Opera

Subterms

    More stories

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Salzburg Festival Remains a Crammed Summer Stage

      by

      No other festival matches the sheer profusion of classical music, opera and theater offerings at the Salzburg Festival.Early in 1779, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart sulked back to Salzburg, Austria, having failed to land a permanent job abroad. In a letter to a family friend, he sneered at the city he was returning to.“Salzburg is no place for my talent,” he wrote, adding: “One hears nothing; there’s no theater; no opera! — and even if they wanted to stage one, who is there to sing?”If only Mozart could see his hometown now.I read those words last weekend in a program note at the Salzburg Festival, which, over the past century, has been largely responsible for giving this place perhaps the richest, densest musical offerings in the world for six weeks each summer.Salzburg’s bounty of nearly 200 opera, concert and theater performances, continuing this year through Aug. 31, is so intoxicating that it can lead to some dizzying sprints.Last Tuesday, I left one concert early — squeezing past the confused people in my aisle right after Jean-Guihen Queyras played Kodaly’s Cello Sonata at 7 p.m. — so that I could make it to the baritone Christian Gerhaher’s lieder recital. And had Gerhaher’s haunting Schumann not felt quite so conclusive, I would have run, at 10:15, to try and make the second part of a third program.Salzburg has competition. The Aix-en-Provence Festival in France has more varied spaces and a commitment to new work; in Germany, Bayreuth has a laser focus on Wagner and, as in this year’s augmented reality “Parsifal,” an experimental spirit. Glyndebourne, in England, has pastoral grace; Lucerne and Verbier, in Switzerland, vibrant orchestras and chamber intimacy.But Salzburg is still the annual stage, crammed to bursting.Cecilia Bartoli, standing, starred in “Orfeo ed Euridice,” the annual production at Salzburg programmed as a vehicle for her.Monika Rittershaus/Salzburg FestivalAnd currently in some flux. There have been reports of internal tensions as Kristina Hammer, who last year replaced the festival’s longtime president, settles in. A big-budget renovation project looms, as Europe’s economic situation is unsettled by war and inflation. (The cost of paper has risen so high that Salzburg no longer prints opera librettos in its programs.)Heated controversy last summer over the ties to Russia of the conductor Teodor Currentzis, a recent stalwart here, has largely eased. And tickets have been selling briskly.Yet the pressure is always on to justify Salzburg’s reputation and its often sky-high prices, which can reach north of $500. As Jürgen Flimm, an old artistic director here, is said to have put it, “People don’t come to the Salzburg Festival to watch us save money.”The staged operas I saw during my six days here didn’t seem cheap, but they looked and felt too much the same: all gloomily sleek. Best was Martin Kusej’s rueful production of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro,” set in a series of anonymous, sterile, nearly empty spaces populated by the rootless members of a contemporary crime syndicate.The druggy opening promised a too-broad mafioso approach, but Kusej settled in with action that was sly, surreal and sensual, muted without being chilly, full of casual, bloody violence but also melancholy tenderness. The cast was strong, particularly a trio of female leads — Adriana González, Sabine Devieilhe and Lea Desandre — with light, precise voices and a Mozartian blend of wistfulness and energy.And Raphaël Pichon’s conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic, the festival’s eminent house band, was remarkable. While Pichon often does Mozart with his period-instrument ensemble, Pygmalion, he embraced the Philharmonic’s more traditional warmth. Detailed without being finicky, this was a grand but dashing, controlled but vibrant “Figaro.”Christof Loy’s staging of Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice” had one of Loy’s typical airy sets — wood-paneled but otherwise as blank as the rooms in “Figaro” — as well as his wan, sometimes swooping, sometimes sullen venture into choreography.With Gianluca Capuano serenely leading Les Musiciens du Prince, Monaco, this was one of the annual vehicles for the star singer Cecilia Bartoli, who premiered it this spring at the Salzburg Whitsun Festival, the sister event she runs. Dressed in a men’s suit with a long ponytail, Bartoli’s Orfeo had impassioned dignity, but her voice was less persuasive and juicy — sounding sharp-edged at the top of its range, colorless at the bottom — than in her other recent appearances here.Both of these works were done in the modest-size Haus für Mozart, while Krzysztof Warlikowski’s dreary take on Verdi’s “Macbeth” — interpreting the action as the internal drama of a couple driven mad by their inability to conceive a child — sprawled across the expanse of the main festival theater’s stage.The soprano Asmik Grigorian was a highlight as Lady Macbeth in Verdi’s “Macbeth.”Bernd Uhlig/Salzburg FestivalIn an unfocused production busy with neorealist-style film, movie theater seats and children wearing oversize bobblehead Banquo masks, the soprano Asmik Grigorian, Salzburg’s reigning prima donna of late, alone managed to seize attention with her clear, focused singing and convincing sobriety. Under Philippe Jordan, the Philharmonic sounded vague and limp; this was a performance full of imprecise coordination between pit and stage, in a work that needs to be taut to fully speak.Far tauter, more delicate and more potent was Currentzis’s conducting of Peter Sellars’s wrenching, decade-old completion of Purcell’s “The Indian Queen.” Adding some of that composer’s religious choruses alongside harrowing spoken excerpts from Rosario Aguilar’s novel “The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma,” exploring the impact of Spanish colonization on Central Americans, Sellars created a hypnotically solemn meditation on that corrosive, ambivalent colonial encounter — here semi-staged under somber light.Utopia — the orchestra and choir Currentzis has been touring with since he and his MusicAeterna ensemble came under fire for their partnership with a state-owned Russian bank — performed with exquisite sensitivity. In a superb cast, the soprano Jeanine De Bique stood out with a voice and presence of unaffected directness.Also narcotic and stark, but in a more maximalist mode, was “Nathan the Wise,” Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 18th-century parable of religious tolerance, one of the festival’s spoken theater productions and the most exciting directorial work I saw at Salzburg.It was staged in darkly industrial style by Ulrich Rasche on one of his characteristic turntable stages, over which his actors ceaselessly walk — rhythmically swaying into slowly shifting configurations, while hurling out their lines with stylized aggression. The showmanship, the physical virtuosity, the intensity and clarity of the text have all been hard to forget.The soprano Jeanine De Bique stood out in a semi-staged presentation of Purcell’s “The Indian Queen.”Marco Borrelli/Salzburg FestivalIt has not been unusual in recent years to find the fully staged operas — in theory, Salzburg’s glory — uneven, and the drama offerings more adventurous. While the festival’s artistic leader, Markus Hinterhäuser, has excellent taste in musicians, his choices in opera directors can tend iffy.So can some repertory decisions. With just five full stagings, for example, does it make sense for two to be Shakespeare adaptations by Verdi? (After “Macbeth,” “Falstaff” opens on Saturday.)And Hinterhäuser has stubbornly resisted premieres and contemporary work, instead showcasing modernist rarities like Enescu’s “Oedipe,” Nono’s “Intolleranza 1960” and Martinu’s mid-20th-century refugee drama “The Greek Passion,” which opens on Sunday. These are invaluable projects, but surely 21st-century music does not have to be so completely exiled from Salzburg.Hinterhäuser has been a steady, intelligent hand, though, and many would like to see him extend his contract, which runs through 2026. He demurred when asked in an interview if he hoped to stay longer, saying that he and the festival’s board will discuss the matter this fall. But recent tweaks to the administrative hierarchy have led to speculation about friction between him and Hammer, the new president.The festival’s president serves as a kind of global ambassador, networker and fund-raising chief, and Hammer, a German-Swiss marketing executive and consultant, was an unexpected choice from outside the usual Salzburg circles. (Her predecessor, Helga Rabl-Stadler, came from a prominent Austrian family and had been a politician, journalist and businesswoman before her quarter-century as president.)There can be advantages to having someone in the position with deep connections at the highest reaches of government — as in 2020, when the festival leveraged its influence to put on a robust event amid worldwide pandemic closures.But it’s also important to remember that Rabl-Stadler went through her own difficulties early on. In an interview, Hammer presented herself as an underestimated outsider, patiently learning the ropes.“I swallow it if somebody runs me over because they think: ‘Who is the blonde? Certainly not the president,’” she said. “I don’t care. If people need time to get used to me, I understand.”She has been buoyed by the fact that the festival’s corporate sponsors, among the president’s prime responsibilities, have remained stable. And this spring, Hammer secured a 12 million euro ($13.1 million) private gift — unusually large for a festival financed so generously by the government — for a new visitor center.That project will be a prologue to the main renovation, which, organized by the festival’s well-liked business manager, Lukas Crepaz, will cost an estimated 480 million euros ($527.2 million) and last until 2032. It will increase the comfort for audiences, update outdated backstage facilities and add more behind-the-scenes space by pushing further into the adjoining mountain.“It creates a lot of question marks for the festival,” Hinterhäuser said. “But we have to do it.”The construction schedule has been planned to keep all the theaters open each summer. So the fire hose of performances will remain on — with no end to the need to choose, for example, between two memorable 11 a.m. concerts: the sumptuous, detailed Philharmonic under Andris Nelsons, or the Mozarteum Orchestra, exuberantly fresh with its incoming chief conductor, Roberto González-Monjas.Where else but at this festival could you hear “Le Nozze di Figaro” and then, the following morning, Mozart’s “Coronation Mass,” whose Agnus Dei gives the soprano soloist a melody its composer would later crib from himself for the time-stopping “Dove sono” in “Figaro”?At Salzburg, the bounty — the extravagance, the sheer profusion — is the point. More

    • 63 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Seeing ‘L’Orfeo’ in Santa Fe

      by

      Among the company’s annual summer offerings, Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo,” from 1607 but newly reorchestrated and imaginatively staged, stands out.It’s a change so small, you might not even notice it. But the posters and playbills around the campus of Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico have given Monteverdi a makeover: Gone is the article from “L’Orfeo,” which is being styled this summer as simply “Orfeo.”Few are likely to, and shouldn’t be, bothered by a shift so innocuous. And you could say the same for how the work, premiered in 1607 and the oldest surviving opera still regularly performed, is being presented here: with a deferential new orchestration by Nico Muhly for modern instruments, and a myth-free yet no less magical staging by Yuval Sharon.This “Orfeo,” which premiered on July 29, was the last of Santa Fe Opera’s five productions to open during its annual summer season. A newcomer, having never been staged there before, it is also the highlight of the company’s current offerings, which I saw over the past week.I started with opening night of “Orfeo,” in which the baritone Luke Sutliff jumped in to perform the title role — heroic not just given the circumstances, but also because of his thoroughly assured interpretation and stage presence, and, most impressively, the ability on short notice to pull off the complicated movement of Sharon’s production. (The intended star, the tenor Rolando Villazón, had been injured during the final dress rehearsal but was back by the second show.)Audience members got a taste of Monteverdi’s score before many of them had taken their seats; at different corners of the Crosby Theater campus, in the tree-dappled desert hills outside Santa Fe, small brass ensembles sounded the opening Toccata of the opera, in a touch from the playbook of Wagner’s Bayreuth Festival in Germany.But once the show began properly, Monteverdi’s music took shape anew in Muhly’s treatment. Not so noticeably, though; each performance of “L’Orfeo” involves choices about instrumentation and articulation, work that has long been the territory of historically informed performance specialists like John Eliot Gardiner. Here, though, Muhly has written an indisputably clear, easy-to-replicate version of the score for modern orchestras, with enough lushness to satisfy a large opera house in future productions.An injury kept Villazón out of the opening-night performance of “Orfeo,” but he was back for the second show.Curtis BrownMuhly’s version of the score is most remarkable for how unremarkable it seems on the surface. Often, it sounds like “L’Orfeo” as we know it — opera’s foundational tale, of Orpheus and Eurydice — with small adjustments like a string line moved to the winds and more deeply fleshed-out harmonies. Occasionally, though, Muhly adds a flourish and a touch of his own idiom: tremolos of shivering tension; glassy violins giving way to arpeggiated textures; dirgelike calls from low brasses; fluttering winds.He creates, in the end, a personal love letter to Monteverdi that relishes not just a musical conversation, but the making of music itself, which is in the spirit of both the piece and Sharon’s production.Sharon, the artistic director of Detroit Opera and the founder of the enterprising company the Industry in Los Angeles, is the most imaginative opera director in the United States, one who works in a collaborative spirit, across disciplines, sometimes to build a world premiere from scratch. This “Orfeo,” though, joins his Bayreuth “Lohengrin” as one of his tamer productions; there’s no headline-making concept, like the four acts of “La Bohème” performed in reverse or “Götterdämmerung” reduced to a one-hour drive through a parking garage. But here, he achieves a complex, deceptive sleekness while teasing out a single, timeless idea from the tale.His production takes place on an AstroTurf-covered dome, a small, artificial hill among the natural, immense ones seen through the open back of the stage. At the start, a white bed fit for a sanitarium sits on top, occupied by someone visibly sick and dressed in white; it’s La Musica (the pure-voiced soprano Lauren Snouffer), who, after picking up a lyre, is suddenly animated with the potential of music. The stage is then populated with a chorus of singers, who are dressed as if presenting a capsule collection in oranges and magentas in Carlos J. Soto’s characteristically stylish costumes.Orfeo’s story unfolds as a celebration of music and its meaning, its uses in moments of happiness and sadness alike. After the protagonist’s journey to the Underworld — in Alex Schweder and Matthew Johnson’s design, the dome opens to reveal a dark, misty grotto animated by light projections — and after Euridice dies a second, permanent death, her voice (the soprano Amber Norelai) is heard through a gramophone that Orfeo holds closely. Who among us hasn’t done something similar, listening to a song we know will amplify our pain?There are comedic touches as well, and joyous appreciations of community and music in an Arcadian ur-society absent of ideology. During the second performance, on Wednesday, that spirit turned from exuberant to assertive as the theater’s surroundings rumbled with thunder, and as the sunset was obscured by brush-stroke streaks of rain in the distance.That night, as Villazón belatedly stepped into the role, he did so with noticeably altered, muted blocking, and his voice was as uncooperative as it has been in recent years. He remains a charismatic presence — funny, touching, magnetic — but his tenor can shift suddenly from smooth, with a warm vibrato, to raw, with a hard edge that doesn’t befit a character whose musical beauty moves the gatekeepers of the Underworld.The mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey’s performance was a high point of “Pelléas et Mélisande.”Curtis BrownThe Santa Fe Opera Orchestra — a group in nimble, lively and consistently excellent form throughout the week — took up “Orfeo” with brisk, dancing energy under Harry Bicket’s baton, and, promisingly, settled more into the score during the Wednesday performance.This season, Bicket is doing double duty, also leading Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” in an appropriately enigmatic yet frustratingly obtuse production by Netia Jones. Seen on Thursday, his conducting produced something like the opposite of “Orfeo”: an atmosphere that moved almost imperceptibly forward, with flashes of color and sensuality.In that production, the mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey sang Mélisande with a weighty lower range and a mixture of chilliness and seeping passion. Another commanding stage presence — whether here, or earlier this season as Octavian in “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Metropolitan Opera — she is emerging as a major artist of her generation.There were other vocal standouts elsewhere throughout the week. That “Pelléas” also included a frighteningly resonant Zachary Nelson as Golaud; his fellow baritone Huw Montague Rendall as Pelléas, often warm and achingly tender, strained only at the top of his role’s range; and the great mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, who had the opposite trouble, plush but diminished at the bottom.Two singers in other productions were even more memorable: the bass-baritone Nicholas Brownlee and the soprano Ailyn Pérez.Nicholas Brownlee’s Dutchman seemed to preview a promising Wagnerian future.Curtis BrownAs the title character in Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman,” Brownlee — often working against a clumsy staging by David Alden, but supported throughout by the energetic, detail-oriented baton of Thomas Guggeis — projected agony and careworn bitterness throughout the theater, even as he was made, strangely, to sing lying down or on his side. (That was among many baffling directorial choices, including a “Spinning Chorus,” performed by Minion look-alikes in Oompa-Loompa choreography.) Brownlee’s enunciation was clear, his voice booming and blending well with the soprano Elza van den Heever’s mighty and ardent Senta. You could sense a fruitful Wagnerian future unfolding before him.And in “Rusalka,” Pérez has found in the title role a part that rewards the richness of her sound. David Pountney’s elegant production, which treated the “Little Mermaid”-like story as the metaphor it always has been, has her rarely leaving the stage, crossing paths with the likes of Raehann Bryce-Davis’s playfully vicious Jezibaba and Mary Elizabeth Williams’s ferociously alluring foreign princess. At times Pérez was athletic, singing the “Song to the Moon” while climbing suspended chairs as if they were a jungle gym, projecting her longing as she leaned back, holding onto the furniture by a single hand. Through it all, her phrasing remained shapely, controlled and actorly, erupting in agony or passion but just as quickly retreating to a quiet, floating soprano, while in the pit Lidiya Yankovskaya teased out the Romantic elements of Dvorak’s score.In Rusalka, the soprano Ailyn Pérez has found a role that rewards her rich sound.Curtis BrownInevitably in a densely packed series of performances, not everything lands. Santa Fe’s “Tosca,” with de Chirico-inspired sets by Ashley Martin-Davis, propelled with inevitability under John Fiore in the pit. But onstage, the baritone Reginald Smith Jr.’s Scarpia was a villain deprived of nuance; and while there was promise in the tenor Joshua Guerrero’s passionately Italianate Cavaradossi and the soprano Leah Hawkins’s sumptuous Tosca, a bit of vocal unwieldiness betrayed works in progress.Keith Warner’s production had a few novel touches — including a jump scare better seen live than described here — but is mostly a dressed-up version of the familiar tragedy. And he seemed aware of his lineage in the opera’s history as, in the final moments, Tosca shot herself while a doppelgänger, dressed in a costume redolent of Maria Callas’s famous red gown and tiara, walked slowly offstage.It’s a confusing, if unnecessary punctuation that isn’t set up by the staging. But Warner’s heart is in the right place: It is possible to present opera with reverence and a bit of fresh style at the same time. For an example, you need only look to “Orfeo.” More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Anna Netrebko Sues Met Opera After Losing Work Over Support of Putin

      by

      Seeking at least $360,000, the singer accused the storied opera house of discrimination, defamation and breach of contract. The company disputed her claims.The star Russian soprano Anna Netrebko filed a lawsuit on Friday against the Metropolitan Opera, seeking at least $360,000 in compensation for work she lost when the company parted ways with her after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.Netrebko was fired by the Met last year after refusing to denounce Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, whom she had publicly supported in the years before the invasion. In the complaint, she accuses the Met of discriminating against her because she is Russian; of issuing “defamatory” statements about her in the press; and of breaching contracts by not paying her for some lost work.The Met disputed her claims. “Ms. Netrebko’s lawsuit has no merit,” the company said in a statement.Netrebko has in recent months taken aim at the Met, filing a complaint last year through the American Guild of Musical Artists, the union representing opera performers.In February, an arbitrator in that dispute ordered the Met to pay her more than $200,000 for 13 canceled performances because of a contractual agreement known as “pay or play,” which requires institutions to pay performers even if they later decide not to engage them. The Met had argued that Ms. Netrebko was not entitled to payment because of her refusal to comply with the company’s demand that she denounce Mr. Putin, which the company said had violated its conduct clause.Still, the arbitrator refused Ms. Netrebko’s request for an additional $400,000 in fees for engagements in coming seasons that had been discussed but not formally agreed to, including leading roles in Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut” and “Tosca,” as well as Verdi’s “Macbeth” and Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades.” Ms. Netrebko was earning the Met’s current fee for top artists of about $15,000 a performance.The complaint filed by Ms. Netrebko on Friday said that the Met still owed her most of those additional fees, as well as compensation for emotional distress and damage to her reputation. The complaint accuses the Met and its general manager, Peter Gelb, who has been critical of Ms. Netrebko in the news media, of leading a “defamatory crusade” against her.The suit notes that even after she publicly stated that she opposed the war, Mr. Gelb spoke with her on the phone and asked her to specifically denounce Mr. Putin. “Gelb indicated that if Netrebko issued such a statement, the Met would continue its relationship with her,” the suit said. “Netrebko responded that, as a Russian citizen, she could not make such a statement.”The complaint is the latest effort by Netrebko, a major star and box-office draw, to rehabilitate her image. Netrebko still has a busy international performing schedule, largely in Europe. But since the invasion, she has faced cancellations and protests elsewhere, including in the United States and parts of Asia.She has struggled to get beyond questions about her past support for Putin. She endorsed him for president in 2012, and has spoken glowingly about him over the years. And in 2014, when she donated to an opera house in Donetsk, a war-torn city in Ukraine controlled by pro-Russian separatists, she was photographed holding a separatist flag.Since the invasion, Ms. Netrebko has sought to distance herself from Putin, saying they have only met a few times.Mr. Gelb has defended the Met’s decision to cut ties with Ms. Netrebko and other artists who have voiced support for Mr. Putin. “It’s more important than ever that our position does not change,” he said earlier this year, “until the war is won by Ukraine.”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      The Opera Star David Daniels’s Sexual Assault Trial: What to Know

      by

      The countertenor and his husband, Scott Walters, each face a charge of aggravated sexual assault in Texas.Update: Just as the trial was set to begin on Friday, David Daniels and his husband, Scott Walters, pleaded guilty to sexual assault of an adult, a second-degree felony, after reaching a deal that will spare them jail time.The opera star David Daniels, one of the world’s leading countertenors, is expected to go on trial in Houston this week over charges that he sexually assaulted a young singer after a performance there in 2010.Mr. Daniels and his husband, Scott Walters, were arrested and charged with sexual assault in 2019 in connection to an incident in which the singer, Samuel Schultz, said he was drugged and assaulted by the couple, according to charging documents filed at the time by the Harris County District Attorney’s Office in Texas. Mr. Daniels and Mr. Walters have denied the accusations, saying they had consensual sex with Mr. Schultz.Mr. Daniels is one of the most prominent classical stars to face criminal charges during the national #MeToo reckoning. His performing career has suffered since the arrest, and he was fired from his position as a tenured professor of voice at the University of Michigan in 2020.Opening arguments are scheduled to begin in Houston on Friday morning. Mr. Daniels, 57, and Mr. Walters, 40, each face one felony count of aggravated sexual assault.Here’s what you need to know.Who is David Daniels?Mr. Daniels rose to fame as a countertenor, singing high parts that were once the province of castratos or mezzo-sopranos. He appeared on many of the world’s leading stages, including the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the Royal Opera House in London.He was featured on the cover of music magazines and released numerous recordings, and was known in particular for his performances of Handel, starring in productions of his operas “Rinaldo,” “Giulio Cesare,” “Rodelinda,” “Radamisto” and others. His success helped propel new interest in countertenors, and when he and Mr. Walters were married in 2014, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an avid opera fan, officiated.Who is Samuel Schultz?Mr. Schultz, a baritone who is now 36, was a 23-year-old graduate student at Rice University, in Houston, at the time of the encounter with Mr. Daniels. He went public with an accusation of rape in 2018 amid the #MeToo movement — first anonymously, in an online post, and then naming Mr. Daniels and Mr. Walters as his attackers in an interview with The New York Daily News.Mr. Schultz later became an officer at the American Guild of Musical Artists, the union representing American opera performers, but he resigned in 2020, citing concerns that the union had kept details of its sexual harassment investigation of the opera star Plácido Domingo confidential as part of negotiations for a $500,000 settlement from Domingo.What is Mr. Daniels accused of?Mr. Schultz has accused the two men of assaulting him in May 2010 after he went to hear Mr. Daniels in Handel’s “Xerxes” at Houston Grand Opera.Mr. Schultz has said he was introduced to Mr. Daniels and Mr. Walters by a friend. After attending the performance and cast party, Mr. Schultz has said he was invited to Mr. Daniels and Mr. Walters’s apartment. There, he said, he was given a drink that caused him to lose consciousness. He has said that he awoke alone, naked and bleeding from the rectum.What has each side said about the accusations?Mr. Daniels and Mr. Walters have repeatedly described the encounter as consensual. They say Mr. Schultz drove himself to their apartment after they attended several parties together.“David and Scott are innocent of any wrongdoing,” their lawyer, Matt Hennessy, said in a statement in 2019. “Sam Schultz is not a victim. He never would have gotten this much attention from his singing, and he knows and resents that fact. He waited eight years to complain about adult, consensual sex to ride the #MeToo movement to unearned celebrity. We will fight this.”Mr. Hennessy did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. Schultz has said that he had been afraid to come forward with the accusations, worried it would hurt his career, and that he had told his family, his therapist and some friends about what happened at the time.“I am pleased that finally, after several lengthy delays, I will get my day in court and hope that justice will be served,” Mr. Schultz said in a statement this week. “I look forward to testifying and having a jury hear the evidence of the case.”What have the authorities said about the case?A Houston police officer, D.H. Escobar, wrote in the charging documents that he had found Mr. Schultz to be “credible and reliable.” The officer said that he had met with a therapist Mr. Schultz consulted in 2010, and that her notes were consistent with what Mr. Schultz had told the police. The officer said he had also reviewed medical records that showed that Mr. Schultz had sought medical attention “as a result of the sexual assault” on June 1, 2010.John Donnelly, a spokesman for the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, declined to comment on the case.Dianna Wray contributed reporting from Houston. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Review: Braxton’s ‘Trillium’ Gets the Attention It Needs

      by

      Anthony Braxton’s “Trillium X,” part of a sweeping cycle of operas that began in the 1980s, finally premiered in Prague.Anyone bold enough to take command of a pirate ship should also be prepared for strife. Cannon battles? Frustrated crew members? All part of the job.Yet Helena, the captain of the Dragon Lily BX4, must face more than that in the first act of Anthony Braxton’s opera “Trillium X,” which was completed in 2014 but premiered on Tuesday at the DOX Center for Contemporary Art in Prague.After scheming like a titan of industry, and after sending scores of enemies to their watery graves — even after genocidally pledging to foster “the kind of mess that historians will love forever” — Helena still has to deal with those who doubt her ruthlessness. When the pirate discovers some young stowaways aboard her vessel, she learns that they have studied her violent exploits at college. They’re not impressed, calling her “overrated” to her face.It’s one of the best jokes in this opera. And it was hardly the only punchline in the four-act, over-five-hour evening, which had young audience members laughing out loud in the aisles of the museum’s joyously oversold hall.In the role of Helena, the soprano Eva Esterkova deployed a secure vibrato — including in piercing, high-tessitura phrases — that channeled the character’s unflappability. On the whole, the performance came off as a significant milestone in Braxton’s opera career, thanks to some revelatory work by a cast of 12, the Prague Music Performance Orchestra and the conductor Roland Dahinden, a longtime Braxton collaborator. Officially a concert performance, the show had enough video projections and lighting design choices to foment some stage magic, too.Roland Dahinden led the Prague Music Performance Orchestra in the performance.Marek BoudaThis “Trillium X” also served as a reminder of the broader “Trillium” series, an ambitious cycle that Braxton has said will eventually include 36 discrete acts — all of which can then be freely recombined from one production to the next. They have been produced by his own Tri-Centric Foundation on shoestring budgets in the United States. But this performance in Prague demonstrated just how much American opera companies, and audiences, are missing in neglecting this project.You may catch a scrappy outfit like Experiments in Opera delving into the “Trillium” operas at a black box theater, like that company did earlier this year. Braxton’s foundation produced a semi-staged version of “Trillium J” in 2014: a vivacious performance that was released as a Blu-ray, alongside a studio-recorded version. But, sadly, major classical music presenters have shown little interest in this work.That might have something to do with a broadly held perception that Braxton is too abstruse for the mainstream. Since the 1960s, he has long been reputed for the complex, overlapping nature of his many creative guises: as an experimental composer, as a student of jazz and an improviser, and, starting in the 1980s, a creator of music dramas.In the “Trillium” operas, the music seems to always be in flux, moving from pleasingly sour drone states to singsong marches and riotous blasts of orchestral pandemonium. Nor do the plots stay put. As in other “Trillium” works, each act of “Trillium X” featured the same singers, and the same character names, but placed them in entirely different situations. Braxton has expressed affection for the operatic cycles of Wagner and Stockhausen, but with no linear narrative, this is far from the “Ring.”Alongside all the complexity — and here is the too-often undersold part — this stuff is a lot of fun, too. In the semi-staging of “Trillium J,” which is also available on Vimeo, you can see how much the soprano Kamala Sankaram enjoys playing (in her character’s own words) a “helpless maiden who happens to own 400 nuclear weapons stockpile containers — not to mention the chemical gas warfare options.”Featuring the soprano Kamala Sankaram.After the first act on the high seas in “Trillium X,” the second act begins with singers hiding out from robots that have taken away humans’ voting rights, and their ability to get credit. Act III, titled “The Three Sisters,” depicts the joint wedding of a trio of celebrity bank robbers. (Esterkova was once again a key presence during that section’s gun-toting delirium.) The fourth act begins in the White House’s war room, before moving to the site of a Roman orgy.Dahinden’s orchestra responded to the score’s tumultuous moments with precise intonation and enviable balance. But the violins also sound sympathetic and sweet in the second act, as human characters lamented the way they’d allowed robots to slowly take over the world.Video projections (Barbora Jagrova and Tobuke are credited for the lighting and visual designs) that show robots patrolling a doomed, lamp-lit cityscape were both comic and chilling. When one live human singer proposed a détente with the robots, he was greeted with pretaped sounds from the robots, which declared on repeat: “YOU. ARE. WRONG.”Those robot chants, as well as cannon blasts and nuclear explosions in other acts, were delivered by speakers. Singers, too, were amplified. But the sound mix didn’t feel artificial; each portion of the orchestra was audible at all times. In the second act, brass exclamations contributed to an interpolated Braxton piano composition performed by pianist Hildegard Kleeb. (Since Braxton has written that “all compositions in my music system can be executed at the same time/moment,” the insertion of this material — like Composition No. 30 for piano solo, or Composition No. 257, which included the brasses — was fair play.)Braxton’s own Tri-Centric Orchestra deserves more opportunities to play this music in American halls. But the Prague Music Performance Orchestra proved that it can also pull off a credible “Trillium” show; thankfully, the program for Tuesday’s concert advertised the ensemble’s plans to record “Trillium X” and present the live premiere of “Trillium L” in 2025.So this language is not too complex to be learned. This orchestra’s founder and director, Jan Bartos, said in an email that the concert had come together with a week of rehearsal and a budget of about $100,000.More performances of this music, and at a similarly high level, should be possible. A question, then, now hangs over the United States: Who will take on “Trillium” next?Trillium XPerformed on Tuesday at the DOX Center for Contemporary Art in Prague. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      At Bayreuth, the Work on Wagner’s Operas Is Never Done

      by

      At the festival that Wagner founded, a new “Parsifal” looks different depending on how you see it, and a workshop model refreshes revivals.After the enormous risk of its beginning, the Bayreuth Festival in Germany was for a long time a place where the stagings of Richard Wagner’s operas were encased in amber.When his four-opera “Ring,” which inaugurated the festival in 1876, was brought back for the first time 20 years later, Wagner’s widow, Cosima, stuck with a vision essentially identical to the one her husband had overseen. “Parsifal” was even more static: After premiering at Bayreuth in 1882, it returned there as an unchanging ritual until 1934.But in Bayreuth’s modern era, perpetual workshopping prevails. New productions usually play for five summers before cycling out, and the expectation is that directors will keep futzing through that time. Sets change; sequences are adjusted and eliminated; details are added and subtracted.Now, it’s Valentin Schwarz’s turn to tinker.His “Ring” opened last summer. It was a caustic, contemporary-dress interpretation that compressed the work’s sprawling settings to a single estate and eliminated the mythological magic, the dragons, potions and instant transformations. The “Ride of the Valkyries” was a waiting room of wealthy women strutting in cosmetic surgery bandages. The world-ending conflagration Wagner intended for the ending was a fire-free anticlimax at the bottom of an empty pool.On Monday, though, as the sweeping music of that ending played, a backdrop lowered to reveal the theatrical lighting behind, and the body of Wotan, the king of the gods, was seen hanging from the grid, dripping wet — the death of divinity, “Sunset Boulevard”-style. It was a fresh addition to the staging, if still something of a letdown, a mild finale after 15 keyed-up hours.There were more tweaks to this “Ring.” The kidnapping and hoarding of children — an obsession with youthfulness; a sense of violence passed through generations — is one of Schwarz’s themes. So it makes sense for girls we saw drawing in “Das Rheingold” to now return to pay their respects at a coffin in “Die Walküre.” The hard-partying decadence of the characters in “Götterdämmerung” is even harsher this year, and the suicide of a goddess earlier in the “Ring” is more strongly telegraphed in the final moments of “Rheingold.” The child of Brünnhilde and Siegfried, not in Wagner’s libretto, died in last year’s version but now escapes the apocalyptic finale.You can tell Schwarz intended these revisions to heighten certain aspects of his interpretation. But their impact is generally minor. And the most important change from last summer isn’t onstage — it’s in the pit.Last year, Cornelius Meister conducted the premiere because Pietari Inkinen had to drop out with a case of Covid late in the rehearsal process. Meister’s work ended up being blandly neutral, not quite compatible with Schwarz’s vivid, provocative staging.Newly volatile and fierce under Inkinen, the orchestra now matches, and feeds, the curdled, unsettled mood of this “Ring”; the sound is often forceful, but it’s stubbornly anti-grandeur. Sometimes that means brash playing that even verges on unbeautiful. The winds were almost wild in a grinding, grim account of the introduction to “Siegfried” on Saturday, and gawkily reedy — at once sinister and whimsical — as Hagen and Gutrune plotted in “Götterdämmerung” on Monday.The pacing is tauter this year, and more tense. Inkinen propelled scenes forward, giving and receiving from the singers during long narratives. The “Todesverkündigung,” the dreamlike scene in “Die Walküre” in which Brünnhilde appears to Siegmund in a vision, was steadily, hauntingly built. All in all, the orchestra was, as Wagner intended, a character in its own right, one as anxious, unstable and fascinating as Schwarz’s conception at its best.As Hagen, the production’s linchpin, the bass Mika Kares, a newcomer to the cast, was most memorable: aggressive and doleful, stony and agonized, shambling around the set like the overgrown child he is.Another newcomer, the soprano Catherine Foster, an alert actress and proud presence, sang with clean tone and slicing high notes as Brünnhilde in “Die Walküre” and “Götterdämmerung.” Sounding gruff as Wotan — a role he shared last year with another singer — and acting with overkill, even by this staging’s standards, the bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny settled in as a meditative, wry Wanderer in “Siegfried.”Tobias Kratzer’s 2019 staging of “Tannhäuser,” revived this year, features a performance within a performance of the opera.Enrico NawrathOver a week at the festival, the quality of the singing was consistently high. And pre-opening cancellations provided the opportunity for some heroics.The uncannily pure-toned tenor Klaus Florian Vogt and the sensitive, easily vulnerable soprano Elisabeth Teige sang in “Die Walküre” one day, and “Tannhäuser” the next. Even more remarkable, the tenor Andreas Schager sang the title roles in “Siegfried” on Saturday and “Parsifal” on Sunday, and then Siegfried in “Götterdämmerung” on Monday — all with clarion enthusiasm. This is the kind of Wagnerian Everest-climbing you get only at Bayreuth.In Tobias Kratzer’s crowd-pleasing 2019 production of “Tannhäuser,” the title character abandons the bohemian high life of Venus and her road-tripping pals for a sober, rule-based order: a performance at Bayreuth of, yes, “Tannhäuser.” (Referencing Bayreuth and its past productions in new stagings is almost de rigueur at the festival.)Metatheatrical collisions ensue — Ekaterina Gubanova is laugh-out-loud funny as Venus infiltrates the “Tannhäuser” within the “Tannhäuser” — before a tragic final act strains to tie up a lot of thematic loose ends.But the production is an endearing party, one that extends outside during the first intermission to a pond near the festival theater, for a gleefully messy, proudly queer, highly eclectic performance ranging among the likes of “I Am What I Am,” “Part of Your World” and “Ol’ Man River.” Back inside, Nathalie Stutzmann conducted a warmly effusive performance, with just a slightly chaotic ending to Act II.It was a superb vehicle for the festival’s chorus, directed by Eberhard Friedrich — but quite possibly outdone by the group’s powerful, elegant work in “Parsifal,” from ethereal to mighty to ferocious and back again.Georg Zeppenfeld, left, and Andreas Schager in Jay Scheib’s new production of “Parsifal,” which is designed to be seen in augmented reality but which can also be viewed as a more straightforward staging without the technology.Enrico NawrathPablo Heras-Casado led that opera with a calm confidence that never felt rigid. The selling point of this “Parsifal” — new this year and directed by Jay Scheib — is the incorporation of augmented reality, or AR. But because of internal conflicts over funding, less than a fifth of the audience is provided with the glasses that superimpose over the live action a panoply of floating, moving digital images.On opening night, I and other critics saw the staging with the AR glasses. But then I returned to see the show as the vast majority of visitors will: without them.Some things about the inoffensive, unilluminating, unmoving live staging are clearer without the busy AR imagery. I now caught that desert mining seems to be going on in Act III, and that, at the end, Gurnemanz and a female lover, who embraced guiltily at the opera’s start, are happily reunited.But the use of live video onstage — highly effective in an unsparing perspective on Amfortas’s bloody wound being probed and dressed — elsewhere just shows us close-ups of what we can already see, as at a stadium concert. The fallen sorcerer Klingsor wears high heels, a nod toward gender blurring that goes otherwise unexplored.As a traditional production, this “Parsifal” was nothing special; it felt palpable that most of the staging’s resources were going into developing the AR. But even if the results of that venture weren’t satisfying artistically or emotionally, the technology worked. And its ambition was true to the spirit of experimentation — and, these days, revision — that has coexisted with reverent tradition at Bayreuth for almost 150 years. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Has Scott Joplin’s ‘Thoroughly American’ Opera ‘Treemonisha’ Found Its Moment?

      by

      “Treemonisha” — brilliant, flawed and unfinished — is ripe for creative reimagining at a time when opera houses are looking to diversify the canon.“He has created an entirely new phase of musical art and has produced a thoroughly American opera.”The anonymous critic who wrote these bold words didn’t have a performance of Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha” to evaluate, or a recording. In June 1911, all the reviewer had to go on was Joplin’s 230-page piano-vocal score.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’ at the Bayreuth Festival Experiments With AR

      by

      Cutting-edge technology has again come to the Bayreuth Festival, where Wagner premiered his final opera with the latest stagecraft in 1882.For Richard Wagner, the latest technology was crucial to staging his operas.In Bayreuth, Germany, where he opened a hilltop theater in 1876 to realize his vision for his works, he promised that “the most up-to-date artistic resources will be used to offer you scenic and theatrical perfection.”That year, the Rhinemaidens at the start of his “Ring” were supported behind the scenes by wheeled machines that made them seem to swim. A projector with prisms tried to create the effect of gods walking across a rainbow. The auditorium was dimmed — unusual at the time — to focus the audience’s attention and enhance the illusions.Nearly 150 years later, cutting-edge technology has come again to Bayreuth: augmented reality, which adds a dense, often impenetrable layer of surreal imagery to Jay Scheib’s new production of “Parsifal,” which opened on Tuesday.Among the many AR images visible through special glasses are motion-capture outlines of figures walking, embracing and suddenly ablaze.Joshua HiggasonThis medium could hardly be further from the creaky machinery and gas lighting of the 19th century. But the goal is the same as Wagner’s: to create “scenes such as you might imagine had come from an ideal world of dreams.”But there’s a catch.After a squabble within the notoriously squabbling Bayreuth Festival about funding the expensive augmented reality, or AR, glasses, money was allotted for 330 sets in a theater of 1,925 seats.So 83 percent of the audience just experiences the old-fashioned article: Wagner’s operatic mystery play about a young man who ends up redeeming the ailing rituals of a corps of Holy Grail knights, straightforwardly staged and superbly sung, and conducted with muscular solidity by Pablo Heras-Casado. A much smaller group, including critics, gets the glasses, which superimpose on that live staging a crowded AR environment that is constantly in motion.Are the 83 percent missing much?They miss the space between them and the stage seeming to fill with twinkling stars as the soft prelude begins. The bare trees rotating in the ether. The motion-capture outlines of figures walking, embracing and suddenly ablaze. The asteroids. The fly that seems to land on the outside of the AR lenses.Later, the flocks of birds, blood-red globules and spiky strawberries. The slithering snakes and spinning, silently cackling skulls. The blossoming flowers. The arrows, spears, machetes, axes, grenades and severed arms. The forlornly quivering plastic bags and the bounding fox. The rocky ledge that appears to fill the area beneath the seats in the third act.In AR style, the 3-D images don’t move with you as you move your head. Rather, you seem to be able to pan across an environment that surrounds you: not a realistic landscape but a galaxy of disembodied elements floating in the darkness, a free-association, stream-of-consciousness panoply linked, to varying degrees, to the plot.Some of the images’ textures are photorealistic, but most emphasize their computer-generated unreality, their unnatural angles and fake finishes, their eerie weightlessness. The aesthetic — with its collagelike excess of uncanny juxtapositions and its flat affect — evokes the digital art that has sometimes been winkingly called post-internet.Georg Zeppenfeld on the spare, slightly ominous, vaguely sci-fi set for Act I, designed by Mimi Lien.Enrico NawrathBut for those wearing the glasses, the union of the production’s AR and live aspects isn’t generally happy. The lenses are tinted, so the live performance looks considerably dimmed, and the staging’s frequent video projections are almost invisibly faint.The AR elements (designed, along with the video, by Joshua Higgason) often block the onstage action, even as those elements are fragmented enough to suggest they are offering a complement to that action, rather than a self-sufficient alternative.However dreamlike, the resulting visual confusion doesn’t convey the hypermaximalist, proudly absurdist overload of Bayreuth productions like Christoph Schlingensief’s 2004 “Parsifal” or Frank Castorf’s 2013 “Ring.” This is because Scheib’s sensibility — in both the virtual and live spheres — is basically plain and direct.When I peeked below the glasses to watch bits of the performance without AR, there was nothing particularly imaginative or illuminating about this “Parsifal.” The first act takes place in a spare, slightly ominous, vaguely sci-fi landscape — the sets were designed by Mimi Lien — with a halo of flashing lights that brings to mind the spaceships of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” or “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.”These Grail knights wear stylish, contemporary clothes — long tunics, yellow skirts, boldly patterned hoodies — designed by Meentje Nielsen. The sorcerer Klingsor’s enchanted garden in Act II is a psychedelic pool party in “Barbie” colors. After Parsifal destroys the garden, the third act is set in a lonely desert encampment, alongside a machine on the blurry line between war and industry: maybe an earthmover, maybe a tank.The tenor Andreas Schager is tirelessly passionate and convincingly boyish as the guileless Parsifal, and the bass-baritone Derek Welton is mournful yet reserved as Amfortas, the wounded king of the Grail. The bass Georg Zeppenfeld is an elegiac Gurnemanz, who oversees the knights; the baritone Jordan Shanahan, a brooding Klingsor.Klingsor’s enchanted garden in Act II is depicted as a psychedelic pool party in “Barbie” colors.Enrico NawrathThe mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca sounds luxurious — lean yet velvety — as the ambiguous, ambivalent Kundry, cursed to shuttle forever between the realms of Klingsor and the Grail and a role too often screamed. Bayreuth’s chorus, directed by Eberhard Friedrich, is, as ever, poised and powerful. On Tuesday, the orchestra didn’t quite bring out the exquisite transparency and delicacy of some important passages, but Heras-Casado’s conducting was vibrant, even-keeled and well-paced.There were a few memorable AR moments. At the end of Act I, a boy in jeans seems to walk through the space, slowly flapping wings attached to his arms — perhaps a melancholy nod to the winged children in Stefan Herheim’s celebrated 2008 “Parsifal” here, just as the dam we seem to be at the bottom of at the start of Act II may be a reference to the hydroelectric plant that opened Patrice Chéreau’s centennial “Ring” at Bayreuth in 1976.Yet there is something bland and empty at the production’s core. It’s not clear what Scheib thinks the nature of the sickness is at the root of this Grail cult, so it’s not clear what Parsifal’s climactic redemption offers. If the final AR image of plastic bags, echoed by one onstage, gestures toward a critique of environmental despoliation, it’s a wan gesture.This means the augmented reality has little profound substance to support, just a jittery desire to stimulate — to ornament and impress — which is just what Wagner didn’t want from stage technology. Scheib’s AR decorations rarely inspire emotion or a sustained sense of wonder: the impression, as Gurnemanz says to Parsifal, of time becoming space.The inadvertent result of all the lavish resources is to prove the superiority of the live over the digital — to keep us sneaking back under our glasses from the augmented real to the really real. The closest parallel in the opera to contemporary technical wizardry is Klingsor’s false garden; it feels rather perverse to extend those artificial seductions to the rest of a piece that’s condemning them.We have come a long way from this opera’s premiere at Bayreuth in 1882, when Gurnemanz and Parsifal stepped in place as a painted backdrop scrolled by, turned by hand on rollers, to create the illusion they were walking. “The simplest of means,” one observer wrote, “had brought about an overwhelming effect.”For all its ambitions and expense, Scheib’s “Parsifal” never overwhelms.ParsifalThrough Aug. 27 at the Bayreuth Festival in Bayreuth, Germany; bayreuther-festspiele.de. More