Nezet-Seguin, Yannick

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      The Soprano Ailyn Pérez Doesn’t Feel Like a Beginner Anymore

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      Ailyn Pérez didn’t get a chance to see the billboards in New York: the Metropolitan Opera’s advertisements for its coming season, featuring a portrait of her in spectral whites, her eyes closed as she comes face to face with a butterfly.She had been too busy appearing at San Francisco Opera’s centennial concert, rushing to Munich to sing Desdemona in Verdi’s “Otello” and flying to Santa Fe to star in Dvorak’s “Rusalka.” On the outdoor stage in New Mexico, she didn’t encounter any butterflies, but she did swallow an insect.“I started coughing,” Pérez, 44, said with a laugh during an interview last month on the grounds of Santa Fe Opera. “But this is my third opera here, and I’ve learned that you deal with the elements.”Friends have sent her photos of the New York billboards, which are a first for her. She has been performing at the Met since 2015 — blossoming into a soprano of lush vocal beauty, dramatic acuity and commanding presence — but there hasn’t been a new production built around her until this season, when Daniel Catán’s “Florencia en el Amazonas” receives its company premiere.“I haven’t posted any of the photos, because I don’t want to post something and then it’s gone,” Pérez said. “But I see it, and I just think, Wow, I’ve always wanted this, and I didn’t know it would be this role. It blows my mind.”She is excited not only by the career milestone, but also by what “Florencia” means for the Met. Catán’s 1996 opera — a Gabriel García Márquez-inspired story of a diva’s homecoming, opening Nov. 16 — is part of a wave of contemporary works joining the repertory there. More remarkably, it is the house’s first Spanish-language show. And at its heart is Pérez, the daughter of Mexican immigrants.Ushering in this era of the Met’s history is, she said, “such an honor.” To her colleagues, though, especially Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director, who is conducting “Florencia,” this moment is well-deserved for one of the house’s leading sopranos.“We go back to the Salzburg Festival over a decade ago,” Nézet-Séguin said of his relationship with Pérez. “And we’ve been regularly making music together. The generosity of the person comes through in every vocal performance that she gives. The refinement, the quality of the voice, the generosity of the heart — it’s what makes her exceptional.”Pérez, whose repertoire includes both lyric and dramatic roles, starred in “Rusalka” at the Santa Fe Opera this summer. Curtis BrownPérez grew up in Chicago, where her parents, both from towns near Guadalajara, Mexico, met. She started school on the South Side, but at 6 moved to the suburb of Elk Grove Village. There, she made a point of speaking English in the classroom despite Spanish being the default language at home.“It was a time where, if you spoke Spanish, you had E.S.L. classes, which I’m sure was the system’s way of caring,” Pérez said, “but it also hindered a group of students from learning with everyone else.”Making friends was difficult. Her homemade ham sandwiches came with avocado and jalapeño, which she said wasn’t good for trading at lunch. There was also the fact that she looked different from other children.But her Elk Grove elementary school was where she first took music classes. The instructor was playful, teaching rhythm and tempo with a wink and farting noises. “This is meant to be fun,” Pérez remembered thinking. She rented a recorder, then took up the cello to join the orchestra and flute to be in the band.In high school, she started voice lessons because they were required for her to take part in the musical. At her first session, the teacher handed her some sheet music and asked her to sing. She felt confident about breathing because of her experience on flute, and was able to sight-read the score. “He looked at me like, ‘Who are you?’” Pérez recalled. She knew virtually nothing about opera but was breezing through the famous Puccini aria “O mio babbino caro.”In the end, she got to perform in musicals — as Sarah in “Guys and Dolls,” and as Reno Sweeney in “Anything Goes” — but her interest was quickly overtaken by opera. Pérez checked out CDs from the library and made her way through the classic recordings of Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi, Mirella Freni and Montserrat Caballé. She brought a recording of “La Traviata” to her teacher and asked why the music made her cry.She adored Renée Fleming, whom she got to meet after a recital in Chicago. The great soprano told her that she had “nice cheekbones,” to which she replied, “Oh my God, thank you.” But, more important, that concert was the moment, Pérez said, that she “saw someone do the thing” of singing.Pérez had still not been to an opera. That wouldn’t happen until she saw Gounod’s “Faust” — starring a student Lawrence Brownlee — at Indiana University Bloomington. She studied there because, she was told, Met singers were on the faculty. Her teachers included the sopranos Martina Arroyo and Virginia Zeani, who originated the role of Blanche in Poulenc’s “Dialogues des Carmélites,” which Pérez would go on to perform at the Met.She continued her studies at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia, finishing there in 2006. Two years later, she was onstage in Salzburg, performing alongside the tenor Rolando Villazón, under Nézet-Séguin’s baton, in Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette.” After that prestigious debut, her arrival at the Met didn’t come until 2015, when she sang Micaëla in a revival of “Carmen.”“A confident, forthright presence in a role that can fade into merely demure, Ms. Pérez has a penetrating, settled voice,” Zachary Woolfe wrote of that night in The New York Times. “Her tone may not be sumptuous, but it’s clear and articulate, and she uses it with intelligence and a sense of purpose.”Pérez as Micaëla in “Carmen” at the Met: “A confident, forthright presence in a role that can fade into merely demure,” the Times critic wrote.Marty Sohl/Met OperaPérez could hardly be accused of not having a sumptuous voice today. Her sound has become richer, while remaining nimble enough for a spinto repertoire encompassing both lyric and dramatic roles; she can inspire awe as the Contessa in “Le Nozze di Figaro” one night and as the doomed nymph of “Rusalka” the next.Her career at the Met has been representative of that range, in part because she is a favorite of Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “Each season, she has grown and developed, and quite frankly gotten better and better,” he said. “She very convincingly becomes the characters whom she’s portraying, but above all her voice is absolutely beautiful.”In spring 2020, Pérez was set to sing in “Simon Boccanegra” at the Met, but the season was cut short by the pandemic. “The closure really knocked me out,” she said. It helped — a lot — that by then she had met Soloman Howard.They had been introduced in Santa Fe. In 2016, Pérez starred as Juliette in “Roméo,” and her colleagues included Howard, a bass-baritone, as the duke. “He took my breath away,” she said. “He’s such a brilliant artist and connector. Whether speaking or singing, the presence brings something that draws people in but also delivers this power. I knew that his calling in life would be big.”It wasn’t until 2019, though, that they began dating. They attended the Vienna Opera Ball together, and traveled to see each other perform. Once the pandemic hit, they sheltered together in Chicago. Where she was despondent, he was resourceful. He rounded up equipment for them to start recording music at home.At one point, Santa Fe Opera asked Pérez to tape herself singing “Song to the Moon” from “Rusalka,” and Howard said, “‘We are going to make a video,’” she recalled. “He cut stars out of foil and pinned them on the drapes. He got a boulder from a local Home Goods store. I was like the Little Mermaid on the rock, and that was all him.”When live opera resumed, Pérez reopened the Met’s auditorium as the soprano soloist in Verdi’s Requiem, to observe the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. She doesn’t really remember that night — “I was out of my body” — but others do. Gelb, who said, “You can’t fake Verdi,” remembered her sounding “absolutely magnificent.” Nézet-Séguin, called it “a performance for the ages.”Howard, Pérez said, gave her something to hope for in the months leading up to that Requiem. She referred to him as “mi vida” — “my life.” Out and about in the opera world, they are something of a power couple, beloved and difficult to miss in their red-carpet-ready style. (“That’s all Soloman.”) Days after the opening night of “Rusalka” in Santa Fe, they got married.The ceremony was small and private. A larger celebration will come, to be planned in the spaces between two peripatetic careers — which will soon bring Pérez back to the Met for “Florencia” rehearsals.It’s an opera that Gelb has long wanted to bring to the house; he was just waiting, he said, for the right star. And he knew that his hope for Pérez had paid off last season when, during the run of “Carmélites,” he asked her to sing Florencia’s final aria for the Met board on only a day’s notice. She delivered it, he added, “with so much beauty and conviction, she had the board sort of swooning along with her.”In Santa Fe, Pérez spoke about the role with the depth of a literary thinker, but acknowledged that she will have to see what the director, Mary Zimmerman, comes up with for the production. She is certain, at least, of the confidence she is bringing to “Florencia,” a product of the years leading up to this moment.“I don’t feel like a beginner anymore,” Pérez said. “I’m not wondering what happens next. Now, I can really look back and see it all.” 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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      The Maestro Wore Blue: Bringing Pizazz to the Pit at the Met

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      Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Metropolitan Opera’s music director, dressed in a blazing sapphire jacket and trim black pants, stood before a mirror backstage on a recent afternoon and smiled.“Oh my God, it’s so good,” he said, waving his baton. “I love it so much.”There were three days until the opening of Puccini’s “La Bohème,” and Nézet-Séguin, surrounded by a small team of tailors, designers and assistants, was offering feedback on his attire, which had been designed by the Met’s costume shop.His outfit was modeled on one worn onstage by a band leader in Franco Zeffirelli’s classic production. Could the golden braid that dangled from his right shoulder be fastened, so it did not create a distraction in the pit? Was the jacket comfortable enough to accommodate the sweeping gestures that the music demanded? And should there be more red, or maybe gold?The Met’s costume shop has designed outfits for Nézet-Séguin for eight productions, including this jacket for “Bohème.”“The more unusual elements,” he said, “the more fun for the audience.”Since the Met returned from the long pandemic shutdown, in the fall of 2021, Nézet-Séguin has been on a mission to challenge sartorial conventions, wearing eye-catching outfits designed by the Met’s costume shop in eight productions. There is limited space to make a statement; the designers focus on his back, since that is what most audience members will see.“We want to get some attention but not be too distracting,” said Robert Bulla, the Met’s assistant head costumer. “Nothing too obnoxious, but something that occasionally catches the light.”A conductor’s look book: clockwise from top left, “Champion,” “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” “The Hours” and “Lohengrin.”Nézet-Séguin sports a black-and-white hooded jacket modeled on a vintage Everlast boxing robe for Terence Blanchard’s “Champion,” an opera about the boxer Emile Griffith that had its Met premiere this month. (At the start of the second act, he enters the pit wearing the hood and boxing gloves, but removing both to conduct.)For “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the season in 2021, Nézet-Séguin wanted to wear something special. The opera’s costume designer, Paul Tazewell, suggested this fireworks pattern.Rose Callahan/Metropolitan OperaHe wore a stained-glass pattern on his jacket for a 2021 revival of Puccini’s “Tosca,” which opens in the Church of Sant’Andrea della Valle in Rome. And he switched from green to red to white shirts in Wagner’s “Lohengrin” this season, mimicking the look of the choristers, whose robes changed colors throughout the show.Nézet-Séguin said his outfits helped strengthen the bond between the pit and the stage.“You don’t want to ignore the orchestra,” he said. “If the conductor is there and seen, I think that helps the connection. It’s much more integrated.”At work in the costume shop. The jacket being constructed echoes one worn by a band leader onstage in the production.The costumes are also part of his efforts to make opera, which has long had a reputation for conservatism, more exciting and accessible.“We have to be more modern and approachable,” he said. “We want to welcome everybody.”While earlier music directors at the Met, all men, favored white tie and tails, Nézet-Séguin, who has held the post since 2018, has long had a more eclectic style, both in his clothes and appearance. He has bleached-blond hair and wears a diamond earring and several gold rings. He is fond of performing in clothes by designers like the Canadian Marie Saint Pierre and can be seen onstage in red-soled Christian Louboutin shoes.“The more unusual elements,” Nézet-Séguin said, “the more fun for the audience.”As the Met prepared to reopen its doors to the public after the pandemic shutdown in 2021, Nézet-Séguin felt it was time for a change.The Met was preparing to open the season with Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the first work by a Black composer in the company’s history. Nézet-Séguin wanted to wear something to reflect the importance of the moment. The costume designer for “Fire,” Paul Tazewell, suggested a fireworks pattern, with flashes of red, indigo, teal and orange.“To be plain dressed — it just felt wrong to me,” Nézet-Séguin said.Beyond white tie and tails. “We want to get some attention but not be too distracting,” Robert Bulla, an assistant head costumer at the Met, said.Landon Nordeman for The New York TimesThe designs often riff on an opera’s central themes. For Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” based on the 1998 novel and the 2002 film it inspired, he wore a floral pattern, a nod to the work’s many references to flowers.Comfort is a priority — the designers want to ensure that he feels unhindered, and they use lightweight and stretchable fabric for flexibility and to absorb sweat. The costume shop often produces several of each jacket so he can change into a fresh one between acts.Some operas are more challenging than others. The team struggled to come up with an idea for “Bohème” before recalling that the production includes a scene in which a band leader guides a procession of soldiers across the stage.Nézet-Séguin, who painted his nails fuchsia for “Champion,” sometimes adds his own touches.“It’s good to be breaking this mold of what everyone thinks classical music and opera is,” Bulla said. “Some people say it’s taken a long time to start this evolution process. But at least it’s evolving.”Nézet-Séguin sometimes adds his own touches. He painted his nails fuchsia for “Champion,” to match the purple robe worn onstage by Ryan Speedo Green, who plays Griffith. And he said he was eager for a day when the Met orchestra musicians would be allowed to dress with more variety. (The dress code demands tuxedos or long, flowing black clothes for evening performances.)“It’s baby steps,” he said. “When I make statements like this, mentalities can evolve. We have to think more creatively and ergonomically. This is only the beginning.” More

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      Review: In ‘La Bohème’ at the Met, the Star Is in the Pit

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      Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director, is conducting a beloved production of Puccini’s perennial classic for the first time.Winter grips Paris at the start of the third act of Puccini’s “La Bohème.”The shock of the cold is there in the loud, abrupt pair of notes as the curtain sweeps open — a slap across a frozen face. A soft but terse march in the flute and harp is a pricking chill, which deepens in a muted chord that builds from the bottom to the top of the strings, then the woodwinds. The cellos shiver, almost inaudibly, below. In just a few seconds, Puccini has conjured February, frigid and lonely.The Metropolitan Opera has put on “La Bohème” nearly 1,400 times, more than any other work; its players could do this moment in their sleep. But rarely are those chords at the beginning of Act III as poised and precisely tuned as they were when the company revived Franco Zeffirelli’s beloved production on Friday evening, their resonance as they built so evocative of the echoing bells Puccini calls for soon after.That tiny refinement is the kind of effect that needs real rehearsal to achieve, but “Bohème” doesn’t usually get that. For an expensive repertory factory like the Met to function, not every piece can be given equal attention; some, particularly the core Italian standards, must be thrown onstage with very little attention at all. The result is that this Puccini chestnut tends to get done on a high level but not the highest, with experienced but not starry maestros.Not so on Friday, when “La Bohème” was led for the first time at the Met by its current music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin — with the resources, energy and focus that always attend productions overseen by a company’s artistic leader.This hasn’t happened in decades. James Levine conducted “Bohème” more than 40 times at the Met, including the premiere of the Zeffirelli production in 1981. But not since Levine led a benefit performance in 1992 — about 400 “Bohèmes” ago — has a music director of the company been on the podium for it.So there was an overall sense of polish and verve on Friday, particularly in the orchestra: the tanginess of the winds when the bohemians’ landlord is regaling them in Act I, the delicacy of the strings at the beginning of Mimì’s aria introducing herself to Rodolfo. Like Nézet-Séguin’s approach to Verdi’s “La Traviata,” his “Bohème” is characterized by close juxtapositions of the sumptuous slowing down of tempos and furious bounding ahead. The goal of these back-and-forth extremes of speed seems to be feverish intensity, but the result is more often an atmospheric, even lightheaded dreaminess, beautiful and detailed but a bit unnatural.As Rodolfo and Marcello’s wistful duet began in the final act, for example, Nézet-Séguin pulled the reins until the music almost solidified into nostalgic amber: Time literally stopped. It is, he wrote on Instagram, “fulfilling my dream” to conduct this score at the Met, and there was throughout a sense of his lingering over it, however lovingly.The chorus, like the orchestra, was adroit, even in the Latin Quarter chaos of Act II. Best in the cast was the bass-baritone Christian Van Horn, his Colline solidly, capaciously and wittily sung. As Marcello, Davide Luciano seemed to be showing off the size of his substantial baritone by sometimes bellowing. Alexey Lavrov’s baritone, on the other hand, often vanished as Schaunard, and Sylvia D’Eramo had an expressive face but a wispy soprano as Musetta.There’s often a certain blandness to Stephen Costello’s calm, restrained tenor. But as his voice warmed through his performance as Rodolfo on Friday, what started off as coolness came to feel more like poignant reserve. The soprano Eleonora Buratto was a forthright rather than fragile Mimì, with muscular high notes tending toward the steel more often associated with Cio-Cio-San in Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.”All in all, it was clear who the central figure of this “Bohème” was: the man waving the baton. These days, splashy contemporary operas and new productions get the spotlight — and get the music director. But for the sake of the company’s artistic health and vibrancy, it’s important to also have Nézet-Séguin in the pit for titles that too often get taken for granted.La BohèmeYannick Nézet-Séguin leads performances through May 14; the run continues through June 9 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      ‘Hey, Mr. Living Composer’: ‘Champion’ Takes Shape at the Met

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      Terence Blanchard has been in rehearsals, with pencil and paper at the ready, as he tailors his opera ahead of its New York premiere.A basement rehearsal room at the Metropolitan Opera was so packed recently that it began to resemble a sweltering boxing gym.In one corner, members of the Met’s music staff were grouped together like judges tallying punches as they looked down at their scores. Nearby, a drummer and pianist locked into a syncopated groove, following the beat of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who was conducting while seated on an elevated platform.A phalanx of dancers rushed in to evoke an intense, collective workout regimen filled with balletic grace and pugilistic intensity. Those moves were choreographed by Camille A. Brown, who was close by, keeping an eye on every acrobatic feint. A former World Boxing Organization heavyweight champion paced the room, offering exhortations and encouragement.Supervising all this was the composer and trumpeter Terence Blanchard. He watched as his first opera, “Champion,” took shape ahead of its Met debut on Monday. (A Live in HD simulcast is planned for April 29.)After premiering at Opera Theater of St. Louis in 2013, “Champion” has played at the Washington National Opera‌ ‌and, scaled to a chamber-size orchestration, at SFJazz in San Francisco. But when this work — modeled on the life of the boxer Emile Griffith, and following Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which arrived triumphantly at the Met in 2021 — opens in New York this week, it will be thoroughly revised and expanded to embody the composer’s recent thoughts about opera, as a form. To wit: in this latest version of “Champion” there are not only new arias (and new lines for supporting characters); what will be heard in New York this season also reflects Blanchard’s latest work when it comes to orchestral complexity and vocal elegance.Performers in “Champion” evoke the world of boxing in choreography by Camille A. Brown.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesBlanchard has been in “Champion” rehearsals, at the ready to revise his score as needed.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesThe opera tells the life story of Emile Griffith, who is depicted in two roles sung by Ryan Speedo Green and Eric Owens.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesFor example, during the rehearsal last month, the soprano Latonia Moore, as Griffith’s mother, was singing a rhythmically bumptious riff from the first act when she and Blanchard noticed that the phrase, as written, wasn’t sitting in the most powerful part of her range. “Hey, Mr. Living Composer,” she called out, in a teasing tone. “Could you rewrite this for me?”Blanchard got to work immediately, composing a new vocal part on a blank page of staff paper: a melodic line that could work atop the existing orchestral harmony. He took a photograph of the revision before passing it along.“I couldn’t believe that he just sat there right in the room and wrote it,” Moore said later. “I expected he would come in with it a few days later, OK? It was like, ‘No, here it is.’ Oh my God! And it was really good.”In an interview after a rehearsal, Blanchard explained how his flexibility — unusual in the world of opera, in which scores, like schedules, are set far in advance — was the result of some early, on-the-job training in his career as a jazz performer.“Art Blakey taught me years ago: The easiest thing to do is to write something nobody can play,” Blanchard recalled. “The magic comes in not just through the melody and the harmony, but who’s playing it.”“You can see she has a powerful voice,” he said of Moore. To him, the calculation was simple: He wanted to feature that voice in the strongest possible way. “So that’s what it’s gonna be changed to.”Blanchard, right, with Joshua Balan, a cast member.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesMoore’s role, as that of Griffith’s manipulative and sometimes absent mother, is hardly the only one to be subjected to extensive revisions. The bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green — a standout in “Fire” and the star of “Champion” — said that when he first discussed this opera with Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, he felt that the role was a touch high for him.Gelb told him, “Speedo, That’s the beauty of having a living composer: Things can change,” Green recalled.“CHAMPION,” WITH A LIBRETTO BY MICHAEL CRISTOFER, TELLS Griffith’s tabloid-ready life story. Green sings Young Emile, while the veteran bass-baritone Eric Owens is cast as Old Emile, who lives in a nursing home on Long Island in the early 2000s. The boxer leaves the Virgin Islands for New York, then works in a hat factory before becoming a welterweight champ in the 1960s. In the ring with Benny Paret, Griffith unintentionally delivers blows that prove to be fatal, leaving Griffith anguished for years.“There’s this dream state that Emile is in,” Blanchard said, “because he’s dealing with dementia. There’s a combination of that harmony and that voicing, versus when it’s younger Emile. And chords moving; it goes back and forth. But it’s all story-driven, and it’s story-driven inside my language that I grew up listening to, as a jazz musician.”There is another thread in the opera, of Griffith’s journey from a straight-coded world to one of queerness. As a young man, in New York, he is drawn to gay bars and men while also excelling in the “man’s world” of boxing. The sports universe either doesn’t want to hear about queerness, or openly derides him for his sexual orientation.Just as Griffith navigates dramatic contrasts, so too does Blanchard’s score.The composer likes to talk about his love for Puccini — and you can hear some of that in Young Emile’s Act I aria “What Makes a Man a Man?” But in the boxing sequences, there’s a driving sense of muscular, post-bop jazz tumult. (As in “Fire,” the drummer Jeff Watts, known as Tain, leads a jazz combo embedded within the orchestra.) And there are some moments in which the fusion is well blended enough that no stylistic input seems to have the upper hand.Blanchard said that from his first visits to New York, starting in the spring of 1980, he took in a wide range of music. Although he was associated with traditionalist-minded players of New Orleans, he made a point of hearing the trio Air, which included the cutting-edge music of composer Henry Threadgill.“People were like, ‘Why are you going to that?’” Blanchard said. “And I’m like: ‘Bruh, because I’m trying to figure out what fits for me. I want to experience it all. Why limit myself, because you think I shouldn’t like this? Let me find out for myself.’”Those experiences pay off in “Champion.” In one of the early scenes at a gay bar, Blanchard writes sumptuous orchestral music — a cousin of sorts to the bluesy music heard in a club that figures in the story of “Fire,” but with the string section, not the jazz combo, taking center stage during the bacchanal. “It’s the sexiest sound those Met strings will ever make,” Moore said after a rehearsal. “You could see that they were feeling it!”In an interview, Blanchard tipped his hat to an early teacher, the composer Roger Dickerson, who used timbres and modes from American jazz when writing classical works like the New Orleans Concerto. (The pianist, composer and critic Ethan Iverson recently lavished praise on that rarely heard piece, describing its finale as “boogie-woogie gone surreal, the kind of thing Louis Andriessen tried to write over and over again, but better.”)When Blanchard started working with classical musicians, as he has done in his long partnership with Spike Lee as the composer of his soundtracks — Dickerson informed him that he had a unique opportunity, and a responsibility.“‘You have to keep in mind, the library of music for orchestral music has been limited,’” Blanchard recalled his teacher as saying. “‘There needs to be an expansion of it, through jazz — and maybe you’re the person to do that.’ He put that in my mind way back when.”Blanchard’s score for “Champion” synthesizes the varied musical genres he has taken in during his career as a composer and performer.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesBlanchard, who in 2021 became the first Black composer to have his work staged at the Met, has moved opera forward in exactly that way with his latest revisions to “Champion,” Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, said.Even as the conductor has offered small suggestions in rehearsals — like proposing a bit of bowed, marcato playing for the strings instead of pizzicato that could get lost in the Met’s grand auditorium — he has also deferred to Blanchard, who he said has been “much more hands on” about fine-tuning the orchestration.“I think he’s using the orchestra not to amplify his thoughts,” Nézet-Séguin said. “It’s more: How can I use it as a vehicle, the same way I would use a band? It doesn’t replace anything; it becomes its own thing.”Looking up at the stage after a recent run-through of “Champion,” Nézet-Séguin added of Blanchard, with a touch of pride in the musicians: “I’m pretty sure that in his next ventures — whether it’s film music, or whatever it is — he’s going to miss all that.” More

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      Review: A Blunt New ‘Lohengrin’ at the Met Stars a Shining Knight

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      The tenor Piotr Beczala sings with uncanny serenity and command in the title role of Wagner’s opera, directed by François Girard with little subtlety.Directors love Wagner’s operas, which infuse the suggestive sketchiness of parables into clearly conceived plots and characters. They offer both strong bones and flexibility.“Lohengrin,” about an anxious and divided society into which arrives a figure with magical powers and secrets, has recently been placed in settings as varied as a laboratory, a classroom and a neo-fascist town square.And, on Sunday at the Metropolitan Opera, in a dark, blunt mixture of pre-modern and post-apocalyptic elements. Directed by François Girard, the production suffers from a facile children’s-theater color scheme, but boasts a shining musical performance from the orchestra and the two leading singers.At the Met in 1998, Robert Wilson distilled “Lohengrin” into a vision of hovering bars of light and glacially shifting gestures. The opening night audience, used to hyper-naturalistic Wagner productions, rebelled with a storm of boos. But 25 years later, the Wilson staging seems like an ahead-of-its-time landmark, a harbinger of how the company’s dramatic range would broaden.Among the highlights of this new era has been Girard’s staging, from 2013, of Wagner’s “Parsifal.” Set on a stark hillside among a group of men in white button-ups and black pants, this was a take on the opera’s protectors of the Holy Grail as a contemporary cult over which planets loomed and orbited in projections.Those cosmic projections have returned in Girard’s “Lohengrin,” with a kind of catastrophic heavenly explosion depicted during the orchestral prelude. The action that follows begins under a blasted wall that hangs at an angle over the stage, a huge hole open to a view of morphing stars and galaxies.The people who enter are dressed in early medieval robes and heavy jewels; a pagan throne is formed from tree roots. But the wall is made of reinforced concrete, and Lohengrin, the mystical knight who soon arrives to avenge the honor of a woman accused of killing her brother, is wearing the spare modern-day outfit of the Grail defenders in Girard’s “Parsifal.”The connection makes some sense: As we learn at the end of “Lohengrin,” when its title character’s secrets are revealed, Lohengrin is Parsifal’s son. But Girard’s nod to his “Parsifal” doesn’t do his new production any favors. While that “Parsifal” was revelatory in imagining the opera’s climax as the integration of women into the Grail cult, this “Lohengrin” isn’t interested in fresh interpretations. No one will mistake it for a landmark in Met history.Instead, Girard’s “Lohengrin,” which brings the opera back to the company after 17 years, is an emphatic, serviceable, basically conservative framework for the piece. Thankfully, some superb singers fill the frame. Most important, almost floating through the staging with uncanny serenity and dignity, is Piotr Beczala in the title role.Beczala, who has appeared at the Met mostly in French and Italian classics, was an impressive Lohengrin.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis square-jawed, always stylish tenor is best known at the Met for playing dashing men in French and Italian classics, like the Duke in “Rigoletto,” Rodolfo in “La Bohème” and, this winter, the ardent Loris in “Fedora.” But the clearest precursor to his melancholy Lohengrin is his Lensky in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” who sings with wintry loneliness as he prepares to duel and die.Beczala performs the Wagner role — pure, precise and often treacherously exposed — with total security and elegance. The soft passages have fairy-tale delicacy; his outpourings, a robust plangency reminiscent of his more extroverted roles. But this Lohengrin, even at his most passionate, has the proper coolness of an otherworldly figure. He is human, but not entirely.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.There is also an intriguing coolness when we meet Tamara Wilson’s unjustly accused Elsa, a glassy sheen to her tone as icy-blond as her hair. But while Beczala’s Lohengrin maintains his reserve, Wilson’s voice gradually warms, gently molten in their love duet and palpably angry in confrontation.Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, conducts this grand score with a sure sense for the elasticity of pace that makes Wagner’s scenes breathe. He led the orchestra on Sunday in broad expansions before focusing it back into tumbling momentum. The shimmering start of the prelude to Act I was fragile without being wispy, building with lyrical flow to a stirring climax.There are onstage trumpets in this opera, and extra brass forces in the balconies. But Nézet-Séguin kept the textures light; even at its mightiest, the sound was never stolid.Tamara Wilson as Elsa with Beczala.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesChanging shirts between the acts, from black to red to white, he also underlined the already obvious play with color that is all too central to the staging. The choristers manipulate complicated sets of magnets in their robes to reveal red, green or white linings, depending on the dramatic needs of the moment. (The sets and costumes were designed by Tim Yip, an Academy Award winner for “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”; the gloomy lighting, by David Finn; the interstellar projections, by Peter Flaherty.)Green symbolizes King Heinrich, who has arrived in Brabant (around Antwerp in present-day Belgium) with his followers to rally the people there to join him in fighting off a coming invasion from the east. Red is the color of the native Brabantians, who are under the sinister influence of Friedrich von Telramund and his wife, the sorceress Ortrud. And white evokes the innocence and purity of Elsa, to whose aid Lohengrin has come.Fine, if rather on the nose. But the endless flashings of the different linings on the beat of musical flourishes — and the visible struggles that some choristers on Sunday had with the magnets — grew tiresome.And must every Met production now have bits of choreographed slinking and twirling? Here, credited to Serge Bennathan, were lightly dancing attendants with lanterns, heads-thrown-back courtiers, whirling nobles and laughably in-time marching. It was all of a piece with a production that’s straightforward to the point of eye-roll overstatement.As Ortrud, the soprano Christine Goerke was perhaps the performer closest to the mood of the staging: She’s unsubtle, if effective, constantly wringing her hands and gripping her necklaces. Girard strands her alone, making over-the-top witchy gestures, for almost the whole of the Act III prelude. We get it: She’s evil!Goerke’s voice has vigor, but rich phrases alternate with sour, snarled ones; some high notes shiver, while some just miss the mark. The bass-baritone Evgeny Nikitin, an imposing presence, sounded weary and out of tune as Telramund. I found myself wishing that the baritone Brian Mulligan, who sang the Herald with unusually vivid intensity, had that larger part instead. The bass Günther Groissböck was a forceful Heinrich.Wilson and, top, Christine Goerke. The choristers manipulate their robes to reveal red, green or white linings, depending on the dramatic needs of the moment.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Met’s chorus, in one of the most difficult works in its repertory, was both stentorian and evocative: In the awe-struck passage after Lohengrin introduces himself, its ethereal singing was almost more felt than heard. Only in some of the most complex counterpoint could the sound have been crisper, the words sharper.Girard’s staging is more lucid than his murky take on Wagner’s “Der Fliegende Holländer,” which will be revived at the Met this spring. It does, at least, convey the urgency of the march toward war that gives the opera its stakes. And this production will always be an unintentional memorial to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.Conceived as a co-production of the Bolshoi Theater and the Met, it premiered at the Bolshoi in Moscow on Feb. 24, 2022, the day of the invasion. Soon it became clear that sharing the production would be impossible, and that the sets would have to be rebuilt from scratch, adding over $1 million to the show’s cost.“Lohengrin” is an opera with war on its mind. But King Heinrich and his call to defend Germany against invaders don’t make for an easy parallel with the besieged Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky.That is because Heinrich’s story was taken up — by Wagner and, later, by the Nazis — as a symbol of pan-Germanic nationalism, with all its darkness and xenophobia. That is the context in which a few opera companies have changed a word in Lohengrin’s final line, when he declares, at the magical return of Elsa’s brother, that the people’s “Führer,” or leader, has arrived.To further avoid the associations of this savior figure with Hitler, many directors offer a comment in how they depict the brother. Is there something ominous about him? Something redemptive? Anything?Girard, though, has a very Aryan-looking, blond young man in flowing, angelic white come down the stairs, a final odd bit of naïveté in this “Lohengrin,” a production that ends up being too simplistic for a complex moment and a complex opera.LohengrinContinues through April 1 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Yannick Nézet-Séguin Extends His Contract With the Philadelphia Orchestra

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      The four-year extension will keep him at the podium through at least the end of the 2029-30 season.The conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who has led the Philadelphia Orchestra to accolades and worked to broaden its repertory, including by promoting the music of overlooked composers, has renewed his contract, the orchestra announced on Sunday.The four-year extension will keep Nézet-Séguin, 47, at the podium through at least the end of the 2029-30 season. As part of the deal, he has been given an expanded title, serving as both music and artistic director of the 123-year-old ensemble.In an interview, Nézet-Séguin likened his relationship with the orchestra to a “great and healthy marriage.”“Making music when we know each other, when we love each other, makes a world of difference,” he said. “To see this relationship flourish and expand — I’m very grateful for it.”Nézet-Séguin, who began his tenure as the orchestra’s eighth music director in 2012, is one of classical music’s busiest conductors. In addition to his post in Philadelphia, he is music director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York and leads the Orchestre Métropolitain of Montreal, where he was born.Matías Tarnopolsky, the president and chief executive of the orchestra and the Kimmel Center, said Nézet-Séguin was a transformative figure in the orchestra’s history.“The music they are making together is transcendental — this great orchestra, this extraordinary conductor,” he said. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts in this relationship.”Nézet-Séguin has helped guide the orchestra’s recovery from the pandemic, which has brought steep financial losses and resulted in a decline in the number of people attending concerts. (The orchestra lost about $26 million in ticket sales and performance fees after canceling more than 200 concerts at the beginning of the pandemic.)The orchestra is experimenting with ways of attracting new concertgoers, including by lowering ticket prices and holding performances at different times of the day. Attendance has improved over the past few months, reaching an average of 60 percent capacity so far this season, compared with 66 percent before the pandemic.As classical music grapples with a history of racial and gender discrimination, Nézet-Séguin has emerged as a champion of overlooked composers. This week, for example, the Philadelphia Orchestra performed the Negro Folk Symphony by William L. Dawson, a Black composer. The orchestra gave the world premiere of the piece in 1934 but, before this week, had only performed it in full on one other occasion.Nézet-Séguin said that in the coming years he planned to continue to diversify the orchestra’s repertory, which he hopes will help nurture new classical music fans.“We must listen more to people from communities we want to embrace,” he said. “We must not always impose. We should ask, ‘How can we welcome you?’”Nézet-Séguin also hopes to raise the orchestra’s profile by leading more tours, including in China and other parts of Asia, as well as in the United States. Last fall, the orchestra canceled a tour of China planned for May, worried that the country’s then-strict coronavirus protocols would create logistical challenges. The tour was meant to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the orchestra’s visit to the country in 1973, when it became the first American ensemble to perform in Communist-led China.Under Nézet-Séguin, the orchestra has won accolades, including its first-ever Grammy last year, for a recording of two symphonies by Florence Price, the first Black woman to have her music played by a major American orchestra.Nézet-Séguin will be feted in Philadelphia in the coming days with what the orchestra is calling “Philly Loves Yannick Week.” As part of the festivities, the ensemble has produced a bobblehead modeled on him, complete with his trademark bleached-blond hair and red-soled Christian Louboutin shoes.He said he could envision many more years in Philadelphia, noting the orchestra’s history of music directors with lengthy tenures, so long as the musicians wanted him and he could keep them stimulated.“There’s nothing I can do as a conductor if I don’t have my orchestra with me,” he said. “At the end of the day, I’m just the person waving and thinking. In the end they do the music.” More

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      Review: Yuja Wang Sweeps Through a Rachmaninoff Marathon

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      It was a momentous occasion as Wang played all five of Rachmaninoff’s works for piano and orchestra at Carnegie Hall for one show only.Yes, Yuja Wang did an encore.After playing, with electric mastery, all four of Rachmaninoff’s dizzyingly difficult piano concertos and his “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini” on Saturday — the kind of feat for which the phrase “once in a lifetime” was invented — she would have been forgiven for accepting a sold-out Carnegie Hall’s standing ovation, letting those two and a half hours of music speak for themselves, and heading home for a bubble bath.But this is a superstar artist as famous for what comes after her written programs as during them. At Carnegie in 2018, she responded to waves of applause with seven encores. Appearing with the New York Philharmonic a few weeks ago, she returned to the keyboard no fewer than three times.So on Saturday, the audience hushed as Wang, after all she’d already done with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, sat back down at the piano and played the “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” from Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice.” It had the same freshness and tender lucidity that, in her hands, had lay beneath even Rachmaninoff’s densest, most ferocious fireworks.She didn’t seem to have broken a sweat — neither on her face nor in her music-making, which had been calmly dazzling all the way through the final flourish of the Third Concerto at the program’s end.To these scores’ vast demands she brought both clarity and poetry. She played with heft but not bombast, sentiment but not schmaltz. Her touch can certainly be firm, but not a single note was harsh or overly heavy; her prevailing style is sprightly, which is why the concert didn’t feel like eating five slices of chocolate cake in a row. In the 18th variation of the “Rhapsody,” the work’s aching climax, she began demurely and dreamily before adding muscle. But when the orchestra joined in, a point at which many pianists begin to pound, she refused to hammer.She didn’t give the sense that she was pacing herself, either, over this very long stretch. With five breaks — two pauses, two full intermissions and one long, impromptu stop spurred by a medical emergency in the audience that interrupted the Second Concerto, the opener, just after the final movement had begun — the concert lasted about four and a half hours.Wang took on her marathon with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra.Chris LeeThe program was flanked by the Second and Third concertos, touchstones of the repertory for the past century, and also included the youthful First; the changeable, big-band-inflected Fourth; and the playfully kaleidoscopic “Rhapsody.” The composition and revision of these five pieces extended almost from the beginning to the end of Rachmaninoff’s career, from the early 1890s to the early 1940s. (He was born 150 years ago this April.) But all of them share his unmistakable stamp: the sumptuous soulfulness, the soaring expansions, the restless rhythmic shifts and, of course, the alternation of fierce energy and intimate reflection in the piano.Wang is nimble at that alternation, with power and accuracy in fast fingerwork and fortissimo chords — and, just as important, patience and elegance in cooler moments. Her pillowy chords at the close of the Second Concerto’s middle movement floated quietly into place, and she was shadowy but luminous before that piece’s ending romp.Before the final plunge near the end of the Third Concerto, the piano takes one last, brief inward look. Wang shaped this passage with exquisite detail: the first two chords gentle, the next suddenly louder and surprisingly tough — tougher than she’d sounded in solo moments like this during the whole concert — before the rest of the phrase ebbed into mist. This handful of measures painted a whole situation and personality: vulnerable, strong, searching but not lost. It was as memorable as the blazing runs and octaves that followed.The program’s first block, the Second and First concertos, might have involved shaking out some jitters over the momentousness of the occasion. Whatever the reason, there was a sense of audibly finding the right gear among Nézet-Séguin and this orchestra — which has a historical claim to Rachmaninoff, having premiered the Fourth Concerto and the “Rhapsody” before eventually recording all five of these pieces with him as the soloist.The Second Concerto’s opening movement was unsettled on Saturday, and the balances seemed off: The strings, less rich than turgid, swamped the winds and often Wang. Rubato stretched the line, but everyone wasn’t always stretching in the same direction. Wind solos felt excessively manicured, to the point of preciousness.But things gradually settled in. Apocalyptic storm clouds moodily gathered underneath the piano line in the first movement of the Fourth Concerto. And by the “Rhapsody,” which followed the Fourth, the ensemble had taken on the ideal Rachmaninoff sound: glittering and grand.The Philadelphians were practically feline in the iridescent orchestration of the grim Dies Irae’s appearance in the “Rhapsody.” A shivering hush in the first movement of the Third Concerto was like a snow in which Wang made soft footsteps with the palest chords. In the second movement, the winds at the start sounded as flexible and natural as they had all day, and the orchestra now seemed to sweep Wang’s lines upward rather than smothering her in the race to the final measures.That culminating dash had the easy sparkle of Wang’s best work. The concert also showed off, perhaps better than ever before, another defining feature of her performances: flamboyant clothes.A lot of them. She wore, along with her typical very high heels, a different dress for each of the five pieces, with skintight fits and shimmering fabric in red, ivory, green and silver — and, most immortal, a magenta minidress for the “Rhapsody” paired with sparkling periwinkle leg warmers. (Alas, there was no costume change for the encore. Next time!)With the controversy that greeted Wang’s attire choices 10 or 15 years ago now thankfully muted, we can concentrate on the joyfulness of those choices, which on Saturday were apt partners for these fundamentally joyful works. Virtuosity on this level, in material this ravishing, is elevating to witness — which is why, even after so many hours, I was left at the end feeling an exhilarated lightness. Like many others I saw, I drifted up the aisle and onto the street unable to stop smiling.Yuja Wang and the Philadelphia OrchestraPerformed on Saturday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More