Layoffs and Job Reductions

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      L.A.’s Center Theater Group Lays Off Staff and Halts Work on One Stage

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      With box office revenues, subscriptions and donations all down since the pandemic, the theater said it would pause production on one of its three stages, the Mark Taper Forum.In the face of what is described as a “crisis unlike any other in our 56-year history,” the Center Theater Group, a flagship of the Los Angeles theater world, announced a series of sharp cutbacks Thursday to deal with drops in revenue and attendance and said that it would suspend productions at one of its three stages, the Mark Taper Forum.The theater said it would lay off 10 percent of its 200-person work force.In a note to patrons, the theater said it “continues to feel the aftereffects of the pandemic and has been struggling to balance ever-increasing production costs with significantly reduced ticket revenue and donations that remain behind 2019 levels.” Theater officials said the organization posted an $8 million shortfall for the 2022-23 fiscal year and a $7 million shortfall the year before, much of which had been covered by federal pandemic assistance that is now ending.The 736-seat Taper, a semicircular amphitheater that has been a showpiece for innovative productions — “Slave Play” recently enjoyed a mostly sold-out run here — will suspend productions beginning this July and at least through the 2023-2024 season.And the theater is postponing a world premiere that had been set to open there this August, “Fake It Until You Make It” by Larissa FastHorse. As a result, the final production at the Taper for this season will be “A Transparent Musical,” a world premiere based on the television show “Transparent,” about the patriarch of a Los Angeles family coming out as transgender.The Los Angeles organization becomes the latest arts organization in the country — from regional theaters to symphony orchestras to opera houses — to grapple with a drop-off in attendance in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.The center, which has a long record of championing new and innovative work, has been struggling to redefine its mission and regain its financial footing since reopening after the pandemic. The group is made up of three theaters: the Taper, the Ahmanson, and the Kirk Douglas Theater. The Ahmanson and the Taper are part of the Music Center complex in downtown Los Angeles; the Kirk Douglas is in Culver City.Season subscriptions at the Taper are 35 percent below what they were before the pandemic shutdown began; subscriptions at the group’s main theater, the Ahmanson, are down 42 percent. Its longtime artistic director, Michael Ritchie, stepped down in December 2021, six months before the expiration of his contract. He was replaced by Snehal Desai, the producing artistic director of East West Players, who will step into his new role this summer. He will take the helm at a reduced institution.“We didn’t think that it would happen this fast or this dramatically — before he got in the door,” said Brett Webster, a spokesman for the center. “He did go in knowing this was a possibility.”The Taper is particularly admired here because of its relatively intimate feel and its willingness to take on new productions, sometimes to acclaim, and sometimes not.“Pausing season programming at the Taper is a difficult but necessary decision that will impact artists and audiences; and is particularly painful for the talented and committed CTG staff who have dedicated so much to bringing great theater to L.A.,” the theater said.The Center Theater Group has a long and distinguished history here, the site of such pathbreaking productions as “Angels in America” and “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” the Anna Deavere Smith play. More

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      How MTV Broke News for a Generation

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      MTV News bridged a gap between news and pop culture without talking down to its young audience. As it prepares to shut down, Kurt Loder, Tabitha Soren, Sway Calloway and others reflect on its legacy.A little over a year into his first term, President Bill Clinton made good on a promise to return to MTV if young voters sent him to the White House. The town hall-style program in 1994 was meant to focus on violence in America, but it was a question of personal preference that made headlines and helped put MTV News on the media map.Boxers or briefs?“Usually briefs,” Mr. Clinton responded to a room full of giggles.Now, a generation after MTV News bridged the gap between news and pop culture, Paramount, the network’s parent company, announced this week that it was shuttering the news service.The end of MTV’s news operation is part of a 25 percent reduction in Paramount’s staff, Chris McCarthy, president and chief executive of Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount Media Networks, said in an email to staff that was shared with The New York Times.MTV News and its cadre of anchors and video journalists were the ones to tell young people about the suicide of Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, and the killings of the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. They brought viewers on the presidential campaign trail and face to face with world leaders like Yasir Arafat, and took them into college dorms in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. They also embraced the messy chaos of 1990s and early 2000s celebrity, as when Courtney Love interrupted an interview with Madonna. They always put music first.Through it all, MTV News never strayed from its core mission of centering the conversation around young people.“There were no comparisons, it was one of one,” said SuChin Pak, a former MTV News correspondent. “We were the kids elbowing in. There just wasn’t anything out there for young people.”SuChin Pak, left, an MTV News correspondent, with Fergie, of the rap group the Black Eyed Peas, and Snoop Dogg. Ms. Pak said of MTV News, “We were the kids elbowing in.”Jason Merritt/FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesMTV News broke up the television news environment “in terms of young versus old, hip versus square” rather than the conservative-versus-liberal approach of many cable news networks today, said Robert Thompson, a professor of television and pop culture at Syracuse University. Its influence can be seen in the work of Vice News, the brash digital-media disrupter that is preparing to file for bankruptcy, and in the hand-held camcorder style of reporting that some CNN journalists have embraced.MTV was able to corner a young audience who could name the entire catalog of the band Flock of Seagulls but also had a curiosity about current events, he said.The Music Television network debuted in 1981 like a “fuse that lit the cable revolution,” Mr. Thompson said. Six years later, MTV News came on air under the deep, sure-footed voice of Kurt Loder, a former Rolling Stone editor, who co-hosted a weekly news program called “The Week in Rock.” But it was his interrupting-regular-programming announcement of Cobain’s death in 1994 that cemented Mr. Loder as “the poet laureate of Gen X,” Mr. Thompson said.“It was live TV at its best, I suppose, for an awful event,” Mr. Loder, who now reviews films for Reason magazine, said in an interview.MTV News tried to set itself apart from other cable news operations in a number of ways, Mr. Loder said.For starters, its anchors and correspondents did not wear suits. They also weren’t “self-righteous” and tried “not to talk down to the audience,” he said. That became especially important as rap and hip-hop seeped into every fiber of American culture.“We didn’t jump on rap at all as being a threat to the republic; we covered that stuff pretty evenhandedly,” Mr. Loder said. MTV then started adding more hip-hop to its music programing “and suddenly there’s a whole new audience.”Sway Calloway was brought into the MTV News fold to “elevate the conversation” around hip-hop and pop culture, and to do so with credibility.“MTV News took news very seriously,” he said. “We all wanted to make sure that we kept integrity in what we did.”Mr. Calloway, who now hosts a morning radio program on SiriusXM, said he knew respect for hip-hop culture had reached a new level when he was sitting in the Blue Room of the White House with President Barack Obama.“When Biggie said, ‘Did you ever think hip-hop would take it this far?’ I never thought that the culture would be aligned with the most powerful man in the free world, that we would be able to have a discussion through hip-hop culture that resonates on a global basis,” Mr. Calloway said. “That’s because of MTV News.”From its inception, MTV News saw itself as a critical connector for young voters. Tabitha Soren, an MTV News correspondent in the 1990s, saw that first hand on the campaign trail with MTV’s “Choose or Lose” get-out-the-vote campaign, and in the White House.“People were very earnest and sincere in wanting young people to be educated voters, not just willy-nilly, get anybody to the ballot box,” she said. “I felt like we were trying to make sure they were informed.”For Ms. Soren, who was 23 when she first appeared on air for MTV News in 1991, being able to connect with a younger audience was made easier because she was their age, she said. That meant asking Arafat about the role of young people in the intifada and going to Bosnia to follow American troops, many of whom were the same age as MTV’s viewers.“I was empathetic because I was their age,” said Ms. Soren, who is now a visual artist in the Bay Area. “My natural curiosity most of the time lined up with what the audience wanted to hear about.”During a town hall-style forum on MTV in 1994, President Bill Clinton was famously asked about his preference in underwear.Diana Walker/Getty ImagesThat rang especially true for Ms. Pak, who was born in South Korea and filmed a docu-series for MTV News about growing up in America with immigrant parents.“It was a culture shift for me personally, but with an audience that suddenly was like, wait, are we going to talk about this version of what it means to be American that is never shown and never talked about, and do it in the most real way possible?” said Ms. Pak, who was with MTV for a decade and now co-hosts a podcast. “Where else would you have seen that but MTV?”Just as Mr. Loder and Ms. Soren became cultural touchstones for Generation X, Ms. Pak, Mr. Calloway and others filled that role for millennials. Racing home after school to catch Total Request Live, they watched video journalists report the day’s headlines at 10 minutes to the hour during the network’s afternoon blocks and between Britney Spears and Green Day videos.“A lot of people were getting their news from us, and we understood that and knew it,” Ms. Pak said. “For all of us it was, OK, what is the audience, what’s our way in here that feels true? You do that by sitting down with them versus standing over them.” More

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      Following Theater Graduates Who Were Left Without a Stage

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      The Times’s theater reporter tracked drama students who emerged from a well-regarded North Carolina conservatory into a world with performance on pause.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.I’m the theater reporter at The New York Times. But for more than a year, there was very little theater.So what have I been doing? Well, at least in part, I’ve been writing about the people whose lives, and livelihoods, have been upended by the pandemic-prompted shutdown.That means actors, of course, and fans, too. But I’ve also been intrigued, almost since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, by what the widespread layoffs and absence of productions would mean for aspiring theater artists,. That’s what led me to report the article that appeared in Sunday’s paper about a group of drama students who graduated last year from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.Over time, I was able to talk to 22 of the 23 drama students in the class of 2020, and they reminded me of so much that I love about journalism, and about artists — they were open and generous and self-aware, and sometimes uncertain about how to think about what this strange and unexpected time would mean for them. And it seems like the article has resonated with readers, for which I am grateful.I started pitching the story to The Times’s culture editors last summer. Then, in January, prompted by the annual what-do-we-want-to-do-this-year meetings, I moved it to the top of my wish list.But how to proceed? I started by reaching out to a number of leading drama programs in New York and around the country, and by talking with educators and students about what was happening with the class of 2020. I was just trying to get my head around what a story might look like.As I gathered reporting, my editors and I resumed a debate we have over and over: breadth versus depth. Was the best way to proceed to write in a sweeping fashion about the most interesting graduates from a variety of programs, or to go deep on a single program that could stand in for the larger universe?Once we decided to focus on one class, it was time to select a school. This is the kind of multiple-choice question for which there is no single right answer. We wanted a well-regarded program, but maybe not one of the schools right in our backyard, and we wanted a group of students with a variety of back stories and a range of pandemic experiences.The University of North Carolina School of the Arts appealed because it met those criteria, and I just had a gut feeling, after talking with the program’s dean, its communications director and a few of the students, that I would find the level of candor that might make a story succeed.As has been true for much of my work over the last year, the reporting was largely by phone — the students have scattered, with one in England, one in Australia and the others all over the United States and often on the move. But I did get to meet some of them.In May, I took my first reporting flight since the pandemic began, to Winston-Salem, to tour the campus and attend the 2021 commencement, which members of the class of 2020 were invited to attend, and two did. (One bonus: I got to see what a Fighting Pickle, the school’s mascot, looks like.)I visited with three members of the class. David Ospina, who is now working as a real estate photographer, met me for cold brew coffee on a very hot North Carolina morning; Lance Smith showed me around his mom’s apartment, where he’s been making music and self-taping auditions during the pandemic; and Sam Sherman joined Mr. Smith and me at a picnic table on campus to debrief the morning after commencement. And over dinner with the dean and several faculty members, I learned more about the school’s programs and how it had weathered the pandemic.It’s been great to start reporting in person again. It just leads to better conversations and richer material, and I’m so grateful to all the students for their thoughtfulness. As I sat with Mr. Smith and Mr. Sherman, one memory prompted another — the student production of “Pass Over” they worked on, the alumni panels they attended, the books they’re reading and the survival jobs they’re taking and the dreams they’re trying to hold on to. “I’m starving to be in a room with people, playing with each other, having fun and goofing off and seeing what works and maybe having a breakthrough one day,” Mr. Sherman said. Mr. Smith agreed. “I miss being in it,” he added. “I miss doing it.” More

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      AT&T's WarnerMedia Group to Merge With Discovery

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      AT&T’s WarnerMedia group is merging with the reality programmer Discovery. What does that mean for your favorite shows?It’s as if Logan Roy, the fictional patriarch of the Waystar Royco media empire on HBO’s popular series “Succession,” masterminded the deal himself: AT&T has thrown in the towel on its media business and decided to spin it off into a new company that will merge with Discovery Inc. More

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      The Met Opera’s Musicians, Unpaid Since April, Are Struggling

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      About 40 percent of the players have left the New York area, and a tenth have retired. Now the Met is seeking long-term pay cuts, and offering them partial pay if they come to the bargaining table.As the months without a paycheck wore on, Joel Noyes, a 41-year-old cellist with the Metropolitan Opera, realized that in order to keep making his mortgage payments he would have to sell one of his most valuable possessions: his 19th-century Russian bow. He reluctantly switched back to the inferior one he had used as a child.“It’s kind of like if you were a racecar driver and you drove Ferraris on the Formula One circuit,” Mr. Noyes said, “and suddenly you had to get on the track in a Toyota Camry.”The Metropolitan Opera House has been dark for a year, and its musicians have gone unpaid for almost as long. The players in one of the finest orchestras in the world suddenly found themselves relying on unemployment benefits, scrambling for virtual teaching gigs, selling the tools of their trade and looking for cheaper housing. About 40 percent left the New York area. More than a tenth retired.After the musicians had been furloughed for months, the Met offered them reduced pay in the short term if they agreed to long-term cuts that the company, which estimates that it has lost $150 million in earned revenues, says it will need to survive. When the musicians resisted, the Met offered to begin temporarily paying them up to $1,534 a week — less than half their old pay, but something — if they simply returned to the bargaining table, a proposal the musicians are weighing.Now the Met’s increasingly rancorous labor battles — it has locked out its stagehands, and outsourced some set construction to Wales — are adding more uncertainty to the question of when the opera house can reopen after its long pandemic shutdown.Joel Noyes, a cellist in the orchestra, reluctantly sold his treasured 19th-century bow so he could continue to make his mortgage payments. Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesThe toll on the players has been steep.Benjamin Bowman, 41, is one of the orchestra’s two concertmasters — a leader of the first violin section who serves as a conduit between players and maestros. He and his family moved to Stuttgart, Germany, where he took a temporary job with the state orchestra. Daniel Khalikov, 37, a violinist, has been struggling to make the $2,600-a-month loan payments for his two fine violins. Angela Qianwen Shen, 30, a violinist who is not able to collect unemployment because she is in the United States on a visa, picked up some translation work to make ends meet.And Evan Epifanio, 32, the orchestra’s principal bassoonist, put his belongings in storage in June and left the city for the Midwest, where he said he and his husband have been dividing their time between the homes of his parents and his in-laws.“I’m living in my in-laws’ basement at the peak of my career,” Mr. Epifanio said. “I’m a one-trick pony, and now I can’t even do that.”Over the past year, 10 of the orchestra’s 97 members have retired, a stark increase from the two to three who retire in an average year, said Brad Gemeinhardt, the chairman of the orchestra committee, which negotiates labor issues on behalf of the musicians. Prominent figures in the music world are sounding warnings about the peril the orchestra faces: Riccardo Muti, the revered conductor, said in a statement earlier this year that the “artistic world is in disbelief that the very existence of a great orchestra like the Met’s could be in danger and even at risk of disappearing.”The Met, which was financially fragile even before the virus, was forced to shut its doors on March 12, 2020, and it furloughed most of its workers, including those in its orchestra and chorus, in April. (It continued to pay for their health coverage.) In the fall, the Met presented an offer to its employees: it would resume partial payments in exchange for significant long-term pay cuts and concessions. The unions resisted. By the end of the year the Met orchestra was the only major ensemble without a deal to receive pandemic pay, according to the International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians.Then, in December, the company locked out its roughly 300 stagehands after their union, Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, rejected the Met’s proposed pay cuts. (In a letter to the union last year, Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, wrote that the average full-time stagehand cost the Met $260,000 in 2019, including benefits; the union disputes that number, saying that when the steady extra stage hands who work at the Met regularly, and sometimes full-time, are factored in, the average pay is far lower.)Mr. Gelb said that the company had no choice but to seek cuts when the pandemic left it in a perilous financial situation.“Suddenly we had no revenue, we had shut our doors and we had to do immediate triage so that the company would not fall apart and fold,” Mr. Gelb said. “We are doing the best we can in terms of keeping the company viable so that they will have jobs to return to.”At the end of last year, the Met offered the unions that represent the orchestra and chorus an olive branch: reduced paychecks for simply coming to the bargaining table. The American Guild of Musical Artists, which represents choristers, dancers and others, accepted the arrangement in January, and its members are receiving paychecks. Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians has not yet accepted the offer, Adam Krauthamer, the union’s president, said, but it is in the final stages of reaching a deal that the orchestra is voting on.Jeremy McCoy, who rose to assistant principal double bass while playing in the orchestra for 35 years, retired in May. Mr. McCoy, 57, said that he had been contemplating an early retirement, but not quite this early. When he realized that the Met’s furlough could last a long time, he said, he put in his papers, a decision that would allow him to begin collecting his pension rather than having his expenses eat into his savings indefinitely.Mr. McCoy said he was repelled by the idea of returning to an adversarial relationship between the musicians and management.“I don’t want to go back to big concessions and to a toxic environment,” he said.The opera house has been closed for more than a year, and the orchestra pit empty. Victor Llorente for The New York TimesThe Met said it was seeking to cut the payroll costs for its highest-paid unions by 30 percent — the change in take-home pay would be approximately 20 percent, it said — and that when ticket revenues and core donations returned to prepandemic levels, it would restore half of what had been cut. The Met declined to disclose the current average pay of its musicians, but during the run-up to contentious labor negotiations in 2014, officials said that the players had been paid an average of around $202,000 the prior year.Lincoln Center, with the Met in the middle, has been eerily empty. Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesMany orchestras have reached agreements for substantial, lasting pay cuts, including the New York Philharmonic, whose musicians agreed to 25 percent cuts to their base pay through August 2023. Mr. Krauthamer said that the Met Orchestra’s union had put forward its own proposal, which would cut pay but preserve work rules that the Met was seeking to change.Some orchestra members have said that they felt betrayed that the opera was not using its musicians in “Met Stars Live in Concert,” the pay-per-view recitals it has been producing from opulent settings in Europe. Most feature only piano accompaniment. A Met official with knowledge of the situation said that for the other performances, members of the company’s orchestra were not included because of the difficulties of travel during the pandemic and because of ongoing labor negotiations.The Met Orchestra has started staging its own virtual concerts and collecting donations to distribute to musicians in need. The most recent, starring the soprano Angela Gheorghiu, singing from Romania, began by clarifying that the performance was “not affiliated with the Metropolitan Opera.”Tanya Thompson, a carpenter who has worked at the Met for 15 years, says she will be back, but during the pandemic she has become an overnight home health aide. Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesBetween stagehands and management, the temperature is even higher.Since the lockout, the work of preparing sets for the coming season has gone to nonunion shops elsewhere in this country and overseas. The Met regularly commissions set-building outside the institution, but these jobs had been slated to be done internally.Sets for two operas scheduled to premiere at the Met next winter, “Rigoletto” and “Don Carlos,” are being built by Bay Productions, a company in Cardiff, Wales; the set for “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” will be built in California. With the sets being built elsewhere, the Met’s scenic painters are losing work even though they have not been locked out because there is nothing for them to paint, so they remain on furlough, said Cecilia Friederichs, a national business agent for the United Scenic Artists union.But the company will still need stagehands if it wants the show to go on this fall, said James J. Claffey Jr., the president of Local One.“You don’t even get to an opening night without us,” he said.The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees has launched a lobbying effort urging lawmakers to support a measure that would block stimulus funds from going to arts organizations that, like the Met, have locked out union employees.Mr. Gelb said that the effort seemed “self destructive” and that “any attempt to damage the institution will only make it harder for the employees once we return.”Tanya Thompson, a union carpenter who has worked at the Met for 15 years, had planned to return to work there in December. When Local One was locked out, she decided to continue in the new job she had taken over the summer to make ends meet: as an overnight home health aide for elderly patients.Ms. Thompson, 52, said she plans to go back to the opera house as soon as there’s a deal.“I’m a lifer,” she said. “We care about what we do and we want the Met to succeed.” More

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      California Lost 175,000 ‘Creative Economy’ Jobs, Study Finds

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesRisk Near YouVaccine RolloutNew Variants TrackerAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCalifornia Lost 175,000 ‘Creative Economy’ Jobs, Study Finds“There is no economic recovery in our area unless a working creative engine is driving it,” said Representative Karen Bass of California.The Broad Museum in Los Angeles. Job loss in the “creative economy workforce” reached 24 percent in Los Angeles County, according to a report released Thursday by the Otis College of Art and Design.Credit…Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated PressFeb. 25, 2021, 4:44 p.m. ETArts advocates and elected officials in California called on Thursday for additional government spending to avert what one organization leader called a “pending cultural depression” brought on by the pandemic.“There is no economic recovery in our area unless a working creative engine is driving it,” Karen Bass, a U.S. Congresswoman representing part of Los Angeles, said in a video prerecorded for a panel discussion.“Congress must provide additional assistance to the creative economy and its million of employees,” she continued, saying that her district could not fully recover unless the arts community there led the way.The calls for more aid were aired during a video conference hosted by Otis College of Art and Design, which released a report it commissioned on the creative economy. Two economic impact surveys Thursday by the advocacy group Californians for the Arts were also discussed.The Otis College report said that between February 2020 and December 2020, total job loss in the “creative economy workforce” reached about 13 percent statewide and 24 percent in Los Angeles County.During that period, the state lost 175,000 jobs in that economy, which was said to include architecture and related services, creative goods and products, entertainment and digital media, fashion and fine arts, the report said.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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      Its Musicians Are Out of Work, but the Met Is Streaming

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeMake: BirriaExplore: ‘Bridgerton’ StyleParent: With ImprovRead: Joyce Carol OatesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookIts Musicians Are Out of Work, but the Met Is StreamingAnna Netrebko sang a recital live from Vienna as the opera company and its unions remain in a standoff.The soprano Anna Netrebko, the Metropolitan Opera’s reigning diva, concentrated on songs by Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Richard Strauss in her streaming recital.Credit…Metropolitan OperaFeb. 7, 2021The Metropolitan Opera rang in 2020 auspiciously, with a Puccini gala featuring Anna Netrebko, the company’s reigning diva.But in March, of course, just weeks before Netrebko was to return to the Met as Tosca, the company closed because of the pandemic. It has been shut for the past 11 months, canceling a slew of plans, including a new production of “Aida” for Netrebko, and furloughing hundreds of its workers without pay.On Saturday Netrebko returned to the company — in a sense — with the latest recital in its Met Stars Live in Concert series, streamed from the Spanish Riding School in Vienna and available through Feb. 19. In recent years Netrebko has moved into weighty dramatic soprano repertory. But for this occasion, accompanied elegantly by the pianist Pavel Nebolsin, she presented lighter material, mostly intimate songs by Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Richard Strauss.[embedded content]From the opening, Rachmaninoff’s “Lilacs,” she seemed to become the young protagonist of the text, singing with subdued tenderness and mellow colorings as she recalled the fresh fragrances of dawn and wistful happiness among the flowers. When Netrebko let go in bursts of full-voiced radiance, as in Rimsky-Korsakov’s exuberant “The Lark’s Song Rings More Clearly,” it was almost startling.Here were hints of the fearsome intensity and thrilling sound she brought to Act II of “Turandot” for the gala over a year ago. But watching her recital, it was hard not to think about what was missing this time: the Met’s musicians. Since the end of March, the unionized orchestra and chorus, among other workers, have remained furloughed, with talks between the unions and management at a standstill. Frustrations have been vented on social media over the Met’s decision to stream recitals like Netrebko’s while the company’s house artists remain out of work. (The orchestra is planning its own streaming concert, independent of the Met, on Feb. 21 at metorchestramusicians.org, featuring the star soprano Angela Gheorghiu; proceeds will go to the Met Orchestra Musicians Fund.)The issue has been hanging over the recital series, which began in July with Jonas Kaufmann and is a venture into testing whether opera audiences will pay for online content, as well as an attempt to keep fans and patrons of the Met engaged. Many of the recitals, by singers like Joyce DiDonato, Bryn Terfel and, most recently, Sondra Radvanovsky and Piotr Beczala, have been artistically rewarding and sensitively directed. But the orchestra and chorus are the core of the Met.Netrebko’s recital was originally planned for October, but in September, while performing at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, she was diagnosed with Covid-19 and briefly hospitalized. So it was a relief to have her looking and sounding wonderful. Her tendency to sometimes let a note slip off pitch was a bit more prevalent than usual. But I’ve always felt this criticism was a little unfair. Like many singers from Russian and Scandinavian traditions, she brings a cool Nordic cast to her sound and sings whole phrases with focused tone, saving vibrato for bursts of intensity. So even small imperfections of pitch stand out.Ms. Netrebko, center, appeared with the pianist Pavel Nebolsin, left, and the mezzo-soprano Elena Maximova.Credit…Metropolitan OperaOne hardly cares, given the splendor of her charismatic vocalism. Even when bringing affecting restraint to songs like Strauss’s “Morgen” or Debussy’s “Il pleure dans mon coeur,” she kept the operatic fervor stirring just below the surface, ready to unleash in climactic phrases. I loved how she began Tchaikovsky’s “Nights of Delirium” with hushed, milky tone, then slowly built intensity as the music expressed a young woman’s thoughts of sleepless, feverish nights consumed with memories of a lover. And she capped a beguiling performance of the aria “Depuis le jour” from Gustave Charpentier’s opera “Louise,” in which a young seamstress in Paris who has run off with a lover expresses blissful romantic contentment, with a softly shimmering high B.She was joined by the excellent mezzo-soprano Elena Maximova in a duet from Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades” and the famous Barcarolle from Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann.” During a break, the soprano Christine Goerke, the recital series’ host, spoke with Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, about Netrebko’s future plans, which include Elsa in a new production of Wagner’s “Lohengrin,” with Goerke as Ortrud. Count me in.But next up for her, if reopening this fall goes as planned, will be a concert at the company’s Lincoln Center home with its full orchestra in October. A return to live performance, with the Met’s essential artists fully paid, cannot come soon enough.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More