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      The Classical Music Our Critics Can’t Stop Thinking About

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      Watch and listen to five recent highlights, including performances by Davóne Tines and Lise Davidsen, and a new album by Ethan Iverson.The New York Times’s classical music and opera critics see and hear much more than they review. Here is what hooked them during the past month. Leave your own favorites in the comments.Davóne TinesAn installation view of “Living Room, Orlean, Virginia,” part of “Making Home — Smithsonian Design Triennial” at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAndrew Carnegie’s 1902 mansion on Fifth Avenue, a Georgian homage on an immense, Gilded-Age scale, is currently the home of a more modest domestic scene: the bass-baritone Davóne Tines’s childhood living room.As part of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s triennial exhibition, “Making Home,” Tines has worked with the director Zack Winokur and the artist Hugh Hayden to create “Living Room, Orlean, Virginia,” an uncanny, poignant replica of the house of Tines’s grandparents, who raised him.‘Living Room, Orlean, Virginia’Sonic composition by Davóne Tines and Zack Winokur with Alma Lee Gibbs Tines, and John Hilton Tines Sr. Sound engineered by Al Carlson.The “Living Room” tableau, arranged on an enormous rocker, is a meditation on “home” as something soothing yet precarious for a musician like Tines, who spends much of his year on the road. On closer inspection, this installation, with its cozy arrangement of furniture, an upright piano and even a rug over carpeted flooring, has a dreaminess to it: Eerily, the photo frames are empty.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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      Strauss’s ‘Die Frau Ohne Schatten’ at the Metropolitan Opera

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      “Die Frau Ohne Schatten,” a dense ode to fertility, may not sound appealing at first. But in this performance, the fairy tale comes movingly to life.It’s not easy to make “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” sound appealing.Believe me, I’ve tried. But when you describe Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s most opulent creation, which opened on Friday in one of its infrequent, glittering revivals at the Metropolitan Opera, the piece always seems dense and ponderous.Starting with the title: “The Woman Without a Shadow.” In this fairy tale, being without a shadow is both a literal condition and a representation of the inability to bear children. The idiosyncratic symbolism only deepens as the plot probes layers of fantastical realms, complete with a singing falcon, a choir of the unborn and the clock ticking down to an emperor’s transformation into stone. Two couples — one human, one demigod — face temptation but persevere through trials to achieve enlightenment and happiness. Oh, and fertility, too.You might think a four-hour allegorical ode to pregnancy isn’t your thing. But I’m here to tell you: Just go.With its formidable length and daunting vocal, instrumental and scenic demands, “Frau,” written around the time of World War I, has much in common with Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, to which it nods. And both tend to seem stilted and overblown when summarized.But like the “Ring,” “Frau” comes alive in performance — its royalty and commoners, flashes of magic and heavy-handed symbols, ending up movingly real and relatable. Hofmannsthal’s elegantly stylized, exquisitely poetic (and, for some, pretentiously contrived) text is warmed by the intensity and compassion of Strauss’s music.Last seen at the Met 11 years ago, “Frau” has always been an event for the company. The Met premiere, conducted by Karl Böhm in 1966, was a historic highlight of the first season in its Lincoln Center home.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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      Bringing the Magic of ‘Fanny and Alexander’ to the Opera Stage

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      A new opera by Mikael Karlsson and Royce Vavrek, directed by Ivo van Hove, aims to capture the lavishness of Ingmar Bergman’s film, in half the time.Ingmar Bergman’s film “Fanny and Alexander” luxuriates in space. In its longest version, a television mini-series that spanned more than five hours, the camera lingers on interiors that in their accumulating details say as much as the characters, who themselves say quite a lot.Bergman made another edit of the film, of a little more than three hours, for theatrical release. But the longer “Fanny and Alexander” spends 90 minutes alone on a single Christmas Eve and morning in the lives of the loving but complicated Ekdahl family in early 20th-century Uppsala, Sweden.Opera, too, is a slow-moving art form that luxuriates, but in different ways. Composers and singers relish sound, not sight. And so, in a new opera based on “Fanny and Alexander,” opening at La Monnaie in Brussels on Dec. 1, that Christmas scene takes half as long as it does in the TV cut. It’s one of several changes that were made for this adaptation, composed by Mikael Karlsson to a libretto by Royce Vavrek, and with a starry team that includes the director Ivo van Hove and the singers Sasha Cooke, Thomas Hampson and Anne Sofie von Otter. (The production will be streamed on multiple platforms on Dec. 13.)The director Ivo van Hove and the singer Anne Sofie von Otter, rehearsing the new opera. Ingmar Bergman, van Hove said, is “a realist about human emotions, but he is also poetic.”Simon Van RompayMost obviously, the opera has a running time of two and a half hours, less than half that of the longer cut of the film. Still, the stage version will be recognizably “Fanny and Alexander,” Bergman’s partially autobiographical coming-of-age tale, in which fantasy lives freely alongside reality as a vast tableau of human experience is seen through the eyes of a child. Bergman, who had planned for it to be his last film, said around its release, in 1982, that it represented “the sum total of my life as a filmmaker.”The film plays on television every Christmas in Sweden, and Karlsson, who is Swedish, said he felt the most pressure to get that holiday scene right. When he, Vavrek and van Hove met early in the opera’s development, van Hove suggested hurrying through Christmas to get to the wedding: the marriage of Alexander’s recently widowed mother to the local bishop, the precipitating event of the story’s darkest dramas.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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      Angelina Jolie Plays Opera Diva Maria Callas. We Went With Her to the Met.

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      The Metropolitan Opera House was awash in pearls and tuxedos on a recent gala evening. Socialites traded political gossip by the bar, and bankers discussed coming vacations in the Maldives.Then a golden elevator door slid open and a glamorous figure slipped out.Heads turned, cellphones clumsily emerged and people began to talk. Is that really her? What is she doing here? She seems taller in person. Look at those tattoos!I had invited Angelina Jolie to the Met to see a performance of Puccini’s “Tosca” ahead of the release of “Maria,” a new film starring Jolie as opera’s defining diva, Maria Callas.Jolie and Larraín at the Met. “There’s an authenticity here that is beautiful,” Jolie said. “There’s a poetry to it all.”Jolie is one of the most recognizable people on the planet, commanding attention wherever she goes. But her night at the opera got off to a bumpy start. She had a problem with her dress, a black, floor-length Yves Saint Laurent with a velvet cape. (The seamstresses in the Met’s costume shop were summoned, but Jolie soldiered on without help.) And when I met her in the foyer, she seemed to be having last-minute doubts about me shadowing her, saying it might spoil the experience.“I just want to enjoy the evening,” she told me. “I want to take it all in.” More

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      Puccini Died 100 Years Ago. So Did the Great Opera Tradition.

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      There’s a knock at the door.A poor young poet is struggling to write in his attic apartment when he is interrupted by the sickly seamstress who lives downstairs. Her candle has gone out; can he light it?Barely 15 minutes later, these two strangers are singing ecstatically about their love. Implausible, right? But when a performance of Giacomo Puccini’s “La Bohème” is working its hot magic, nothing could be more believable.And nothing could be more essentially operatic than such a scene, with the emotions compressed and heightened through music. Puccini, who died 100 years ago, on Nov. 29, 1924, proved himself again and again a master of moments like this: unleashing a Technicolor extravagance of feeling while at the same time conveying plain, simple truth.A painter assuring his jealous girlfriend that her eyes are the most beautiful in the world. A prince, pursued by a city desperate to know his name, promising that it will remain a secret. A teenage geisha convinced her husband will come back to her.Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) was the Dickens of opera, able to manage the elusive combination of nearly universal accessibility and deep sophistication.A. Dupont/Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs DivisionOnce you know these passages, just thinking about them can bring you to tears. Spoken, the texts would be generic, sentimental, even laughable. Set to Puccini’s music, they suggest the most sincere and profound experiences that humans are capable of. More

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      Tales of 19th-Century A.I.: Don’t Fall in Love With a Singing Robot

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      Love me, love me, pretend that you love me.One of today’s most popular artificial intelligence apps is Replika, a chatbot service whose users — many millions of them — converse with virtual companions through their phones or on VR headsets. Visually, the avatars are rudimentary. But each Replika offers personal attention and words of encouragement, and gets better at it with each update. There are dozens of A.I. services like this now: imitation humans who promise, via text or voice, to console, to understand, to adore.Many users (men and boys, mostly) are developing long-term bonds with these simulated lovers (“women,” mostly). Some fall into ruin. A young man in Britain tried to assassinate the former queen after plotting with a Replika avatar; and last month a mother filed a lawsuit against Character.AI, another of these apps, after her son killed himself with the encouragement of his virtual “girlfriend.”It all sounds new. It all sounds alarming. Yet these online lonely-hearts are brushing against anxieties at the core of modern art and philosophy — anxieties, as Sigmund Freud wrote more than a century ago, that things not alive may yet have spirits, and that our animistic ancestors were onto something.One of the most famous musical automatons of Enlightenment Europe: a female organist, designed by the Swiss inventor Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz in 1774.Grisel/RDB/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesIntricate gearwork drives the automaton’s fingers, which play the organ’s keys. Her eyes move back and forth, and her chest rises and falls as if breathing.Grisel/RDB/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesThis fall I’ve been thinking about lovers and robots, erotics and mechanics — ever since seeing two performances, both at Lincoln Center, that resonated with all our contemporary worries about art, sex and technology. One was Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” (1881) at the Metropolitan Opera, which puts an android musician at center stage: the automaton Olympia, whose song and dance captivate and then devastate her human paramour. The other, next door at New York City Ballet, was “Coppélia” (1870), a merry comedy featuring not only dancing machines but also, more troublingly, humans pretending to dance like machines.Is our projection of life onto technology a sign of derangement? Or is it more like wish fulfillment? In both “Hoffmann” and “Coppélia,” grown men fall hard for female contraptions, only to discover the gears and grease that power their music and movement. Singing and dancing, in particular, seem to awaken these men’s archaic passions and juvenile needs, and shatter their rational skepticism about gadgets.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: Lise Davidsen Meets Puccini in ‘Tosca’ at the Met

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      The powerhouse soprano, already a company stalwart at 37, still seems to be figuring out a character whose moods change on a dime.Aficionados have sometimes criticized the Metropolitan Opera for waiting too long to engage singers with starry careers in Europe, like a sports team that acquires only veterans. Even the loudest complainers, though, would have to praise the Met’s early, deep investment in the powerhouse soprano Lise Davidsen, a generational talent from Norway.Davidsen, 37, made her house debut five years ago in Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades.” The title role in Puccini’s “Tosca,” which she sang on Tuesday in a gala honoring the centenary of the composer’s death, is already her seventh part with the company.With a huge, marble-cool voice that she can pull back to a veiled shadow or unleash in a floodlight cry, Davidsen has been most memorable in works by Wagner and Strauss that have broad vocal lines for her to sail through.She has embodied the mythic longing of Ariadne in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” and brought opulent purity to Eva in Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.” Last season, venturing into Verdi with “La Forza del Destino,” she captured Leonora’s eternal woundedness.For saintly, long-suffering figures like Wagner’s Sieglinde and Elisabeth, she’s perfect. Davidsen is tall and statuesque — noble, yet modest. She’s not slow-moving onstage, but there’s something glacial about her. She seems most comfortable when she can settle into a character’s steady state for a few hours and just sing.Tosca is a different beast, and Davidsen still seems to be figuring her out. Puccini’s operas are nothing but endless, changeable business: pocketing letters, discovering keys, spying a knife. Every tiny response is illustrated in the music, and moods shift on a dime. His works require hair-trigger agility, even febrility.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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      Daniele Rustioni, Fixture at the Met Opera, Will Be Its Guest Conductor

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      Beginning next fall, Rustioni will lead at least two operas each season and help provide continuity for the Met as it rebuilds after a wave of retirements.Daniele Rustioni, an Italian conductor who has become a fixture of the Metropolitan Opera in recent years, has been named its principal guest conductor, the company announced on Wednesday.When he joins the Met next season, Rustioni, 41, will be tasked with helping to bring stability and continuity to the Met Orchestra whenever the company’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, an ever-busy maestro, is away. The ensemble is still working to rebuild after a wave of retirements during the pandemic.“The chemistry I feel with this orchestra and chorus is quite special,” Rustioni said in an interview. “They give an incredible amount of energy, and they are always super committed.”Rustioni, who will serve an initial three-year term, will lead at least two operas each season, the Met said. He is only the third person in the company’s 141-year history to hold the title of principal guest conductor. Fabio Luisi, the last maestro to occupy the post, was hired in 2010 when the Met was grappling with the unpredictable health problems of James Levine, its former music director.Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director since 2018, said that he and Rustioni had shared artistic values, and that “having Daniele in this elevated role is good for the orchestra, good for the chorus and good for opera.”Under Nézet-Séguin, the Met Orchestra has worked to recover from the pandemic, filling 17 vacancies and going on high-profile tours in Europe and Asia. But critics have raised concerns about the Met Orchestra’s quality and consistency.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