More stories

  • in

    Jaap van Zweden Bids Farewell, and Other Classical Highlights

    The Philharmonic’s maestro ends his tenure, Igor Levit comes to Carnegie Hall, and the Metropolitan Opera takes a chance on reviving two recent hits.The New York Philharmonic’s spring gala is not usually of much musical interest. It tends toward mild fare — just enough to keep the donors happy before dinner and dancing.But this year, the playing will draw closer attention. The gala, on April 24, features the only appearance this season by Gustavo Dudamel, the Philharmonic’s next music director. He will take part in the celebration of the orchestra’s education programs, including its signature Young People’s Concerts, which are turning 100.The Philharmonic has been careful not to have its Dudamel-led future step too much on its less starry present. This season also brings the final months of Jaap van Zweden’s brief tenure as music director, which will begin on his favored ground: the classics.A mid-March program of Mozart’s elegant Piano Concerto No. 17 (with Conrad Tao as soloist) and Beethoven’s deathless Fifth Symphony is such a sure audience pleaser that the Philharmonic is confidently giving it four performances, rather than the usual three.Van Zweden led the orchestra in Beethoven’s Fifth in October 2015, a few months before he got the music director job. I wrote then that “conducting this imaginative and playing this varied don’t appear at Geffen Hall every week.” His meticulousness didn’t come off as mannered, as it sometimes does. The inner two movements felt especially inventive, and I’ll be listening for whether the whole thing has the polish and momentum that have tended to elude the orchestra recently.A few days later, van Zweden will turn his attention to the new, as the Philharmonic plays fresh pieces by Tan Dun — a concerto for the principal trombonist, Joseph Alessi, called “Three Muses in Video Game” — and Joel Thompson.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    A Model for Modern ‘Ring’ Operas Is Unfolding in Brussels

    Romeo Castellucci’s production of Wagner’s “Ring” at La Monnaie embodies ideas that the Metropolitan Opera should take note of for its own staging.Before Act II of Romeo Castellucci’s new staging of Wagner’s “Die Walküre,” at La Monnaie in Brussels, a note projected onto the curtain reads: “This production respects animals and takes care of their well-being as a priority.”At a recent performance, the message seemed like a follow-up to the first act, a way to explain the presence of a wolflike dog that stalked Sigmund and Sieglinde like an angel of death. But then the animals kept coming: at least 15 birds, then a horse for each of the nine Valkyries at the start of Act III.The use of animals is impressive on its own. Their entrances, though, are coups de théâtre on top of the already impressive stage magic in this high-risk, high-payoff “Walküre” — the latest installment in Castellucci’s “Ring” cycle at La Monnaie. (“Das Rheingold,” which I watched on video, opened last fall; “Siegfried” premieres in September, followed by “Götterdämmerung” in January.)As the Metropolitan Opera in New York shops around for its own “Ring” production later this decade (basically next week in the industry’s long planning cycles), its leaders might take notes from La Monnaie. Castellucci’s staging is a reminder that spectacle can have substance, that a “Ring” can be both abstract and theatrical and, above all, that an audience can handle intelligence — beliefs that the Met lost sight of with its most recent “Ring.”A bird, one of many used in “Die Walküre,” flying over Bretz, left, and Marie-Nicole Lemieux as Fricka.Monika RittershausCastellucci is an auteurist director who makes the extraordinary seem natural, who conjures surprises that baffle and amaze, sometimes self-indulgently, but often brilliantly. Driven more by imagery than plot, he has been best suited to staging oratorios or concert works like Mozart’s Requiem and Mahler’s Second Symphony. When it was announced that he would direct his first “Ring” in Brussels, there were scattered groans among opera fans who wondered whether his non-narrative style could sustain 15 hours of music.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    A Critic Who Strives to Hit the Right Note

    Zachary Woolfe, the classical music critic for The New York Times, shared how he endeavors to make his writing accessible to both neophytes and experts.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Zachary Woolfe grew up in a musical household. His parents were big fans of Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, and often played their music throughout their Long Island, N.Y., home.So when he, as a teenager, hung a picture of the dramatic soprano Birgit Nilsson above his bed, they were supportive, he said, if a bit confused.“I was a serious cellist from elementary school through high school,” said Mr. Woolfe, 39, the classical music critic for The New York Times. He began taking private lessons when he was about 9 and played in all-county and all-Long Island orchestras, and his love of the genre has only grown.Now, 13 years into a career as a music critic at The Times — he began as a freelance critic in 2011 — Mr. Woolfe has carved out a niche among classical music critics. His goal is to make the genre accessible to readers new to the art form, as well as interesting to aficionados who may be attending their 25th performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.“I think what people are interested in is passion,” Mr. Woolfe said. “Even if you didn’t understand every word, my goal is for you to be drawn into my pieces because you can tell that I really care about what I’m writing about.”In a recent phone conversation, shortly before he attended a performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at New York City’s Carnegie Hall, Mr. Woolfe reflected on the importance of covering classical music across the globe and the future of the genre. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    Met Opera Taps Its Endowment Again to Weather Downturn

    The company has withdrawn nearly $40 million in additional funds from its endowment to cover expenses, but sees signs it may be emerging from its post-pandemic woes.The Metropolitan Opera, still reeling from the disruption brought by the pandemic, said on Thursday that it had withdrawn nearly $40 million in additional emergency funds from its endowment as it works to survive one of the most trying periods in its 141-year history.The move came after the Met took $30 million from its endowment fund last season to help cover operating expenses amid weak ticket sales and a cash shortfall. Nonprofits usually try to avoid drawing down their endowments, which are meant to grow over time while producing investment income. The Met’s endowment fund is now worth about $255 million, down from $309 million in July.“For most people the pandemic is over. For arts institutions, we’re still in it,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “But we see a way out. There is light at the end of the tunnel.”The company pointed to several signs that it may be turning the corner.Paid attendance has risen to about 73 percent so far this season from roughly 63 percent at the same point last season, and is nearly back to what it was just before the pandemic hit. The Met’s Live in HD cinema broadcasts — which contributed more than $15 million to the company’s bottom line before the pandemic, but are currently only breaking even — are beginning to draw larger crowds. And as the Met presents more contemporary opera, it is attracting younger audiences: The average age of single-ticket buyers for in-person performances has fallen to 44 from 50 before the pandemic.The Met expects cash gifts of more than $100 million to help replenish the endowment over the next few years. The company is also working to land a “transformative” gift, Gelb said. He declined to provide details, saying only that he hoped it would come “sooner rather than later.”Gelb said that the Met “obviously can’t make a habit” of dipping into its endowment, but that the withdrawal would help the company while ticket revenues recover and as it waits for expected donations.Victor Ryan Robertson, left, and Will Liverman, right, in Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” a contemporary opera that attracted an audience this season. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Under the extraordinary financial challenges and circumstances that we’re facing we believed it was the prudent thing to do,” he said. “The alternative would be not to perform.”The Met is hardly the only performing arts organization still struggling to emerge from the pandemic. Across the United States, regional theaters are staging fewer shows, giving fewer performances, laying off staff and, in some cases, shutting down. Orchestras and dance and opera companies have in recent months slashed budgets, sold real estate and trimmed their seasons to try to stay afloat.But the Met faces acute challenges. Mounting live opera is expensive, requiring lavish sets, star singers and a much larger orchestra and chorus than the biggest Broadway shows can boast. Inflation has added to the opera company’s burden, with the costs of shipping and materials increasing sharply. And ticket revenues last season from in-person performances and movie-theater broadcasts were down by about $25 million from before the pandemic.In addition to tapping its endowment, the Met said it would institute measures to cut costs and increase revenues that were suggested by Boston Consulting Group, which conducted a study of the company’s operations on a pro bono basis.The Met has already begun giving fewer performances: 194 this season, down from 215 last season. It plans to change its scheduling over the next few years so that each opera has a more condensed run; they currently can have two or three short runs that may be spread out in the fall, winter and spring. Doing so will allow the company, which sometimes presents as many as four different operas in the course of a week, to have fewer operas in rotation at any given moment. And the plans call for scheduling more of the Met’s most popular titles, like Puccini’s “La Bohème,” on weekends, when they tend to bring in substantially more revenue than less familiar works. These changes, along with other cost-cutting measures and more targeted marketing efforts, are expected to net the company about $25 million to $40 million each year.Even before the pandemic, the Met, the largest performing arts organization in the United States, with an annual budget of about $312 million, faced existential questions, as the old model in which subscribers would buy tickets to many productions each year faded.The pandemic, which forced the company to shut down for more than a year and a half, exacerbated those troubles. Many of the Met’s patrons, who are older, stopped attending live performances and cinema broadcasts as frequently, leaving the company looking for new audiences.This season, the Met accelerated its embrace of contemporary works, which have made up a greater share of the repertory in recent seasons.Modern operas have proved over the past few years to be more of a box-office draw on average than the classics. In December, Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” ended an eight-performance run with 78 percent attendance — outselling “La Bohème,” which had 74 percent attendance. Others fared less well: Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking,” which was promoted heavily and given the coveted spot to open the 2023-24 season, ended its nine-performance run in October with 62 percent attendance.Later this season the Met will bring back Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” hoping to replicate their success in earlier seasons, when they drew sellout crowds.Next season, the Met will present four contemporary operas, down from six this season. “Grounded,” about the toll of drone warfare by Jeanine Tesori and George Brant, will open the season in September. John Adams will conduct the Met premiere of his latest opera, “Antony and Cleopatra.” And Heggie’s “Moby Dick” and Osvaldo Golijov’s “Ainadamar” will also be on the agenda.Gelb said he was confident that the Met’s bet on contemporary opera would pay off, adding that ticket sales could surpass prepandemic levels next season. “We’re demonstrating that accessible, new work that is emotionally impactful can be as successful or more successful than revivals of classics,” he said.While works like “La Bohème” and Bizet’s “Carmen” continue to draw crowds, and a holiday version of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” had 87 percent attendance over 13 performances in December, there has been less interest in other staples of the repertory. A nine-performance revival of Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” ended in November with 56 percent attendance; an eight-performance run of Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” with a starry international cast, finished with 64 percent attendance.Gelb said that the company would continue to present an array of classics and revivals: Richard Strauss’s fairy tale opera “Die Frau ohne Schatten,” for one, will be staged in the 2024-25 season.The recent withdrawals have undone some of the Met’s halting attempts to rebuild its endowment, which has long been seen as too small for an institution of its size, and meant that the smaller fund did not benefit as much from the recent stock market rally. The Met, which has been authorized to draw an additional $40 million from the endowment, has withdrawn $36 million so far.Asked if he was concerned about the dwindling endowment, Gelb said: “It’s what keeps me up at night.” He said the latest withdrawals were necessary because the company was “fighting for our survival.”“The endowment is there certainly not to be raided,” he said, “but to be used in a time of crisis rather than going out of business.”Across the country, opera companies of all sizes are still grappling with the effects of the pandemic as they face smaller audiences because of shifting habits and lifestyles, rising costs and the loss of government aid that kept many alive during the pandemic.Opera Philadelphia eliminated five staff positions this season and slashed its budget by about 15 percent. Seattle Opera, seeing a steep drop in subscriptions, has significantly reduced its slate of performances, and Portland Opera recently said it would sell its headquarters to help pay off debt and replenish its endowment. Tulsa Opera scaled back its season, moving some performances to smaller venues. And Syracuse Opera, facing ticket sales that were still more than 40 percent below prepandemic levels and difficulties securing sponsors, announced in November that it was canceling the rest of its season and furloughing staff.“We’re competing with traveling Broadway shows and popular concerts,” said Camille Tisdel, the chair of Syracuse Opera’s board. “Families have only so much money to spend, and during the pandemic, people really got used to being at home.”The Met has so far avoided serious disruptions to its operations. But there are still fears that without a significant infusion of cash in the near future, there could be more turbulence.“I believe ultimately we are going to find a winning path,” Gelb said. “We have very loyal audiences and very loyal new audiences who believe the Met is a thrilling and exciting cultural institution. And ultimately that is how we’re going to fight our way out of this difficult hole that the pandemic has helped put us in.” More

  • in

    The Metropolitan Opera Moves Bizet’s ‘Carmen’ to America

    Starring a magnetic Aigul Akhmetshina, Carrie Cracknell’s lethargic staging updates Bizet’s opera to present-day America.The Metropolitan Opera says its new production of “Carmen” aims at “reinvigorating the classic story.”To that end, the director Carrie Cracknell has updated Bizet’s tale of a heedless, headstrong woman and her tragic fate from early-19th-century Spain to present-day America. It seems that the action has been placed somewhere along the border with Mexico, where guns are smuggled in long-haul trucks and rodeo riders (rather than the libretto’s toreadors) are local celebrities.But this change — intended “to find the relevance to contemporary concerns” in the piece, as Cracknell says in an interview in the program — ends up being little change at all. The bland, lethargic staging, which opened on New Year’s Eve, falls into the pattern of so many of the Met’s updatings: It is, almost gesture for gesture, the same as any extra-stale traditional “Carmen,” just dressed up in cutoff jeans and trucker hats instead of flamenco skirts and castanets.Don’t be fooled. The only truly impressive aspect of this “Carmen” is its Carmen: the 27-year-old mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina, in turquoise cowboy boots. Though this icon of the repertory is her first leading role at the Met, she seems unfazed by the pressure, singing with easily penetrating evenness and clarity, never needing to push. Her molten yet agile tone can be confiding one moment and extroverted the next, and she moves with magnetic naturalness onstage.But she suffers from a staging that lacks passion, wit, depth and variety. Cracknell, who is making her Met debut, describes her directorial approach as “looking through a feminist lens.” Perhaps because harshness or darkness in the title character could be perceived as antifeminist — as Carmen somehow provoking her ex-lover to kill her rather than lose her — Akhmetshina’s take on the part is fundamentally sweet and sincere, well-meaning and fun-loving. Even her seductiveness is gently nonthreatening, with the same old hand-on-hip mannerisms as the Carmens of a century ago.The other leading artists are still more at sea. As the opera’s ingénue, the soprano Angel Blue swings up to excitingly free high notes, but her voice pales a bit and wavers with vibrato lower down — and the production can’t decide whether it wants the standard meek Micaëla or a more assertive woman. As Escamillo, here a selfie-taking rodeo star rather than a bullfighter, the bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen swaggers just enough to remain sympathetic, his sound compactly resonant.Akhmetshina and the tenor Rafael Davila, who played Don José in the production’s New Year’s Eve opening.Ken Howard/Metropolitan OperaOn Sunday, the tenor Rafael Davila had the tough assignment of replacing Piotr Beczala, who was announced as ill just a few hours before curtain, as Don José, the soldier whose mania for Carmen drives him from decent country boy to murderous outlaw. Davila’s sturdy voice grew unreliable as it rose, and in a staging seeking to shift as much moral responsibility as possible onto José, he was, oddly, no more violent or volatile than the norm.The conductor Daniele Rustioni kept to moderate, well-judged tempos, and the train always stayed firmly on the tracks, including precise work by the chorus — although that came at the expense of ferocity and sensuality. In the preludes to the third and fourth acts were glimpses of a wilder, more expansive and more beautiful vision of Bizet’s score.Michael Levine’s sets are grandly spare and unevocative. With a high chain-link fence awkwardly shoving much of the action to a thin strip downstage, the first act takes place outside a factory making weapons, rather than the libretto’s cigarettes. Carmen and her merry band make off with a truck that then dominates the second and — crashed and burning on its side — third act. Skeletal, cagelike black bleachers rotate ominously in the fourth.Modern-day touches abound. Ann Yee’s choreography for a little second-act dance party echoes the finger-pumping-in-the-air style of the crowd at a pop show; the rodeo audience does the wave. Tom Scutt’s costumes are plausible Carhartt-ish evocations of today’s border country denizens; Guy Hoare’s lighting veers wildly, naturalistic to stark to frantic.Yet the 21st-century-ness is all on the surface, even if Cracknell’s goal is nothing less than a revolution in the opera’s sexual dynamics. “Ending violence against women and reimagining the depiction of violence against women,” she says, “live at the center of the feminist movement.”But this “Carmen” reimagines nothing. It seems from her interviews that Cracknell wants to emphasize the broader structures of gender and class that make Carmen’s death a societal tragedy instead of an individual crime of passion. But the director struggles to render that distinction legible to the audience.The bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen, as the rodeo star Escamillo, takes a selfie with Akhmetshina and a crowd.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSure, a security guard walks by during Carmen and José’s final confrontation and doesn’t intervene. And at the end, the women in the bleachers at the rodeo rise in solidarity while the men remain seated. But it’s all too little, too late for anything approaching a structural critique — or even just interesting, vibrant theater.Some of Cracknell’s choices, in fact, make the work less provocative. The children’s chorus mimics the changing of the guard in the opera’s opening act; if you’d like, society is training them for militarism. But rather than doubling down, Cracknell has the kids sing directly to the audience, choosing charm over menace.And it’s wrongheaded to imply, as Cracknell does, that the male chauvinism has been suppressed and the violence romanticized in previous “Carmen” productions. At the Met alone, I remember a performance of an old-fashioned Franco Zeffirelli staging around 2000, a few years after it premiered, in which the deadly final scene really did provide the queasy sensation of spying through a window on a murder, with all the attendant feelings of horror, excitement and shame.Richard Eyre’s production, which replaced the Zeffirelli in 2009 and set the work at the time of the Spanish Civil War, introduced a pervading sense of grimness, of the characters being thrown together by forces beyond their control. That was a show in which you certainly felt Carmen’s brooding fate more than her stereotypical insouciance or sex appeal. It made the stakes of the opera clearer and darker than they were on Sunday.And in removing the opera’s exoticizing of Spain as the playground of bandits and Gypsies, Cracknell, who is British, introduces a more insidious exoticizing. As in the Australian director Simon Stone’s 2022 Met staging of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” the frisson of this “Carmen” is its glib depiction of so-called flyover states — the part of the country that fascinates the operagoing elite as much as Seville fascinated 19th-century Paris.There’s something depressing, even corrosive, in taking such a superficial glance at our fellow Americans, when — especially as an election year dawns — our cultural institutions should be trying to help us understand one another.CarmenThrough Jan. 27, and returning in the spring with a new cast, at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

  • in

    Murder Most Unromantic in a New ‘Carmen’ at the Metropolitan Opera

    A close observer might have noticed the flicker of menace that passed between the man and the woman: how his hand, which had just cupped her cheek, slid down and opened to encircle her throat. But though her body grew still for a moment, it didn’t show fear. Instead, she seemed to give as good as she got during their heated exchange of words that occurs in full view of a crowd — a crowd that appeared to freeze when he grabbed her arm and roughly shoved her, sending her flying to the ground.Domestic abuse is often considered a private problem that happens behind closed doors. On New Year’s Eve, it will take center stage at the Metropolitan Opera in a new production of Bizet’s “Carmen,” conducted by Daniele Rustioni. The opening run stars the Russian mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina in the title role and the tenor Piotr Beczala as José, the soldier whose obsession with Carmen culminates in her murder. The modern-dress production, set near an unspecified border in America, includes scenes like this moment from Act II, rehearsed on a recent afternoon, that aim to shed light on society’s complicity in violence against women.The production’s director, Carrie Cracknell, said she wanted to question the view that Carmen’s death at the hands of José is a crime of passion, the result of her corrupting and discarding an innocent soldier. “We talk about domestic violence as these things which we understand to be a secret between a man and a woman,” she said. In the case of Carmen’s death, she added, “we’re trying to frame that as an outcome that feels as much about gender as about two individuals.”Akhmetshina rehearsing. The production is set not in Andalusia but at an unspecified American border.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe British Cracknell, 43, has made a name for herself in theater with acclaimed productions of works like Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and Euripides’ “Medea” — stories, she said, “about women who find themselves caged by patriarchal structures and cause chaos as a way of dealing with it.” With “Carmen,” her Met debut, she takes on a reliable box office hit, one whose title character — with her teasing, chromatic melodies — came to define operatic sex appeal for generations.But these days the opera also leaves many uncomfortable with its French colonialist fantasies played out in an Andalusia peopled by licentious women and lawless smugglers, a place that risks luring a good man away from duty, family and the churchgoing girl his mother wants him to marry. When José stabs Carmen at the same moment that her new lover triumphs inside the bullfighting arena, it feels as if Bizet is not only killing off a character but restoring the hierarchical order of his time.In recent years, productions have put new spins on this ending. In Cologne, the director Lydia Steier had Carmen wrest back enough agency to kill herself. At the Royal Opera House in London, Barrie Kosky’s androgynous Carmen rose up after her death with a shrug. In a 2018 production in Florence, directed by Leo Muscato, Carmen turned the gun on José and shot him. (That drew disapproving tweets from the future prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni.)The musicologist Susan McClary, who has been publishing studies on class, race and sex in classical music since the early 1990s, said in a video interview that while the tensions in “Carmen” lend themselves to modern interpretation, the music makes the audience complicit in craving the destruction of Carmen and what she represents.“The problem is that final chord, which seems to shout ‘hurrah!’” McClary said. Up until then, she argues, the slippery chromaticism of Carmen’s music has been pitted against the more stable lyricism that characterizes José and Micaëla, the childhood sweetheart sent by his mother to bring him to his senses. At the moment in which the bullfighter triumphs and José moves in for the kill, McClary said, “all of the dissonances that have led up to that in the confrontation between José and Carmen are suddenly resolved in that chord.”Cracknell said of Carmen’s death: “We’re trying to frame that as an outcome that feels as much about gender as about two individuals.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCracknell said that while it is inevitable that audiences feel pulled toward the dramatic resolution of the opera — which here is the death of a woman — she wants to “de-romanticize” Carmen’s death. When women are killed by their intimate partners, “the reality of these things is that they’re chaotic and messy and horrific and that they destroy lives,” she said. “So we’ve tried to replicate that rather than allowing it to feel like a kind of intimate, central moment of transition.”In Akhmetshina, who is making her highly anticipated Met debut, Cracknell has an interpreter who brings deep experience with the work to the stage. At 27, Akhmetshina has already sung the role in so many productions — this is her seventh, and she has plans to star in two more, at London’s Royal Opera House and at Glyndebourne — that she can rattle off a list of different takes on the death scene. In an interview in between rehearsals, she spoke of Carmen as a character who continues to be unsettling.“What is fascinating is that women hate Carmen and men hate Carmen,” Akhmetshina said, still wearing her costume of black leather trousers, a black cutout top and turquoise cowboy boots. “Women because they cannot have the same power, men because they cannot control her.” Even today, she said, “our world is not ready for Carmen. She’s absolutely honest and truthful.”In one production, she said, her character willed José to kill her to put an end to his killing men he was jealous of. In another, she committed suicide in a desperate search for intense feelings. Earlier this season at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, in a staging set among organ traffickers, she joked that she spent so much time “cutting people in pieces” that she was ready to kill Carmen herself. “I was like, ‘just murder her,’” she said, “that’s it. Get rid of her.”Akhmetshina said she identified with Carmen’s outsider perspective and love of freedom. She grew up in a village in Bashkortostan, the daughter of a single mother of three. “Until I moved to the city, I never thought that we were not OK,” she said. “We had a farm and everything was enough.” When she moved to a city, she encountered a different reality — of steep rents and airfares so high, her mother’s salary could barely cover the cost of a flight to Moscow. “The whole structure is built so that people from the small places stay in their place,” she said.A scene from Cracknell’s “Carmen” with Akhmetshina (in blue cowboy boots), who said she identified with Carmen’s outsider perspective and love of freedom.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I needed space, I needed freedom,” Akhmetshina said. “I’m half Tatar, half Bashkir. If you look at the history of these small nations, we were constantly traveling around mountains, the forest, living in small communities that constantly moved around.” Her affinity with Carmen runs deeper than music, she said. “It’s kind of in my blood.”Ethnic difference is not a factor in Cracknell’s production, which instead highlights gender and class tensions. For the choreographer Ann Yee, this was an opportunity to develop dances free of castanets and flamenco clichés. She described Carmen’s allure as connecting more to psychological yearnings than to Orientalist fantasy. “We’ve hooked into this idea of liberation and wildness, about what is on the other side of the journey, the border,” she said in an interview. “It’s this wild appetite that exists in Carmen and which radiates through the people that she is a part of.”Yee said that removing “Carmen” from the Andalusian context also helped to sharpen its feminist message. “If you are looking too hard to situate it in one place, it becomes more difficult to realize that this could happen anywhere.” By the time Carmen meets her death, Yee suggested, “we can all hold ourselves accountable.”“Women are still killed by their partners on an enormous scale in most places in the world,” Cracknell said. “And we are obsessed with that narrative.” In her production, she emphasizes the number of witnesses who watch José’s jealousy turn progressively more menacing without intervening.In the Act III confrontation that results in Carmen being pushed to the floor, not one of her fellow smugglers steps in to help. Instead it is Micaëla, the character Bizet created as Carmen’s opposite and rival, sung here by the soprano Angel Blue, who offers a helping hand. Carmen accepts it, reluctantly, but lets go of it so quickly that she comes to her feet in an embarrassed stumble.Cracknell said it was Blue who had come up with the idea in rehearsal. “Angel just instinctively walked over and helped her up,” she said. “It became this incredible, simple moment of solidarity between these two stepping outside of the trope of two women being pitted against each other and fighting at all costs to win the man. And in that moment, Micaëla’s choice was to support another woman and to see her as a victim in her own right.” More

  • in

    Mildred Miller, Stalwart of the Metropolitan Opera, Dies at 98

    In her 23 years at the Met, she sang with the greatest stars of her day. She had a second career as a leading figure in the artistic life of Pittsburgh.Mildred Miller as Octavian in “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Metropolitan Opera, which was said to be her favorite role. Sedge LeBlanc/The Metropolitan OperaThe mezzo-soprano Mildred Miller Posvar sang opera’s so-called trouser roles so many times that one of her daughters once told a friend, “My mommy is a boy.”Ms. Posvar, known in her professional life as Mildred Miller, was Cherubino in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” a record-breaking 61 times at the Metropolitan Opera House. Her warm, even tone and clear diction became associated indelibly with the composer’s amorous page in the way that Kirsten Flagstad was with Isolde and Feodor Chaliapin with Boris Godunov. She “defined that role for a generation of opera lovers,” Opera News said about her. And there were many other roles as well.Ms. Posvar died on Nov. 29 at her home in Pittsburgh. She was 98.Her death was confirmed by her daughter Lisa Posvar Rossi and by the Metropolitan Opera, where she sang in 338 performances, including the title role in “Carmen,” Suzuki in “Madama Butterfly” and Octavian in “Der Rosenkavalier,” which was said to be her favorite.After her debut at the Met on Nov. 17, 1951, the New York Times critic Noel Straus wrote that she had “scored heavily” as Cherubino and that she had “a handsome magnetic stage presence; a fine, fresh voice expertly produced; and pronounced histrionic ability.”Ms. Miller would go on to perform with the company for another 23 years; her final performance was on Dec. 3, 1974, as Lola in “Cavalleria Rusticana.” In Europe as well as the U.S., she sang with the greatest stars of her day: Nicolai Gedda, Leontyne Price, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and others. She was already broadly known in the U.S. by the end of the 1950s, thanks to appearances on television shows like “Voice of Firestone” and “The Bell Telephone Hour.”Ms. Miller and Lawrence Davidson rehearsing the Met’s production of Gounod’s “Faust” in 1953. She was with the Met from 1951 to 1974.Sam Falk/The New York TimesPerhaps the highlight of her career was the recordings she made of Mahler’s great orchestral song cycles with Bruno Walter, the magisterial conductor who had given the premiere of one of them. Walter handpicked the young Ms. Miller for his 1960 recording of “Das Lied von der Erde,” 49 years after giving the first performance in Munich; afterward, according to the 2001 book “Bruno Walter: A World Elsewhere,” by Erik Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky, he said, “I don’t think we can improve on that.” A 1963 recording she made with Walter of “Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen” won the prestigious Grand Prix du Disque in France.Her reviews were mostly excellent throughout her career, with a few quibbles here and there. “My impression is that she was a really solid singer who sang well and was really important to the company,” said Peter Clark, the former archives director at the Metropolitan Opera. “The kind of solid singer that the Met really depended on. She could sing whatever the Met asked her to.”Ms. Miller also had a second career, as a leading figure in the artistic life of Pittsburgh, which assumed more importance after her retirement from the Met. In 1967 her husband, Wesley Posvar, had become president of the University of Pittsburgh, and 11 years later Ms. Miller founded, with Helen Knox, the Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, now known as the Pittsburgh Festival Opera, which has been notable in the development of emerging opera stars. The company established the Mildred Miller International Voice Competition in 2011.Mildred Müller was born on Dec. 16, 1924, in Cleveland, the daughter of immigrants from Germany, Wilhelm and Elsa Müller. Rudolf Bing, the Met’s imperious general manager, later insisted that she Americanize her surname, given the proximity of the war years. Her father owned a household decorating store in Cleveland and was, she later recalled, “very strict” about her piano practicing.She graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Music in 1946 and from the New England Conservatory of Music, where she studied under the famous midcentury opera conductor and impresario Boris Goldovsky, in 1948. “He taught me to sing and act,” she later said.She made her opera debut at the Tanglewood Music Festival in the American premiere of Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes” under Leonard Bernstein, who she later said conducted with his fists. She was beginning to be noticed.When Mr. Bing contacted her for the Met, she turned him down because she wasn’t satisfied with the role he offered. She later turned him down a second time. It wasn’t until the third try that he snagged her, for the role of Cherubino, which she would go on to make her own.Ms. Miller played so many so-called trouser roles in her career that one of her daughters once told a friend, “My mommy is a boy.”Opera VictoriaHer husband died in 2001. In addition to her daughter Lisa, she is survived by another daughter, Marina Posvar; a son, Wesley William Posvar; seven grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.Ms. Miller also made her mark in the world of lieder. Critics remarked on the naturalness of her diction in German and, as was typical of music criticism at the time, her striking appearance: She “seems to acquire more of the accouterments of glamour with each passing year,” the critic Allen Hughes wrote in The Times in 1966, going on to offer a mild complaint that her lieder recital had “created a hunger for simplicity,” before offering the condescending observation that “one wondered how Miss Miller would sing these songs if she wore a simple sweater and skirt.”All that notwithstanding, he concluded, the “recital was virtually flawless from start to finish.” More

  • in

    Can One of Opera’s Greatest Singers Get Her Voice Back?

    Anita Rachvelishvili was pregnant when she began to lose her voice.It was the middle of 2021. She and her husband had tried for years to conceive, and it seemed like a child would be the storybook ending to being forced to slow down during the pandemic. Rachvelishvili, the Georgian mezzo-soprano, had spent the previous decade crisscrossing the world, blazing through some of the most difficult parts in opera.She made her name with a potent combination of capacious sound and interpretive subtlety. In 2018, Riccardo Muti, the pre-eminent Verdi conductor, called her “without doubt the best Verdi mezzo-soprano today on the planet.” Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager, recently said: “She was the greatest dramatic mezzo-soprano singing. It seemed there was no big, meaty role she couldn’t tackle.”Rachvelishvili sang Carmen, the role of her 2009 breakthrough, hundreds of times, and was scheduled to ring in 2024 as Bizet’s classic antiheroine in the splashy premiere of a new production at the Met.Instead, the show will go on without her. Rachvelishvili, 39, will spend New Year’s Eve at home in Tbilisi, where she was born, as she tries to reconstruct the fundamentals of the voice that brought her stardom and then abandoned her.“It is a nightmare, a total nightmare,” she said over dinner in September at a rustic restaurant nestled in the woods outside the city. “I’ve had two years of nightmare at this point.”Transforming the body and causing sweeping hormonal changes, pregnancy is rarely easy for opera singers, who rely on a carefully calibrated physical apparatus to dependably produce huge waves of unamplified sound. Rachvelishvili had not quite felt herself in the handful of performances she did while she was carrying the baby — her voice, she said, came out “scratchy and strange” — but she assumed things would return to normal after the birth.Lioness: Rachvelishvili at the Tbilisi State Conservatory, where she studied after auditioning with a Whitney Houston song.Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesShe delivered her daughter, Lileana, in late November 2021, and something still felt different, though the lower part of her voice was, if anything, bigger than before. She figured she could handle the low-lying role of Marfa in Mussorgsky’s “Khovanshchina,” which she was to rehearse in Paris just a month later — months sooner than many singers return after giving birth.“It was the worst decision of my life,” she said, sitting alongside Otari Maisuradze, her husband — who became her vocal coach, too, after a rift with her teacher early in her crisis.Over a week of conversations, meals, walks and drives in and around Tbilisi, Rachvelishvili described how rushing back to the stage had helped set off an agonizing dance of one step forward, two steps back. Seeming improvement would be countered by dispiriting nights, and the increased size of her low notes was offset by the sudden disappearance of her high ones. Her once-steady confidence and smooth column of sound were both fractured.“You start having big panic attacks, then you lose control completely,” she said. “Of breath, of body. Everything.”Her husband spoke softly. “She was my lioness,” he said. “I am very proud I have very strong women in my family. But these two years, with this trouble, she became like a little cat.”A VOICE IS A MYSTERIOUS, largely invisible amalgam of body and psyche — of tiny, vibrating vocal cords; muscles that provide support for the breath; cavities through which sound resonates; and the self-belief to fearlessly deploy it all. Problems are inevitable, though the path to overcoming them is uncertain, since medical interventions can be chancy. And talking about them is still stigmatized within the industry, perhaps in part because responses to artists are already so subjective that illness or injury can cloud later evaluation even if the difficulty has been “fixed.”“Every singer, at some point, will have some kind of vocal issue,” said the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, who made an arduous recovery from surgery on her cords earlier in her career. “It’s like football players: Every quarterback has some shoulder issue at some point.”Rachvelishvili warming up with her husband, who has become her vocal coach.Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesMaria Callas couldn’t undo her instrument’s unraveling. In an essay about her, the conductor and critic Will Crutchfield once wrote, “There is no example of an important operatic singer encountering serious vocal problems and returning to form.”That is true, to a point. The tenor Jonas Kaufmann has been open about vocal issues, yet has managed to keep singing challenging parts at a high level. But Rolando Villazón, another 21st-century star tenor, never recovered from his troubles.“Every singer goes through that fear of the high notes, or feeling not really comfortable with your voice,” Rachvelishvili said. “I just need to have this battle with myself, by myself. Nobody else can help me. I need to remember how I was, and how Anita did it.”THOUGH SHE CAME TO OPERA LATE — she sang a Whitney Houston song when she auditioned for conservatory — Rachvelishvili was not merely an intuitive natural talent but also a smart, dedicated musician. She slowly built on a firm technique and stuck to her relatively low signature role as she waited and worked.“I sang Carmen for so many years because I didn’t have easy high notes,” she said. “I took time to learn how to do those notes so that the body knew what it was doing.”Those notes grew stronger without her pushing, and she practiced diligently to incorporate the nuances, colors and seductive soft singing that set her apart from many who shared her repertoire. She sang the wild Azucena in Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” with startling refinement in 2018 at the Met, where her triumphs culminated in a scorching run as the Princesse de Bouillon in Cilea’s “Adriana Lecouvreur” early in 2019.Rachvelishvili and Otari Maisuradze with their daughter, Lileana, who was born in November 2021. Rachvelishvili’s vocal problems began when she was pregnant.Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesHer future seemed limitless. In addition to Azucena and Verdi’s Eboli and Amneris, major roles in “Les Troyens,” “Werther,” “La Favorite” and “La Gioconda” were on the horizon. With her powerful high notes, sumptuous tone and onstage intensity, it seemed that Wagner’s Ortrud, Fricka, Kundry and even Isolde — the province of big-voiced sopranos — might be possible.Then came the pandemic. Rachvelishvili had struggled to get pregnant in the past, but she said that the drastic reduction in travel and stress in 2020, as well as the hormones prescribed by her doctor, helped it happen.Fearful of losing the baby, she was cautious in the early days of the pregnancy, but she sang some performances in mid-2021. Muti said of their concert “Aida” in Italy that summer, “She was able in the past to hold long phrases without any problem, and now going in the high register she had some difficulty.”Still, he added, “you could feel, here and there, the great singer.”When she sang “Khovanshchina” in Paris so soon after giving birth, it was possible, because of the role’s low center of vocal gravity, to believe she was back in her old shape — even if a short excerpt posted by the opera company suggests that her tone had grown more fragile, her vibrato wider, even beyond her high notes.“It was like a completely different body,” Rachvelishvili said, “with a completely different voice.”“It was like a completely different body,” Rachvelishvili said of performing after giving birth, “with a completely different voice.”Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesIn the past, her muscular support had originated down by her pelvis, but that was disrupted by the pregnancy and birth. While she searched for a new approach, her next engagement, “Adriana Lecouvreur” at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in early 2022, was disastrous. The Princesse’s high notes, once easy for her, refused to come. At the premiere, Rachvelishvili fled the theater in despair before her curtain call, something she had never done.“It was the most horrible experience of my life, not being able to sing the way I wanted,” she said. “I couldn’t go out after a performance like that. It’s not the old Anita they’re used to, or I’m used to. I’m not going out; it’s insulting to them, to La Scala.”She canceled the rest of the run, then moved on to Munich, where she had a long rehearsal period before she was supposed to sing her first Didon in Berlioz’s “Les Troyens.” A doctor saw inflammation on her vocal cords; it could have been allergies, acid reflux, a hormonal imbalance or laryngitis, or some combination of those factors.Unable to produce high notes or offer the elegant control of volume and texture for which she was admired, she left before the premiere. She began to lose faith in herself, which set off a vicious cycle with her physical problems.“I said to my therapist that I’d kill myself if it wasn’t for the baby,” she recalled. “I have a baby to take care of.”She was also her family’s breadwinner. Maisuradze had long ago devoted himself to supporting her career, and even star singers are freelancers.“The responsibility is huge, because everybody depends on me working,” she said. “I have my parents to take care of, and my family, and the baby. People said that if I couldn’t sing, I should just stop. And I said, ‘Will you feed my family if I stop?’ I have to at least try and try and try. I need to bring some money to the table.”But in summer 2022, she had to drop “Cavalleria Rusticana” in London and “Aida” in Salzburg before they opened. Leaving the “Aida,” Rachvelishvili released a statement citing back pain after the birth of her daughter and asking “all haters and even some colleagues” to “please stop inventing stories about me losing my voice or nonsense like this.”She retreated to Tbilisi to work. And early in fall 2022, she was able to creditably sing the generally low Dalila in Saint-Saëns’s “Samson et Dalila” in Naples, though her high notes were still problematic.“I said to my therapist that I’d kill myself if it wasn’t for the baby,” Rachvelishvili recalled. “I have a baby to take care of.”Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesThe tenor Brian Jagde, her co-star in that “Samson” and several other productions during this period, sometimes went so far as to anchor her during scenes with a hand at her waist, to lend the lower muscular support that she no longer felt internally.“There’s nothing harder to watch than a person onstage with you that you believe in so much, and she’s struggling,” he said. “There were clear signs the top wasn’t working like she wanted it to, and she was working desperately to make it work. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t.”She canceled a fall run of Verdi’s “Don Carlo” at the Met, but arrived there to sing “Aida” in December. Rachvelishvili thought the first performance went passably, but the company’s administration disagreed.“It was obvious that she was not the same singer — at least temporarily not the same singer — who had conquered our stage so brilliantly up to that point,” Gelb said, and he decided to remove her from the coming “Carmen” and a solo recital that was to have taken place earlier this month.“I had a painful discussion with her in my office, because I wanted her to hear it from me,” he said. “I said that we needed to wait until she was back singing well again, and then we’d be happy to have her return. She had a hard time accepting that.”EARLY THIS YEAR, RACHVELISHVILI was able to get through another “Samson,” in Berlin, and a new role, Charlotte in Massenet’s “Werther,” in Athens, with her body feeling more dependable. But when she returned to Munich in the spring for “Aida,” she began having terrifying panic attacks onstage, paralyzed by fear of the high notes, and left after four of eight performances.“She’s such a tough character, but she’s human,” Jagde said. “That was what I saw progress for her in a negative way: less belief in herself because of what was happening. The physical affected the mental for her.”“On 50 seconds, we are working two or three days,” Maisuradze said of Rachvelishvili’s practice routine. “They must be beautiful, the voice and colors, and stylistically true.”Daro Sulakauri for The New York TimesDropping out of all her engagements after early June, she had minor surgeries for stomach problems and to lessen the effects of acid reflux, and another procedure to remove what she said was a small polyp on her vocal cords. Since then, she has been at home in Tbilisi with her husband and daughter. Lileana, she said, is “worth everything. She’s even worth never singing again.”But she still hopes she can have both. Rachvelishvili and Maisuradze have been painstakingly reviewing her instrument and technique, going through scores phrase by phrase and restitching together her different registers, returning to the basics.“On 50 seconds, we are working two or three days,” Maisuradze said. “They must be beautiful, the voice and colors, and stylistically true.”Of her high register, Rachvelishvili said this month: “It’s not as perfect as I want, or as I had it a few years ago, honestly. But it’s much easier; it’s there; it’s not difficult anymore to take them.”The clock is ticking: A new role, Laura in Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda,” is scheduled for April in Naples, before a revival of “Aida” in Munich. Noting her voice’s solid technical foundation, Muti was optimistic.“She is young,” he said, “so she will come back. We are waiting with great enthusiasm.”Rachvelishvili has fought her panic with therapy, antidepressants and meditation, but it still lurks. “All the physical problems, the vocal problems, are gone,” she said. “Right now, I’m just battling with myself and my head to make sure that when I go onstage soon, I will feel calm inside. The joy of being back is so big that it overtakes me sometimes.”She described a recent video call with her manager. “I was doing a high note in Dalila’s second aria,” she said, “and he stopped me: ‘I see the fear in your eyes. Don’t be afraid, just go for it. You can do it without fear in you.’ And I did it, and it was perfect.” More