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      Review: In Her Met Debut, a Conductor Leads a Fresh ‘La Bohème’

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      Eun Sun Kim, who recently made history at the San Francisco Opera, had an auspicious arrival at the podium in New York for Puccini’s classic.Giacomo Puccini’s beloved “La Bohème,” with its lyrically rich and deftly written score, has the makings of a surefire opera. Yet the music is full of traps for a conductor, especially when it comes to pacing and rhythmic freedom; give singers too much expressive leeway, and things can easily turn flaccid.Even in a good performance of this well-known staple, it’s hard for a conductor’s work to stand out against the singers’ voices, which usually claim our attention. But on Tuesday, when “Bohème” returned to the Metropolitan Opera — in Franco Zeffirelli’s enduringly popular production, and with an appealing cast in place — the star of the evening was the conductor, Eun Sun Kim, in her Met debut.Last month, Kim made history at the San Francisco Opera as the first woman music director of a major American opera company. And at the Met this week, she did the job with musicianly care, assured technical command, subtlety and imagination. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard Puccini’s score so freshly played.On one level, Kim’s achievement was all in the details. From the opening measures of Act I, set in a cramped garret shared by the story’s struggling artists, Kim took a vibrant tempo held just enough in check to allow for the crisp execution of dotted-note rhythmic figures, sputtering riffs and emphatic syncopations. In the playing she drew from the orchestra, which sounded alert and at its best, she teased out distinct thematic threads while letting skittish, colorful flourishes work their magic and then waft away.Tuesday evening’s Rodolfo, the tenor Charles Castronovo, who sang with beefy sound and a touch of impetuousness, clearly likes to take ample time to deliver ardent melodic phrases. Kim gave him breathing room. Yet she showed that even while following a singer sensitively, a conductor can subtly nudge him along so a line does not go slack.She was equally alert to the characteristics of Anita Hartig, as Mimì, a soprano whose bright voice, even when high-lying phrases had metallic glint, came across with tremulous, affecting vulnerability. Hartig brought a conversational flow to the aria “Mi chiamano Mimì,” stretching one phrase to express a bashful, intimate feeling and slightly rushing another to convey nervousness. Kim kept the orchestra with her every moment, and the entire scene around that aria — the awkward, nervous exchanges between Rodolfo and Mimì as they first meet — had shape and drive.Kim’s way of conveying the structural elements of the score — which is not just a series of dramatic scenes but, in Puccini’s hand, a composition with an overall form — was just as important as her attention to details. Her work in Act III, the emotional core of the opera, was exceptionally fine. Mimì seeks out Rodolfo’s friend Marcello (the robust-voiced baritone Artur Rucinski) at the tavern where he and Musetta (Federica Lombardi, a vivacious soprano) are now living, to share her despair over Rodolfo’s constant jealousy. The singers were intense in their back and forth, but the long, arching melodic lines that hold this scene together are in the orchestra, and Kim brought them out with tautness and full-bodied sound.The whole cast was strong, including the firm yet warm bass-baritone Nicholas Brownlee as Colline and the youthful, spirited baritone Alexander Birch Elliott as Schaunard. There are 14 more performances of “Bohème” this season. The great news is that for all but four of them, Kim will be in the pit.La BohèmeThrough May 27 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Review: ‘Porgy and Bess’ Returns to a New Opera Landscape

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      The Metropolitan Opera’s revival boasts strong performances but raises difficult questions about race and American music.George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” is both easy and impossible to love.Its contradictions may have been captured best in Truman Capote’s “The Muses Are Heard,” his 1956 dispatch from a touring company’s historic stop in the Soviet Union. “Porgy,” he wrote, was like an allergen to Russian officials — its characters erotic, God-fearing and superstitious.But its reflection of America was a different story. “An exploited race at the mercy of Southern whites, poverty-pinched and segregated in the ghetto of Catfish Row,” Capote said, “could not be more agreeably imagined if the Ministry of Culture had assigned one of their own writers to the job.”“Porgy” — which returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Sunday after two years, its performances still exhilarating but its staging still blandly naturalistic — keeps raising questions over its three hours. And after a long pandemic closure, during which the Met, like the rest of the country, took a fresh look at racial inequities, those questions are increasingly difficult to sit with.Just a couple: Does “Porgy,” a leading contender for the Great American Opera, fulfill Antonin Dvorak’s prophecy that this country’s homegrown music would be founded on Black melodies? If so, did the work’s all-white creative team achieve that by exploiting stereotypes?Opera is rife with troubled histories and receptions. Of two works now playing at the Met, Puccini’s “Turandot” is set in a fairy-tale China out of late Romantic Orientalism; Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” ends with a startling paean to German nationalism. Classics like those tend to be defended with a logic that some have applied to “Porgy”: This is an art form that deals in broad strokes and the mythic. Who, then, are Porgy and Bess if not just another pair of star-crossed lovers?The soprano Angel Blue, left, as Bess and the bass-baritone Alfred Walker as a mighty and menacing Crown.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut that argument is on shakier ground with “Porgy” than “Turandot”; Gershwin’s work inevitably carries the baggage of American history. And its characters, mythic or not, can feel like cartoons of Black pain, violence and poverty. Black artists have had vastly divergent responses to the piece, but what James Baldwin called “a white man’s vision of Negro life” has remained ensconced in the repertory, held up by the same institutions that have long overlooked the work of Black composers.There’s no clear resolution to any of the problems that have dogged “Porgy” since its premiere, in 1935. But it is here to stay — a discomfort to be experienced, pondered and managed, not removed. It’s no coincidence that the Met accompanied this production’s debut two years ago with face-saving initiatives like talks, an album celebrating Black artists of its past and an exhibition to match, and the announcement that it would present its first opera by a Black composer. (That work, Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” opened the season in September.)If “Porgy” is the Great American Opera, it is more for its score — an innovative and seamless blend of grand opera, Broadway, and invented spirituals and folk melodies — than for its subject matter. (For that, we have the melting pot milieu of Kurt Weill’s “Street Scene,” the original sin of American greed in Marc Blitzstein’s “Regina” or stateside verismo in William Grant Still’s “Highway 1, U.S.A.,” to name just a few.)And at the Met, James Robinson’s production — a mostly timid, literal presentation of the libretto, by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward and Ira Gershwin — undercuts the defense of “Porgy” as timelessly mythic with its realistic direction and designs (by Michael Yeargan and Catherine Zuber). Even the preshow curtain, a towering photograph of Catfish Row, suggests something documentary. At odds with all this is the stylized and thoroughly modern choreography of Camille A. Brown.Much of the 2019 cast remains intact, including, from left: Latonia Moore as Serena, Eric Owens as Porgy and Denyce Graves as Maria.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut in the pit, the conductor David Robertson made an argument for the triumphs of Gershwin’s score, with stylistic shifts fluid and distinctly articulated. “Porgy” is also one of the great operatic portraits of a community; as such, its true stars are the chorus singers, matching the instrumentalists with vigor and richly textured delivery.As Porgy, the bass-baritone Eric Owens sang with limited power, but imbued each line with dramatic consideration. The soprano Angel Blue’s Bess was one of tragic juxtapositions: luminous in “Oh, the train is at the station” and shattering in the conflicted Act III reprise of “Summertime.” (That standard was first heard, lush and stylishly ornamented, at the start of the opera, sung by Janai Brugger as Clara).Much of the cast remains intact from 2019: Denyce Graves’s caring and comical Maria; Ryan Speedo Green’s mighty Jake; Alfred Walker’s similarly mighty but menacing Crown; Frederick Ballentine’s flamboyant Sportin’ Life; and Latonia Moore’s Serena, this production’s finest pairing of artist and aria in the showstopping “My man’s gone now,” and a commanding comfort in the later “Oh, Doctor Jesus.”Moore, Green and Blue — all Met regulars — come to this revival fresh from “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” As recently as last year, the idea of two operas with exclusively Black ensembles running at the company in the same month would have been fantastical. Thankfully, that’s no longer the case.Porgy and BessThrough Dec. 12 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Review: Wagnerian Comedy Is No Joke in the Met’s ‘Meistersinger’

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      The sprawling opera returned to the Met after seven years, with Antonio Pappano on the podium and an excellent cast.There were swaths of empty seats at the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday evening, when Wagner’s sprawling comedy “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” returned to the house after seven years.Was it the limits on foreign tourists, lifting soon? Persistent fears about the Delta variant, despite a vaccinated and masked audience? More permanent changes to viewership habits, egged on by the pandemic? Wariness about a performance of very Wagnerian, six-hour length?It’s likely all of the above, and more; arts institutions around the country are grumbling about soft ticket sales as they reopen. But whatever the reasons at the Met, it’s a shame: This “Meistersinger” is excellent, a paean to a community joyfully bickering and making music together that touched me deeply in this period of reckoning with all we lacked for a year and a half.A love story intertwined with a song contest, set in a storybook vision of medieval Germany, it brings back to the company after 24 years the eminent conductor Antonio Pappano. He takes on one of the scores most closely associated at the Met with James Levine; the last time someone other than Levine led a run of this opera there was 1985.With Levine in “Meistersinger,” there was grandeur, richness, not heaviness but glowing weight. Pappano, the longtime music director of the Royal Opera House in London, offers a lighter, lither reading, not rushed but evenly flowing, airy even when agitated. From the prelude to the first act — more lyrical than majestic — this was tender, mellow Wagner, most notable in quieter moments: the warm curlicues of the orchestral reactions to the song rules in the first act, the glistening music of nightfall in the second, the hushed prelude to the third.As the cobbler Hans Sachs, the leader of Nuremberg’s guild of tradesmen who moonlight as singing poet “masters,” the baritone Michael Volle is fiercely articulate. He is not the kindly Santa Claus figure often associated with this role, but rather a changeable, ambivalent, even peevish, very human Sachs.Klaus Florian Vogt — the tenor playing Walther, the knight who bursts onto the Nuremberg scene with an innovative approach to songwriting and a crush on the young Eva Pogner — remains one of the oddest major artists in opera. His appeal has been his uncannily pure voice, which, emerging from classically handsome blond looks, gives him an otherworldly quality in otherworldly roles like Wagner’s Lohengrin.But that voice has in recent years been turning more nasal and glassy. While some high notes, particularly toward the opera’s end, sail out like sunshine, and while he’s an effortlessly noble presence, Vogt’s sound is ever more an acquired taste.There are no equivalent quibbles about this revival’s playful, assertive Eva: the soprano Lise Davidsen, whose voice is luminous when soft and startlingly big at full cry. Her soaring embrace of Sachs and sublime start to the quintet that follows in the third act aroused only excitement about the remarkable Met season she is embarking on, with the title role of Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” and Chrysothemis in his “Elektra” to come.The baritone Johannes Martin Kränzle was comically bumbling but sang with straightforward earnestness as Beckmesser, the officious town clerk competing (at least in his own mind) for Eva’s hand in marriage. The resonant bass Georg Zeppenfeld, one of Europe’s finest Wagnerians but an unaccountable absence from the Met over the past decade, was splendidly genial as Veit Pogner, Eva’s father. The tenor Paul Appleby was lively as Sachs’s apprentice, David; the mezzo-soprano Claudia Mahnke made a characterful Met debut as Magdalene, Eva’s attendant; and the bass-baritone Alexander Tsymbalyuk sang with calm consolation as the Night Watchman.It is to Volle’s credit that he doesn’t stint the darkness that suddenly engulfs the piece in its final minutes, when Sachs, trying to persuade the victorious Walther to join the masters, grimly warns of foreign encroachments on the country and its “holy German art.” It’s a call taken up with rally-style fervor by the crowd, and it’s hard not to hear in it premonitions of what was to come in Nuremberg four decades after Wagner’s death.The Met’s utterly literal, quaint staging by Otto Schenk and Günther Schneider-Siemssen, now nearly 30 years old, offers no comment on this notoriously explicit swerve toward chauvinism — nor on the sense many have had that Beckmesser represents Wagner’s antisemitic obsessions, nor on much of anything else beyond the letter of the libretto.But Volle, at least, forces us to reckon with a scene as discomfiting as any in opera — a vivid depiction of the ease with which communal celebration can tip into nationalism, a reminder that even good guys can harbor awful leanings. Sachs’s monologue isn’t a reason not to perform “Die Meistersinger.” It felt on Tuesday, more than ever, a reason it should be seen.Die Meistersinger von NürnbergThrough Nov. 14 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      How ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones’ Brought Step to the Met

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      The opera’s choreographer and co-director, Camille A. Brown, talks about the legacy of the African diaspora and influence of “School Daze” in her dances.Camille A. Brown had a lot of catching up to do. She wasn’t part of the original creative team behind Terence Blanchard’s opera “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” when it was presented in 2019 in St. Louis. But at the Metropolitan Opera, where the production runs through Saturday — the first time a work by a Black composer has been presented there in its 138-year history — her touch is palpable.Clearly, she caught up. And she’s making history, too: Brown, who shares directorial duties with James Robinson, is the first Black artist to direct a Met production. She is also the opera’s choreographer, and as such has brought social dance — step, the percussive form popular at historically Black colleges and universities (H.B.C.U.) — to the Met stage.Opening Act III is a step number that stops the show in its tracks. On opening night, the dancers held their final pose, one foot crossed over the other as sweat poured down their faces. Frozen in a line facing the audience, they tried to control their breathing as the audience clapped and roared. And clapped and roared some more. It lasted for more than a minute, and it was spectacular.When was the last time a dance stopped an opera in its tracks? Brown, a Tony-nominated dance-maker who choreographed “Porgy and Bess” under Robinson’s direction at the Met, has never experienced anything like it.Brown at opening night last month.Krista Schlueter for The New York Times“I was just thrilled,” she said. “I was thrilled for the moment. I was thrilled for social dance. I was thrilled for the dancers onstage that had been working for six weeks to put this show together.”She added: “I feel like the audience — to me — was clapping for several reasons. It was about the dance, but it was about what it meant to see that on the stage. And legacy.”Step and its use of the body as a percussive instrument speaks to the Black experience: When their drums were taken away, enslaved people created rhythm with their bodies. In the opera, step enters the picture when the protagonist, Charles (Will Liverman), is a college student and pledges at the fraternity Kappa Alpha Psi. He also continues to grapple with the experience of having been molested by his older cousin when he was a young boy, seen in flashbacks. (The opera is based on the 2014 memoir by The New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow.)While Act I contains no actual dance, the characters roam the stage with vibrant texture — their everyday, pedestrian movement, both rich and real, is recognizably Brown. Along with the step number, Brown choreographed another major dance, which opens Act II and shows Charles surrounded by dancers slipping in and out of erotic moments. Full of tension and longing, it reveals the character’s state of mind: confused and anguished, yet also intrigued.The baritone Will Liverman surrounded opens surrounded by dancers slipping in and out of erotic moments. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBrown is adept at baring emotion through the body. The dancers, their arms reaching imploringly, move vividly and broadly as if washing the stage with brushstrokes. Later, they transform into trees as Charles sings: “We draw our strength from underneath. We bend, we don’t break. We sway!”As he sings, Charles rounds his body forward in a powerful contraction and opens his arms as he stands straight and ultimately rises above his suffering.In “Fire,” which will be broadcast theatrically on Oct. 23 as part of the Met Live in HD series, Brown displays her choreographic range. “There was the more contemporary dance side, and then there’s the more rhythmical side,” she said. “You don’t get to feel those extremes in one place very often.”And her directorial prowess is only growing. Up next? She directs the Broadway revivalof Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” Recently Brown spoke about her work on “Fire” and honoring her ancestors. What follows are edited excerpts from that conversation.Brown with her co-director, James Robinson, during a rehearsal in August.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesHow did you, as a choreographer and director, envision the opera?When I’m working on a show, and as a director of my company, I always try to find, what is my entry point to the story? I thought about some of my dear friends that had very similar stories, so I entered it in that way.When I first heard about the opera and I found out that there was a fraternity section, I was so excited. There’s an opportunity to do a step dance inside of an opera?Why is it so important to put social dance on the Met stage?We talk about Terence being the first Black composer on the Met stage. And so along with that comes the Black lens and along with that comes Black culture spoken through or danced through the Black lens. And knowing that, at one point in the Met’s history, Black people weren’t allowed to perform on that stage.So you go from that to now: We are doing something that is so rooted in African tradition on the Met stage. That is so powerful. You see the fraternity-sorority, you see the H.B.C.U., but you also see the Juba dance [the African-American percussive form that uses the feet and the hands]. And you see the African diaspora onstage.“We are doing something that is so rooted in African tradition on the Met stage,” Brown said of the fraternity scenes.Jackie Molloy for The New York TimesHow did you put the number together?I was inspired by two movies: “Drumline” and “School Daze.” I’ve always loved “School Daze,” and when this opportunity came about to create the fraternity scene, I thought this needs to be a moment. Yes, Charles is pledging, and he’s going through that experience, but it’s also important, especially being on the Met stage, to show as much as we can of what that whole entire experience is. I want to talk about the dream ballet. Is it OK if I call it that?[Laughs] Yeah, yeah, that’s totally fine.What were you thinking?In any show that I’ve done, there’s always one piece that is really, really hard for me. And that was what you call the dream ballet. The first two weeks of working on it, I was freaking out a little bit because I wasn’t liking what I was doing.What happened?I was talking to my co-director, James Robinson, about the movie “Moonlight” and about how Charles was wrestling with what we are calling phantoms in his dreams — and how they haunted him, but they also enticed him. And so I gave myself a break and eased back on criticizing myself and said, You know what? Just play. Give yourself the space to figure it out.How did “Moonlight” influence you?Just by the beautiful imagery. Just wanting to talk about relationships and the sensitivity, and how does it feel to touch someone for the first time? Feeling like it’s wrong, but wanting to trust that it’s OK.“We talk about Terence being the first Black composer on the Met stage. And so along with that comes the Black lens.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow involved were you in the first act?It may be easy for someone to come in and go, Oh, well, she just did the choreography. But that really wasn’t the case. James and I were both thinking about the molestation scene and how the chorus interacts.Most of the chorus members were also in “Porgy,” so I’d already worked with them. We were talking about how they move because even though they’re technically not dancing, they still are moving. And it’s the 1970s. We looked at some videos and talked: What were the small ways that people walked to indicate the time period?Was Katherine Dunham in your mind throughout this experience?Oh! Why do you ask?Because of your use of social dance and the fact that she choreographed at the Met. And because so much of this opera, at its root, is about the body as a force. It’s urgent. It made me think of your lineage.I always carry her and Pearl Primus and Dianne McIntyre and Marlies Yearby in the space with me. This is a historical moment, but this is also about people who have paved the way for you. It is coming from a deep place — it is coming from the social dance. How can I contribute to that legacy of Black choreographers delving into the African diasporic space? It’s about contributing to the space. When we do what we know, and we show how honest we are with our decisions, that is honoring our ancestors. More

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      Review: The Met’s ‘Turandot,’ Strongly Sung, Garishly Staged

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      Christine Goerke and Yusif Eyvazov star in a revival of Franco Zeffirelli’s production, which adds gaudiness to Puccini’s sophisticated score.By opening its season a few weeks ago with Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the first work by a Black composer in its history, the Metropolitan Opera was attempting to engage with the present moment, in all its roiling complexities.But on Tuesday the old Met, a company of grand tradition and unabashed spectacle, returned with a revival of Puccini’s “Turandot” in Franco Zeffirelli’s glittering, gaudy, opulent, tacky and overwhelmingly popular 1987 production.When this production was last mounted, in the fall of 2019, the lead roles of Turandot, an icy Chinese princess, and Calàf, the prince who seeks to win her love, were sung splendidly by the soprano Christine Goerke and the tenor Yusif Eyvazov. Assuming these demanding parts again on Tuesday, they were even better.But 2019 seems a long time ago. Much has changed since the pandemic forced the closure of cultural institutions around the world, including a wave of anti-Asian hostility that has compelled the arts to re-examine lingering prejudices and racist stereotypes. For some, “Turandot” — not just Zeffirelli’s extravagant production, but the opera itself, set in the fantastical Peking of legend — is an example of the problem. As much as I love the music, and as often as I’ve seen (or put up with) this staging, it was impossible not to view it this time in this context.To hear Puccini’s score as rife with awkward evocations of Asian exotica and stereotypes is, to me, unfair. The story of “Turandot,” which is based on a fairy tale by the 18th-century Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi, prodded Puccini, who had already absorbed elements of Asian music, to explore those sources even further. In the score, he incorporates several Chinese melodies. Like Debussy, who had an epiphany when he attended an 1889 exposition of Asian arts and culture in Paris, Puccini was genuinely excited by Chinese culture. He doesn’t just drop these tunes into this score, but blends them — with nuance and respect — into his own Italianate, 20th-century harmonic language.Goerke sang the daunting aria “In questa reggia” with steely sound and thrilling intensity.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStill, the characters can come off as clichéd or worse. And it’s too easy to dismiss concerns by saying the opera is just a fairy tale, or that Zeffirelli’s production is just an over-the-top costume epic that shouldn’t be taken too seriously.Perhaps the most problematic characters — at least in Zeffirelli’s interpretation — are the trio of royal ministers with names that can make today’s audiences cringe: Ping, Pang and Pong (in this revival, Hyung Yun, Tony Stevenson and Eric Ferring). True to Gozzi, Puccini was evoking stock types out of commedia dell’arte. As the ministers bicker, chatter and fret over the deadly riddles Turandot puts her suitors through, he gives the three ministers much bustling, comedic music to sing. Yet the orchestra keeps needling the vocal lines with jabbing dissonances and modernist harmonic twists, so a sober subtext comes through.And there are stretches when the ministers pine for their homes in the country and yearn for the old times that are some of the most beguiling music in the opera. These ravishing episodes are lush with Impressionist-like harmonic writing and hazy colorings. (You almost hear Puccini saying, “Take that, Debussy!”) The issue is less the score than the production: The Met could rid Zeffirelli’s staging of the mincing, fan-waving antics, allowing the ministers to appear as the sage observers they are.Goerke and Eyvazov sang so well that I was swept up in Puccini’s music during their scenes, despite the silvery extravagance of the imperial palace, here so bright you almost squint. Goerke sang the daunting aria “In questa reggia” with steely sound and thrilling intensity, and, later, soared impressively over the full chorus and orchestra. Eyvazov, an athletic-looking Calàf, had beefy sound and clarion top notes, getting a big ovation for his “Nessun dorma.”Puccini’s score blends Chinese melodies into his Italianate, 20th-century harmonic language, but Zeffirelli’s 1987 staging can feel over-the-top.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe soprano Gabriella Reyes, her voice radiant and rich in vibrato, was an uncommonly strong Liù, the servant in love with Calàf; Timur, Calàf’s father, was the stalwart bass-baritone James Morris, appearing 50 years after his Met debut. The superb Met chorus has Puccini’s score and Zeffirelli’s staging down pat; the singing in the big ensemble scenes was glorious. The conductor Marco Armiliato led a sure-paced and colorful performance.But what is the Met to do with this production, which seems increasingly anachronistic? Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, got burned in 2009 when he replaced Zeffirelli’s grandly realistic production of “Tosca” with a sparer, grimmer staging that was booed at its premiere and, in time, cast aside. This “Turandot” has drawn audiences for decades. But the time may have come for a more probing and restrained take on what is — for me and many others — Puccini’s great final opera.TurandotThrough Nov. 16 (and in the spring with a different cast) at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Jazz and Opera Come Together in ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones’

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      Two critics discuss Terence Blanchard’s “Fire,” the Metropolitan Opera’s first work by a Black composer.“Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the Metropolitan Opera’s season last week, was a milestone: the company’s first work by a Black composer. The music, by Terence Blanchard —  a jazz trumpeter also known for his scores for Spike Lee films — has earned praise from both classical and jazz critics.The New York Times’s chief classical critic Anthony Tommasini described “a compositional voice dominated by lushly chromatic and modal harmonic writing, spiked with jagged rhythms and tart dissonance.” The jazz writer Nate Chinen wrote for NPR that “the smooth deployment of extended jazz harmony, often in breathing, fleeting passages, marks the piece as modern — as does the work of a rhythm section nestled within the orchestra.”The Times sent two more critics to the second performance on Friday. Seth Colter Walls, based on the classical desk, and Giovanni Russonello, who specializes in jazz, have both covered figures who cross with ease between concert halls and jazz clubs. But “Fire,” based on a 2014 memoir by the Times columnist Charles M. Blow, was their first night at the opera together, the spur to an extended discussion.SETH COLTER WALLS As we walked into the Met, you described yourself as an opera neophyte. But as Duke Ellington said, good music is good music. And from our intermission chats, I know we agree that this was a richly enjoyable work. How do you place it within Blanchard’s career?GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO We knew going in that Blanchard’s body of work is one of the broadest and most imposing of any living jazz musician. But I was struck by how many aspects of his past output seemed to come together in “Fire.” He’s one of the rare jazz composers who can load up a piece with rich harmony and real rhythmic pleasure, without feeling the need to tie things up neatly or deliver a clean payoff. That style fed perfectly into the emotional ambivalence that gives this opera its power.WALLS I find that quality to be one of the weapons he offers Spike Lee, who in his films tends to delight in keeping alive ambiguous tension. Blanchard can suture small wings of hope to what otherwise seems a rock of despair, and keep you wondering whether the whole assemblage will rise or fall.Will Liverman, left, and Angel Blue star in “Fire” at the Met.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRUSSONELLO From the opening scene of “Fire,” his diverse palette was put in the service of narrative nuance. As Charles, the main character, speeds down the highway, holding a pistol and a fatal decision in his hands, a distant swing feel wafted up from the pit, propelled by the bassist Matt Brewer and the drummer Jeff Watts, who’s known in jazz circles as Tain. It had the same restless, pushing-forward feeling as many of Blanchard’s small-group jazz compositions. But a drape of violins also hung above, moving in unison with the baritone Will Liverman’s vocal lines — and calling to mind some of those sweeping film scores.WALLS True, though Liverman also sounded a bit swamped by some of that opening brass-and-percussion-heavy writing. But soon after, the subtlety of his singing impressed me. Flintier aspects of his tone dominated during the first act, but then fell away as the night wore on. Even by the time of the “golden buttons” melody in the first act, I think we both were moved by the warmth in his voice.RUSSONELLO And by the gravitas of his duet on that melody with the soprano Angel Blue, who plays three characters: the half-menacing Destiny; the all-too-sympathetic Loneliness; and Greta, with whom he falls in love.Which leads me to another successful element of “Fire” that reflects Blanchard’s roots in the Black musical tradition: the interplay between vocalists, in duets and ensembles. Some of the most rousing moments were not solos but shared performances: When Charles’s mother, Billie (Latonia Moore), sings about her frustrated dreams early in the opera, the chorus is behind her describing the tough conditions of their town, giving her struggles texture and weight. Charles’s brothers’s recurring taunt — “Charles baby, youngest of five” — becomes one of the opera’s most memorable refrains.From left, Blue, Walter Russell III, Latonia Moore and Liverman. One of the opera’s strengths is in the interplay between vocalists in duets and ensembles.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWALLS Following Billie to her job at the meat-preparation plant also turns into a fine group number. And, crucially, there are laugh lines in these and other scenes.RUSSONELLO Group dance performances stood out, too. Act II’s opening ballet sequence and the step-team number in Act III were probably the clearest examples of African diasporic tradition meeting opera convention; in both moments, something sparked.Blanchard has said that, like his first opera, “Champion” (2013), “Fire” is an “opera in jazz.” But like any postmodernist, his understanding of what constitutes jazz is quite open. It can mean wildly extended harmony, blues inflections, odd-metered cadences, unconventional instrumental pairings. With “Fire,” the blueprint was classic Italian opera, but the furniture was these other elements. And magnetic rhythm was a constant throughout.WALLS The cast clearly loved sliding bluesy figurations between passages delivered with operatic vibrato.At the start of Act III, when Charles pledges the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, the step routine drew the night’s longest and most vigorous applause.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRUSSONELLO Blanchard has such a knack for counterintuition: A consequential scene at a blues club begins with the orchestra playing some straightforward blues in the background, but when the bandleader character (Spinner, Charles’s scalawag father, played by Chauncey Packer) gets onstage, he sings something more operatic and complex.WALLS I loved that head-fake from Blanchard. (I also wanted to attend a full set of Spinner’s at that club.)RUSSONELLO Spinner’s “Lord Love the Sinner” is a rapscallion anthem that harks back to Sportin’ Life’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So” in “Porgy and Bess.” Which brings up the question of how “Fire” relates to other works in the American canon that toe the line between blues, jazz and opera — including works by William Grant Still (a favorite composer of yours, Seth) or Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. (What powerful work might they have made with a Met commission?) Were there any major touchstones that jumped out as we took in “Fire”?WALLS Blanchard sounds like Blanchard, which is key. He’s coming out of a folk tradition, like Still. He’s adding ringers from his jazz career to the opera pit, like Anthony Davis and Leroy Jenkins have done. But he’s his own composer. Some piano-led moments made me think of what Jelly Roll Morton, known to riff on Verdi’s “Il Trovatore,” would have done if given a chance to let his New Orleans aesthetic shine forth from the Met stage.Blanchard, holding up his finger, rehearses the jazz ensemble that is embedded in the “Fire” orchestra.Simbarashe Cha for The New York TimesRUSSONELLO It bears noting that New Orleans — Blanchard’s hometown, too — has its own rich (though badly forgotten) history of Black opera. The first opera in the United States was staged there, and in the years between Reconstruction and Jim Crow a number of opera houses featured casts of color. Blanchard’s father, an amateur opera singer, was an inheritor of that tradition; this, in turn, became part of his son’s musical DNA.WALLS That second-act dream-ballet music — perfect for the languid, suggestive dancing that it was paired with — was but one passage suggesting Blanchard’s love for the standard repertory. Yet we haven’t had anything quite like “Fire.” Leonard Bernstein looked at intergenerational trauma amid a distinctly American sound world in “A Quiet Place” — and while I love it, it’s also a notorious problem piece. And “Porgy and Bess” has never really worked as an evening of theater for me. (Great tunes, though.)So my response to this big-budget production was: Finally! Real classical music resources are being used here, for a real exploration of American musical culture. I feel like there’s a huge potential audience for this material — even for people who may not think of themselves as operagoers. (“Fire” will be simulcast to movie theaters on Oct. 23 as part of the Met’s Live in HD program.)RUSSONELLO At the start of Act III, when Charles pledges the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, the step routine drew the night’s longest and most vigorous applause. It tapped into a dance tradition that’s basically unrelated to opera, but was accorded a different kind of power appearing at the Met.WALLS One of the virtues of Kasi Lemmons’s libretto — and what Blanchard does with it — is that we get these sequences that are at are both encomiums to bulwarks of Black life and critiques. Charles’s extended family, his church and his fraternity each play a part in keeping him from telling the truth about being molested by his cousin. The drama and the music keep braiding together pride and frustration, in a way that makes the opera’s conclusion and Charles’s self-acceptance feel truly momentous. More

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      Carlisle Floyd, Whose Operas Spun Fables of the South, Dies at 95

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      His celebrated works drew from the musical traditions of revival meetings and country hoedowns, telling stories of intolerance.Carlisle Floyd, the composer-librettist whose operas explored the passions and prejudices of the South in lyrical tales that drew on rural fundamentalism, the Great Depression, the aftermath of the Civil War and other regional themes, died on Thursday in Tallahassee, Fla. He was 95. His death was announced by his publisher, Boosey & Hawkes.Among the leading 20th-century American opera composers, Mr. Floyd is often cited with Ned Rorem, Philip Glass, John Coolidge Adams, the Italian-American Gian Carlo Menotti, Samuel Barber and others whose works have joined the standard repertory, including George Gershwin, who called his “Porgy and Bess” a folk opera, and Leonard Bernstein, whose “Candide” was an operetta.The son of an itinerant South Carolina preacher, Mr. Floyd grew up with the music of the South: revival meeting hymns, square dance fiddlers, rollicking country hoedowns and folk songs. He wrote them into many of his operas, whose plots were largely derived from classics of literature, featuring social outcasts and narrow-minded neighbors who ostracized them.Mr. Floyd said his exposure to religious bigotry early in life had shaped his operatic themes. “The thing that horrified me already as a child about revival meetings,” he told The New York Times in 1998, “was mass coercion, people being forced to conform to something against their will without ever knowing what they were being asked to confess or receive.”His best-known opera was “Susannah,” based on the Apocrypha story of Susanna and the Elders. Taken from the Book of Daniel to the Tennessee hills and rendered in Smoky Mountain dialect, it portrays a young woman wrongly accused of promiscuity and a traveling preacher who incites a mob, then seduces her. The preacher is slain by her brother, and Susannah stands defiant, holding off the mob with a shotgun.With hymns, square dances and arias simulating folk songs, “Susannah” leapt to national renown at the New York City Opera under Erich Leinsdorf in 1956. It won the New York Music Critics’ Circle Award, was entered at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958 as an outstanding example of American opera, and over the years became a favorite of regional companies, one of the most performed operas of the American musical stage.Other notable Floyd operas included “Of Mice and Men,” his adaptation of John Steinbeck’s story of two tragic migrant farm workers in the Dust Bowl; “Willie Stark,” his treatment of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” about a ruthless politician modeled on Louisiana’s Huey P. Long; and “The Passion of Jonathan Wade,” about a Reconstruction-era love affair destroyed by intolerance and hate.American audiences flocked to regional performances of Mr. Floyd’s work, especially “Susannah” and “Of Mice and Men.” But New York critics were negative about his music, if not his storytelling. In 1999, four decades and some 800 regional performances after it opened, “Susannah” was finally performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Valhalla of grand opera in America.Renee Fleming as Susannah Polk and Samuel Ramey as Olin Blitch in the Met Opera’s 1999 production of “Susannah,” composer Carlisle Floyd’s best-known work.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Amiable, direct, wholly without guile, Carlisle Floyd’s American heroine and the work that bears her name arrived at the halls of grand opera on Wednesday night, looking like some lonely tourist lost in the vastness of Grand Central Terminal,” Bernard Holland wrote in The Times.He added: “The piece is perfect in size and difficulty for the regional opera house or the amateur production, but lesser singing, I suspect, reveals its thinness even more. Mr. Floyd has a nice way with hoedowns, countrified modal melody and drumroll crescendos, but there is amazingly little going on at the musical end of this opera.”Other critics disparaged his operas as narrowly drawn. But Mr. Floyd insisted that his stories reflected larger realities and that his characters — insular people fearful of outsiders and anyone different — were universal. And he scoffed at perceptions of his music as folk opera, implying that its tonal country sounds were naïve.“A lot of critics don’t like to acknowledge that there are no absolutes in taste, which is intensely personal and which governs a composer’s choice of idiom,” he told Opera News in 1999.Mr. Floyd’s “Of Mice and Men,” based on the John Steinbeck novel, at the New York City Opera in 2003. From left: Rod Nelman as George Milton, Anthony Dean Griffey as Lennie Small and Peter Strummer as Candy.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Floyd never sought to join the New York-Northeast musical establishment. He devoted much of his life to teaching, starting at Florida State University in 1947, and over 30 years wrote most of his operas in Tallahassee. From 1976 to 1996, he was a professor at the University of Houston, where he wrote several of his last operas, including “Cold Sassy Tree,” based on a novel by Olive Ann Burns about the romance between an aging widower and a young northerner that scandalizes a small Georgia town.His last opera, “Prince of Players,” was premiered by the Houston Grand Opera in March 2016, months before his 90th birthday, and was performed by the Little Opera Theater of New York at Hunter College in February 2017.Adapted from a Jeffrey Hatcher play (and subsequent 2004 film) about Edward Kynaston, one of the last actors of Restoration England to play female roles, “Prince of Players” centers on Kynaston’s crisis in 1661, when Charles II declares that all female roles on London stages must be played by women.Reviewing the Houston production, Opera News said it revealed “Floyd’s deep understanding and sympathy for issues that pervade our culture today — the complexities and subtleties of gender identity, sexual preference and their social consequences — played out in a story from 17th-century England.”Anthony Tommasini, in a review of the New York production for The Times, said: “It’s miraculous that a composer whose reputation dates to his 1955 ‘Susannah,’ one of the most performed American operas, is still working with assurance and skill.”Carlisle Sessions Floyd was born in Latta, S.C., on June 11, 1926, one of two children of Carlisle and Ida (Fenegan) Floyd. He and his sister, Ermine, were schooled in a succession of South Carolina towns where their father was a Methodist preacher. Their mother nurtured Carlisle’s creative instincts, giving him piano lessons and encouraging him to write short stories.After graduating from high school in North, S.C., he entered Converse College in Spartanburg in 1943. He studied music and piano under the composer Ernst Bacon. In 1945, when Mr. Bacon became director of the music school at Syracuse University, Mr. Floyd followed him there and earned a bachelor’s degree in music in 1946.He began teaching at Florida State and was soon composing. In 1949, he earned a master’s degree at Syracuse. His first two operas sputtered, but “Susannah,” his third, thrived. It opened at Florida State in 1955, and its New York City Opera premiere was hailed a year later. Ronald Eyer, in Tempo, called it an “unadorned story of malice, hypocrisy and tragedy of almost scriptural simplicity.”In 1957, Mr. Floyd married Margery Kay Reeder. She died in 2010. No immediate family members survive.Mr. Floyd’s only non-American subject, an interpretation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” premiered at the Santa Fe Opera in 1958.After a long gestation, “Of Mice and Men” opened at the Seattle Opera in 1970. It was widely performed by regional repertory companies. But when it finally landed at the New York City Opera in 1983, Donal Henahan of The Times said it “failed ultimately because it is a feeble score too dependent on gray declamatory lines and melodramatic clichés of the sort that no longer turn up even in television serials.”Composer/librettist Carlisle Floyd, right, talks with conductor Patrick Summers about the music for Floyd’s upcoming opera “Cold Sassy Tree” during rehearsals Thursday, April 6, 2000, in Houston. “Cold Sassy Tree,” set to open Friday, April 14 in Houston, is Floyd’s latest and perhaps final opera.BRETT COOMER/Associated PressIn 1999, David Gockley, then general director of the Houston Grand Opera and a longtime admirer of Mr. Floyd’s work, told Opera News that New York reviewers were unfair to composers like Mr. Floyd.“Carlisle Floyd is America’s foremost opera composer,” Mr. Gockley was quoted as saying. “If you’re not part of the Northeastern establishment, specifically the New York scene, you have no status. Because Floyd always lived and taught in Florida or Houston, he has been regarded as a regional figure, when in fact he is a national one.”Mr. Floyd, who lived in Tallahassee, received the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush at the White House in 2004. In 2008 he was named, along with the conductor James Levine and the soprano Leontyne Price, as among the first honorees of the National Endowment for the Arts for lifetime achievement in opera.“Falling Up: The Days and Nights of Carlisle Floyd, the Authorized Biography” by Thomas Holliday, was published in 2013. More

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      Review: After a Met Opera Milestone, ‘Boris’ Brings Another

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      The company is performing the terse, original 1869 version of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” for the first time.You may have heard about the widely publicized landmark with which the Metropolitan Opera opened its season on Monday: Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” its first work by a Black composer. Flying under the radar is the less momentous but still significant milestone that followed on Tuesday, when the company finally performed the original 1869 version of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov.”Opera is littered with competing editions and unclear authorial intentions. Does the Giulietta act go before or after the Antonia act in “Les Contes d’Hoffmann”? Do you sing Verdi’s masterpiece in Italian as “Don Carlo,” or — as the Met will do for the first time in its history late this winter — in the original French, as “Don Carlos”?But probably no major work is as vexed as “Boris Godunov.” Mussorgsky had never written an opera when he created this often brusque, raw, darkly sober, oddly spare score about a troubled czar and his troubled country. We’re not entirely sure why it was rejected by the imperial theater directorate, but the main reason may have been a banal one: The piece lacked a major female character.The scene of Boris’s coronation as czar in this revival of the Met’s spare production, new in 2010.Richard Termine for The New York TimesSo Mussorgsky gamely (perhaps even happily) revised, adding material — including Marina, a leading lady of sorts — and taking chunks out; a version of that version premiered in 1874. Then, after Mussorgsky’s death, his friend Rimsky-Korsakov took it upon himself to reorchestrate, rejigger and sometimes recompose the work to make it more colorful and less idiosyncratic. This seems scandalous to us, but without Rimsky “Boris” would never have entered the international repertory early in the 20th century.Over the past 50 years or so, as part of a general vogue for presenting art as its creators envisioned, Rimsky’s glittering interventions fell from grace in favor of Mussorgsky’s starker orchestrations. But his revised, post-1869 version has remained the norm. Or, more precisely, an amalgam: The available options have served as a kind of grab bag, with scenes and passages kept or left out at will, and ordered in various sequences. (That all this is possible speaks to how strange and episodic the work is, as well as to how compelling it remains in almost any form.)It was therefore not unusual that, when the Met’s current production premiered in 2010, it could contain, among other choices, both the act set in Poland (from Mussorgsky’s revised version) and the scene at the Cathedral of St. Basil, which had been cut after 1869. This was a sprawling, two-intermission affair of almost four and a half hours.Maxim Paster, center, and Aleksey Bogdanov, just left behind him, are two of several singers making their Met debuts in this production.Richard Termine for The New York TimesThe 1869 version, still a rarity, runs about half that, in a single act of seven scenes presented at the Met without intermission. (The edition being performed is by Michael Rot.) This is by no means an abbreviated “Boris.” But conducted with cool, efficient clarity and seriousness by Sebastian Weigle, it is certainly a lithe evening, a sour shot of a demanding, easily manipulated populace and the leader that the crowd alternately acclaims and reviles: the title character, privately tormented by guilt at having come to power by murdering the 8-year-old heir to the throne.Lithe, too, is the Met’s nearly set-less staging, which the director, Stephen Wadsworth, took on at the last minute back in 2010 and which works well in this version, allowing for fluid scene changes and reflecting the austerity of Mussorgsky’s original vision. His orchestra acts not as a Wagner-style character in its own right, nor as an melodic interlocutor. (There aren’t many melodies.) Instead, it serves as a propelling undercurrent and atmosphere for exposed vocal lines tailored to the rhythms of Russian speech — anticipating Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” which borrows audibly from “Boris,” and Janacek. Adroitly handled, the technique allows the opera to be talky while flowing ever forward.And this was a cast of sonorous, articulate singing talkers, led by the production’s star from 2010, the bass René Pape, his voice as burnished and secure as ever as Boris. If Pape’s tonal pleasures have often seemed to come at the expense of vivid characterizations — as in his beautiful, bland Gurnemanz in Wagner’s “Parsifal” — he fits the restraint of this conductor, chorus and production.This staging is the occasion for several accomplished Met debuts: the bass Ain Anger, commanding as the monk Pimen, who predicts Boris’s downfall; the tenor David Butt Philip, bright yet brooding as Grigory, who proclaims himself Dmitry, the believed-to-have-been-killed rightful heir to the throne; the baritone Aleksey Bogdanov, firm and forthright as the nobleman Shchelkalov; and the tenor Maxim Paster, bronze-toned and cynical as Prince Shuisky.David Butt Philip (left, against wall) plays a monk pretending to be the heir to the Russian throne who falls in with Varlaam (Ryan Speedo Green, arm raised), a vagrant monk.Richard Termine for The New York TimesThe bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green, the best singer in “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” has equally rich, unforced power here as the drunken monk Varlaam. The mezzo-soprano Tichina Vaughn, as a piquant inn hostess, and the tenor Miles Mykkanen, as the plangent Holy Fool who haunts Boris, are both excellent.Should we prefer the 1869 original? I actually find the revised version’s ending — the angry mob, bent on revolution, is yet again flipped into cowed fervor, this time by the false Dmitry — to be more effective and haunting than the curtain falling on Boris’s death, particularly in Pape’s all too mellow performance here. But I don’t miss the Polish act, which has always seemed a bit out of place in its deployment of operatic conventions. And the work’s general pessimism seems better suited to its original terseness than to more epic scale.My answer — today, at least — is yes.Boris GodunovThrough Oct. 17 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More