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      Met Opera to Mandate Booster Shots for Staff and Audiences

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      It is the first major performing arts institution to require boosters, as concern mounts over rising coronavirus cases and the spread of the Omicron variant. The rule will take effect Jan. 17.The Metropolitan Opera announced Wednesday that it would require all eligible adult employees and audience members to get Covid booster shots in order to enter the opera house, making its safety measures stricter than those on Broadway or at other venues.The Met is the first major performing arts organization in the city to announce a booster-shot mandate that will apply to audiences as well as staff members; the new rule will take effect Jan. 17. The policy was announced as concern about rising caseloads and the spread of the Omicron variant is mounting: The average daily number of coronavirus cases in the city has more than doubled over the past two weeks.“We think we should be setting an example,” Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met, said in an interview. “Hopefully we will have an influence on other performing arts companies as well. I think it’s just a matter of time — everyone is going to be doing this.”It is not the first time that performing arts organizations, eager to reassure audiences that they could safely visit theaters, have imposed virus prevention measures that went beyond government mandates. When Broadway theaters announced over the summer that they would require audiences to be vaccinated and masked, it was several days before Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that New York City would impose a vaccine mandate for a variety of indoor spaces, including performing arts venues.Since the Met reopened after losing more than a full season to the pandemic, it has required that staff members and patrons be fully vaccinated to enter the opera house. But Gelb said that it had become “obvious” to him that even stronger safeguards were now necessary.“It’s of paramount importance that the audience members and employees feel safe when they enter the building,” he said. “To me, there is no question — this is the right move.”Since November, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended booster shots — either six months after people receive a second Pfizer or Moderna shot, or two months after a single dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.When the Met’s new rules take effect Jan. 17, people eligible for booster shots will be required to have them to enter the opera house. (There will be a short grace period: People will be allowed in unboosted if the performance falls within two weeks of the date they become eligible for boosters. People who are not yet eligible for their booster shots will still be allowed in.) Inside the opera house, people will be required to wear face masks, except when they are eating or drinking in the limited areas where that is allowed.Met officials said that they reviewed their new policy with leaders of the various unions that represent its workers in advance of Wednesday’s announcement and described the union response to the rules as “very positive.”Len Egert, the national executive director of the American Guild of Musical Artists, said that union officials had determined that at the Met, “boosters are warranted,” and had subsequently bargained to make sure its members’ rights were protected.Adam Krauthamer, the president of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, said his union “applauds the Met’s plan to make vaccine boosters mandatory” and called the move “a necessary step forward to ensure the public’s safety and keep N.Y.C. as a beacon of live performance.”The company has adopted strict safety measures since reopening; in October, choristers wore masks backstage during a performance of “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.” Todd Heisler/The New York TimesIt was not immediately clear whether other arts institutions would follow the Met. Gelb said he had informed the leaders of Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center that the Met would soon be adding a booster-shot mandate.Synneve​ Carlino, a spokeswoman for Carnegie Hall, said late Wednesday afternoon that officials there were “currently looking at boosters, but have not yet put new requirements into place.” The New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center did not immediately say whether they would change their Covid policies. The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4U.S. surpasses 800,000 deaths. More

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      Review: ‘Magic Flute’ Welcomes Children Back to the Met

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      A winning cast opened the company’s holiday season with a trimmed, English-language version of Mozart’s classic.It’s always heartening to see lots of eager children in the audience when the Metropolitan Opera presents its family-friendly version of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” during the holidays.But when the company reopened in September, their return was uncertain. The Met, which since the start of its season has required all who enter to be vaccinated, de facto banned children under 12, who were not eligible for vaccines.When eligibility expanded at the end of October, though, the door was open for kids to come back. And they did on Friday, to Julie Taymor’s fantastical production — trimmed to just under two intermissionless hours and performed in J.D. McClatchy’s snappy English adaptation.The tenor Rolando Villazón as Papageno, a role usually sung by baritones, and the soprano Hera Hyesang Park as Pamina.Karen Almond/Metropolitan OperaThe performance boasted a winning cast and glowing playing from the orchestra, led with elegance and insight by Jane Glover. I’ve long been in the minority in finding Taymor’s stylized, puppet-filled staging overly busy — too inventive for its own good. But the audience applauded each scenic touch and stage trick, including some children near me, though there seemed not that many of them in attendance overall. (The company is also offering an abridged, English-language version of Massenet’s “Cinderella,” which opens on Friday.)From the melting love aria that Prince Tamino sings early on, the tenor Matthew Polenzani — who sang the role at this staging’s premiere in 2004 — was in warm, ardent voice. When the questing Tamino exchanges questions with the Speaker (the robust bass-baritone Patrick Carfizzi), who oversees the entrance to a temple of wisdom, Polenzani’s heated earnestness lent the scene dark intensity. And his English diction was a model of clarity.Pamina, with whom Tamino falls in love, was sung beautifully by the plush-voiced soprano Hera Hyesang Park. Pamina’s mother, the Queen of the Night, was the soprano Kathryn Lewek, who dispatched her florid leaps and super-high notes with fearless brilliance. The powerful bass Morris Robinson made an imposing yet trustworthy Sarastro, the spiritual leader of the temple.In a bold move, the tenor Rolando Villazón sang Papageno, the hapless bird catcher — traditionally a baritone role. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Villazón, a star since the early 2000s, was candid about the vocal troubles and mental setbacks that almost led him to retire in recent years. He said in the interview that he believed his voice was mended. But on Friday, his low range was weak and patchy, and even his higher notes had trouble carrying in the house.Still, he sang honestly and energetically, and brought a charming blend of comedic antics and wistful yearning to his portrayal of this bumptious character who yearns for love — and finds it, eventually, with Papagena, here the sunny soprano Ashley Emerson.On the podium, Glover balanced warmth and brightness, breadth and high spirits, and rightly received an enthusiastic ovation. When she made her Met debut in 2013 in this holiday “Magic Flute,” she was just the third woman to conduct at the company. This current run is her first time back.Glover has worked with the Royal Opera and the Glyndebourne Festival in England, the Berlin State Opera, the Royal Danish Opera and other major houses. Isn’t it time for the Met to utilize her full capabilities?The Magic FluteThrough Jan. 5 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Rolando Villazón Returns to the Met Opera in Mozart's “Magic Flute”

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      Rolando Villazón, a onetime star plagued by vocal issues, is returning to the house after eight years for “The Magic Flute.”It was deep into Julie Taymor’s playful production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” at the Metropolitan Opera. Darkness had fallen onstage; the hero, Prince Tamino, and Papageno, the cheeky bird catcher, were lost.“Papageno,” Matthew Polenzani, who sings Tamino in the abridged, English-language, family-friendly “Flute” that opens the holiday season at the Met on Friday, called out at a recent rehearsal. “Are you still with me?”As he rotated past on a set piece, the tenor Rolando Villazón, wearing Papageno’s lime-green long johns and backward baseball cap, answered in accented English, “I’m right here.”Coming from Villazón, there was a note of defiance in saying that on the Met’s mighty stage. Though he was once one of the company’s brightest young stars, Friday marks his first performance there in eight years. Many — him included — assumed he would never appear at the Met again.Villazón, 49, in rehearsal for “The Magic Flute.” In the mid-2000s he was one of the Met’s brightest rising stars.Jonathan Tichler/Met Opera“We can call it a roller coaster,” Villazón, 49, said in an interview. “A very bumpy career.”Plagued for much of the past 15 years by vocal problems and mental fears, Villazón lost his consistency and his nerve. “Everything fell apart for him,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “At least at the Met. He had some vocal setbacks and disappeared from our radar.”Villazón had reconciled himself to the end of his career, but during the pandemic he stumbled across a new approach to singing — and now believes he isn’t yet finished. Returning to the Met as Papageno, a role almost always sung by a lower voice, might still appear to be an admission of weakness: a tenor losing his high notes and scrambling to the safety of baritone territory.Not so fast.“I’m not a baritone,” Villazón said, noting that Mozart wrote the part for Emanuel Schikaneder, the “Flute” librettist, who was a famed actor and impresario but far from a traditional opera singer. “There are some low notes that aren’t really for a tenor, like B flat. But they’re mostly in the harmony. The lowest when he sings alone is a C, which is very central.”“Everything fell apart for him,” said Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager. “At least at the Met.”George Etheredge for The New York TimesIt’s true, though: When Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, asked him to sing Papageno for a recording in 2018, Villazón at first demurred. “I mean, in terms of the character, I love the character,” he said, “But, of course, baritone role, ta ta ta. …”In other words, people might take his casting as an admission that the voice that had brought him celebrity was in permanent retreat. It was a fear he soon got over.“To be honest,” he said, “it’s been a long time since I am worried about what people think.”This is still a course few would have predicted when he rose, in the early 2000s, as a lyric tenor, boyish and ardent in “La Bohème,” “Rigoletto,” “La Traviata” and “L’Elisir d’Amore” — even if there was always a duskiness to his tone, allowing him to be convincing in, for example, the heavier title role of Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann.” A 2005 profile in The New York Times observed that Villazón was being compared to Plácido Domingo, at whose Operalia competition Villazón got his big break in 1999.“The voice, at this early stage,” the Times profile said, “weighs in on the light side but is tinged like Mr. Domingo’s with the dark shading of a baritone.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}That summer, Villazón and Anna Netrebko, also fast-rising at the time, created a sensation in Willy Decker’s spare, vivid staging of “La Traviata” at the Salzburg Festival in Austria, and were swiftly anointed opera’s next onstage power couple.“He seemed,” Gelb said, “to be the most exciting tenor in 2005, ’06.” In 2007, Villazón and Netrebko were the stars of a gala celebration of the Met’s 40th anniversary at Lincoln Center.George Etheredge for The New York TimesGeorge Etheredge for The New York TimesBut while Netrebko’s career continued to skyrocket, calamity struck Villazón: He began to crack on some high notes, a tenor’s lifeblood. Cancellations piled up, including a Live in HD broadcast of “Lucia di Lammermoor” from the Met alongside Netrebko.A cyst was eventually discovered inside his vocal cords; after a delicate operation in 2009, he couldn’t speak for some time, let alone sing. He gingerly re-emerged on opera and concert stages, including a Met run of “Eugene Onegin” in 2013. (“Despite some initial cautiousness in the first act, in which he sometimes sounded underpowered,” the Times review said, “he sang with confidence and poise.”)“It was for me very important to reestablish myself, to reposition as a tenor,” Villazón said. But the long period of uncertainty and tweaks to his technique had left their mark, and he began to lose confidence in himself and his instrument.“Around 2015, 2016, that’s when I started to develop stage fright, because I was afraid of getting something else,” he said. “I was hitting nine out of 10 high notes. When you are in this business, and at this level, you hit 10 out of 10. They might not be all beautiful, but you hit all of them. If you’re not hitting one of those 10, you start thinking, Is this the one? And then you start hitting eight out of 10, and seven out of 10.”He worked with sports coaches, and tried taking a small amount of anti-anxiety medication before performances. That helped with his fear, but took away the internal fire that he felt fueled his best work.“How do I stop it being hell to go on and perform?” he recalled thinking. He re-embraced the Baroque repertory that he had done earlier in his career under the conductor Emmanuelle Haïm, moving away from the high notes that had turned perilously unreliable. Then he developed what he called “uncomfortable sensations,” even in the middle of his voice.With a breakthrough during the pandemic, Villazón believes he has mastered some of the vocal problems that have plagued him.George Etheredge for The New York TimesIn 2017, 10 years after headlining the Met’s 40th-anniversary gala, Villazón dropped out a few days before his appearance at its 50th. He felt basically done: “I thought, Let me reach 50 and I can call it quits as a singer.”It helped that singing wasn’t all he was doing by that point. He had some success as a television personality, was directing productions and had been named the artistic leader of the Mozartwoche festival in Salzburg. He had even started writing novels.But he wasn’t yet ready to give up performing entirely, and discovered that acid reflux was causing his new round of problems. He had another operation, at the end of 2018, and slowly his vocal steadiness, though not his high notes, came back.Then, practicing during the pandemic, he hit a note — an F — and immediately knew something had shifted in the way he produced sound. Working with coaches, he revised his approach to his voice; even some of his older, higher-flying roles felt possible again.“The way it feels, I’m entering the greatest moment of my career,” he said. “I have no ambitions. I don’t need to achieve, professionally, anything else. It’s all artistic achievements.”So his coming seasons will include Mozart’s Tito and Idomeneo; Edgardo in “Lucia”; even Loge, the trickster fire god in Wagner’s “Das Rheingold,” which Villazón was working on when he had his pandemic breakthrough.“I certainly plan to sit with him and discuss other roles with him,” Gelb said. “I don’t want this to be a drive-by appearance. But it’s up to him, and what he feels comfortable with.”Papageno, then, is hopefully not the beginning of the end for Villazón, but a delightful lark — a part for which he doesn’t feel the need to apologize, and on which he can lavish his fascination with the figure of the clown.“They never lose, they never die, and they never quit,” he said. “The clown goes on.” More

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      N.Y.C. Arts Organizations Awarded $51.4 Million Dollars in Grants

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      The Department of Cultural Affairs is awarding $51.4 million in grants to more than 1,000 nonprofit arts and cultural groups that are seeking to rebound from the pandemic.As New York City’s arts and culture sector seeks to rebound from the economic devastation wrought by the pandemic, the Department of Cultural Affairs announced on Thursday that it would award $51.4 million in grants to more than 1,000 nonprofit arts organizations.The grants, for the 2022 fiscal year, represent the largest-ever allocation for what is known as the Cultural Development Fund. Some of the grants will broadly increase funding for organizations that need a financial shot in the arm; other grants will offer more targeted support of disability arts, language access, arts education and more.Officials also said that a chunk of the money — about $5.1 million — is being sent to more than 650 groups working in underserved communities that were hard hit by the pandemic.“This improved funding will encourage artists, creators and producers across the city to continue to express their insights and stories on their own terms,” Vicki Been, the deputy mayor for housing and economic development, said in a statement.A survey of the effects of the coronavirus commissioned by the Department of Cultural Affairs in the spring of 2020 found that overall, about one in 10 arts organizations thought they would not survive the pandemic. Smaller organizations in particular were some of the hardest hit, according to the survey.Some of the grants, of less than $10,000, have been awarded to small theater companies, choirs and museums. And to further help ensure that modestly sized groups and even individual artists receive a share of the funding, almost $3 million will be given to five local arts councils serving each borough. Those councils, in turn, will distribute the money to local constituents, city officials said.But large organizations will also benefit. Some of the city’s most recognizable arts institutions like the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the 92nd Street Y are among the organizations that will receive some of the largest grants, in excess of $100,000 each.The grants — $45.5 million in mayoral funds and $5.9 million in City Council member items — are part of what officials said was a roughly $230 million annual budget for the Department of Cultural Affairs.“Culture is essential to healthy, vibrant neighborhoods, and there is no recovery for New York City without our cultural community,” Gonzalo Casals, the city’s cultural affairs commissioner, said.Sarah Bahr More

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      Review: ‘Tosca’ Catches Fire at the Met Opera

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      Sondra Radvanovsky and Brian Jagde sing thrillingly, and Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts a superb performance of Puccini’s classic.Sometimes, for reasons no one can fully explain, an opera performance just catches fire. That’s what happened at the Metropolitan Opera on Thursday, when Puccini’s “Tosca” returned.In a fall at the Met that’s been full of momentous new works, intriguing repertory firsts and six-hour epics, this seemed on paper just an ordinary revival of David McVicar’s production. The soprano Sondra Radvanovsky was returning in the title role; the tenor Brian Jagde was appearing at the Met for the second time, singing Cavaradossi; the veteran baritone George Gagnidze (a late replacement for Evgeny Nikitin) was Scarpia; and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, was in the pit.Yet starting with the opening measures, chilling orchestral chords that represent the villainous Scarpia, this performance abounded in crackling energy, sure-paced suspense, romantic reverie and thrilling singing from Radvanovsky and Jagde.It was Nézet-Séguin who seemed to be inspiring these formidable singers and the orchestra. On Monday, the Met announced that he was withdrawing from a January run of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” and taking a nearly four-week sabbatical from his conducting duties, including his directorship of the Philadelphia Orchestra.Nézet-Séguin has been maintaining a busy schedule this fall, including Met runs of two demanding contemporary works, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and “Eurydice”; in the announcement he said he needed some time to “re-energize.” Though it was a concerning decision, and it’s disappointing to lose him for “Figaro,” if taking a short break will allow him to keep summoning the kind of energy he had for “Tosca,” then so be it.He didn’t bring an unusual interpretive approach to Puccini’s familiar score. He simply led a splendid performance: rhythmically crisp, transparent, textured and colorful. While giving singers expressive leeway, he maintained shape and direction and favored slightly brisker than usual pacing. When, in Act I, Cavaradossi, trying to calm his jealous lover’s suspicions, turns to Tosca with a lyrical outpouring that begins their duet, Jagde and Radvanovsky sang with plenty of melting lyricism. Still, what a pleasure it was to hear the music — thanks to Nézet-Séguin’s subtle control — performed with a clear pulse, in a tempo that did not allow for any indulgences.Radvanovsky’s account of the great aria “Vissi d’arte” was at once intensely anguished and surpassingly beautiful, our critic writes.Ken Howard/Metropolitan OperaRadvanovsky was extraordinary. Like Maria Callas, perhaps the 20th century’s defining Tosca, she uses the slightly grainy quality of her sound to exciting dramatic purpose. Her account of the great aria “Vissi d’arte” was at once intensely anguished and surpassingly beautiful. The ovation went on so long it seemed Radvanovsky might be forced to break character and acknowledge it. But not this Tosca. One of the best actresses in opera, she made the character her own with affecting touches — flirtatious and playful one moment, fearful and anguished the next.In Jagde she had a tenor who could match her soaring power. It’s hard to believe that he spent almost 10 years early in his career as a baritone. On Thursday his enormous, vibrant voice was capped by exciting top notes. Now and then I wanted a little more subtlety and elegance. But it’s hard to complain when you have a singer with such a big, beefy instrument.Gagnidze held his own as Scarpia, conveying the character’s malevolence but also his aristocratic disdain. Patrick Carfizzi as the Sacristan, Kevin Short as Angelotti and Tony Stevenson as Spoletta were all excellent.There are just four more performances this month with Radvanovsky, Jagde and Nézet-Séguin. When word gets out, tickets may be scarce.ToscaThrough Dec. 18 with this cast (and in January and March with different artists) at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Met Opera’s Conductor Drops Out of ‘Figaro’

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      Yannick Nézet-Séguin said a nearly four-week break from the podium would allow “time for me to re-energize” after a busy autumn.Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Metropolitan Opera’s music director, will not conduct, as planned, a revival of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” in January, the company announced on Monday evening.Nézet-Séguin will be “taking a brief, almost four-week sabbatical from all conducting duties commencing Dec. 19,” the Met said, and quoted him as adding, “This short break will allow time for me to re-energize as we return in the new year with more inspiring art.”The Philadelphia Orchestra, of which Nézet-Séguin is also music director, announced that Xian Zhang would take over his scheduled concerts on Dec. 31 and Jan. 2, but said that his time off would not affect his appearance with the orchestra at Carnegie Hall on Jan. 11, nor two subsequent weeks of subscription concerts in Philadelphia in January.Nézet-Séguin — who earlier in his career was known for keeping a particularly hectic schedule, and sometimes canceling — is currently in the midst of leading the Met’s run of Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice.” It is the second company premiere he has conducted this fall, after opening the season with Terence Blanchard and Kasi Lemmons’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.”He also led the Met’s forces in outdoor performances of Mahler’s Second Symphony and a nationally telecast version of Verdi’s Requiem for the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, as well as concerts in Philadelphia, at Carnegie and in Montreal, where he is the music director of the Orchestre Métropolitain.He conducts Puccini’s “Tosca” at the Met from Thursday through Dec. 18, as well as a new production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos” that opens on Feb. 28.For the “Figaro” run, which opens on Jan. 8, Nézet-Séguin will be replaced by Daniele Rustioni — who is at the Met to conduct a new production of “Rigoletto” starting New Year’s Eve — and (for the final performance, on Jan. 28) Gareth Morrell. Five more “Figaro” performances scheduled for April will be conducted by James Gaffigan. More

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      ‘I Savor Everything’: A Soprano’s Star Turn at the Met Opera

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      Erin Morley, a fixture at the Met for over a decade, is now singing the title role in “Eurydice.”The soprano Erin Morley is no stranger to the Metropolitan Opera, where she has been a fixture for over a decade. But until now she has never been the face of the company.That changed in recent weeks, as her likeness — blown up to the size of buses and billboards — has promoted her star turn in “Eurydice,” which had its Met premiere on Tuesday.“I feel like I’ll never get used to seeing my face on a billboard,” Morley, 41, said in an interview on Wednesday morning. “It’s definitely been strange to walk by it every day on my way to rehearsal.”Morley sings the title role in the opera, composed by Matthew Aucoin and with a libretto by Sarah Ruhl based on her 2003 play. Eurydice is the heart of this retelling of the classic myth, which premiered at Los Angeles Opera in early 2020. In Ruhl’s conception, she is reunited with her dead father in the underworld and feels ambivalent (at best) about her relationship with history’s greatest musician; she contends with those uncertain feelings in the work’s most substantial aria, “This is what it is to love an artist.”Morley descending to the underworld in a rainy elevator in Mary Zimmerman’s production of “Eurydice.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPeter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, referred to that aria during a speech at the party that followed the premiere. Introducing the cast with generous superlatives, he said: “She’s singing ‘what it means to love an artist.’ But we are learning what it means to love her, the incomparable Erin Morley.”Since her 2008 Met debut, in the anonymous role of a madrigalist in Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut,” Morley has become a scene stealer — comical and absolutely precise in the musical stratosphere as Olympia in Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann”; alluring even while singing offstage as the Forest Bird in Wagner’s “Siegfried”; and a full-bodied lyrical force holding her own alongside Renée Fleming and Elina Garanca as Sophie in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier.” For the Met’s livestreamed At-Home Gala early in the pandemic, she memorably accompanied herself on piano in the bel canto showpiece “Chacun le sait,” from Donizetti’s “La Fille du Régiment.”In an interview, Gelb said that the Met has “a big stake” in her future. Within the next four seasons, she will sing eight different roles, including Pamina in a new staging of Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” and a leading part in a Baroque pastiche the company is developing.Just before the show started on opening night, Morley and some dancers practiced a lift.Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesWaiting backstage for her cue to enter.Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesMorley and Nathan Berg, who plays Eurydice’s father, visible on monitors backstage.Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesWith Orpheus (Joshua Hopkins, far right) and his double (Jakub Jozef Orlinski) in the background, Eurydice reclines in the beach scene that opens the opera.Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesBut first “Eurydice,” which continues at the Met through Dec. 16 and will be broadcast in cinemas on Dec. 4. Still riding the high of opening night, she spoke about preparing for the role, weathering the pandemic and returning to the Met. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.What has your relationship with contemporary opera been?I did a lot of new music when I was in college. I had a lot of composer friends and loved learning their stuff. Since then I’ve done contemporary music but not premieres, and certainly not an opera premiere. A lot of my colleagues have done more new opera than I have. I’ve seen their experience, and how much it fuels them, and I didn’t really get it until now. This is the most exciting thing I’ve ever been a part of.How did the pressure of something new differ from the standard repertory?Both situations have a certain amount of gravity to them. But with this, I felt a sort of responsibility: I’m the first to bring this to the Met, and I’m offering a sort of baseline for people to look at for the years to come.Obviously, there are huge challenges in learning a new piece because there’s no reference for it, and it takes exponentially more time. The first time I talked with Matt was two and a half years ago. He writes very mathematical rhythms. I’ve never had my musicianship so thoroughly questioned; there were days when I felt like I spent 20 minutes on two measures. Part of that is that he writes with the intent of achieving some sort of natural speech rhythms. It comes out sounding quite nice, but it’s time-consuming.Morley has her costume and makeup touched up backstage by Marian Torre, left, and Riyo Mitsui.Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesA fixture at the Met since 2008, she is taking on a title role there for the first time.Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesShe reenters the stage from below, her feet painted a sooty black.Kirsten Luce for The New York Times“There are huge challenges in learning a new piece,” she said, “because there’s no reference for it.”Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesYou’ve been singing with the Met for a while, but how does it feel to be on posters and playbills?I started with the Met in their young artist program. Coming out of that, it’s a hard bridge to fully fledged professional, and the Met offered me a lot of those bridges. It’s kind of beautiful and satisfying to take your audience on a journey with you, and know that the people who saw me in “Eurydice” also saw me in “Manon Lescaut.”Seeing the billboards, I feel a certain responsibility to carry the show, to bring people into the theater and celebrate this moment that the Met is having. Sometimes that’s a lot to take on. But it really fueled me put that much more energy into it.A real highlight of the Met’s At-Home Gala was you accompanying yourself.It was satisfying and beautiful to be able to revisit my identity as a pianist. I was an accompanist for quite a while, and I didn’t realized how much I’d missed that. It was, however, dissatisfying to not be collaborating with anyone. It was extremely exciting to watch and be a part of that experience, but it was so sad to just be alone.We were all so nervous that day. My husband took our kids to the park when I went on, because there was nowhere to go. They came back after I finished, and my daughter said, “Mom, you missed a note.” Which I had.Morley takes in the applause at her curtain call after the show.Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesEmbracing a castmate after the curtain fell, with Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, at left.Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesBut you seemed so carefree, not nervous at all. And you landed that — what is the high note in “Chacun le sait”?It’s a high F at the end. This is why I’m a performer. I respond to adrenaline pretty well. I was really high on nerves that day. And I had missed that. I missed adrenaline so much during the pandemic that I went skydiving. I remember feeling after it was over: It was the exact same experience as having a performance onstage at the Met.What was it like returning, finally, to the Met?About a year ago I did a photo shoot in the Met for Town & Country with Angel Blue, Isabel Leonard and Peter. And it was totally eerie to be in the building with all the lights off and nobody there. It was just so profoundly depressing.Then coming into the house for my first “Eurydice” rehearsal — it was almost too much for my heart to hold. It was a beautiful reunion, but it was also tinged with a little sadness because we’ve all been through so much. Everybody seems changed; I give 10 percent, 20 percent more to my projects now because I just don’t know if I’m ever going to have it again. It was so hard to lose it during the pandemic, that I savor everything so much more now. More

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      Review: The Met Opera’s ‘Eurydice’ Tries to Raise the Dead

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      The composer Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s teeming, wearying adaptation of her play is a contemporary vision of the Orpheus myth.What does it sound like when you’re dead?“There are strange high-pitched noises,” a character in Sarah Ruhl’s play “Eurydice” writes to his daughter, who is still in the land of the living, “like a teakettle always boiling over.”Slippery, curdling tones, as if you were hearing sour milk being poured, score our first visit to the underworld in Ruhl and the composer Matthew Aucoin’s teeming, wearying adaptation of the 2003 play, which had its Metropolitan Opera premiere on Tuesday.Ruhl and Aucoin’s ambition, to offer a contemporary vision of the story of Orpheus and his attempt to rescue his wife from oblivion, resonates to the very origins of this art form. Jacopo Peri’s “Euridice,” from 1600, is the earliest surviving opera, and Claudio Monteverdi’s “Orfeo,” written a few years later, is the earliest still regularly performed. Orpheus operas clutter the next four centuries; Luigi Rossi’s gorgeous 1647 version had a rare production at the Juilliard School earlier this month.In Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s opera, the recently dead are overseen by three stones (from left, Chad Shelton, Ronnita Miller and Stacey Tappan).Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt’s not surprising that a tale about the greatest musician in history, a man who could make the very stones weep when he performed, keeps appealing to his descendants. The scenario offers composers a wedding party, a tragic death, an evocation of what lies beyond, an attempt at resurrection, a plangent lament — opportunities to shine, and to place themselves in a grand tradition.Aucoin, 31, doesn’t shy from taking on this lineage. His score is massive and assertive, but agile; it keeps moving, endlessly eclectic, but unified by a muscular grip on the pace, and played with tireless vitality by the Met Orchestra under the company’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.The sheer scale of Aucoin’s music is luxurious, but it never luxuriates for long, always rushing on to the next, different thing — as if, for all its splendor, it was afraid of losing our attention. A pummeling restlessness that evokes John Adams shares the manuscript with softly glistening bells; a riff on elevator-music bossa nova, with batteries of raucous percussion.The dancing at Orpheus and Eurydice’s wedding, a hint of pop music glimpsed through ominous shadows, is a little jewel. Hades, the god of the underworld who tempts her to her destruction, is a screechingly high tenor (here Barry Banks, relishing the extremity).Morley, with Hopkins, is the focus far more than in most operas about the Orpheus myth.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOrpheus (the baritone Joshua Hopkins) has a double (the countertenor Jakub Jozef Orlinski, in his Met debut). Down in hell, the recently dead are overseen by a trio of those weeping stones (Ronnita Miller, Chad Shelton and Stacey Tappan, all vivid). Unlike in most Orpheus operas, the main aria here goes to Eurydice (the soprano Erin Morley), gently bemoaning the pain of loving an artist: “Inside his head there is always something more beautiful.” Near the end, an effusion of Puccinian warmth yields to yet more punchy percussion, then a fanfaring pastiche of the Handelian Baroque before the work’s grimly quiet conclusion. A chorus chants offstage.It’s all a lot; it can feel like too much. Plain-spoken yet poetic, Ruhl’s play is the kind in which a scene is devoted simply to Eurydice’s father creating a room for her out of string — about the most heartbreakingly delicate act you can imagine. But Aucoin gives the sequence an orchestral accompaniment of Wagnerian grandeur, rising to a pitched climax, as if the father had just built Valhalla.And not long before that passage comes a similarly jarring instrumental interlude with the bruising intensity of something out of Berg’s “Wozzeck.” Later, as Orpheus emerges from the underworld — instructed, sigh, not to look back at his wife, who’s following him — a cacophony of drumming and brass makes the moment feel less appropriately dramatic than simply bullied.Opera feeds on too-muchness, of course, and the Orpheus myth is life-or-death stuff, not undeserving of big, fervent music. But given Ruhl’s winsome treatment, the resulting sensation is of Aucoin’s music swamping the story, rather than guiding and being guided by it. You take in the plot, but feel too overwhelmed to feel.A surfeit of scoring was also a problem in Aucoin’s last opera, the turgid “Crossing” (2015), about Walt Whitman during the Civil War. He wrote that libretto; thanks to Ruhl’s lucidity, “Eurydice,” first heard in February 2020 at Los Angeles Opera, is a clearer, stronger work. Her play, written a few years after her father’s death, added a twist, grafting onto the traditional myth a story about a parent and child grieving their distance.Hades (Barry Banks, relishing the part’s screechingly high tenor range) tempts Eurydice to her doom.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis structure puts much more focus than usual on Eurydice, the conjunction of these romantic and familial strands. But at the Met there is a misty blank at the center of the work: Morley, in a role that dominates the music and action, has a voice that is poised and precise — and so slender as to be almost inaudible for much of the opera. (Aucoin’s dense scoring doesn’t help, but she has problems being heard even in transparent moments.) There are artists with small instruments that nevertheless penetrate the vast Met; Morley’s does only in its highest notes.As a result, we never feel sufficiently compelled by her; it’s a reminder that the emotional impact of operatic characters emerges from singers’ vocal presences. It is easy to like this Eurydice, her presence sweet yet unsentimental, but it is hard to care about her as much as we must. Her love for Orpheus, her recognition of her father (the sober bass-baritone Nathan Berg), her fear and her maturation — we know these things are happening, but none of them really come to life.Aucoin and Ruhl have interpolated some unnecessary cuteness into a play already tipping toward twee. At the gates of hell, the stones instruct Orpheus not to sing there “unless you sing in a dead language” — so Hopkins and Orlinski duly start intoning Latin, in a parody of medieval plainchant.The countertenor double feels like the kind of idea that gets embraced at a brainstorming session. It’s true, the sound of Orlinski’s luminous voice making a halo around Hopkins’s robust lower lines can be quite pretty.But it’s a muddle figuring out what the double is doing onstage, particularly in Mary Zimmerman’s production, which gives him tiny angel wings but also has him often appear shirtless and brooding. Is he Orpheus’s trainer? His id? His creative side? A clever musical effect ends up clogging the drama. (Coincidentally, Terence Blanchard and Kasi Lemmons’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the Met’s season, also included a baritone’s high-pitched double, but with clearer dramaturgy: a boy soprano representing the main character’s younger self.)Zimmerman’s blandly fantastical “Eurydice” staging efficiently depicts the action — the elevator down to hell; the shower that makes the dead forget their lives; the looming, pocked walls of the underworld — but lacks magic and sparkle. (The stones, monumentally caked gray beings, are charming; Ana Kuzmanic is the costume designer.) One relief: The text is projected as it’s sung onto Daniel Ostling’s set, letting the audience focus fully on the action.“Eurydice” is most moving as a symbol of a shift in the Met’s artistic priorities. If you had said just a few years ago that the company’s music director would be conducting two recent American operas — this and “Fire” — in two months, no one would have believed you. Pandemic reshuffling made that happen, but Nézet-Séguin said in a recent interview that the past year and a half has left him newly committed to maintaining that pace and personally leading a pair of contemporary works each season.Brett Dean and Matthew Jocelyn’s eerie 2017 adaptation of “Hamlet” arrives in the spring. Premieres by Kevin Puts, Missy Mazzoli, Mason Bates, Jeanine Tesori and others are on the horizon, as are overlooked works of the past few decades, like Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.”What a time to be on this side of the underworld.EurydiceThrough Dec. 16 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More