credit…via GlimmerglassMarch 1, 2021Updated 7:18 p.m. ETWith many performing arts organizations trying to determine when it will be safe to return to their theaters, the Glimmerglass Festival announced Monday that it would take advantage of its bucolic surroundings in upstate New York to build an outdoor stage so it can perform this summer for socially-distanced audiences on its lawn.The festival, in Cooperstown, N.Y., about 200 miles from New York City, was determined to make a comeback this summer after the coronavirus forced the cancellation of its 2020 season. So it will move performances out of its usual theater, the Alice Busch Opera Theater, to an outdoor stage, and will divide its rolling lawns into socially distanced areas that can fit up to four people with chairs and blankets. Covered booths will also be offered that can fit up to six. “We invite you to join us this summer for a socially distanced festival where you will experience reimagined operas in the most ventilated area we could find: the great outdoors,” Francesca Zambello, the festival’s general and artistic director, said in a video presentation.Festival leaders made the choice to move outdoors from its intimate 915-seat theater “primarily for the health and safety of our company members, audience members and community,” Ms. Zambello said. The stage will be built on the south side of its grounds. The open-air performances will not be the only thing different about this summer’s festival, which is scheduled to run from July 15 to Aug. 17. The company said it would shorten its operas to 90 minutes for the safety of its audiences — avoiding the need for intermissions when people would mingle — and to build on the success it had with an abbreviated work in 2019, when it presented a 90-minute adaptation of “The Queen of Spades,” which combined elements of Tchaikovsky’s score and the Pushkin story. Among this summer’s operas will be shortened versions of Verdi’s “Il Trovatore,” Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” and Offenbach’s “Songbird (La Périchole).” The festival has lined up several opera stars for its summer’s offerings, including the bass-baritone Eric Owens and the mezzo-sopranos Isabel Leonard and Denyce Graves. The company will also mark the beginning of a three-year initiative this season called “Common Ground” that would unveil six new pieces that show an audience stories of life in America. As part of the initiative, the festival will offer two new pieces, a dance called “On Trac| More

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      He Called His Song ‘American Anthem.’ It Actually Became One.

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Biden AdministrationliveLatest UpdatesReview of Russian HackingBiden’s CabinetPandemic ResponseAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHe Called His Song ‘American Anthem.’ It Actually Became One.In his inaugural address, President Biden quoted Gene Scheer’s song, a patriotic hymn championed by the opera star Denyce Graves and recorded by Norah Jones for a Ken Burns soundtrack.Gene Scheer was watching the inauguration on television when President Biden suddenly began quoting “American Anthem,” a song he wrote more than 20 years ago.Credit…Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesPublished More