Metropolitan Opera

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      It’s the End of an Era at the Metropolitan Opera

      by

      As the 2022-23 season ends, the country’s largest performing arts institution looks ahead to a future of fewer titles.The Metropolitan Opera’s 2022-23 season may well have been the end of an era.Since September, the Met, which closes for the summer on Saturday, has put on 22 titles — 23 if you count both stagings of Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” one complete in German and one an English-language holiday abridgment. As a repertory house and the country’s largest performing arts organization, it juggles multiple works at a time. On some weekends, it’s been possible to see four different operas in 48 hours.But is there enough of an audience to fill so many performances in a 4,000-seat theater?Ticket sales have been robust for some new productions, even of contemporary works. But revivals, less obviously newsworthy and less widely promoted, are no longer sure things — especially slightly off-the-beaten-path stuff like Mozart’s “Idomeneo” or Verdi’s “Don Carlo.”In an attempt to make ends meet, the Met has raided its endowment and plans to put on 10 percent fewer performances next season, which will feature just 18 staged operas (six of them written in the past 30 years). The days of being America’s grand repertory company, of 20-plus titles a year, could be slowly entering the rearview mirror.So it was fitting that, last month, the Met said farewell to one of the shows that typified the era that’s ending: its “Aida” from the 1980s. The production was typical Met: hardly cheap but sturdy and flexible, into which you could toss singers with relatively little rehearsal. The company’s model has depended on a core of stagings of the standards like this — ones which could be mounted, and sell well, year after year.If there’s less of a year-after-year opera audience, though, the only solution may be to do less.It’s melancholy to look back on the past season and realize that my two favorite performances were the kind of thing that might go by the wayside in the Met to come. They were revivals of works by no means obscure, but not nearly as famous as, say, “Carmen”: Donizetti’s gentle romantic comedy “L’Elisir d’Amore” and Shostakovich’s ferocious satire-tragedy “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.”From front left, Javier Camarena, Golda Schultz and Davide Luciano in Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore.”Marty Sohl/Metropolitan OperaThis has been the glory of the Met: the love, care, craft and experience that go into works as different as these two — starkly contrasting titles, both presented at the highest level. In “Elisir,” the tenor Javier Camarena and the soprano Golda Schultz were all tenderness, but were lit, as if from within, with a lively spirit by the conductor Michele Gamba, making his company debut.The conductor of “Lady Macbeth,” Keri-Lynn Wilson, was also making her debut, and showed mastery of Shostakovich’s score, which is in a savage, if often eerily beautiful, mode that would have stunned Donizetti.Neither run was nearly a sellout, but the season would been immeasurably more barren without them.The new vision that the company will be pursuing next season has a silver lining in its doubling down on contemporary opera. Sales for recent works have been pretty robust, though it’s unclear whether they’ve done well because people like them or because they’ve tended to be among the splashy, expensively publicized new productions rather than the perennial chestnuts.But even if successful at the box office, the contemporary pieces this season have not been highlights. This spring, “Champion,” a boxing melodrama by Terence Blanchard — who also composed “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the Met’s 2021-22 season — was musically stilted and dramatically stodgy. Last fall, Kevin Puts’s score for “The Hours,” based on the novel and film, was relentlessly, exhaustingly tear-jerking.While Puts’s work was a vehicle for a trio of divas, including Renée Fleming and Kelli O’Hara, the real star was the third: the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato as a brooding but dryly witty Virginia Woolf, her voice mellow yet penetrating.Joyce DiDonato as Virginia Woolf in “The Hours.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHers was one of the performances of the year. Another was the mezzo Samantha Hankey’s alert, youthful Octavian in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier.” Hankey was joined by the Marschallin of the radiant soprano Lise Davidsen, who kept her immense voice carefully restrained for much of this long, talky opera before unleashing its full force in the final minutes.In a clunky new production of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” by the director François Girard, the tenor Piotr Beczala seemed almost to float — utterly assured and elegant in the otherworldly, treacherously exposed title role. This is a singer nearing 60 and doing his best work.But the coup of the year may have been the Met debut of the conductor Nathalie Stutzmann. Leading one new production of a Mozart opera is hard enough, especially as an introduction to the company — but two, simultaneously? And Stutzmann’s work in both Ivo van Hove’s austere “Don Giovanni” and Simon McBurney’s antic “Magic Flute” was superb: lithe but rich, propulsive without being rushed or stinting these scores’ lyricism.How was she repaid? Before “Flute” opened, Stutzmann was quoted in The New York Times remarking that McBurney’s production, which raises the pit almost to stage level, lets the musicians see what’s going on rather than keeping them, as usual, in the “back of a cave” where there’s “nothing more boring.” Jokey and innocuous. But for some reason, the musicians flew to social media and condemned her for accusing them of playing bored.Even worse, the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, rather than standing up for his colleague or trying to resolve the conflict behind the scenes, publicly cheered this unseemly pile-on, adding seven clapping emojis to an Instagram post by the orchestra. He and the musicians should be ashamed of themselves; Stutzmann should be celebrated.Next season, while curtailed, is hardly free of ambition, offering a profusion of recent works and some intriguing repertory pieces, like Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” (not seen at the Met since 2006), Puccini’s “La Rondine” and Wagner’s “Tannhäuser.”This new approach to programming is an experiment. Revivals of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and “The Hours” will test whether contemporary operas have legs beyond their premiere runs, and we’ll see if the trims to the season increase sales for what remains.Hopefully, it all keeps the Met alive and vibrant. But whatever the coming years bring will likely be quite different. It was oddly, sadly appropriate that the veteran soprano Angela Gheorghiu, absent from the company for eight years and set to return for two performances of “Tosca” in April, came down with Covid-19 and had to cancel.This is a new phase, fate seemed to say, and the old divas — at least the ones not named Renée — need not apply. More

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Kaija Saariaho, Pathbreaking Composer, Is Dead at 70

      by

      She brought new colors to modernist music, sometimes using electronics, and became the first female living composer to have two operas staged by the Met.Kaija Saariaho, a Finnish composer who was brought up in the world of male-dominated high modernism but who broke away to forge an identity of her own, becoming the first woman to have more than one work of hers staged by the Metropolitan Opera, died on Friday at her home in Paris. She was 70.She had been diagnosed with brain cancer in 2021, said her publisher, Chester Music, which confirmed the death.Ms. Saariaho brought new and often mysterious colors to classical music.In Paris, where she had settled permanently, she experimented with tape and live electronics, which she applied to nearly every form in classical music: works for solo instrument and small ensemble, and for symphony orchestra and opera. Over the years she rose to the top of her field, a slow-changing industry that only in recent years has made steps to correct the repertoire’s gender imbalances.Her first opera, “L’Amour de Loin,” which premiered at the Salzburg Festival in Austria in 2000 and came to the Met in 2016, won the Grawemeyer Award for music composition. Her most recent entry into that genre, “Innocence,” debuted at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France in 2021 and will travel to the Met in the 2025-26 season.When the Met joined the work’s list of commissioners, Ms. Saariaho in turn joined a select group of living composers to have a second opera mounted by that house — and the only woman to gain that distinction.Kaija Saariaho was born on Oct. 14, 1952, in Helsinki. She studied at the storied Sibelius Academy there, and was a pioneering impresario of contemporary music, forming the group Open Ears with fellow young artists. She left to continue her education in Freiburg, Germany, with summer courses taken in the modernist hotbed of Darmstadt. She moved to Paris in 1982 to finish her studies at IRCAM, the institute founded by Pierre Boulez.A complete obituary will appear soon. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Review: Tomasz Konieczny Returns to the Met Opera in ‘Dutchman’

      by

      After a triumphant house debut in 2019, the bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny brought power and clarity to the title role in “The Flying Dutchman.”On Tuesday night, four years after being hailed as the breakout star of a revival of Wagner’s “Ring” at the Metropolitan Opera, Tomasz Konieczny returned there to headline “Der Fliegende Holländer,” or “The Flying Dutchman.” It was worth the wait.Konieczny’s Dutchman, cursed to ride the seas endlessly in a ghost ship with black masts and red sails, seemed to channel supernatural forces as he emerged from the bowels of François Girard’s unremittingly dark production. Konieczny possesses an instrument of granitic power and brassy resonance, combining the depth of a tuba with the brightly penetrating cast of a trumpet. He can also cover his voice and fill it with pitiful tears. For such a sizable instrument, his attack is astonishingly clean; he inflates a straight tone to a vibrating roar and makes it sound like an exquisite cri de coeur.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, offered the role to Konieczny, a Polish bass-baritone, in 2019 when Gelb heard Konieczny’s company debut as Alberich in the “Ring” that year. Konieczny brought unusual charisma and nobility to the designated villain of Wagner’s epic tetralogy, and his Dutchman is likewise a complex creation.A tragic figure whose stoic demeanor masks a writhing pain within, Konieczny’s Dutchman rises above earthly concerns but rages with focused fury against the ever-fresh torments of his Sisyphean predicament. His invincibility has made him disdainful of humans and desperate for death, and yet he harbors a romanticized fixation upon love. The Dutchman comes ashore once every seven years in search of a woman who can redeem him with her fidelity and break his curse. (Of course, the premise contains passive-aggressive misogyny — that a man in search of a faithful woman is doomed to look for her forever.)As Senta, the woman who returns the apparitional captain’s obsessive attention, Elza van den Heever sang with a ductile soprano. In “Senta’s Ballad,” she catapulted into high-lying phrases with strength and point and drew her voice into a slender thread for beautifully formed pianissimo high notes. As infatuation consumed her, van den Heever summoned the tonal amplitude to fill out Wagner’s portrait of a love that is annihilating in its totality.The clear thrust of Eric Cutler’s tenor gave the role of Erik, Senta’s abandoned lover, unusual poignancy. The bass Dmitry Belosselskiy effectively rendered Daland, Senta’s venal, easily dazzled father, as a strong yet foolish man who would trade his daughter for riches.Girard’s production — like his recent “Lohengrin” — attempts to get a lot of mileage out of a few ideas. It’s long on ambience, with billowing fog and undertones of sickly, hallucinogenic greens, and short on storytelling.Fortunately, the 29-year-old conductor Thomas Guggeis, making his Met debut, added depth to the atmosphere of roiling fantasy. The overture came alive with stormy eddies and pulsating vigor, even as video projections of a maelstrom and cracks of lightning felt redundant. The strings, in particular, found imaginative colors: Their throbbing vitality, unabashed romance and otherworldly shrieks covered the range of a work that swings from bel-canto influences to the enthralling mythmaking that would become Wagner’s signature. There were some missed opportunities — such as the dark timbres that color the Act II duet for Senta and the Dutchman — but overall, Guggeis was a confident, sensitive, decisive presence.At times, Girard’s abstract staging still seems to distrust the material, but kinetic conducting and a richly characterized central performance show that it may simply have been waiting for a few artists to redeem it.Der Fliegende HolländerThrough June 10 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      The Conductor Thomas Guggeis Is Rising Fast After a Surprise Debut

      by

      Thomas Guggeis was a young repetiteur at the Berlin State Opera five years ago when he was asked a career-changing question: Could he conduct “Salome”?He had worked with the singers, but this new production of Strauss’s opera was meant to be led by the veteran maestro Christoph von Dohnányi — until a dispute with the director led him to back out mere hours before the final dress rehearsal. So Guggeis went on in his place. And he was back in the pit on opening night.“This was a situation of a star is born,” said Bernd Loebe, the general manager of Frankfurt Opera, who saw Guggeis lead that performance.It wouldn’t be the last time Guggeis, now 29, stepped into a high-pressure situation. Earlier this season, as the State Opera’s Kapellmeister, or house conductor, he picked up rehearsals and two runs of a new “Ring” cycle after Daniel Barenboim withdrew because of illness. And on May 30, he will make his North American debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, leading a revival of Wagner’s “Der Fliegende Holländer,” taking over from Jaap van Zweden.Things are happening quickly — Guggeis starts as the general music director of the Frankfurt Opera this fall — but he is trying to maintain a steady development that some of his peers have abandoned in favor of peripatetic celebrity.“There was a question of how to go on,” he said in an interview at the State Opera here. “Do you jump on the moving train or do you stay on track? Together with my agent, I decided to keep calm. If an opportunity is meant to be, there will still be interest and possibility in two or three years.”APART FROM an uncle — the accomplished percussionist Edgar Guggeis — Guggeis grew up in a nonmusical family in Bavaria. His father was the director of a brewery, and his mother was a tax clerk. But he played instruments from a young age, and sang in choirs.Guggeis followed those interests to the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich, but not with single-minded focus. He studied conducting but, aware of the precarious life it promised, also picked up a degree in quantum physics.“I was really interested in the subject,” he said, “and I just wanted to have something on the safe side. You never know how it works out as a conductor. When I started, if you asked me, ‘Where do you see yourself in 10 years?’ I would say I don’t know. But I will have this other degree, and I can always go back to that.”Guggeis is trying to maintain a steady development. “There was a question of how to go on,” he said. “Do you jump on the moving train or do you stay on track? Together with my agent, I decided to keep calm.”Ava Pellor for The New York TimesNow, Guggeis might read about a discovery related to something he remembers studying in school. But his specialty was theoretical particle physics, which is impossible to follow on a part-time or casual basis. So he has stopped keeping up with the field.During his time in Munich, Guggeis was often at the Bavarian State Opera while it was under the music directorships of Kent Nagano and Kirill Petrenko. In between classes one day, he sat in on a rehearsal of Strauss’s “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” led by Petrenko. By the second act, he decided to skip school and stay. He was hooked, and saw nearly everything the house had to offer in what amounted to a parallel education. “To see those conductors,” he said, “was amazing, but also so formative.”Guggeis continued to study conducting in Milan, then returned to Germany to serve as a repetiteur in Berlin. He coached singers from the piano but almost never spoke with the house’s long-reigning maestro, Daniel Barenboim. “It was hard to get close to him,” Guggeis said, “because everyone wants something from him there.” But slowly, the two built a relationship in which Barenboim became increasingly approachable.For his part, Barenboim didn’t need much time at all. He recalled watching the young conductor lead a rehearsal and immediately thinking he was gifted.“You can see these things straight away with somebody,” Barenboim said. “And he was obviously a very natural conductor. He had a rare combination of easiness and comfortable responsibility. He moved his arms in a natural way, and was naturally in command. From the very beginning.”Their bond deepened. “It felt like family,” Guggeis said. “He was generous, supportive, kind and always there when I had questions about career.” They talked about music, art and philosophy, or gossiped about Pierre Boulez. Between those conversations and the rehearsals Guggeis would watch and later ask about, Barenboim became, he said, “the most influential mentor for me.”GUGGEIS BELONGS to a class of conductors — more common in Germany — that comes up through opera houses rather than concert halls, even if their careers eventually balance both. He said that the repertoire he learned as a repetiteur has stuck “deeply in my head and guts,” and that his time at the State Opera in Berlin, as well as in Stuttgart and Berlin as a Kapellmeister, has defined his approach to the podium, such as how to manage rehearsals and soloists or wrangle a large-scale work for orchestra and chorus.“You can never buy that experience,” he said, “no matter how talented you are.”He has also tried to test out famous pieces like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony away from very public stages like the Philharmonie in Berlin or the Musikverein in Vienna. He has conducted the Beethoven, but in Italy, in a five-concert series with the Milan Symphony Orchestra, following advice he once heard attributed to Herbert von Karajan, that regardless of where you lead this work, the first 15 times won’t be good; so start early.Guggeis at the Met. In fall, he becomes general music director of the Frankfurt Opera.Ava Pellor for The New York TimesWhen Guggeis shares memories and insights like that, he sounds like a conductor looking back on a career rather than forward. His mix of confidence and self-awareness was part of what endeared him to Barenboim, who said: “He’s very talented, but he knows that he has a lot to learn. He has a great curiosity, and that will go until the end of his life.”Curiosity, but also the courage to take on classics by Wagner and Strauss in front of the boo-happy audience at the Berlin State Opera. (Reviews during his time as Kapellmeister have tended to be positive.) So, when he stepped into the pit for “Salome,” it was just another day on the job. He was supported by Dohnányi, who remains a mentor — and gave him most of his score library — and stunned Barenboim.“It was remarkable,” Barenboim said. “There was no ‘What shall we do now?’ His future was absolutely clear.”Loebe, Frankfurt Opera’s general manager, was similarly struck by this 24-year-old conductor he had never heard of before. “I wanted to know more,” he said. “So I saw him many more times, and we started to have many meetings.” Loebe was looking for a new music director, and Guggeis was “the only guy I wanted.”Frankfurt’s orchestra, Loebe added, was used to having two or three choices, but he insisted on Guggeis, who formed a quick bond with the musicians. During the pandemic, he led them in a streamed performance of Mozart’s “Requiem” — one of the few videos online of his conducting — that reveals his clear direction, level head and sense of shape. Then, in 2021, he was named as their new music director.Mozart is how Guggeis will begin his tenure next season, with a new production of “Le Nozze di Figaro” premiering on Oct. 1. In a demonstration of the range he hopes for there, he will also lead Ligeti’s “Le Grand Macabre,” Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” Verdi’s “Don Carlo” and Strauss’s “Elektra,” in addition to concert programs.Guggeis’s inaugural season in Frankfurt took shape as he was wrapping up his time as Kapellmeister in Berlin. There, he was working with Barenboim on a new production of Wagner’s four-opera “Ring” that was unveiled all at once last October, an immense and virtually unheard-of undertaking for a repertory house. It was years in the making, but Barenboim’s health rapidly declined that summer, and the planned four cycles were split between Guggeis and Christian Thielemann.When his condition permitted, Barenboim shared his wisdom with Guggeis about, for example, which notoriously tricky passages in the operas’ 16 hours of music should be the focus of rehearsals. They still speak; Guggeis values his advice, seeing it as the equivalent of singers working with coaches long into their careers.Guggeis was also in constant contact with Thielemann, an experienced hand in Wagner. “We were working out problems together,” he said. “It was very interesting. But then he would also say things like not to worry about ‘Ride of the Valkyries,’ because it’s self-going, it will become loud by itself. All this was really fantastic for me.”Earlier this month, Guggeis said goodbye to Berlin, for now; his tenure as Kapellmeister ends this season. He led two concerts with the Staatskapelle, the opera house’s storied orchestra, and was on a plane to New York for “Holländer” rehearsals the next day.“The little bird is now flying from its nest,” he said in an interview at the Met. “I’m conducting professionally since five years, more or less. I was with this fabulous orchestra and now I’m here working at this tremendous place. To be here is something I never would have expected, and couldn’t ever wish for.” More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Music

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

      by

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

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Grace Bumbry, Barrier-Shattering Opera Diva, Is Dead at 86

      by

      A flamboyant mezzo-soprano (who could also sing meaty soprano roles), she overcame racial prejudice to become one of opera’s first, and biggest, Black stars.Grace Bumbry, a barrier-shattering mezzo-soprano whose vast vocal range and transcendent stage presence made her a towering figure in opera and one of its first, and biggest, Black stars, died on Sunday in Vienna. She was 86.Her death, following a stroke in October, was confirmed in a statement by the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where she was long a mainstay, performing more than 200 times over two decades.Growing up in St. Louis in an era of segregation, Ms. Bumbry came of age at a time when African American singers were a rare sight on the opera stage, despite breakthroughs by luminaries like Leontyne Price and Marian Anderson.But with a fierce drive and an outsize charisma, Ms. Bumbry broke out internationally in 1960, at 23, when she sang Amneris in Verdi’s “Aida” at the Paris Opera.The following year, she landed in something of a national scandal in West Germany when Wieland Wagner, a grandson of Richard Wagner, cast her as Venus, the Roman goddess of love, in a modernized version of Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” at the storied Bayreuth Festival.She was the first Black woman to perform at the festival, cast as a character typically portrayed as a Nordic ideal in an opera written by a composer known for his antisemitism and German nationalism. The festival — and newspapers — were flooded with letters asserting that the composer would “turn in his grave.”Ms. Bumbry was undeterred. Indeed, she was well prepared.“Everything that I had learned from my childhood was now being tested,” she recalled in an interview with St. Louis Magazine in 2021. “Because I remember being discriminated against in the United States, so why should it be any different in Germany?”The audience did not share such misgivings: Ms. Bumbry was showered with 30 minutes of applause. German critics were equally enchanted, christening her “the Black Venus.” The Cologne-area newspaper Kölnische Rundschau credited her with an “artistic triumph,” and Die Welt called her a “big discovery.”Her landmark performance helped earn her a $250,000 contract (the equivalent of more than $2.5 million now) with the opera impresario Sol Hurok.Ms. Bumbry performed at the White House in 1962, invited by the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, on the advice of European friends who had seen her at Bayreuth.Cecil Stoughton/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and MuseumIt also won her another honor: a performance at the White House, in February 1962. On the advice of European friends who had seen Ms. Bumbry at Bayreuth, Jacqueline Kennedy, the first lady, invited her to sing at a state dinner attended by President John F. Kennedy and Mrs. Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, Chief Justice Earl Warren and other Washington power brokers.Suddenly, she was a star.“If there is a more exciting new voice than Grace Bumbry’s skyrocketing over the horizon I have not heard it,” Claudia Cassidy wrote in The Chicago Tribune in a review of a recording of her arias the same year. “This is a glorious voice, by grace of the gods given its chance to be heard in its fullest beauty.”Of her Carnegie Hall debut in November 1962, Alan Rich of The New York Times gave a qualified review, but allowed that “Miss Bumbry has a gorgeous, clear, ringing voice and a great deal of control over it.”“She can swoop without the slightest effort from a brilliant high to a beautiful resonant chest tone,” he wrote.Ms. Bumbry transcended not only racial perceptions but vocal categorizations as well. Originally a mezzo-soprano, she made a striking departure by taking on soprano parts, too, which gave her access to marquee roles in operas such as Richard Strauss’s “Salome” and Puccini’s “Tosca.”“She gloried in the fact that she was able to perform both roles in Verdi’s ‘Aïda,’” Fred Plotkin wrote in a 2013 appreciation for the website for WXQR, the New York public radio station. “She could be Tosca and Salome, but also Carmen and Eboli.”Ms. Bumbry appearing in the 1968 film of Bizet’s opera “Carmen.”Erich Auerbach/Getty ImagesMs. Bumbry displayed a broad range in her choice of roles. In 1985, she received raves for her performance as Bess in the Metropolitan Opera’s 50th anniversary performance of George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” despite her conflicted feelings about a folk opera set among the tenements of Charleston, S.C., and rife with unflattering Black stereotypes.“I thought it beneath me,” she said in an interview with Life magazine. “I felt I had worked far too hard, that we had come far too far to have to retrogress to 1935. My way of dealing with it was to see that it was really a piece of Americana, of American history, whether we liked it or not. Whether I sing it or not, it was still going to be there.”Grace Melzia Bumbry was born on Jan. 4, 1937, in St. Louis, the youngest of three children of Benjamin Bumbry, a railroad freight handler, and Melzia Bumbry, a schoolteacher.A musical prodigy as a youth, she honed her skills in the choir at St. Louis Union Memorial Church and by performing Chopin on the piano at ladies’ tea parties. At 16, she saw a performance by Ms. Anderson, who would become a mentor, and was inspired to enter a singing contest on a local radio station. She took top prize, which included a $1,000 war bond and a scholarship to the St. Louis Institute of Music. She was nonetheless denied admission because of her race.“The reality was wounding,” Ms. Bumbry said in an interview with The Boston Globe. “But when it happened, I also thought, I’m the winner. Nothing can change that. My talent is superior.”Ms. Bumbry sang the national anthem at the Kennedy Center Honors gala in Washington in 2009. She was an honoree that year.Alex Brandon/Associated PressEmbarrassed, the radio contest organizers arranged for her to appear on “Talent Scouts,” a national radio and television program hosted by Arthur Godfrey. After hearing her heart-rending performance of “O Don Fatale,” from Verdi’s “Don Carlo,” the avuncular Mr. Godfrey informed the audience, “Her name will be one of the most famous names in music one day.”The exposure helped put her on a path to Boston University, and later, Northwestern University, where she fell under the tutelage of the German opera luminary Lotte Lehmann, who became another valuable mentor as Ms. Bumbry moved toward her debut in Paris.As her star continued to rise over the years, Ms. Bumbry was never afraid to inhabit the prima donna role offstage as well as on, outfitting herself in Yves Saint Laurent and Oscar de la Renta and tooling around in a Lamborghini.After marrying the tenor Erwin Jaeckel in 1963, she settled in a villa in Lugano, Switzerland. The couple divorced in 1972. Ms. Bumbry left no immediate survivors.Beyond her prodigious vocal skills, Ms. Bumbry brought a famous sultriness to her roles, a reputation she put to good use for a 1970 performance of “Salome” at the Royal Opera House in London.She leaked word to the press that for the racy “Dance of the Seven Veils,” she would strip off all seven veils, down to her “jewels and perfume,” as she put it — although the jewels, it turned out, were sufficient enough to serve as a “modest bikini,” as The New York Times noted.It hardly mattered. “In the history of Covent Garden,” Ms. Bumbry said in a 1985 interview with People magazine, “they never sold so many binoculars.” More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      A Drone Opera, Brought to You by General Dynamics? A Company Clarifies.

      by

      “Grounded,” a new work about the psychological toll of drone warfare, drew scrutiny after its presenter, Washington National Opera, advertised the support of a major military contractor.When the Washington National Opera announced that it would open its coming season with the premiere of “Grounded,” a new opera exploring the psychological toll of drone warfare, its star composer, Jeanine Tesori, got less attention than its listed sponsor: General Dynamics, the military contractor.Anger erupted online, with critics accusing Washington National Opera of serving as a mouthpiece for the defense industry. A think tank that advocates military restraint labeled it a “killer drone opera.” New York magazine gave the opera a “despicable” rating on its Approval Matrix, describing it as “the drone-bombing opera ‘Grounded,’ sponsored by General Dynamics.” RT, a state-owned Russian news outlet, said the work showed the strength of the American military-industrial complex.The creative team behind “Grounded,” an adaptation of an acclaimed Off Broadway play, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, which commissioned the opera, grew disturbed by how the new opera was being portrayed. They worked behind the scenes to push the Washington National Opera to make it clear that General Dynamics, which has been a major sponsor of the opera company since 1997, had nothing to do with the creation of the opera.“I felt action was needed to guarantee that the audience would see ‘Grounded’ knowing that it is solely the work of its creators,” Tesori, a major Broadway composer who has expanded into opera, said in a statement to The New York Times. She added that she had only recently become aware of the philanthropic support of General Dynamics.The composer Jeanine Tesori said that “action was needed to guarantee that the audience would see ‘Grounded’ knowing that it is solely the work of its creators.”An Rong Xu for The New York TimesOn Tuesday, after days of negotiations, Washington National Opera posted a statement seeking some distance from its benefactor.“For the sake of clarity,” the statement said, “no sponsor or supporter of W.N.O. had any involvement in the creation of ‘Grounded’ or in the contents of its libretto.”The company changed its website, whose “Grounded” page had described General Dynamics as its “presenting sponsor,” to clarify that the company is a “W.N.O. season sponsor.” It also rewrote its promotional text for the opera, removing some militaristic language, including a line that had described its protagonist as a “hot shot F-16 fighter pilot, an elite warrior trained for the sky” and a line noting that “war ‘with all the benefits of home’ isn’t clear-cut.” The new description cut a reference to the “horror of war.”An early rendering of the set of the opera “Grounded.”Design and rendering by Mimi LienThe episode highlights the difficulties that cultural institutions sometimes face in protecting the integrity of their art while cultivating rich donors. The Kennedy Center, the parent organization of Washington National Opera, has in recent years faced pressure to cut ties with some benefactors, including tobacco companies.General Dynamics has long been a sponsor of Washington National Opera, providing more than $500,000 to the company each year in recent years. Gregory S. Gallopoulos, a senior vice president at General Dynamics, is a member of the opera company’s board.Timothy O’Leary, the general director of Washington National Opera, said in an interview that General Dynamics had no input on “Grounded,” or any other works.“No sponsor has any say in our artistic decisions, or ever could,” he said. “Any sponsor who tried to interfere in that way is not a sponsor from whom we would accept support.”The “Grounded” opera, adapted from a play by George Brant, was announced by the Met in 2017, part of an effort by the company to promote contemporary opera. The Met agreed to co-produce the opera with Washington National Opera ahead of its planned Met premiere in 2025.The New York Times described the play it is based on as a “haunting portrait of a woman serving in the United States Armed Forces coming under pressure as the human cost of war, for combatants as well as civilians, slowly eats away at her well-armored psyche.”Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, described the work as an “antiwar opera” and said that it provided a nuanced portrayal of the costs of war. He said he had advised his counterparts in Washington to take swift action once concerns started spreading on social media about the opera’s support from General Dynamics.“If this misperception was not corrected, it would be very bad for the work,” he said in an interview. “The work would be somehow tainted before anybody ever got a chance to see it.”General Dynamics on Tuesday declined to comment on the controversy, but said in a statement, “We are proud to support the arts.”Phebe N. Novakovic, the chairman and chief executive of General Dynamics since 2013, is an opera buff who grew up listening to recordings on a Victrola record player with her Serbian grandmother. Shortly after she rose to the top of the company, General Dynamics became a full-season sponsor of Washington National Opera.When asked in a 2016 interview why the company was such a big supporter of the opera, Novakovic cited her grandmother’s influence.“I have honored both her memory and my love of that form of human expression through supporting the opera,” she said at the Economic Club of Washington. “We get folks from all over our company coming to the opera.” More

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      The Pains and Privileges of Staging Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni’

      by

      Three artists preparing a new production of this classic at the Metropolitan Opera discuss what makes it so difficult yet satisfying.There are operas that are challenging for their sheer technical demands — the density of Berg’s “Lulu” or the heroic immensity of Wagner epics. And then there are those that seem simple but are actually some of the most difficult.In that second category fall Mozart’s three collaborations with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte — “Le Nozze di Figaro,” “Don Giovanni” and “Così Fan Tutte” — works of slippery psychology, frank humanity and, crucially, crystalline construction that punishes any mistake onstage or in the orchestra pit.Particularly tough to stage is “Don Giovanni,” which returns to the Metropolitan Opera in a new production on May 5, with Peter Mattei in the title role. Its score runs nearly three hours with major events at the beginning and end — Giovanni murders the father of a woman he nearly rapes, then later is dragged to hell — but little in between other than characters repeating mistakes, as if in loops of unhealthy habits.Without the hand of a confident director, the story rapidly sags. And, in true operatic fashion, its telling is equally dependent on a conductor’s momentum, and actorly, complex expression from the singers. When all the pieces fall into place, “Don Giovanni” unfurls with a sublime, graceful beauty that a casual listener might find straightforward, even light.But, the conductor Nathalie Stutzmann said, “the simpler this opera sounds, the more difficult it is to create.” As she prepares to open the Met’s new “Don Giovanni,” she and two other members of its team — Ivo van Hove, the director, and Ying Fang, a leading Mozart soprano who stars as Zerlina — discussed the work’s challenges and gifts. Here are edited excerpts from those conversations.Ivo van Hove“This man has been idolized as a libertine — his mission is “Viva la libertà” — but his own freedom, not the freedom of other people,” said van Hove.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesI’ve seen some famous productions. There was Peter Brook in 1984, with Peter Mattei; it was a minimalist staging but very powerful. I’ve seen Michael Haneke’s in Paris, and that was modern, with Don Giovanni as the C.E.O. of a big firm. And I’ve seen another one in Salzburg by my idol, Patrice Chéreau, whose work I used to see in Paris all the time when I was young, with my little car and no money, driving back after the show was over.A challenge is that it’s very long. The first act is sharp as a knife, and the second is almost repeating the things we have seen, but developing them deeper. And that’s where it gets even more challenging — there are these buffa parts, that even those huge directors that I’ve seen fail at. They get lost in there. If you start to do comedy, it doesn’t work; then it’s about nothing. You have to deepen the emotions, not play it light or funny, which is not really what it is anyway.My starting point was something that people often forget: The original title was “Il Dissoluto Punito, Ossia il Don Giovanni” [“The Rake Punished, or Don Giovanni”]. When I saw this title, a lot of doors opened. Mozart had a clear point of view on the character. I had always found it a bit difficult to accept that Donna Anna is a little bit in love with him while she’s raped in the first scene, and then a few minutes later he kills, without any reason, her father. This man has been idolized as a libertine — his mission is “Viva la libertà” — but his own freedom, not the freedom of other people. “Don Giovanni” became for me suddenly a very contemporary opera.When I studied the score and the text, I discovered that it talks about power structures in our society: Don Giovanni, servants like Leporello, but also the farmers’ community in Masetto. Don Giovanni seduces Masetto’s fiancée, Zerlina, with the promise of a fabulous future of riches and a house, and all these things. Then there’s the sexual, emotional dominance of Donna Elvira; these power structures are about control at the detriment of others, and Don Giovanni is at the top while the others resist him.And the libretto is so well written, the characters are all complex and ambivalent individuals. They are a bit like Ingmar Bergman characters: neither good nor bad, just human. So, all of this becomes almost like a description of the times we live in.The ending can be very difficult, but I wanted Don Giovanni to go to hell, and burn in hell forever. What we show is something you don’t expect. But he, as a person, is a problem that has to be dealt with. And with this ending, now that he is dealt with, everybody can move on with their lives. They have closure. It is actually a conventional, happy ending. But I think that is necessary: You see them taking up daily life, as if they were starting again.Nathalie Stutzmann“My idea is to make it really alive, and very much about the story,” Stutzmann said.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesMozart is a kind of doctor for any singer or musician’s playing: Every note that is not right, every dynamic, every articulation, every balance is hearable immediately. Everything that you can cover in later Romantic music — you can hide much more in Wagner — you can’t with Mozart.This orchestration in “Don Giovanni” is so precise. I’ve never seen in Mozart so many fortepiano dynamics; it’s abrupt and a permanent change of color. Which is interesting, but also tiring and very hard to play for three hours. You can never relax. It is a nonstop race — a race that goes to the abyss at the end.The arc of it is already in the first measure of the overture. Those notes are the abyss; you have them again at the end. So you have to build the overture so that people understand. Then there is everything in between.There is the party, which is a virtuoso moment for the orchestra and singers. A lot is connected to the words, the phrasing, but you cannot do that if you are singing every note égal. You don’t have time. So, you have to respect the appoggio [breath support] of the language, and you have to be super strict with the rhythm. When it’s not precise, it’s like a sugar crash. But when it is, it works like a Swiss clock.I’ll never forget a phrase that I read in a book: Mozart said, one of the most difficult, important and crucial things to realize in playing my music is simply the right tempo. In this opera, it’s one key for me. The phrasing seems simple, but the realization is incredibly difficult. The pulse needs to be organic, and one thing needs to be related to the next.There are many places where we need to make a connection; for me that is the recitativo. My idea is to make it really alive, and very much about the story. I also include the pianoforte instrument in the arias, sometimes, for joyful moments — like the kisses of Zerlina, a little bit in the spirit of Mozart, what he would do.What I try to achieve is less of a gap between the recitativo moments and the arias. Typically at this time, the story was told by the recitativo, and the aria described the feeling. But in this opera, the recitativo has so many stories, while the arias are also telling them. It’s a very modern opera in that respect.Ying Fang“To interpret this, you have to be faithful to what Mozart has already written,” Fang said.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesWhen you sing the music right, Mozart is like medicine, a balm for the voice. It’s indescribably beautiful, and just so genius. But it can be deceptive. It sounds very simple and effortless, but it takes a lot of hard work to achieve that.You have to have perfect legato, and perfect breath control, to get through a lot of long phrases. Mozart also writes runs with crazy coloratura, as well as some dramatic moments. To do all that requires secure technique. It’s very different from verismo, or Verdi. Clarity and purity: When you’re singing Mozart’s music, you have to use particular muscles to be flexible yet keep the purity of the tone. This is all a testament of healthy, and good, technique.Mostly in the recitatives, Zerlina gets more dramatic. In the scene right before “Batti, batti,” when she goes back to Masetto after almost being seduced by Don Giovanni, she displays her capability in dealing with Masetto, saying: “What, you don’t believe me? Then kill me. Please, let’s just make peace.” It’s completely human, and so relatable. That’s another thing about these roles; you can see yourself, and you know you could be that person.But to interpret this, you have to be faithful to what Mozart has already written. He is a great vocal composer; a lot of things are already written into the score, stressed in how the language is expressed. If you follow that, the emotions speak for themselves. So, the interpretation has to be a little more strict, but it should seem effortless.The hard work to do that is in the preparation. You’ve got to know other people’s lines, and be aware and listen to whatever is happening around you. Once you know all that, everything is clear, and you can stop thinking too much and just enjoy being in your character. Then, the beauty of it is just so satisfying. It really is one of the greatest joys. More