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      Review: ‘Il Trovatore’ at the Met Opera Doesn’t Catch Fire

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      The energy in Verdi’s classic must come from the singing, but the cast of this revival fails to convey the work’s passion.Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” begins with a group of soldiers keeping a weary patrol. “Drive off the sleep that hangs heavy on our eyelids,” they sing, begging their commander to entertain them with a story.His spine-tingling tale riles them up. But the sleepiness never quite lifts from the revival of “Il Trovatore” that opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday afternoon. While this was only the first of 12 performances of David McVicar’s cement-gray staging — a long run — already on Saturday there was the worn-out feeling of a show ready to rest.The conductor Daniele Callegari kept things flowing in the orchestra pit. But particularly in the operas of the Italian bel canto tradition from which “Il Trovatore” (1853) emerged, the energy — in this piece, it’s closer to crazed passion — must come from the singing.The tenor Michael Fabiano is usually the kind of artist who provides that energy, even if his voice can seem tensely pressed out rather than smoothly natural. As Manrico on Saturday, though, he tended listless, sounding strained from his first offstage song. He occasionally made some attractively plangent sounds, but couldn’t conjure this character’s moody restlessness.As Azucena, the mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton sang with neither the raw power nor the varied, surprising colors needed to make this long-suffering woman’s plight feel truly central to the story. Igor Golovatenko, a baritone who has made a strong impression at the Met in Russian works and, last season, in Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino,” was gruffer than usual on Saturday as Count di Luna.Fabiano and Willis-Sorensen. As Leonora, she kindled some of the passion the production was otherwise lacking. Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera“Il balen,” his monologue about his consuming love for the noblewoman Leonora, should unfold in long, aching lines but here was tired and blunt. Even putting a leading man, the bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green, in the supporting role of Ferrando didn’t end up seeming like luxury casting; this part wants richer depths than Green’s voice provided on Saturday.The show did give reassuring signs about the continued health of the Met’s chorus under its new director, Tilman Michael. That group of soldiers early on sounded hearty and believably frightened, and the women of Leonora’s convent sang with evocative mistiness.Best among the soloists was the soprano Rachel Willis-Sorensen as Leonora. She wasn’t entirely comfortable when agility was required, and she didn’t have the vocal heft and commitment to give the “Miserere” in the final act its full stature. But along with some light-filled high notes, there’s a gentle creaminess to her tone that made the aria “D’amor sull’ali rosee” feel earnest and true.Thanks to Willis-Sorensen, some embers of passion glowed near the opera’s end. But it was too little, too late, for a performance that never caught fire.Il TrovatoreContinues through Dec. 6 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Met Opera and Singer Injured in Onstage Fall Settle Decade-Old Lawsuit

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      Wendy White, a veteran mezzo-soprano, was performing when she fell in 2011. Her suit, which claimed negligence, had been one of the company’s longest-running court cases.More than a decade after she was injured in a fall from a platform on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera while singing in a production of “Faust,” the veteran mezzo-soprano Wendy White has settled her lawsuit against the company.Ms. White, who says she suffered nerve and muscle damage that prevented her from singing professionally after the accident in 2011, had been expected to return to court this month. But she recently reached a deal with the Met and a scheduled trial was called off. Neither side disclosed details.“Under the terms of the confidential agreement we’re not permitted to comment,” the Met said in a statement. A lawyer for Ms. White declined to comment.The settlement brings to an end one of the longest-running legal disputes in the Met’s 141-year history. The case dragged on amid rounds of legal filings and appeals — and efforts by New York State lawmakers to help Ms. White. She was injured during the Dec. 17, 2011, performance of Gounod’s opera about selling one’s soul to the devil while singing the role of Marthe.Ms. White was walking from a backstage staircase to an elevated platform onstage when a piece of scenery broke and the platform collapsed. She fell eight feet. She did not break any bones, but was taken to the hospital for injuries.The Met said at the time that her injuries did not initially appear to be serious. But Ms. White, who sang more than 500 performances at the Met after making her debut as Flora in Verdi’s “La Traviata” in 1989, never appeared on its stage again.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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      Circe and Muse No Longer: A New Opera Reconsiders Alma Mahler

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      “Alma,” premiering this week at the Vienna Volksoper, views its often-vilified protagonist through a feminist lens: as a thwarted composer and mother.At the end of 1901, the budding composer Alma Schindler received a 20-page letter from Gustav Mahler laying out the expected terms of their future life together.She was 22 years old; he was nearly two decades older, an established composer and the director of the Vienna Court Opera. She had to stop writing music, he wrote, because “if we are to be happy together, you will have to be my wife, not my colleague.” Later he added: “You must surrender yourself to me unconditionally, make every detail of your future life dependent on my needs.”Soon after, the couple wed. Looking back years later, she wrote of the incident: “The iron had entered my soul and the wound was never healed.”Ella Milch-Sheriff’s opera “Alma,” which premieres on Saturday at the Vienna Volksoper, positions this decision as a turning point in the life of Alma Mahler-Werfel. She outlived Mahler by more than 50 years and came to be associated — as a lover, a supporter, an object of obsession or an inspiration — with some of the best-known artists of the 20th century, including Walter Gropius, Franz Werfel, Arnold Schoenberg and Oskar Kokoschka.“When she gave up her composing, she, in a way, killed her own soul,” Milch-Sheriff said in an interview at the Volksoper. “After that, she didn’t feel she deserved to have children because she’d already killed her own children, which were her future creations that were never born.”“Alma” unfurls in reverse chronology, with acts focusing on Mahler-Werfel’s lost children.Lisa Edi 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

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      Can a Synthetic Voice Be Taught to Sing Opera?

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      “The Other Side of Silence,” a new work in development, is experimenting with giving operatic voice to a text-to-speech synthesizer.The opera opened with amplified breathing: gasps, hisses, labored inhalations. A string quartet introduced spidery harmonics that consolidated into brighter chords and were joined, over time, by radiant voices. Exuberantly lyrical, their lines unfolded in stark contrast with those of the protagonist, who, strapped into a wheelchair center stage, had thus far contributed only some short comments in the machine tones of a text-to-speech synthesizer.But then the synthetic voice began to sing, cutting through acoustic textures with a sound profile all of its own. In the upper register it seemed to combine the timbre of a boy soprano with a brushed metal finish, while the lower range had some of the compressed warmth of a countertenor. The voice, an uncanny combination of expressive directness and can’t-quite-place-it strangeness, moved from one note to the next with the slick flexibility of rubber.The voice belonged to Mark Steidl, the star and co-librettist, with Katherine Skovira, of “The Other Side of Silence.” The first act of this opera, composed by Robert Whalen, was presented last week in a public workshop at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.Steidl has cerebral palsy and speaks through an augmentative and alternative communication (or A.A.C.) device, which can make ordinary interactions painfully slow. Making space for underrepresented voices has become a stated priority for much of the opera world. To tell the story of a nonspeaking disabled character in “The Other Side of Silence,” a team of creators, researchers and software developers had to first learn how to engineer the voice itself.The opera’s creators believe that Steidl’s singing voice is the first case of a generative synthetic voice taught to sing opera. While “The Other Side of Silence” depicts a disabled person’s struggle for creative flourishing and agency, the underlying theme of opportunity and fear in the age of artificial intelligence has a Faustian resonance that fits comfortably into this art form’s canon.In the work, which is being developed with Opera Saratoga, Zari, a nonspeaking, nonbinary character based on Steidl, is heavily dependent on a team of caregivers, including a mother who chafes at her child’s gender identity. Zari decides to move into an experimental smart home in a remote desert, run by an A.I. entity called the Chimera that promises unprecedented independence. But with access to Zari’s thoughts, the Chimera begins to take over their decision-making and, in a medical crisis, intervenes in ways that leave Zari’s mind altered forever.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: ‘Ainadamar’ Fills the Met Opera Stage With Flamenco

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      Osvaldo Golijov and David Henry Hwang’s opera, inspired by the life of Federico García Lorca, arrived at the Met with a dizzying blend of styles.It took nearly 20 years, but the music of Osvaldo Golijov has arrived at the Metropolitan Opera. And it’s not the work that he originally expected.In 2006, Peter Gelb, before taking over as the company’s general manager, announced that Golijov, celebrated at the time for his jubilantly multicultural hit “La Pasión Según San Marcos,” had been commissioned to write a new opera for the Met. The company later said it would be based on Euripides’ “Iphigenia in Aulis,” with a premiere set for the 2018-19 season.Then, in 2016, during a dry spell for the composer, who had developed a reputation for missed deadlines, the project was called off.There was another Golijov opera readily available for the Met to program, though: “Ainadamar,” a fantasia about the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. It’s a seemingly sure bet, so frequently performed since its 2003 premiere that it has appeared in New York multiple times already.So Golijov finally got to take his bow on the house’s stage, with the opening of a new production of “Ainadamar” on Tuesday. A fluidly staged dream heavy on flamenco spectacle, it was assured in its movement, but not in its musical performance. After all these years, the Met still doesn’t appear quite ready for Golijov.The production, directed by Deborah Colker, has constant flamenco choreography by Colker and Antonio Najarro.Sara Krulwich/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

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      With a ‘Ring,’ the Dallas Symphony Becomes a Wagner Destination

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      Fabio Luisi, a seasoned “Ring” conductor, will lead Wagner’s four-opera epic over a week in concert, breaking new ground for American orchestras.Richard Wagner conceived his four-opera “Ring” as a Gesamtkunstwerk: a marriage of poetry and music, for voices and orchestra, with coordinated sets, costumes and action. It’s a huge, expensive challenge even for top opera companies, calling for powerful singers, an accomplished conductor and orchestra, and a stage director and designer who can enliven a convoluted epic of family dysfunction, greed, destruction and rebirth.How much of Wagner’s impact remains if you subtract scenery and costumes, and most of the action — with neither water nor fire, sword nor spear, celestial palace nor subterranean smithy?Those questions will be put to the test by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, which is alone in the American classical music and opera scene this season by presenting a complete “Ring,” over four evenings at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center beginning on Sunday.At the podium will be Fabio Luisi, the orchestra’s music director since 2020, who led the “Ring” at the Metropolitan Opera a dozen years ago. In Dallas, he began to roll out the cycle last spring, presenting “Das Rheingold” and “Die Walküre”; “Siegfried” and “Götterdämmerung” followed earlier this month, semi-staged by Alberto Triola, who collaborated with Luisi and the Dallas symphony on “Salome” and “Eugene Onegin.”A concert staging of the “Ring,” Luisi said in a video interview from his home near Zurich, does not compromise the work.“In Wagner’s time the acting was extremely reduced,” he said. “We cannot compare the acting in the ’60s and ’70s of the 19th century with acting now. Even after the war, in Bayreuth, the stagings by Wieland Wagner were pretty much static.”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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      Patrick Summers, Veteran Opera Conductor, to Step Down in Houston

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      Summers, who has helped introduce new operas into the American canon, will leave his role at Houston Grand Opera in 2026.Patrick Summers, a veteran conductor who over the past 26 years has helped turn Houston Grand Opera into one of most innovative companies in the United States, will leave his post in 2026, the company announced on Wednesday.Summers, 61, Houston Grand Opera’s artistic and music director, said he was eager for a change and felt he was leaving the organization in a strong position.“I love the company and the work that we’ve done here,” he said. “But I realized it’s time to make space for a new generation.”Summers has played an important role in introducing new operas into the American canon.He has premiered 11 works in Houston, including Jake Heggie’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” and Carlisle Floyd’s “Cold Sassy Tree.” He has recorded new and recent operas, including Daniel Catán’s “Florencia en el Amazonas.” And, as a guest conductor, he has led major premieres at other companies: He was on the podium, for example, when Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking” had its debut at San Francisco Opera in 2000.The star soprano Renée Fleming called Summers a “consummate musician” and a “natural educator.”“His effect has been to maintain a high standard of quality and hire great singers and have wonderful productions,” she said. “The whole ecosystem has benefited from his long tenure there.”Summers joined Houston Grand Opera as music director in 1998. He was recruited by David Gockley, the company’s general director from 1972 to 2005, who made it a hub for experimentation, commissioning dozens of new works. Summers became artistic and music director in 2011.Khori Dastoor, Houston’s general director and chief executive since 2021, said Summers’s creative drive had transformed the company.“He lives in the future; he lives in commissions,” she said. “He lives in the support of talent at the beginning, when it’s most needed.”Dastoor said that the company had not yet begun searching for a successor but that she hoped there would not be a long gap between Summers and his replacement.“We’re united and ready to make an ambitious and bold choice when the time comes,” she said.For his next chapter, Summers said, he did not anticipate taking on another major director role, hoping to focus on performance. He will be given the title of music director emeritus at Houston Grand Opera and continue to appear there. This season, he is leading a new production of Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” and performances of Missy Mazzoli’s “Breaking the Waves.”Since the pandemic, Houston Grand Opera has been in a relatively strong position compared to its peers, with strong ticket sales and fund-raising.Summers said he was proud of the company. “We’re one of the real success stories in the arts in the United States,” he said. “How could I have any regrets?” More

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      Osvaldo Golijov’s ‘Ainadamar’ Opera Makes Its Met Debut

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      Osvaldo Golijov’s opera about Federico García Lorca makes its Met debut in a dance-heavy production, directed by the choreographer Deborah Colker.Rippling scales of Spanish guitar, the howls of a raspy-voiced singer, thunderous clapping and stamping — the sounds could have been coming from a tavern in Andalusia, home of flamenco. But this was the Metropolitan Opera House during a recent rehearsal for its new production of “Ainadamar.”A one-act opera by the Argentine-born composer Osvaldo Golijov, “Ainadamar” has its Met debut on Tuesday. And it wasn’t just the sounds of flamenco that were unusual for the opera house. There were two choreographers in the room, one of whom, Deborah Colker, was the production’s director.Since its premiere at the Tanglewood Music Center in 2003, “Ainadamar”— an 85-minute work about the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca — has had many productions, including in a Golijov festival at Lincoln Center in 2006. But this one, which played at the Scottish Opera and Detroit Opera before coming to New York, has by far the most dance in it.“What Deborah has done blew me away,” Golijov said in a phone interview. “She revealed to me something I had not thought about”: that the opera “can be danced throughout.”Colker is known for her dance company in Brazil, as well as her choreography for Cirque du Soleil and the opening ceremony of the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. She had a musical education, seriously studying classical piano as a child, but “Ainadamar” is the first opera she has directed.“I direct like a choreographer,” she said after the rehearsal, noting that her theatrical approach to the opera was simple: gestures, movement, dance. “This is my language, yes, but this is also what the music is asking for.”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