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      Review: A Devastated Drone Pilot Opens the Met Opera’s Season

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      Jeanine Tesori and George Brant’s bloodless “Grounded,” about a fighter pilot turned dissociating drone operator, stars the mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo.On a fall evening in 1883, the Metropolitan Opera opened its doors for the first time with a performance of “Faust,” the classic tale of a man who sells his soul to Mephistopheles to gain power and pleasure.On Monday, 141 years later, another Met season began with Jeanine Tesori and George Brant’s “Grounded,” a bloodless new opera on that same old theme of making an ill-advised deal with the devil.The same old theme, but with 21st-century trappings — a plot about advanced weapons technology; a libretto loaded with words unprintable in this newspaper — that are still unusual in the tradition-bound opera world, particularly on the Met’s most important night of the year. There is an assumption that operas on charged contemporary themes must be risky and important. “Grounded,” which doesn’t risk much, politically or musically, shows this isn’t so.Its protagonist, Jess, is a hotshot fighter pilot who falls in love with a rancher she meets while on leave in Wyoming. When she gets pregnant, she is pulled out of her beloved F-16 cockpit, and out of combat in the Middle East. With a loyal husband and daughter, she is without the sense of freedom and mastery she had soaring through — and dropping bombs from — what she calls “the blue.”A few years later, her old boss, the U.S. military, has a proposal: Would she apply her gifts to operating a missile-bearing Reaper drone, thousands of miles away from her targets? It’s much less glamorous than her former “Top Gun” life, but she’ll be able to go home and hug her child at the end of the day.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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      What Belongs to Opera? Garth Greenwell’s Novel of Desire

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      Greenwell’s “What Belongs to You” reaches the opera stage with a team that includes the composer David T. Little and the director Mark Morris.The composer David T. Little isn’t sure whether it was really his idea to write the opera “What Belongs to You.”Nine years ago, he was given an advance copy of Garth Greenwell’s debut novel of the same name by his friend and fellow musician Alan Pierson, from the group Alarm Will Sound. As Little read the book, a finely hewed account of desire and shame, and their resonances in an American’s dangerous love for a Bulgarian hustler, he thought: This is a song cycle waiting to happen, if not a full-length opera.He said as much in an email to Pierson, taking the first step that led to the premiere of “What Belongs to You” on Thursday at the Modlin Center for the Arts in Richmond, Va. Now, Little said, “I suspect Alan masterminded this thing from the beginning.”In the years since Little was sent the book, Greenwell has become a critical darling, the author of “Cleanness” and “Small Rain,” which was released this month. Little and Pierson brought on more artists: the Grammy Award-winning vocalist Karim Sulayman, for whom the opera was written, and Mark Morris, the choreographer and director, who is staging the work’s premiere.Pierson conducting during a rehearsal of “What Belongs to You” at the Modlin Center for the Arts in Richmond, Va.Maansi Srivastava for The New York TimesAnd, yes, this is exactly what Pierson was hoping would happen.“This is a book that I’ve been deeply connected to from the beginning,” he said. He and Greenwell, a former singer, were students and collaborators at the Eastman School of Music, and remained close friends as Greenwell became a poet, a teacher and then a prose writer, whose style seemed to reflect the different phases of his life. Pierson read early versions of “What Belongs to You,” which Greenwell dedicated to him.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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      A (Very) Belated Donizetti Premiere in South Africa

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      The 1838 score for “Dalinda,” which uses chunks of “Lucrezia Borgia,” was found in Naples in 2019. A student company in Cape Town just gave the first staged performance.“Could Donizetti ever have imagined that the world premiere of one of his operas would take place in Africa?”That’s the question Jeremy Silver, the director of Opera UCT, a student company from the University of Cape Town, posed to the audience before the first staged performance of “Dalinda” on Sept. 4.But here it was, an opera discovered just a few years earlier — presented not at an ornate European opera house but at the Baxter Theater, built in the 1970s, and performed by Opera UCT with a cast largely comprising Black singers and supertitles in English and IsiXhosa.The rediscovery of “Dalinda” is a musical detective story with its origins in Donizetti’s frustration at failing to get his opera “Lucrezia Borgia” past the censors in Naples, where he was resident at the Teatro di San Carlo. The composer of “Lucia di Lammermoor,” “La Fille du Regiment” and “Don Pasquale,” Donizetti was a prodigious worker, often producing several operas in a year. But he spent four frustrating years reworking “Lucrezia” while composing other pieces, and in 1838 he decided to change the setting and characters entirely and add new music.He called the new opera “Dalinda,” setting the action in the Middle East at the time of the Third Crusade in the 12th century, and making his title character the dominating wife and daughter of feared Muslim leaders. But Dalinda has a secret: Her illegitimate son is a Christian knight whom she longs to know. The plot revolves around their unexpected reunion when the Franks (as the Christian Crusaders are called) and the Saracens (Muslim fighters) meet to celebrate the end of a three-year war. It doesn’t turn out well.Like “Lucrezia,” the opera has the story of a mother and son at its heart, and Donizetti used “large chunks” of that music in “Dalinda,” the British-born Silver said in an interview at the University of Cape Town’s College of Music, which has produced alumni like Pretty Yende, Golda Schultz and Musa Ngqungwana. “But there is progressively more new music as it goes on, some of it really wonderful.”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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      A Soprano Who Despises Encores Interrupts Her Co-Star’s

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      Angela Gheorghiu drew criticism after she stormed onstage to stop a tenor’s encore during a performance of “Tosca” in Seoul.It was the third act of Puccini’s “Tosca” at a theater in Seoul, and the South Korean tenor Alfred Kim, responding to enthusiastic applause, was singing a rare encore of “E lucevan le stelle,” one of the opera’s most beloved arias.Then the unexpected happened: The celebrated soprano Angela Gheorghiu, who was singing the title role in a performance on Sunday, stormed onstage and demanded that he stop, according to local media reports and accounts by audience members.“Excuse me,” she said, signaling to the orchestra to pause.When the orchestra continued playing, she also refused to stop. “It’s a performance; it’s not a recital,” Gheorghiu said. “Respect the audience. Respect me.”Gheorghiu, 59, a diva of the old school known for her preternatural voice and strong-willed demeanor, faced an immediate backlash.She initially did not appear for a curtain call. But when she eventually emerged, she was booed, blowing a kiss as she exited the stage after only a few seconds. She was widely denounced by commentators and fans in South Korea. And the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts, where the performance took place, demanded an apology.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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      The Creators of ‘Grounded’ Discuss Writing for the Met Opera

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      Allow the creators of opera some grace.Composers, librettists and their colleagues put years of work into something that, if they are lucky, gets a workshop performance or two before arriving onstage. If there is a revival — never a given in opera — they have an opportunity to make revisions.This process can be brutal for artists. And it’s not the usual one for the composer Jeanine Tesori and the playwright George Brant, the creators of “Grounded,” which opens the Metropolitan Opera’s season on Sept. 23.Tesori was written operas before, but she and Brant are more often animals of the traditional theater and the Broadway musical, environments where constant revisions responding to workshops, rehearsals and preview performances are the norm. Operas are also revised until the last possible moment, but they are never given the luxurious feedback that creators get in theater.“In the theatrical space, the audience is part of the process,” said Tesori, the Tony Award-winning composer of the shows “Kimberly Akimbo,” “Fun Home” and “Caroline, or Change.” She learned from George C. Wolfe, the decorated playwright and director, “that the audience is your final scene partner.”“I wish I were one of those artists who really knows what they have, but I just don’t,” she said. “So, I feel like I’m still getting to know what ‘Grounded’ is.”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: This ‘Figaro’ Puts All Mozart’s Characters in One Voice

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      By singing men and women, nobles and servants, the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo takes the opera’s theme of human mutability to a chaotic extreme.Charles Dickens was celebrated for solo public readings in which he would give voice to a novel’s full cast of characters. I’ve watched the great actor David Greenspan take all the roles in Eugene O’Neill’s sprawling play “Strange Interlude” and, earlier this year, saw Eddie Izzard do the same in “Hamlet.”But when the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo has a go at a similar feat — performing Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” as a one-man show at Little Island — it is an altogether different ambition.An opera singer’s repertoire is usually firmly circumscribed. Sure, transposition can nudge unfriendly music into a more comfortable key. And sure, some mezzo-sopranos can sing some soprano parts, and vice versa. But while Dickens, in a reading, could shift from Scrooge to Tiny Tim simply by adjusting an accent or affecting a growl, it’s another story for one person to hit the notes of both Susanna and the Count in “The Marriage of Figaro,” let alone invest both with beauty and power.A vocal range can be wide, but it’s not infinite; a singer’s identity tends to be pretty fixed.It’s that fixity that Costanzo, who has recently been named the general director of Opera Philadelphia, means to have some fun with. Mozart and his “Figaro” librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, might well nod along: The opera is full of characters pretending to be other people, even other genders. Human mutability is one of the main themes.Costanzo — with his director, Dustin Wills, and his arranger and conductor, Dan Schlosberg — takes this to a challenging, chaotic extreme. In this much-trimmed 100-minute “Figaro,” Costanzo sings all the parts, or enthusiastically tries to: men and women, nobles and servants, high notes and low.I was misleading earlier, however: This isn’t precisely a one-man “Figaro.” It’s more of a one-voice version, with a handful of actors joining Costanzo onstage for much of the relentlessly high-spirited performance, playing main roles, some cast across gender, and impressively lip-syncing along with Costanzo’s sung Italian. (Toward the end, there are also sweet — and audible — contributions from a few child members of the Young People’s Chorus of New York City.)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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      Classical Music and Opera This Fall: Programs, Premieres and More

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      Osvaldo Golijov’s Lorca-inspired opera comes to New York, and the pianist Igor Levit plays with the Cleveland Orchestra, among other highlights.The Metropolitan Opera’s gamble on contemporary work continues. Celebrations of big anniversaries for two musical innovators, Charles Ives and Pierre Boulez, are worth seeking out. And Carnegie Hall will host world-class orchestras. But don’t expect Gustavo Dudamel, the New York Philharmonic’s next music director, to be a fixture yet; until 2026, he is dedicated to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which opens Carnegie’s season with a three-night residency. Here are highlights from this fall’s performance calendar. (Locations are in Manhattan unless otherwise specified; dates are subject to change.)SeptemberATLANTA OPERA Not quite 50 years old, this company is bucking the belt-tightening, season-shrinking trend in American opera. It is presenting “La Bohème” (updated to the Covid-19 pandemic) and “Rent,” the Broadway musical that transplanted Puccini’s classic to the AIDS era, both staged by Tomer Zvulun, its artistic director, and Vita Tzykun. (Sept. 18-Oct. 6; Pullman Yards, Atlanta)‘INDRA’S NET’ How about a hopeful perspective on our divided times? The invaluable Meredith Monk created and will perform in “Indra’s Net,” the conclusion to a trilogy of works about our relationship with the natural world and inspired by Buddhist and Hindu legends. (Sept. 23-Oct. 6; Park Avenue Armory)Meredith Monk’s “Indra’s Net,” performed here at the Holland Festival, is coming to the Park Avenue Armory in September.Ada Nieuwendijk‘THE LISTENERS’ Missy Mazzoli, who is working on an operatic adaptation of George Saunders’s “Lincoln in the Bardo,” first brings another work with literary inspiration to Opera Philadelphia: “The Listeners,” with a libretto by Royce Vavrek, based on Jordan Tannahill’s unsettling novel about the search for meaning and a cultish leader who claims to have answers. (Sept. 25-29; Academy of Music, Philadelphia)OctoberLOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC Gustavo Dudamel will be at the podium for three nights to start Carnegie Hall’s season: with Lang Lang in Rachmaninoff’s Second piano concerto; with Alisa Weilerstein in a new cello concerto by Gabriela Ortiz; and with the Mexican singer-songwriter Natalia Lafourcade. (Oct. 8-10; Carnegie Hall)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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      With ‘Maria’ Biopic, Angelina Jolie Could Make Her Oscar Comeback

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      “Maria,” about the opera diva Maria Callas, plays to the star’s strengths. Its Venice Film Festival debut was timed so the actress could avoid Brad Pitt.She’s one of the most famous actresses to have ever lived, but how formidable is Angelina Jolie’s filmography?After winning the supporting-actress Oscar for “Girl, Interrupted” (1999), Jolie made a few big hits like “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” and “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” as well as a string of movies that remained steadfastly so-so. (Who remembers “Taking Lives,” “Come Away” or “Life or Something Like It”?) Jolie’s most recent movies, the mildly received “Those Who Wish Me Dead” and “Eternals,” were released back in 2021, and her only other Oscar nomination happened ages ago, for Clint Eastwood’s 2008 film “Changeling.”Jolie has said that she takes frequent breaks from acting to spending time with her family, but it’s still been awhile since a movie really leveraged all she has to offer. Perhaps that’s why journalists at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday were quick to herald a career comeback in “Maria,” which stars Jolie as the opera singer Maria Callas: Here, at last, is a project that knows how to take full advantage of her star persona.Directed by Pablo Larraín, “Maria” follows the soprano near the end of her life as she reflects on the pressures of fame, her tortured romance with the wealthy shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), and a singing career that began to falter as Callas lost confidence in her voice. It’s a meaty role that lets Jolie switch between strength and tremulous vulnerability with a couple of operatic set pieces that have her singing directly to the camera, all but asking the viewer to marvel at that movie-star face.Musical biopics tend to be catnip for Oscar voters, and at Thursday’s news conference for “Maria,” the first question was whether Jolie suspected she might have a shot at gold when taking on this role. The actress demurred, saying the people she was most eager to please were the opera fans familiar with Callas.“My fear would be to disappoint them,” Jolie said. “Of course, if in my own business there’s response to the work, I’m grateful.”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