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    Lise Davidsen Is an Opera Star Worth Traveling For

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    Her high notes emerging like shafts of sunlight, Davidsen is playing the title role in Janacek’s “Jenufa” at the struggling Lyric Opera of Chicago.A new pop song is the same streamed anywhere. And if you wanted to see Beyoncé this year, she likely came to a town not far from you, giving pretty much the same show in Barcelona as she did in Detroit.But an opera star doing a role in Berlin or London doesn’t mean she’ll bring it to New York. When it comes to the art form’s greatest singers, there are things you simply can’t hear by staying put. And Lise Davidsen is worth traveling for.Davidsen, the statuesque 36-year-old soprano with a flooding voice of old-school amplitude, has been singing the title character in Janacek’s crushing “Jenufa” at Lyric Opera of Chicago this month. Though she has been a regular presence at the Metropolitan Opera — where she will star in a new production of Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” in winter — there’s no promise she’ll ever perform Jenufa there.So for those of us who hear in Davidsen’s rich, free tone the kind of golden-age instrument we otherwise know mostly through glimpses on old recordings, it was a privilege to be in Chicago.The added incentive was that the redoubtable soprano Nina Stemme would be onstage with her. At 60, Stemme is stepping away from the kind of dramatic touchstones, like Isolde and Brünnhilde, that Davidsen is gradually stepping into.Pavel Cernoch and Nina Stemme in “Jenufa,” directed by Claus Guth.Michael BrosilowDavidsen and Stemme in “Jenufa,” conducted by Jakub Hrusa, the young conductor recently appointed music director of the Royal Opera in London, in a grimly spare staging by Claus Guth: This was a coup for Lyric, especially since the Janacek has been running alongside a winning cast in Donizetti’s “La Fille du Régiment,” as fizzily charming as “Jenufa” is desperately sad.Seen over the course of 24 hours this weekend, the pairing shows off the best of a venerable company that has been struggling in the pandemic’s aftermath, along with much of the American performing arts scene. Its chief executive, Anthony Freud, announced in September that he would step down this coming summer, two years before the end of his contract.Freud, 66, is retiring as the gap between opera’s costs and the demand for tickets grows ever wider. Financial pressures have prompted the company to pare back its performances; Lyric’s current season features just six mainstage productions, compared to eight in the last full season before the pandemic.But this was a weekend Freud could be proud of. The title character of “Jenufa,” set amid tangled romantic and familial relationships in a Moravian village in the 19th century, is secretly pregnant by a man who refuses to marry her. Her stepmother, a civic figurehead known as the Kostelnicka, desperate to keep the family from disgrace, kills the baby, a crime whose discovery leads to a stunned, sublime gesture of forgiveness.For this raw, agonized story, Janacek wrote tangy, lush yet sharply angled music, with unsettled rhythms and roiling depths; obsessively repeated motifs, as anxious as the characters; passages of folk-like sweetness; vocal lines modeled on spoken Czech for uncanny naturalness even in lyrical flight and emotional extremity; and radiant climaxes.Davidsen’s upper voice is her glory: steely in impact but never hard or forced, emanating like focused shafts of sunlight. (In Janacek’s fast, talky music, the middle of her voice didn’t project as clearly, but this is a quibble.)For a singer of such commanding capacity, she is remarkably beautiful in floating quiet. She played the character with prayerful dignity, reminiscent of Desdemona in Verdi’s “Otello”; at the beginning of the third act, when Jenufa starts to think her suffering might finally be behind her, Davidsen registered on her face and in her freshening tone a cautious but real happiness. This is a singer who acts with her voice.I’ve always thought of Jenufa and the Kostelnicka as antagonists — a spirited youngster facing a repressive older generation — but this performance movingly suggested they are more alike than different: two independent-minded women, both isolated from the village mainstream. And Stemme’s voice remains strong and even; this is not your standard acid-tone Kostelnicka; in soft duet at the start of Act II, she and Davidsen made a combination that evoked “Norma”-like bel canto.Hrusa supported that sensitivity on the podium. His vision of the score emphasizes its sheer beauty, encouraging smooth lyricism and a kind of musical patience, letting the drama unfold rather than spurring it on. Sometimes this feels like mildness, at the expense of spiky intensity. But that this “Jenufa” is played something like a sustained hymn often heightens the aching tragedy.Guth’s production emphasizes the uniformity and repetition that define this small town’s small-mindedness. A prisonlike atmosphere prevails in Michael Levine’s airy yet forbidding set, Gesine Völlm’s constricting costumes and James Farncombe’s lighting, all leached of color.Metal bed frames that line the walls in the first act are arranged, in the second, to form an eerie enclosure, reminiscent of a refugee camp, in which Jenufa has been hidden to give birth. An ominous crowd of women in “Handmaid’s Tale”-style bonnets lurks on the sidelines; a dancer is dressed as a slow-stalking raven. The folk-wedding dresses that finally add brightness in Act III convey genuine joy after so much ashy heartbreak.Fizzy joy: Lisette Oropesa in Laurent Pelly’s production of “La Fille du Régiment” at Lyric Opera.Michael BrosilowThat kind of joy permeates “La Fille du Régiment,” one of the repertory’s most delightful comedies, presented in Chicago in the winkingly stylized Laurent Pelly production that has been at the Met since 2008. (The mountain range made of old maps is still superbly silly.)Lisette Oropesa and Lawrence Brownlee are both sprightly in Donizetti’s stratosphere-touching coloratura; this opera is famous for a tenor aria with nine high Cs, and after an ovation Brownlee repeated it with flair. But the pair are even better in the score’s slower-burning, longer-arching passages of tenderness.Lyric Opera of Chicago may be in serious trouble; its chief may be taking an early exit. But, having attracted Oropesa and, especially, Davidsen to the company for these memorable debuts, Freud is leaving on a high note. More

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      An Opera’s Riverboat Journey Brings the Rainforest Onboard

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      Mary Zimmerman, known for a dreamy approach to theater, stages the Metropolitan Opera’s company premiere of “Florencia en el Amazonas.”There really was no reason for Mary Zimmerman to get stuck while directing her new production of “Florencia en el Amazonas,” which premieres on Thursday at the Metropolitan Opera.The staging is her sixth for the Met, and at first glance, the work looked to be square in her wheelhouse. Her storytelling often has a dreamlike quality, and here was an opera suffused with poetic oneirism and the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez: the tale of a diva traveling incognito on an Amazonian riverboat ostensibly to perform in Manaus, a city nestled deep in the rainforest, but really to try to reunite with her missing lover and muse, the butterfly hunter Cristóbal.Yet when time came to start conceptualizing her production, Zimmerman found herself stalling. The fit was maybe too perfect.“I’m quite a bit overidentified with Florencia,” Zimmerman said after a recent rehearsal. “I am single, and I kind of lost the great love of my life because I couldn’t stop doing theater, and I couldn’t be smaller than I was. A lot of us performers and artists with broken hearts, partly everything we put on is for that person, whether they’re going to see it or not.”Zimmerman eventually got over her bout of director’s block, to mount a milestone for the Met: Daniel Catán’s work, with a libretto by Marcela Fuentes-Berain, is the company’s first by a Mexican composer. A vehicle for the soprano Ailyn Pérez, the production will also be conducted by the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.“Florencia” is almost entirely set on the boat, and most productions, starting with Francesca Zambello’s premiere staging at Houston Grand Opera in 1996, have made the ship a scenic centerpiece. But Zimmerman turned her gaze outward. “I wanted to emphasize the natural world and the outdoors,” she said. At the Met, the focus will be on what the passengers see during their journey rather than on their mode of transportation.Gabriella Reyes, center, in rehearsal for the production, in which the costumes are inspired by the Amazon River and the surrounding rainforest.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat shift of emphasis is in accordance with Catán’s score, Nézet-Séguin said. “I’ve never been in the Amazon, but any forest you first go in, it just looks like a bunch of trees and leaves the same color, then you spend a few minutes, open your eyes and there’s a million details,” he added. “I feel like this piece is this way.”Amazonian flora and fauna were a fruitful source of inspiration for the creative team, especially the costume designer Ana Kuzmanic: Even the striking outfits and headpieces that symbolize the spread of cholera were drawn from the opera’s setting. “We discovered there’s this type of bird in the Amazon called the harpy eagle, so that’s what they’re based on,” Zimmerman said. “Originally, they were just like straight-up Venetian masks, but then we made them more like the animal.”The costumes also represent physical elements like the ever-present water, at one point with the summoning of figures representing waves. “I honestly feel the blue waves are the best water costuming I’ve ever seen,” Zimmerman said. “Because representing water onstage, other than using water, is hard. It’s changeable, it’s moving all the time.” (She should know: Her breakthrough came in 2001 with a Tony Award-winning staging of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” that involved an actual pool. She also tackled opera’s most famous pond with “Rusalka” at the Met in 2017.)To Zimmerman’s delight, Catán’s score even includes musical interludes in which she could let her imagination run free. “My favorite is the three-and-a-half-minute one, which I call ‘night into day,’ or we sometimes call it ‘the creature ballet,’” she said of a scene that involves a bottle containing wedding rings. “We just love watching it and working on it.”For Nézet-Séguin, the playfulness and fluidity of Zimmerman’s staging feel like an answer to Catán’s score. “The orchestration is very inventive,” he said. “It’s, of course, evoking the nature with the birds and the noise of the forest, but it’s also very well developed in terms of adopting the general flow of the piece, which is never static. I feel like he’s so good at suggesting a constant wave, like a river or like the ocean, or any body of water, that’s never stopping.” (Catán, who died in 2011, embraced a neo-Romantic style and often has been compared to Puccini.)“Florencia sort of finds her true identity by shedding her famous identity,” Zimmerman said, “and there’s a kind of dissolution into the natural world.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJust as the landscapes change over the course of Florencia’s trip, so do the travelers — the discoveries are as emotional as they are visual. “So much is transforming and changing throughout the opera,” Zimmerman said. “Florencia sort of finds her true identity by shedding her famous identity, and there’s a kind of dissolution into the natural world, I think.”Pérez also described the opera’s journey as more than physical. “It almost becomes a subplot of a much more spiritual and community story, with a sense of humor and a sense that the destination is about enjoying the journey,” she said, “reflecting on choices and choosing love and viewing death as a rebirth into another life.”In a sense, working on “Florencia” has also meant a trip back to Pérez’s own roots. The Met hasn’t presented a Spanish-language opera in nearly a century, and Pérez, born in Chicago to Mexican immigrants, is thrilled to finally sing in the language she spoke at home as a child. “It’s not even the Castilian Spanish of Spain but Mexican Spanish, Latin American Spanish,” she said, “so I don’t have to be corrected over how I say my words for the first time in my life.”That feeling of connection, both to one’s self and to the surrounding world, makes “Florencia” a fitting addition to the Met’s efforts at greater inclusivity in recent years. For Nézet-Séguin, it’s important “to have alternative possibilities on our stage, alternating moods or ways of thinking about life,” he said. “And clearly this opera has a lot of humor, sometimes a little dry humor, sometimes more playful, and I see the production is adapting to this very much.”Zimmerman is definitely on board, so to speak, with that view. “You want to support and lift and entertain the audience,” she said. “My motto is: Never a dull moment, and always be blossoming.” More

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      The Met Opera Puts On a Malcolm X Marathon

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      For 18 hours on a rainy Sunday this Halloween weekend, the Metropolitan Opera House was visited by the ghost of Malcolm X.Words made famous by the Black nationalist leader and civil rights figure in his classic autobiography, dictated to Alex Haley and posthumously published in 1965, could be heard echoing throughout the soaring lobby of the Lincoln Center theater. It was a welcomed haunting, conjured by the Met in conjunction with a new production of Anthony Davis’s opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” which premieres on Friday.Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, Malcolm X’s daughter.Text from “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”From 6 a.m. until a little after midnight, a starry lineup of Malcolm surrogates — including his daughter Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Michael R. Jackson and the actor Leslie Odom Jr. — read from the autobiography continuously and in its roughly 500-page entirety.“I didn’t think that they would do it,” said the director and playwright Robert O’Hara, who staged “Slave Play” and is at the helm’s of the Met’s production. He proposed the reading to the company’s leadership as a way to build word of mouth for the opera. “It’s amazing just to have the words in this space, and for the Met to open its doors and let people come.”Top row, from left, Maurio Hines, Anthony Davis and Christopher Davis, April Matthis. Second row, from left, Courtney B. Vance, Robert O’Hara, Bill Haley Jr. Third row, from left, Leah Hawkins and Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, Makeda Hampton, Liesl Tommy.The event was free to attend, and an estimated 680 people cumulatively made their way to the lobby’s Grand Tier balcony, up the undulating, red-carpeted steps and around the low-hanging starburst chandeliers. At 10 a.m., about 100 people sat or stood around a small stage with a black backdrop set up in front of the building’s floor-to-ceiling windows.Marcia Sells, the Met’s chief diversity officer, said that Sunday was the first time the space had been used for a free event.“To all these people who are coming in here, to the speakers, to even the Black staff members who have worked here for a long time,” Sells said, “this represents the Met saying, ‘Yes, you really are included.’”Thompson, who plays a young Malcolm X in the opera.Shabazz’s Kaaba pendant.Around 10:30, the actor Peterson Townsend, a performer in “X,” brought a resounding musicality to an early chapter in which Malcolm details his inauspicious early years as a small-time drug dealer and hustler in Harlem known as Detroit Red.The actor Courtney B. Vance, of “The People v. O.J. Simpson” and “The Preacher’s Wife,” followed, drawing big laughs with a rousing rendition of a scene in which Malcolm X escapes the World War II draft by feigning madness at the induction office.“The educated folks had Martin Luther King, but the folks on the street — Malcolm had them,” Vance said in an interview after his reading. “It’s a wonderful opportunity to talk about him and what he stood for and to maybe make people go, Hmm, I want to learn more.”The Met’s event was free to attend, and brought in an estimated 680 people throughout the day.Peterson Townsend, a performer in “X,” preparing for his reading on Sunday.More than 70 speakers appeared, including Bill Haley, Alex Haley’s grandson; David C. Banks, the chancellor of the New York City Department of Education; and Liesl Tommy, the director of the Aretha Franklin biopic “Respect.”Around 2:30 p.m., Shabazz movingly channeled her father, and received a standing ovation, for a section that recounted his intellectual awakening while confined at Norfolk Prison Colony in Massachusetts, spurred by a trove of history and philosophy texts.“It’s a great way to tell my father’s story and to reach different audiences,” she said in an interview. “It’s as relevant now as it was then. We’re still living with the same challenges.”Readers on deck: Sunday’s event included appearances by more than 70 participants.Christopher-Rashee Stevenson, a member of the theater company Elevator Repair Service, watching Shabazz speak.“X” premiered at New York City Opera in 1986. This revival, which first ran in Detroit in 2021, was conceived by O’Hara as an Afrofuturist fable in which the title character is an archetypical Everyman who transcends time and space. The Met’s production stars the baritone Will Liverman, who opened the Met’s 2021-22 season in “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the first presentation of a work by a Black composer in its history; Kazem Abdullah will conduct Davis’s score, which was revised for Detroit and changed further for the Met.Davis said that the aim, then and now, was to present a challenge to opera as an art form, in the spirit of Malcolm himself.“I wanted to help transform opera into a truly American form, one that reflects African American musical traditions,” he said. “Not only can opera play an important role in music today, it can make statements about who we are and what’s going on in the world.” More

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      Review: An Opera About Drones Brings a Pilot’s War Home

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      Jeanine Tesori and George Brant’s “Grounded,” which Washington National Opera premiered on Saturday, is headed to the Metropolitan Opera next year.The young mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo has a wide grin, haunted eyes and a mellow, confident voice that flashes with lean anxiety. In tone and presence, she’s driven, intense, wry. Onstage she’s unsentimental — and unsettled.She is, in other words, perfectly cast as a swaggering fighter pilot turned dissociating drone operator in “Grounded,” which Washington National Opera premiered on Saturday at the Kennedy Center.“Grounded,” which will open the Metropolitan Opera’s season next fall, originated as a one-woman play a decade ago, when the ethics of drone warfare were at the center of national attention. Written by George Brant, the play traveled widely, and had an Off Broadway run featuring Anne Hathaway, who at one point was planning to star in a film adaptation.But opera swept in first. The Tony Award-winning composer Jeanine Tesori, known for intelligently audience-pleasing musicals like “Fun Home” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” took on the project through the Met’s commissioning program.Tesori and Brant expanded the piece, giving the anonymous pilot a name (Jess) and giving voice to other characters, including Jess’s beleaguered husband and the cacophonous “kill chain” of commanders she hears over her headset. Washington National Opera was eventually brought on as a kind of out-of-town tryout for Michael Mayer’s production.This led to some unwelcome news coverage earlier this year, when Washington announced its season — sponsored by the military contractor General Dynamics, a longtime company donor. The headlines wrote themselves: A drone maker was paying for a “killer drone opera.”The production, directed by Michael Mayer, with set design by Mimi Lien, is dominated by LED screens.Scott SuchmanThe company put out a statement insisting that benefactors had no role in the work’s creation. But it was still a little surprising to hear Timothy O’Leary, the general director in Washington, thank General Dynamics, alongside other major givers, from the stage at the Kennedy Center before the performance on Saturday.The opera begins in Iraq, where Jess is doing her best “Top Gun” impression as a hotshot F-16 pilot. (The F-16 was developed by General Dynamics.) The quietly ominous rumble at the start of Tesori’s score gives way to a chorus of fliers whose stentorian march morphs into a neo-Baroque fugue.The Middle East is suggested by rustling rainsticks, part of a big, varied percussion section, and some modal harmonies; Jess’s voice soars as she sings of “the solitude, the freedom, the peace” she finds in the sky. Tesori’s lyrical ease and eclecticism, the fluidity with which she blends, blurs and moves between styles, are impressively on display, guided with a sure hand by the conductor Daniela Candillari.On leave with her squadron in Wyoming — the pretext for some whispers of swaying cowboy hoedown music — Jess falls in love with a rancher, Eric, and gets pregnant. (The brief duet when she returns to let him know, her profane apologies melting into shared happiness, is perhaps the most charmingly natural moment in the piece.)Her pregnancy, and the birth of their daughter, takes her out of her beloved cockpit. When she wants to return to the skies, she is instead assigned to drone duty — appropriately enough in Las Vegas, the capital of American not-quite-reality.However demeaning for a onetime star pilot, the job will let Jess go home at night, and she is promised by her commander that “the threat of death has been removed” — a mantra taken up by Washington National Opera’s excellent chorus with grim fervor. The Trainer (Frederick Ballentine, his tenor frighteningly shining) describes the Reaper drone’s capabilities and exorbitant cost in a worshipful call-and-response, religious-style chant.Tesori smartly conjures the uncertainty with which Jess begins to learn her new task, with an orchestral landscape of eerie, jittery spareness. Missile explosions happen with uncanny, anesthetized sweetness, a soft choral “boom.”The assurances that this will be “war with all the benefits of home” go awry, of course, as Jess’s professional and domestic lives begin to collapse together. On a trip to the mall with her daughter, she grows paranoid that they’re being surveilled by cameras, just as her Reaper spies on its targets. A double, Also Jess (the forbiddingly pure-voiced soprano Teresa Perrotta), emerges for duets of slippery dissonance as the tension ratchets up.Ratchets up, but not enough. The impact of “Grounded” is surprisingly unexplosive. This may be because Tesori is at heart a composer of normality — even (or especially) when abnormal things are happening, like the accelerated-aging disease at the center of “Kimberly Akimbo.”D’Angelo as Jess, the fighter pilot turned drone operator.Scott SuchmanHer 2003 masterpiece, “Caroline, or Change,” was a perfect marriage of her music with a text, by Tony Kushner, that steadily maintained its reserve amid heartbreak. Her previous opera, “Blue” (2019), about police violence, emanated a sad, wounded dignity. Tesori is at her best mining emotion from this dignified reserve — from the everyday.But “Grounded” is more surreal — and eventually psychotic — material, and Tesori and Brant don’t pursue Jess’s dissolving mental state with the relentlessness, economy or extremity of, say, Berg’s “Wozzeck.” While it’s understandable that the Met would want a single-actor play expanded into something more traditionally grand, the bagginess is palpable in the transition from an 80-minute monologue to a two-and-a-half-hour opera.Eric, for one thing, remains a cipher. His arias feel more like the result of post-workshop notes — “flesh out Jess’s husband” — than emotional imperative or importance to the plot. While the tenor Joseph Dennis is affable in the role, his chemistry with D’Angelo is nil. Besides the messianic Trainer, the stylized characters of the drone operation — the Commander; Jess’s teenage partner, the Sensor; and the “kill chain,” amplified over loudspeakers from offstage — are insufficiently vivid.And while Jess’s ambivalence and troubles are clearly depicted, the storytelling, especially in the second act, is too busy to build the necessary claustrophobia, despite D’Angelo’s talent and earnest commitment. “Grounded” should come as a sobering shock, with the laser-guided horror of a Tomahawk, but for all the touches of churning darkness in the music, it’s oddly gentle.In Mayer’s swiftly shifting if not quite elegant staging, much of Mimi Lien’s set is dominated by LED screens. The projections have been designed by Kaitlyn Pietras and Jason H. Thompson, who did similar work on the triptych “Proximity,” which premiered earlier this year at Lyric Opera of Chicago.On the screens, in impressive high definition, we see blue skies rushing past, nighttime mountains, a sonogram, the grayish desert landscape observed from above by the Reaper drone’s pitiless eye. And we see the Reaper stretched across the stage, as rivetingly chilly as an empire vessel in “Star Wars.” On our first encounter with it, there’s even a shiver of sinister John Williams in Tesori’s score.Yet it is a little pat to describe “Grounded” — as Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, did in an interview in May with The New York Times — as an “antiwar opera.” It is not exactly that, even if it culminates (spoiler alert) in Jess intentionally crashing the $17 million Reaper because she hallucinates that her target’s daughter is her own.The opera implies that old-fashioned fighter piloting is nobler, and better for soldiers’ mental health, than the video-game-style drone deployment that has expanded the battlefield to encompass, potentially, all of us. Darkly, given the state of global affairs lately, the piece seems to say that war is OK; there are just better and worse — more and less authentic — ways of waging it.GroundedThrough Nov. 13 at the Kennedy Center; kennedy-center.org. More

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      At the Met, a Refurbished ‘Bohème’ and an Art Deco ‘Ballo’

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      A gift from a board member recently paid for the company to rebuild sets for Franco Zeffirelli’s deathless 1981 production of Puccini’s classic.If you go to “La Bohème” at the Metropolitan Opera this season and are convinced that the big snowdrift in Act III looks a little fresher than usual, you’re not hallucinating.A million-dollar gift from a board member recently paid for the company to rebuild some of the sets for Franco Zeffirelli’s deathless 1981 production of Puccini’s classic, and the snow that dominates a wintry scene on the outskirts of Paris was one of the targets. It now looks more newly fallen — though the seam between the set piece and the stage floor was gapingly obvious from the orchestra level on Saturday evening.Some whiter snow was the news of this “Bohème” — alongside an unusually assertive, stylish Schaunard from the young baritone Sean Michael Plumb, in a small part that often fades into Zeffirelli’s teeming backgrounds.Federica Lombardi’s focused soprano created a Mimì more forthright, even indignant, than the norm, making her fatal Act IV more tender by comparison. The bass-baritone Christian Van Horn sang a soberly resonant “Vecchia zimmara,” and the soprano Olga Kulchynska was a bright Musetta. As Rodolfo, the veteran tenor Matthew Polenzani pushed his voice out at climaxes but otherwise often sounded faded, and a few hairs flat.The sets for David Alden’s 2012 Met staging of Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” have not been rebuilt — but, only 11 years old, they sometimes seemed shakily resistant to being moved when the opera was revived on Friday.Quinn Kelsey, front left, as Renato and Liv Redpath as Oscar in Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” at the Met.Ken Howard/Met OperaHere, the cast was the exciting part, at least by the end of the evening. The performance seemed to settle in as it went on, with the tenor Charles Castronovo’s tone as Gustavo — pale for much of the opera — finally taking on more color, fullness and freedom.And after an uncertain beginning, the soprano Angela Meade delivered a memorable Amelia. Her sound is essentially cool, but it got fuller and more inflamed as the weird, tragic plot developed, ending up lean yet glowing, like a red-hot poker.One singer required no warming up: the baritone Quinn Kelsey, who seems ever more a pillar of the Met, particularly in Verdi. “Ballo” is the story of a Swedish king, Gustavo, who is in love with Amelia, the wife of his closest friend — and Kelsey plays Renato, the agonized friend who goes from Gustavo’s confidant to his assassin.His presence hulking and brooding, Kelsey has that most special of operatic attributes: an instantly recognizable voice, capacious and moody, with a smoky, slightly nasal, sneering, sinister edge but also a fundamental seductive smoothness and nuanced eloquence.His and Meade’s back-to-back arias in the third act — her plea “Morrò, ma prima in grazia” into his wounded “Eri tu” — were together the musical highlight on Friday. The mezzo-soprano Olesya Petrova sang Ulrica with steady power, and the soprano Liv Redpath sounded lucid and gentle as the sprightly page Oscar. Carlo Rizzi, one of the Met’s often underappreciated maestros in the Italian repertoire, conducted both “Ballo” (with steady drive) and “Bohème” (with sumptuous clarity).“Ballo,” which premiered in 1859, is from the period after Verdi’s canonical trio of “Rigoletto,” “Il Trovatore” and “La Traviata,” and before his late-stage epics “Don Carlos” and “Aida.” In this middle period — think also of “Les Vêpres Siciliennes” and “La Forza del Destino,” which the Met is presenting in a new production this winter — he experimented with shades of emotional ambiguity and sometimes jarring juxtapositions of tone.In “Ballo,” he combined elements of Italianate melodrama and champagne-bubbly French high spirits in a mixture that can be excitingly volatile. Alden’s staging is a kind of stylized, largely grayscale Art Deco explosion, with a degree of strange excess intended to echo the piece’s own — like a Busby Berkeley production number at the end of the first scene, complete with dancing waiters; and, in Act II, a conspirator frantically hurling himself against a wall.With severely raked sets, sickly floodlighting and surreal touches like skull masks and angel wings, Alden suggests that much of the opera is Gustavo’s fever dream, or fantasy. But the eerie elegance of some moments diffuses elsewhere into some awkwardness, with the chorus milling around. When it premiered, the production seemed like its many ideas hadn’t yet gelled. They still haven’t. More

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      Review: A ‘Rodelinda’ Brings Promise of Handel on the Hudson

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      R.B. Schlather’s new staging of this opera, with the excellent musicians of Ruckus, is the first of several Handel productions at Hudson Hall.Huge if true, as they say: The new production of Handel’s “Rodelinda” that opened on Friday at Hudson Hall is just the first in a series of annual Handel stagings there to come.For the next several years, Hudson, N.Y., has the potential to become a Baroque opera destination, even for those accustomed to the rich offerings of New York City. Sure, you can catch Handel down the river in Manhattan, but regularly programmed stage works of his are likely to be found only at the Metropolitan Opera or Carnegie Hall, two cavernous spaces not exactly suited to the precision and immediacy in which this composer’s music thrives.Hudson Hall is far from a traditional opera house; with no pit and seemingly indifferent acoustics, it was used in the 19th century for speeches by the likes of Emerson and Susan B. Anthony. But, outfitted with 281 folding chairs arranged around its boxy room’s tight proscenium on Friday, it was surprisingly ideal for the intimacy of Handel — despite having the look, as my companion told me, of “Waiting for Guffman.”The result was nothing so cringe-worthy as the kind of town hall community theater satirized in that movie. With smart direction by R.B. Schlather and excellent performances from the early-music group Ruckus, this is a “Rodelinda” worth of a multiyear commitment to Handel.Schlather, an American director who should be as well known in the United States as he is in Europe, is a trusted steward of this repertoire, having staged unconventional Handel productions at a Lower East Side gallery and at National Sawdust in Brooklyn. He also, crucially, was at the helm of a beloved, immersive “The Mother of Us All” at Hudson Hall in 2017.Futterer in the opera’s title role, the wife of a king who has fled after his throne is usurped.Matthew PlacekHis “Rodelinda” has enough dramaturgical sense to know that the opera — while melodramatic, about murderous and ultimately pointless palace intrigue in medieval Italy — can be a bit baggy in its second act, from which Schlather cut the most material for his more streamlined, two-and-a-half-hour production. But throughout, he is also largely restrained, with few interventions. His scenic and costume designs are redolent of the Victorian age (a nod to Hudson Hall’s era of moralistic speechmaking), though not meticulously devoted to specificity or accuracy with the aesthetic.Schlather’s intelligence comes through best in other details. His unit set of a single room may be a good money-saver, but it also casts “Rodelinda” as a kind of surreal purgatory between reigns, romances and stages of grief. (Hauntingly, the lone window looks out to a black void.) And he stages the arias — moments of reflection that stop action yet spin out rich psychology through repetition — as addresses rather than as inner thoughts, lending Handel’s small cast the preternatural honesty and self-awareness of Sally Rooney characters.Crucially, in the finale — after deaths both supposed and real; after lovers are spurned, separated and reunited — Schlather seats the six surviving characters at a table, where their exhausted faces betray the traumatic reality of Handel’s rejoicing, relieved music.In that scene, and throughout the evening, it was clear that Schlather had spent a lot of time with the singers on dramatic care. Action can move slowly in a Handel opera, but his production is one in which there is always something to see in the performers’ evolving expressions, whether they are directly involved in the action or simply observing it from across the room.The soprano Keely Futterer, in the title role, looks immediately as if she’s just been through a great tragedy and is staring down another as she desperately holds on to her child, Flavio (a silent role that Myles Fraser shares with Tessa K. Prast). But she is a strong character with a plush, powerful sound to match, at one point, as a power move, brazenly taking and drinking the wine of the man who usurped her husband’s throne. She ornamented her melodies with adventurousness, though those flourishes sometimes got lost in wide vibrato or proved unwieldy. The mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce was affectingly ardent and unsure as her husband, Bertarido.Williams, left, as the imperious Garibaldo, with Buchholz as Eduige.Matthew PlacekAs the two villains, Grimoaldo and Garibaldo, the tenor Karim Sulayman and the bass-baritone Douglas Williams had the finest vocal outings of the night. Sulayman’s Grimoaldo was appropriately barking yet small, the depiction of a true insecure beta. Here, as is often the case with him, he was driven as much by theatrical instinct as by beauty, holding them in elegant balance and smoothly flowing between the two. Williams’s Garibaldo, by contrast, was a mighty presence, booming and characterfully wicked, imperious in holding his strength and sexuality over others.The gift of a space like Hudson Hall is that, without too much effort by either the audience or the artists, you can hear every nuance of Handel’s music and its interpretation. But that can be double-edged, revealing any faults in what is already a vulnerably exposing style. So you could sense, on Friday, the relatively soft enunciation of the mezzo-soprano Teresa Buchholz’s Eduige, for example, or the pinched countertenor of Brennan Hall’s Unulfo.Lapses like those, though, were outweighed by the truly up-close performances of the evening’s stars: Ruckus. Their command of the score was immediate, precise and fleet in the overture, but also jittery, with questioning flashes of darkness and uncertainty. With a mercurial, almost improvisatory spirit that responded to the drama in real time, they played with the fieriness and emotional charge of verismo.It’s no surprise that, a few rows in front of me, someone in the audience was rocking along to the music. As Schlather brings Handel back to Hudson Hall over the next several years, let’s hope he brings Ruckus, too.RodelindaThrough Oct. 29 at Hudson Hall in Hudson, N.Y.; hudsonhall.org. More

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      Drone Warfare Comes to Washington Opera Stage in ‘Grounded’

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      Wearing combat boots and a U.S. Air Force flight suit, the mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo took her place onstage one recent morning and began to sing about war.“I break down the airfields, the refineries, the consulates and factories,” she sang inside a rehearsal studio in Washington. “I return them to desert, to particles.”D’Angelo was preparing to star in “Grounded,” a new work about drone warfare, composed by Jeanine Tesori and with a libretto by George Brant, that will premiere at Washington National Opera on Saturday, ahead of a run at the Metropolitan Opera in New York next season.On that morning, she was learning how to move around the set in the role of Jess, an F-16 pilot reassigned to drone duty because of an unexpected pregnancy. Because, as with any opera, rehearsals for “Grounded” have been full of the usual considerations about props, musical cues and choreography.But this process has also been anguished and emotional. The opera offers an unvarnished look at the psychological toll of drone warfare, and its themes have taken on fresh relevance amid the escalating violence of the Israel-Hamas war.Tesori, left, and Michael Mayer, the production’s director.Melissa Lyttle for The New York Times“For everyone in the room, it has been intense,” D’Angelo said in an interview between rehearsals. “There are moments of beauty and calm and serenity. And then, total chaos.”Because of its war themes, “Grounded,” adapted from Brant’s play of the same name, has already drawn scrutiny. In the spring, anger erupted after Washington National Opera listed the presenting sponsor of the production as General Dynamics, the military contractor.Critics accused the opera company of serving as a mouthpiece for the defense industry. The house later clarified, saying that General Dynamics had helped underwrite the entire season, not just “Grounded,” and that the corporation had no say over the programming or its contents.Tesori said that the scrutiny had been unexpected, but that she was hopeful audiences would look beyond politics. She noted that she and Brant started working on the opera in 2014, long before they knew where it would premiere or who would be among the sponsors.“Every impulse, every note of this, is done from two writers who are trying to birth this work, and they don’t know what hospital they’re in,” she said. “I think it’s really clear now, and that’s great.”Ahead of the premiere, Washington National Opera is working to promote discussion about the themes of “Grounded” with service members, veterans and their families, inviting them for talks and performances.Timothy O’Leary, the company’s general director, said that it was important to provide context to members of the military and the defense industry. “Grounded” raises questions about the morality of remote warfare and explores its toll on the mental health of service members.“It’s one thing to read about these issues in a newspaper, but to walk in the shoes of somebody on the front lines wrestling with these questions of moral responsibility and life and death — that’s an entirely different experience,” he said. “The stage has always been part of how we understand the costs of war, both to warriors and to the innocent.”“Grounded” premiered as a one-woman play in 2013 and had an Off Broadway run at the Public Theater in 2015, in a production starring Anne Hathaway. After seeing the play, the Met’s leaders, including Peter Gelb, its general manager, and Paul Cremo, its dramaturg, commissioned the opera adaptation.A rehearsal for “Grounded,” which will open the Metropolitan Opera’s season next year.They turned to Tesori, a celebrated composer who has won Tony Awards for the musicals “Kimberly Akimbo” and “Fun Home,” and has written operas like “Blue,” about a Harlem family struck by tragedy.Gelb described Tesori as “one of the most gifted composers around,” and said he expected “Grounded” would resonate.“It’s something,” he added, “that people can understand, given the events in which we live today.”At Washington National Opera, Tesori and Brant have been joined by the theater director Michael Mayer and the conductor Daniela Candillari. Mimi Lien designed a kaleidoscopic set with nearly 400 LED panels that display live video and visual effects.This version of “Grounded” is Brant’s first libretto. He reworked the play for the opera stage, adding characters such as Jess’s husband, Eric (the tenor Joseph Dennis); a commander (the bass Morris Robinson); a trainer (the tenor Frederick Ballentine); and a male chorus that, at times, is called the Drone Squadron.“It was important to be sure that these new characters had full dimension and full agency,” Brant said. “And that required new language.”D’Angelo, and Joseph Dennis, who sings a role created for the opera adaptation of Brant’s play.Melissa Lyttle for The New York TimesIn 2016, Brant and Tesori visited the Met, whose stage was set for Puccini’s “La Bohème,” and had the actress Kelly McAndrew perform excerpts from the play to give a sense of how its material would land in the opera house.“It was really then that we all started to get excited because we saw the potential, and we saw what this one character looked like in the space of that vast canvas,” Brant said. “She belonged there, and there was a place for her there.”Tesori spent about 10 months at her home on Long Island working on the score. She was drawn to the idea of writing for a female lead character. “She is the subject, not the object,” Tesori said. “And her launch is not romantic love; it’s something else.”She was a fan of D’Angelo and wrote the opera with her in mind, attending her voice lessons to get a sense of her sound. Tesori also reviewed testimonials of drone operators and pilots. She came away feeling that the psychological damage of remote warfare was “as great, if not greater, because you can’t see it.”“I feel ashamed that I didn’t know anything,” she said. “I think maybe because, what do you do with the information once you’ve seen it?”The Met tends to try out new operas in other cities before putting them on its own stage; it enlisted Washington National Opera for the premiere. (“Grounded” will open the Met’s 2024-25 season, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director.)Preparations for the opera were going smoothly until the spring, when Washington National Opera’s 2023-24 season was announced and questions about the role of General Dynamics — a major sponsor of the opera company since 1997, with a senior vice president on its board — began to spread on social media.A think tank that advocates military restraint labeled “Grounded” a “killer drone opera.” New York magazine gave the opera a “despicable” rating on its Approval Matrix, describing it as “the drone-bombing opera ‘Grounded,’ sponsored by General Dynamics.” RT, a state-owned Russian news outlet, said the work showed the strength of the American military-industrial complex.The team of “Grounded” preparing for the premiere this weekend, which follows criticism over the Washington National Opera’s relationship with General Dynamics, the season’s sponsor.Melissa Lyttle for The New York TimesThe creative team behind “Grounded” grew disturbed by how the opera was being portrayed. It worked behind the scenes to push the Washington National Opera to make it clear that General Dynamics had nothing to do with its work. The company eventually issued a statement that said, “For the sake of clarity, no sponsor or supporter of W.N.O. had any involvement in the creation of ‘Grounded’ or in the contents of its libretto.” But it stopped short of cutting ties with General Dynamics; the company is still listed as a “W.N.O. season sponsor” on promotional materials for “Grounded.”Brant said that he was not aware that General Dynamics was a supporter of Washington National Opera until criticism began to circulate. He said he was pleased by the opera house’s statement.“It was important to know that the sponsor had absolutely no involvement,” he said. “I’m happy that it’s been resolved the way that it has.”Tesori, who was deep in composition when the controversy arose, said she felt that it was important for the company to explain the wall between artists and benefactors. “It had to be clarified,” she said. “It got clarified, and then here we are.”At the rehearsal in Washington, Tesori, Brant and Mayer worked with the cast to plot stage directions, as well as refine the music and libretto.Mayer said that the opera had more to say than its commentary on war. It also addresses, he added, the “increasing dehumanization of the population as the screens start to take over all aspects of our lives.”Mayer said that “Grounded” represents the “increasing dehumanization of the population as the screens start to take over all aspects of our lives.”Melissa Lyttle for The New York Times“It brings into focus how precious genuine connection is, and how tenuous it is,” he said. “It reverberates beyond just a story about warfare.”D’Angelo, who has been preparing for the role of Jess since 2020, said that the opera captured her character’s inner struggle. By day, Jess takes part in drone missions from a trailer in Las Vegas; by night, she returns to her family.“You can understand this rhythm and how disorienting it must be,” she said. “You get just the tiniest little hint of what a person in her situation, her mental state, must be experiencing.”As Tesori walked out of the rehearsal room, she said that she felt the work was finally coming to life, but that she did not yet have the words to describe it.“It’s a feeling of discovery,” she said. “Eventually a piece speaks to you — like a kid, it begins to tell you what it needs.”“There’s no way of knowing,” she added, “until you’re in the room.” More

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      After Nearly Five Decades, Waltraud Meier Takes Her Final Opera Bow

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      The famed singer, known for her captivating presence, intellectual approach and distinctive sound, is retiring from the stage with “Elektra.”“Orest and I are very nice to one another,” the opera star Waltraud Meier said during an interview at her light-filled penthouse in West Berlin. “This time around, we’re going to do everything differently.”She was speaking not about the mythical character, but about her small black cat, which she adopted in Greece. In Richard Strauss’s “Elektra,” Orest returns home to kill his mother, Klytämnestra, avenging the murder of his father, Agamemnon.And the role of Klytämnestra is how Meier will bring her 47-year stage career to a close at the Berlin State Opera on Friday.She will retire in the Patrice Chéreau production of “Elektra” that she originated at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France in 2013. Chéreau’s “Elektra,” the last of his series of acclaimed opera productions, adopts his typical classical, humanist style.Klytämnestra is one of the roles that have defined her career. Known for her captivating stage presence, intellectual approach and distinctive, tonally complex mezzo-soprano voice, Meier first made her mark in Wagner operas: as Ortrud in “Lohengrin,” Kundry in “Parsifal” and Venus in “Tannhäuser.” A daring leap into the dramatic soprano repertoire in the early 1990s made her a generation’s defining Isolde.As Orest occasionally nuzzled her, Meier discussed her career, her work with music and text, and the importance of listening onstage. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.How do you approach a new role?First, I read the text. Everyone’s text: It’s more important to really know what the other people onstage are saying. Then I listen to the music as a whole. I ask myself, What do I want to say? What could I be in this role? And then I decide if I should do it, and how I’ll do it. The conversation about how to do it vocally comes after.What have you learned about the role of Klytämnestra over the years?Patrice Chéreau and I had the strong feeling that we wanted to give her back her dignity. The story is a tragedy. There are two sources for the Electra story: Euripides and Aeschylus. Patrice based his direction more on Aeschylus. Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto is so influenced by Freud — so in Hofmannsthal’s “Elektra” we get too much of the point of view of Elektra, of how she sees the story.But that’s not necessarily the real story. Clytemnestra is not just this man-murderer. She had a reason to murder her husband. Her daughter was sacrificed, and Agamemnon came back with a lover. Not that it’s justified, but she had a reason. And she knows her destiny is to be killed by her son. In Greek tragedy, it’s always the son who avenges the father. And his son avenges him. And so it goes for generations and generations. Clytemnestra did what she thought was right, to regain her dignity and some justice.The story for Klytämnestra [in the opera] is really tragic. She comes in; she has the strong need to finally talk to her daughter. But in the whole conversation — that half-hour scene between Klytämnestra and Elektra — they don’t talk about what happened. She wants to talk about it, she comes in for that, to talk, so that her nightmares can disappear. But they are not able to talk about it. It’s really sad.And you get the character away from Grand Guignol.That would be so banal. This other way goes much deeper. And it’s much more true.What did you learn most from your years of work with Chéreau?I learned to be true and natural. To take every word seriously. To believe what I am saying. How to walk. Patrice always hated that singer walk that doesn’t express anything. He didn’t like singers just facing the audience. He liked the diagonal; it gives more tension in the body.He took music seriously. He prepared us by first reading the role, just the text, at a table, like a play. We spoke it in our language. Then we learned the music, and then we went onstage. That’s not what other directors do, unfortunately.How do you overcome a production that hurts a piece? Do you try to bring something you learned from before?Yes. You can’t totally step out of the “regie” [“direction”], but I always wanted to at least give my role, my interpretation — or incarnation, as I prefer to call it — a stronger truth. In general, I tried to avoid productions like that. And then there is that wonderful word: no.What creates truth onstage?Seriousness. Taking the words and the music seriously. Not mocking yourself, not interpreting it. No irony. As I said about Klytämnestra: Believe her! Be it! Don’t make a comment on it. I did several productions with the director Klaus Michael Grüber, who told me to imagine the whole audience was 11 years old. An 11-year-old knows already everything about love, hate, hope, betrayal, all those feelings, but he doesn’t like irony and sarcasm.Are there roles you considered singing that you didn’t, and regret?No. There were two occasions when I had signed contracts and then decided not to, and it was the right choice. I had a signed contract to do Brünnhilde in “Die Walküre” at La Scala. Daniel Barenboim thought I could have conveyed new things in the role, and I agreed, but couldn’t figure out how to sing it.I also had a contract for Salome at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, when Götz Friedrich was the intendant [artistic director], conducted by Giuseppe Sinopoli. But looking at the music, I thought, No, I am not Salome. To sing it — that’s soprano soprano. You have to have a silver voice. I’m copper. Of course, you don’t hear those silvery Strauss voices as much now.Did you ever wish you could sing something for a different voice type — a tenor, or a baritone?The Ingemisco in the Verdi Requiem! And seriously, in “Don Carlo,” Philip’s aria from the fourth act, “Ella giammai m’amò.” But, you know, if you have the chance to listen to it when it’s sung by someone that is touching you deep down in your soul, then it’s better you have not sung it yourself.What are your reflections on your years singing at the Metropolitan Opera?Well, let’s not talk about the “Carmen”! I always loved the Met. I always felt I had the support of people there. Joe Volpe was the best intendant ever. “Only a happy singer is a good singer,” he said. He made us feel comfortable, feel good showing our best.It’s a big house. It’s different to sing there. You have to act bigger, sing with more sound. Real theater-making is maybe not the thing you should ask for at the Met. A subtle gesture like I might make at the house here in Berlin will maybe be perceived up to Row 10, and then be lost.You mentioned earlier that the silvery Strauss voices are not as often heard now.For me, there is a sad trend of singing too loud. I miss the nuance. What makes it difficult to go back is that the audience loves when it’s loud. When singers give too much volume, the success misleads them. For me, that’s not music. Music is something else. Music is so refined, signing can be so refined. It’s much more interesting to really sing piano, mezzo piano, mezzo forte and not always fortissimo.Do you imagine yourself teaching after retirement?I don’t have the patience for real vocal teaching. If I did a master class, then I’d do it not in the sense that it’s done now, where you have two days, and singers have an hour here and there, and they work on an aria. That’s not what I’m interested in. I’d prefer a master class with a team of singers where we can really work on a scene. Then I could teach them how to listen. Listening is much more important onstage. More

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      In an Opera About Civil War Spies, Dancers Help Drive the Drama

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      Houston Grand Opera, known for innovation, unveils Jake Heggie’s “Intelligence,” directed by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and featuring Urban Bush Women.In a theater at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan one recent afternoon, a rehearsal for the coming opera “Intelligence,” about Civil War-era spies, was about to begin.But as the stage lights came on and the music blared, there were no singers in sight. Instead, six dancers from Urban Bush Women, a dance troupe in Brooklyn, were front and center, locking arms, jumping into the air and improvising movements inspired by African traditions.“I want to see if we can find that physical charge,” Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, the founder of Urban Bush Women, who is directing and choreographing the opera, told the dancers. “Let it breathe. Let it flow.”“Intelligence,” which opens the season at Houston Grand Opera on Friday, tells the story of Elizabeth Van Lew, a member of an elite Confederate family, who operates a pro-Union spy ring with the help of Mary Jane Bowser, an enslaved woman in her household. The opera, with music by Jake Heggie and a libretto by Gene Scheer, offers a meditation on the legacy of slavery and the overlooked role of women in the war.“Intelligence,” more than eight years in the making, stands out for another reason. While dance is an afterthought or an embellishment in many operas, it drives this drama, with eight performers from Urban Bush Women sharing the stage with seven singers, including the mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton as Van Lew and the soprano Janai Brugger as Bowser. The dancers serve as a Greek chorus, falling like soldiers on a battlefield or passing secrets along a chain.“It’s a big story, and dancers are an integral part of the storytelling force,” Zollar said. “They’re not just coming in for their number or routine.”The dance-centered approach may be unusual, but it is a natural fit at Houston Grand Opera. For decades the company has been known for innovation, helping birth important 20th-century works like Leonard Bernstein’s “A Quiet Place” (1983) and John Adams’s “Nixon in China” (1987).Jawole Willa Jo Zollar is directing and choreographing “Intelligence” for Houston Grand Opera. “It’s a big story, and dancers are an integral part of the storytelling force,” she said.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesUnder David Gockley, Houston Grand Opera’s general director from 1972 to 2005, the company embarked on an ambitious effort to commission dozens of new works and garnered an international reputation for risk-taking. “Intelligence” is the company’s 75th premiere — and the fourth opera by Heggie to debut in Houston.Khori Dastoor, Houston’s general director and chief executive since 2021, said the company aimed to build on its legacy.“We can be an important opera company, but also maintain our nimbleness and spirit of innovation,” she said. “We aren’t having debates about whether change is good. We’re always thinking about what’s next.”Houston Grand Opera’s agility served it well during the pandemic. While many cultural organizations are still struggling to win back audiences, Houston is in a relatively strong position, with a budget this fiscal year of about $33 million, compared with about $24 million before the pandemic. Ticket sales were up about 8 percent last season, compared with the 2018-19 season, even as subscriptions fell. Donations have been robust; earlier this year, the company secured a $22 million gift, the largest in its history.And audiences remain enthusiastic. The company has been working to draw more Black, Latino and Asian residents by venturing outside the opera house more often. Last season, it partnered with 140 community groups and presented operas at 32 locations across Houston. On a night in late October, “Intelligence” will be performed before an audience of nearly 2,000 primarily low-income high school students.“Most of our audience at Houston Grand Opera does not experience us in the opera house; they experience us in their neighborhood or at a school,” said Patrick Summers, the company’s artistic and music director. “We let people in our own community tell us their stories.”The artistic focus is also shifting, even as classics like Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” and Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” remain staples of the repertoire.Last season the company premiered “Another City,” a chamber opera about homelessness in Houston that is based on interviews with residents, inside a nondenominational Christian church and service organization. And in 2021, the company staged the premiere of “The Snowy Day,” an opera based on the 1962 children’s book known as one of the first to prominently feature a Black protagonist.“Every opera company is really a reflection and expression of their city,” said Dastoor, the first woman to serve as general director. “I want our operas to look and feel and sound like Houston.”“Intelligence,” which was originally scheduled to premiere in 2021 but was delayed by the pandemic, highlights neglected voices, with themes that connect to modern-day social issues.Zollar rehearsing with Vincent Thomas, left, Johnson and Medina.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesHeggie got the idea from a docent who approached him during an event at the Smithsonian in Washington and suggested that he look into Van Lew and Bowser for his next opera.“I started Googling their names, and my jaw was just on the floor,” he said. “I had been looking for what the next story would be, and I knew it was right because I felt this fire and this shiver.”Heggie turned to Scheer, a frequent collaborator, for the libretto, and he approached Houston Grand Opera about commissioning the work, encouraged by its history of championing new music.“You can’t guarantee success with a new piece,” he said. “But Houston is willing to give it a chance.”Heggie said he was given a choice early on, based on budget considerations, to feature a dance company or a chorus. He had already written operas with prominent choruses and said he thought that the seven singers of “Intelligence” could together sound like a chorus.He thought dance would be a better fit, he said, a way to fill in some of the “question marks in the storytelling” arising from the limited records of Van Lew and Bowser’s intelligence-gathering operation.“Dancers can explore the emotional world of this — really where there aren’t words but there can be movement that might give us clues,” he said. He wrote a percussive score to match.Heggie reached out to Zollar, the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2021, who founded Urban Bush Women in 1984 as a way to elevate the stories of women in the African diaspora. She was hesitant at first — she had never directed an opera — but started to see connections between opera and dance. It helped that she was a fan of Heggie’s first opera, “Dead Man Walking,” which premiered at San Francisco Opera in 2000 and opened the Metropolitan Opera season this fall.Heggie and Scheer visited Zollar in Tallahassee, Fla., where she teaches at Florida State University.“They were really interested in the points of view that I would bring to the story, not just as a name attached,” she said. “And the dance. They definitely wanted the dance.”The creative team for “Intelligence” includes the conductor Kwamé Ryan, the set designer Mimi Lien and the costume designer Carlos Soto.In preparation for the opera, Zollar and other members of the team visited the South for research. They toured the White House of the Confederacy in Richmond, Va., visited the former site of the Van Lew mansion and walked the Richmond Slave Trail.Zollar said those visits offered a “spiritual grounding” for the opera and a reminder that the country was still grappling with the legacy of slavery. “It’s still vibrating,” she said. “It’s still with us in the air.”In choreographing the opera, she drew inspiration from a variety of sources, including the African writing system called Nsibidi, as well as the Kongo cosmogram, a symbol from the BaKongo belief system in West Central Africa.Zollar said she wanted her dancers to be a spiritual force in the opera: “They are what’s whispering in your ear, what’s around us that we cannot see.” From left, Cook, Gaskins, Medina, Johnson, Ware and Earle.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesZollar said she wanted the dancers of Urban Bush Women to be a spiritual force in the opera; she calls them the “is, was and will,” referring to their ability to speak to the present, past and future. They play with notions of entanglement and secrecy, echoing the themes of the opera.“They are what’s whispering in your ear,” she said, “what’s around us that we cannot see.”At the Guggenheim rehearsal, she encouraged the dancers to draw on their own influences — club dancing, jazz, Cuban music. She worked with Mikaila Ware, a member of Urban Bush Women, to refine a sequence of jumps and falls.“It’s so beautiful,” Zollar said. “Can you give me a little bit more suspension? Can you give me a little bit more air?”A central challenge for Zollar was adjusting to the scale of opera. She has been fine-tuning the dancers’ movements so they resonate at the Brown Theater in Houston, which has more than 2,400 seats.Having the backing of a prominent opera company, she said, allowed her to spend the time necessary to immerse herself in the work. She added she was feeling a mix of “sheer terror and excitement” ahead of the premiere.“Usually, I operate on prayers, spit and gaffer’s tape,” she said. “Now we can fully realize our vision. Now we can create something new.” More