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      Spotlighting Lady Macbeth’s Anguish: Can What’s Done Be Undone?

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      With radical adaptations of Verdi’s “Macbeth” and Puccini’s “Tosca,” Heartbeat Opera shows why it’s so vital to New York’s music scene.Heartbeat Opera, a small, nimble company that has received its share of plaudits over the years, is on the cusp of a milestone birthday: its 10th. But there was a time recently when it didn’t know whether it could go on, its artistic director, Jacob Ashworth, said.Speaking from the stage after opening night of Heartbeat’s two-part spring festival on Tuesday, Ashworth said that the departure of the company’s founding artistic directors during the pandemic put its future in doubt.On the evidence of the new, radical reconceptualizations of Puccini’s “Tosca” and Verdi’s “Macbeth” — Heartbeat’s first mainstage shows since 2019, which opened this week at the Baruch Performing Arts Center — the company hasn’t skipped a beat.Taken together, the operas demonstrate the strengths that make Heartbeat so vital to New York’s opera scene. “Lady M,” an utterly original recreation of Verdi’s opera that places Lady Macbeth’s doubts and moral quandaries at its center, is an astonishing display of the company’s musical imagination, theatrical instincts and intellectual firepower. “Tosca,” more ambitious but less successful, shows how Heartbeat, agile and daring, can quickly align with an issue as urgent as the women’s rights movement in Iran, where uprisings in the fall captured international attention.A scene from “Lady M,” with Algozzini and Kenneth Stavert as Macbeth.Russ Rowland“Lady M” is Heartbeat at its best. The production’s director, Emma Jaster; its music director and arranger, Daniel Schlosberg; and its original adapters, Ashworth and Ethan Heard, have reoriented the audience’s point of entry into one of Verdi’s most distinctively colored scores, trimming the length, the orchestrations and the list of characters to reveal the work’s core. Macduff, the chorus, Macbeth’s big Act IV aria — all scrapped.In typical stagings, Lady Macbeth comes across as an unsubtle, unrepentant harridan whose abrupt crisis of conscience in the opera’s final act stretches credulity. The soprano role offers a string of marvelous set pieces — a hell-raising letter scene, a chaotic drinking song, a spellbinding sleepwalking scene — but they rarely form a coherent arc.Heartbeat starts with Lady Macbeth’s breakdown as the essential truth of her character and then molds the narrative to fit it. The show begins with Lady Macbeth in bed, sobbing uncontrollably, full of remorse for all the blood she has helped to shed. Her crying is so relentless that Macbeth, irritated and unmoved, gets up to go sleep on the couch. Then, the action flashes back to the score’s beginning, in which Macbeth — often treated as a weak-willed hero buffeted by supernatural forces and a monstrous wife — appears as a cool, calculating, sociopathic yuppie handing out his business card to members of the audience. The witches prophecy that he will climb the corporate ladder.In Heartbeat’s telling, Lady Macbeth, no longer the scapegoat for her husband’s foul behavior, is the one who is led astray by an avaricious spouse. The Macbeths’ desire for public glory finds an outlet in the hollow vanities of social media, represented throughout the show by a ring light, its bright cast a reminder of manipulated reality rather than truth.As Lady Macbeth, Lisa Algozzini charted the gradual degradation of a woman forced to reflect her husband’s ambitions back to him. Her “La luce langue” — haunted, fearful and quivering with uncertainty — became an elegy for people that she and Macbeth had not yet murdered, and “Una macchia” had a raw guilt to it. Algozzini simplified the cabaletta in the letter scene and skipped the high D flat in the sleepwalking scene, but her performance was still filled with gripping details. Kenneth Stavert, as Macbeth, showed a bright, open baritone sound that had depths of strength and propulsion.Schlosberg, with the vision of a master sculptor, chipped away at Verdi’s score to reveal new contours and continuities in the music and action. He didn’t so much reduce Verdi’s orchestration as reinvent it for an ensemble of six musicians (including himself as conductor and pianist). Samuel George’s trombone playing was jauntily demonic and, in its brief imitations of a French horn, somehow noble. Paul Wonjin Cho’s wild, soused clarinet solo in the drinking song injected instability into a predictable aria form. At one point, the percussionist Mika Godbole bowed a vibraphone to make it sound like a glass harmonica. They played like a band possessed, and the use of electronics added an otherworldly texture bubbling with disruption. It was flat-out brilliant.Anush Avetisyan and Chad Kranak in “Tosca,” set in an unnamed religious dictatorship that requires women to wear hijab and abide by stringent social norms.Russ RowlandThe orchestrations for “Tosca” never quite rose to that level. Schlosberg started with an unassailable idea to feature three cellos and a double bass — a nod, probably, to the famous cello quartet in Act III — but despite the handsome string playing, the instrumentation was too bare to deliver the score’s romance.“Tosca” had one of those Heartbeat concepts that lends itself to a zeitgeist-y epithet, along the lines of its Black Lives Matter “Fidelio” in 2018 and a #MeToo “La Susanna” in 2019. But the depth and ingenuity of the company’s engagement consistently erases any suspicion of topical opportunism.Staged by the Iranian American director Shadi G. and adapted by her in collaboration with Ashworth, “Tosca” had a show-within-a-show structure. They set Puccini’s opera — a melodrama roiled by sex, murder and the abuse of power — in an unnamed religious dictatorship that requires women to wear hijab and abide by stringent social norms. Even the ushers and musicians wore head scarves. We see a cast of singers staging a traditional production of “Tosca,” set in Rome, under the watchful eye of security forces and morality police, who stalk the edges of the stage and take note of the performers’ violations of the country’s moral code.Shadi’s framing introduced a fresh sense of danger. At one point, the police drag the actor portraying Cavaradossi (the tenor Chad Kranak) offstage and beat him. He desperately lunges back onto the stage only to be clawed back into the wings. It was harrowing to watch.Still, the staging could feel forced and, at times, risible, as security forces popped up, Whac-a-Mole style, in unexpected places. The singers — including Anush Avetisyan (a Tosca with a dark-hued voice), Gustavo Feulien (an elegantly underplayed Scarpia) and Joseph Lodato (a vocal standout as Angelotti) — brought a sense of scale and subtlety to their assignments that suited Baruch’s black box theater.In a way, “Lady M” expresses a more compelling sense of displacement. In its final minutes, Lady Macbeth and the witches sang the refugee chorus. As a choice it felt unusual, then somehow inevitable. Here was a woman mourning a homeland that wasn’t gone but still unavailable to her, because she had lost her way — proof, if any were needed, that Heartbeat certainly hasn’t. More

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      ‘Hey, Mr. Living Composer’: ‘Champion’ Takes Shape at the Met

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      Terence Blanchard has been in rehearsals, with pencil and paper at the ready, as he tailors his opera ahead of its New York premiere.A basement rehearsal room at the Metropolitan Opera was so packed recently that it began to resemble a sweltering boxing gym.In one corner, members of the Met’s music staff were grouped together like judges tallying punches as they looked down at their scores. Nearby, a drummer and pianist locked into a syncopated groove, following the beat of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who was conducting while seated on an elevated platform.A phalanx of dancers rushed in to evoke an intense, collective workout regimen filled with balletic grace and pugilistic intensity. Those moves were choreographed by Camille A. Brown, who was close by, keeping an eye on every acrobatic feint. A former World Boxing Organization heavyweight champion paced the room, offering exhortations and encouragement.Supervising all this was the composer and trumpeter Terence Blanchard. He watched as his first opera, “Champion,” took shape ahead of its Met debut on Monday. (A Live in HD simulcast is planned for April 29.)After premiering at Opera Theater of St. Louis in 2013, “Champion” has played at the Washington National Opera‌ ‌and, scaled to a chamber-size orchestration, at SFJazz in San Francisco. But when this work — modeled on the life of the boxer Emile Griffith, and following Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which arrived triumphantly at the Met in 2021 — opens in New York this week, it will be thoroughly revised and expanded to embody the composer’s recent thoughts about opera, as a form. To wit: in this latest version of “Champion” there are not only new arias (and new lines for supporting characters); what will be heard in New York this season also reflects Blanchard’s latest work when it comes to orchestral complexity and vocal elegance.Performers in “Champion” evoke the world of boxing in choreography by Camille A. Brown.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesBlanchard has been in “Champion” rehearsals, at the ready to revise his score as needed.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesThe opera tells the life story of Emile Griffith, who is depicted in two roles sung by Ryan Speedo Green and Eric Owens.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesFor example, during the rehearsal last month, the soprano Latonia Moore, as Griffith’s mother, was singing a rhythmically bumptious riff from the first act when she and Blanchard noticed that the phrase, as written, wasn’t sitting in the most powerful part of her range. “Hey, Mr. Living Composer,” she called out, in a teasing tone. “Could you rewrite this for me?”Blanchard got to work immediately, composing a new vocal part on a blank page of staff paper: a melodic line that could work atop the existing orchestral harmony. He took a photograph of the revision before passing it along.“I couldn’t believe that he just sat there right in the room and wrote it,” Moore said later. “I expected he would come in with it a few days later, OK? It was like, ‘No, here it is.’ Oh my God! And it was really good.”In an interview after a rehearsal, Blanchard explained how his flexibility — unusual in the world of opera, in which scores, like schedules, are set far in advance — was the result of some early, on-the-job training in his career as a jazz performer.“Art Blakey taught me years ago: The easiest thing to do is to write something nobody can play,” Blanchard recalled. “The magic comes in not just through the melody and the harmony, but who’s playing it.”“You can see she has a powerful voice,” he said of Moore. To him, the calculation was simple: He wanted to feature that voice in the strongest possible way. “So that’s what it’s gonna be changed to.”Blanchard, right, with Joshua Balan, a cast member.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesMoore’s role, as that of Griffith’s manipulative and sometimes absent mother, is hardly the only one to be subjected to extensive revisions. The bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green — a standout in “Fire” and the star of “Champion” — said that when he first discussed this opera with Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, he felt that the role was a touch high for him.Gelb told him, “Speedo, That’s the beauty of having a living composer: Things can change,” Green recalled.“CHAMPION,” WITH A LIBRETTO BY MICHAEL CRISTOFER, TELLS Griffith’s tabloid-ready life story. Green sings Young Emile, while the veteran bass-baritone Eric Owens is cast as Old Emile, who lives in a nursing home on Long Island in the early 2000s. The boxer leaves the Virgin Islands for New York, then works in a hat factory before becoming a welterweight champ in the 1960s. In the ring with Benny Paret, Griffith unintentionally delivers blows that prove to be fatal, leaving Griffith anguished for years.“There’s this dream state that Emile is in,” Blanchard said, “because he’s dealing with dementia. There’s a combination of that harmony and that voicing, versus when it’s younger Emile. And chords moving; it goes back and forth. But it’s all story-driven, and it’s story-driven inside my language that I grew up listening to, as a jazz musician.”There is another thread in the opera, of Griffith’s journey from a straight-coded world to one of queerness. As a young man, in New York, he is drawn to gay bars and men while also excelling in the “man’s world” of boxing. The sports universe either doesn’t want to hear about queerness, or openly derides him for his sexual orientation.Just as Griffith navigates dramatic contrasts, so too does Blanchard’s score.The composer likes to talk about his love for Puccini — and you can hear some of that in Young Emile’s Act I aria “What Makes a Man a Man?” But in the boxing sequences, there’s a driving sense of muscular, post-bop jazz tumult. (As in “Fire,” the drummer Jeff Watts, known as Tain, leads a jazz combo embedded within the orchestra.) And there are some moments in which the fusion is well blended enough that no stylistic input seems to have the upper hand.Blanchard said that from his first visits to New York, starting in the spring of 1980, he took in a wide range of music. Although he was associated with traditionalist-minded players of New Orleans, he made a point of hearing the trio Air, which included the cutting-edge music of composer Henry Threadgill.“People were like, ‘Why are you going to that?’” Blanchard said. “And I’m like: ‘Bruh, because I’m trying to figure out what fits for me. I want to experience it all. Why limit myself, because you think I shouldn’t like this? Let me find out for myself.’”Those experiences pay off in “Champion.” In one of the early scenes at a gay bar, Blanchard writes sumptuous orchestral music — a cousin of sorts to the bluesy music heard in a club that figures in the story of “Fire,” but with the string section, not the jazz combo, taking center stage during the bacchanal. “It’s the sexiest sound those Met strings will ever make,” Moore said after a rehearsal. “You could see that they were feeling it!”In an interview, Blanchard tipped his hat to an early teacher, the composer Roger Dickerson, who used timbres and modes from American jazz when writing classical works like the New Orleans Concerto. (The pianist, composer and critic Ethan Iverson recently lavished praise on that rarely heard piece, describing its finale as “boogie-woogie gone surreal, the kind of thing Louis Andriessen tried to write over and over again, but better.”)When Blanchard started working with classical musicians, as he has done in his long partnership with Spike Lee as the composer of his soundtracks — Dickerson informed him that he had a unique opportunity, and a responsibility.“‘You have to keep in mind, the library of music for orchestral music has been limited,’” Blanchard recalled his teacher as saying. “‘There needs to be an expansion of it, through jazz — and maybe you’re the person to do that.’ He put that in my mind way back when.”Blanchard’s score for “Champion” synthesizes the varied musical genres he has taken in during his career as a composer and performer.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesBlanchard, who in 2021 became the first Black composer to have his work staged at the Met, has moved opera forward in exactly that way with his latest revisions to “Champion,” Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, said.Even as the conductor has offered small suggestions in rehearsals — like proposing a bit of bowed, marcato playing for the strings instead of pizzicato that could get lost in the Met’s grand auditorium — he has also deferred to Blanchard, who he said has been “much more hands on” about fine-tuning the orchestration.“I think he’s using the orchestra not to amplify his thoughts,” Nézet-Séguin said. “It’s more: How can I use it as a vehicle, the same way I would use a band? It doesn’t replace anything; it becomes its own thing.”Looking up at the stage after a recent run-through of “Champion,” Nézet-Séguin added of Blanchard, with a touch of pride in the musicians: “I’m pretty sure that in his next ventures — whether it’s film music, or whatever it is — he’s going to miss all that.” More

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      Review: ‘Ainadamar’ Turns Lorca Into Death-Haunted Opera

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      Osvaldo Golijov’s poetic 2003 work is being presented in a new production at Detroit Opera that will travel to the Met.DETROIT — Spain is “a country of death, a country open to death,” the poet Federico García Lorca wrote.Those words come from his classic lecture on “duende,” the spirit he saw as presiding over Spanish culture — the dark, earthy, imperfect, wild, morbid quality of its greatest art, music and bullfighting. When an ancient woman with barely a wisp of voice left takes the stage of a dimly lit country cabaret, cracks her way through a line of song and still gives you chills, duende is in the room.And duende should be in the room, too, for “Ainadamar,” Osvaldo Golijov’s death-haunted opera about Lorca, which opened at the newly ambitious Detroit Opera on Saturday evening in a production headed for the Metropolitan Opera in the 2024-25 season.A poetic meditation that keeps erupting in sensual, riotous flamenco rhythms, the 80-minute piece — which premiered in 2003 and was substantially revised two years later — crosses time with seductively blurry ease in David Henry Hwang’s libretto, translated by Golijov into Spanish.Part takes place in 1969, when the Catalan actress Margarita Xirgu, near the end of her life, tells a student about collaborating with Lorca decades before on his first successful play, “Mariana Pineda,” about a 19th-century martyr of Spanish liberalism.Flashbacks bring us to the summer of 1936, as Xirgu tries to persuade Lorca to escape with her to Cuba, where they will be safe from the right-wing revolt in Spain. But he refuses, and is soon killed by Nationalist forces — another saint who dies for freedom. (Ainadamar, the “fountain of tears,” is a natural spring in the hills above Granada where he is believed to have been murdered.)There is a ritualistic, dreamlike, sometimes even delirious quality to the work. Its “images” — Golijov and Hwang’s name for their three sections — each begin with a distinctive rendering of the choral ballad from the start of “Mariana Pineda,” repetitions that eventually give the sense of an endless, circular festival of mourning.Daniela Mack, left, as Lorca and Reyes in the Detroit production.Austin Richey/Detroit OperaWhile the storytelling and structure are quite grounded, even straightforward, the text has the heightened, often surreal quality of Lorca’s verse. Xirgu and Lorca’s debate about going to Cuba seems to transport them to the island in a woozy fantasy. A group of statues of Mariana Pineda join the poet in song at one point, and — just in time for Easter — the scene at Ainadamar brings in the “voices of the fountain” in a fevered vision that draws explicit comparison to the crucifixion.Xirgu’s memories and the present-tense action flow together amid the pitch-bending wails of a female choir, the “niñas.” Some of its members remain offstage, but some come on and join a small troupe of flamenco dancers, choreographed by Antonio Najarro in Deborah Colker’s stark staging here in Detroit.Jon Bausor’s set, somberly lit by Paul Keogan, is dominated by a circular playing space rounded by a translucent curtain of floor-length strings — part stylized fountain, part screen for projections, part evocation of the beaded divider you pass through at the back of a dusty small-town store.The pit orchestra is buttressed by flamenco guitars; a guitar and a box-drum cajón are played onstage. Suggestive use is made of the sampled, amplified sounds of horses’ hooves, water dripping and ominous spoken passages from ’30s radio broadcasts.In one arresting sequence, Golijov morphs gunshots into a hallucinatory beat that’s half flamenco, half techno. Ingeniously, Ramón Ruiz Alonso, the right-wing politician who was a leader in Lorca’s arrest and murder, sings his few but crucial phrases in the wailing cante jondo (or “deep song”) style.Isaac Tovar with chorus members and dancers in “Ainadamar,” which has choreography by Antonio Najarro.Austin Richey/Detroit OperaAs much as it gestures to the 1930s and ’60s, “Ainadamar” is a throwback to the turn of the 21st century, when Golijov was among the most celebrated figures in classical music.Born in 1960 in Argentina into a family of Eastern European Jewish descent, he also studied in Israel and came to live in the United States, and brought all those strands — old world and new; global north and south — to bear in a musical style of artful yet explosive eclecticism, incorporating tango, flamenco, rumba, klezmer, folk ballads and more.Within the fusty classical music world, his disparate, energetic mélange of influences was swiftly embraced amid the multiculturalism that was fashionable in the 1990s, and Golijov nearly drowned in honors and commissions: Grammys, a MacArthur “genius” grant, a festival devoted to him at Lincoln Center, a concerto for Yo-Yo Ma.His defining success, the irrepressibly percussive Afro-Latin oratorio “La Pasión Según San Marcos,” a bold updating of the tradition of the Bach Passions, premiered in 2000. (It was a good year for sprawling, polyglot recastings of religiously minded choral works: John Adams’s “El Niño,” about the Christmas story, was first heard three months later.)“Ainadamar” was one of the often achingly lovely works that followed “La Pasión” in the handful of years before Golijov ran into a wall of unbearable pressure, missed deadlines and a plagiarism kerfuffle — leading to a decade of, essentially, silence before “Falling Out of a Time,” an intense, intimate song cycle about a grieving father, appeared just before the pandemic.His work never quite went away, and “Ainadamar” is well traveled in a variety of productions. But it and him feel newly relevant in our time — even if the language of the “multiculti” ’90s has shifted to “diversity, equity and inclusion.”Spanish is still a language rarely sung in mainstream opera houses. And amid fresh calls for broader representation at all levels of the arts, Golijov’s work, while generally written for standard forces, often also gives the opportunity for performers from nonclassical traditions to contribute on their own terms. He doesn’t just translate flamenco for a symphony orchestra; he also demands a place in the pit and onstage for flamenco singers, dancers and players.But even with its creativity and beauty, “Ainadamar” has weaknesses. Though Golijov introduces enough intriguing ideas to keep the accessibility of his music from blandness — trembling marimba and warily sliding yawns of strings somehow perfectly conjure martyrdom — there is, as in much of his work, sometimes a sense of vamping when he intends the effect to be incantatory. And though it isn’t long, “Ainadamar” seems ready to end several times before it does.When it does end, though, in this production, it’s memorable, with the curtain falling on the poignant, fantastical sight of lanterns dimming underwater. Colker’s staging has an appealing simplicity that splits the difference between the realistic and more symbolic scenes, though the rotating murder sequence and the final “image” — in which past and present, living and dead, collide — could be clearer. And Tal Rosner’s projections tend to be busy or obvious — hands, droplets of water, close-ups of women crying out — more than elegant or expressive.Reyes and Mack in the production directed by Deborah Colker.Austin Richey/Detroit OperaConducted by Paolo Bortolameolli, the orchestra played with poised sobriety, and the all-important battery of percussion was lively. But the textures should be lusher to get the full hypnotic effect of Golijov’s score, and some passages of frenetic activity were vague rather than urgent.As Xirgu, the soprano Gabriella Reyes was sympathetic, with haunting rises up to ethereal floated high notes late in the piece. Vanessa Vasquez, another soprano, was tender as her student, Nuria. As Lorca, the mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack — Golijov nods to the operatic tradition of the woman-as-man “trouser role” — had mellow charm.They were impressive, but none was harrowing; the overall effect of the opera was muted, bloodless. The same was true of the flamenco singer Alfredo Tejada, who as Ruiz Alonso gets the keening lines of a call to prayer. Tejada’s wails, though, were pretty rather than heart-piercing.There was much to admire about this “Ainadamar.” But it was solid, stable, attractive — not wrenching or raw. Duende, which should have permeated the opera house, was all too hard to come by.AinadamarPerformances continue on April 14 and 16 at the Detroit Opera House; detroitopera.org. More

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      James Bowman, Who Helped Resurrect the Countertenor, Dies at 81

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      He took up the repertory for the highest male voice at a time when few were performing it. He was particularly known for two roles in Britten operas.James Bowman, a British countertenor who championed repertory for that voice at a time when few singers were attempting it and inspired more composers, including Benjamin Britten, to write for it, died on March 27 at his home in Redhill, south of London. He was 81.Terry Winwood, his civil partner, confirmed the death but said the cause had not yet been determined.When Mr. Bowman started singing professionally in the 1960s, the countertenor — the highest of the male voices, working the same range as female contraltos and mezzo-sopranos — was something of a rarity on opera and concert stages. Alfred Deller, who died in 1979, was the go-to countertenor of the day, but his voice and his acting ability were said to have been limited.“Bowman was a revolutionary talent,” the critic Rupert Christiansen, revisiting one of Mr. Bowman’s 1970s recordings, wrote in The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2019, adding that “his technique brought a new power to the countertenor repertory.”Mr. Bowman’s breakthrough came in 1967, when he was working as a teacher and was doing most of his singing in choirs. He described the moment to The Santa Fe Reporter in 1987.“A friend came up from London and told me that Benjamin Britten was holding auditions for ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’” Mr. Bowman said, referring to Mr. Britten’s 1960 opera, whose Oberon role had originally been written for Mr. Deller. “This is sort of a fairy story — I’d never done anything onstage in my life, but I wrote to Britten and I said, ‘I think I am eminently suited to the role of Oberon.’”He was invited to audition.“I knew that you could barely hear the people who had sung the part before,” he said. “So I went to Covent Garden and I made a big noise and socked them between the eyeballs — and it worked! The next thing I knew I was on tour.”Oberon became one of his signature roles. Mr. Britten wrote other works for him as well, including the part of Apollo in “Death in Venice,” the 1973 Britten opera.“James Bowman’s ringing Apollo sounded authentically unterrestrial,” Martin Cooper wrote in The Daily Telegraph, reviewing the world premiere of the piece at Snape Maltings in Suffolk, England.Mr. Bowman was heard frequently in concert settings as well, and he had a knack for deploying his musical gifts to striking effect in famed performance spaces. Tim Page, writing in The New York Times about a two-hour concert of works by Handel recorded at Westminster Abbey in 1985, called his voice “unusually versatile and pleasing.” Twenty years later, also in The Times, Bernard Holland, after catching him in a “Messiah” at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan, said that Mr. Bowman “sang the countertenor parts with a voice and a dramatic personality able to command attention in a crowd.”His performances and his dozens of recordings encouraged other singers to explore the countertenor repertory, and Mr. Winwood said he was always generous with advice and support for younger singers.“He would think nothing of hiring a studio and arranging a meeting with young singers who he had never even met,” Mr. Winwood said by email, “and I’m pretty sure he would never charge for his time.”In a tribute on the website of the London-based choir Tenebrae, Nigel Short, the choir’s director, recalled the crucial support Mr. Bowman gave him early in his career. He also shared fond memories of Mr. Bowman’s impish sense of humor.“He was such a brilliant, instinctive singer and musician, a huge character and incredibly kind and generous,” Mr. Short wrote, “but my fondest memories will always be of him giggling and snorting loudly at something totally outrageous he’d just whispered in the ears of anyone standing close by.”Mr. Bowman made for a lively newspaper interview as well. He was always eager to dispel stereotypes about countertenors, especially unflattering ones that branded them as effeminate and made them the target of jokes.“We’re a down-to-earth bunch who just happen to like singing in a high register,” he told The Sunday Telegraph of Britain in 1996. “When I look around at my colleagues, I’m struck by how normal most of them are.”When Mr. Bowman performed Handel’s “Messiah” with the St. Thomas Choir at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan in 2005, one critic wrote that he “sang the countertenor parts with a voice and a dramatic personality able to command attention in a crowd.”Jennifer Taylor for The New York TimesJames Thomas Bowman was born on Nov. 6, 1941, in Oxford, England, to Benjamin and Cecilia (Coote) Bowman. He attended the centuries-old school King’s Ely, beginning in 1951; originally a boy chorister there, he soon became head chorister. According to an obituary published by the school, he gave his first concert as a countertenor in 1959 to a small school group in a chapel at Ely Cathedral. The school now hosts an annual James Bowman Lecture promoting the creative and liberal arts.Mr. Bowman attended New College, Oxford, as an organ scholar and was a member of the New College and Christ Church choirs. In 1965 he met David Munrow, who invited him to join his Early Music Consort of London. He continued performing with that group well into the 1970s, and he was also a member of the early music choral group Pro Cantione Antiqua.Mr. Bowman and Mr. Winwood were together for 48 years. He leaves no other immediate survivors.Producing the countertenor voice, Mr. Bowman told The Sunday Telegraph, involved “using the edge of your vocal cords, and neglecting the central part, which is the bass area.”“I can sing bass,” he added. “I use my bass voice to warm up with, before I sing countertenor. But I can’t keep up a bass voice for long — it feels odd.”Although he was a champion of the countertenor and urged composers to write for it, not all of them hit the mark, he told The Independent of Britain in 1990.“People say, ‘I’ve written you an opera,’ and either the range is too wide or they want you to be something bizarre like a singing corpse,” he said. “I’ve spent my life fighting the idea of being a piece of exquisitery on a table — trying just to be a singer, not a countertenor.” More

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      Angela Gheorghiu, Diva of the Old School, Is Back at the Met Opera

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      A fight was brewing recently at the Metropolitan Opera, and Angela Gheorghiu was in the thick of it.She and some other singers were rehearsing the second act of Puccini’s “Tosca,” and the moment had arrived when Cavaradossi, the passionate tenor lead, scuffles with the henchmen who are restraining him.Gheorghiu — the glamorous, veteran Romanian soprano singing the opera’s title role in two performances, on Saturday afternoon and Wednesday evening — was standing in such a way that the melee was driving right toward her. Sarah Ina Meyers, the revival’s director, began to pause to give her a new position out of the fray, but Gheorghiu practically shouted at everyone to keep going; she would figure out where to move on the fly.“I will respond; I’m quick!” she told them in an excited, heavily accented tumble of words. “Go, go! Action, action!”“Generally my colleagues say, ‘Angela, relax!’” she said in an interview later. “But I cannot relax. Even when I study at home, I’m there. When I open a score, I’m there. My skin, my cells, they’re all there. I’m alive; I have the fire on me.”Where Gheorghiu, 57, has not been of late is the Met. Though she was long a frequent presence with the company after her debut in 1993, these performances of “Tosca” are her first appearances on its stage in eight years.“It’s an unfair gap,” she said of her time away. “It’s unfair because I know I have my public here, and it’s part of my life.”Grand of manner and demanding, but also generous and gregarious, taking grinning selfies for Instagram with everyone in the room, Gheorghiu is well known — and generally well liked, even by colleagues she exasperates — for being one of the few remaining divas in the larger-than-life, old-school mold of Geraldine Farrar, Maria Callas and Jessye Norman.Gheorghiu’s former manager described her as “always interesting, no matter what — onstage, offstage.”Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesOld-school in the tumult that has tended to accompany her: cancellations, firings, willful behavior, a long marriage of ups and downs to the star tenor Roberto Alagna (until their divorce 10 years ago). And old-school in her voice, which as she was gaining renown was full and dark-hued, flexible and free to the top of its range.“She is a serious artist,” said Jack Mastroianni, who spent years as her manager. “I think sometimes people forget that because of the sensational news that comes out of her cancellations, or whatever. She’s always interesting, no matter what — onstage, offstage.”Because Gheorghiu was joining a “Tosca” run already in progress, she wouldn’t be getting any rehearsal time onstage, with the orchestra, or in costume.“I don’t know what was on his mind,” she said of Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “First of all, he offered me one performance. And I said, for one performance, I will not come. Just one? Come on. I would spend it all on my flight! And of course I need a hotel. So, two.”But why accept a mere two?“Because,” she said, with a sigh, “I must tell you the truth. I adore this city. I adore this theater, from the very beginning.”At the beginning, it was a love affair. Of Gheorghiu’s 1993 debut, in “La Bohème,” Alex Ross wrote in The New York Times that “the preternatural beauty of the voice made a lingering impression.”Ovations at the Met were a long way from small-town Adjud, Romania, where she was born in 1965 to a dressmaker mother and a train operator father. The Soviet-backed regime of Nicolae Ceausescu was then just beginning, an era that later informed her depiction in “Tosca” of life in early-19th-century Rome amid the repressive forces of the police chief Scarpia.“Tosca, it’s myself,” Gheorghiu said. “I’m an opera singer, like her. And I’m not a killer, but I lived in a situation in Romania where you had no right to say something, where you were all the time afraid.”From left, Gheorghiu, Plácido Domingo and Waltraud Meier in “Carmen” at the Met in 1996.Sara KrulwichAs a child, she was obsessed with Leonard Bernstein’s television specials, and began to study voice seriously in her early teens.“I was an opera singer, all my life, from the beginning,” she said. “It was so clear. I didn’t have a Plan B. Never, never. And for all my roles, from when I was 18, I had no teacher, no coach, no pianist. I am my own everything.”Mastroianni said: “What she went through to get from where she was, it takes guts and moxie. And she has that in spades.”Gelb first heard her sing Violetta in Verdi’s “La Traviata” in the early 1990s, then tried (unsuccessfully) to sign her to Sony Classical when he ran the label.“When she was singing ‘Traviata’ in her prime,” he said, “I think hers was the greatest ‘Traviata’ of that time. She was a throwback to the kind of glamorous divas of previous generations, with incredible artistic personality and charisma.”Her voice — clean and pure, with alluring depths but without heavy vibrato or overwhelming size — was perfect for capture on CDs. It was the tail end of the classical recording industry’s heyday, and she was lavishly promoted.“It was a voice that microphones loved,” Gelb said. Gheorghiu still comes across as valuing recordings more urgently than do some singers — “We have to leave a testimony,” she said — and there are certain roles she has sung for albums but never onstage, like an exquisite Cio-Cio-San in “Madama Butterfly.”Almost as soon as she entered the international scene, she became a star at the Royal Opera House in London, a home base in those early years. She divorced her first husband and married Alagna; in a curtain speech before they appeared together in “La Bohème” at the Met in 1996, Joseph Volpe, then the company’s general manager, announced that the two had been wed the previous day. Rudolph W. Giuliani, the mayor of New York at the time and an opera aficionado, officiated.The following year, on tour with the Met in Japan, Gheorghiu refused to wear the blonde wig for her character, Micaëla, in “Carmen,” and Volpe uttered what became an immortal line among opera fans: “The wig goes on, with or without you.” (For one performance, she chose without, and an understudy replaced her.)Appearing and recording frequently as a duo, she and Alagna grew notorious for their hubristic demands. They attempted to veto Franco Zeffirelli’s designs for a new Met “Traviata” in the late 1990s; the show went on, without them. Gheorghiu still sang in New York, but from 2003 to 2005 she was absent for two seasons in a row, which hadn’t happened since her debut.“I feel home here,” Gheorghiu said of the Met.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesWhen Gelb took over, in 2006, he tried to rectify this and bring her back in full force. Gheorghiu said that he eventually offered a contract that required her to sing at least 18 performances a year, which would have restricted her ability to take on engagements in Europe.“And finally, I said no,” she said. “And from this moment, I think he was upset. That’s why I was more rare here.”(“I have no recollection of that,” Gelb said. “If I spent my life being offended by opera singers, I would have ended my career a long time ago.”)She abandoned a new Met production of “Carmen,” in which she was to sing the title role, as well as a new staging of “Faust” whose updated concept she disliked.A new production of Puccini’s “La Rondine,” a rarity for whose wistful mood Gheorghiu was well suited, did go forward, in 2009. But over the following decade, there were just a pair of “Bohème” performances in 2014 and the brief stint in “Tosca” in 2015 — in which her voice, never huge, sometimes seemed perilously slender.“When she was last here, there were mixed results,” Gelb said. “Like many members of the audience, she did not like the Luc Bondy production, and she decided to do her own staging. So she kind of defied the directorial team; she sort of went off the reservation.”The current Met “Tosca,” a throwback to Zeffirelli-style realistic splendor, is more to Gheorghiu’s taste, but she is just as headstrong as ever about taking direction. There was, throughout the recent rehearsal, the sense that she wanted to leave as much of the blocking as possible to what her impulse might end up being in the moment.“I like acting,” she said as Meyers, the director, tried, to little avail, to guide her toward setting in stone a sequence in which Scarpia mauls Tosca onto a divan. “But so you don’t see the acting. Reality.”Gheorghiu would like for this not to be her Met farewell; she’d love to sing Fedora here, and Adriana Lecouvreur.“I feel home here,” she said. “I really adore each centimeter: the dust, the smell, the sweating onstage, the costumes, the atmosphere in rehearsal. So I had some friendly discussion with Peter, and I feel like, of course, give me this, then what else? Let’s see how this goes.”Gelb didn’t commit. “But I’ve always admired her and I always will admire her,” he said. “She’s part of opera history, and part of opera history at the Met.” More

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      Review: Lise Davidsen Shines, and Evolves, in ‘Der Rosenkavalier’

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      The radiant young soprano returned to the Metropolitan Opera to star as the Marschallin in a revival of Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier.”When the luminous soprano Lise Davidsen released her first solo album several years ago, she faced criticism over her repertoire.Chiefly, that while she was just in her early 30s she had chosen to record Strauss’s autumnal “Four Last Songs.” In an interview then, her characteristic geniality gave way to exasperation. “It pisses me off a little bit that you have to be a certain age to feel certain feelings,” she said. “Teenagers have all those feelings, and more, in a day.”With more measured calm, she added: “But I do believe that I’m entitled to take on those feelings, to take on the difficulties in life. That’s our job in opera.”She challenged doubters again on Monday when Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” returned to the Metropolitan Opera with Davidsen, 36, making her role debut as the Marschallin — a character more typically portrayed by seasoned grandes dames. So much so that this production, by Robert Carsen, opened in 2017 as a vehicle for Renée Fleming’s farewell to the role.Never mind that in the libretto, the Marschallin is in her early 30s. Or that Fleming was around Davidsen’s age when she first sang the part at Houston Grand Opera. But as Davidsen said of the “Four Last Songs,” a performer has every right to a role if she can persuasively “take on those feelings,” not to mention the notes. And Davidsen can, on both fronts.Davidsen excels in repertoire — mostly Wagner and Strauss — somewhere between the achingly human and the otherworldly: the saintly Elisabeth in “Tannhäuser,” the mythical title character in “Ariadne auf Naxos,” the forlorn Sieglinde in “Die Walküre.” The Marschallin, however, is entirely earthbound. In conflict with neither God nor the gods, she is simply staring down middle age and the inevitability of change.That said, the Marschallin is a woman of stature: influential, composed and well connected. Davidsen captures this naturally, exuding confidence more than wisdom, and behaving with discretion in public while reserving playfulness for the intimacy of her bedroom.When we meet the Marschallin, she has just spent the night with her 17-year-old lover, Octavian; over the course of the first act, her amorous bliss gives way to solemnity as she explains that their affair has an expiration date — “today or tomorrow, or the day after next.” When Fleming sang that line, it was with the authority of experience. But where her Marschallin looked back, Davidsen’s seems to look forward; she’s keeping it together while aware of the anxiety that sets in whenever she looks in the mirror.Throughout, Davidsen alternates between conversational restraint — enunciating each syllable of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s talky libretto with penetrating focus — and white-hot radiance. Her terms of endearment for Octavian emerge like a rising sun. And in the final trio, her sustained high A on the word “glücklich” (“happy”) soars and crescendos to a glowing benediction for her lover’s new life with Sophie.“Der Rosenkavalier” is an ensemble opera in which it can be difficult to call anyone a protagonist, but Davidsen’s Marschallin leaves the stage the most evolved. Among the lines that landed freshly on Monday was her last. With Sophie’s father, Faninal, she passes by the happy new couple. He sings, “Young people are always the same”; and she responds, “Yes, yes,” with a D sharp falling nearly an octave below to an E, as if sighing.On Monday, that moment was a reminder that while the opera often seems like the story of two generations, it is more like a tale of three: Octavian’s, the Marschallin’s and Faninal’s. With that “yes, yes,” Davidsen’s Marschallin suddenly matures, shedding the anxiety of wrinkles and lovers lost to enter the next phase of her life.Also remarkable on Monday was the mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey, singing the role of Octavian at the Met for the first time. She made even bigger the mighty yet smooth sound, as well as the tireless energy and dramatic skill, that she brought to her performances last year in a “Rosenkavalier” at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. With a cherubic face she looked every bit the part of a young lover, and, with a touch of careless manspreading while lighting a cigarette, very much a boy.The baritone Brian Mulligan made a role debut, as well, as Faninal, with commanding ease and entertaining comedic instinct. And veterans of the production returned: the soprano Erin Morley, still a bright, elegant presence as Sophie; and the bass Günther Groissböck, still a dangerously handsome Baron Ochs, though more strained in this revival, his gravely low notes and declamatory articulation characterful but not always assured.Under Simone Young’s baton, the Met Orchestra improved as the evening progressed. The opening, a kind of pornography in music, was romantic where it should have been ecstatic, and a Mozartean interlude in the first act wasn’t scaled back to match the style; the dreamily glinting rose motif was more legato than lustrous. But Young effectively conjured the romping chaos of Ochs’s cohort in the second act, along with his famous waltz and the darker, “Salome”-like dancing rhythms of the third act.Carsen’s production remains the textbook-perfect staging of modern Met history: elegant and satisfyingly grand, smart but not daring. His major intervention — moving the opera’s setting from the 18th century to the year in which it premiered, 1911, from the cusp of revolutionary Europe to the brink of World War I — also remains eerily evocative.The Marschallin’s bedroom is covered in large canvases: portraits of great men, scenes from battle and court. It seems as though the walls can barely support the weight of history. In the first act, her life is saturated at a tipping point of decadence; a parade of visitors and excess — needy orphans, salespeople with the latest fashions, an attention-hungry tenor — overwhelm her, the score and the stage. By the end, the set opens up around Octavian and Sophie as they rejoice in their future together, revealing a line of soldiers charging into battle, and stumbling as they die.When the production opened in 2017, its depiction of a society blissfully unaware of the transformation ahead recalled the recent, surprise election of President Donald J. Trump. Since then, it has been redolent of much else in our time of too-muchness: the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, climate disaster.If Carsen’s “Rosenkavalier” has staying power, it is because of this chameleonic resonance. As the Marschallin well knows, the only constant, in a forward-spinning world, is change.Der RosenkavalierThrough April 20 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Review: In Chicago, an Opera Triptych Reaches for Connection

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      Lyric Opera of Chicago follows a recent world premiere with yet another: “Proximity,” a set of works by three librettist-composer pairs.CHICAGO — Major opera companies used to put on new or recent works once in a blue moon. But, astonishingly, pieces by living composers make up about a third of the Metropolitan Opera’s coming season. And on Friday, Lyric Opera of Chicago, just a month after one world premiere, presented another.Houses like these have been spurred by a hunger for fresh audiences that don’t have any particular devotion to “Aida” or “La Traviata.” But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. Creaking into development mode is a huge shift for institutions that have, for decades, almost solely done works from the distant past.And in Lyric’s premiere here on Friday, “Proximity,” the company gave itself an even more ambitious assignment than one new commission: three of them, by three composer-librettist pairs, sharing a single evening. Moreover, each opera takes on a different capital-I Issue, dealing with our closeness to and dependence on others: gun violence in Chicago; the difficulty of connection in a world mediated by technology; and the threat we pose to our planet.That this unwieldy idea ended up being stageworthy — sober, often blunt, sometimes meditative, sometimes listless, sometimes aggressively affecting — is largely because of the production’s ingenious director, Yuval Sharon.In shows like his “La Bohème,” which presented the opera’s four acts in reverse, Sharon has proved himself adept at executing thorny, even silly-sounding concepts in ways that end up being surprisingly clever and moving. With “Proximity,” he avoided the obvious decision to play the three pieces one after the other, à la Puccini’s “Il Trittico.”Instead, Sharon showed them off to better effect by putting them in closer, well, proximity: weaving them together, alternating scenes from the operas in a two-act evening. So, for example, the final half-hour of Act I brings the audience from a stylized Chicago L ride in “Four Portraits” (music by Caroline Shaw; text by Shaw and Jocelyn Clarke) to a realistic funeral in “The Walkers” (Daniel Bernard Roumain; Anna Deavere Smith), to the abstract poetry of “Night” (John Luther Adams; John Haines).Caroline Shaw and Jocelyn Clarke’s “Four Portraits” features a stylized ride on Chicago’s elevated train system.Todd RosenbergWith the edges of the scores smoothed by the conductor, Kazem Abdullah, and Lyric’s excellent orchestra, the three sound worlds play nicely together, with a shared grounding in repeating, minimal motifs, steady tonality and sensible, self-effacing lyricism — no earworm melodies, but no harshness, either, and hardly any look-at-me virtuosity.For a flexible set, the production designers Jason H. Thompson and Kaitlyn Pietras have stretched an LED screen across the stage floor and, halfpipe-style, up the backdrop. The screen is filled with spiffy and colorful imagery: slowly panning Chicago streetscapes seen from above; vast vistas of outer space; pulsating visualizations of communications networks. Without unwieldy scene changes, the three operas blend into a single performance with impressive seamlessness.It helps that Sharon, the artistic director of Detroit Opera, is experienced with collaborations (and logistics) even more complicated than this. For “Hopscotch” — presented in 2015 by the Industry, the experimental company he founded in California — audience members got into cars that drove around Los Angeles, and six composers and six writers shared billing.And his job is made easier here in Chicago by the fact that these are not three roughly equal installments, like the ones in “Il Trittico.” “The Walkers,” at an hour, is longer than “Four Portraits” and “Night” combined, so those shorter pieces naturally feel like interludes, breaking up a work that would otherwise dominate the threesome.And none of the three tells a story so realistic or sustained that it feels jolting to interrupt. The libretto of “The Walkers” is the latest in Smith’s long career of creating politically charged dramatic texts drawn from interviews she has conducted — in this case, with people she was introduced to through Chicago CRED and Choose to Change, organizations devoted to addressing gun violence in the city.Some passages from the interviews are sung as lamenting monologues, in the style of TED Talks; some remain spoken, with light underscoring. Quirks of speech — “you know,” “uh” — are preserved in a bit of naturalism that, especially when sung, is also endearingly strange.But some confusion is introduced because Smith and Roumain have, alongside these somber, stand-alone statements, embedded a loosely developed, difficult-to-follow plot about a gang rivalry, formed from composites of interview subjects. However impassioned the soprano Kearstin Piper Brown may be, it’s hard to make the plight of her roughly sketched character — who is targeted for killing after she is wrongly assumed to have shot a child — as clear or compelling as the plain-spoken truth of the longer monologues.The score is least convincing in slouchily rhythmic, singsong passages with drum kit. But Roumain pulls his orchestra back to a mellow steady-state undercurrent for the monologues, emphasizing the clarity of the text above all.And the funeral scene near the end of Act I is a persuasive Requiem, with lightly neo-Baroque solemnity and some stirring arias, including ones for the noble-toned baritone Norman Garrett and the shining tenor Issachah Savage as two of the figures who “walk” among vulnerable youth and attempt to guide them.The first of Shaw’s “Four Portraits” conveys a relationship between characters named only A (the countertenor John Holiday) and B (the baritone Lucia Lucas) that is stymied by an inability to connect: The call literally won’t go through.Shaw’s instrumental textures — ethereal strings; pricks of brasses and winds; sprightly pizzicato plucking; Minimalism-derived repetitions, more tentative than relentless — support a babble of fractured voices representing the technological ether, a conceit Nico Muhly explored in his 2011 opera “Two Boys.” Here and in the second section, that crowded L ride, the dramaturgy is hazy, the music bland.The last two sections are more interesting and beautiful, with troubled darknesses under the surface serenity. Shaw renders a car’s GPS as an electronically processed voice that veers from turn-left instructions to poetic flights, yielding to an introspective aria just right for Lucas’s tender voice.And in the final “portrait,” Lucas and Holiday, his tone floating into a soar, at last encounter each other without barriers, the music grandly building as a choir makes a trademark Shaw sound: a kind of modest, sliding low hum. (While Carlos J. Soto’s street clothes in “The Walkers” are an agile mixture of everyday and fanciful, the shapeless gray robes in “Four Portraits” do neither singer any favors.)Zoie Reams as the Erda-like narrator of John Luther Adams and John Haines’s “Night.”Todd RosenbergThe most disappointing of the three pieces is the 12-minute “Night,” a monotonous and clotted score from Adams, a usually inventive composer whose sonic depictions of ocean depths and parched, flickering deserts have been uncannily evocative. Here, his mezzo-soprano Sibyl (Katherine DeYoung, filling in for an ill Zoie Reams), like Erda in Wagner’s “Ring,” is a kind of earth goddess offering gnomic warning about a coming reckoning. Lowered from the flies and walking amid images of planets and stars, she is interrupted for stretches by a stentorian chorus.It’s a dreary way to end the first act. The second comes to a close in more powerful, if also emotionally manipulative, fashion, with the last scene of “The Walkers.” Singing the first-person account of Yasmine Miller, whose 20-month-old baby was killed in a 2020 shooting, Whitney Morrison’s gentle soprano is a little timid and tremulous. But the story is so obviously heartbreaking, and her performance so sincere, that criticizing her feels like actually criticizing a grieving mother.Mustering a warmly supportive chorus and a clichéd, echoey faux-choral keyboard effect, this finale is almost orgiastically sentimental, down to Miller’s smiling story about the new child she’s pregnant with and a quotation ascribed to Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey emblazoned on the screen: “For Black people, hope has to be resurrected every day.”Treacle is, of course, hardly foreign to opera. But bending real tragedy into thin uplift is.ProximityThrough April 8 at the Lyric Opera House, Chicago; lyricopera.org. More

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      Renée Fleming Adds a New Role to Her Repertoire: Pat Nixon

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      The superstar soprano discusses her debut in John Adams’s “Nixon in China” at the Paris Opera. For starters, she spends the second act with a dragon.In May 2017, the star soprano Renée Fleming sang the role of the Marschallin in Richard Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” for the last time — and with that, said goodbye to one the roles that had defined her career.Since then, Fleming, 64, has appeared in concerts and on Broadway, and premiered a new opera, “The Hours,” which was written for her. Now, for the first time in a decade, she is preparing a role debut in the established repertoire: Pat Nixon in John Adams’s 1987 opera “Nixon in China,” which opens at the Paris Opera on Saturday in a new production by Valentina Carrasco.Some sopranos in their 50s and 60s have voices that darken and thicken, making them perfect for character roles, often vengeful older women like Klytaemnestra in Strauss’s “Elektra” or the Kostelnicka in Janacek’s “Jenufa.” Fleming, who has always had both a fastidious technique and a strong instinct to protect her voice, still sings with her characteristic pure, blooming tone.This makes Pat Nixon, the former first lady whose musings on “the simple virtues” and “the fruit of all our actions” are the beating heart of the opera’s second act, a logical, though initially surprising, choice. Fleming has thrown herself into preparation with her typical studiousness: reading books and articles about the Nixons, studying film reels to capture what Carrasco called Nixon’s “gestures, smoking — she was a heavy smoker — and slightly constricted and strained smile.” Fleming discussed her approach to the role in a video interview from Paris. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.“Nixon in China” is defined in so many people’s heads by the iconic original production by Peter Sellars that came to the Met. How does this staging differ?It’s a bit madcap, I would say, in a good way. There’s a lot of creative choices to bring this piece alive that are quite different than anything I’ve seen. I’ve watched most of what’s available, at least on the internet; it’s just been tremendous fun. People have treated the piece in an insistently serious way. This is the first time where — I think enabled by the passage of time — a director could say, “We all know what happened, we’re familiar with the piece, and now we can think about it in a different way.”In Valentina Carrasco’s production, Fleming spends Act II with an onstage dragon, “which is quite delightful,” Fleming said. Here they stand behind a screen of scattered Ping-Pong balls.Elisa Haberer/Opéra national de ParisWhy Pat Nixon?I’ve been a tremendous fan of John Adams forever. There was a period when I was emailing him on a regular basis to see if there was anything of his that he thought I could do. I’ve always loved new music and have been performing a lot of it since I was a student. But nothing worked out until this.How is it to play someone like Pat Nixon who — as opposed to a princess, or mermaid or other standard opera heroine — is in our cultural memory?It’s really different. These are people who lived during my lifetime. I don’t remember them well. I was in middle school around the time all of this happened; I wasn’t paying attention. But there’s all this archival material to look at — and they come to life once you start reading. There were books about the Nixons and their marriage that were quite interesting, especially “Pat and Dick: The Nixons, an Intimate Portrait of a Marriage,” by Will Swift and “Pat Nixon: The Untold Story,” by Julie Nixon Eisenhower.In every single video or photograph from the visit, Pat stands out because of her fashion, which was all very carefully chosen. I get to wear the red coat, which is helpful. I had a talk, thanks to a friend, with Frank Gannon, who knew the Nixon family for about five years and was a special assistant in the White House at the time of the trip. He was able to shed light on their marriage — on how crazy they were about each other, especially him for her. She was extremely protective of him and of their children.The piece is not mocking her.On the contrary, I think the creators genuinely respected her. I was surprised, too, because they really aren’t as kind to some of the other characters, namely Henry Kissinger. Alice Goodman’s text is so exquisite. Especially for Chou En-lai, and for Pat Nixon it’s beautiful and poetic. The images in Pat’s main aria, “This is prophetic,” are a vision for what this alliance could look like in a positive sense.I love singing it, and I love portraying her — and in this production, I spend the whole second act with a dragon, which is quite delightful, and which exemplifies her positive vision for this alliance. There are so many beautiful vibrant pictures created in this scene, and all of them heartfelt. It feels to me like a particularly feminine point of view.What is it like to sing this score, in Adams’s distinctive style?It’s challenging to learn, because it changes meter every bar pretty much, and the aria has a quite high tessitura; it sits consistently too much up at the top of the staff. It’s beautiful music, and what makes it possible is that the higher phrases are separated by a few bars so you can relax, get a rest. I also love the unique use of the orchestra. Just to look down into the pit and see five or six saxophones and two pianos creating an extraordinary texture gives me an enormous pleasure. The top of the second act, Pat’s act, is such a joy. It has a sparkling quality to it that you just can’t help but respond to.Playing Pat Nixon is different from typical opera for Fleming: “These are people who lived during my lifetime,” she said.Elisa Haberer/Opéra national de ParisAdams insists that singers in his operas are enhanced with microphones given the thickness of the orchestral textures. How does that feel?I find being miked helpful. I think that as orchestras and conductors have less time to work on balance, and the demands being made on singers just to be loud — if that continues to increase, I don’t think it’s helpful to the art form to insist that there never be any enhancement on the stage. There’s a huge difference between a subtle enhancement — already being used in a lot of theaters because the acoustic is poor — and full-blown amplification. I appreciate it, especially because a lot of what I’m doing is way upstage. And many set designers don’t want to be forced into building boxes all the time to help us with the acoustic.When “Nixon” premiered, it was sometimes dismissively called a “CNN opera” because of its engagement with current events and politics. Now, this production premieres amid growing tensions between the U.S. and China and protests in Paris.Travel to China for artists had just opened up — but now surveillance balloons, or the American discovery of surveillance balloons, seems to have messed that up. I hope that communication continues. It serves everyone, and both sides know that. It’s a really sensitive time. There are a lot of Chinese artists in the show, some of whom live in China, and even doing this piece is sensitive for them. There were images to be used in a montage at the end of the opera that had to be changed or modified because of those sensitivities. The montage is trying hard to be objective about these conflicts and their relationship to what happened at the time the opera is set. It seems to be more sensitive to discuss what’s happening now than what happened in Mao’s time.Outside of our dressing rooms last night, there were fires on the street. There were demonstrators running from the Place de la République to the Bastille. That’s what it’s been like every day. It’s ironic, because my [1991] debut here in “Figaro” had demonstrators outside, who then during the show broke into the theater. It was quite uncomfortable, because someone actually came onstage with a huge machete. So thus far, it’s really been not too terrible. More