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      Why Isn’t My Favorite Composer More Popular?

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      I love the operas of Leos Janacek. So do audiences — when they go to see them. But the works remain stubbornly on the outskirts of the repertory.When I was just getting started as an operagoer, I went to see “The Makropulos Case,” the Czech composer Leos Janacek’s tale of a woman desperate to elongate a life that has already lasted three centuries.It left me exhilarated, dazed and with only one thing on my mind: buying a ticket to return the next weekend.I’m not the only one to have this reaction. “People felt they had to come back,” Yuval Sharon said recently about the audiences when he directed “The Cunning Little Vixen,” another thrilling, heart-rending Janacek opera. “It was unlike any piece they’d experienced. It just seizes you.”That’s still my feeling about Janacek’s operas. On Sunday, when the Cleveland Orchestra finished an elegant but crushing concert version of “Jenufa,” which ends with a vision of forgiveness and reconciliation after extraordinary suffering, I would have happily sat through it again, right then and there.The end of ‘Jenufa’Elisabeth Söderström and Wieslaw Ochman; Vienna Philharmonic; Charles Mackerras, conductor (Decca)For this brutal account of small-town woe, Janacek wrote earthy, lush yet sharply angled music, with unsettled rhythms and roiling depths. There are obsessively repeated motifs, as anxious as the characters, as well as passages of folk-inspired sweetness.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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      ‘Queen of Spades’ Review: A Fiery Soprano Breaks Through

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      At the Metropolitan Opera’s season premiere of Elijah Moshinsky’s production, it was the women who led, while a strong cast carried the patchwork plot.Tchaikovsky’s “Queen of Spades” tells the story of an addict, Hermann, whose obsession with cards leaves a trail of destruction. Along the way, some of the opera’s female characters become collateral damage. But at the Metropolitan Opera’s season premiere of Elijah Moshinsky’s stenciled historical-dress production on Friday, it was the women who came into focus.In large part this was because of the fiery performance of the soprano Sonya Yoncheva, who made her role debut as the aristocratic Lisa who breaks off an illustrious engagement to throw in her lot with the wild-eyed Hermann, clinging to him even after he uses deadly force to extract a supernatural gambling secret from her grandmother.“Young women often fall in love with” bad guys, Yoncheva noted in an earlier interview with The New York Times. On Friday, she drew on a wide range of vocal shadings to evoke flickers of girlish curiosity, fatalism and raw erotic longing that lent uncommon depth and agency to her character.Her commitment helped make sense of an opera that, with its collage of pastiche, quotations and narrative devices, can feel like a Frankenstein creation. Here, amid the cold glitter of a rococo-obsessed imperial court with people rigidly gliding about under towering wigs, Hermann and Lisa’s search for intense emotions seemed both nihilistic and perfectly plausible.Yoncheva might not have dominated the proceedings quite as much if she had appeared alongside a Hermann of equal stature. But the tenor Arsen Soghomonyan was dramatically stiff and vocally uneven in his house debut. Much of those jitters must be because he stepped into the role at short notice after the successive withdrawals of the tenors Brian Jagde and Brandon Jovanovich this month.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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      How ‘The Queen of Spades’ Brought Two Tchaikovsky Brothers Together

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      The composer’s brother Modest long wanted to collaborate. They eventually got their chance, to bring Pushkin to the opera stage.In 1888, Modest Tchaikovsky wrote a letter to his brother Pyotr, the composer. Modest, a former law student and budding dramatist and critic, had recently been commissioned by the Imperial Theaters in St. Petersburg, Russia, to write his first opera libretto: an adaptation of Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades.”Modest revered his older brother’s talent and international renown. He had already proposed potential collaborations to Pyotr twice, to no avail. He had a composer lined up for “The Queen of Spades,” Nikolai Klenovsky, but he was disheartened that he and his brother would not be working on it together.Pyotr’s response to the letter was measured but blunt. “Forgive me, Modya, but I do not regret at all that I will not write ‘The Queen of Spades,’” adding: “I will write an opera only if a plot comes along that can deeply warm me up. A plot like ‘The Queen of Spades’ does not move me, and I could only write mediocrely.”Then Klenovsky dropped “The Queen of Spades.” Ivan Vsevolozhsky, the director of the imperial theaters, asked Pyotr to take over. He agreed.And so “The Queen of Spades,” which returns to the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, became the first collaboration between the two Tchaikovsky brothers, men of different disciplines and artistic abilities, despite their closeness. This work was the culmination of nearly 40 years of Modest’s attempt to escape the cool of Pyotr’s shadow and bask in his light. The result, the musicologist Richard Taruskin wrote, was the “first and probably the greatest masterpiece of musical surrealism.” It’s a testament to their camaraderie and fraternity, as well as their openness and intimacy.When stripped to its thematic core, Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades,” first published in 1834, has all the makings of spectacle — obsession, greed, madness, phantasmagoria — that you could also find in sentimental Italian operas of the 19th century. Pushkin was not just god of Russian letters, but the god, yet his writing wasn’t easy to adapt into a libretto. His storytelling is anecdotal and ironic, lacking in empathy and tenderness for and between its characters. No one evolves, and there are no changes of heart. And “The Queen of Spades” is short; Taruskin counts the text at “barely 10,000 words.”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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      Santa Fe Opera Continues to Draw Performers From Across the Globe

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      Nearly 70 years old, the Santa Fe Opera and its summer season draw singers, directors, designers, conductors and apprentices from across the globe.In 1956, in the high desert just north of Santa Fe, N.M., a young New York conductor had a vision to build an outdoor opera house. Many scoffed at such an idea in the Southwest, but John Crosby persisted. He had fallen in love with opera as a young man attending the Metropolitan Opera.Nearly 70 years later, the Santa Fe Opera, which opens its annual two-month season on June 27, attracts singers, directors, stage designers and conductors from across the globe. In many ways it has a sort of operatic pipeline to New York and the Metropolitan Opera.“There’s this wonderful legacy of artists who have had their debut here and gone onto the Met and other houses,” Robert K. Meya, general director of the Santa Fe Opera, said during a recent phone interview. “And John Crosby’s vision was very tied to the Metropolitan Opera. He first heard Richard Strauss at the Met, and he moved very quickly to bring many of Strauss’s first operas to Santa Fe years later.”That early vision of championing Strauss’s lesser-known works defined the company — six of his operas had their professional U.S. debuts in Santa Fe, including “Capriccio” in 1958 and “Intermezzo” in 1984 — in the decades after his death in 1949.Crosby’s vision to stage a world premiere or a U.S. premiere almost every season among its five annual productions has also distinguished the company.The conductor John Crosby wanted to bring opera to Santa Fe, so built an outdoor opera house and started the company in 1956.Santa Fe Opera ArchivesWe 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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      Opera Companies Find Savings and Gains Through Collaborations

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      Co-productions can help companies across the globe save money, collaborate artistically and ensure that lesser-known works are seen by more audiences.Simon McBurney’s acclaimed production of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Khovanshchina,” which debuted last month at the Salzburg Easter Festival ahead of its Metropolitan Opera premiere, almost didn’t happen.McBurney’s staging, once envisioned as a co-production between the Met and the Bolshoi in Moscow, was in limbo after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In response to the war, the New York company severed ties with all Russian state-run institutions.At that time, Nikolaus Bachler had recently taken over as artistic director of the Easter Festival and was looking for other companies to share productions with. One of his ambitions was to present McBurney’s “Khovanshchina” in Salzburg. The Met signed on as co-producer. “For me, it was crucial to find partners from the very beginning,” he said in an interview last month at his office in Salzburg’s picturesque Altstadt, or Old City, shortly before the second and final performance of “Khovanshchina” at the festival, on April 21.“Especially for a festival like ours, it is such a pity — they did this in the past — that you do a production for two times and then it’s over,” he said. “This is an artistic waste and economic waste.”A scene from John Adams’s “Antony and Cleopatra” at the Met, a co-production with San Francisco Opera and the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona.Karen Almond/Met OperaIn recent years, the Met has increasingly turned to co-producing not only to share costs, but also as a way to collaborate artistically with other companies. The final premiere of the current season, John Adams’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” is a co-production with San Francisco Opera and the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” a Met commission composed by Mason Bates that adapts Michael Chabon’s novel, will open the 2025-26 season and is a collaboration with the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where it premiered in November. Two further premieres in the new season, “La Sonnambula” and Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” are shared among various opera companies in Europe and the United States.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 Soprano Sonya Yoncheva Has Many Roles, On and Off the Stage

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      Sonya Yoncheva discusses her turn as Lisa in “The Queen of Spades” at the Metropolitan Opera, her summer concerts, her production company and more.The soprano Sonya Yoncheva has established herself as one of today’s most versatile opera stars.Just over a decade ago, in 2014, she caused a splash after jumping in on short notice as Mimi in her first staged performance of Puccini’s “La Bohème” at the Metropolitan Opera. When the Bulgarian native appears as Lisa in Tchaikovsky’s tragic love story “The Queen of Spades,” from Friday through June 7, it will be her sixth role debut at the house.Yoncheva, 43, maintains a busy schedule that includes a recent gala at the Opéra Garnier in Paris and her third production as the title character in “Iolanta,” also by Tchaikovsky, at the Vienna State Opera. In Europe this summer, she will perform Handel, Bellini and more.Yoncheva performing in “Iolanta” at the Vienna State Opera.Vienna State Opera / Michael PöhnUnder the auspices of her production company, SY11 Events, she will also appear in August in Sofia, Bulgaria, for outdoor concerts alongside the tenors Vittorio Grigolo, José Carreras and Plácido Domingo. Started in 2020, the enterprise joined forces with the label Naïve for her most recent album, “George,” inspired by the life and work of the French writer George Sand (born Aurore Dupin, she is known in the music world for her tumultuous relationship with Frédéric Chopin).An even less conventional project is the 2023 book “Fifteen Mirrors,” combining personal confessions about select characters and portraits in which Yoncheva poses in different guises.“I understand my work as a process,” she said by phone from outside Geneva, where she lives with her husband, the conductor Domingo Hindoyan, and their two children. “The interpretation takes up maybe an even bigger part than the singing.”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: Unsuk Chin’s New Opera Gives Music to the Unsaid

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      Unsuk Chin’s “The Dark Side of the Moon,” a reinterpretation of the Faust myth, reflects a restless mind with constant musical invention.Unsuk Chin’s new opera conveys, with uncanny precision, the restless energies inside a person’s head.Called “Die Dunkle Seite des Mondes” (“The Dark Side of the Moon”), the work premiered on Sunday at the Hamburg State Opera in Germany. It’s a reinterpretation of the Faust myth, drawing loose inspiration from a famous series of letters between the quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung.This is Chin’s second opera, following “Alice in Wonderland,” which was first performed at the Bavarian State Opera in 2007. It was as kinetic as her new one, though sillier, more eclectic and ultimately more haunting.“Die Dunkle Seite des Mondes” centers on a character called Dr. Kieron, sung by the baritone Thomas Lehman. He is an irascible yet brilliant scientist whose harsh perfectionism masks a fragmenting mental state. Searching for human connection and trying to slow the pace of his thoughts, he falls prey to a cynical, Nietzsche-quoting faith healer, Master Astaroth, performed by the baritone Bo Skovhus.At the start of the opera, Dr. Kieron’s sung text shows a confident man with bristly charisma. He mocks his assistant, his students and his colleagues with laser wit; In response, they grudgingly praise his intellect. Later, in a seedy bar, he entertains the other patrons with ludicrous tall tales that they believe despite themselves. Dr. Kieron’s behavior recalls Pauli, who dismissed bad science by saying it was “not even wrong,” but also Chin’s teacher, the composer Gyorgy Ligeti. “Ligeti was the harshest critic you could ever imagine,” she has said, “not only toward his students, but to his colleagues and himself.”Chin’s music takes us into Dr. Kieron’s psyche, and it’s an exhausting place. Melodic fragments flare up and burst; orchestral registers and timbres shift constantly. The score shows a mind that can’t stay still. No wonder Dr. Kieron searches for solace with Master Astaroth, whose therapy-speak pronouncements seem profound when accompanied by blessedly static, ethereal music.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: A Game of Light and Shadow in Gounod’s ‘Faust’

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      Sara Holdren’s new production for Heartbeat Opera takes its lead from Bulgakov’s Faustian novel “The Master and Margarita.”The director Sara Holdren has made it pretty clear that she’s a fan of Mikhail Bulgakov.In the biography that accompanies her new production of Gounod’s “Faust” for Heartbeat Opera, Holdren ends with a bit of Cyrillic script that translates to “Manuscripts don’t burn,” the most famous line from Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita.”A passage from that book, a Soviet spin on the Faust story, also appears in Holdren’s note about her staging. During her work she thought often, she wrote, about one of the devil’s lines: “What would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people.”This idea, that light and shadow, and all they represent, are intertwined and essential to life itself, guides Holdren’s take on “Faust,” which opened on Thursday at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, in a new adaptation by her and Jacob Ashworth, with a chamber arrangement by Francisco Ladrón de Guevara.Before “Faust” was a sprawling grand opera in the 1860s, sung through across five acts and including a ballet, it was a humbler opéra comique, with spoken dialogue between its flights of musical expression. Holdren blends the two versions, trimming the length and adapting the spoken lines to sound as if they were written today.The goal, as always with Heartbeat Opera, is to breathe urgency into a classic. And “Faust,” which isn’t performed often, was once the classic. Perhaps the most popular work of its day, it opened the Metropolitan Opera in 1883. (Martin Scorsese depicted one of those Gilded Age performances of “Faust” in his film adaptation of “The Age of Innocence.”) Now, however, it’s harder to come by. The Met hasn’t even presented it in over a decade.Holdren, who was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize this year, is also an excellent theater critic for New York Magazine; often, I’m convinced she’s the finest in town. You can sense a real, exciting theatrical instinct in her production of “Faust,” particularly in the inventive ways she plays with light and shadow (designed by Yichen Zhou).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