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    Met Opera’s ‘Diva Whisperer’ Retires After 18 Years

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    Suzi Gomez-Pizzo, wearing a tangerine sweatshirt and sneakers, barreled down the backstage corridors of the Metropolitan Opera on a recent afternoon, a trolley full of clothes behind her.It was the first act of John Adams’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” and Gomez-Pizzo, who supervises costumes for female leads at the Met, was lining up a series of quick changes for the soprano Julia Bullock, the opera’s Cleopatra. In the span of minutes, Gomez-Pizzo had to help Bullock change from a sleek burgundy gown to a slinky watercolor dress to a bejeweled pharaoh’s outfit.“You got this,” Gomez-Pizzo told Bullock, handing her a water bottle. “You look stunning.”After 18 years, Gomez-Pizzo, 64, a fast-talking native New Yorker, is retiring this month from the Met. She has garnered a reputation as a calm troubleshooter with a knack for defusing last-minute sartorial snafus: broken shoes, missing earrings, ripped gowns.“Before I even think of it, she anticipates the needs,” said the soprano Jullia Bullock, here with Gomez-Pizzo. “I know that no matter where my mind is, or feelings are, I’ve got this totally secure, reliable person.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesBut perhaps her most important role has been as confidante and cheerleader to the stars. She meets opera singers at their most vulnerable, casually asking them to strip down and sit for fittings. She is often the last person they see before heading onto the Met’s stage, one of the grandest in opera. It is a critical moment when doubts, fears and yearnings — for water, chocolate or moral support — are particularly urgent.At the Met, Gomez-Pizzo is known simply as the diva whisperer. Over the years, she has befriended some of opera’s biggest stars, including Anna Netrebko, Lise Davidsen, Angel Blue, Elza van den Heever, Deborah Voigt and Natalie Dessay.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Pint-Size Singers at the Met Opera Children’s Chorus Tryouts

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      The Metropolitan Opera Children’s Chorus has long been an elite training ground for young singers. Getting in requires grit, personality and a soaring voice.The Metropolitan Opera’s stage door, a plain entrance hidden in the tunnels of Lincoln Center, routinely welcomes star singers, orchestra musicians, stagehands, costumers and ushers. But a different bunch of visitors arrived there on a recent afternoon, carrying stuffed toy rabbits and “Frozen” backpacks.They were children, ages 7 to 10, dressed in patent leather shoes, frilly socks and jackets decorated with dinosaurs. They were united in a common mission: to win a spot in the Met children’s chorus, a rigorous, elite training ground for young singers.“This might be the biggest day of my life,” said Naomi Lu, 9, who admires pop singers like Taylor Swift and Katy Perry. She was knitting a lilac friendship necklace to stay calm as she waited in the lobby. “I feel nervous and excited at the same time,” she said. “You could say I’m nerv-cited.”Anthony Piccolo, the director of the Met’s children’s choir, auditions a group of hopefuls.Alexander Zhou waits his turn.Skye Yang.Singing in the shower or in a school choir is one thing. But these students, who came from across New York City and its suburbs, were vying for the chance to perform at the Met, one of the world’s grandest stages, a temple of opera that presents nearly 200 performances each year. Chorus members have a chance at roles like the angelic boys in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute”; the Parisian kids in Puccini’s “La Bohème”; or the street urchins in Bizet’s “Carmen,” to name a few.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Watch Five Highlights From the Met Opera Season

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      There were some great shows at the Metropolitan Opera this season. I went three times to a vividly grim new production of Strauss’s “Salome” and to a revival of his sprawling “Die Frau Ohne Schatten,” and I would have happily returned to either one.But overall the season, which ends on Saturday with a final performance of John Adams’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” had considerably more misses than hits.Lately, the company has given more resources to contemporary work. That’s an admirable endeavor — and a risky one, both financially and creatively. This season the Met presented four recent operas, none of them box office home runs or truly satisfying artistically.“Antony and Cleopatra” had passages of Adams’s enigmatic melancholy, but the piece slogged under reams of dense Shakespearean verse. “Grounded,” by Jeanine Tesori and George Brant, which opened the season in September, starred a potent Emily D’Angelo as a drone operator, but couldn’t rise above a thin score. Osvaldo Golijov and David Henry Hwang’s “Ainadamar,” its music raucously eclectic, struggled to make its dreamlike account of Federico García Lorca’s death into compelling drama.Best of the bunch was “Moby-Dick,” by Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer, a bit bland musically but at least clear and convincingly moody. The tenor Brandon Jovanovich’s world-weary Ahab, stalking the stage with a belted-on peg leg, has stayed with me.So too has the pairing of a volatile Julia Bullock and Gerald Finley, the embodiment of weathered authority, as Adams’s Cleopatra and Antony. Among other strong performances, Ben Bliss and Golda Schultz, the two leads in a revival of a scruffy staging of Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte,” sang with melting poise.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Donald Palumbo Reinvigorated the Met Opera Chorus. Next Stop Chicago.

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      The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has hired Donald Palumbo, 76, the former chorus master of the Metropolitan Opera, to lead its chorus.When Donald Palumbo departed his post as chorus master of the Metropolitan Opera last year after nearly two decades, he could have easily taken a break.But Palumbo, 76, wasn’t finished. “I knew it was not a retirement situation for me,” he said.Now Palumbo has lined up his next position: the Chicago Symphony Orchestra announced on Tuesday that he would serve as its next chorus director — only the third in the choir’s 67-year history — beginning an initial three-year term in July.“I love this chorus,” Palumbo said in a telephone interview from Chicago, where he was rehearsing the chorus. “I love this city.”Palumbo was a fixture at the Met from 2007 to 2024, helping turn the chorus into one of the most revered in the field. He could often be seen during performances racing around backstage, working with singers to refine bits of the score.He was chorus master at Lyric Opera of Chicago from 1991 to 2007. At the Chicago Symphony, he said, he hoped to work with the singers on “creating an identity as a chorus from the way we sing, and the way we devote ourselves to the music.”Jeff Alexander, the Chicago Symphony’s president, said that Palumbo had built a close relationship with the chorus during guest appearances over the years, creating ”an atmosphere of collaboration that yielded exceptional artistry.”“We knew this would be the ideal choice to build on the legacy of this award-winning ensemble,” Alexander said in a statement.Palumbo, who lives in Santa Fe and will commute to Chicago, is already at work with the Chicago singers. He will serve as guest chorus director this month for Verdi’s Requiem, working with Riccardo Muti, the Chicago Symphony’s former music director. In July, he will begin his tenure as chorus director with a performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony at the Ravinia Festival, led by the festival’s chief conductor, Marin Alsop.While Palumbo has forged a close relationship with Muti, he said, he was still getting to know Klaus Mäkelä, the Chicago Symphony’s incoming music director, who begins in 2027. (Palumbo said he has been watching videos of Mäkelä on YouTube: “Everything he does musically is exciting,” he said.)Palumbo said he hoped to stay in Chicago beyond the end of his initial term in 2028.“I certainly am not planning on having a cutoff point,” he said. “I intend to keep working.” More

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      A New Opera Shines Light on Ukrainian Families Separated by War

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      The Metropolitan Opera, hoping to revive support for Kyiv, released an excerpt from “The Mothers of Kherson,” about abducted Ukrainian children and their relatives.The Metropolitan Opera typically takes pains to keep developing works under wraps to give artists the space to make changes and take risks.But “The Mothers of Kherson,” an opera recently commissioned by the Met about abducted Ukrainian children and their relatives, is different. The company released an excerpt from the opera on Monday — more than a year before its premiere — hoping it might help revive support for Ukraine in its battle against Russia.“This is one way of fighting back,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “We don’t want the world to forget what’s going on. This is an artistic way of reminding them.”“The Mothers of Kherson,” by the Ukrainian composer Maxim Kolomiiets, with a libretto by the American playwright George Brant, tells the story of two mothers in the southern city of Kherson who embark on an arduous, 3,000-mile journey to rescue their daughters, who are being held by Russians at a camp in Crimea.The characters in the opera are fictional, but the story is based on the accounts of Ukrainian mothers who traveled into Russian-occupied territory, and back again, to recover their children. (In March, the State Department said it would pause funding for the tracking of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia, under a program run by the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Queen of Spades’ Review: A Fiery Soprano Breaks Through

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      At the Metropolitan Opera’s season premiere of Elijah Moshinsky’s production, it was the women who led, while a strong cast carried the patchwork plot.Tchaikovsky’s “Queen of Spades” tells the story of an addict, Hermann, whose obsession with cards leaves a trail of destruction. Along the way, some of the opera’s female characters become collateral damage. But at the Metropolitan Opera’s season premiere of Elijah Moshinsky’s stenciled historical-dress production on Friday, it was the women who came into focus.In large part this was because of the fiery performance of the soprano Sonya Yoncheva, who made her role debut as the aristocratic Lisa who breaks off an illustrious engagement to throw in her lot with the wild-eyed Hermann, clinging to him even after he uses deadly force to extract a supernatural gambling secret from her grandmother.“Young women often fall in love with” bad guys, Yoncheva noted in an earlier interview with The New York Times. On Friday, she drew on a wide range of vocal shadings to evoke flickers of girlish curiosity, fatalism and raw erotic longing that lent uncommon depth and agency to her character.Her commitment helped make sense of an opera that, with its collage of pastiche, quotations and narrative devices, can feel like a Frankenstein creation. Here, amid the cold glitter of a rococo-obsessed imperial court with people rigidly gliding about under towering wigs, Hermann and Lisa’s search for intense emotions seemed both nihilistic and perfectly plausible.Yoncheva might not have dominated the proceedings quite as much if she had appeared alongside a Hermann of equal stature. But the tenor Arsen Soghomonyan was dramatically stiff and vocally uneven in his house debut. Much of those jitters must be because he stepped into the role at short notice after the successive withdrawals of the tenors Brian Jagde and Brandon Jovanovich this month.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How ‘The Queen of Spades’ Brought Two Tchaikovsky Brothers Together

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      The composer’s brother Modest long wanted to collaborate. They eventually got their chance, to bring Pushkin to the opera stage.In 1888, Modest Tchaikovsky wrote a letter to his brother Pyotr, the composer. Modest, a former law student and budding dramatist and critic, had recently been commissioned by the Imperial Theaters in St. Petersburg, Russia, to write his first opera libretto: an adaptation of Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades.”Modest revered his older brother’s talent and international renown. He had already proposed potential collaborations to Pyotr twice, to no avail. He had a composer lined up for “The Queen of Spades,” Nikolai Klenovsky, but he was disheartened that he and his brother would not be working on it together.Pyotr’s response to the letter was measured but blunt. “Forgive me, Modya, but I do not regret at all that I will not write ‘The Queen of Spades,’” adding: “I will write an opera only if a plot comes along that can deeply warm me up. A plot like ‘The Queen of Spades’ does not move me, and I could only write mediocrely.”Then Klenovsky dropped “The Queen of Spades.” Ivan Vsevolozhsky, the director of the imperial theaters, asked Pyotr to take over. He agreed.And so “The Queen of Spades,” which returns to the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, became the first collaboration between the two Tchaikovsky brothers, men of different disciplines and artistic abilities, despite their closeness. This work was the culmination of nearly 40 years of Modest’s attempt to escape the cool of Pyotr’s shadow and bask in his light. The result, the musicologist Richard Taruskin wrote, was the “first and probably the greatest masterpiece of musical surrealism.” It’s a testament to their camaraderie and fraternity, as well as their openness and intimacy.When stripped to its thematic core, Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades,” first published in 1834, has all the makings of spectacle — obsession, greed, madness, phantasmagoria — that you could also find in sentimental Italian operas of the 19th century. Pushkin was not just god of Russian letters, but the god, yet his writing wasn’t easy to adapt into a libretto. His storytelling is anecdotal and ironic, lacking in empathy and tenderness for and between its characters. No one evolves, and there are no changes of heart. And “The Queen of Spades” is short; Taruskin counts the text at “barely 10,000 words.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Opera Companies Find Savings and Gains Through Collaborations

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      Co-productions can help companies across the globe save money, collaborate artistically and ensure that lesser-known works are seen by more audiences.Simon McBurney’s acclaimed production of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Khovanshchina,” which debuted last month at the Salzburg Easter Festival ahead of its Metropolitan Opera premiere, almost didn’t happen.McBurney’s staging, once envisioned as a co-production between the Met and the Bolshoi in Moscow, was in limbo after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In response to the war, the New York company severed ties with all Russian state-run institutions.At that time, Nikolaus Bachler had recently taken over as artistic director of the Easter Festival and was looking for other companies to share productions with. One of his ambitions was to present McBurney’s “Khovanshchina” in Salzburg. The Met signed on as co-producer. “For me, it was crucial to find partners from the very beginning,” he said in an interview last month at his office in Salzburg’s picturesque Altstadt, or Old City, shortly before the second and final performance of “Khovanshchina” at the festival, on April 21.“Especially for a festival like ours, it is such a pity — they did this in the past — that you do a production for two times and then it’s over,” he said. “This is an artistic waste and economic waste.”A scene from John Adams’s “Antony and Cleopatra” at the Met, a co-production with San Francisco Opera and the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona.Karen Almond/Met OperaIn recent years, the Met has increasingly turned to co-producing not only to share costs, but also as a way to collaborate artistically with other companies. The final premiere of the current season, John Adams’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” is a co-production with San Francisco Opera and the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” a Met commission composed by Mason Bates that adapts Michael Chabon’s novel, will open the 2025-26 season and is a collaboration with the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where it premiered in November. Two further premieres in the new season, “La Sonnambula” and Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” are shared among various opera companies in Europe and the United States.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Soprano Sonya Yoncheva Has Many Roles, On and Off the Stage

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      Sonya Yoncheva discusses her turn as Lisa in “The Queen of Spades” at the Metropolitan Opera, her summer concerts, her production company and more.The soprano Sonya Yoncheva has established herself as one of today’s most versatile opera stars.Just over a decade ago, in 2014, she caused a splash after jumping in on short notice as Mimi in her first staged performance of Puccini’s “La Bohème” at the Metropolitan Opera. When the Bulgarian native appears as Lisa in Tchaikovsky’s tragic love story “The Queen of Spades,” from Friday through June 7, it will be her sixth role debut at the house.Yoncheva, 43, maintains a busy schedule that includes a recent gala at the Opéra Garnier in Paris and her third production as the title character in “Iolanta,” also by Tchaikovsky, at the Vienna State Opera. In Europe this summer, she will perform Handel, Bellini and more.Yoncheva performing in “Iolanta” at the Vienna State Opera.Vienna State Opera / Michael PöhnUnder the auspices of her production company, SY11 Events, she will also appear in August in Sofia, Bulgaria, for outdoor concerts alongside the tenors Vittorio Grigolo, José Carreras and Plácido Domingo. Started in 2020, the enterprise joined forces with the label Naïve for her most recent album, “George,” inspired by the life and work of the French writer George Sand (born Aurore Dupin, she is known in the music world for her tumultuous relationship with Frédéric Chopin).An even less conventional project is the 2023 book “Fifteen Mirrors,” combining personal confessions about select characters and portraits in which Yoncheva poses in different guises.“I understand my work as a process,” she said by phone from outside Geneva, where she lives with her husband, the conductor Domingo Hindoyan, and their two children. “The interpretation takes up maybe an even bigger part than the singing.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More