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      Review: A Met Opera-Bound ‘Semele’ Takes Its First Bows

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      Claus Guth’s entertaining and often sexy new staging of Handel’s opera-oratorio hybrid in Munich is a coproduction with the Metropolitan Opera.Staging oratorios in the opera house is nearly routine nowadays, especially those by Handel; for every “Agrippina,” you’re likely to get a “Messiah” too.Somewhere in between is “Semele,” a dramatic work that Handel described as “after the manner of an oratorio.” It lends itself both to the concert hall and the opera house, and with a long list of principal characters thrives best with a luxury cast — which it received at the Bavarian State Opera in an entertaining, lucid and often sexy new staging by Claus Guth that premiered on Saturday, a coproduction with the Metropolitan Opera that will eventually travel to New York.That “Semele” has been categorized as an oratorio has more to do with context than form. By the time it premiered at Covent Garden in 1744, Italian operas, which Handel had been composing for decades, were falling out of fashion, and he had moved on to English-language concert works like “Messiah.”In writing “Semele,” Handel and an unknown collaborator adapted William Congreve’s early 18th-century opera libretto of the same name. But rather than present it as a theatrical work, Handel disguised it as an oratorio for the Lenten concert season — even though the secular story, based on Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” wasn’t right for the occasion. There was hardly anything Christian about its brazen eroticism and adultery, or about a god having to explain to his mortal mistress that she needs rest because she doesn’t have his sexual stamina.Handel wasn’t able to have it both ways; “Semele” ran for several performances, then languished until the 20th century. But its resurgence has been richly mined, with musicians and directors continuously inspired by its Epicurean longing and sensuality, its psychological complexity and its timeless treatment of incompatible love — all thoughts and feelings, in Handel’s aria writing, repeated, examined sculpturally and reconsidered with doubt and revelation.From left, Nadezhda Karyazina, Rae and Emily D’Angelo in the production, in which the world of Semele’s fantasies is rendered in shades of black to contrast with the white of reality.Monika RittershausGuth’s production dives into the Semele’s subconscious, her frustrations and fantasies, on the day of her wedding. A reluctant bride, she is first shown posing next her groom, Athamas, before stepping out of a shell-like gown that maintains its shape without her. It’s not the last time that happens; she always seems to be getting into or out of a dress as she drifts between reality and daydream, between accepting her life and rejecting it.During the overture, crisply and briskly articulated in the pit under Gianluca Capuano’s baton, Semele and Athamas are seen posing with friends and family for increasingly cringe-worthy group portraits, their forced smiles as uncomfortably glaring as the enormous floral letters spelling out “LOVE” behind them. Distracted by a black feather — Guth’s nod to the libretto’s depiction of the god Jupiter as an eagle — Semele retreats into her mind, represented by a sudden change in light from bright to dark in Michael Bauer’s design.She imagines breaking out of her wedding’s austerely white, grand room with an ax as she tears a hole into the wall of Michael Levine’s bandshell-like set of a three-sided room enclosed with a ceiling. In doing so, she opens a portal into the world of the gods, where her affair with Jupiter will set off a chain of events that leads to her doom.Here, however, the story isn’t so straightforward. And neither are the performances. A Guth production often demands actorly skill of its singers, and in Munich — at the Prinzregententheater, one of the Bavarian State Opera’s smaller halls — the principal cast members were intimately close to the audience, exposed both visually and musically.No one more so than the soprano Brenda Rae as Semele, who rarely leaves the stage and is given one of the show’s most athletic arias, “Myself I shall adore.” As an actor, she sympathetically traced a downward plunge from hesitation to ecstasy, then harried despair and hollowed catatonia. Musically, however, she struggled to match the challenging score; her voice on Saturday was agile but thin, particularly through runs and ornamentation. Even the soft serenity she achieved in “O sleep, why dost thou leave me?” gave way, on a sustained trill, to a disorientingly jagged warble.As Jupiter, Michael Spyres, too, gave an unsteady account of a difficult role. His instrument remains baffling: immense in its power and remarkable in its baritone-tenor range, but also unwieldy and better suited to the legato phrasing of the famous aria “Where’er you walk” than the more acrobatically breathless “I must with speed amuse her.” At the end of that, though, he impressively joined a high-kicking chorus line choreographed by Ramses Sigl.He wasn’t the only singer given movement onstage. Jakub Jozef Orlinski, the countertenor in the role of Athamas, is also a breakdancer, which Guth spotlights when his character desperately attempts to entertain Semele. Charismatic and handsome, Orlinski stopped the show with the applause his dance earned. But more enchanting was the purity of his sound — sublimely crystalline in “Come, Zephyrs, come” — which blended warmly with the lower end of Athamas’s altolike tessitura.Orlinski, a break dancer beyond the opera house, is made to do so in a scene of his character trying to impress Semele.Monika RittershausThat aria, put in Athamas’s mouth rather than Cupid’s, made for a shattering juxtaposition with Semele’s “O sleep.” Orlinski and Rae sang near, but not at, each other, embodying that painfully familiar feeling of two people expressing themselves yet failing to truly communicate.As Jupiter’s enraged and scheming wife, Juno, the typically mighty but pleasant mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo seemed to have been handed a part not suited to her voice; but with the sprightly soprano Jessica Niles as Iris, she provided much of the show’s levity, through musical delivery and physical comedy. Charming, as well, was the bass-baritone Philippe Sly, his sound focused and vibrant as Semele’s father, Cadmus, and the drowsy Somnus.Among the smaller roles, Nadezhda Karyazina, as Semele’s sister, Ino, was prone to excessive gesture, but found a touching balance of outward emotion and poise in the climactic scene of her stepping in to marry Athamas.By that point, Guth shows Semele as alive, but so deep in her imagination that she can’t find her way back to reality; rather than reduced to ashes by Jupiter’s thunderbolts, she sits in the wedding hall lifeless as the world goes on around her. Semele may be free from the institution of marriage, but the institution endures without her.It’s a bittersweet ending that comes through persuasively and clearly. In that regard, when it reaches New York, Guth’s staging will be a fitting addition to the Met’s current era of many handsome, cosmetically modern productions. More uncertain, though, is how it will scale from the Prinzregententheater — whose seating capacity barely tops 1,100 — to the 3,800-seat Met, a company in desperate need of a second, smaller house.Semele transforms in the final moments from lifelessness to something like rebirth, suggesting that she may be more of a prophet than a mere dreamer. But the change occurs on her face alone; the question, now, is whether Guth can repeat that subtlety at the Met.SemeleThrough July 25 at the Prinzregententheater in Munich; staatsoper.de. More

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      Review: A Composer’s ‘Lear’ Freshens a Shakespeare Evening

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      The Met Orchestra’s season-ending concert at Carnegie Hall featured the premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s “Heath (‘King Lear’ Sketches).”The Metropolitan Opera orchestra’s uneven, season-ending concert at Carnegie Hall on Thursday had a sleepily evergreen theme: Shakespeare.Two standards inspired by the classic pair of star-crossed lovers — Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” Fantasy Overture and Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from “West Side Story” — dominated the program, alongside a brisk account of the final act from Verdi’s “Otello.”But the freshest part of the evening was the shortest: the new, 11-minute “Heath (‘King Lear’ Sketches),” by Matthew Aucoin.Aucoin’s opera “Eurydice,” presented at the Met in 2021, musically overwhelmed a fragile text. With this bit of “Lear,” on the other hand, he has found a subject grand enough to match his sensibility.Yet Aucoin’s restraint in handling these huge forces is one of the most notable things about “Heath,” whose four sections, played without pause, exude a confident, brooding reserve. With tolling bells, grim chords and an uneasy melody, the opening immediately brings to mind Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov,” another tale of a king gone mad.This first section, “The Divided Kingdom,” shows Aucoin’s talent for creating orchestral textures that are simultaneously granitic and flickering, like fast-shifting storm clouds. Sharp snaps of snare drum punctuate a gradual increase in forcefulness to a bleak, expansive landscape of solemn brasses and a droning in the strings, which melts into an almost Tchaikovskian Romantic sweep.A slightly faster second section, named after Lear’s Fool, is pierced by the hard, maniacal playfulness of flutes — hinting at the scores for Kurosawa’s filmed Shakespeare adaptations — before a brief, spare interlude inspired by the blinded Gloucester’s raw regret. The fourth part, “With a Dead March” (the play’s indication for the final mass exit), builds in dense, steady waves before suddenly receding to a subtle, discomfiting yet elegant ending of rustling percussion.Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra, deserves credit for consistently leading this richly gifted composer’s works with both organizations over the past few years. (Aucoin is currently working on an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s “Demons,” planned for the Met.)Despite being clear and energetic on the podium, Nézet-Séguin couldn’t quite whip up the crisp brilliance needed to make the over-familiar Bernstein and Tchaikovsky pieces on the program newly memorable. Neither was slow, exactly, but they nevertheless felt a bit tired and hectically blurred, with hiccups in the horns and trumpets at the end of a long season. The Tchaikovsky lacked the passionate opulence that is this score’s reason for being.The “Otello” finale was originally intended as a vehicle for the veteran soprano Renée Fleming, a superb Desdemona in her day who delivered a tender performance of the opera’s “Ave Maria” during the Met’s livestreamed “At-Home Gala” in April 2020.When she withdrew a few months ago, Fleming was replaced by Angel Blue, a rising star who sang a warm “La Traviata” in March and will be featured by the company in three major roles next season. Blue’s voice and presence are sweet, sincere and straightforward; on Thursday, her upper register was particularly shining (other than an ascent to a slightly off soft A flat at the end of the “Ave Maria”).But there wasn’t the fullness to her tone that would have made her lower music really penetrate. The tenor Russell Thomas was smoothly stentorian if bland as Otello; perhaps, without the journey of the first three acts, this half-hour excerpt is fated to come across as anticlimactic. These are talented singers, but the programming did them no favors.Met OrchestraPerformed on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      How the Head of Inside Broadway Spends His Sundays

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      There is usually a matinee in store for Michael Presser, who is the founder of Inside Broadway.More young people might be tuning into the Tony Awards this weekend thanks to the work of Michael Presser, the founder of Inside Broadway, a nonprofit organization that brings Broadway musicals to New York City schools and New York City schoolchildren to Broadway musicals.What started in the early 1980s as a free ticket program for local students to see “Cats” now reaches 75,000 students in 90 schools every year with its own touring productions and educational programs. Current shows in rotation include “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” “Sophisticated Ladies” and “Free to Be … You and Me.”Mr. Presser, 75, lives in Greenwich Village. Though his organization will turn 41 this year, he is not yet done marking its latest milestone birthday. “Since we work on a fiscal year, we’re still 40 until June 30,” he said. “We’re still celebrating.”QUIET FORMALITY I’m not a morning person, so I absolutely love to have quiet around me in the morning. No TV, no radio, and basically I prefer to settle in with the morning papers and spend a good period of time going through the news of the day. I never lie around in pajamas or athletic clothes. I am formal.“I very much enjoy the plants, and I very much enjoy my gardener who takes care of them. I’m not a horticulturalist.”Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesGREEN SPACE There is a garden connected to my apartment. It’s a lovely place to be on Sunday mornings with the newspapers and tea. I’m not a coffee drinker. I prefer black tea or green tea. Many times when I have guests visit me from outside of New York, they’re fascinated to see a garden in the heart of Manhattan. They assume all New Yorkers live in Times Square. I very much enjoy the plants, and I very much enjoy my gardener who takes care of them. I’m not a horticulturalist.ON THE TELEPHONE I do like to spend a little time in the morning making phone contact with friends and relatives from outside of New York. It’s a very good time to speak with people who are in different time zones. I prefer catching up by phone, because it allows for a more direct and personal exchange. Social media I think tends to be rather superficial.“This particular neighborhood is so rich in history and architecture,” Mr. Presser said of Greenwich Village.Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesA GREAT HONOR I take a weekly walk through the neighborhood. This is something I started doing during the pandemic. Back then I was taking these walks daily. Even though I’ve been here a long time, I very much enjoy Greenwich Village. I think sometimes you maybe take for granted your immediate neighborhood. But this particular neighborhood is so rich in history and architecture. It’s a very special area of New York and I actually consider it a great honor to be a longtime resident.Mr. Presser often stops at Murray’s Bagels on Sixth Avenue. “That is lunch.”Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesPHILLY THROWBACK I always end up stopping for bagels and lox. That’s kind of a Sunday tradition from my childhood in Philadelphia. When I was a boy, one of my uncles used to deliver a bag of bagels and lox to our house every Sunday. It was truly something to look forward to. So I kind of continue it as a fond memory. I’ll stop at Sixth Avenue, Murray’s. I’ll take it home and sit outdoors in the garden. That is lunch.MATINEE Sunday, I feel, is the best day of the week to go to the theater, and I have always loved having a matinee performance to attend. While I do go to many performances during the week, on Sundays I’m well rested and can focus on the performances, something that’s sometimes harder to do during the week. I go to Broadway but also many other kinds of shows, Off Broadway and so on. It’s really wonderful, the wide variety of theater we have here. It’s a good time to sort of take that in. Recently I saw “Kimberly Akimbo” and a brand-new opera at the Metropolitan Opera, “Champion,” and I had a wonderful opportunity to see one of the final performances of “Phantom of the Opera.”“It’s really wonderful, the wide variety of theater we have here.”Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesTAKE ME OUT Sunday during the baseball season is a great time to get out to Yankee Stadium. I always liked baseball as a child, and then I sort of lost interest in it for a rather long time, and I seem to have rediscovered it again. I think it’s a fascinating game; the strategies, the players that have such unique skills. And during the summertime I think it’s a wonderful experience to be outdoors at a baseball game. Yankee Stadium is a real New York institution. I take the subway. All New Yorkers take the subway.Mr. Presser often meets friends for dinner on Sunday evenings. “We do not discuss politics,” he said. “That’s a firm rule.”Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesFIRM RULE We have a sort of gang of friends who meet for dinner on Sunday evenings at the Westway Diner in Hell’s Kitchen. It gives us an opportunity to exchange what we’ve been doing this week, particularly about the world of the arts. We have a lot of strong and interesting opinions, and I always encourage everybody to respect other people’s opinions. For instance, we frequently discuss who performed at the opera or what they saw this week. We do not discuss politics. That’s a firm rule. No politics.TRAVEL RESEARCH After dinner, it’s free time, and what I like to do generally is to plan projects and activities and especially travel I’m going to be doing in the coming months. Because I’m not a beach person, I almost always plan travel around major cosmopolitan cities. I can figure out what theater I might like to see and research key people I might like to meet in the local arts community.LATE-NIGHT STACK I’m an evening person. I can stay up late, until 1 a.m. or sometimes later. It gives me some time for personal reading. I am a great fan of the New York Public Library, which I feel is one of the great privileges of living in New York. I always have a stack of books that I’ve gotten from the library. I prefer biographies and history. One of the nice things about the library is you can borrow a book, and if you don’t like it you can send it right back.Sunday Routine readers can follow Inside Broadway on social media at @Inside_Broadway. More

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      It’s the End of an Era at the Metropolitan Opera

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      As the 2022-23 season ends, the country’s largest performing arts institution looks ahead to a future of fewer titles.The Metropolitan Opera’s 2022-23 season may well have been the end of an era.Since September, the Met, which closes for the summer on Saturday, has put on 22 titles — 23 if you count both stagings of Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” one complete in German and one an English-language holiday abridgment. As a repertory house and the country’s largest performing arts organization, it juggles multiple works at a time. On some weekends, it’s been possible to see four different operas in 48 hours.But is there enough of an audience to fill so many performances in a 4,000-seat theater?Ticket sales have been robust for some new productions, even of contemporary works. But revivals, less obviously newsworthy and less widely promoted, are no longer sure things — especially slightly off-the-beaten-path stuff like Mozart’s “Idomeneo” or Verdi’s “Don Carlo.”In an attempt to make ends meet, the Met has raided its endowment and plans to put on 10 percent fewer performances next season, which will feature just 18 staged operas (six of them written in the past 30 years). The days of being America’s grand repertory company, of 20-plus titles a year, could be slowly entering the rearview mirror.So it was fitting that, last month, the Met said farewell to one of the shows that typified the era that’s ending: its “Aida” from the 1980s. The production was typical Met: hardly cheap but sturdy and flexible, into which you could toss singers with relatively little rehearsal. The company’s model has depended on a core of stagings of the standards like this — ones which could be mounted, and sell well, year after year.If there’s less of a year-after-year opera audience, though, the only solution may be to do less.It’s melancholy to look back on the past season and realize that my two favorite performances were the kind of thing that might go by the wayside in the Met to come. They were revivals of works by no means obscure, but not nearly as famous as, say, “Carmen”: Donizetti’s gentle romantic comedy “L’Elisir d’Amore” and Shostakovich’s ferocious satire-tragedy “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.”From front left, Javier Camarena, Golda Schultz and Davide Luciano in Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore.”Marty Sohl/Metropolitan OperaThis has been the glory of the Met: the love, care, craft and experience that go into works as different as these two — starkly contrasting titles, both presented at the highest level. In “Elisir,” the tenor Javier Camarena and the soprano Golda Schultz were all tenderness, but were lit, as if from within, with a lively spirit by the conductor Michele Gamba, making his company debut.The conductor of “Lady Macbeth,” Keri-Lynn Wilson, was also making her debut, and showed mastery of Shostakovich’s score, which is in a savage, if often eerily beautiful, mode that would have stunned Donizetti.Neither run was nearly a sellout, but the season would been immeasurably more barren without them.The new vision that the company will be pursuing next season has a silver lining in its doubling down on contemporary opera. Sales for recent works have been pretty robust, though it’s unclear whether they’ve done well because people like them or because they’ve tended to be among the splashy, expensively publicized new productions rather than the perennial chestnuts.But even if successful at the box office, the contemporary pieces this season have not been highlights. This spring, “Champion,” a boxing melodrama by Terence Blanchard — who also composed “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the Met’s 2021-22 season — was musically stilted and dramatically stodgy. Last fall, Kevin Puts’s score for “The Hours,” based on the novel and film, was relentlessly, exhaustingly tear-jerking.While Puts’s work was a vehicle for a trio of divas, including Renée Fleming and Kelli O’Hara, the real star was the third: the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato as a brooding but dryly witty Virginia Woolf, her voice mellow yet penetrating.Joyce DiDonato as Virginia Woolf in “The Hours.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHers was one of the performances of the year. Another was the mezzo Samantha Hankey’s alert, youthful Octavian in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier.” Hankey was joined by the Marschallin of the radiant soprano Lise Davidsen, who kept her immense voice carefully restrained for much of this long, talky opera before unleashing its full force in the final minutes.In a clunky new production of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” by the director François Girard, the tenor Piotr Beczala seemed almost to float — utterly assured and elegant in the otherworldly, treacherously exposed title role. This is a singer nearing 60 and doing his best work.But the coup of the year may have been the Met debut of the conductor Nathalie Stutzmann. Leading one new production of a Mozart opera is hard enough, especially as an introduction to the company — but two, simultaneously? And Stutzmann’s work in both Ivo van Hove’s austere “Don Giovanni” and Simon McBurney’s antic “Magic Flute” was superb: lithe but rich, propulsive without being rushed or stinting these scores’ lyricism.How was she repaid? Before “Flute” opened, Stutzmann was quoted in The New York Times remarking that McBurney’s production, which raises the pit almost to stage level, lets the musicians see what’s going on rather than keeping them, as usual, in the “back of a cave” where there’s “nothing more boring.” Jokey and innocuous. But for some reason, the musicians flew to social media and condemned her for accusing them of playing bored.Even worse, the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, rather than standing up for his colleague or trying to resolve the conflict behind the scenes, publicly cheered this unseemly pile-on, adding seven clapping emojis to an Instagram post by the orchestra. He and the musicians should be ashamed of themselves; Stutzmann should be celebrated.Next season, while curtailed, is hardly free of ambition, offering a profusion of recent works and some intriguing repertory pieces, like Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” (not seen at the Met since 2006), Puccini’s “La Rondine” and Wagner’s “Tannhäuser.”This new approach to programming is an experiment. Revivals of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and “The Hours” will test whether contemporary operas have legs beyond their premiere runs, and we’ll see if the trims to the season increase sales for what remains.Hopefully, it all keeps the Met alive and vibrant. But whatever the coming years bring will likely be quite different. It was oddly, sadly appropriate that the veteran soprano Angela Gheorghiu, absent from the company for eight years and set to return for two performances of “Tosca” in April, came down with Covid-19 and had to cancel.This is a new phase, fate seemed to say, and the old divas — at least the ones not named Renée — need not apply. More

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      Kaija Saariaho, Pathbreaking Composer, Is Dead at 70

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      She brought new colors to modernist music, sometimes using electronics, and became the first female living composer to have two operas staged by the Met.Kaija Saariaho, a Finnish composer who was brought up in the world of male-dominated high modernism but who broke away to forge an identity of her own, becoming the first woman to have more than one work of hers staged by the Metropolitan Opera, died on Friday at her home in Paris. She was 70.She had been diagnosed with brain cancer in 2021, said her publisher, Chester Music, which confirmed the death.Ms. Saariaho brought new and often mysterious colors to classical music.In Paris, where she had settled permanently, she experimented with tape and live electronics, which she applied to nearly every form in classical music: works for solo instrument and small ensemble, and for symphony orchestra and opera. Over the years she rose to the top of her field, a slow-changing industry that only in recent years has made steps to correct the repertoire’s gender imbalances.Her first opera, “L’Amour de Loin,” which premiered at the Salzburg Festival in Austria in 2000 and came to the Met in 2016, won the Grawemeyer Award for music composition. Her most recent entry into that genre, “Innocence,” debuted at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France in 2021 and will travel to the Met in the 2025-26 season.When the Met joined the work’s list of commissioners, Ms. Saariaho in turn joined a select group of living composers to have a second opera mounted by that house — and the only woman to gain that distinction.Kaija Saariaho was born on Oct. 14, 1952, in Helsinki. She studied at the storied Sibelius Academy there, and was a pioneering impresario of contemporary music, forming the group Open Ears with fellow young artists. She left to continue her education in Freiburg, Germany, with summer courses taken in the modernist hotbed of Darmstadt. She moved to Paris in 1982 to finish her studies at IRCAM, the institute founded by Pierre Boulez.A complete obituary will appear soon. More

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      Review: Tomasz Konieczny Returns to the Met Opera in ‘Dutchman’

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      After a triumphant house debut in 2019, the bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny brought power and clarity to the title role in “The Flying Dutchman.”On Tuesday night, four years after being hailed as the breakout star of a revival of Wagner’s “Ring” at the Metropolitan Opera, Tomasz Konieczny returned there to headline “Der Fliegende Holländer,” or “The Flying Dutchman.” It was worth the wait.Konieczny’s Dutchman, cursed to ride the seas endlessly in a ghost ship with black masts and red sails, seemed to channel supernatural forces as he emerged from the bowels of François Girard’s unremittingly dark production. Konieczny possesses an instrument of granitic power and brassy resonance, combining the depth of a tuba with the brightly penetrating cast of a trumpet. He can also cover his voice and fill it with pitiful tears. For such a sizable instrument, his attack is astonishingly clean; he inflates a straight tone to a vibrating roar and makes it sound like an exquisite cri de coeur.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, offered the role to Konieczny, a Polish bass-baritone, in 2019 when Gelb heard Konieczny’s company debut as Alberich in the “Ring” that year. Konieczny brought unusual charisma and nobility to the designated villain of Wagner’s epic tetralogy, and his Dutchman is likewise a complex creation.A tragic figure whose stoic demeanor masks a writhing pain within, Konieczny’s Dutchman rises above earthly concerns but rages with focused fury against the ever-fresh torments of his Sisyphean predicament. His invincibility has made him disdainful of humans and desperate for death, and yet he harbors a romanticized fixation upon love. The Dutchman comes ashore once every seven years in search of a woman who can redeem him with her fidelity and break his curse. (Of course, the premise contains passive-aggressive misogyny — that a man in search of a faithful woman is doomed to look for her forever.)As Senta, the woman who returns the apparitional captain’s obsessive attention, Elza van den Heever sang with a ductile soprano. In “Senta’s Ballad,” she catapulted into high-lying phrases with strength and point and drew her voice into a slender thread for beautifully formed pianissimo high notes. As infatuation consumed her, van den Heever summoned the tonal amplitude to fill out Wagner’s portrait of a love that is annihilating in its totality.The clear thrust of Eric Cutler’s tenor gave the role of Erik, Senta’s abandoned lover, unusual poignancy. The bass Dmitry Belosselskiy effectively rendered Daland, Senta’s venal, easily dazzled father, as a strong yet foolish man who would trade his daughter for riches.Girard’s production — like his recent “Lohengrin” — attempts to get a lot of mileage out of a few ideas. It’s long on ambience, with billowing fog and undertones of sickly, hallucinogenic greens, and short on storytelling.Fortunately, the 29-year-old conductor Thomas Guggeis, making his Met debut, added depth to the atmosphere of roiling fantasy. The overture came alive with stormy eddies and pulsating vigor, even as video projections of a maelstrom and cracks of lightning felt redundant. The strings, in particular, found imaginative colors: Their throbbing vitality, unabashed romance and otherworldly shrieks covered the range of a work that swings from bel-canto influences to the enthralling mythmaking that would become Wagner’s signature. There were some missed opportunities — such as the dark timbres that color the Act II duet for Senta and the Dutchman — but overall, Guggeis was a confident, sensitive, decisive presence.At times, Girard’s abstract staging still seems to distrust the material, but kinetic conducting and a richly characterized central performance show that it may simply have been waiting for a few artists to redeem it.Der Fliegende HolländerThrough June 10 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      The Conductor Thomas Guggeis Is Rising Fast After a Surprise Debut

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      Thomas Guggeis was a young repetiteur at the Berlin State Opera five years ago when he was asked a career-changing question: Could he conduct “Salome”?He had worked with the singers, but this new production of Strauss’s opera was meant to be led by the veteran maestro Christoph von Dohnányi — until a dispute with the director led him to back out mere hours before the final dress rehearsal. So Guggeis went on in his place. And he was back in the pit on opening night.“This was a situation of a star is born,” said Bernd Loebe, the general manager of Frankfurt Opera, who saw Guggeis lead that performance.It wouldn’t be the last time Guggeis, now 29, stepped into a high-pressure situation. Earlier this season, as the State Opera’s Kapellmeister, or house conductor, he picked up rehearsals and two runs of a new “Ring” cycle after Daniel Barenboim withdrew because of illness. And on May 30, he will make his North American debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, leading a revival of Wagner’s “Der Fliegende Holländer,” taking over from Jaap van Zweden.Things are happening quickly — Guggeis starts as the general music director of the Frankfurt Opera this fall — but he is trying to maintain a steady development that some of his peers have abandoned in favor of peripatetic celebrity.“There was a question of how to go on,” he said in an interview at the State Opera here. “Do you jump on the moving train or do you stay on track? Together with my agent, I decided to keep calm. If an opportunity is meant to be, there will still be interest and possibility in two or three years.”APART FROM an uncle — the accomplished percussionist Edgar Guggeis — Guggeis grew up in a nonmusical family in Bavaria. His father was the director of a brewery, and his mother was a tax clerk. But he played instruments from a young age, and sang in choirs.Guggeis followed those interests to the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich, but not with single-minded focus. He studied conducting but, aware of the precarious life it promised, also picked up a degree in quantum physics.“I was really interested in the subject,” he said, “and I just wanted to have something on the safe side. You never know how it works out as a conductor. When I started, if you asked me, ‘Where do you see yourself in 10 years?’ I would say I don’t know. But I will have this other degree, and I can always go back to that.”Guggeis is trying to maintain a steady development. “There was a question of how to go on,” he said. “Do you jump on the moving train or do you stay on track? Together with my agent, I decided to keep calm.”Ava Pellor for The New York TimesNow, Guggeis might read about a discovery related to something he remembers studying in school. But his specialty was theoretical particle physics, which is impossible to follow on a part-time or casual basis. So he has stopped keeping up with the field.During his time in Munich, Guggeis was often at the Bavarian State Opera while it was under the music directorships of Kent Nagano and Kirill Petrenko. In between classes one day, he sat in on a rehearsal of Strauss’s “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” led by Petrenko. By the second act, he decided to skip school and stay. He was hooked, and saw nearly everything the house had to offer in what amounted to a parallel education. “To see those conductors,” he said, “was amazing, but also so formative.”Guggeis continued to study conducting in Milan, then returned to Germany to serve as a repetiteur in Berlin. He coached singers from the piano but almost never spoke with the house’s long-reigning maestro, Daniel Barenboim. “It was hard to get close to him,” Guggeis said, “because everyone wants something from him there.” But slowly, the two built a relationship in which Barenboim became increasingly approachable.For his part, Barenboim didn’t need much time at all. He recalled watching the young conductor lead a rehearsal and immediately thinking he was gifted.“You can see these things straight away with somebody,” Barenboim said. “And he was obviously a very natural conductor. He had a rare combination of easiness and comfortable responsibility. He moved his arms in a natural way, and was naturally in command. From the very beginning.”Their bond deepened. “It felt like family,” Guggeis said. “He was generous, supportive, kind and always there when I had questions about career.” They talked about music, art and philosophy, or gossiped about Pierre Boulez. Between those conversations and the rehearsals Guggeis would watch and later ask about, Barenboim became, he said, “the most influential mentor for me.”GUGGEIS BELONGS to a class of conductors — more common in Germany — that comes up through opera houses rather than concert halls, even if their careers eventually balance both. He said that the repertoire he learned as a repetiteur has stuck “deeply in my head and guts,” and that his time at the State Opera in Berlin, as well as in Stuttgart and Berlin as a Kapellmeister, has defined his approach to the podium, such as how to manage rehearsals and soloists or wrangle a large-scale work for orchestra and chorus.“You can never buy that experience,” he said, “no matter how talented you are.”He has also tried to test out famous pieces like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony away from very public stages like the Philharmonie in Berlin or the Musikverein in Vienna. He has conducted the Beethoven, but in Italy, in a five-concert series with the Milan Symphony Orchestra, following advice he once heard attributed to Herbert von Karajan, that regardless of where you lead this work, the first 15 times won’t be good; so start early.Guggeis at the Met. In fall, he becomes general music director of the Frankfurt Opera.Ava Pellor for The New York TimesWhen Guggeis shares memories and insights like that, he sounds like a conductor looking back on a career rather than forward. His mix of confidence and self-awareness was part of what endeared him to Barenboim, who said: “He’s very talented, but he knows that he has a lot to learn. He has a great curiosity, and that will go until the end of his life.”Curiosity, but also the courage to take on classics by Wagner and Strauss in front of the boo-happy audience at the Berlin State Opera. (Reviews during his time as Kapellmeister have tended to be positive.) So, when he stepped into the pit for “Salome,” it was just another day on the job. He was supported by Dohnányi, who remains a mentor — and gave him most of his score library — and stunned Barenboim.“It was remarkable,” Barenboim said. “There was no ‘What shall we do now?’ His future was absolutely clear.”Loebe, Frankfurt Opera’s general manager, was similarly struck by this 24-year-old conductor he had never heard of before. “I wanted to know more,” he said. “So I saw him many more times, and we started to have many meetings.” Loebe was looking for a new music director, and Guggeis was “the only guy I wanted.”Frankfurt’s orchestra, Loebe added, was used to having two or three choices, but he insisted on Guggeis, who formed a quick bond with the musicians. During the pandemic, he led them in a streamed performance of Mozart’s “Requiem” — one of the few videos online of his conducting — that reveals his clear direction, level head and sense of shape. Then, in 2021, he was named as their new music director.Mozart is how Guggeis will begin his tenure next season, with a new production of “Le Nozze di Figaro” premiering on Oct. 1. In a demonstration of the range he hopes for there, he will also lead Ligeti’s “Le Grand Macabre,” Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” Verdi’s “Don Carlo” and Strauss’s “Elektra,” in addition to concert programs.Guggeis’s inaugural season in Frankfurt took shape as he was wrapping up his time as Kapellmeister in Berlin. There, he was working with Barenboim on a new production of Wagner’s four-opera “Ring” that was unveiled all at once last October, an immense and virtually unheard-of undertaking for a repertory house. It was years in the making, but Barenboim’s health rapidly declined that summer, and the planned four cycles were split between Guggeis and Christian Thielemann.When his condition permitted, Barenboim shared his wisdom with Guggeis about, for example, which notoriously tricky passages in the operas’ 16 hours of music should be the focus of rehearsals. They still speak; Guggeis values his advice, seeing it as the equivalent of singers working with coaches long into their careers.Guggeis was also in constant contact with Thielemann, an experienced hand in Wagner. “We were working out problems together,” he said. “It was very interesting. But then he would also say things like not to worry about ‘Ride of the Valkyries,’ because it’s self-going, it will become loud by itself. All this was really fantastic for me.”Earlier this month, Guggeis said goodbye to Berlin, for now; his tenure as Kapellmeister ends this season. He led two concerts with the Staatskapelle, the opera house’s storied orchestra, and was on a plane to New York for “Holländer” rehearsals the next day.“The little bird is now flying from its nest,” he said in an interview at the Met. “I’m conducting professionally since five years, more or less. I was with this fabulous orchestra and now I’m here working at this tremendous place. To be here is something I never would have expected, and couldn’t ever wish for.” More

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      This ‘Magic Flute’ Has Ringtones, Bird Tracks and a Foley Artist

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      Supernatural happenings, curses and romances, heartbreaking arias and vocal fireworks — what’s not to love?Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” (“The Magic Flute”), a wildly popular gateway opera, has been a frequent presence on stages since its premiere in 1791. It’s a fair bet, though, that Simon McBurney’s production, which opens at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, is the first to feature a ringtone duplicating the bird catcher Papageno’s five-note musical trademark. Or to use about 100 speakers strategically placed all over the house.Morley (Pamina) and Brownlee (Tamino) rehearsing “Die Zauberflöte.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesThe tenor Brenton Ryan, as Monostatos, in the production.Lila Barth for The New York TimesFor McBurney, the use of technology is less about embracing the present than about nodding to the creation of “Zauberflöte.” That was at Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna, which was run by the multitasking Emanuel Schikaneder, the opera’s librettist and originator of the role of Papageno.“Schikaneder had the latest ways of making thunder, he had machines make the sound of rain, he had bird calls, he had people making the sound of horses’ hooves,” McBurney said in an interview. “The use of sound creates a magical world, and yet at the same time at the heart of ‘The Magic Flute’ are real human concerns.”The juxtapositions of intimacy and cosmic scale, simplicity and complexity, low and high technology have long been emblematic of McBurney’s work as a founder and artistic director of the London-based theater company Complicité. Audience members at his solo show “The Encounter” (which had a Broadway run in 2016) experienced the production through earphones, immersing them in sophisticated soundscapes. Something that could have added distance between performer and theatergoer brought them closer.Morley rehearsing with the orchestra, which is raised almost to the level of the stage.Lila Barth for The New York TimesMcBurney experimented with sound again for “Zauberflöte,” which was first staged in 2012 at the Dutch National Opera and has been presented around Europe. (It replaces the 19-year-old Julie Taymor production at the Met; her abridged, English-language version for families remains in the repertory.) A distinctive trait of McBurney’s “Zauberflöte” is the importance of the sonic environment.“For a forest scene I have five or six bird tracks that I can send out, a running brook that I’m going to put in a speaker in the far right side of the stage, two tracks of wind blowing in trees,” Matthieu Maurice, a sound designer, said at a recent rehearsal.The singers are amplified through body microphones, though only for the spoken sections — plentiful in “Zauberflöte,” which is a singspiel, a numbers show with dialogue between arias. The mics are turned off for the sung parts, requiring constant adjustments by two sound mixers.“There’s so much more I can do with the dialogue with a mic,” said the soprano Erin Morley, who plays the pure-hearted princess Pamina. “I can face upstage, I can whisper something. I’m sure there will be some purists out there who will hate this, but the important thing is that we are not singing with mics.”The director Simon McBurney at the Met. “The use of sound creates a magical world,” he said, “and yet at the same time at the heart of ‘The Magic Flute’ are real human concerns.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesNathalie Stutzmann, this production’s conductor, was also on board. “In a house as big as this one, it is obvious to me that we need to use modern technology,” she said. “The Met is huge. It’s a lack of intelligence not to adapt to a space. It’s normal to help the singers fill the space when they are speaking. It’s also important that the volume of the spoken parts match the volume of the sung parts in an opera like this one, otherwise it feels like two different works.”Amplification also allows the integration of a live Foley artist, Ruth Sullivan, who operates out of a self-contained space, visible stage left, that looks like a zany inventor’s laboratory. “Her relationship with the actors is a musical one, essentially,” McBurney said of Sullivan. “They know the sounds she is going to make, and so it is a dance in the same way Nathalie Stutzmann is dancing with the singers, trying to make the cellos and the voices work together.”The artist Blake Habermann contributes drawings and ingenious effects to live projections.Lila Barth for The New York TimesHabermann’s drawing adds to the projections.Lila Barth for The New York TimesStutzmann works as closely with Maurice as she does with the musicians and singers. (The associate sound designer, he has been implementing Gareth Fry’s original vision for the past eight years, while adding flourishes of his own, including the ringtone.) The sound effects are indicated on the sheet music, so she knows exactly what to expect and when.Adding to the increased interconnection among the opera’s moving parts, the pit is almost level with the stage.“We decided, ‘Let’s raise the orchestra, let’s make people aware of the players,’” said Michael Levine, the set designer. “Because we’re so used to the players being hidden, and they weren’t in the 18th century.”From left, Luka Zylik, Deven Agge and Julian Knopf as the three spirits that guide Tamino and Papageno.Lila Barth for The New York TimesDuring the spoken sections at rehearsal, players in the orchestra turned toward the stage like flowers to the sun. They could watch the action for a change.“There’s nothing more boring than being an orchestra musician and being in the back of a cave with no idea of what’s happening on the stage,” Stutzmann said. “Can you imagine spending three or four hours, five for Wagner, at the bottom of a pit and have no idea what’s happening above you?” Not only can the musicians see this “Zauberflöte”; some also become part of the action.Being positioned higher creates a challenge, though. “We have to be careful not to cover up the singers,” Stutzmann said. “The sound balance is changed because we’re up and above, so we’re louder. You have to be vigilant while avoiding being bland.”Ruth Sullivan, the production’s live Foley artist. “Her relationship with the actors is a musical one, essentially,” McBurney said. “They know the sounds she is going to make, and so it is a dance.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesMuch of the production’s visuals are also created in plain view. The artist Blake Habermann contributes drawings and ingenious effects — watch how he renders a starry sky — to live projections. “I show all my tricks and then they become doubly magical,” McBurney said with an impish grin.For Levine, making the entire house part of one organism reminds everybody that the artificiality and evanescence of the art form constitute its strength. “What we wanted to do is to bring the audience into the fallibility of theater,” he said. “Things are being made before your eyes, and it’s live, and it’s not going to happen again. And the people that are constructing it are here with you in the same room, and we’re all doing it together.”A scene from the production at the Met.Lila Barth for The New York TimesIf the projections are the modern equivalent of the magic lanterns developed in the 17th century, McBurney and Levine also came up with a contemporary version of a magic carpet: a central square platform that can transport the characters, but that also suggests the instability they experience. It can go up and down, and it can be inclined as various angles; the singers can scamper on top or scurry below. “It is much more secure when you’re on it,” Morley said. “From afar, it looks terrifying.” Laughing, she allowed that “when we go underneath the platform, there were a few moments in rehearsal when I said, ‘You want me to do what?’”Some modern directors have been criticized for overemphasizing an opera’s staging over its music, and forcing interpretations that depart from the familiar. But McBurney’s North Star remains the music, and trying to stay faithful to what it meant for its creator.“I think that for Mozart, if you can make music so beautiful, people will come out changed,” he said. “We can debate whether he was right or not well, but it’s called ‘The Magic Flute.’ The flute changes the way that people behave.”Mozart, he added, had confidence in his music: “He knew that it could move people in a way that might alter their lives.” More