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    Aix Festival: How to Experience It From Afar

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    Many of the offerings at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France are broadcast, or they travel to other theaters. Here are some highlights.Every summer, opera moves from the city to the country. Stars pack their bags for idyllic destinations, and their most dedicated, deep-pocketed fans follow.It’s festival season, and perhaps the most interesting one is in Aix-en-Provence, France. At the Aix Festival, directors take risks on classics, and new works are unveiled in spots as old-fashioned as a Baroque theater and as unlikely as a monolithic stadium off the highway. Audience members come from around the world, often laid back in linens and sandals, expecting an operatic adventure worth traveling for.This year’s Aix Festival, which continues through July 21, has been somberly tinted by the death of its general director, Pierre Audi, in early May. He had commissioned two productions that premiered during the opening weekend: an intimate, charged reimagining of Britten’s “Billy Budd” by the director Ted Huffman and the composer Oliver Leith; and the world premiere of “The Nine Jewelled Deer,” a long but frequently beautiful collaboration among the composer Sivan Eldar, the director Peter Sellars, the artist Julie Mehretu and the author Lauren Groff.It’s too soon to know whether those shows will travel and take root. But other festival productions already have plans to be broadcast and streamed online, or even to be revived at other opera houses. Below are ways to experience them for yourself. (Some media may be restricted in certain countries.)‘Don Giovanni’Andrè Schuen, above, and Clive Bayley in “Don Giovanni” at the Grand Théâtre de Provence.Monika RittershausThe festival opened on July 4 with a new production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” directed by Robert Icke in his opera debut and conducted by Simon Rattle, leading the lush Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Icke is known for his intelligent, liberal adaptations of theater classics, and he was similarly bold, if sometimes overflowing with ideas, in taking on one of the most difficult operas in the canon.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Peter Sellars Is Still Living His Life Through Art

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      The director, one of the most influential in opera, is staging new productions in New York, France and Austria this summer.Peter Sellars watched the rehearsal and wept in the dark.It was a recent afternoon at Purchase College, north of New York City, and an ensemble was going over a soft yet cataclysmic passage in Matthew Aucoin’s “Music for New Bodies.”A group of singers was almost wailing the word “down,” over and over, as an instrumental undertow seemed to stretch time into a yawning void. The music made plain the terror in the text — Jorie Graham’s poetry of cancer treatments and climate change — and the cheeks of Sellars, the production’s director and one of the most revered figures in the performing arts, grew wet with tears.Among his collaborators, Sellars is cherished for this openness with his feelings. He wraps anyone and everyone in a bear hug. He releases sudden honks of laughter. He cries.“He allows himself to be impacted,” said the soprano Julia Bullock, “and releases his emotions very easily.”“Music for New Bodies” arrives at David Geffen Hall on Thursday as part of the American Modern Opera Company’s summer residency at Lincoln Center. Sellars’s production is in the pared-down, nearly ritualistic style for which he’s become known. With barely any set or props, the singers and instrumentalists are the focus, onstage together under moody lighting, in shifting formations that have the charged drama of Baroque paintings.“I made the staging, but staging is too fancy a word,” he said in an interview. “It’s just — you can see the music.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Stuart Burrows, Welsh Lyric Tenor Who Straddled the Atlantic, Dies at 92

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      He was a mainstay at both the Metropolitan Opera and the Royal Opera House, winning acclaim for his full tenor range and a rich, unforced tone, notably singing Mozart. Stuart Burrows, a Welsh lyric tenor prized by conductors on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1970s and ’80s for his agile singing in Mozart, becoming a mainstay at the Metropolitan Opera and at Covent Garden in London, died on Sunday in Cardiff, Wales. He was 92.His death, in a hospice facility, was confirmed by his son, Mark.Mr. Burrows was a coal miner’s son who was schooled in the chapels of Cilfynydd, the village where he was born. His clear voice and attention to detail would make him an ideal Ottavio in “Don Giovanni” and Tamino in “The Magic Flute.”His control was effortless throughout the full tenor range, his tone rich and unforced, as in his role as Lensky in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin.” In Georg Solti’s 1974 recording of that opera, Mr. Burrows’s voice was “most beautiful and sensitive,” the critic John Warrack wrote in a review in the magazine Gramophone.Mr. Burrows nearly opted for a professional rugby career as a young man in the early 1950s — he turned down a contract with the club in Leeds at the last minute — but he knew he had a gift that he could not ignore, though his career wouldn’t blossom for another decade.“I knew I could sing,” he told the BBC in 1972. Yet, he added, “I never had ambition to be a singer.” Singing was merely part of the landscape in bardic Wales; the renowned baritone Geraint Evans was born in the same village — and even on the same street — as Mr. Burrows.He had settled happily into a role as a schoolteacher in nearby Bargoed, teaching woodworking and music, “a job which he enjoyed immensely,” Roger Wimbush wrote in a biographical sketch in Gramophone in 1971. But then Mr. Burrows sang “Il Mio Tesoro” from “Don Giovanni,” in Welsh, in a singing competition in 1959 at the age-old national Eisteddfod festival, and won. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Lisa Laurén’s Artsy Childhood Inspires Her Sought-After Animal Heads

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      When Lisa Laurén gets a request for an animal costume head, she said, “it’s kind of like I’m going on a play date.”Using her imagination, resources and hands, Laurén crafts animal heads that are vivid, colorful and eye-catching.“I’m trying to condense somebody else’s dream and make it into something,” Laurén said from the kitchen of her high-ceilinged apartment on a leafy street near the Spree River in Berlin. A clay fox head covered tightly with foil stood on a large tray, awaiting its next phase of creation.The animal heads are an offshoot of Laurén’s main job as a freelance textile artist, a role that includes painting backdrops for staged productions and helping develop costumes for television, film and theater. She has worked for an array of clients including Netflix, Apple TV+, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Tate Museum in London, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.Lisa Laurén, a textile designer, creates imaginative animal heads for performers. “I’m trying to condense somebody else’s dream and make it into something.” Laurén has been making animal costume heads for theater, opera and artistic performances since 2011, when the Komische Oper Berlin commissioned her and a close collaborator, Benjamin Tyrrell, to make a set for a staging of Leos Janacek’s 1923 opera, “The Cunning Little Vixen,” in which many characters are forest animals.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Telemann’s Comic Opera Was a Delight. Why Is It Ignored?

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      Georg Philipp Telemann’s overlooked intermezzo “Pimpinone” is being presented by the Boston Early Music Festival this weekend.In the standard repertoire, comic opera more or less starts with Mozart. Of course, others came before him, but his towering command of the form — the way he fully realizes characters from high and low backgrounds and gives them personal dignity, quirky foibles and exquisite arias — casts a long shadow over all of them.Still, there’s a two-hander from the first half of the 18th century, a few decades before Mozart’s birth, that anticipates the comic style to come. Pitting a wily maid against a buffoonish master — stock types that Mozart, Rossini and Donizetti would continue to mine for the next 100-plus years — it entertained audiences with its delightful music, relatable characters and reversal of the traditional power dynamics accorded by gender and social station.This is Georg Philipp Telemann’s “Pimpinone,” from 1725, which came eight years before Pergolesi’s better-known piece with the same premise, “La Serva Padrona,” but is rarely heard today. The Boston Early Music Festival, though, is presenting it in a rare staging at Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, in Great Barrington, Mass., on Friday and Saturday, then at Caramoor in Katonah, N.Y., on Sunday.“It’s one of those quirks of history that ‘Pimpinone’ hasn’t become a repertory piece, because it really deserves to be,” said Steven Zohn, a Telemann scholar.“Pimpinone” belongs to a long-obsolete genre of classical music, the intermezzo, a short comedy intended to be broken up and performed between the acts of a dramatic or tragic opera. Its everyday characters have jobs, worry about money and fall prey to gossip, in stark contrast to the noble bearing and life-or-death stakes of the mythological and historical personages of opera seria.From left, Immler, Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière and Danielle Reutter-Harrah in “Pimpinone.”Kathy WittmanWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      On Smaller Opera Stages, Daring Art Has More Room to Breathe

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      Unlike most countries, Germany has a network of minor but generously subsidized theaters whose vitality is remarkable, and unmatched.Near the end of Judith Weir’s opera “Miss Fortune,” there is an uncanny duet between the main character, Tina, and her fate. Tina is sung by a soprano, and Fate by a countertenor. Although their music is similar, the difference in their vocal timbres creates an unsettling clash.At a recent production of “Miss Fortune” that I attended at the Theater für Niedersachsen in Hildesheim, a small city in northern Germany, that scene had a memorable charge. Its strange lyricism was undercut by the humor of Tina telling her destiny to butt out as one might set boundaries with a problematic ex.It was a great operatic moment, and it played to a sparse audience in a city of just over 100,000 people.During the past season, Germany’s leading opera houses — in Berlin and Munich, in Stuttgart and Hamburg — offered largely familiar though well-rendered pleasures, along with a handful of new works by marquee artists in contemporary music. But, unlike almost any other country in the world, Germany also has a large network of smaller professional opera houses that step up, offering modernist masterpieces, overlooked rarities and work from this century. (According to the German Music Information Center, the country has 83 institutions presenting opera and music theater.)In addition to the Theater für Niedersachsen, I traveled to opera houses in Darmstadt, Dessau-Rosslau, Lübeck, Magdeburg, Bielefeld and Kassel throughout the season. Although the performances were often at a lower technical level than in the country’s opera capitals — the orchestral playing less polished, the singing rougher, the stagings and acting more beholden to clichés — they also showed a scene whose vitality remains unmatched, thanks to generous but increasingly precarious government funding.Germany’s smaller opera houses allow up-and-coming artists to hone their craft, giving onstage experience to generations of performers. Sonja Isabel Reuter, who gave an assured interpretation of Tina in “Miss Fortune,” is Theater für Niedersachsen’s only ensemble soprano. Last season, she sang four completely different vocal roles in the space of a week: Mimi from “La Bohème,” two different operetta characters and the solo soprano part in Dvorak’s cantata “The Specter’s Bride.” Her three seasons at the house, she said in a phone interview, “were like a crash course in how to be an opera singer.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: ‘The Comet/Poppea’ Merges Opera’s Past and Present

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      A Monteverdi masterpiece and a new work by George Lewis are played simultaneously in an American Modern Opera Company production at Lincoln Center.When you enter the David H. Koch Theater for “The Comet/Poppea,” you are directed not into the auditorium but through some passageways and onto the stage. It’s a rare perspective to be facing a hall full of empty seats, with the delightful, rebellious undercurrent of being where you’re not supposed to be.Being where you’re not supposed to be is one of the few threads tying together the two operas that are played more or less simultaneously over the following 90 minutes. Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” (1643) charts the improbable climb of Nero’s mistress to the throne of the Roman Empire. George Lewis’s “The Comet” (2024), set about a century ago, imagines a Black man who finds himself in a once segregated, now abandoned space after an apocalyptic event.The idea of intermingling these very different works came from the director Yuval Sharon, who is always cooking up half-mad ideas like this, and the American Modern Opera Company, or AMOC, a collective exploring its capacious vision of the art form over the next month during a residency at Lincoln Center.The audience for “The Comet/Poppea,” which opened on Wednesday and runs through Saturday, sits in two sections facing each other across the stage. Between them is a large circular platform that has been divided in two. One side is the realistic, amber-lit restaurant of “The Comet”; the other, where “Poppea” plays, is a heavenly vision of a pristinely white Roman bath, the walls encrusted with white plaster flowers.This turntable is constantly rotating, in an effort to convey a sense of “a visual and aural spiral,” as Sharon writes in a program note. But while “The Comet/Poppea” tries to conjure a cyclone, whipping together past and present, Black and white, high class and low, naturalism and stylization, it ends up feeling more like a trudge.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In ‘Lash,’ Rebecca Saunders’s First Opera, Sex Flirts With Death

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      Rebecca Saunders has collaborated with the artist Ed Atkins to create “Lash,” a work that hovers around themes of illness and intimacy.Toward the end of “Lash,” a new opera by Rebecca Saunders, a vocal quartet of invites the listener to “come to bed and die.”Saunders, 57, is a masterly composer whose recent music is becoming more passionate, expressive and lyrical than ever. An artist whose works are regularly performed throughout Europe, she has won many prizes, including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at last year’s Venice Music Biennale. Her subtle music has an unmistakable momentum.The text of the opera is by Ed Atkins, an artist and writer who often uses hyper-realistic C.G.I. video to unsettling effect. A critically acclaimed, career-spanning exhibition of his work is currently on show at Tate Britain in London, and his “Old Food,” which featured sandwiches filled with uncannily modified bodies, was shown at the 2019 Venice Art Biennale. Like his video work, Atkins’s prose is obsessed with the strangeness of sex and death.On Friday, “Lash” will premiere at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. It is Saunders’s first opera and Atkins’s first libretto. Though Saunders wrote a piece based on words by Atkins, “Us Dead Talk Love,” in 2021, “Lash” is the first time the artists have shaped a piece together from the beginning.That relationship allowed Saunders to finally take on an opera. “I didn’t want to give a piece to somebody and just let go,” Saunders said. “I wanted to find the author and the directors and the house who would enable us to work on a collaborative project.”“Lash” features four female performers — the singers Noa Frenkel, Sarah Maria Sun and Anna Prohaska, and the actor Katja Kolm — who represent separate strands of a single consciousness.Marcus LieberenzWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Best Classical Music of 2025, So Far

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      Our critics picked nine performances that included star turns, new opera productions and the unveiling of a concert hall at the Frick Collection.‘Salome’Those looking for the full, lurid grandeur of Strauss’s “Salome” could find it this spring in a new production at the Metropolitan Opera. But in February, the scrappy company Heartbeat Opera pre-empted the Met with a thrillingly pared-down version, putting the audience just feet from the action and reducing a huge orchestra to two percussionists and an octet of clarinetists who played a total of 28 instruments, including a handful of saxophones. Presented in the intimate surroundings of the Space at Irondale in Brooklyn, with the performers exposed between two blocks of seating, the queasy-making story unfolded with raw clarity. ZACHARY WOOLFERead our review of Heartbeat Opera’s “Salome.”Takacs QuartetAmong the glories of the renovated Frick Collection, which reopened in April, is a new space for chamber performance, replacing the museum’s much-venerated music room. The roughly 220-seat, curved Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, subterranean but airy, with crackling acoustics, was put through its paces in a burst of six excellent concerts, featuring a variety of ensemble sizes, instruments and repertory, from Tudor to today. Most indelible was the veteran Takacs Quartet, coruscating in works by Beethoven and Janacek. And, in Brahms’s Piano Quintet, the group’s electric music-making was abetted by Jeremy Denk on a late-19th-century Steinway. WOOLFERead our overview of concerts at the Frick’s new concert hall.Yunchan LimYunchan Lim performing Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations” at Carnegie Hall.Chris LeeWhen Yunchan Lim said, right after winning the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2022 with a barnburner Rachmaninoff concerto, that he wanted to play Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, the reaction was largely amused disbelief. Not every teenage virtuoso turns so quickly to performing Bach’s 75-minute labyrinth, which requires preternatural reserve and concentration more than technical fireworks. But in April at Carnegie Hall, Lim, now 21, showed that his true gift is for restrained poetry, as he rose from studious, polite opening minutes to eventually offer a “Goldbergs” of heightened, nearly Romantic intensity and contrasts. It was an exhilarating journey. WOOLFERead our review of Lim’s “Goldbergs.”Sondra RadvanovskyWhat makes a great Tosca? To get a sense, watch the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, who returned to the Metropolitan Opera in January with what amounted to a master class. She embodies Puccini’s breakneck tragedy at its finest, with a fearlessness that is both musical and dramatic: an openness to vulnerability, even fragility, that can inspire sympathy but, with a formidably strong core, whip into the fury of fight-or-flight desperation. I won’t soon forget the penetrating softness of her “Vissi d’arte” or the chilling sotto voce with which, standing above Scarpia’s corpse, she growled, “And before him all of Rome trembled.” JOSHUA BARONERead our review of Radvanovsky in “Tosca.”‘Akhnaten’Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” has been performed on major opera stages in the past decade with something of a monopoly: the same production, by Phelim McDermott, starring the same countertenor, Anthony Roth Costanzo. But at the Komische Oper in Berlin this spring, the director Barrie Kosky unveiled a refreshingly different vision for the work: pure abstraction and a minimalism that, in climaxes of opulence, mirrors the deceptive richness of Glass’s score. The company’s chorus, in near-constant movement, was heroic, and John Holliday’s sound as Akhnaten was gorgeously expressive and, in an ideal reflection of the role, as human as it was heavenly. BARONEWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More