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      Britain’s Major Opera Companies Suffer in Arts Spending Shake-Up

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      English National Opera lost its government subsidy, and the Royal Opera House received a 10-percent cut, with funding diverted to organizations outside London.LONDON — English National Opera has for decades been one of the world’s major opera companies. In 1945, it premiered Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes.” In the 1980s, it became the first British opera company to tour the United States. Last year, it started rolling out a new “Ring” cycle that is expected to play at the Metropolitan Opera starting in 2025.Now, that standing is in question.On Friday, Arts Council England, a body that distributes government arts funding in England, announced a spending shake-up. Nicholas Serota, the council’s chairman, said in a news conference that funding for London-based organizations had been reallocated to those in poorer parts of Britain, a process that involved “some invidious choices.”English National Opera was the biggest loser in the reshuffle. It will no longer receive any regular funding from the Arts Council. For the past four years, it received around £12.4 million a year, or about $14 million. The annual grant made up over a third of the company’s budget.Instead, English National Opera will receive a one-off payment of £17 million to help it “develop a new business model,” Arts Council England said in a news release, which could potentially include relocating the company to Manchester, 178 miles north of its current home at the ornate Coliseum theater in London.English National Opera was not the only major company affected by the funding overhaul. The Arts Council also cut funding to the Royal Opera House in London by 10 percent, to £22.2 million a year.In a news release, the Royal Opera said that, despite the cut and other challenges such as rising inflation, it would “do whatever we can to remain at the heart of the cultural life of the nation.”Two other companies that tour productions throughout England, Welsh National Opera and Glyndebourne Productions, saw funding drop by over 30 percent.John Allison, the editor of Opera magazine, said in a telephone interview that the changes were “unquestionably damaging to opera in Britain.” Some innovative small companies had received a funding boost, Allison said, including Pegasus Opera, a company that works to involve people of color in the art form. But, he added, it was still “a very gloomy day.”Britain’s arts funding model is somewhere between the systems of the United States — where most companies receive little government assistance, and raise their own funds via philanthropy, ticket sales and commercial activities — and continental Europe, where culture ministries bankroll major institutions. Arts Council England reviews its funding decisions every few years. This time, some 1,730 organizations applied for subsidies, requesting a total £655 million a year — far more than the organization’s £446 million budget.So, some cuts to English National Opera and the Royal Opera House were expected. Britain’s government has long stated a desire to divert arts funding from London to other regions, in a policy known as “leveling up.” In February, Nadine Dorries, the culture minister at the time, ordered the Arts Council to reduce funding to London organizations by 15 percent. The move would “tackle cultural disparities” in Britain, she told Parliament then, “and ensure that everyone, wherever they live, has the opportunity to enjoy the incredible benefits of culture in their lives.”Serota, the Arts Council chairman, said in a telephone interview that the body had not targeted cuts at opera companies specifically. “We’re still going to be investing more than £30 million in opera a year,” he said, highlighting boosts to regional organizations including the Birmingham Opera Company, English Touring Opera and Opera North.The Arts Council slashed grants for several major London theaters, too. The Donmar Warehouse lost its funding entirely, as did the Hampstead Theater and the Barbican Center. The National Theater saw its funding drop by about 3 percent, to £16.1 million per year from £16.7 million.At a time when the Bank of England says that Britain is facing a multiyear recession, even relatively small cuts will raise huge concern for arts organizations. Sam Mendes, the director of “1917” and “American Beauty,” who was the Donmar Warehouse’s founding artistic director, said in a news release that “cutting the Donmar’s funding is a shortsighted decision that will wreak long lasting damage on the wider industry.” The theater, he added, “is a world renowned and hugely influential theater, and the U.K. cannot afford to put it at risk.”Serota said he was “confident” that the Donmar would be able to find alternative sources of funding. “But I know,” he continued, “that’s an easy thing to say.” More

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      Review: The Met Brings Back a Shorter, Weaker ‘Don Carlo’

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      David McVicar’s staging from last season has returned, but in a four-act, Italian-language form. In this case, less is less.Another week, another set of music without a definitive version.This time it isn’t a variant-strewn album rollout from Taylor Swift or Lil Baby, but rather a work by Giuseppe Verdi, whose “Don Carlo” returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Thursday night in a four-act, Italian-language edition of a staging by David McVicar.When McVicar’s production premiered last season, it was a true event: the company’s first mounting of “Don Carlos,” a version of Verdi’s original, five-act, French-language take, from 1867.Now, the Met has returned to the Italian, based on Verdi’s 1884 conception. But in a puzzling move, it has done away with its vintage practice of presenting the opera in five acts. So on Thursday, the short but crucial opening act was cut.This may sound like hairsplitting, but when it comes to Verdi’s longest opera, less is less, even with a strong cast like the Met’s for this revival.The tenor Russell Thomas is an appealing, emotive Don Carlo; on Thursday, he sounded particularly noble (and ardent) at the higher end of his range. In house-filling phrases, Russell’s bright sound had a brassy, tossed-off assurance, with little sign of strain. Yet in lower-pitched lines, he occasionally sounded swamped by the plush orchestral sound under the baton of Carlo Rizzi.“Don Carlo” demands a lot of strong voices, and the best addition in this revival is the exciting performance, particularly late in the evening, from the bass Günther Groissböck as King Philip II. If the mezzo-soprano Yulia Matochkina was a bit laryngeal during Princess Eboli’s early Veil Song outside the monastery, her take on the character had settled into a gloomy radiance by the time she needed to curse her own beauty (and thirst for machinations) deep into the plot.But what plot, exactly? Without the opportunity to enjoy the first act’s mysterious meet-cute in Fontainebleau, it’s difficult for an audience to root for the doomed pairing of Don Carlo and Elisabeth. (She’s originally Don Carlo’s intended; later she’s his stepmother and queen, after her marriage to his father, Philip.)Element after element in the opera was similarly hamstrung. The soprano Eleonora Buratto brought an elegant tone and brilliant high notes to bear in Elisabeth’s climactic final appearance onstage — yet the hourslong buildup to that moment felt rote. Throughout, Don Carlo’s advocacy on behalf of the oppressed Flemish also came across as muted without the first act’s sketching of diplomatic intrigue between France and Spain. The absence, and its effect on the opera’s momentum, was glaring, particularly in McVicar’s safe and budget-conscious production, which is light on theatrical coups and complex blocking.There was enjoyment, though, in the blends of voices among the singers — with the baritone Peter Mattei, as Rodrigo, seemingly always in the middle of the best moments. He often provided the jolt that the staging otherwise lacked: his big, supple sound worked well alongside Thomas’s Carlo in their early duet and in their jailhouse goodbye, and spurred Groissböck’s Philip into more dramatically varied phrasing during their early political debates.The Met could, in the future, milk McVicar’s staging for a five-act, Italian-language version. But this one was a dramatic fizzle; the big hits were present and accounted for, and largely well sung, but the evening was, strangely, a drag. Cuts aren’t supposed to make operas feel longer.Some fans will want to hear “Don Carlo” in any form. But as is the case with various editions of the same pop album, there’s no particularly urgent need to collect ’em all.Don CarloThrough Dec. 3 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Music, Science and Healing Intersect in an A.I. Opera

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      “This is what your brain was doing!” a Lincoln Center staffer said to Shanta Thake, the performing arts complex’s artistic director, while swiping through some freshly taken photos.It was the end of a recent rehearsal at Alice Tully Hall for “Song of the Ambassadors,” a work-in-progress that fuses elements of traditional opera with artificial intelligence and neuroscience, and the photos did appear to show Thake’s brain doing something remarkable: generating images of flowers. Bright, colorful, fantastical flowers of no known species or genus, morphing continuously in size, color and shape, as if botany and fluid dynamics had somehow merged.“Song of the Ambassadors,” which was presented to the public at Tully on Tuesday evening, was created by K Allado-McDowell, who leads the Artists and Machine Intelligence initiative at Google, with the A.I. program GPT-3; the composer Derrick Skye, who integrates electronics and non-Western motifs into his work; and the data artist Refik Anadol, who contributed A.I.-generated visualizations. There were three singers — “ambassadors” to the sun, space and life — as well as a percussionist, a violinist and a flute player. Thake, sitting silently to one side of the stage with a simple, inexpensive EEG monitor on her head, was the “brainist,” feeding brain waves into Anadol’s A.I. algorithm to generate the otherworldly patterns.“I’m using my brain as a prop,” she said in an interview.The “ambassadors” included, from left, Debi Wong, Laurel Semerdjian and Andrew Turner.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesDigital art by Refik Anadol was projected above the Tully stage.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesJust to the side of the stage, level with the musicians, sat a pair of neuroscientists, Ying Choon Wu and Alex Khalil, who had been monitoring the brain waves of two audience volunteers sitting nearby, with their heads encased in research-grade headsets from a company called Cognionics.Wu, a scientist at the University of California, San Diego, investigates the effects of works of art on the brain; in another study, she’s observing the brain waves of people viewing paintings at the San Diego Museum of Art. Khalil, a former U.C. San Diego researcher who now teaches ethnomusicology at University College Cork in Ireland, focuses on how music gets people to synchronize their behavior. Both aim to integrate art and science.Read More on Artificial IntelligencePublic Defenders: Clearview AI’s facial recognition software has been largely restricted to law enforcement. Now, the company plans to offer access to defense lawyers.Creating Art: Artwork made with artificial intelligence won a prize at the Colorado State Fair’s art competition — and set off fierce backlash about how art is generated.Generative A.I.: Apps like Stable Fusion use artificial intelligence to create images. Some say it is the key to unlock creativity, but critics abound.Are These People Real?: We created our own artificial-technology system to understand how easy it is for a computer to generate fake faces.Which makes them a good match for Allado-McDowell, who first pitched “Song of the Ambassadors” in January 2021 as a participant in the Collider, a Lincoln Center fellowship program supported by the Mellon Foundation. “My proposal was to think about the concert hall as a place where healing could happen,” said Allado-McDowell, 45, who uses the gender-neutral pronouns “they” and “them.”Healing has long preoccupied them. They suffered from severe migraines for years; then, as a student at San Francisco State University, they signed up for a yoga class that took an unexpected turn. “I was besieged by rainbows,” they recalled in a forthcoming memoir. “Orbs of light flickered in my vision. Panting shallow breaths, I broke out of the teacher’s hypnotic groove and escaped to the hall outside. As I knelt on the carpet, cool liquid uncoiled in my lower back … as a glowing purple sphere pulsed gold and green in my inner vision.”This, they were told, was a relatively mild form of kundalini awakening — kundalini being, in Hindu mythology, the serpent that is coiled at the base of the spine, a powerful energy that generally emerges from its dormant state only after extensive meditation and chanting. Others might simply have dropped yoga. “For me, it was an indication that I didn’t understand reality,” Allado-McDowell said. “It showed me that I didn’t have a functional cosmology.”Audience volunteers were outfitted with research-grade headsets from a company called Cognionics.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesWhat followed was a yearslong quest to get one. Along the way, they picked up a master’s degree in art and went to work for a Taiwanese tech company in Seattle. At one point, while sitting in a clearing in the Amazon rainforest, they had a thought: “A.I.s are the children of humanity. They need to learn to love and to be loved. Otherwise they will become psychopaths and kill everyone.”Later, in 2014, Allado-McDowell joined a nascent A.I. research team at Google. When the leader suggested collaborations with artists, they volunteered to lead the initiative. Artists and Machine Intelligence was launched in February 2016 — 50 years after “9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering,” the pioneering union of art and technology led by Robert Rauschenberg and the AT&T Bell Labs engineer Billy Kluver. The connection was not lost on Allado-McDowell.One of the earliest partnerships they established was with Anadol: first for “Archive Dreaming,” a project inspired by the Borges story “The Library of Babel,” then for “WDCH Dreams,” Anadol’s A.I.-driven projection onto the billowing steel superstructure of the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. For “Song of the Ambassadors,” Anadol said, “we are transforming brain activities in real time into an ever-changing color space.”Anadol’s artwork also responds to Skye’s music, which alternates between periods of activity and repose. “We wanted to bring people in and out of a space of meditation,” Skye said. “I carved out these long gaps where all we’re doing is environmental sounds. Then we slowly bring them out.”All this is tied to Allado-McDowell’s goal of testing the therapeutic powers of music in a performance setting. “Might there be policy implications?” they asked. “Might there be a role that institutions could play if we know that sound and music is healing? Can that open up new possibilities for arts funding, for policy, for what is considered a therapeutic experience or an artistic experience?”The jury is still out.“We know that listening to music has an immediate impact for things like mood, attention, focus,” said Lori Gooding, an associate professor of music therapy at Florida State University and president of the American Music Therapy Association. Positive results have been found for people who have suffered a stroke, for example — but that’s after individualized therapy in a medical or professional setting. The approach in “Song of the Ambassadors,” she said, is different because of “the public aspect of it.”Derrick Skye’s score was performed by musicians including the violinist Joshua Henderson.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesOne goal of the project is to turn a hall like Tully into a public healing space.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesWu and Khalil, the neuroscientists involved with the production, have yet to analyze their data. But at a panel discussion preceding Tuesday’s performance — and yes, this opera did come with a panel discussion — Khalil made a prediction that left the audience cheering.“We’ve started to understand that cognition — that is, the working of the mind — exists far outside our head,” he said. “We used to imagine that the brain is a processor and that cognition happened there. But actually, we think our minds extend throughout our bodies and beyond our bodies into the world.”With music, he continued, these extended minds can lock onto rhythms, and through the rhythms onto other minds, and then onto yet more. As for the spaces where that happens, Khalil said, “You can start to think of them as healing places.” More

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      Review: ‘Carmen’ Returns to Its Comic Opera Roots

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      MasterVoices sheds the typical grand-opera treatment of Bizet’s classic to reveal a sleeker, funnier show.Do we truly know Bizet’s “Carmen”?To be fair, the opera could single-handedly fill out a playlist of classical music’s greatest hits, with its Overture, Habanera and “Toreador Song,” among other gems. It has played at the Metropolitan Opera over a thousand times since it debuted there in 1884.But that grand-opera version, with its recitative — and some ballet music adapted from the Bizet catalog — was finalized after the composer’s death. When the work premiered at the Opéra Comique in Paris, in 1875, audiences instead heard spoken dialogue in between the score’s rip-roaring numbers.When you remove the subsequent meddling, and dial things back to Bizet’s original idea for “Carmen,” you get a sleeker, funnier show: one in which the tawdry violence and blithe indifference to pat morality comes off with a devil-may-care kick.Most companies stick to the grand-opera confection. Yet MasterVoices — New York’s scrappy, pop-up music drama specialists — brought the original idea to town on Tuesday for a one-night-only performance at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center. (It was sung and spoken in English, using a fluid, ingenious translation by Sheldon Harnick, the Broadway veteran and lyricist of “Fiddler on the Roof.”)As sung by the mezzo-soprano Ginger Costa-Jackson, this Carmen was suitably entrancing, but also a savvy operator. Her mix of laser-sharp intonation and a dark timbre has been heard in smaller roles at the Met, where she is a member of the young artist program, but the intimacy of the Rose Theater allowed her greater freedom for subtle dramatic effects.When rebuffing ceaseless male attention in Act I, Costa-Jackson used cabaret theatrics, including flicks of the finger and generous servings of side eye, to emphasize how much of Carmen’s story — even her vaunted independence — amounts to a show observed by the citizenry of Seville.There were slight signs of pushing too hard during the Habanera, but Costa-Jackson’s aggressive, overall take on the role was a success, especially by the third act: As Carmen came face to face with a grim recognition of her unalterable fate, she had full command of a glowering power, easily slicing through some of Bizet’s most dramatic scoring.Just as strong was the soprano Mikaela Bennett as Micaëla. Her top notes sparked as clearly on Tuesday as they did in Michael Gordon’s doom-metal chamber opera “Acquanetta” in 2018. John Brancy’s suavely warm baritone made for a dashing Escamillo. And although the tenor Terrence Chin-Loy’s honeyed sound as Don José could overindulge in the character’s naïveté, he produced a climactic characterization of authentic, thrilling malevolence.Ted Sperling, MasterVoices’ artistic director, conducted an Orchestra of St. Luke’s performance of polished, singing ease. During the first act’s expositional recounting of Carmen’s knife fight, Sperling rushed the tempo a bit, making it difficult for the skilled singers of the MasterVoices chorus to be heard as cleanly as elsewhere. Yet his reading was in service of an evening that strutted.MasterVoices tends to underpromise then overdeliver, and Tuesday’s performance was carefully not billed as a staging. But with this cast — and some choreography by Gustavo Zajac — it was much more than a mere concert.Previously, I have admired the way Sperling and his players can figure out a problem piece like Kurt Weill’s “Lady in the Dark” or the largely forgotten “Let ’Em Eat Cake,” by the Gershwins. Their only real problem is budgetary. Short runs or one-night performances are great for audiences in the know. But imagine a stable home, and enduring engagements, for these musicians. They could go from being a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it novelty to something that New York desperately lacks: a standing, smashing comic opera company.CarmenPerformed on Tuesday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan. More

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      Joanna Simon, Opera Singer from Famously Musical Family, Dies at 85

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      A renowned mezzo-soprano, she grew up alongside her younger sisters, Carly and Lucy, both of whom became singer-songwriters.Joanna Simon, a smoky-voiced mezzo-soprano who grew up in a family loaded with musical talent, including her younger sisters Carly and Lucy, before forging an acclaimed career as an opera and concert singer, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. She was 85.Mary Ascheim, a first cousin of Ms. Simon’s, said the cause was thyroid cancer. Ms. Simon died in a hospital a day before Lucy Simon’s death at 82 at her home in Pierpont, N.Y.Ms. Simon was one of the best-known American opera singers to emerge in the 1960s, a time when arts funding was flush, audiences were full and gleaming new music palaces were opening, chief among them the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in New York.She made her professional debut in 1962 as Cherubino in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” at New York City Opera. The same year, she won the Marian Anderson Award, an annual prize given to a promising young singer.She stood out for her range of material, mastery of foreign languages and willingness to take risks on contemporary composers. She was the first to sing the role of Pantasilea, a courtesan in 16th-century Italy, in “Bomarzo,” by the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera, when it made its debut in 1967 at the Opera Society of Washington (today the Washington National Opera). That performance won her worldwide acclaim, and she reprised it in New York and Buenos Aires.She was equally regarded as a concert singer, performing classical and contemporary songs, including “Over the Rainbow.”A few days before one recital in New York, in 1975, she tripped on a rug in her apartment and broke her leg. Rather than call off the show, she mounted the stage on crutches.“As soon as I was sure that my voice hadn’t been affected, I knew I would go on,” she told The New York Times.Her easy grace and glamorous good looks made her a popular guest on television talk shows. She sang and sat for interviews on “The Tonight Show” and “The Dick Cavett Show,” and she was a featured performer on the last original telecast of “The Ed Sullivan Show” before it went off the air in 1971.In her embrace of popular culture, Ms. Simon was not too far removed from her singer-songwriter sisters. Carly Simon achieved lasting fame in the early 1970s with pop hits like “Anticipation” and “You’re So Vain.” Lucy Simon sang with Carly early on — they were billed as the Simon Sisters — and later found success as a composer. She received a Tony nomination in 1991 for best original score, for the musical “The Secret Garden.”The sisters occasionally crossed paths. Joanna sang backup on Carly’s album “No Secrets” (1972) and Lucy’s album “Lucy Simon” (1975), and Carly played guitar offstage during Joanna’s performance on “The Mike Douglas Show” in 1971. Carly wrote her own opera, “Romulus Hunt,” released as an album in 1993; it featured a character named Joanna, a mezzo-soprano.The sisters grew up singing and playing music together and remained close as adults, avoiding the petty jealousies that often ensnare siblings engaged in similar careers.“When Lucy was 16, I envied her hourglass figure,” Joanna Simon told The Toronto Star in 1985. “When Carly first became successful, I envied her first $200,000 check. But those feelings lasted for 20 minutes, and I didn’t dwell on them. I knew it was a given in the operatic world that very few achieved that kind of success. I never expected it, so I wasn’t disappointed.”Ms. Simon in “Bomarzo” with New York City Opera in 1967, the year the opera, by the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera, had its debut. She was the first to sing the role of Pantasilea, a courtesan in 16th-century Italy, in that opera. New York City OperaJoanna Elizabeth Simon was born on Oct. 20, 1936, in Manhattan, the oldest child of Richard L. Simon, a publisher and founder of Simon & Schuster, and Andrea (Heinemann) Simon, a singer and homemaker. The family lived in Manhattan and, later, the Fieldston neighborhood of the Bronx.The Simon children took to music early; Joanna could play piano at 6 years old. In high school she thought she would become an actress, though by college, at Sarah Lawrence (which Carly also later attended), she had switched to musical comedy. Then a voice coach encouraged her to consider opera.Upon graduating in 1958 with a degree in literature, she continued her opera training in Vienna, then returned to New York to start her career.Ms. Simon, who lived in Manhattan, married Gerald Walker, a novelist and editor at The New York Times Magazine, in 1976. He died in 2004. She dated Walter Cronkite until his death in 2009.In addition to her sister Carly, she is survived by her stepson, David Walker, and a step-grandson. Her brother, Peter, a photojournalist, died in 2018.Ms. Simon continued to sing professionally through the early 1980s, then gradually pulled back before retiring in 1986 to join “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS as a cultural correspondent. She won an Emmy Award in 1991 for a documentary on creativity and manic depression.Funding for arts programming at “MacNeil/Lehrer” eventually dried up, and her position was cut. Casting about for a new career, she became a real-estate broker. Within six months, she told The Times in 1997, she had sold $6 million in property. She later became a vice president of her company, Fox Residential Group.While her musical background wasn’t the key to her newfound success, she said it sometimes came in handy.“When I take customers into potential apartments, I go into the next apartment and vocalize,” she said. “If they can hear me, it’s no deal.” More

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      How to Be Medea? Summon Your Anger and Despair, and Hit the Gym.

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      Sondra Radvanovsky has taken on one of opera’s most grueling roles. “You can’t just act it,” she said. “You really have to live it.”It was intermission on a recent night at the Metropolitan Opera, and the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky was in her dressing room — eyes closed, head bowed — working to summon distant memories.Radvanovsky, who sings the title role in Luigi Cherubini’s “Medea,” was thinking of her father, and the day, more than three decades earlier, when she was 17, that she had found him dead after a heart attack at her childhood home in California. As part of her preperformance ritual, she began to recite the feelings coursing through her as she looked back: loss, abandonment, love and hatred.“He’s here with me,” she said, looking at her father’s driver’s license, which she had placed on a piano, not far from a pouch containing her mother’s ashes.The moment of reflection was all part of her efforts to channel the pain and despair from her life into “Medea,” a tour-de-force opera in which her character, the vengeful sorceress, commits a series of dark and disturbing acts, including murdering her own children.“You can’t just act it,” she said. “You really have to live it.”“Medea,” which opened the Met’s season and will be broadcast to movie theaters around the world on Saturday as part of the company’s Live in HD series, has emerged as a career-defining performance for Radvanovsky, 53, who has won praise for her intense and eerie portrayal.Radvanovsky as Medea, on opening night of the Met’s fall season.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesShe has approached the role — one of the most demanding in the repertory — with focus and purpose, adding boxing sessions with a personal trainer to build stamina and strength, and rehearsals with her vocal coach to ensure her singing remains warm and resonant throughout the three-hour opera, during which she rarely has a break.“Medea” has also proved to be defining on a personal level for Radvanovsky, offering cathartic escape from a trying period in her life: Her mother died in January, and she separated from her husband of 21 years in February.“It’s been very therapeutic for me,” she said. “The rage, the sadness, the depression, the loneliness — I’m unpacking these emotions and feelings in my own life, and onstage.”David McVicar, the director of “Medea,” said he felt Radvanovsky had found a way to draw on her pain without being overpowered by it.“She was able to channel that energy, rather than allowing it to destroy her,” he said. “She was able to turn it into a character, she was able to get it out, to express it, to make some art out of those difficult emotions.”He added: “Weirdly, playing a role like Medea, I think, has been really healthy for her. It’s cathartic.”The idea of tackling “Medea” came in 2017, when Radvanovsky sang the title character in the Met’s production of Bellini’s “Norma.” Her vocal coach, Anthony Manoli, suggested she spend some time looking at “Medea,” and she began to notice similarities with “Norma.” She said she thought that it would be a natural next challenge, both emotionally and vocally.“It’s in the same vein,” she said. “I find it like bel canto on steroids.”Soon, she was discussing the idea with McVicar, a frequent collaborator, and Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager.Radvanovsky with her trainer, Jason Lee. “The singing part has to be second nature,” she said. “The rest of the apparatus is what you really have to focus on. What we do is very athletic.”George Etheredge for The New York TimesGelb said that he had been impressed by Radvanovsky’s mastery of the dramatic Italian repertoire. In addition to “Norma,” she had performed, to wide acclaim, Donizetti’s Tudor operas at the Met in 2016, a bravura feat that Beverly Sills made famous in the 1970s at New York City Opera.“If any other singer had asked me” about “Medea,” he said, “I would have probably not have responded as positively.”He added, “My instinct was when she said she wanted to do it that we should do it, knowing that it’s a real tour de force for a singer.”Even with the Met’s support, Radvanovsky knew she was signing up for one of the biggest challenges of her career.The opera has a daunting legacy. Maria Callas defined the role of Medea in the 1950s with a series of seminal recordings, and her interpretation still looms large. And it’s a physically exhausting undertaking: Medea does not leave the stage once she enters, about 40 minutes into the first act, then is given subtle high notes, expansive arias and an abundance of passages that demand both nuance and power.“It is vocally herculean,” Radvanovsky said.The turmoil in her personal life added to the difficulties. The death of her mother, who had Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia, left Radvanovsky depressed and lonely.“I knew that it was going to be hard,” she said, “but I didn’t know it was going to be almost insurmountable.”The dissolution of her marriage was also a shock. In the aftermath, she felt uncertain as she began exploring her own independence for the first time in decades. She also underwent a physical transformation, losing about 40 pounds.Radvanovsky, who has to stalk the stage and writhe, showed off her kneepads at a dress rehearsal. Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesAs she prepared for the demands of the eight-run performance of “Medea” at the Met, she began personal training sessions with a focus on strengthening her core muscles.In between boxing and bench-pressing at a downtown Manhattan gym recently, Radvanovsky said she was often exhausted for the entire day after a performance, and noted the bruises on her legs. She must writhe and stalk the stage in an unwieldy dress and sing in a variety of supine positions.“The singing part has to be second nature,” she said. “The rest of the apparatus is what you really have to focus on. What we do is very athletic.”On opening night last month, she was intensely focused. In the moments before the performance, she said she decided to “open Pandora’s box” and allow herself to experience the trauma of her life more deeply. It was the first time in her career that she could not recall anything about the performance aside from her entrance and exit.“I really felt I was Medea,” she said. “I didn’t see an audience. I just saw the people onstage.”Critics applauded her energy and intensity, some commenting that she seemed unfazed by the demands of the role.“Giving her all in a writhing, high-note-hurling take on the spurned sorceress of Greek myth, pacing herself cannily and commanding at full cry, Radvanovsky would have deserved credit simply for showing up and taking on one of opera’s most daunting vocal and dramatic challenges,” Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times’s classical music critic, wrote in a review.Her recent success has led to talk of future engagements at the Met. Gelb said he and Radvanovsky were discussing several possibilities, including three operas by Puccini — “Turandot,” “La Fanciulla del West” and a return to “Tosca” — as well as Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda.”In her dressing room after a recent performance, Radvanovsky was energetic, standing at a sink as she used shaving cream to wash fake blood off her hands. She said she felt uplifted knowing that her performance had resonated with thousands of people.“It’s such an emotional role, and it’s an emotional time for me,” she said. “I feel a sense of relief.” More

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      From the Underworld to Our World: An Opera About Frida and Diego

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      “I hope the exit is joyful — and I hope never to return.” Frida Kahlo confided these remarks to her diary in 1954, just a few days before making her final exit.In a new opera, “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego” (“The Last Dream of Frida and Diego”), the composer Gabriela Lena Frank and librettist Nilo Cruz imagine Kahlo overcoming her reluctance to return from beyond. She is summoned back on the Day of the Dead with a mission: to escort her husband, Diego Rivera, to the underworld. What lures her is the prospect of being given a chance to paint once more.“Sueño,” the debut opera by Frank, 50, has had a long road to the stage. In 2007, she was invited by the Arizona Opera artistic director Joel Revzen to write a work. He suggested the Mexican painter‌ Kahlo as an ideal topic. It resonated with her immediately.“On a personal level, the fact that Frida is a multiracial woman of color with a disability is something I can really relate to,” Frank said in a recent video interview, referring to her heritage — Peruvian-Chinese on her mother’s side, Lithuanian-Jewish on her father’s — as well as her history of hearing loss and Graves’ disease. “She lived this rich, full life that any able bodied, non-disadvantaged person would love to be able to live. And she did so through some very dangerous times in world history.”The commission from Arizona Opera fell through. But in the meantime, Frank established herself as a significant American composer, winning the Latin Grammy Award for best contemporary classical composition in 2009.Frida Kahlo’s “The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and Señor Xólotl” from 1949, which depicts Rivera as a child, embraced by Kahlo and by an earth goddess.The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art and the Vergel Foundation; Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New YorkWhen the “Sueño” project was revived, San Diego Opera’s general director, David Bennett, took the lead. In 2015, he convinced San Francisco Opera to come onboard as a co-producer, securing the support needed to bring “Sueño” to the stage. Now, after further pandemic delays, the work will premiere at San Diego Opera on Oct. 29, with San Francisco’s production coming in June.The material is well-trodden — Kahlo’s life and work have inspired films, books, dance and Robert Xavier Rodríguez’s musical theater-tinged opera “Frida” (1991) — but Frank and Cruz determined from the outset to take a novel approach to it. Instead of dramatizing Kahlo’s physical and emotional torments and her notoriously tempestuous relationship with Rivera realistically, they embed these biographical details in the mythic context of a Day of the Dead ritual. Motifs from their paintings are integral to the story — as is the act of painting itself.“I thought: Let’s do something different,” said Cruz, 62, recalling the first time he and Frank met to discuss the project. Frank had gravitated toward Cruz, a Cuban American playwright and poet, after reading his “Anna in the Tropics,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2003. “It looked like a libretto,” she said, “with monologues that could obviously be arias and lots of witty banter with a great sense of rhythm that composers can get into.”Thus began a collaboration that has shaped the development of the careers of these two artists. Over the course of the opera’s prolonged incubation, the pair have worked on about a dozen projects, from a brief choral piece about the assassination of the poet Federico García Lorca to “Conquest Requiem,” an oratorio inspired by the complex, contradictory legacy of the Nahua woman Malinche and her role in Cortés’s war against the Aztecs.And the long postponement of “Sueño” had its upside. “The opera is different for having this long relationship,” Frank said.Sketches by the costume designer Eloise Kazan; above, Frida. Eloise KazanAnd, here, Catrina. Eloise KazanA rendering of a “Sueño” set, by the scenic designer Jorge Ballina.Jorge BallinaWhen they started to work on it, Frank played samples of her music for Cruz, including “Requiem for a Magical America: El Día de los Muertos” (2006), a “folk requiem” ballet originally scored for band and dancers, and “La Llorona,” a viola concerto about death and the afterlife. Cruz found these pieces so evocative that he decided to use the Mexican folk tradition of the Day of the Dead to anchor the opera.“What I love about that idea is that we go into a mythic landscape that is bigger than life,” he said. “I think those are the brushstrokes that an opera needs.”‌The Spanish-language libretto ‌he wrote uses the Day of the Dead to enact a reversal of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice — a myth central to the history of opera itself. Frida crosses the threshold from the underworld to the living for the single day allotted and guides the ailing Diego back with her as he accepts his mortality.The opera is replete with references to the pre-Columbian Mexican culture and folklore that so profoundly inspired Kahlo and Rivera. The realm where the departed souls reside is depicted as Mictlan, the Aztec underworld. Access back to the world of the living for the Day of the Dead ritual is controlled by Catrina, a trickster figure.Catrina also serves as the mouthpiece for the wit that leavens Cruz’s poetic, magic realism-inflected text. “Nothing illustrates the Mexican sense of humor and irony toward death more than the sugar-candy skulls that are made for the festivities of the Day of the Dead,” Cruz said, “as if death were sweet to eat and it can disintegrate in our mouths.”The most surprising of the opera’s quartet of characters is a young actor named Leonardo — a countertenor role — who impersonates Greta Garbo for a fan, whom Leonardo crosses over from Mictlan to visit every year.Leonardo embodies the world of art, which coexists with the worlds of the living and of the dead. The entire opera is structured around the passage among these three worlds, which are separate yet also connected. Frank said she set out to create “evocative soundscapes so that the audience is very clear when we enter a different phase of Frida and Diego’s story.”Frank established a musical vocabulary to conjure these worlds by assigning distinct gestures and instrumental colors to each: lush harmonies to evoke “the grandeur of the underworld beneath the moonlight, a big, night sound”; hints of folkloric music and lighter dance rhythms for the world of the living; and intimate, chamber music-like textures for the world of art.Diego Rivera’s “Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park,” at the Diego Rivera Mural Museum, in Mexico City.Fernando Llano/Associated PressFor authenticity, said Bennett from San Diego Opera, it was important to round out the creative team with Mexican artists and to hire native Spanish-speaking singers for the two leads. The mezzo-soprano Guadalupe Paz and the baritone Alfredo Daza will create the roles of Frida and Diego.The Mexican-born conductor, Roberto Kalb, who recently led the premiere of Tobias Picker’s opera “Awakenings,” admires the diversity of colors in Frank’s score, with the marimba threaded throughout as a unifying timbre. “She’s a master orchestrator and writes for the chorus as well as anyone,” he said. “It’s her first opera, but it doesn’t sound like it.”Frank’s references to Mexican music tend to be subtle and, for Kalb, “are always done elegantly, with great respect. As a Mexican, I appreciate that, because so many pieces just slap it on.”Kalb described the overarching tone of Frank’s music as “ancient spectralism” — referring to a focus on the phenomenon of sound itself, which she blends with an early-music flavor.“A timeless kind of sound is important,” Frank said. “That’s how Frida and Diego saw what they did. Yes, they were creating new art. But they were obsessed with old Mexican art and tradition.”Specific examples of their art influenced Cruz’s ideas for the dramatic structure. In “The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and Señor Xólotl,” from 1949, Kahlo depicts Rivera as a child, embraced by herself and by an earth goddess. Cruz said that from this image he derived the opera’s core concept of Kahlo helping Rivera cross over at the end of his life, three years after her death: “It is a self-portrait that celebrates the union of the Riveras, perhaps in the afterlife, or in a more idealistic and artistic world.”Rivera’s mural “Dream of a Sunday Afternoon at Alameda Central Park” (1946-47), which mingles his life story with a political history of Mexico, springs to life at the beginning of second act as the artist is shown painting it. Frida emerges from its composition to re-enter the world of the living.The director, Lorena Maza, who is from Mexico City, said that she and her design team took their cues from the two painters’ shared love of Indigenous and folk art, as well as their activism. But equally fundamental to the opera’s mise-en-scène are their differences in outlook: the intimacy of the self-portraits that figure so prominently in Kahlo’s work — “each one a battle against pain and disintegration” — and the social realism of Rivera’s epic murals.“Mainly what we bring to the table is the Mexican view of the story,” Maza said. “What Anglo-Saxon culture knows about the Día de los Muertos, or about Frida and Diego, is a bit different from how we live it. We want to avoid the folkloric, cliché version of this celebration and of these two artists. For us, these are very close, personal characters who have been with us since we were children and who both created a Mexican visual identity for us.”The opera’s aim, suggested by the final lines of the chorus of departed souls, is to invite us to enter into the world of Frida and Diego, to erase the borderlines between the real and the imagined:“Life is briefbut the light will followthe strokes of your paintbrush.From your paintings emerge,an anthem of sun,the glory of your gaze.” More

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      Jakub Hrusa Set to Lead Royal Opera House

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      The young Czech conductor will replace Antonio Pappano, who is heading to the London Symphony Orchestra.Jakub Hrusa leading the New York Philharmonic at David Geffen Hall, in New York, in 2019.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesLONDON — Jakub Hrusa, a rising Czech conductor, on Tuesday was named the music director of the Royal Opera House in London, one of the highest-profile positions in opera.Hrusa, 41, who has been the chief conductor of the Bamberg Symphony in Germany since 2016, will take on the role in September 2025, replacing Antonio Pappano, who announced last year that he was leaving to become the chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra after a successful 20-year tenure at the opera house.There has long been speculation in London’s opera world over who would replace Pappano. Neil Fisher, a critic for the Times of London, rounded up a dozen contenders last year, including Edward Gardner, a former music director at English National Opera, and Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, who, until recently, led the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Hrusa was not on the list. But the Czech, who is also the principal guest conductor of the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, where Pappano is the principal conductor, has long received praise.When Hrusa made his New York Philharmonic debut, in 2017, the critic Anthony Tommasini, in The New York Times, wrote: “With his sweeping arm gestures and choreographic swiveling, Mr. Hrusa is a very animated conductor.” He added, “His approach worked, judging by the plush, enveloping sounds and impressive execution he drew from the Philharmonic players in an auspicious debut.”In a highlight at this year’s Salzburg Festival, Hrusa led a breathless rendition of Janacek’s “Kat’a Kabanova,” directed by Barrie Kosky.Critics have also praised Hrusa’s two performances at the Royal Opera House: a 2018 production of Bizet’s “Carmen,” also directed by Kosky, and a run of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” this spring. In The Times of London, Fisher wrote that Hrusa’s conducting of “Lohengrin” “cannily distills the eeriest sonorities of the score, highlighting its bleak beauty.”Hrusa is not the first relatively lesser known option to become the opera house’s music director. When Pappano took the job, in 2002, he came from La Monnaie in Brussels and had little reputation in London at the time.In a news release, Hrusa, who grew up in Brno, the Czech city where Janacek lived, said he was thrilled to accept the position. “I have always dreamt about a long-term relationship with a house where one can reach the highest standards in opera, and I realized very quickly that I adored the whole team of artists and staff at Covent Garden,” he said.Oliver Mears, the director of the Royal Opera, said in the release that everyone at the house had “been hugely impressed by not only his superlative music and theater-making but also by the generosity and warmth of his personality.”On Tuesday, the Royal Opera House detailed some of Hrusa’s early engagements in the new role. In the 2027-28 season, he will conduct Wagner’s four-part “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” with Kosky directing.Pappano described the all-encompassing role of music director last year in an interview with The New York Times: “With all the competition that there is for people’s attention, for fund-raising, even for survival for classical music institutions,” he said, “the job has become much more than just conducting.”A looming challenge for the Royal Opera could be a cut in its budget. The British government is slashing the amount of funding it gives to cultural institutions in London by a total 15 percent, so that it can give more money to arts organization in poorer regions. Last year, the government gave the Royal Opera House £35.8 million, or about $40 million, equivalent to 43 percent of the house’s total income, including for the Royal Ballet. An announcement on future funding is expected this month. More