Opera

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares38 Views

    Anthony Roth Costanzo, Star Countertenor, to Lead Opera Philadelphia

    by

    Costanzo will be a rare figure in classical music: an artist in his prime who is also working as an administrator.Anthony Roth Costanzo, the celebrated American countertenor who is one of opera’s biggest stars, will lead Opera Philadelphia as its next general director and president, the company announced on Thursday.Costanzo, 41, whose tenure starts in June, will be a rare figure in the classical music industry: an artist in his prime who is also working as an administrator. He said he would continue to perform widely even as he works to reshape Opera Philadelphia, which has struggled to recover from the disruption of the pandemic.“I’m really interested in how I can have the most impact,” Costanzo said in an interview. “And there’s only so much you can do as an individual artist.”Stephen K. Klasko, the chair of Opera Philadelphia’s board of directors, said Costanzo rose to the top of a list of 40 candidates because of his eagerness to attract new audiences and form new partnerships as the company looks for a sustainable business model.“He’s enthusiastic, he’s positive,” Klasko said, “and he sees our future as being an entity that goes beyond opera.”At Opera Philadelphia, Costanzo will oversee fund-raising, business strategy, audience development, community initiatives and artistic planning. Klasko said that while Costanzo did not have traditional credentials, the board was impressed by his work as a creative producer and impresario. Costanzo has curated festivals, for example, at the New York Philharmonic.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

    More stories

    • 150 Shares23 Views

      in Music

      Review: John Adams’s ‘El Niño’ Arrives at the Met in Lush Glory

      by

      The opera-oratorio, an alternate Nativity story, featured a flurry of Met debuts, including the director Lileana Blain-Cruz and the conductor Marin Alsop.On Tuesday night, the Metropolitan Opera continued to play a bit of catch-up with the American composer John Adams.As a Minimalist of striking imagination and moral probity, Adams has developed a distinct musical style and point of view that have earned him a firm place in the pantheon of American art music over the past 40 years or so. His operas, though, didn’t make it to the Met stage until 2008, when “Doctor Atomic” had its East Coast premiere. “Nixon in China” followed in 2011 and “The Death of Klinghoffer” in 2014, decades after they were written. These are Adams’s so-called CNN operas, with subject matter ripped from headlines and history books. But “El Niño,” a hybrid opera-oratorio from 2000 that had its Met premiere on Tuesday, is a different animal.Created with the librettist and director Peter Sellars, a frequent collaborator, “El Niño” is an alternative Nativity story, drawing its Spanish, Latin and English texts from the Apocrypha, 20th-century Mexican and South American poetry, a medieval mystery play and, of course, the New Testament. The gospels of James and Pseudo-Matthew, which didn’t make it into the codified Bible, provide some of the most characterful scenes, as when Joseph comes home to find Mary six months pregnant and exclaims irately, “Who did this evil thing in my house and defiled her?”The air of triumph as the curtain came down on Tuesday night owed as much to the piece as to the director Lileana Blain-Cruz’s vibrant and infectiously exultant production. It was almost as inspiring to see as it was to hear Adams’s marvelous work on the Met’s stage.It was an evening of firsts. The trailblazing conductor Marin Alsop made her long overdue Met debut to much applause. The singers Julia Bullock and Davóne Tines and most of the creative team also made their first appearances.Taking a cue from the piece’s Latin flavor, Blain-Cruz trades the Middle Eastern climate of standard biblical depictions for a lushly tropical realm. The set designer Adam Rigg’s storybook framework, with rolling hills and broad-leaved plants that look like cardboard cutouts, achieves grandeur without aloofness. Montana Levi Blanco’s moss-green costumes for the chorus amplify the sense of a thriving natural world, but shocks of hot pink and aquatic blue, particularly in Yi Zhao’s hallucinogenic lighting design for “Shake the Heavens,” recall the iridescent striations of a Mexican serape. The puppet designer James Ortiz’s contributions reach a captivating zenith in the “Christmas Star” finale of Part 1.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

    • 125 Shares46 Views

      in Music

      Lileana Blain-Cruz Directs ‘El Niño’ For Her Met Opera Debut

      by

      When Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera’s general manger, asked the director Lileana Blain-Cruz what she wanted to stage, she didn’t need any time to think about her answer: “El Niño.”A couple of years ago, she had already been hired to direct Missy Mazzoli’s “Lincoln in the Bardo,” an adaptation of the George Saunders novel that will premiere in the 2026-27 season, but Gelb was curious about what else she might be interested in.Long a fan of John Adams and his collaborations with the director-librettist Peter Sellars, Blain-Cruz particularly loved their 2000 oratorio “El Niño,” a blending of the Nativity story with ancient and modern texts, like poetry by Rosario Castellanos and Gabriela Mistral.“It makes you weep, and you don’t expect it,” Blain-Cruz said of the piece. “It shook me and stayed in my imagination for a while after I heard it, but I didn’t know when I would have a chance to make it happen onstage myself.”Gelb quickly said yes. Now, Blain-Cruz’s production of “El Niño” will premiere at the Met on Tuesday, bringing with it the return of the brilliant mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges and the long-awaited house debuts of Julia Bullock, Davóne Tines and the conductor Marin Alsop.Davóne Tines, center, makes his Met debut in “El Niño. Costumes are by Montana Levi Blanco. Lila Barth for The New York TimesWe 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

    • 100 Shares54 Views

      in Music

      Nadia Boulanger, Music’s Greatest Teacher, Wrote an Opera

      by

      Nadia Boulanger’s “La Ville Morte” was repeatedly thwarted by death and World War I, then nearly lost. Finally, it is having its American premiere.In March 1912, the famous violinist and composer Eugène Ysaÿe visited the home of his fellow musician Raoul Pugno in Paris. At the piano, Pugno played and sang through “La Ville Morte,” an opera he was writing with Nadia Boulanger, a mentee-turned-collaborator 35 years his junior.“Of this very private performance,” Ysaÿe wrote to Boulanger later that month, “I keep the most profound and happiest impression.” The opera, he told her, was “so beautiful, so sound, so poignant.”“La Ville Morte” was the most ambitious project of Boulanger’s young composing career. And once it took shape, with a piano-vocal score completed that summer, she wrote under the final measures, “Alleluia!!!!”But one thing after another kept “La Ville Morte” from reaching the stage. In 1914, Pugno, an essential partner in selling it to the public, died. World War I broke out, delaying the planned premiere, not for the last time. Several years later, Boulanger’s dear sister, the composer Lili Boulanger, died, too, and Nadia virtually stopped writing or promoting her own music.Robin Guarino, center, the director of “La Ville Morte” for Catapult Opera, rehearses with the singers. Guarino said she was amazed by the score and the “feminism sizzling under the surface.”Ava Pellor for The New York TimesBoulanger would instead go on to become one of the greatest music teachers in history — a formative figure for titans of the 20th century, like Aaron Copland and Elliott Carter, and other legends, including Quincy Jones, Burt Bacharach and Philip Glass.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

    • 113 Shares88 Views

      in Music

      Anthony Davis Puts His Operatic Spin on Edith Wharton

      by

      Anthony Davis has written operas based on recent history. But now he is adapting, and dramatically changing, Wharton’s 1912 novel “The Reef.”The composer and pianist Anthony Davis is known for drawing inspiration from real-world figures in his operas.“X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” — recently mounted by the Metropolitan Opera — and “The Central Park Five,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, are both grave, ripped-from-the-headlines stories about well-known people.But Davis has also written rollicking adaptations of literary material. Less frequently produced but no less interesting are chamber operas like “Lilith” — a saucy and inventive take on the story of Adam’s first wife that features a divorce court in the Garden of Eden. Similarly, “Lear on the 2nd Floor” is a riff on Shakespeare that brings “King Lear” into contemporary discussions about medicine and Alzheimer’s disease.“The Reef,” Davis’s latest music drama to arrive onstage and his follow-up to “The Central Park Five,” seems more fitting in that literary cohort. That is, once it’s finished. Still in progress, the piece dipped its toes into the world by way of a recent workshop performance at Merkin Hall, presented by the Berkshire Opera Festival.Adapted from Edith Wharton’s 1912 novel of the same name, “The Reef,” with a libretto by Joan Ross Sorkin, has been in development, in fits and starts, since 2014. (Since then, Davis premiered “The Central Park Five” and revised the score of “X,” ahead of its traveling revival.)At the Merkin performance, the work departed significantly from Wharton’s text. For one thing, it’s set in Martinique rather than in Paris or the French countryside. The novel’s love-triangle treatment of romance, late Victorian propriety and social class has also been altered by a change of one character’s racial identity: The demimonde-adjacent Sophy is, in Davis and Sorkin’s version, the nursemaid Sonya, a biracial member of the sugar-cane estate’s domestic staff. A quartet of other Black workers on the estate, named the Invisibles, has also been added to the mix. The opera’s creators are toying with the idea of setting their story in 1928 to make more of the Jazz Age’s emergence.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

    • 125 Shares105 Views

      in Music

      La Scala Opera Taps Fortunato Ortombina to Succeed Dominique Meyer

      by

      Fortunato Ortombina, the general director of Teatro La Fenice, Venice’s opera house, will succeed Dominique Meyer, a respected French impresario.The Teatro alla Scala in Milan, one of the world’s most prestigious and storied opera houses, announced Tuesday that its next leader would be Fortunato Ortombina, who is currently general director of Venice’s opera house, Teatro La Fenice.Ortombina will succeed Dominique Meyer, a respected French impresario who has run La Scala since 2020 and who previously led the Vienna State Opera. The appointment of Ortombina comes as Italy’s current national government has made it clear that it favors homegrown talent over foreigners at major cultural posts.“A decision has finally been reached,” Mayor Giuseppe Sala of Milan, who is the chairman of the foundation that runs the opera house, said Tuesday after a board meeting. The appointment of Ortombina ended months of speculation and whispers in the opera world.Italy’s culture minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano, enthusiastically welcomed the appointment on Tuesday. “After three foreign general directors, Stéphane Lissner, Alexander Pereira and Dominique Meyer, an Italian returns to La Scala,” he said in a statement, which noted that the practice of Italian opera singing had recently been added to UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list.Ortombina’s appointment was unanimous, Sala said Tuesday. It was widely expected, and followed months of rejected candidates, crossed vetoes pitting board members against lawmakers at the local and national levels, and even a new law instituting age limits for theater leaders that critics said was intended to oust the foreigners who hold such posts.The haggling had risked putting politics and vested interests ahead of the theater’s artistic legacy, said Alberto Mattioli, an opera critic who recently published a book about Italy’s opera houses and their history. “It’s all been a power game” over appointments, while omitting discussion of cultural policy or a vision for the theater and its “core business, opera,” he said.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

    • 138 Shares82 Views

      in Music

      A Pathbreaking Singer Arrives at the Met, With Pearls and Tattoos

      by

      Dav­óne Tines, who stars in the oratorio “El Niño,” is challenging traditions in classical music and using art to confront social problems.The bass-baritone Dav­óne Tines, wearing Dr. Martens boots, a sleeveless black shirt and six vintage pearl rings, stood on a rehearsal stage at the Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan the other day and began to sing.“My soul’s above the sea and whistling a dream,” he sang, a passage from the Nativity oratorio “El Niño” by John Adams, in which Tines makes his Met debut this month. “Tell the shepherds the wind is saddling its horse.”Tines, 37, known for his raw intensity and thundering voice, has quickly become one of classical music’s brightest stars. He has won acclaim for performances of Bach, Handel and Stravinsky, and he has helped champion new music, originating roles in operas like Adams’s “Girls of the Golden West” and Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.”Tines has also used his art to confront social problems, including racism and police brutality. In 2018, he was a creator of and starred in “The Black Clown,” a searing rumination on Black history and identity inspired by a Langston Hughes poem. In 2020, he released a music video after the police killing of Breonna Taylor, calling for empathy and action.During a rehearsal break at the Met, he described his art as cathartic, saying his aim was to “pick apart the complicated, contentious existence that is knit into the American landscape.”“It’s a blessing to be a performing artist because you get an explicit place to put your feelings,” he said. “It’s the blessing of having a channel.”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

    • 100 Shares95 Views

      in Music

      A ‘Missionary for Opera’ Steps Down in Chicago

      by

      Anthony Freud is leaving Lyric Opera of Chicago on good terms, though the company faces challenges in a strained environment for the performing arts.In 1975, Anthony Freud went to a performance that changed his life.Still in his teens, he waited in line for hours to see a concert version of Benjamin Britten’s opera “Peter Grimes” at the BBC Proms in London. For the Proms, seats are removed from the Royal Albert Hall to create a vast standing room, and Freud found himself pressed against the stage, just a few feet from the tenor Jon Vickers, who sang a crushingly intense Grimes.“This is what I want to spend my life doing,” he realized, recalling the show with relish in a recent interview. “I want to be a missionary for opera.”Last Sunday, Freud, now 66, was once again as close as he could be to the opera stage. At a matinee of Verdi’s “Aida,” the final full performance of his 13-year tenure as the general director of Lyric Opera of Chicago, Freud was front row, left aisle.Freud in the dressing room of William Clay Thompson, right, before the season finale of “Aida.”Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesHe usually sat there — in the theater’s traditional seat for the general director — only on opening nights. But “it seemed right to be in that seat today,” he said during intermission, as he made his way upstairs to greet donors.After 30 years leading opera companies — Welsh National Opera and Houston Grand Opera before coming to Chicago — Freud is retiring as one of the field’s most experienced hands. Gentle and genial, with a deep knowledge of operas and voices, he has tried to balance his venturesome spirit with the sensibilities of audiences — to challenge without alienating the people he needed for support.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

    • 138 Shares156 Views

      in Music

      ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones’ Review: A Met Milestone Returns

      by

      After making history as the Metropolitan Opera’s first work by a Black composer, Terence Blanchard’s “Fire” is back — with its showstopping step dance.The Metropolitan Opera premiere of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” on Sept. 27, 2021, was a momentous event. Doubly so: “Fire” was the company’s first staged opera after an 18-month pandemic closure, and it was, after 138 years, its first work by a Black composer.The opera, with a score by Terence Blanchard and a libretto by Kasi Lemmons, took on some of the grandeur and excitement of that moment. The raucous fraternity step dance that opens the third act brought down the house.That step dance still stopped the show on Monday evening, when “Fire” returned to the Met. Two and a half years later, the work is a test case. The company has sharply increased its diet of contemporary operas — some of which, including “Fire,” sold very well as new productions. But how will these operas perform when they’re brought back, without the same promotional push?On Monday, at least, the audience seemed robust and, as it was during the initial run, notably diverse. And “Fire” remains a heartfelt piece, emanating a touching if vague sadness. But without the exhilarating sense of occasion it had at its Met premiere, the opera’s shortcomings were clearer.Based on the New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow’s memoir of his turbulent upbringing in Louisiana, “Fire” is a progression of episodes — some upbeat, some forlorn. It takes the form of a search: The lonely Charles, his psyche wounded as a child by his cousin’s sexual abuse and his mother’s real but distracted love, looks for belonging and healing.He tries church, fraternity membership, his siblings, a woman, another woman, but none offer what he’s seeking; all want him to be different than he is. Only after a hasty, therapy-speak conclusion in the final minutes, presided over by an ethereal choir and the voice of his younger self, can he finally accept himself and sing, “Now my life begins.”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