Metropolitan Opera

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Putting the Brutality of a Prize Fight on the Met Opera Stage

      by

      Terence Blanchard’s “Champion,” about the fighter Emile Griffith, is the rare opera to engage with sports. A boxing consultant helped keep it gritty.Emile Griffith fought Benny Paret on March 24, 1962, in a highly anticipated welterweight championship bout at Madison Square Garden.In the 12th round, Griffith knocked Paret into the ropes and pounded him with more than a dozen unanswered blows. As The New York Times put it the next day, “The only reason Paret still was on his feet was that Griffith’s pile-driving fists were keeping him there, pinned against the post.”Paret never regained consciousness and died 10 days later. The fight and its terrible aftermath were high drama. One might even call the story operatic.There has been little overlap between the high drama of sports and the high drama of opera, beyond the bullfighting in “Carmen” or perhaps that odd singing competition in “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.” But in telling Griffith’s story, Terence Blanchard and Michael Cristofer’s 2013 opera “Champion,” which opened earlier this month at the Metropolitan Opera and streams live in movie theaters on Saturday, brings together the brutality of boxing with the soaring passions of opera.It helps that “Champion” is not just a tale of boxing, but also of Griffith’s life as a closeted gay man, an immigrant with a tough childhood and complicated relationship with his mother, and later an old age troubled by dementia and regret.But boxing is the catalyst for the story. The 1962 bout was the third between Griffith and Paret, who had split their first two fights. (Those earlier contests are omitted from the opera, keeping the focus on the fateful third.)Ryan Speedo Green, center, as Griffith after winning the fight against Paret (Eric Greene) in “Champion.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt was a time when big boxing matches were big news. Pre-fight hype was everywhere, with all aspects of the fighters’ preparations scrutinized. The Times marveled at Griffith’s “$130 a day suite with two television sets and a closet the size of a Y.M.C.A. room” in Monticello, N.Y., as well as the “turtleneck sweaters, seal coats and Ottoman club chairs” that surrounded the ring as he sparred.The terrible aftermath of the fight brought even more intense coverage. News of Paret’s serious condition made the front page of The Times, days after the fight, with the headline “Paret, Hurt in Ring, Given Little Chance.”At the time, the biggest controversy was the referee’s delay in stopping the contest. “Many in the crowd of 7,500 were begging” the referee to intervene, The Times reported. The referee, Ruby Goldstein, was later exonerated by the State Athletic Commission.But there was more to the story. Though Griffith said he was “sorry it happened,” he added, “You know, he called me bad names during the weigh-in” and during the fight, “He did it again, and I was burning mad.”“Bad names” was how Griffith, The Times and other newspapers described Paret’s taunts. The true nature of those words was not widely known at the time. But in the mid-2000s Griffith revealed the full story. Paret had called Griffith “maricón,” a Spanish slur for a gay man. Griffith was secretly bisexual.The opera’s second act deals with the fallout from the fatal punches, and Griffith’s later life, including a brutal beating he received outside a gay bar. Griffith died in 2013 at 75.The Met worked hard to get the details and the atmosphere of a prize fight right: the ring announcer (who acts here as a Greek chorus of sorts), the sound of the bell, the trophies and championship belts, a “ring girl” signaling the changing of the rounds and the macho posturing of the weigh-in. (The conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin emerges in the pit for the second act in a boxer’s hooded robe.)Helping to make it look accurate was Michael Bentt, a former professional world champion who served as the opera’s boxing consultant. “I’m not an expert on opera,” he said. “But I’m an expert on rhythm. And boxing is rhythm.”Bentt told the production team that there should be no stool in the ring before the first round, only between later rounds. And he thought that the boxing mitts, used by a trainer to block a fighter’s punches, looked too clean. “I said: ‘Make them look gritty. Rub them on the concrete to get them nasty looking.’ There’s nothing clean about the world of boxing.”The Met’s fight director, Chris Dumont, is used to working out sword fights. But for “Champion,” he had to choreograph fisticuffs and make them look convincing without anyone getting hurt.Champion. Griffith after winning the middleweight title in 1966.Larry Morris/The New York Times“For the body shots, they might make some contact with each other,” he said. “But you don’t want someone to get hit in the face. Even if it’s light, it won’t feel too good.”There are several ways to depict boxing: One is to simulate it as closely as possible, as some boxing movies do, by showing powerful punching and splattering blood. A more apt choice for the stage is stylization.“Since they have to sing, actually boxing through those scenes would wind them,” Dumont said of Ryan Speedo Green, who portrays the younger Griffith, and Eric Greene, who plays Paret. Most of the time, when a blow lands, the singers freeze, as if in a snapshot. Some parts are performed in slow motion.The show reaches its sporting peak with the re-creation of the 1962 fight, which ends the first act. The tension and anticipation operagoers may feel as the ring appears onstage is not all that different from the mood among fight fans or sportswriters in the moments before a big bout. All sports have some atmosphere of pregame expectation. But when the sport involves two combatants trying to hurt each other with repeated blows to the head, there is an added frisson of fear, or even dread.In “Champion,” Griffith goes down in the sixth round, and the shouts of a boisterous onstage crowd add to the tension. Then comes the fatal moment.Although the boxers’ blows onstage do not land, that does little to temper the grim moment when a flurry of unanswered shots floor Paret. “I watched the actual fight and tried to keep it as real as possible,” Dumont said. “The 17 blows are fairly close to what it was, in real time. We are not actually landing blows, but moving fast enough so the audience is tricked. It moves back to slow motion as he is falling to the mat.”And in the orchestra pit, the snare drummer looks up at the stage. Each time a blow falls, he raps a synced snare shot.A night at the opera can bring murder or war or bloodshed. But the historically and sportingly accurate depiction of a prize fight that ended with a man’s death has an unsettling quality all its own. As Goldstein, the referee, testified: “It’s the type of sport it is. Death is a tragedy that occasionally will happen.” Or, as Bentt said of “Champion,” “We can’t tiptoe around that it’s violence.” More

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      The Maestro Wore Blue: Bringing Pizazz to the Pit at the Met

      by

      Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Metropolitan Opera’s music director, dressed in a blazing sapphire jacket and trim black pants, stood before a mirror backstage on a recent afternoon and smiled.“Oh my God, it’s so good,” he said, waving his baton. “I love it so much.”There were three days until the opening of Puccini’s “La Bohème,” and Nézet-Séguin, surrounded by a small team of tailors, designers and assistants, was offering feedback on his attire, which had been designed by the Met’s costume shop.His outfit was modeled on one worn onstage by a band leader in Franco Zeffirelli’s classic production. Could the golden braid that dangled from his right shoulder be fastened, so it did not create a distraction in the pit? Was the jacket comfortable enough to accommodate the sweeping gestures that the music demanded? And should there be more red, or maybe gold?The Met’s costume shop has designed outfits for Nézet-Séguin for eight productions, including this jacket for “Bohème.”“The more unusual elements,” he said, “the more fun for the audience.”Since the Met returned from the long pandemic shutdown, in the fall of 2021, Nézet-Séguin has been on a mission to challenge sartorial conventions, wearing eye-catching outfits designed by the Met’s costume shop in eight productions. There is limited space to make a statement; the designers focus on his back, since that is what most audience members will see.“We want to get some attention but not be too distracting,” said Robert Bulla, the Met’s assistant head costumer. “Nothing too obnoxious, but something that occasionally catches the light.”A conductor’s look book: clockwise from top left, “Champion,” “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” “The Hours” and “Lohengrin.”Nézet-Séguin sports a black-and-white hooded jacket modeled on a vintage Everlast boxing robe for Terence Blanchard’s “Champion,” an opera about the boxer Emile Griffith that had its Met premiere this month. (At the start of the second act, he enters the pit wearing the hood and boxing gloves, but removing both to conduct.)For “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the season in 2021, Nézet-Séguin wanted to wear something special. The opera’s costume designer, Paul Tazewell, suggested this fireworks pattern.Rose Callahan/Metropolitan OperaHe wore a stained-glass pattern on his jacket for a 2021 revival of Puccini’s “Tosca,” which opens in the Church of Sant’Andrea della Valle in Rome. And he switched from green to red to white shirts in Wagner’s “Lohengrin” this season, mimicking the look of the choristers, whose robes changed colors throughout the show.Nézet-Séguin said his outfits helped strengthen the bond between the pit and the stage.“You don’t want to ignore the orchestra,” he said. “If the conductor is there and seen, I think that helps the connection. It’s much more integrated.”At work in the costume shop. The jacket being constructed echoes one worn by a band leader onstage in the production.The costumes are also part of his efforts to make opera, which has long had a reputation for conservatism, more exciting and accessible.“We have to be more modern and approachable,” he said. “We want to welcome everybody.”While earlier music directors at the Met, all men, favored white tie and tails, Nézet-Séguin, who has held the post since 2018, has long had a more eclectic style, both in his clothes and appearance. He has bleached-blond hair and wears a diamond earring and several gold rings. He is fond of performing in clothes by designers like the Canadian Marie Saint Pierre and can be seen onstage in red-soled Christian Louboutin shoes.“The more unusual elements,” Nézet-Séguin said, “the more fun for the audience.”As the Met prepared to reopen its doors to the public after the pandemic shutdown in 2021, Nézet-Séguin felt it was time for a change.The Met was preparing to open the season with Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the first work by a Black composer in the company’s history. Nézet-Séguin wanted to wear something to reflect the importance of the moment. The costume designer for “Fire,” Paul Tazewell, suggested a fireworks pattern, with flashes of red, indigo, teal and orange.“To be plain dressed — it just felt wrong to me,” Nézet-Séguin said.Beyond white tie and tails. “We want to get some attention but not be too distracting,” Robert Bulla, an assistant head costumer at the Met, said.Landon Nordeman for The New York TimesThe designs often riff on an opera’s central themes. For Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” based on the 1998 novel and the 2002 film it inspired, he wore a floral pattern, a nod to the work’s many references to flowers.Comfort is a priority — the designers want to ensure that he feels unhindered, and they use lightweight and stretchable fabric for flexibility and to absorb sweat. The costume shop often produces several of each jacket so he can change into a fresh one between acts.Some operas are more challenging than others. The team struggled to come up with an idea for “Bohème” before recalling that the production includes a scene in which a band leader guides a procession of soldiers across the stage.Nézet-Séguin, who painted his nails fuchsia for “Champion,” sometimes adds his own touches.“It’s good to be breaking this mold of what everyone thinks classical music and opera is,” Bulla said. “Some people say it’s taken a long time to start this evolution process. But at least it’s evolving.”Nézet-Séguin sometimes adds his own touches. He painted his nails fuchsia for “Champion,” to match the purple robe worn onstage by Ryan Speedo Green, who plays Griffith. And he said he was eager for a day when the Met orchestra musicians would be allowed to dress with more variety. (The dress code demands tuxedos or long, flowing black clothes for evening performances.)“It’s baby steps,” he said. “When I make statements like this, mentalities can evolve. We have to think more creatively and ergonomically. This is only the beginning.” More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Review: In ‘La Bohème’ at the Met, the Star Is in the Pit

      by

      Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director, is conducting a beloved production of Puccini’s perennial classic for the first time.Winter grips Paris at the start of the third act of Puccini’s “La Bohème.”The shock of the cold is there in the loud, abrupt pair of notes as the curtain sweeps open — a slap across a frozen face. A soft but terse march in the flute and harp is a pricking chill, which deepens in a muted chord that builds from the bottom to the top of the strings, then the woodwinds. The cellos shiver, almost inaudibly, below. In just a few seconds, Puccini has conjured February, frigid and lonely.The Metropolitan Opera has put on “La Bohème” nearly 1,400 times, more than any other work; its players could do this moment in their sleep. But rarely are those chords at the beginning of Act III as poised and precisely tuned as they were when the company revived Franco Zeffirelli’s beloved production on Friday evening, their resonance as they built so evocative of the echoing bells Puccini calls for soon after.That tiny refinement is the kind of effect that needs real rehearsal to achieve, but “Bohème” doesn’t usually get that. For an expensive repertory factory like the Met to function, not every piece can be given equal attention; some, particularly the core Italian standards, must be thrown onstage with very little attention at all. The result is that this Puccini chestnut tends to get done on a high level but not the highest, with experienced but not starry maestros.Not so on Friday, when “La Bohème” was led for the first time at the Met by its current music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin — with the resources, energy and focus that always attend productions overseen by a company’s artistic leader.This hasn’t happened in decades. James Levine conducted “Bohème” more than 40 times at the Met, including the premiere of the Zeffirelli production in 1981. But not since Levine led a benefit performance in 1992 — about 400 “Bohèmes” ago — has a music director of the company been on the podium for it.So there was an overall sense of polish and verve on Friday, particularly in the orchestra: the tanginess of the winds when the bohemians’ landlord is regaling them in Act I, the delicacy of the strings at the beginning of Mimì’s aria introducing herself to Rodolfo. Like Nézet-Séguin’s approach to Verdi’s “La Traviata,” his “Bohème” is characterized by close juxtapositions of the sumptuous slowing down of tempos and furious bounding ahead. The goal of these back-and-forth extremes of speed seems to be feverish intensity, but the result is more often an atmospheric, even lightheaded dreaminess, beautiful and detailed but a bit unnatural.As Rodolfo and Marcello’s wistful duet began in the final act, for example, Nézet-Séguin pulled the reins until the music almost solidified into nostalgic amber: Time literally stopped. It is, he wrote on Instagram, “fulfilling my dream” to conduct this score at the Met, and there was throughout a sense of his lingering over it, however lovingly.The chorus, like the orchestra, was adroit, even in the Latin Quarter chaos of Act II. Best in the cast was the bass-baritone Christian Van Horn, his Colline solidly, capaciously and wittily sung. As Marcello, Davide Luciano seemed to be showing off the size of his substantial baritone by sometimes bellowing. Alexey Lavrov’s baritone, on the other hand, often vanished as Schaunard, and Sylvia D’Eramo had an expressive face but a wispy soprano as Musetta.There’s often a certain blandness to Stephen Costello’s calm, restrained tenor. But as his voice warmed through his performance as Rodolfo on Friday, what started off as coolness came to feel more like poignant reserve. The soprano Eleonora Buratto was a forthright rather than fragile Mimì, with muscular high notes tending toward the steel more often associated with Cio-Cio-San in Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.”All in all, it was clear who the central figure of this “Bohème” was: the man waving the baton. These days, splashy contemporary operas and new productions get the spotlight — and get the music director. But for the sake of the company’s artistic health and vibrancy, it’s important to also have Nézet-Séguin in the pit for titles that too often get taken for granted.La BohèmeYannick Nézet-Séguin leads performances through May 14; the run continues through June 9 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Review: A Tenor Arrives at the Met Opera in ‘Elisir’

      by

      The 27-year-old Xabier Anduaga debuted in the role of Nemorino in a revival of Donizetti’s romantic comedy.There are some arias that are so beloved, so virtually indestructible, that they more or less sing themselves. Think of “La donna è mobile” or “Vissi d’arte.” A good performance gets audiences applauding; a great one transports them.“Una furtiva lagrima,” with its teary sighs and bursts of joy, is one of those arias, and when the 27-year-old Spanish tenor Xabier Anduaga sang it on Sunday in the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of Donizetti’s frolicsome comedy “L’Elisir d’Amore,” time seemed to stop. Cutting a lonely figure in a field against a midnight-blue sky, he sang with enchanting beauty. He took the second verse in a beguilingly soft tone and rounded out the cadenza with a convincing messa di voce — one more polished than the rendition captured on video last week.Anduaga’s soigné style, and vibrant yet plangent timbre, made him an uncommonly sensitive Nemorino — more of a melancholy-prone Werther scribbling poeticisms in a notebook than a sunny country bumpkin mooning over his beloved. His gracefully produced sound nevertheless carried wonderfully throughout the Met’s vast auditorium, and his acting, subtly charming instead of cloyingly eager, was of a piece with his voice.Still, Anduaga missed opportunities that seemed tailor-made for him — the descending lines of “Adina, credimi” lost their legato — but once he figures out how to bring his ravishing vocalism to the less showy parts of this role, it will no doubt become a signature one.Nemorino has his eye on a woman who is worldlier than he — he admires her studiousness in his first aria — and Aleksandra Kurzak’s confident, intuitive way with Adina’s music, reflecting a long familiarity with coloratura roles, implicitly conveyed that quality. Some breathiness perforated her tone, and her vibrato widened at high volume, but she did tap into the magic of her early coloratura days with a silvery, delicately vulnerable “Prendi.”The baritone Joshua Hopkins, who sang Papageno in Julie Taymor’s production of “The Magic Flute” earlier this season, turned in another fantastic performance. With a velvety tone, cocked eyebrow and dash of swagger, his Belcore was as much a macho sensualist as a cartoonish military sergeant. Even though “Come Paride” is something of a gag — nodding as it does to Dandini’s supercilious “Come un’ape” from Rossini’s “La Cenerentola” — Hopkins’s evenly textured, firmly woven sound elevated it to a thing of beauty. Elsewhere, his patter percolated, creating a smooth yet lively murmur.Bartlett Sher’s production has Dulcamara arrive in a gilded carriage bearing his snake oils, and as opera’s favorite charlatan, Alex Esposito traded basso buffoonery for the tradition of slippery salesmen like Pirelli and Harold Hill.The conductor Michele Gamba painted in dusky pastels, finding unanimity of color in swelling strings and pearly woodwinds. There were occasional ensemble issues, but once the opera entered its final stretch — with “Una furtiva lagrima” flowing into “Prendi” and on to the all’s-well finale — Donizetti’s sturdily constructed masterwork seemed to take care of itself.L’Elisir d’AmoreThrough April 29 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      ‘Hey, Mr. Living Composer’: ‘Champion’ Takes Shape at the Met

      by

      Terence Blanchard has been in rehearsals, with pencil and paper at the ready, as he tailors his opera ahead of its New York premiere.A basement rehearsal room at the Metropolitan Opera was so packed recently that it began to resemble a sweltering boxing gym.In one corner, members of the Met’s music staff were grouped together like judges tallying punches as they looked down at their scores. Nearby, a drummer and pianist locked into a syncopated groove, following the beat of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who was conducting while seated on an elevated platform.A phalanx of dancers rushed in to evoke an intense, collective workout regimen filled with balletic grace and pugilistic intensity. Those moves were choreographed by Camille A. Brown, who was close by, keeping an eye on every acrobatic feint. A former World Boxing Organization heavyweight champion paced the room, offering exhortations and encouragement.Supervising all this was the composer and trumpeter Terence Blanchard. He watched as his first opera, “Champion,” took shape ahead of its Met debut on Monday. (A Live in HD simulcast is planned for April 29.)After premiering at Opera Theater of St. Louis in 2013, “Champion” has played at the Washington National Opera‌ ‌and, scaled to a chamber-size orchestration, at SFJazz in San Francisco. But when this work — modeled on the life of the boxer Emile Griffith, and following Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which arrived triumphantly at the Met in 2021 — opens in New York this week, it will be thoroughly revised and expanded to embody the composer’s recent thoughts about opera, as a form. To wit: in this latest version of “Champion” there are not only new arias (and new lines for supporting characters); what will be heard in New York this season also reflects Blanchard’s latest work when it comes to orchestral complexity and vocal elegance.Performers in “Champion” evoke the world of boxing in choreography by Camille A. Brown.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesBlanchard has been in “Champion” rehearsals, at the ready to revise his score as needed.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesThe opera tells the life story of Emile Griffith, who is depicted in two roles sung by Ryan Speedo Green and Eric Owens.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesFor example, during the rehearsal last month, the soprano Latonia Moore, as Griffith’s mother, was singing a rhythmically bumptious riff from the first act when she and Blanchard noticed that the phrase, as written, wasn’t sitting in the most powerful part of her range. “Hey, Mr. Living Composer,” she called out, in a teasing tone. “Could you rewrite this for me?”Blanchard got to work immediately, composing a new vocal part on a blank page of staff paper: a melodic line that could work atop the existing orchestral harmony. He took a photograph of the revision before passing it along.“I couldn’t believe that he just sat there right in the room and wrote it,” Moore said later. “I expected he would come in with it a few days later, OK? It was like, ‘No, here it is.’ Oh my God! And it was really good.”In an interview after a rehearsal, Blanchard explained how his flexibility — unusual in the world of opera, in which scores, like schedules, are set far in advance — was the result of some early, on-the-job training in his career as a jazz performer.“Art Blakey taught me years ago: The easiest thing to do is to write something nobody can play,” Blanchard recalled. “The magic comes in not just through the melody and the harmony, but who’s playing it.”“You can see she has a powerful voice,” he said of Moore. To him, the calculation was simple: He wanted to feature that voice in the strongest possible way. “So that’s what it’s gonna be changed to.”Blanchard, right, with Joshua Balan, a cast member.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesMoore’s role, as that of Griffith’s manipulative and sometimes absent mother, is hardly the only one to be subjected to extensive revisions. The bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green — a standout in “Fire” and the star of “Champion” — said that when he first discussed this opera with Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, he felt that the role was a touch high for him.Gelb told him, “Speedo, That’s the beauty of having a living composer: Things can change,” Green recalled.“CHAMPION,” WITH A LIBRETTO BY MICHAEL CRISTOFER, TELLS Griffith’s tabloid-ready life story. Green sings Young Emile, while the veteran bass-baritone Eric Owens is cast as Old Emile, who lives in a nursing home on Long Island in the early 2000s. The boxer leaves the Virgin Islands for New York, then works in a hat factory before becoming a welterweight champ in the 1960s. In the ring with Benny Paret, Griffith unintentionally delivers blows that prove to be fatal, leaving Griffith anguished for years.“There’s this dream state that Emile is in,” Blanchard said, “because he’s dealing with dementia. There’s a combination of that harmony and that voicing, versus when it’s younger Emile. And chords moving; it goes back and forth. But it’s all story-driven, and it’s story-driven inside my language that I grew up listening to, as a jazz musician.”There is another thread in the opera, of Griffith’s journey from a straight-coded world to one of queerness. As a young man, in New York, he is drawn to gay bars and men while also excelling in the “man’s world” of boxing. The sports universe either doesn’t want to hear about queerness, or openly derides him for his sexual orientation.Just as Griffith navigates dramatic contrasts, so too does Blanchard’s score.The composer likes to talk about his love for Puccini — and you can hear some of that in Young Emile’s Act I aria “What Makes a Man a Man?” But in the boxing sequences, there’s a driving sense of muscular, post-bop jazz tumult. (As in “Fire,” the drummer Jeff Watts, known as Tain, leads a jazz combo embedded within the orchestra.) And there are some moments in which the fusion is well blended enough that no stylistic input seems to have the upper hand.Blanchard said that from his first visits to New York, starting in the spring of 1980, he took in a wide range of music. Although he was associated with traditionalist-minded players of New Orleans, he made a point of hearing the trio Air, which included the cutting-edge music of composer Henry Threadgill.“People were like, ‘Why are you going to that?’” Blanchard said. “And I’m like: ‘Bruh, because I’m trying to figure out what fits for me. I want to experience it all. Why limit myself, because you think I shouldn’t like this? Let me find out for myself.’”Those experiences pay off in “Champion.” In one of the early scenes at a gay bar, Blanchard writes sumptuous orchestral music — a cousin of sorts to the bluesy music heard in a club that figures in the story of “Fire,” but with the string section, not the jazz combo, taking center stage during the bacchanal. “It’s the sexiest sound those Met strings will ever make,” Moore said after a rehearsal. “You could see that they were feeling it!”In an interview, Blanchard tipped his hat to an early teacher, the composer Roger Dickerson, who used timbres and modes from American jazz when writing classical works like the New Orleans Concerto. (The pianist, composer and critic Ethan Iverson recently lavished praise on that rarely heard piece, describing its finale as “boogie-woogie gone surreal, the kind of thing Louis Andriessen tried to write over and over again, but better.”)When Blanchard started working with classical musicians, as he has done in his long partnership with Spike Lee as the composer of his soundtracks — Dickerson informed him that he had a unique opportunity, and a responsibility.“‘You have to keep in mind, the library of music for orchestral music has been limited,’” Blanchard recalled his teacher as saying. “‘There needs to be an expansion of it, through jazz — and maybe you’re the person to do that.’ He put that in my mind way back when.”Blanchard’s score for “Champion” synthesizes the varied musical genres he has taken in during his career as a composer and performer.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesBlanchard, who in 2021 became the first Black composer to have his work staged at the Met, has moved opera forward in exactly that way with his latest revisions to “Champion,” Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, said.Even as the conductor has offered small suggestions in rehearsals — like proposing a bit of bowed, marcato playing for the strings instead of pizzicato that could get lost in the Met’s grand auditorium — he has also deferred to Blanchard, who he said has been “much more hands on” about fine-tuning the orchestration.“I think he’s using the orchestra not to amplify his thoughts,” Nézet-Séguin said. “It’s more: How can I use it as a vehicle, the same way I would use a band? It doesn’t replace anything; it becomes its own thing.”Looking up at the stage after a recent run-through of “Champion,” Nézet-Séguin added of Blanchard, with a touch of pride in the musicians: “I’m pretty sure that in his next ventures — whether it’s film music, or whatever it is — he’s going to miss all that.” More

    • 163 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Angela Gheorghiu, Diva of the Old School, Is Back at the Met Opera

      by

      A fight was brewing recently at the Metropolitan Opera, and Angela Gheorghiu was in the thick of it.She and some other singers were rehearsing the second act of Puccini’s “Tosca,” and the moment had arrived when Cavaradossi, the passionate tenor lead, scuffles with the henchmen who are restraining him.Gheorghiu — the glamorous, veteran Romanian soprano singing the opera’s title role in two performances, on Saturday afternoon and Wednesday evening — was standing in such a way that the melee was driving right toward her. Sarah Ina Meyers, the revival’s director, began to pause to give her a new position out of the fray, but Gheorghiu practically shouted at everyone to keep going; she would figure out where to move on the fly.“I will respond; I’m quick!” she told them in an excited, heavily accented tumble of words. “Go, go! Action, action!”“Generally my colleagues say, ‘Angela, relax!’” she said in an interview later. “But I cannot relax. Even when I study at home, I’m there. When I open a score, I’m there. My skin, my cells, they’re all there. I’m alive; I have the fire on me.”Where Gheorghiu, 57, has not been of late is the Met. Though she was long a frequent presence with the company after her debut in 1993, these performances of “Tosca” are her first appearances on its stage in eight years.“It’s an unfair gap,” she said of her time away. “It’s unfair because I know I have my public here, and it’s part of my life.”Grand of manner and demanding, but also generous and gregarious, taking grinning selfies for Instagram with everyone in the room, Gheorghiu is well known — and generally well liked, even by colleagues she exasperates — for being one of the few remaining divas in the larger-than-life, old-school mold of Geraldine Farrar, Maria Callas and Jessye Norman.Gheorghiu’s former manager described her as “always interesting, no matter what — onstage, offstage.”Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesOld-school in the tumult that has tended to accompany her: cancellations, firings, willful behavior, a long marriage of ups and downs to the star tenor Roberto Alagna (until their divorce 10 years ago). And old-school in her voice, which as she was gaining renown was full and dark-hued, flexible and free to the top of its range.“She is a serious artist,” said Jack Mastroianni, who spent years as her manager. “I think sometimes people forget that because of the sensational news that comes out of her cancellations, or whatever. She’s always interesting, no matter what — onstage, offstage.”Because Gheorghiu was joining a “Tosca” run already in progress, she wouldn’t be getting any rehearsal time onstage, with the orchestra, or in costume.“I don’t know what was on his mind,” she said of Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “First of all, he offered me one performance. And I said, for one performance, I will not come. Just one? Come on. I would spend it all on my flight! And of course I need a hotel. So, two.”But why accept a mere two?“Because,” she said, with a sigh, “I must tell you the truth. I adore this city. I adore this theater, from the very beginning.”At the beginning, it was a love affair. Of Gheorghiu’s 1993 debut, in “La Bohème,” Alex Ross wrote in The New York Times that “the preternatural beauty of the voice made a lingering impression.”Ovations at the Met were a long way from small-town Adjud, Romania, where she was born in 1965 to a dressmaker mother and a train operator father. The Soviet-backed regime of Nicolae Ceausescu was then just beginning, an era that later informed her depiction in “Tosca” of life in early-19th-century Rome amid the repressive forces of the police chief Scarpia.“Tosca, it’s myself,” Gheorghiu said. “I’m an opera singer, like her. And I’m not a killer, but I lived in a situation in Romania where you had no right to say something, where you were all the time afraid.”From left, Gheorghiu, Plácido Domingo and Waltraud Meier in “Carmen” at the Met in 1996.Sara KrulwichAs a child, she was obsessed with Leonard Bernstein’s television specials, and began to study voice seriously in her early teens.“I was an opera singer, all my life, from the beginning,” she said. “It was so clear. I didn’t have a Plan B. Never, never. And for all my roles, from when I was 18, I had no teacher, no coach, no pianist. I am my own everything.”Mastroianni said: “What she went through to get from where she was, it takes guts and moxie. And she has that in spades.”Gelb first heard her sing Violetta in Verdi’s “La Traviata” in the early 1990s, then tried (unsuccessfully) to sign her to Sony Classical when he ran the label.“When she was singing ‘Traviata’ in her prime,” he said, “I think hers was the greatest ‘Traviata’ of that time. She was a throwback to the kind of glamorous divas of previous generations, with incredible artistic personality and charisma.”Her voice — clean and pure, with alluring depths but without heavy vibrato or overwhelming size — was perfect for capture on CDs. It was the tail end of the classical recording industry’s heyday, and she was lavishly promoted.“It was a voice that microphones loved,” Gelb said. Gheorghiu still comes across as valuing recordings more urgently than do some singers — “We have to leave a testimony,” she said — and there are certain roles she has sung for albums but never onstage, like an exquisite Cio-Cio-San in “Madama Butterfly.”Almost as soon as she entered the international scene, she became a star at the Royal Opera House in London, a home base in those early years. She divorced her first husband and married Alagna; in a curtain speech before they appeared together in “La Bohème” at the Met in 1996, Joseph Volpe, then the company’s general manager, announced that the two had been wed the previous day. Rudolph W. Giuliani, the mayor of New York at the time and an opera aficionado, officiated.The following year, on tour with the Met in Japan, Gheorghiu refused to wear the blonde wig for her character, Micaëla, in “Carmen,” and Volpe uttered what became an immortal line among opera fans: “The wig goes on, with or without you.” (For one performance, she chose without, and an understudy replaced her.)Appearing and recording frequently as a duo, she and Alagna grew notorious for their hubristic demands. They attempted to veto Franco Zeffirelli’s designs for a new Met “Traviata” in the late 1990s; the show went on, without them. Gheorghiu still sang in New York, but from 2003 to 2005 she was absent for two seasons in a row, which hadn’t happened since her debut.“I feel home here,” Gheorghiu said of the Met.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesWhen Gelb took over, in 2006, he tried to rectify this and bring her back in full force. Gheorghiu said that he eventually offered a contract that required her to sing at least 18 performances a year, which would have restricted her ability to take on engagements in Europe.“And finally, I said no,” she said. “And from this moment, I think he was upset. That’s why I was more rare here.”(“I have no recollection of that,” Gelb said. “If I spent my life being offended by opera singers, I would have ended my career a long time ago.”)She abandoned a new Met production of “Carmen,” in which she was to sing the title role, as well as a new staging of “Faust” whose updated concept she disliked.A new production of Puccini’s “La Rondine,” a rarity for whose wistful mood Gheorghiu was well suited, did go forward, in 2009. But over the following decade, there were just a pair of “Bohème” performances in 2014 and the brief stint in “Tosca” in 2015 — in which her voice, never huge, sometimes seemed perilously slender.“When she was last here, there were mixed results,” Gelb said. “Like many members of the audience, she did not like the Luc Bondy production, and she decided to do her own staging. So she kind of defied the directorial team; she sort of went off the reservation.”The current Met “Tosca,” a throwback to Zeffirelli-style realistic splendor, is more to Gheorghiu’s taste, but she is just as headstrong as ever about taking direction. There was, throughout the recent rehearsal, the sense that she wanted to leave as much of the blocking as possible to what her impulse might end up being in the moment.“I like acting,” she said as Meyers, the director, tried, to little avail, to guide her toward setting in stone a sequence in which Scarpia mauls Tosca onto a divan. “But so you don’t see the acting. Reality.”Gheorghiu would like for this not to be her Met farewell; she’d love to sing Fedora here, and Adriana Lecouvreur.“I feel home here,” she said. “I really adore each centimeter: the dust, the smell, the sweating onstage, the costumes, the atmosphere in rehearsal. So I had some friendly discussion with Peter, and I feel like, of course, give me this, then what else? Let’s see how this goes.”Gelb didn’t commit. “But I’ve always admired her and I always will admire her,” he said. “She’s part of opera history, and part of opera history at the Met.” More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Review: Lise Davidsen Shines, and Evolves, in ‘Der Rosenkavalier’

      by

      The radiant young soprano returned to the Metropolitan Opera to star as the Marschallin in a revival of Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier.”When the luminous soprano Lise Davidsen released her first solo album several years ago, she faced criticism over her repertoire.Chiefly, that while she was just in her early 30s she had chosen to record Strauss’s autumnal “Four Last Songs.” In an interview then, her characteristic geniality gave way to exasperation. “It pisses me off a little bit that you have to be a certain age to feel certain feelings,” she said. “Teenagers have all those feelings, and more, in a day.”With more measured calm, she added: “But I do believe that I’m entitled to take on those feelings, to take on the difficulties in life. That’s our job in opera.”She challenged doubters again on Monday when Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” returned to the Metropolitan Opera with Davidsen, 36, making her role debut as the Marschallin — a character more typically portrayed by seasoned grandes dames. So much so that this production, by Robert Carsen, opened in 2017 as a vehicle for Renée Fleming’s farewell to the role.Never mind that in the libretto, the Marschallin is in her early 30s. Or that Fleming was around Davidsen’s age when she first sang the part at Houston Grand Opera. But as Davidsen said of the “Four Last Songs,” a performer has every right to a role if she can persuasively “take on those feelings,” not to mention the notes. And Davidsen can, on both fronts.Davidsen excels in repertoire — mostly Wagner and Strauss — somewhere between the achingly human and the otherworldly: the saintly Elisabeth in “Tannhäuser,” the mythical title character in “Ariadne auf Naxos,” the forlorn Sieglinde in “Die Walküre.” The Marschallin, however, is entirely earthbound. In conflict with neither God nor the gods, she is simply staring down middle age and the inevitability of change.That said, the Marschallin is a woman of stature: influential, composed and well connected. Davidsen captures this naturally, exuding confidence more than wisdom, and behaving with discretion in public while reserving playfulness for the intimacy of her bedroom.When we meet the Marschallin, she has just spent the night with her 17-year-old lover, Octavian; over the course of the first act, her amorous bliss gives way to solemnity as she explains that their affair has an expiration date — “today or tomorrow, or the day after next.” When Fleming sang that line, it was with the authority of experience. But where her Marschallin looked back, Davidsen’s seems to look forward; she’s keeping it together while aware of the anxiety that sets in whenever she looks in the mirror.Throughout, Davidsen alternates between conversational restraint — enunciating each syllable of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s talky libretto with penetrating focus — and white-hot radiance. Her terms of endearment for Octavian emerge like a rising sun. And in the final trio, her sustained high A on the word “glücklich” (“happy”) soars and crescendos to a glowing benediction for her lover’s new life with Sophie.“Der Rosenkavalier” is an ensemble opera in which it can be difficult to call anyone a protagonist, but Davidsen’s Marschallin leaves the stage the most evolved. Among the lines that landed freshly on Monday was her last. With Sophie’s father, Faninal, she passes by the happy new couple. He sings, “Young people are always the same”; and she responds, “Yes, yes,” with a D sharp falling nearly an octave below to an E, as if sighing.On Monday, that moment was a reminder that while the opera often seems like the story of two generations, it is more like a tale of three: Octavian’s, the Marschallin’s and Faninal’s. With that “yes, yes,” Davidsen’s Marschallin suddenly matures, shedding the anxiety of wrinkles and lovers lost to enter the next phase of her life.Also remarkable on Monday was the mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey, singing the role of Octavian at the Met for the first time. She made even bigger the mighty yet smooth sound, as well as the tireless energy and dramatic skill, that she brought to her performances last year in a “Rosenkavalier” at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. With a cherubic face she looked every bit the part of a young lover, and, with a touch of careless manspreading while lighting a cigarette, very much a boy.The baritone Brian Mulligan made a role debut, as well, as Faninal, with commanding ease and entertaining comedic instinct. And veterans of the production returned: the soprano Erin Morley, still a bright, elegant presence as Sophie; and the bass Günther Groissböck, still a dangerously handsome Baron Ochs, though more strained in this revival, his gravely low notes and declamatory articulation characterful but not always assured.Under Simone Young’s baton, the Met Orchestra improved as the evening progressed. The opening, a kind of pornography in music, was romantic where it should have been ecstatic, and a Mozartean interlude in the first act wasn’t scaled back to match the style; the dreamily glinting rose motif was more legato than lustrous. But Young effectively conjured the romping chaos of Ochs’s cohort in the second act, along with his famous waltz and the darker, “Salome”-like dancing rhythms of the third act.Carsen’s production remains the textbook-perfect staging of modern Met history: elegant and satisfyingly grand, smart but not daring. His major intervention — moving the opera’s setting from the 18th century to the year in which it premiered, 1911, from the cusp of revolutionary Europe to the brink of World War I — also remains eerily evocative.The Marschallin’s bedroom is covered in large canvases: portraits of great men, scenes from battle and court. It seems as though the walls can barely support the weight of history. In the first act, her life is saturated at a tipping point of decadence; a parade of visitors and excess — needy orphans, salespeople with the latest fashions, an attention-hungry tenor — overwhelm her, the score and the stage. By the end, the set opens up around Octavian and Sophie as they rejoice in their future together, revealing a line of soldiers charging into battle, and stumbling as they die.When the production opened in 2017, its depiction of a society blissfully unaware of the transformation ahead recalled the recent, surprise election of President Donald J. Trump. Since then, it has been redolent of much else in our time of too-muchness: the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, climate disaster.If Carsen’s “Rosenkavalier” has staying power, it is because of this chameleonic resonance. As the Marschallin well knows, the only constant, in a forward-spinning world, is change.Der RosenkavalierThrough April 20 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Met Opera Ordered to Pay Anna Netrebko $200,000 for Canceled Performances

      by

      The company cut ties with the star Russian soprano for her refusal to denounce Vladimir Putin after the invasion of Ukraine. An arbitrator said it must pay her under the terms of her contract.The Metropolitan Opera has been ordered by an arbitrator to pay the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko more than $200,000 for performances it canceled last year after she declined to denounce President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia following the invasion of Ukraine.The arbitrator, in a decision issued last month that has not been previously reported, ruled that the Met should compensate Netrebko for 13 canceled performances — including appearances in “Don Carlo” this season and “La Forza del Destino” and “Andrea Chénier” next season — because of a contractual agreement known as “pay or play,” which requires institutions to pay performers even if they later decide not to engage them.The Met had argued that Netrebko, one of opera’s biggest stars, was not entitled to payment because of her refusal to comply with the company’s demand after the invasion of Ukraine that she denounce Putin, which it said had violated the company’s conduct clause. Netrebko had endorsed Putin for president in 2012 and had spoken glowingly of him before the invasion.The arbitrator, Howard C. Edelman, found that “there is no doubt she was a Putin supporter, as she had a right to be.” But he added that aligning with Putin was “certainly not moral turpitude or worthy, in and of itself, of actionable misconduct.”Netrebko had been seeking an additional $400,000 in fees for engagements in coming seasons that had been discussed but not formally agreed to, including leading roles in Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut” and “Tosca,” as well as Verdi’s “Macbeth” and Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades.” Netrebko earned the Met’s current fee for top artists of about $15,000 a performance.But the arbitrator found that Netrebko was not entitled to fees for those performances because the contracts had not been executed. In addition, he imposed a penalty of nearly $30,000 on Netrebko for making “highly inappropriate” statements after the invasion, including sharing a text on social media that used an expletive to refer to her Western critics, whom she called “as evil as blind aggressors.”In addition to endorsing Putin, Netrebko has occasionally lent support to his policies. When in 2014 she donated to an opera house in Donetsk, a war-torn city in Ukraine controlled by Russian separatists, she was photographed holding a separatist flag.The Met did not comment on the specifics of the ruling but defended its decision to cancel Netrebko’s performances.“Although our contracts are ‘pay or play,’ we didn’t think it was morally right to pay Netrebko anything considering her close association with Putin,” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in an interview.He added: “It’s an artistic loss for the Met not having her singing here. But there’s no way that either the Met or the majority of its audience would tolerate her presence.”Netrebko’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Sam Wheeler, the national executive director of the American Guild of Musical Artists, the union that represented Netrebko, praised the decision, saying it would help protect the rights of artists seeking compensation for canceled engagements.“‘Pay-or-play’ is the bedrock of our collective bargaining agreements across the country, and we will always defend ‘pay-or-play’ provisions to the fullest extent possible,” he said in a statement.Netrebko, a major star and box office draw, still has a relatively busy performing schedule, though she continues to face protests and calls that she be banned from the global stage. A planned concert this month in Taiwan was canceled at the last minute because of concerns about her connections to Putin. She is set to perform a recital at La Scala, in Milan, on Sunday, and will return there this summer for a production of “Macbeth.” Her engagements next season include a concert at the Wiener Konzerthaus, and appearances at the Salzburg Easter Festival in Austria.Facing a series of cancellations in the West last year, she sought to distance herself from Putin, issuing a statement saying that she had met the president only a few times and that she was not “allied with any leader of Russia.” She also canceled her appearances in Russia. But she has avoided directly criticizing Putin or addressing her record of support for him.Separately, the Met announced on Friday that it was firing Netrebko’s husband, the tenor Yusif Eyvazov, from a production of “Tosca” set to open on March 30. Eyvazov, who had been engaged to play the role of the painter Cavaradossi in six performances, will be replaced by Matthew Polenzani. Rehearsals for the production are to begin on Monday.Gelb said that he had hoped Eyvazov would withdraw from the production but that he had decided to fire him primarily because of comments he made last year criticizing the soprano Angel Blue, who withdrew from a production of “Aida” at the Arena di Verona after photos of Netrebko and other artists performing there in dark makeup circulated on social media.Gelb also said that Eyvazov’s association with Netrebko was problematic and that he did not want to disrespect the Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska, who will sing the role of Tosca in four performances.Eyvazov’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment; the Met said he would be compensated for the canceled “Tosca” performances. More