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      Coming Soon: Met Operas Streamed Live Into Your Living Room

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      The company said it would begin offering live simulcasts this month on its website — but only for some customers.The Metropolitan Opera has over the past 16 years built a lucrative business around broadcasting operas live into movie theaters around the world, attracting an audience of millions for classics like “The Magic Flute” and “Madama Butterfly.”Now the company is hoping to build on that success: The Met announced on Monday that it would begin livestreaming some operas directly into living rooms for customers who live far from cinemas that broadcast its productions.The service, called “The Met: Live at Home,” is part of the company’s efforts to expand the audience for opera, at a time when it is grappling with financial challenges brought on by the coronavirus pandemic as well as longstanding box-office declines.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in a statement, “We wanted to make our live performances available to people who don’t have ready access to the movie theaters that carry the Met, whether you reside in the mountains of Montana or on assignment in Antarctica.”The service will be available in the United States and Canada to customers who live at a distance from movie theaters that broadcast the Met’s “Live in HD” series of operas each season; the exact distance will vary depending on the market. It will also be accessible nationwide in another 170 countries and territories where the Met does not offer live transmissions. Depending on the location, each opera will cost $10 or $20 to stream; viewers can watch the operas an unlimited number of times during a seven-day window.The Met is one of many cultural institutions experimenting with livestreaming, which became a popular way of staying connected with audiences during the pandemic, when in-person performances were curtailed. The San Francisco Opera last year began broadcasting some performances live for $27.50.The Met’s movie theater program began in 2006 and before the pandemic generated about $18 million in net profit for the Met each year.The new streaming service poses the possibility of cannibalizing some of those sales, though Gelb said using technology to limit its geographic reach would help mitigate that risk. He said the company had no plans to phase out the movie theater broadcasts, which have sold nearly 30 million tickets and are now available in about 2,000 cinemas in 50 countries.“We don’t want to replace the movie theater experience at this point,” he said. “We want to augment it.”The streaming service will be available starting on Oct. 22, when the Met begins its cinema broadcasts. (This season, 10 productions will be transmitted.) The first performance will be Luigi Cherubini’s “Medea,” which opened the Met season last week to largely positive reviews. More

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      A Trio of Dangerous Women in a Met Opera Week to Remember

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      The company started its season performing “Medea,” “Idomeneo” and “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” three of opera’s most distinctive scores, with care and passion.When you get the opportunity to see a bunch of operas in quick succession, the canon starts forming narratives for you.It suddenly seems obvious that Cherubini’s “Medea,” from 1797 — with which the Metropolitan Opera opened its season on Tuesday — found a germ of inspiration for its title character in the similarly jealous, witchy Elettra of Mozart’s “Idomeneo” (1781), which the Met performed the following evening.And if you, like me, were in the house once more on Thursday to complete this little marathon, you would have felt that Katerina Ismailova, the murderous, defiant antiheroine of Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” (1934), had been conceived in the tradition of Medea: a woman who earns our sympathy even as her crimes repel us.What a week. Three of opera’s most memorable scores, each distinctive, none overfamiliar, all performed with care and passion.The standards that dominate the repertory have not been banished: “Tosca” returns next week, with “La Traviata” to follow a few weeks later. But this opening trio shouldn’t be ignored by newcomers wary of rarer titles; any of these pieces could be enjoyed by anyone. It’s not just the chestnuts of Puccini and Verdi that are capable of speaking to a broad audience.That’s particularly true of “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” Shostakovich’s ferocious depiction of Russian society out of joint, with crime and corruption rampant. In 1994, the director Graham Vick yanked the piece out of its 19th-century setting into what was then the present day: a post-Soviet nation drunk on American-style capitalism, in a horny fever dream of suburban blue skies, comic books, AstroTurf and demented brides wielding vacuum cleaners like rifles.Nearly 30 years later, it remains one of the Met’s most vivid shows, and this scorching revival is an apt tribute to Vick, a visionary artist and opera company leader who died of Covid-19 last year at 67.The tenor Brandon Jovanovich sang with tireless brashness as the man-child Sergei, whose affair with the bored Katerina ends up ruining them both; the bass-baritone John Relyea growled powerfully as the father-in-law she poisons before she and Sergei kill his son. The chorus threw itself into the raucous staging, and the peppery supporting cast included Goran Juric (appearing at the Met for the first time, as a gleefully sinful priest) and Alexander Tsymbalyuk (a flood of sonorous earnestness as the Old Convict).But the opera is dominated by Katerina, its scheming Lady Macbeth. In an excellent Met debut, the soprano Svetlana Sozdateleva is seen-it-all yet soulful, and often magnetically still, as if dazed by the world veering around her. Her voice becomes strident and slicing as it rises in pitch and intensity, but it’s never ugly. When Sergei first seduces Katerina and she limply resists, singing, “I’m a married woman,” Sozdateleva conveys the line’s strange cool tenderness; it’s not sincere, but it’s not a joke.Also making a notable company debut was Keri-Lynn Wilson, on the podium. While Wilson, who is married to Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, is an experienced conductor, there were some grumbles when the season was announced about a plum gig going to the boss’s wife.But the quality of her work on Thursday spoke for itself. Shostakovich’s huge score surges from brooding quiet to deafening fierceness, and Wilson led the orchestra in those shattering brassy marches without being overbearing, and in the stretches of stunned lyricism while keeping the music taut and tense.Indeed, the subtlest, most plainly beautiful passages were among the best, like the glistening dawn as Katerina and Sergei woke up after the Dies Irae-ish crashes of her father-in-law’s funeral, and the soft, grim brooding of the convicts on the way to Siberia in the final act. Some frenetic scenes hadn’t yet settled into lock step on Thursday, but this was a very fine performance.From left, Kate Lindsey, Michael Spyres and Ying Fang in “Idomeneo.”Karen AlmondAnother maestro, Manfred Honeck, also made an impressive Met debut on Wednesday, in the aching melodies and choral grandeur of “Idomeneo” — like “Medea,” a story out of ancient Greece. James Levine brought this opera, about a royal family’s agonies in the face of Neptune’s demand for a human sacrifice during the Trojan War, to the company for the first time, in 1982, and he single-handedly willed it into something of a perennial here. (By the end of this run, it will have had just shy of 80 performances.)Though Mozart is now often the precinct of early-music specialists, Honeck, who leads the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and is a frequent guest across Lincoln Center’s plaza at the New York Philharmonic, is in Levine’s tradition of big-orchestra Classicism: full-bodied, with rich vitality, but without the racing cat-feet tempos that are fashionable these days.Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s neo-Classical staging is still imposing at 40, and clever in its play of ruins and scrims. The soprano Ying Fang, indispensable at the Met in Mozart, sings with both silky warmth and agile sparkle as Ilia, a Trojan princess in love with Idamante, the prince of Crete, where she’s been taken as a prisoner. As Idamante — marked by his father, Idomeneo, as the sacrifice to Neptune — the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey’s tone was elegantly hooded, a little smoky and shadowed.Making his de facto Met debut in the opera’s title role, after a pair of Berlioz concert performances with the company early in 2020, the tenor Michael Spyres sounded freer than he did as Idomeneo at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France a few months ago.But despite the graceful clarity of his declamation and the sweetness of his tone, he did not sound entirely comfortable in the long phrases of the aria “Fuor del mar,” and his extension into the upper reaches of his voice at the end of that number didn’t soar. (The fiery diction and burnished sound of the tenor Issachah Savage, in a small role as the High Priest, spoke to his potential future as an Idomeneo.)The soprano Federica Lombardi is even stronger floating phrases than she is spitting anger as the lovelorn, vengeful Elettra. This Greek princess is the opera’s strangest element, a force of wildness lurking on the outskirts of the plot. She feels like a character in search of an opera of her own — and she’d find it, in a sense, 15 years later, in “Medea.” More

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      The Met Opera Takes on ‘Medea’ in the Shadow of Maria Callas

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      “Let’s talk about the elephant in the room,” the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky said after a recent rehearsal of Luigi Cherubini’s “Medea” at the Metropolitan Opera. “Everybody knows this opera because of Maria Callas.”Callas may loom over the legacy of this opera — her various recordings from the mid-20th century dominate the work’s discography — but her star power was never enough to bring it to the Met, which is staging it for the first time only now, with a new production by David McVicar opening the company’s season on Tuesday.Like many people, McVicar was unfamiliar with the opera until he began to study it for this production. It’s a rarity within a rarity — a seldom performed work from a composer who, despite celebrity and respect in his time, is known today for just a sliver of his output, if at all. A tourist at Père Lachaise, the cemetery in Paris where Cherubini is buried, is more likely to visit the neighboring grave of Chopin.“Every version of Medea has a slightly different narrative and slightly different accretion to the myth,” the director David McVicar said.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesBorn in 1760, a French-assimilated Italian who straddled music’s Classical and Romantic eras, Cherubini premiered his “Médée” in 1797 from a French libretto inspired by both the Euripides and Corneille tragedies. It’s a version of the Greek myth in which she, having helped Jason retrieve the Golden Fleece, exacts revenge on him after he abandons her.“Every version of Medea has a slightly different narrative and slightly different accretion to the myth,” McVicar said. “Euripides introduces the idea of the murder of the children for the first time, and the Baroque opera introduces myriad subplots, and twists and turns. This goes back to Euripides. It’s a Classical piece but also gothic: It belongs to a period of gothic Romanticism in arts and literature.”“Medea” has remained on the outskirts of the repertory for its difficulty.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesAfter the premiere, “Médée” didn’t catch on, and wasn’t the most beloved of Cherubini’s operas among fans like Beethoven. And his reputation after his death, in 1842, was certainly not helped by portraits — however accurate — such as the one in Berlioz’s memoirs, which include a scene of Cherubini, decades after “Médée” and by then the director of the Paris Conservatory, behaving with fussy villainy.But his fortunes changed in the 20th century. In 1909 “Médée” arrived at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, in an Italian translation, called “Medea,” that replaced the spoken French dialogue with new recitative. That version, which McVicar described as “bigger boned and more concise,” was revived in the 1950s by Callas, who went on to perform it widely, including at La Scala and the Royal Opera House in London.For that reason, the work is most familiar as “Medea” — which is how the Met is presenting it, in the Italian translation — though it has remained on the outskirts of the repertory for its difficulty, taken on by a select group of singers including Leonie Rysanek, Gwyneth Jones and Montserrat Caballé.Radvanovsky, center, with Ekaterina Gubanova, left, who sings Neris, and Axel and Magnus Newville, who play Medea’s children.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesThe Italian version replaced the spoken French dialogue with new recitative.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesMcVicar referred to the opera as a soprano version of “Hamlet” because once Medea enters, she more or less never leaves the stage, in various states of distress and fury.Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times“You need to have somebody who can sing it,” said the conductor Carlo Rizzi, who is leading the Met production. “If you have that, you do it. If you don’t, you don’t do it. It’s as simple as that.”Hikers, he added, might take on Mont Blanc or Kilimanjaro; but fewer will try Everest. McVicar, for his part, referred to the opera as a soprano version of “Hamlet” because once Medea enters, she more or less never leaves the stage, in various states of distress and fury.At the back of the stage is an enormous, angled mirror that reflects the action from an aerial perspective.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesIt’s a challenge that appealed to Radvanovsky. The idea for the Met’s production came in the wake of another season-opener, Bellini’s “Norma,” which featured the same trio of Radvanovsky, McVicar and Rizzi. She said that Peter Gelb, the house’s general manager, told her he was happy with her performance and asked what she would like to do next. “‘Medea,’” she answered.“Peter said, ‘Are you sure?’” Radvanovsky recalled. “And I said yeah because after ‘Norma,’ where can one go?”She felt that it was a logical fit for her voice — a way to combine her Met history of bel canto works, like Donizetti’s Tudor operas, and verismo classics like Puccini’s “Tosca.” The question was which language she would sing it in. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director, had wanted to do the French original and was at first attached to this production, but it was decided that they would follow Callas’s tradition, a better fit for both Radvanovsky and the Met.Following Callas’s tradition was a better fit for both Radvanovsky and the Met.Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times“I think both are valid,” McVicar said of the two versions. “But you have to be mindful of the house and the cast that you have. The French can work, but you need a much smaller theater, like the Opéra Comique in Paris. And frankly, the dialogues aren’t very good; they’re clunky and old-fashioned.”McVicar joined the production, not only because he and Radvanovsky have a long, fruitful relationship together in opera, but also because a work like “Medea” is where, he said, he feels most at home.“I’m very much identified here with big Italian war horses because I can do them,” he added. “But is that where my interests lie? I’d have to say no. I’m much more interested in something in the hinterlands, like this.” (That’s why he’d also like to work on Janacek operas in the future, with Radvanovsky, whom he could see in “The Makropulos Case.”)Radvanovsky, left, and McVicar. The stage design is deceptively minimal.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesWith a team in place, the premiere was planned for the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto — this “Medea” is a coproduction with that house, as well as with the Greek National Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago — but the pandemic upended that. Instead, the first run will be at the Met, and McVicar ended up designing it during the most restrictive lockdowns, when he couldn’t work in person with his usual collaborators. What started as a practical move, though, ended up being his way to stay sane, and creative, he said.McVicar returned to the opera’s origins, and thought about how its tensions and turmoil — “the sheer chaos that Medea is capable of unleashing,” he said — fits with its time, coming out of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, as well as Directoire style.That gave the production its look, with costumes “from the Directoire period, roughly speaking, and a real sense of gothic decay,” McVicar said. His stage design is deceptively minimal: a thrust corner with sliding doors that open to reveal both spare scenes and episodes of opulence. At the back is an enormous, angled mirror that reflects the action from an aerial perspective but also serves as a screen for special effects made from projections on the floor — “literally smoke and mirrors,” as he put it.The angled mirror onstage also serves as a screen for special effects.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesThe score, too, can seem simpler than it is, Rizzi said. It’s not written for a very large orchestra, and it doesn’t contain isolated melodies that the audience will leave the house humming. “That doesn’t mean it’s a bad opera,” he added. “It’s a different opera.”A conductor could interpret the music as Classical, but Rizzi has been working with the Met Orchestra to bring out the mercurial tumult that courses through Cherubini’s instrumental writing. The opening Sinfonia alone, he said, “is not a planting of a stake, it’s a wave of a tsunami.”Much of the opera’s shifting character also relies on Radvanovsky as Medea, who in McVicar’s staging is portrayed with expressive physicality. “She can be serpentine, or what we’ve been calling the Hulk, or a goddess,” Radvanovsky said. “It’s exhausting.”“I could not have thought of a better role to be singing right now than Medea,” Radvanovsky said. “It’s the best therapy you can ask for.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesStill, she added, this is a role that a soprano can’t approach with fear — neither of its history nor of its demands. As an actor, she has drawn on experience that parallels the action of the opera: recently, the dissolution of her marriage and the death of her mother. “I could not have thought of a better role to be singing right now than Medea,” she said. “It’s the best therapy you can ask for.”Beyond the music, Radvanovsky has been working with a personal trainer. “I wear a corset onstage, which is great for singing, but then you combine that with Pilates moves,” she said. “I have to be strong, in the best shape my body can be in. We talk about things as a sprint or a marathon. This opera is a marathon.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times More

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      Stalin Once Banned This Opera in Russia, but Audiences Still Enjoy It

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      “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” by Dmitri Shostakovich, a tale of love and betrayal once banned in Soviet Russia, is returning to the Metropolitan Opera.When Joseph Stalin gives your opera a scathing review in Pravda, history is bound to find a spot for you.Such was the case for Dmitri Shostakovich, whose “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” has certainly taken its place in the history books as a classic modern opera, but also as an infamous moment in opera history. In 1934, it was the toast of Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was known then, before setting off on a tour of the Soviet Union for nearly two years. But it was turned into a reviled piece of music after Stalin, wanting to see what all the fuss was about, attended a performance in January 1936 in Moscow.The Soviet leader called it “muddle instead of music, an ugly flood of confusing sound” and “a pandemonium of creaking, shrieking and crashes” in a review attributed to him in Pravda, then the official newspaper of the Communist Party. The opera was banned for decades in the Soviet Union, and Shostakovich feared being arrested. It returned to Russian stages, in a revised version, in 1962 under Nikita S. Khrushchev (though Shostakovich’s original opera is the standard now).As “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” returns after eight years to the Metropolitan Opera on Sept. 29 (for six performances through Oct. 21), the timing feels suddenly urgent against the backdrop of Russia’s war in Ukraine. This production, which premiered in 1994, was first directed by Graham Vick, who died in 2021, with sets and costumes by Paul Brown in a vaguely 1950s setting. For some, the opera stands as testament to one composer’s patriotism, but also to his disdain for the ruling party, all wrapped up in dissonant, volatile music and a raw depiction of lust, violence and the struggle for truth and freedom.“I think every single note he wrote was about him and how he saw the world he was living in, and in that context ‘Lady Macbeth’ is an absolutely seminal work,” said the British director Tony Palmer, whose film “Testimony” in 1988 starred Ben Kingsley as Shostakovich. “Most of the Russians knew instinctively that Shostakovich spoke for them, which says a lot about the power of his music. That’s why it will always resonate, particularly at this moment.”Keri-Lynn Wilson, the conductor, leading a rehearsal. This production will be her Metropolitan Opera debut.Evan Zimmerman/Met OperaThat resonance feels particularly strong for the conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, who is making her Metropolitan Opera debut with this production.“The parallel right now is that Putin is trying to destroy artistic expression just as Stalin did,” Ms. Wilson said, referring to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. “This opera, to me, feels like a direct affront to that, so this is a vehicle for me to channel this incredible anger that I have toward Putin.”Ms. Wilson, who is Canadian with Ukrainian roots, for the past several months has been conducting the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, which she conceived this spring, and organizing with her husband, Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. They helped line up the Ukrainian musicians, as well as performance dates and funding, with the assistance of the Ukrainian government, for a tour across Europe (and in Washington and New York), so moving from that experience to “Lady Macbeth” felt like a natural segue, she said.“I have cousins who are fighting, and they are writing to me and thanking me for what I’m doing with the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra,” Ms. Wilson said. “What it is for me is the feeling of doing justice to show that we can really perform Russian music while shouting at Putin.”Anger is a theme that runs throughout “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.” Based on the novella “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” by Nikolai Leskov, it tells the story of Katerina, a woman trapped in a loveless marriage who falls in love with a village worker named Sergei. The opera’s depiction of their affair is highly sexual, and after a couple of heat-of-the-moment murders gone wrong, the lovers are exiled to a Siberian labor camp and Sergei takes a new lover. The tragic ending, on an icy river, has some of Shostakovich’s most jarring and riveting music. It was a huge success — for a brief spell.“What a lot of people don’t realize is that there was an 18-month gap between opening night of this opera and when Stalin went to see it,” Mr. Palmer said. “There were more performances of this opera in Russia those 18 months than operas of Wagner, Puccini or Verdi.”Shostakovich in the early 1940s. He feared being arrested after “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” was banned in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.Sovfoto/Universal Images Group, via Getty ImagesDespite his fear of backlash after Stalin’s review, Shostakovich continued to be incredibly prolific. In 1937, he unveiled his Fifth Symphony, which was a triumph both with the Communist Party apparatchiks, who saw it as the composer honoring the roots of classical Russian music, and with the intelligentsia of Russian culture who saw it as a requiem for the Great Purge, which Stalin had unleashed the year before.“Shostakovich put everything that he defends as a human and a composer into ‘Lady Macbeth,’ but his genius is that he found a way to compromise and exist in that world after that,” said Kirill Karabits, the Ukrainian-born chief conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in England. “He wanted to remain true to himself but write in a way that satisfied the authorities.”“His music after ‘Lady Macbeth’ is different because it has so many layers,” he added. “He was hiding his criticism. Are his finales happy endings? Or are they happy endings through struggle?”Ms. Sozdateleva in rehearsal. She will make her Metropolitan Opera debut with “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.”Evan Zimmerman/Met OperaFor the Russian soprano Svetlana Sozdateleva, making her Metropolitan Opera debut in a role she has sung several times in Europe, the opera stands on its own for what Shostakovich intended as an artist and a human being: the power of love and betrayal.“The most important thing for me is the theme of all-consuming powerful love and how important it was for Shostakovich to portray such deep feelings and create such a complex character,” Ms. Sozdateleva said. “What’s remarkable is that by the end of the opera, she is a murderer, but the audience is sympathetic to her.”Shostakovich’s understanding of his heroine — and his own reality in the Stalin era — plays into the opera’s rocky history, not to mention its legacy as bold art full of messages and even musical notes that are still being deciphered.“If you wrote a line of poetry that said, ‘Stalin was a bad man,’ then you were dead,” said Mr. Palmer, the director of the Shostakovich film. “But if you wrote a harsh tune that says it, it was a lot harder to prove.” More

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      Charles Castronovo, an American Tenor, Is ‘at Home Everywhere’

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      The Metropolitan Opera is just one of the stops in a busy itinerary for Charles Castronovo, a New York-born singer who performs around the world.In an age of steep global competition, some tenors come and go. Not Charles Castronovo.Since leaving the Metropolitan Opera’s program for young artists just over two decades ago, he has proved his tenacity in a range of lyric and, steadily, more dramatic roles. He compares the requisite balance of vocal refinement and mental stability to a “yin and yang” relationship.“You have to be very sensitive to create something beautiful onstage,” he said by phone from London, “but at the same time remain quite strong because there are ups and downs in a career, let alone in life.”Mr. Castronovo, 47, has a full schedule at leading houses on both sides of the Atlantic where he has become a regular fixture. He started the season this month as Don Ottavio in a revival production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” at the Royal Opera House in London. Next up is the Teatro Verdi Salerno in Italy, where he will sing the leading tenor part in Cilea’s “Adriana Lecouvreur.”Also coveted in French-language repertoire, Mr. Castronovo will return to the Vienna and Berlin State Operas next year for Massenet’s “Manon” and Cherubini’s “Médée.” At both the Bavarian State Opera this December and at the Met, from May 26 to June 9, he will take on the classic role of Rodolfo in Puccini’s “La Bohème.”The tenor pointed to the sincere and direct nature of the character, a poet who becomes smitten with the fatally ill seamstress, Mimi: “He’s super in love, super romantic, super jealous, super crazy — all those things at once. And you think, why did he do this? But I find his reactions to the situation very honest.”Mr. Castronovo drew a parallel to Alfredo in Verdi’s “La Traviata,” a role that he has now sung over 200 times. “They act exactly how I would imagine a young guy in love would,” he explained.Mr. Castronovo with Irina Lungu in a 2011 production of “La Traviata” in Aix-en-Provence, France.Bertrand Langlois/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe music of Verdi will increasingly come into focus for the tenor, as his voice has grown richer and darker. This year, he will release his first solo album — of Verdi arias — on the label Delos.He said that the works of the composer’s middle period, in particular, were “really fitting like a glove.”“It has just a bit more oomph to it,” he continued. “It feels like the next step — probably because I have sung a lot of Mozart and other bel canto [repertoire].”Mr. Castronovo was born in Queens in New York City and raised in California. He credits his ability to tolerate constant travel to the roots of his mother, who immigrated to the United States from Ecuador at 16 (his father is originally from Sicily). “I can find a way to feel at home everywhere,” he said.The singer discovered opera as a teenager through a recording of Plácido Domingo in the title role in Verdi’s “Otello.”“For me, it was like the rock ’n’ roll of classical music because it was dramatic and sexy and strong,” he recalled. “So I listened to tenors’ CDs and tried to mimic them at home. Before I knew it, that was all I could do.”Once in his early twenties, Mr. Castronovo entered a prestigious track that included singing small roles as a resident artist at the Los Angeles Opera and joined the Lindemann Young Artists Development Program at the Metropolitan Opera. In 1999, Mr. Castronovo made his professional Met debut as Beppe in Leoncavallo’s “I Pagliacci.”“In the end,” he said, “you have to get onstage as much as possible. It’s a very different thing to sing a whole role in a studio or in a lesson.”Mr. Castronovo immediately landed leading parts at smaller American opera companies. In 2000, his career migrated to Europe with performances at the Savonlinna Opera Festival in Finland, then at the Berlin State Opera, Vienna State Opera and Royal Opera House.“It took off like crazy,” he recalled. “I am happy to have survived and to keep getting better. It’s [a question of] constantly readjusting; adding new roles; finding new challenges and overcoming them.”He said he was now at a point in his development where he could allow himself to focus less on vocal technique and more on dramatic expression.“I can concentrate more on the arc of the character and add a nuance here and there,” he said. “I feel comfortable enough technically to let myself go emotionally.”Performing as Rodolfo at the Bavarian State Opera last season, he became so carried away that he nearly screamed the character’s utterance of “Mimi” that ends the opera as the heroine dies of consumption, also known as tuberculosis.“When you get choked up and feel like crying, you cannot sing a perfect note,” he explained. “But I could only do it at the very end because I don’t have anything else to sing after that. It was actually perfect.” More

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      Three Divas Give Voice to ‘The Hours’ at the Met Opera

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      New York City’s opera event of the fall — an adaptation of “The Hours” having its staged premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in November — started with a pitch from Renée Fleming.Fleming, the superstar soprano, was mulling over new projects when Paul Batsel, her right-hand man, suggested “The Hours,” Michael Cunningham’s novel inspired by Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” which weaves together one day in the lives of three women across time: Woolf, writing her book; a midcentury homemaker named Laura Brown, who is reading it; and a 1990s editor named Clarissa Vaughan, who, like Clarissa Dalloway, is organizing a party, here for a friend diminished by AIDS.“The Hours” won Cunningham a Pulitzer Prize in 1999, and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 2002, starring a power trio of Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman. Crucially, that movie was scored by Philip Glass, whose soundtrack unified the three stories as lucidly as the motif of “Mrs. Dalloway” did.“I loved, loved, loved the film when it came out,” Fleming, who is singing the role of Clarissa, said in an interview. “It haunted me and stayed with me. The performances were so brilliant, and when I went back to it — all of these ideas, suicide, their lives as L.G.B.T.Q. people in New York City at that time, the period, all that was powerful for me. So when Paul suggested it, I thought: That’s perfect. Three divas, what could be better?”Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, agreed. A composer was already in hand — Kevin Puts, who won the Pulitzer Prize for “Silent Night” in 2012, working here with the librettist Greg Pierce — but the company needed two more stars. Enter Kelli O’Hara, a Tony Award-decorated musical theater actress with opera bona fides (even at the Met, where she was a standout as Despina in Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte”), in the role of Laura; and, as Virginia Woolf, the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, a house regular and audience favorite.The Philadelphia Orchestra premiered “The Hours” in concert form earlier this year, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Reviewing that performance, Zachary Woolfe wrote in The New York Times that, “the new work is, like ‘Silent Night,’ direct, effective theater, with a cinematic quality in its plush, propulsive underscoring, its instinctive sense for using music to move things along.”Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, will be in the pit when the opera arrives at the Met in November, directed by Phelim McDermott (most recently of “Akhnaten” fame) and choreographed by Annie-B Parson. Spread around the world but speaking together on a shared video call, the production’s three stars discussed how they are preparing for rehearsals and for bringing their characters to the opera stage. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.“It really is evocative,” O’Hara said of Kevin Puts’s score. “The more I listen to it, the more I have it circling in me; it’s one of those things that you become obsessed with.”Thea Traff for The New York TimesThese three roles were written with your voices in mind. Can you explain how that plays out in practice?KELLI O’HARA Can I just give a shout-out to Kevin Puts? To have a composer who’s living now and writing now and writing so beautifully now — Renée’s choice of him was so special. He came to a couple of sing-through sessions just to hear me and write a little bit more specifically. I do not take that for granted. To listen and make changes appropriately, he’s quite a mensch that way.RENÉE FLEMING He’s written a lot for me, and he knows my voice really well. The thing that works for me is that the phrases have separation between them, so you’re not really stuck in a high register or a challenging tessitura consistently. And that’s what makes it possible. I’m loving [singing] it in my living room, so let’s hope that translates to the big house.JOYCE DiDONATO I’m looking at the page, I’m looking at the score, and I’m like: Oh Kevin, that’s the money note that audiences will be waiting for. One of the cool things, as I’m working on it, is that I’m finding the groove very easily. It is being crafted for us, but the sign of a really good composer is that it’s clear this can have a life beyond this production. He’s writing it in such a lyrical way that a lot of different voices will be able to take this on. That’s what we want; we want these projects to have a legacy.What do you think makes this version of “The Hours” effective opera?FLEMING Libretti are hard because you have to reduce the number of words to a minimum in order to have room for the music, and that’s especially true here. Greg Pierce’s libretto is concise, and it’s colorful and just beautifully wrought.O’HARA It feels like there’s a constant movement of the drama. That makes it feel, in a way, cinematic. Some of the score as well. It really is evocative. The more I listen to it, the more I have it circling in me; it’s one of those things that you become obsessed with.FLEMING Kevin is not afraid to write something that’s moving and beautiful for the general public. And that is something that, in my lifetime, composers in opera have struggled with.DiDONATO This is an emotional story. Some of the recent pieces that I have seen are very graphic and angular and have sanitized, in a way, the emotion. And I don’t find it in any way maudlin and saccharine — which used to be good words in opera, but I understand why we hesitate to indulge in that. But that, in some ways, is what opera does best.One of the things I look for, certainly with a new piece, is: Why does this need to be sung? What I think they have done really brilliantly is the overlay, the way you can have the same emotional experience by different people in different contexts. And that’s something that can happen easily in opera and not so much in the cinema or theater world. There’s a scene where Virginia Woolf is trying to write, and she’s struggling with just getting the day started, and then Laura comes in and she’s reading it. We have the same words, one is being created and one is being received, and they both are being felt in very different ways. That adds a huge layer of complexity that really works on the opera stage.“We’re always competing against ghosts of the past who created roles,” said DiDonato, who plays Virginia Woolf. Ana Cuba for The New York TimesHow are you coming at these characters, which have been famously occupied by Hollywood stars? Kelli, in your case, this is the second time you are taking on one of Julianne Moore’s roles, after the musical adaptation of “Far From Heaven.”O’HARA I didn’t go back to the movie; that’s sort of a rule for me. If I’ve seen it, I won’t watch it again. Because the only way to make it human or different or new is to put your own vision through it and metabolize it in your own body, your heart and bring it forth. I think that’s what the three of us will do. Opera is very different from film. I haven’t even really considered it being up for comparison.DiDONATO We’re always competing against ghosts of the past who created roles. To me, the key is always, I do the research, but my job is to put the score in front of me and not create past versions. I learned that quite a long time ago. Go to the source, go to the score, the text, and you have to leave the rest behind.FLEMING Well, I’ve always wanted to play Meryl Streep [laughs]. But also, for me, this is one of the only times I’ve gotten to perform a period from my own lifetime. I still have clothing from the ’90s.O’HARA That’s wild. I’m going back to the ’50s. Just put me there all the time.DiDONATO You do get the cutest clothes from that period. I have a little bit of wardrobe envy.You have praised how “The Hours” — whether the book, the film or this opera — captures women’s feelings and experiences. All were created by men. What do they get right?FLEMING This is tricky, because obviously I was pressing for women in the creative team, so we have a choreographer. I think it’s important, moving forward, to appropriately give representation to the stories being told. Even the fact that Denyce Graves [in the role of Sally] and I are lovers in this. This may be something that people clock — that [the queer] community is not represented, at least in the principals. It’s very challenging, on so many different fronts.That said, I do think they did a very good job, and Michael Cunningham did a great job. I have a long relationship with Strauss and Hofmannsthal; there are historical pairings of librettist and composer that have really shockingly presented a woman’s inner life extremely well.“Kevin is not afraid to write something that’s moving and beautiful for the general public,” Fleming said. “And that is something that, in my lifetime, composers in opera have struggled with.”Thea Traff for The New York TimesO’HARA From the Laura Brown perspective, Michael Cunningham is writing his own mother. Look at Sondheim; there is this precedent of artists who work things out in their art. So I want to join them and bring out their story, and my own story with my mother, and my own experience of being a mother. You do have someone who’s writing from a very real place. I’ll come in, and I have to make this woman human and empathetic in the same way. But they are writing from deep knowledge and pain.FLEMING AIDS is at the center of Michael Cunningham’s book as well. A friend of mind said, “I’m glad the Met is finally producing a gay story,” and I thought: Huh, I thought this was about three women. There are different perspectives in this piece. It’s wonderful in that way.DiDONATO For me, I think they’ve captured the captivity sensation that Virginia felt, or that I imagine she felt at that time — the limitations put on her, what it was to be a creative genius as a woman. We do need representation at the table, as Renée is saying. But one of the magical things about the theater is that it’s always about getting in someone else’s head. And that can be me, a girl from Kansas City, trying to understand Virginia Woolf. It can be a man trying to understand a woman, a son about his mother. It’s dangerous if we start blocking those creative outlets.What’s exciting is that we are demanding that those doors are open to everybody. But I don’t think that means we should shut doors completely. We’d be missing out on a lot of great art. I think it’s thrilling that these men want to tell this story. Let’s have a woman write it as well. We have lots of “Barber of Sevilles” and “Figaros.” Let a woman write “The Hours,” and we can compare. More

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      Live Performance Is Back. But Audiences Have Been Slow to Return.

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      Attendance lagged in the comeback season, as the challenges posed by the coronavirus persisted. Presenters hope it was just a blip.Patti LuPone, Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig came back to Broadway. The Norwegian diva-in-the-making Lise Davidsen brought her penetrating voice to the Metropolitan Opera. Dancers filled stages, symphonies reverberated in concert halls and international theater companies returned to American stages.The resumption of live performance after the long pandemic shutdown brought plenty to cheer about over the past year. But far fewer people are showing up to join those cheers than presenters had hoped.Around New York, and across the country, audiences remain well below prepandemic levels. From regional theaters to Broadway, and from local orchestras to grand opera houses, performing arts organizations are reporting persistent — and worrisome — drops in attendance.Fewer than half as many people saw a Broadway show during the season that recently ended than did so during the last full season before the coronavirus pandemic. The Met Opera saw its paid attendance fall to 61 percent of capacity, down from 75 percent before the pandemic. Many regional theaters say ticket sales are down significantly.“There was a greater magnetic force of people’s couches than I, as a producer, anticipated,” said Jeremy Blocker, the managing director at New York Theater Workshop, the Off Broadway theater that developed “Rent” and “Hadestown.” “People got used to not going places during the pandemic, and we’re going to struggle with that for a few years.”Many presenters anticipate that the softer box office will extend into the upcoming season and perhaps beyond. And some fear that the virus is accelerating long-term trends that have troubled arts organizations for years, including softer ticket sales for many classical music events, the decline of the subscription model for selling tickets at many performing arts organizations, and the increasing tendency among consumers to purchase tickets at the last minute.A few institutions are already making adjustments for the new season: The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra has cut 10 concerts, after seeing its average attendance fall to 40 percent of capacity last season, down from 62 percent in 2018-19.Many Broadway shows have struggled to match prepandemic salesPercent change in weekly gross sales in 2021 and 2022, compared with the same week in 2019 More

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      An Orchestra Supports Ukraine, and Reunites a Couple Parted by War

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      “I don’t have a gun, but I have my cello,” a musician says as he joins the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, which is made up of refugees who fled the war and artists who stayed behind.WARSAW — After years of struggling to make a living as musicians in Ukraine, Yevgen Dovbysh and Anna Vikhrova felt they had finally built a stable life. They were husband-and-wife artists in the Odessa Philharmonic — he plays the cello, she the violin — sharing a love for Bach partitas and the music from “Star Wars.” They lived in an apartment on the banks of the Black Sea with their 8-year-old daughter, Daryna.Then Russia invaded Ukraine in February. Vikhrova fled for the Czech Republic with her daughter and mother, bringing a few hundred dollars in savings, some clothes and her violin. Dovbysh, 39, who was not allowed to leave because he is of military age, stayed behind and assisted in efforts to defend the city, gathering sand from beaches to reinforce barriers and protect monuments and playing Ukrainian music on videos honoring the country’s soldiers. “We spent every day together,” Vikhrova, 38, said. “We did everything together. And suddenly our beautiful life was taken away.”Dovbysh was granted special permission to leave the country last month to join the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, a new ensemble of 74 musicians that was gathering in Warsaw, the first stop on an international tour aimed at promoting Ukrainian culture and denouncing Russia’s invasion. Carrying his cello, and wearing a small golden cross around his neck, he boarded a bus for Poland, looking forward to playing for the cause, and also to being reunited with another member of the fledgling ensemble: his wife.“I love my country so much,” he said as the bus passed ponds, churches and raspberry fields in Hrebenne, a Polish village near the border with Ukraine. “I don’t have a gun, but I have my cello.”The bus crossed the border and drove into Hrebenne, in Poland, on its way to Warsaw, where the newly formed orchestra would meet for the first time to rehearse.Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York TimesWhen his bus arrived in Warsaw, he rushed to meet Vikhrova. He knocked on the door of her hotel room, waited nervously, and then embraced her when she opened it. She teased him about his decision to wear shorts for the 768-mile journey, despite the cool weather, a legacy of his upbringing in balmy Odessa. She gave him a figurine of a “Star Wars” creature, Baby Yoda, a belated birthday present.“I’m so happy,” he said. “Finally, we are almost like a family again.”The next morning, they took their chairs in the new Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, led by the Canadian Ukrainian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, to prepare for an 12-city tour to rally support for Ukraine. Beginning here in Warsaw, the tour has continued in London, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Berlin and other cities, and will travel to the United States this week to play at Lincoln Center on Aug. 18 and 19 and at the Kennedy Center in Washington on Aug. 20.The tour has been organized with the support of the Ukrainian government. Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, said in a recent statement celebrating the founding of the orchestra that “artistic resistance” to Russia was paramount. The orchestra also has the backing of powerful figures in the music industry. Wilson’s husband, Peter Gelb, who runs the Metropolitan Opera in New York, has played a critical role, helping line up engagements and benefactors, and the Met has helped arrange the tour. Waldemar Dabrowski, the director of the Wielki Theater, Warsaw’s opera house, provided rehearsal space and helped secure financial support from the Polish government.CULTURE, DISPLACED A series exploring the lives and work of artists driven far from their homelands amid the growing global refugee crisis.At the first rehearsal, musicians filed into the Wielki Theater carrying blue and yellow bags; instrument cases covered in peace signs and hearts; and tattered volumes of Ukrainian poems and hymns.The orchestra was the idea of the Canadian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, who is of Ukrainian descent. “For Ukraine!” she proclaimed at the first rehearsal.Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York TimesAs the musicians began to warm up at rehearsal, Wilson took her place at the podium, locked eyes with the players, and spoke about the need to stand up to Moscow.“For Ukraine!” she said, throwing her fist into the air. Then the orchestra began playing Dvorak.The musicians had arrived mostly as strangers to one another. But slowly they grew closer, sharing stories of neighborhoods pounded by bombs, while the refugees among them recounted their long, tense journeys across crowded borders this winter.Among the violins was Iryna Solovei, a member of the orchestra at the Kharkiv State Academic Opera and Ballet Theater, who fled for Warsaw at the start of the invasion along with her 14-year-old daughter. Since March, they have been among the more than 30 Ukrainian refugees living inside the Wielki Theater, in offices that were converted to dormitories.In March, Solovei, watched from a distance as her home in Kharkiv was destroyed by Russian missiles. She shared photos of her charred living room with her fellow players, telling them how much she missed Ukraine and worried about her husband, who still plays with the Kharkiv ensemble.Our Coverage of the Russia-Ukraine WarOn the Ground: A series of explosions that Ukraine took credit for rocked a key Russian air base in Kremlin-occupied Crimea. Russia played down the extent of the damage, but the evidence available told a different story.Heavy Losses: The staggeringly high rate of Russian casualties in the war means that Moscow may not be able to achieve one of his key objectives: seizing the entire eastern region of Ukraine.Nuclear Shelter: The Russian military is using а nuclear power station in southern Ukraine as a fortress, as fighting intensifies in the region. The risk of a catastrophic nuclear accident has led the United Nations to sound the alarm and plead for access to the site to assess the situation.Starting Over: Ukrainians forced from their hometowns by Russia’s invasion find some solace, and success setting up businesses in new cities.“Everyone has been hurt,” she said. “Some people have been hurt physically. Some people have lost their jobs. Some people have lost their homes.”She reminisced about her days as an orchestra musician in Ukraine, and the deep connections she felt with audiences there. To cope with the trauma of war, she takes walks in a park in Warsaw, where a Ukrainian guitarist plays folk songs at sunset.“The war is like a horrific dream,” she added. “We can forget about it for a moment, but we can never escape it.”Iryna Solovei, left, holding a violin, before the orchestra’s first performance at the Wielki Theater in Warsaw. She has been living in the theater since March.Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York TimesAt the back of the orchestra, in the percussion section, stood Yevhen Ulianov, a 33-year-old member of the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine.His daughter was born on Feb. 24, the first day of the invasion. He told his fellow players how he and his wife, a singer, had gone to the hospital in Kyiv a few hours before the war started. As she went into labor, air-raid sirens sounded repeatedly, and at one point they were rushed from the maternity ward to the basement of the hospital.“I couldn’t understand what was happening,” he said. “I could only think, ‘How will we get out of here alive?’”Ulianov did not play for two months after the invasion, as concerts in Kyiv were canceled and theaters elsewhere were damaged. The orchestra reduced his salary by a third in April, and he relied on savings to pay his bills. Inside his apartment near the center of the city, he practiced on a vibraphone, taking shelter in a corridor when air-raid sirens sounded.“We didn’t know what to do — should we stay or should we leave?” he said. “What if the Russian army came to Kyiv? Would we ever be able to play again?”‘Half of me is in Ukraine, and half of me is outside.’Before the orchestra’s first concert, late last month in Warsaw, Vikhrova and Dovbysh were anxious.They had spent more than a week rehearsing the program, which included pieces by Brahms, Beethoven, Chopin and Valentin Silvestrov, Ukraine’s most famous living composer. But they were unsure how the audience might react. And they were grappling with their fears about the war.Vikhrova had been trying to build a new life in the Czech Republic with their daughter, joining a local orchestra. But she worried about her husband’s safety “every second, every minute, every hour,” she said. She slept near her phone so that she would be woken up by warnings about air raids in Odessa. She grew anxious after one attack there before Easter, when her husband saw Russian missiles in the sky but had no time to take shelter. To take her mind off the war, she played Bach and traditional Ukrainian songs.On their first evening together in five months, Yevgen Dovbysh and Anna Vikhrova, a married couple who were parted by the war and reunited to play together in the orchestra, attended a welcoming party for the new ensemble at Warsaw’s opera house, the Wielki Theater. Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York TimesHolding her husband’s hand backstage, Vikhrova said she longed for the day when they could return to Ukraine with their daughter, who was staying with her mother in the Czech Republic for the duration of the tour.“I feel like I’m leading a double life,” she said. “Half of me is in Ukraine, and half of me is outside.”Dovbysh remembered the fear in his daughter’s eyes when she and her mother left Odessa in February. He recalled taking time to explain the war and telling her she would be safe. He promised they would see each other again soon.When the tour ends this week and his military exemption expires, he is scheduled to return to Odessa. It is unclear when he will be able to see his family again.“Every day,” he said, “I dream of the moment when we can see each other again.”‘We live with a constant sense of worry.’As the war drags on, the musicians have at times struggled to keep their focus. They spend much of their free time checking their phones for news of Russian attacks, sending warnings to relatives.Marko Komonko, 46, the orchestra’s concertmaster, said it was agonizing to watch the war from a distance, likening the experience to a parent caring for an ill child. He fled Ukraine in March for Sweden, where he now plays in the orchestra at the Royal Opera House in Stockholm.“We live with a constant sense of worry,” he said.“We live with a constant sense of worry,” said Marko Komonko, the concert master, far right. Komonko, who now plays at the Royal Opera House in Stockholm, was joined at a rehearsal by Ustym Zhuk, who plays the viola, far left, and Adrian Bodnar a violinist, center. Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York TimesFor more than two months after the invasion, he said, he felt nothing when he played his violin. Then, in early May, he began to feel a mix of sadness and hope when he performed a Ukrainian folk melody at a concert in Stockholm.For some, playing in the orchestra has strengthened a sense of Ukrainian identity. Alisa Kuznetsova, 30, was in Russia when the war began; since 2019, she had worked as a violinist in the Mariinsky Orchestra. In late March, she resigned from the orchestra in protest and moved to Tallinn, Estonia, where she began playing in the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra.When she joined the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, she initially felt guilty, she said, worried that the other players would see her as a traitor because of her work in Russia. But she said her colleagues had reassured her that she was welcome.“For my soul, for my heart,” she said, “this has been really important.”In European cultural capitals, the orchestra has been greeted with standing ovations and positive reviews from critics.“A stirring show of Ukrainian defiance,” a review in The Daily Telegraph said of the orchestra’s performance at the Proms, the BBC’s classical music festival. The Guardian wrote of “tears and roars of delight” for the new ensemble.The players got a standing ovation, their first of many on the tour, at their first performance in Warsaw. Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York TimesBut the musicians say the measure of success will not be reviews, but their ability to shine a light on Ukraine and showcase a cultural identity that Russia has tried to erase.Nazarii Stets, 31, a double bass player from Kyiv, has been redoubling his efforts to build a digital library of scores by Ukrainian composers, so their music can be widely downloaded and performed. He plays in the Kyiv Kamerata, a national ensemble devoted to contemporary Ukrainian music.“If we are not fighting for culture,” he said, “then what is the point of fighting?”Wilson, who came up with the idea for the orchestra in March and plans to revive it next summer, said she made a point of featuring Silvestrov’s symphony as a way of promoting Ukrainian culture. Near the end of the piece, the composer wrote a series of breathing sounds for the brass, an effect meant to mimic the last breaths of his wife.Wilson, who dedicated the piece to Ukrainians killed in the war, said she instructed the orchestra to think of the sounds not as death, but as life.“It’s the breath of life, to show that their spirits go on,” she said in an interview.Vikhrova said the tour had brought her closer to her husband and her fellow players. She cries after each performance of the Silvestrov symphony, and when the orchestra plays an arrangement of the Ukrainian national anthem as an encore.“This has connected our hearts,” she said. “We feel part of something bigger than ourselves.”Anna Tsybko contributed reporting. More