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    Joanna Simon, Opera Singer from Famously Musical Family, Dies at 85

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    A renowned mezzo-soprano, she grew up alongside her younger sisters, Carly and Lucy, both of whom became singer-songwriters.Joanna Simon, a smoky-voiced mezzo-soprano who grew up in a family loaded with musical talent, including her younger sisters Carly and Lucy, before forging an acclaimed career as an opera and concert singer, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. She was 85.Mary Ascheim, a first cousin of Ms. Simon’s, said the cause was thyroid cancer. Ms. Simon died in a hospital a day before Lucy Simon’s death at 82 at her home in Pierpont, N.Y.Ms. Simon was one of the best-known American opera singers to emerge in the 1960s, a time when arts funding was flush, audiences were full and gleaming new music palaces were opening, chief among them the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in New York.She made her professional debut in 1962 as Cherubino in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” at New York City Opera. The same year, she won the Marian Anderson Award, an annual prize given to a promising young singer.She stood out for her range of material, mastery of foreign languages and willingness to take risks on contemporary composers. She was the first to sing the role of Pantasilea, a courtesan in 16th-century Italy, in “Bomarzo,” by the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera, when it made its debut in 1967 at the Opera Society of Washington (today the Washington National Opera). That performance won her worldwide acclaim, and she reprised it in New York and Buenos Aires.She was equally regarded as a concert singer, performing classical and contemporary songs, including “Over the Rainbow.”A few days before one recital in New York, in 1975, she tripped on a rug in her apartment and broke her leg. Rather than call off the show, she mounted the stage on crutches.“As soon as I was sure that my voice hadn’t been affected, I knew I would go on,” she told The New York Times.Her easy grace and glamorous good looks made her a popular guest on television talk shows. She sang and sat for interviews on “The Tonight Show” and “The Dick Cavett Show,” and she was a featured performer on the last original telecast of “The Ed Sullivan Show” before it went off the air in 1971.In her embrace of popular culture, Ms. Simon was not too far removed from her singer-songwriter sisters. Carly Simon achieved lasting fame in the early 1970s with pop hits like “Anticipation” and “You’re So Vain.” Lucy Simon sang with Carly early on — they were billed as the Simon Sisters — and later found success as a composer. She received a Tony nomination in 1991 for best original score, for the musical “The Secret Garden.”The sisters occasionally crossed paths. Joanna sang backup on Carly’s album “No Secrets” (1972) and Lucy’s album “Lucy Simon” (1975), and Carly played guitar offstage during Joanna’s performance on “The Mike Douglas Show” in 1971. Carly wrote her own opera, “Romulus Hunt,” released as an album in 1993; it featured a character named Joanna, a mezzo-soprano.The sisters grew up singing and playing music together and remained close as adults, avoiding the petty jealousies that often ensnare siblings engaged in similar careers.“When Lucy was 16, I envied her hourglass figure,” Joanna Simon told The Toronto Star in 1985. “When Carly first became successful, I envied her first $200,000 check. But those feelings lasted for 20 minutes, and I didn’t dwell on them. I knew it was a given in the operatic world that very few achieved that kind of success. I never expected it, so I wasn’t disappointed.”Ms. Simon in “Bomarzo” with New York City Opera in 1967, the year the opera, by the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera, had its debut. She was the first to sing the role of Pantasilea, a courtesan in 16th-century Italy, in that opera. New York City OperaJoanna Elizabeth Simon was born on Oct. 20, 1936, in Manhattan, the oldest child of Richard L. Simon, a publisher and founder of Simon & Schuster, and Andrea (Heinemann) Simon, a singer and homemaker. The family lived in Manhattan and, later, the Fieldston neighborhood of the Bronx.The Simon children took to music early; Joanna could play piano at 6 years old. In high school she thought she would become an actress, though by college, at Sarah Lawrence (which Carly also later attended), she had switched to musical comedy. Then a voice coach encouraged her to consider opera.Upon graduating in 1958 with a degree in literature, she continued her opera training in Vienna, then returned to New York to start her career.Ms. Simon, who lived in Manhattan, married Gerald Walker, a novelist and editor at The New York Times Magazine, in 1976. He died in 2004. She dated Walter Cronkite until his death in 2009.In addition to her sister Carly, she is survived by her stepson, David Walker, and a step-grandson. Her brother, Peter, a photojournalist, died in 2018.Ms. Simon continued to sing professionally through the early 1980s, then gradually pulled back before retiring in 1986 to join “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS as a cultural correspondent. She won an Emmy Award in 1991 for a documentary on creativity and manic depression.Funding for arts programming at “MacNeil/Lehrer” eventually dried up, and her position was cut. Casting about for a new career, she became a real-estate broker. Within six months, she told The Times in 1997, she had sold $6 million in property. She later became a vice president of her company, Fox Residential Group.While her musical background wasn’t the key to her newfound success, she said it sometimes came in handy.“When I take customers into potential apartments, I go into the next apartment and vocalize,” she said. “If they can hear me, it’s no deal.” More

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      Review: An Opera Sings of a World on the Verge of Ending

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      Ricky Ian Gordon’s “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” is set in a community of Italian Jews just before World War II.One of the many things that came to an end in the conflagration of World War II was the great Italian opera tradition. Puccini, its apotheosis, had died in 1924; in the conflict’s wake, modernism ruled European music, and a certain strand of lyric theater was over.Which adds a bit of poignancy to the fact that Ricky Ian Gordon’s paean to that tradition, his new opera “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” is set in Ferrara, Italy, on the cusp of the war, amid members of the city’s Jewish community who are largely blind to the tragedy that awaits them. Their coming destruction is mirrored by that of the emotive, melodic form being used to tell their story.Emotive and melodic, yes, but here also overdone and overlong. Based on Giorgio Bassani’s 1962 novel of the same name, which Vittorio De Sica adapted into a 1970 film, Gordon’s opera replaces its source’s poetic richness with stentorian earnestness that feels like it continues unabated for, with intermission, three hours.Presented by New York City Opera and the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan, the work is, because of pandemic delays, opening almost simultaneously with another Gordon opera, “Intimate Apparel,” at Lincoln Center Theater. Together, they are a substantial showcase for a composer best known for his artfully impassioned songs, and for his eclecticism and versatility. “Intimate Apparel,” set in 1905 New York, draws on Americana and ragtime; “Finzi-Continis,” italianità.But while Gordon is clearly aiming for Puccinian sumptuousness and extroversion, the score is not exactly tuneful; the 15-member orchestra, conducted by James Lowe, doesn’t offer hummable hits so much as a plush carpet and punctuation for the fervid singers. The vocal lines aren’t ear worms, either. They just keep surging forth in full-throttle monologues and ensembles.It’s a bellowing take on a story that’s not without whispers. Giorgio is a middle-class young man who gets caught up in the circle of the Finzi-Continis, aristocratic Jews living on their verdant estate in idyllic insulation from the increasingly unfriendly world. He falls madly in love with Micòl, the family’s daughter, as the Fascists take over Italy and antisemitism is codified in law.Ciaramitaro, right, plays Giorgio, a middle-class young man who enters the aristocratic circle of the Finzi-Continis.Alan ChinStraightforward enough, but in the opera, far too much incident is crowded into 19 scenes, not counting a prologue and epilogue — an uninterrupted trudge of exposition. Michael Korie’s libretto could have been significantly culled; among other things, the subplot of Micòl’s brother, a closeted gay man longing for his former roommate as his health fails, could have been easily excised. And Korie’s text, which often tips into rhyme, can tend risible: “A feeling I infer of anarchy astir.”As Giorgio, the tenor Anthony Ciaramitaro hardly stopped roaring at the performance on Sunday, but at least he did it indefatigably and with pure tone. The soprano Rachel Blaustein brought a sweetness to Micòl that persevered through her character’s capriciousness. Michael Capasso and Richard Stafford’s staging did its best to handle the flood of episodes, relying on a simple set illuminated by John Farrell’s evocative projections.The opera’s ending jarred surprisingly with the post-Holocaust imperative — doctrine at this point — to “never forget.” Standing after the war in the ruined synagogue of Ferrara, Giorgio addresses his memories, singing, “To live my life, I need to let you go.” It is an intriguing turn from tradition in a work that otherwise hews to it all too ceaselessly.The Garden of the Finzi-ContinisThrough Sunday at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Manhattan; nycopera.com. More

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      One Opera Opening Would Make Any Composer Happy. He Has Two.

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      Ricky Ian Gordon’s “Intimate Apparel” and “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” are premiering in New York almost simultaneously.When the composer Ricky Ian Gordon saw Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies” on Broadway in the early 1970s, it was unlike anything he’d watched on a stage.“He was creating this musical theater that felt like foreign film to me,” Gordon said in a recent interview. “And I wanted to make something in the theater that felt like foreign movies.”“That’s what ‘Follies’ was: a musical about broken lives and disappointment,” he continued, adding an expletive for emphasis. “I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’”Gordon, now 65, did go on to create art inspired by those subjects — in the process becoming considerably better known in the world of opera than theater.In a coincidence caused by pandemic delays, not one but two of his operas are opening nearly simultaneously before this month is out, and both involve the darkness Gordon adored in “Follies.” “Intimate Apparel,” at Lincoln Center Theater, for which Lynn Nottage adapted her own play, deals with lies, deceptions and thwarted dreams in the story of a Black seamstress in 1905 New York. And “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” presented by New York City Opera, is based on a semi-autobiographical Giorgio Bassani novel about the fate of privileged members of the Jewish community in Ferrara, Italy, who were tragically blind to what awaited them during World War II.It’s a highly unusual situation for a living composer: To have two of your operas playing at once in New York, your name usually has to be something like Puccini, whose “Tosca” and “La Bohème” are both running this January at the Metropolitan Opera.“One new opera demands an enormous amount of attention, but two is downright invasive,” Gordon said. “It is incredibly stressful, no matter how often I meditate, but it is also enormously fulfilling, and thankfully, pride-building. It is also strange to be going back and forth between the Lower East Side in 1905 and Ferrara in 1945, but thank God for the IRT.”From left: Krysty Swann, Kearstin Piper Brown and Naomi Louisa O’Connell in “Intimate Apparel,” for which Lynn Nottage has adapted her play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTo fully grasp Gordon’s career, it is important to travel back a little less far than that, to the years that bridged the turn of the 21st century, when it appeared as if he would be among a new generation of composers rejuvenating the American musical. Drawing inspiration from Ned Rorem and Alban Berg, Dmitri Shostakovich and Scott Joplin, he was often lumped in a similarly arty cohort that included fellow composers Adam Guettel, Michael John LaChiusa and Jason Robert Brown.Songs by all four were included on Audra McDonald’s debut solo album, “Way Back to Paradise,” a hybrid of musical theater, avant-pop and art song that came out in 1998 — and, in hindsight, announced a changing of the guard that ended up not happening, as more mainstream rock and pop styles conquered Broadway.Gordon’s subtly lyrical harmonies slowly worked their way into your subconscious, and he suggested emotion rather than hitting the listener with it. That was not what musical theater wanted.“They always called us ‘children of Sondheim,’ ” Gordon said. “He opened a door, but it wasn’t an open door — it was just the door for Sondheim to walk through.”“People started saying that we didn’t write melodies and beats,” he added, then shot out a joking expletive, as if responding to the charge. “Every one of us writes melodies and writes rhythm, but in the language we grew up on and that we evolved out of.”Born in 1956, Gordon was raised on Long Island; he was — as Donald Katz documented in “Home Fires,” a much-praised 1992 book about the Gordon family’s middle-class aspirations and frustrations — once in line to inherit his father’s electrical business. But he discovered opera when he was eight, stumbling onto The Victor Book of the Opera at a friend’s house.“My memory of it is like a Harry Potter moment, like there was smoke and light behind this book,” he said.He was also open to pop, and in his early teens became “transfixed, mesmerized, completely and overwhelmingly obsessed with Joni Mitchell,” as he put it in a story he wrote about her last year for Spin magazine. The story is drawn from a forthcoming memoir that grew out of a writing group Gordon started with some poets and novelists during the pandemic; self-examination is not new to him, and he is candid about his past struggles with alcoholism, drug addiction and eating disorders.He initially enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University as a pianist, but ended up a composer, obsessed with bringing words to musical life. “If I’m setting a poem to music, I memorize it and I let it marinate and live inside of me,” he said. “I love singers, so I want to give them something to act. Even if it’s a song, it should be like a little mini opera.”By the 1990s and early 2000s, he was straddling various forms and genres. He wrote the song cycle “Genius Child” for the soprano Harolyn Blackwell, and his first opera, “The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” a meditation informed by the AIDS epidemic, premiered at Houston Grand Opera in 1996. But his work also appeared Off Broadway, including such musical-theater projects as “Dream True,” a collaboration with the writer and director Tina Landau, and the Proust-inspired show “My Life With Albertine,” which opened at Playwrights Horizons in 2003 with a then-unknown Kelli O’Hara in the title role.After being touted as part of a new generation of musical theater composers, Gordon found more of a home in the opera world.Sarah ShatzThat show, alas, did not go over well, even if Ben Brantley praised the score’s “lovely, intricately layered melodies” in his review for The New York Times.Gordon was proud of “My Life With Albertine” and its failure hurt him deeply. “I thought I needed to face facts: The musical theater right now is not where I am going to flower,” he said. “I had written to all these opera companies that I wanted to do opera, so the next thing I did was ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ with Minnesota Opera. Suddenly, I felt this was where I could do what I do. Now I’m at Lincoln Center, where musicals are usually done, but I’m doing my opera here.”Gordon was, indeed, happily chatting away in an empty room at Lincoln Center Theater, where “Intimate Apparel” — which was well into previews when the first pandemic lockdown came, and now opens Jan. 31 — had just wrapped up a rehearsal in the Mitzi E. Newhouse space.Suddenly, voices piped in from a monitor: A matinee of the musical “Flying Over Sunset” had begun at the Vivian Beaumont Theater above. Coincidentally, that show’s lyrics were written by Michael Korie, Gordon’s librettist on “The Grapes of Wrath” and now “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” which City Opera is presenting with the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, starting Jan. 27.Doing “Intimate Apparel” at Lincoln Center Theater was not a given. It is part of the company’s joint commissioning program with the Met, and the other works from that program that have reached the stage, like Nico Muhly’s “Two Boys” and the recent “Eurydice” by Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl, have been produced at the opera house.“It was really time for Lincoln Center Theater to get the benefit of one of these shows,” Paul Cremo, the Met’s dramaturg, said in an interview. “We thought that with the intimacy of the play, it would really benefit from that space, where some audience members are just six feet away from the characters. And Ricky wrote a beautiful orchestration for two pianos.”Gordon “was a really lovely guide through this process,” said Nottage, left, and the two are at work on other opera.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesWhile Gordon was working on a small scale, for just a couple of instruments, Nottage was tasked with expanding her play, which consists mostly of two-person interactions, into a libretto that would bring together larger groups of characters and make use of a chorus. (Bartlett Sher directs.)“I shared with Ricky what I was listening to and we spoke a lot about what the texture and the feel of the piece should be,” Nottage said. “He’s very deeply invested in Americana music and, in particular, ragtime. What he does really beautifully is weave all of these traditional forms together without it feeling like pastiche. He was a really lovely guide through this process.” (The pair got along so well that they are now at work on a commission from Opera Theater of St. Louis with Nottage’s daughter, Ruby Aiyo Gerber.)The musical style of “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” draws from a different well. “It’s my Italian opera,” Gordon said. “I just thought of putting myself in the head of Puccini, Verdi, Bellini. It’s very different from ‘Intimate Apparel,’ which is very American.”Anthony Ciaramitaro and Rachel Blaustein in rehearsal for “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” about Jewish Italians on the cusp of World War II.Sarah ShatzOne major difference is size: The “Finzi-Continis” score has been arranged for a 15-piece orchestra for the City Opera run and can be expanded for larger ensembles, especially as there are tentative plans to produce it in Italy.“It’s absolutely, unabashedly melodic, just beautiful sweeping melodies,” said Michael Capasso, the general director of City Opera, who is staging the production with Richard Stafford.The two Gordon projects illustrate both the composer’s ecumenical tastes and his versatility. “Ricky sounds like Ricky,” Korie said in an interview, “but he’s not afraid to do what classical opera composers did, or what Rodgers and Hammerstein did for years, and what composers in theater still do, which is they allow themselves to immerse themselves in the sounds of other characters, other times, other places.”From left: Gordon with Michael Korie, the librettist of “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” and Richard Stafford, who is staging the production with Michael Capasso.Sarah Shatz“Finzi-Continis” keeps with his early desire to make something in the theater that felt like foreign movies: Gordon has long been a fan of Vittorio De Sica’s Academy Award-winning film version, from 1970. But rewatching it a few years ago hit him especially hard.“I think there was something about the juxtaposition of personal pain and universal pain — I suddenly saw what made that story so tragic,” he said. “I couldn’t even endure it.”So he called Korie to suggest they adapt Bassani’s book.It’s not a coincidence that both “Intimate Apparel” and “Finzi-Continis” are set in the past, because most of Gordon’s work is. “In some way I’m a memorialist,” he said. “I very often write from a place of grief.”Yet, asked by email what she thought was his signature style, Kelli O’Hara unexpectedly answered: “Joy. I don’t think the subject matters are always joyous, but the music-making is the healer. So yes. Joy.”And, indeed, Gordon chuckled when he said: “I’m lucky that I’m activated by my unhappiness rather than paralyzed. I’ve never been able to sit still because I never felt like I had done enough, I never felt important enough. It has caused me enormous pain but it made me never stop writing. And I’m glad I didn’t shut up.” More

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      Gianna Rolandi, Spirited Soprano With a Radiant Voice, Dies at 68

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      Ms. Rolandi, an acclaimed Vixen and Lucia, made her mark at the New York City Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago.Gianna Rolandi, an American soprano who brought effortless coloratura technique, bright sound and a vibrant stage presence to diverse roles over a 20-year international career, died on Sunday in Chicago. She was 68.Her death, in a hospital, was announced by the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Ms. Rolandi had earlier been the director of the company’s Ryan Opera Center, a training program. No cause was specified.Her husband was the renowned British conductor Andrew Davis, who will step down on June 30 after nearly 21 years as music director and principal conductor of the Lyric Opera.Ms. Rolandi’s auspicious 1975 debut at the New York City Opera, as Olympia in Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann,” came when she was 23 and just out of the conservatory. She took over the role on short notice when the scheduled soprano withdrew. (Three days later she made what was to have been her official debut, as Zerbinetta in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos.”)She quickly won attention for the agility and radiance of her singing — and for, when it was called for, a beguiling sassiness. Beverly Sills, City Opera’s greatest star, became a crucial mentor to Ms. Rolandi in the 1980s, when Ms. Sills retired from singing to become the company’s general director.Along with career guidance, Ms. Sills gave Ms. Rolandi insight into roles she herself had performed to acclaim, among them the title role in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” Elvira in Bellini’s “I Puritani” and Cleopatra in Handel’s “Giulio Cesare.”Reviewing her feisty performance as Zerbinetta with the company in 1982, The New York Times’s Donal Henahan wrote that “in Gianna Rolandi the City Opera had a Zerbinetta capable of creating pandemonium in any opera house anywhere.”Her “deft and virtually unflawed handing of her big, florid aria, one of opera’s most feared obstacle courses for coloratura soprano,” he added, “brought the performance to a halt for as extended an ovation as this reviewer has heard at either of our opera houses this season.”Ms. Rolandi starred in two notable “Live From Lincoln Center” telecasts of City Opera productions: “Lucia di Lammermoor” in 1982, and, the next year, the title role in Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen,” an enchanting folk-tale opera centering on a community of forest animals and a few humans.Ms. Rolandi in the title role in the 1981 City Opera production of Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen.” Beth Bergman“The Cunning Little Vixen” was largely unfamiliar to American audiences when City Opera introduced its colorful production in 1981. It was performed in an English translation of the Czech libretto, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas and directed by Frank Corsaro, with sets and costumes realized from designs by Maurice Sendak.Ms. Rolandi was cast as the bushy-tailed, impish Vixen. It was “one of Ms. Rolandi’s finest roles to date,” the critic Thor Eckert Jr. wrote in The Christian Science Monitor, adding that she acted “with feline grace and an occasional touch of crudity just right for the role.”Her Metropolitan Opera debut came as Sophie in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” in 1979. But despite some acclaimed performances at that house, including the title role of the Nightingale in Stravinsky’s “Le Rossignol” in 1984 and Zerbinetta in 1984-85 (with Jessye Norman as Ariadne), she made just 17 appearances with the Met over six years.Even while appearing with major houses in America and Europe, Ms. Rolandi was content to call City Opera her base.“I feel like I’ve grown up here,” she said in a 1982 interview with The Times. The company “is a blessing for me,” she added. “You get exposure and you don’t have to leave home.”Carol Jane Rolandi was born on Aug. 16, 1952, in Manhattan. Her mother, Jane Frazier, from Winston-Salem, N.C., was a successful soprano who met Dr. Enrico Rolandi, an Italian obstetrician and gynecologist, while performing in Italy. They married and settled in New York.In 1955, when Ms. Rolandi was not yet 3, her father died in an automobile accident. Her mother moved with her and her brother, Walter, to the South, began teaching, and had a 30-year career as a professor of voice at Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C., where Ms. Rolandi grew up.Though drawn early to the violin, Ms. Rolandi kept listening to opera recordings and was increasingly captivated by singing. She studied both violin and voice at the Brevard Music Center, a prestigious summer music institute and festival in North Carolina. She continued her studies at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.Her City Opera debut came shortly after her graduation from Curtis. She went on to sing major roles in more than 30 operas with the company, including the American premiere of the Israeli composer Josef Tal’s “Ashmedai” in 1976 and the world premiere of Dominick Argento’s “Miss Havisham’s Fire” in 1979.Overall, though, she was not drawn to contemporary opera, as she acknowledged in a 1993 interview with Bruce Duffie, later broadcast on the Chicago radio station WNIB. It’s crucial for composers to “make the vocal part singable so you can make a line,” she said, and she did not like pieces that were “all over the place.”“The old guys had it right,” she said: “a nice line.”Ms. Rolandi and her husband, the conductor Andrew Davis, in 2005. The couple moved to Chicago when Mr. Davis became music director and principal conductor of the Lyric Opera there.Cheri EisenbergAfter an earlier marriage to Howard Hensel, a tenor (who appeared with City Opera) and actor, Ms. Rolandi met Mr. Davis in 1984 when she sang Zerbinetta at the Met, a production he was conducting. “We didn’t hit it off particularly well then,” she recalled in a 2006 interview with The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.They later met again at the Glyndebourne Festival in England. “This time it was different,” she said in that interview, “and the fireworks started to happen.” They married in 1989 and lived for some years in England.In addition to her husband, Ms. Rolandi is survived by their son, Ed Frazier Davis, a composer, baritone and conductor, and her brother.Ms. Rolandi retired from the stage in 1994 and focused on teaching. She and her husband moved to Chicago after Mr. Davis’s tenure with the Lyric Opera began in 2000. The next year she was appointed director of vocal studies at the company’s opera center; in 2006 she was promoted to director of the program, a position she held until 2013. Among the notable singers who worked with her in the program were Nicole Cabell, Quinn Kelsey, Stacey Tappan, Erin Wall and Roger Honeywell.Ms. Rolandi always cited the mentoring she received from Beverly Sills as her main inspiration for wanting to nurture young singers. Ms. Sills was “my teacher, my coach, my psychiatrist and finally my friend,” she told the critic Heidi Waleson in an interview for “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias,” Ms. Waleson’s 2018 book about City Opera.She was, Ms. Rolandi said, “my biggest cheerleader and fiercest critic.” More

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      Paul Kellogg, New York City Opera Impresario, Dies at 84

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      He had no opera experience when he was chosen to run the Glimmerglass Opera in upstate New York; 17 years later, he took on City Opera during a difficult period.Paul Kellogg, an innovative impresario who led the Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, N.Y., and later, during a dynamic and financially precarious period, also led the New York City Opera, died on Wednesday at a hospital in Cooperstown. He was 84.His death was announced by the Glimmerglass Festival, as the company is now called. No cause was given.Mr. Kellogg was living on the outskirts of Cooperstown and trying to write a novel when in 1979 he was the unexpected choice to become the executive manager of the four-year-old Glimmerglass Opera, which presented productions in the cramped, acoustically dry auditorium of Cooperstown High School. Though an opera lover, he had no real training in music and scant managerial experience. Yet he immediately envisioned what this fledgling summer festival could become.“A summer festival is not only what it does artistically, it’s what it provides people in the way of a full experience,” he said in a 1993 interview with The Christian Science Monitor.He courted local patrons and found support to boost the programming from one or two productions every summer to, eventually, four. He took on increasing executive and artistic leadership as his title expanded over the years. From the start, along with staples, he presented unusual fare like Bernstein’s “Trouble in Tahiti” and Mozart’s “The Impresario.” Believing in opera as a form of engrossing contemporary theater, he engaged important directors, including Jonathan Miller, Mark Lamos, Leon Major, Martha Clarke and Simon Callow.Most important, he oversaw the construction of a near-ideal house: the acoustically vibrant 914-seat Alice Busch Opera Theater, which opened in 1987 and boasted a large stage, ample backstage area and a proper orchestra pit. The theater, designed by the architect Hugh Handy, was perched in the middle of 43 acres of former farmland near Otsego Lake, about eight miles north of Cooperstown. And the side walls had screens that let the breeze inside, though sliding wood panels were closed over them when the music started. The bucolic setting and the splendid house became a magnet for audiences.Mr. Kellogg oversaw the construction of an intimate, welcoming opera theater in Cooperstown, N.Y., for Glimmerglass’s summer seasons.via GlimmerglassIn a surprising move, the New York City Opera in 1996 announced that Mr. Kellogg would become its general and artistic director — succeeding Christopher Keene, a beloved conductor, who had died the previous year — while remaining with Glimmerglass.The companies were very different operations. At Glimmerglass, which was essentially a nonunion house that relied heavily on interns, the budget for four productions during the 1995 season was about $3.5 million. City Opera during the 1995-96 season was presenting 114 performances of 15 productions, on a budget of about $24 million.Mr. Kellogg made the companies creative partners. New productions were introduced at Glimmerglass, where rehearsals took place in festival conditions, and then later presented at City Opera with the same or similar casts. Both institutions had demonstrated commitment to innovative contemporary productions, offbeat repertory and overlooked 20th-century works, and both had cultivated emerging singers who, while they might not have been stars, had fresh voices and often looked like the youthful characters they portrayed.From left, Nancy Allen Lundy, Anthony Dean Griffey and Rod Nelman in a scene from Carlisle Floyd’s “Of Mice and Men” at City Opera in 2003.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFor a while City Opera prospered under this arrangement. Mr. Kellogg presented 62 new productions there, about half of which had originated in Cooperstown. Among them were Carlisle Floyd’s “Of Mice and Men,” with the tenor Anthony Dean Griffey in a career-making performance as the slow-witted Lennie, and the director Francesca Zambello’s compellingly updated, emotionally penetrating staging of Gluck’s “Iphigénie en Tauride,” starring Christine Goerke in the title role.Still, City Opera was encumbered by the spotty, dull acoustics of the 2,700-seat New York State Theater (now the David H. Koch Theater), which had been designed to meet the needs of the New York City Ballet. In 1999 Mr. Kellogg, in a controversial move, announced that a subtle sound enhancement system was being installed at the theater to enliven the acoustics.Opera was an art form that had gloried in natural voices for centuries, and many felt the company had started down a slippery slope. Even Beverly Sills, once City Opera’s greatest star and a former general director, went public with her dismay.Mr. Kellogg, like City Opera leaders before him, argued that the house was not a second-tier company in the shadow of the Metropolitan Opera but a vibrant institution with a distinctive mission and repertory. He came to view relocating to either a renovated or new house as the only way to fulfill that mission.Yet, in explaining the deficiencies of the company’s home to lure financial backing for his dream, he inevitably undermined outreach to audiences: Why should people attend performances in an inadequate opera house?Several plans were considered and abandoned as financially impossible. Mr. Kellogg pledged to keep searching. It was not to be, and in the end, partly because of Mr. Kellogg’s heavy spending, City Opera spiraled into deeper trouble after he stepped down.City Opera’s home, the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, now the David H. Koch Theater. The hall, designed for ballet performances, was not ideally suited to opera.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPaul Edward Kellogg was born in Los Angeles on March 11, 1937. His father, Harold, who had studied singing with the great tenor Jean de Reszke, worked at 20th Century Fox teaching voice projection and diction. His mother, Maxine (Valentine) Kellogg, was an accomplished pianist.After his family moved to Texas in the late 1940s, Paul majored in comparative literature at the University of Texas in Austin, then continued his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris and at Columbia University in New York. In 1967 he was hired as a French teacher by the Allen-Stevenson School in Manhattan. He went on to become the school’s assistant headmaster.After Mr. Kellogg moved to Cooperstown in 1975, his partner (and later husband), Raymond Han, a noted sculptor and painter, was recruited to work on sets for a few Glimmerglass productions. Mr. Kellogg volunteered to handle props. Company officials came calling in 1979 with a bigger job.Mr. Han died in 2017. Mr. Kellogg leaves no immediate survivors.Under Mr. Kellogg’s leadership, Glimmerglass took its place among the leading summer opera festivals. He started a young-artists program so emerging singers could receive expert coaching and gain experience onstage. Between Glimmerglass and City Opera he had a solid record of fostering news works, among them operas by William Schuman, Stephen Hartke, Robert Beaser, Deborah Drattell and Charles Wuorinen.He made a crucial contribution to the development of new operas through Vox: Showcasing American Composers, an annual program begun in 1999 that presented free readings with top singers and the City Opera orchestra of excerpts from operas that were in progress or unperformed. These invaluable readings led to dozens of premieres elsewhere.But City Opera’s acclaimed work kept draining the budget and punishing the endowment. After widely reported problems with deficits and declining attendance at City Opera during Mr. Kellogg’s final years, he retired from both companies in 2006. City Opera collapsed in 2013. (A new team under the City Opera name has been presenting productions and attempting to resurrect it.) Glimmerglass continues to thrive under the leadership of Ms. Zambello.Mr. Kellogg addressed the audience, with almost every member of the company behind him, on Sept. 15, 2001, the opening of the City Opera season, which had been delayed after the attack on the World Trade Center.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times The defining moment of Mr. Kellogg’s career came just four days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. City Opera had been scheduled to open its fall season on the evening of Sept. 11 with a grim new production of Wagner’s “Flying Dutchman.” At the behest of city officials, the company opened with a matinee performance of the Wagner on the 15th instead.Nervous audience members wondered whether it was even appropriate to be at the opera. Then the curtain rose to reveal a large American flag hanging above the stage and, standing closely together, almost every member of the company: singers in costumes, administrators in business attire, stagehands in dusty jeans and T-shirts, and Mr. Kellogg, in the middle. The performing arts, he said in a quavering voice, have many functions: “catharsis, consolation, shared experience, reaffirmation of civilized values, distraction.” So, he added, “We’re back.” Everyone in the house joined in singing the national anthem. Then Mr. Kellogg, engulfed in hugs, led the City Opera family offstage and the performance began.Suddenly, thoughts of budget deficits, declining patronage and an inadequate house were pushed aside. That performance that day, under that leader, truly mattered. More

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      25 Free Performances Come to Bryant Park Starting in June

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      The park will host events for live audiences of 200 with institutions including the New York Philharmonic, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Joe’s Pub and the Classical Theater of Harlem.With arts performances in New York slowly starting up again, one city tradition is finally set to return: free outdoor events in marquee locations.From June to September, Bryant Park will present a series of 25 programs from some of the city’s most prominent institutions and performance groups, including the New York Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Joe’s Pub, the Classical Theater of Harlem, Paul Taylor Dance Company and the Town Hall.Dan Biederman, the president of the Bryant Park Corporation and the park’s longtime guardian, said the plan for the series began to take shape during the winter, when the park installed its annual ice rink and holiday market.“Thinking ahead to the summer, we thought, the concert halls are probably still going to be closed,” Biederman said in an interview. “Let’s play the same role, making Midtown more cheerful and drawing people to whatever extent we can.”City Parks Foundation’s SummerStage also announced this week that it would be returning to Central Park and other locations with in-person concerts, including a benefit show on Sept. 17 by the band Dawes.Bryant Park’s season functions as a coming-together of New York arts groups, many of which have had few opportunities for live events since the pandemic arrived.“One of the good things that has come out of the pandemic is that there has been a level of cooperation between the different arts organizations,” said Deborah Borda, the chief executive of the New York Philharmonic, which opens the season with four nights of concerts, starting June 9.The Philharmonic began putting on small-scale events throughout city last summer through its NY Phil Bandwagon program, and it is set to perform with a scaled-down ensemble this week at The Shed. Even by June, Borda said, the orchestra does not expect to be back to performing at full size. “We’re not doing Mahler symphonies,” she said.Bryant Park will limit attendance to 200 people for each performance, although producers say it is possible that state regulations could allow bigger crowds as the season progresses. The events are free, but tickets must be reserved in advance. Most events will also be livestreamed.Once arriving at the park, patrons will have their temperatures checked and be shown to their seats, which will be arranged with room for social distancing. The park does not plan to require vaccinations or proof of negative virus tests, but it is considering those as options, according to Dan Fishman, the park’s director of public events.Among the other organizations participating in Bryant Park’s series this summer are Elisa Monte Dance, Harlem Stage, National Sawdust, New York Chinese Cultural Center, Limón Dance Company and Greenwich House Music School. Singers from the New York City Opera will perform a Pride concert on June 18.Many groups and institutions have been scaled down or cocooned altogether since last year.“We’ve been in hibernation,” said Tom Wirtshafter, the president of the Town Hall, which has put on more than 60 virtual programs during the pandemic but, as with most venues, had to furlough most of its staff.Town Hall, which opened its doors in 1921, will close Bryant Park’s season on Sept. 20 with a 100th-anniversary event featuring Chris Thile, the mandolin player whose eclectic tastes range from bluegrass to Bach.Tiffany Rea-Fisher, the artistic director of Elisa Monte Dance, who also curates dance performances at the park, said her company has performed only twice in the last year. It will perform on Aug. 20 with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, and Rea-Fisher said it was not easy to find other dance groups that would be prepared.“It was challenging, finding companies that were ready, stamina-wise,” she said. “You don’t want to bring dancers back after a year and have them hit a performance — it’s just asking for injury.”But like others, she said was thrilled, “smiling ear to ear,” at the prospect of performing once again, and doing so in a prominent spot for New Yorkers.“To be able to do what you trained for,” Rea-Fisher, said, “it’s so joyful, it’s so fulfilling; it feels sublime.” More

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      Lois Kirschenbaum, the Ultimate Opera Superfan, Dies at 88

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      In New York opera circles, an autograph request from her, the mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade said, was considered “a special type of approval.”For more than a half-century, nearly every prominent singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera could expect to be approached backstage afterward by a wispy woman in thick glasses, who held piles of memorabilia to be autographed while she praised the performance in a raspy Brooklyn accent.This was Lois Kirschenbaum, one of New York’s biggest and longest-standing opera buffs and a nightly staple at the opera since the late 1950s, before Lincoln Center was built, when the Met was located in Midtown.Few operatic performances took place at the Met without being observed through Ms. Kirschenbaum’s large binoculars (she was legally blind from birth), usually from a seat in the uppermost balcony secured for little or no money by canvassing operagoers at the entrance just before the opening curtain.And few prominent singers went home without signing numerous items for Ms. Kirschenbaum, whose constant desire to get backstage helped her befriend some of the world’s most famous opera singers, from Beverly Sills to Plácido Domingo.Ms. Kirschenbaum died on March 27 at a hospital in Manhattan after suffering from pneumonia and renal failure, her longtime friend Sally Jo Sandelin said. She was 88.Such was Ms. Kirschenbaum’s reputation at the Met, as well as at New York City Opera, that singers half-joked that they had truly arrived on the New York opera scene only after being approached by Ms. Kirschenbaum after a performance.“It was like getting a special type of approval,” the mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade said. “I never met anyone who didn’t welcome her backstage and want to hang out with her.”She added, “We’d always look out for her and bring her in early if we could, because everyone loved her, and she’d have a hundred things to sign.”The bass singer Samuel Ramey said he was first approached by Ms. Kirschenbaum in his dressing room immediately after his first major role, as Don Basilio in “The Barber of Seville” with City Opera in late 1973.“I was told, ‘You’ve made it now — Lois has asked you for your autograph,’” he recalled, adding that Ms. Kirschenbaum became a constant presence backstage after his performances and that the two became good friends.“She was something else — she always got on the backstage list,” he said.Ms. Kirschenbaum, a wisecracking native of Flatbush, defied the stereotype of a highfalutin opera aficionado. She worked as a switchboard operator for the International Rescue Committee, the humanitarian aid organization, until retiring in 2004. She lived nearly her entire adult life in a rent-controlled apartment in the East Village, from which she would travel by subway and city bus to Lincoln Center while lugging a huge handbag full of photos, programs and recordings to be signed.Ms. Kirschenbaum with the soprano Renata Tebaldi in the late 1960s. Ms. Kirschenbaum’s love of opera began when she heard a recording by Ms. Tebaldi being played in a record shop.via Ken BensonIf she was unable to score a free or cheap ticket just before the performance, she would often slip in with the help of a friendly staffer.“Everyone knew her, from the workers who cleaned the bathrooms, to ticket takers, to the administration and of course the singers,” said another longtime friend, Carl Halperin. “All you had to say was ‘Lois’ and everybody knew who you meant.”Ms. Kirschenbaum was the grande dame of a group of hard-core fans who would flock to the backstage door for autographs and chats.With the help of her formidable handbag, she would quickly find her way to the front of the line and approach singers with complimentary and detailed critiques of their performances — from that night or from years earlier.“She could tell you anything going on in your performances on any given night — this or that particular phrase and what it meant,” the soprano Aprile Millo recalled. “For a singer, it gave you the feeling that you were being heard.”“She was so much part of the opera lore of New York, like the aficionados at La Scala,” the opera house in Milan, Ms. Millo said. Working the switchboard allowed Ms. Kirschenbaum to call singers and opera insiders for updates on news like cast changes or show cancellations, information she would then relay to fellow opera buffs.“For opera, she really was the internet before there was the internet,” said Ken Benson, a manager of opera singers and another longtime friend.And before the Met began putting out detailed schedules months in advance, Ms. Kirschenbaum became known for the homemade lists she compiled of upcoming performances and featured singers.She would distribute copies to fellow buffs during intermission, while enjoying the coffee and sandwiches she routinely smuggled in to avoid the expense of buying food at Met prices.“People would say that Lois’s list was more precise than what you’d get from the press,” Ms. Millo said.Ms. Kirschenbaum “was so much part of the opera lore of New York,” the soprano Aprile Millo said. Ms. Kirschenbaum’s request for an autograph, Ms. Millo added, meant “you got the blessing.”Julie Glassberg for The New York TimesMs. Kirschenbaum gleaned much of her information while soliciting singers’ autographs.“She’d ask them, ‘When are you coming back and what are singing next year?’” Mr. Halperin recalled. “And while Luciano Pavarotti was signing something for her, he’d say he’d be singing ‘La Bohème’ and ‘Tosca’ next season. And she’d collect all this.”Ms. Millo said Ms. Kirschenbaum might have her sign up to 20 pieces of memorabilia at a time. “It was a way to keep you engaged — it was clever of her,” she said.Lois Kirschenbaum was born in New York City on Nov. 21, 1932, to Abraham and Gertrude Kirschenbaum. Her father was an optometrist.An only child, she grew up in Flatbush and graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn. Ms. Kirschenbaum was an avid Brooklyn Dodgers fan, but when the Dodgers left New York for Los Angeles in 1957, her obsession shifted to opera after she heard a recording by the soprano Renata Tebaldi being played in a record shop.In her later years, Ms. Kirschenbaum alternated between haunting the margins of the Met for tickets and autographs and being honored as a special guest at fancy galas held by opera organizations.For her 75th birthday, in 2007, she was feted at a party by singers like Marilyn Horne and Renée Fleming, as well as the Met’s musical director, James Levine — “Jimmy” to Ms. Kirschenbaum — who gave her a ring and an autographed operatic score of “La Bohème.”In 1980, she won a raffle to see Beverly Sills’s farewell performance gala at City Opera, after having seen every role Ms. Sills sang in New York, except one, for 25 years.“Beverly saw me after that and said, ‘Lois, it was fixed,’” Ms. Kirschenbaum laughingly told The New York Times in 2012.In recent years, Ms. Kirschenbaum had begun using a wheelchair and went to the Met only sporadically. She continued to listen to opera (and to Yankees games) on the radio.Friends said she never married and never spoke of any surviving family members.It was unclear what would become of the trove of autographs, programs and photographs left behind in Ms. Kirschenbaum’s apartment.“There was no one more devoted to opera and the artists she loved than Lois,” Ms. Fleming said. “She was a beloved member of the Metropolitan Opera family, like a favorite aunt. I will miss knowing she is watching from the balcony and seeing her afterward at the stage door.” More