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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

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      In New York, Masks Will Not Be Required at the Opera or Ballet

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      Many arts groups, worried about alienating older patrons, have maintained strict rules. Now “the time has come to move on,” one leader said.Masks are no longer required in New York City schools, gyms, taxis and most theaters. But a night at the opera or the ballet still involves putting on a proper face covering.That will soon change. Several of the city’s leading performing arts organizations — including the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic and New York City Ballet — announced on Monday that masks would now be optional, citing demands from audience members and a recent decline in coronavirus cases.“The time has come to move on,” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in an interview.The Met, Carnegie Hall and the Philharmonic will end mask requirements on Oct. 24, along with Film at Lincoln Center and the Juilliard School. The David H. Koch Theater, home to City Ballet, will follow on Nov. 1. Two venues on the Lincoln Center campus, the Mitzi E. Newhouse and Claire Tow theaters, will maintain their mandates.The decision is a milestone for classical, dance and opera institutions, which had been among the most resistant to relaxing mask rules — wary of alienating older patrons, who represent a large share of ticket buyers. As coronavirus infections have declined and masks have vanished from many other settings, arts groups are feeling pressure from audiences to make a change.At the Met, for example, only about a quarter of ticket buyers said in a survey last month that they would feel uncomfortable attending a performance if masks were optional. Over the summer, that number had been close to 70 percent.“People’s attitudes are changing,” Gelb said. He hoped that relaxing the rules would help make the Met more accessible to “younger audiences who really don’t want to wear a mask.” With the elimination of the mandate, the company will also reopen its bars, many of which have remained closed during the pandemic.Proof of vaccination, as well as masks, were required to gain entry to many venues starting last year, when arts organizations returned to the stage after a long shutdown. Over the summer, however, as hospitalizations and deaths declined, many groups began to ease their rules. Broadway theaters (with a few exceptions) dropped the vaccine requirement on May 1, and the mask mandate on July 1.While most classical, opera and dance groups eliminated the vaccine requirement this fall, many kept in place strict mask mandates on the advice of medical advisers. The question of masks posed a challenge for many groups; they risked alienating some ticket buyers, no matter how they proceeded.At the Met, stage managers have delivered announcements from the stage before each performance reminding audiences to keep masks on for the duration of opera. At Carnegie Hall, ushers have checked each row and called out people who were not wearing masks.Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said that the hall kept mask rules in place this fall because of lingering concerns about the virus among some medical advisers and audience members. But it decided to make a change after medical advisers said it could operate safely without masks, and after complaints from the audience were growing.“Ushers were finding it actually quite difficult because a lot of people were very annoyed having to still wear masks when in most of their lives they’re no longer doing so,” Gillinson said in an interview.By eliminating the mask rules, arts leaders hope they can help restore a sense of normalcy at a time when many groups are struggling to recover from the turmoil of the pandemic. While live performance is flourishing once again in New York and across the United States, audiences have been slow to return.Deborah Borda, the president and chief executive of the Philharmonic, said in an interview that the mask rules could change if the virus emerged as a deadly threat once again.“This is an ever-evolving situation,” she said. “We will stay on top of whatever the current medical protocol dictates.”But for now, she said, it is time to change focus.“We feel it’s important that we do our part to help the city return to a much more normal state of affairs,” she said, “and to encourage people to come back into the city and to reinvigorate the economy.” More

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      Review: A Tenor Claims His Place Among the Met Opera’s Stars

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      Allan Clayton brings pathos and terror, along with energy where it’s often missing, to a revival of Britten’s “Peter Grimes.”Benjamin Britten’s first, masterly opera “Peter Grimes” thrives on ambiguity — about the nature of abusive behavior, the sources of compassion, the chicken-and-egg relationship between a tortured psyche and a small town’s small-mindedness.But one thing, at least, was clear when this work returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Sunday afternoon: The company has a star on its hands in the tenor Allan Clayton.An established singer abroad, Clayton made his Met debut just this year, tireless and tormented in the title role of Brett Dean’s “Hamlet.” Back several months later, he is by far the high point of the company’s “Grimes” revival. Nimble, with a repertory that includes Handel alongside Kurt Weill’s “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,” he is bound for a rich future at the house if it will have him.Clayton’s Grimes stands apart not only in his appearance — unkempt, with windswept hair and a wiry beard, where his fellow inhabitants of the Borough look uniformly tidy, as though following a dress code — but also in his actions. He whips his head around with widened, piercing eyes, never at peace and paranoid about how others perceive him. Audibly and visibly doomed, his tone conveys bitterness and pain within the same melodic line as his face betrays fits of rage and shock at his own behavior. By the climactic third act, his voice exemplifies the essence of opera as a theatrical extremity of expression: His mad scene, a patchwork monologue of chest-pounding and stylized ugliness, is a thing of terror and wonder.His performance, reminiscent of Jon Vickers’s fearless benchmark recording from the 1970s, is nearly enough to breathe sustainable life into a production that often lacks it. John Doyle’s staging, from 2008 — which unfolds on a unit set of towering, shabby wooden walls and windows — is showing its age as it creakily moves forward and backward throughout the opera’s two and a half hours.Doyle’s signature approach — what has been called minimalist, though he prefers “essentialist” — was born in modest black box spaces, and eventually scaled to Tony Award-winning takes on Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” and “Company” on Broadway. His “Grimes” is a relic of that time but not as successful in 2022. His stripped-down aesthetic can reveal the heart of a work, but it relies on the detailed, well-rehearsed performances you won’t get with the short turnaround of a Met revival. So cast members tend to sing with little nuance at the audience, rather than to one another, and mostly while standing in place as they would in concert.Still, Clayton wasn’t alone in transcending the production. Nicholas Carter, who also made his Met debut conducting “Hamlet,” here led “Grimes” with drive, precision and a painterliness that lends the work the cohesive shape of a tone poem. His interludes evoked dark, oceanic immensity; violent swerves and surges; and the emerging promise of a dawning sun. They were a source of theater where the staging came up short.Dynamic, too, was Nicole Car as the widowed schoolmistress with hopeless belief in Grimes’s salvation. Car’s soprano, with lyrical grace at the top of her range and grave urgency at the bottom, was on Sunday a wellspring of calm and pathos. In the Prologue, her tone blended with Clayton’s gruff beauty for a duet of unsettling harmony.And, despite moving as a unit, then remaining static for long stretches, the Met’s chorus was compelling as the chattering, destructive residents of the Borough. Its members gave horrifying voice to mob mentality, complementing Clayton’s unraveling in Act III with a chilling climax of their own. Occasionally emerging from the crowd were other standouts: Justin Austin’s lively Ned Keene; Patrick Carfizzi’s authoritative Swallow; Michaela Martens’s wickedly comical Mrs. Sedley.Less persuasive were the mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves as Auntie, in a performance more straightforwardly musical than characterful; and the bass-baritone Adam Plachetka as Balstrode, a major, complicated role that didn’t make much of an impression on Sunday. His voice beautiful but consistently bland, Plachetka gave his fateful directions to Grimes at the end of Act III — to take his boat out to sea and sink it — with a woodenness that threatened to flatten the moment.That is, if it weren’t for Clayton’s response. Silent, he simply accepted his sentence with one last look back over his shoulder: an aching final aria performed with only his eyes.Peter GrimesThrough Nov. 12 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Review: Berlin Takes Wagner’s Approach to Staging the ‘Ring’

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      All four parts of Wagner’s epic were presented within a week, in a new production by Dmitri Tcherniakov inspired by the work’s experimental roots.BERLIN — Lately, the German capital has been looking more like a city to the south: Bayreuth.At least in one respect. The Berlin State Opera, in mounting Wagner’s four-part “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” has taken Bayreuth’s approach — begun by the composer himself — of presenting it all within a week. Most houses build to that marathon slowly, sometimes over the course of several years, but Berlin has unveiled an entire production at once, with the first cycle ending Sunday night.It’s an enormous undertaking — 15 hours of music to be staged and rehearsed by a couple of hundred performers — especially for a busy repertory house like the State Opera. But this new production, a myth-busting and subtly provocative take by Dmitri Tcherniakov, was designed for a special occasion: the 80th birthday of Daniel Barenboim, the company’s long-reigning music director and a titan of Berlin culture.Barenboim’s health, though, has deteriorated in recent months, and he withdrew from the premiere. In his stead came Christian Thielemann, one of very few conductors to have led all 10 of Wagner’s mature operas at Bayreuth. He hasn’t much experience with the State Opera’s orchestra, the Staatskapelle Berlin, but after his first “Ring” with them, he suddenly seems like a worthy contender for its podium when Barenboim eventually steps down.The Staatskapelle executed Thielemann’s vision for the “Ring” — a long crescendo built over the four operas — with sensitivity and skill. His tempos, slower than usual, tested the stamina of singers, but he also had a keen sense of balance, scaling his sound to match theirs onstage. This was an often quiet ring, a near opposite of Georg Solti’s famous (and ever-elevated) studio recording from the mid-20th century with the Vienna Philharmonic. It did, though, reward patient listeners, with Thielemann simultaneously shaping the score on the level of scenes and the immense entirety.Robert Watson as Siegmund and Vida Mikneviciute as Sieglinde in “Die Walküre.”Monika RittershausHe also had a gift for illustrating the representative moments in Wagner’s score: sheets of rain in the opening of “Die Walküre,” or the idyllic forest murmurs at the heart of “Siegfried.” Those, as it happened, were about the only glimpses of nature in Tcherniakov’s “Ring,” which not only demythologizes the work — like the contemporary-dress family drama presented at Bayreuth last summer — but also isolates its characters in a world so human, it’s constructed by their hands and cut off from the outside world.Talk to anyone who saw this “Ring,” and you’re unlikely to hear the same response twice. It’s telling, and satisfying, that the State Opera auditorium was divided in boos and cheers for Tcherniakov during the curtain call for “Götterdämmerung” on Sunday. There didn’t seem to be a passive listener in the house.Wagner’s sprawling, dramaturgically imperfect work — a multigenerational power struggle among gods, creatures and men — has been interpretive fodder for nearly 150 years. In his book “The Perfect Wagnerite,” George Bernard Shaw argued that the “Ring” was a Marxist epic; so did the director Patrice Chéreau in his benchmark centennial staging at Bayreuth.Tcherniakov offers an original reading on the “Ring,” one that departs severely from Wagner but with a story just as rich — unfurling in a challenging, at times obtuse production that defies quick judgment and demands curiosity. The plot doesn’t map onto the libretto, yet like the text, it is many things at once: commentaries on the dangers of playing god; the limits of knowledge and science; the evolution of sexual politics; generational conflict; even the ways in which a renovation can ruin historical architecture. Funny and aching, ironic and horrifying, it is, however irreverent, loyal to the “Ring” as a work of novelistic complexity.Michael Volle as Wotan with Anja Kampe as Brünnhilde in the final scene of “Die Walküre.”Monika RittershausHere, the four operas unfold within the walls of a Cold War-era research center called E.S.C.H.E. (Esche is the German word for ash tree, which in Wagner’s text is mutilated in the name of power, and withers in parallel to the fall of the gods.) It’s a vast facility; the curtain is a blueprint of the third floor, which alone contains 185 rooms. The production’s program refers to Wagner’s lifetime as a golden age of experimentation — sometimes world changing, sometimes perverse. So were the post-World War II years of arms races and scientific pipe dreams, when the story of this “Das Rheingold” begins.The kind of experimentation that takes place at E.S.C.H.E. becomes clear within the opening minutes, in which people gather in a lecture hall to watch a video (by Alexey Poluboyarinov) of a liquid being injected into a brain, stunting neural pathways as they’re being formed. That’s the least of the unnatural acts to come.Wotan, the ruler of the gods — Michael Volle, the production’s high point as a commanding baritone and actor of remarkable range — oversees a kingdom of inquiry into the human mind. Subjects undergo stress tests or are manipulated into love and violence for the sake of observation. In a world where everything is an experiment, nothing emerges as reliably real.The characters visibly age over the four operas. By “Siegfried,” Stephan Rügamer, left, as Mime, and Volle appear decades older than in “Das Rheingold.”Monika RittershausThe ring is not a physical object so much as the idea of knowledge as power. Scenes that would typically be highlights of stage magic — the crossing of the Rainbow Bridge, the blaze that surrounds a sleeping Brünnhilde, the flooding of the Rhine — don’t exist as such in Tcherniakov’s staging, except with unnecessarily winking substitutes. And there isn’t such a high body count; most characters make it to the end of this “Ring” alive.Tcherniakov, as usual, manages details on a level rarely seen in opera. Most impressively, his characters perform to each other rather than at the audience; with no sound, the action could still communicate its essentials. The soprano Vida Mikneviciute, mighty yet fragile as Freia in “Das Rheingold” then Sieglinde in “Die Walküre,” wears years of emotional and physical abuse in her facial expressions and wincing reflexes; Lauri Vasar’s Günther, a boss made into a cuckold in front of his colleagues in “Götterdämmerung,” looks back at one of them with an uncomfortable, sympathetic smile; Claudia Mahnke’s Fricka is a desperate wife who, resigned to a bitter relationship with Wotan, gestures cruelly for him to keep the pen she lends him to sign away Siegmund’s fate.Elsewhere, the cast performs with laugh-out-loud physical comedy, especially Rolando Villazón, however effortful in the unlikely role of Loge. This “Ring” would be an office sitcom if its subtext weren’t so appalling. Tcherniakov traces E.S.C.H.E.’s existence over a half-century or so, beginning in the 1970s and reflected in Elena Zaytseva’s grounding costumes. The place is rotten from the start, seemingly built with dirty money by Fasolt (Mika Kares, who returns in “Götterdämmerung” as a wickedly resonant Hagen) and Fafner (Peter Rose, who comes back in “Siegfried” not as a dragon, but as a psych patient in a straight jacket).Andreas Schager as Siegfried, the ultimate test subject, with Victoria Randem as the forest bird.Monika RittershausThat original sin serves the plot less than it normally would; more important is Alberich’s theft of “gold.” Later scenes suggest that he is an employee at the center, but one who submits to a stress test and breaks under pressure, violently removing the sensors from his head and running out of the lab with as much data as he can carry. He — Johannes Martin Kränzle, a characterful foil to Volle’s Wotan — forms his own dominion of research in the subbasement.Wotan turns out to be the supreme schemer, though, rather than on an equal level with his rival as written: his “Light-Alberich” to the dwarf’s “Black-Alberich.” By “Götterdämmerung,” Alberich — aging throughout the cycle like everyone else — seems to have died, existing only in the mind of Hagen, whereas Wotan appears in all four operas, instead of the usual first three. His cameo at the end, during Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene, is where Tcherniakov’s production snaps into focus; much of her monologue, delivered by the soprano Anja Kampe with equal parts anguish and revelation, is an indictment of Wotan sung directly at him, in a reversal of the final scene of “Die Walküre.”It’s almost as though, like Wagner, Tcherniakov started there, with Siegfried’s death, and worked backward. If you follow that thread, you see his “Ring” as a series of missteps and misplaced priorities. The first two operas exist to set up Wotan’s ultimate test subject: Siegfried, born in the center and raised under constant surveillance. And throughout, Erda (Anna Kissjudit, as assertive as Volle) appears at pivotal moments, along with her three Norns, dispassionate witnesses to Wotan’s folly.Not everything adds up. As is often the case with Tcherniakov, you get the feeling that he ran out of time. He introduces an actual ring in “Götterdämmerung,” but because it serves a traditional purpose as a symbol of fidelity, it doesn’t make sense as an object of everyone’s obsession; also made literal are the sword Nothung and Wotan’s spear, their powers mysterious and irrelevant in a world without magic.Kampe with Schager and Volle. During Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene, she delivers the monologue to Wotan as an indictment.Monika RittershausBut where successful, Tcherniakov’s approach is thoughtful, if rending. He shows how, from the 1970s to the present, women have risen from casual workplace cruelty to precarious power; but also how abusive relationships will always take form in ways like Brünnhilde’s neglect by Siegfried (a tireless, crowd-pleasing Andreas Schager), which drives her to depressive behavior and possibly alcoholism. And Tcherniakov demonstrates, through his own scenic design and lighting by Gleb Filshtinsky, how easily history can be taken for granted or erased, whether Wotan’s legacy or the architecture of E.S.C.H.E.Because so few characters die, they are left to live with their mistakes, and perhaps to perpetuate them for as long as the center remains open. But all “Ring” productions should have an element of renewal, and here that is granted to Brünnhilde, sung by Kampe with a heroic but smaller sound than other sopranos in the role. Instead of greeting the flames of Siegfried’s funeral pyre, she walks out of the facility with a bag in hand. On the empty stage’s back wall, Tcherniakov projects Wagner’s Schopenhauer-influenced version of the Immolation Scene that he never set, in which Brünnhilde describes fleeing from the world of delusion, enlightened and having seen “the world end.”She’s tempted by Erda, who flaps the wings of a toy bird in her hand. But Brünnhilde won’t be fooled. She leaves it all behind, pulling the curtain down behind her — without the knowledge her colleagues so carelessly pursue, perhaps, but with wisdom.Der Ring des NibelungenThrough Nov. 6, then again in April, at the Berlin State Opera; staatsoper-berlin.de. More

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      The Facts and Fictions of Shostakovich’s ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’

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      The 1934 opera, revived this season at the Metropolitan Opera, stoked the ire of the Soviet state, or so the story goes. But archives tell a more interesting tale.Dmitri Shostakovich’s career is the most deeply politicized in Russian music history, perhaps in all music history. Arguably his most politicized composition is his alluring, macabre opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.”“Lady Macbeth,” which is being revived at the Metropolitan Opera through Oct. 21, was condemned in the Soviet press in 1936, two years after its successful premiere in Leningrad. The opera was performed in that city, now called St. Petersburg, some 50 times in 1934, and it had been presented in Cleveland, New York and Philadelphia, along with Buenos Aires, London, Prague, Stockholm and Zurich. But the hammer came down. Shostakovich was censured by the Stalinist regime and feared for his career, as well as his safety.Or at least that’s how the story goes. But the archives of Moscow’s theaters tell a more interesting tale, I learned, as do fortuitously published documents from Russia’s federal archives and private holdings.“Lady Macbeth” is based on an 1865 story by Nikolai Leskov, as adapted by Shostakovich and Alexander Preys. The title character, a childless merchant’s wife, Katerina Izmailova, lives grimly in a grim burg. (Mtsensk is an actual place near the city of Oryol, known in the 19th century for its crafts. It’s not far from Moscow by Russian standards, less than four hours by train.) To escape her surroundings, and to enact vengeance on her besotted, cheating husband, Katerina takes Sergey, a laborer at a flour mill, as her lover after he sexually assaults her.When the relationship is discovered by her father-in-law, she feeds him poisoned mushrooms. And when her husband discovers his dead father, Katerina and Sergey strangle him. Katerina and Sergey are condemned to a remote penal colony. On the long trek to Siberia, Sergey takes up with another woman, Sonyetka. Katerina subsequently drowns Sonyetka and herself in the Volga River. Things could have been worse: Leskov’s story, unlike Shostakovich’s opera, includes infanticide.Svetlana Sozdateleva, left, and Brandon Jovanovich in the work’s current revival at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.Evan Zimmerman/Metropolitan OperaShostakovich takes Katerina’s side in this ghastliness, pushing his opera beyond the bounds of theatrical convention to make a point about amoral responses to amorality. Lowbrow, “popular” genres represent the opera’s execrable characters. Shostakovich flagrantly abuses these genres to allegorize how most of the men in his opera treat most of the women. Katerina is assigned poignant salon arias and pensive recitatives that bear the contours of folk song. Even she, however, does not escape grotesque caricature. At the end of the first act, she describes her loneliness in a fashion that bears, at the start, elements of the Letter Scene in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin.” But Katerina can’t read or write, so the point of reference is skewed.Her singing increases in power, morphing from a Romantic mode to unbalanced expressionism undercut by the horrible cancan accompanying her rape. The brass section explodes, the drums attack, the strings squeal, then everything falls apart in postcoital detumescence. The “pornophony,” to quote a critic for The New York Sun who heard the music in 1935, highlights the body’s plumbing: Toilet plungers serve as trombone mutes.Opera is replete with suffering heroines, and one could argue that Katerina avenges not only what she has had to put with, but also what the heroines of the past have had to put up with, setting to rights the bad treatment of her soprano sisters. Whereas, for example, the protagonists of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” and Puccini’s “Tosca” achieve a state of grace through martyrdom, Katerina achieves payback. Spiritual emancipation, Shostakovich insists like a good Soviet, is a bourgeois decadent concept.That message was lost between 1934, when the opera premiered, and 1936, when it was denounced. The trouble for Shostakovich began on Dec. 26, 1935, with a production on the Bolshoi Theater’s second stage. The action unfolded in front of Katerina’s rickety wooden house, with the sloped floors and exterior staircase collapsed into a platform for the final scene. The rape was not shown, only heard. Afterward, Sergey climbed down from the window to find Boris, who beat him senseless. The music was earsplitting, the brass supplemented to fill the 2,100-seat hall.In a special, concrete-reinforced box sat Joseph Stalin, general secretary of the Communist Party and self-declared opera lover. He attended a performance on Jan. 26, 1926, with Vyacheslav Molotov, the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, and two other aides. The din was too much for them. They left before the end.At the same time, another production of “Lady Macbeth” had long been running up the street from the Bolshoi at the Nemirovich-Danchenko Theater. This production took the name of the heroine: “Katerina Izmailova.” The staging was tightly choreographed and highly claustrophobic, defined by low ceilings, heavy furniture, handmade wallpaper, dark rugs, bricks, mortar and grime. The final scene bunched up a group of convicts in bedraggled derangement, some looking menacing, others injured and hopeless. According to the theater’s lore, Stalin was supposed to have taken in this more restrained, cerebral production, but his chauffeur took him to the Bolshoi instead, since that’s where Stalin typically heard opera.A calculated takedown of the opera in the press centered on Shostakovich’s desire to “tickle the perverted tastes of bourgeois audiences with its twitching, screeching, neurasthenic music.” via Nemirovich-Danchenko TheaterStalin relied on culture, along with the secret police and prison camps, to enforce his rule. Music let him down, however. It had become too discordant, experimental and inaccessible. At the end of 1935, Stalin authorized the establishment of an organization called the Committee on Arts Affairs. It was led by Platon Kerzhentsev, a 54-year-old career propagandist, censor and Lenin hagiographer. Kerzhentsev’s task was to correct culture, which meant correcting the top composer in the land of the Soviets: Shostakovich.On Jan. 28 and Feb. 6, 1936, Shostakovich was the subject of a pair of unsigned reviews — not editorials, as is often claimed — published in Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper. One concerned “Lady Macbeth,” the other “The Bright Stream,” a ballet that Stalin had seen just before the opera. (The famous title of the first of the reviews, “Muddle Instead of Music,” was a Pravda meme, followed by a blasting of a children’s artist called “Scribbles Instead of Drawings.”)Their author was an opportunistic journalist named David Zaslavsky, a former bundist (Jewish socialist political movement member) eager to demonstrate fealty to the Party and to Stalin. Shostakovich knew him and probably found out that he had written the reviews. Zaslavsky used what he was paid for them to settle his Communist Party membership dues.When Stalin exited the Bolshoi performance of the opera in disgust, Kerzhentsev launched an arrow at his rival Alexander Shcherbakov, the first secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers. Shcherbakov had praised the original Leningrad production of “Lady Macbeth” in a letter to Stalin. Stalin redirected that letter to Kerzhentsev, whose arrow struck Shostakovich.Zaslavsky’s takedown of “Lady Macbeth” is vulgarly imaginative, centering on Shostakovich’s desire to “tickle the perverted tastes of bourgeois audiences with its twitching, screeching, neurasthenic music.” It “quacks, hoots, pants and gasps for breath in order to present the love scenes as naturalistically as possible.” And “‘love,’” Zaslavsky added, “is smeared throughout the opera in its most vulgar form.”There are no love scenes, and the circuslike music of the Act I sexual assault is musically linked to the score’s other episodes of brutality, something Zaslavsky neglected to mention in his condemnation. Nor did he mention that “bourgeois audiences” in the United States did not hear all of the panting. It was censored, and, to accommodate conservative critics like Ruth Knowles of the Clean Amusement Association of America, the boudoir scene was concealed behind a curtain.For Stalin, Zaslavsky served his intended purpose. “Yes, I remember the article in Pravda,” he told a cultural official. “It gave the correct policy.” The journal of the Union of Soviet Composers scrambled to reprint Zaslavsky’s articles and devoted several issues to shaming Shostakovich for his “leftism.”There are conflicting accounts of Shostakovich’s reaction to the scandal. Before, Bolshoi dancers remembered him playing through the score of “The Bright Stream,” laughing like a child. After, he turned up at the theater looking for his score in a panic saying he’d do “everything they want me to.” He was frightened, but he also seemed to be offended, for himself and for Russia, hurt that his art had now to be somehow like Pravda itself — that opera, ballet and the other arts had to read in black and white.Levon Atovmyan, a Composers’ Union functionary, once recalled Shostakovich leaving Moscow on the day the scandal broke to perform a concert in Arkhangelsk. The composer received a standing ovation, then headed back to Moscow, getting drunk and playing blackjack on the train. Atovmyan’s account dispels a couple of myths, one being that the opera was banned. It wasn’t. The performance Stalin saw, the fourth in the Bolshoi run, was followed by three more on Jan. 31, Feb. 4, and Feb. 10, 1936. Then the run ended.Another myth is that Shostakovich disavowed opera. “Lady Macbeth” had indeed been conceived as the first of four operas about heroic Russian women. He went back to that plan but put it aside to begin an opera based on Leo Tolstoy’s final novel, “Resurrection.” By that time, in 1940, he had composed himself out of trouble with his Fifth Symphony, which the Soviet musical establishment praised on command. Shostakovich was too valuable to the regime to be silenced.He loved “Lady Macbeth” more than anything he composed before or after it. He dedicated it to his first wife, and it was one of only two compositions that he took with him when he was evacuated out of Leningrad at the start of World War II. He revised it in 1962 under the name “Katerina Izmailova,” excising some of the ghastliness, and it returned to the Soviet stage. Not all of the changes were a response to political demands; some reflected his matured personal attitude toward the drama.“Lady Macbeth” survived a period in which culture became the very thing that its heroine so shockingly resisted: mind-numbing, repressive parochialism. In the final scene of the revised version, after Katerina hurls herself and her rival Sonyetka into the dark waters of the Volga, a convict mutters: “Oh, why is our life so dark, terrible? Are people really born for such a life?” It’s a question for the ages.Simon Morrison teaches at Princeton University. He writes about Russian music, ballet and Stevie Nicks. More

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      Review: ‘Tosca’ Returns, Defined by Its Quiet Moments

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      Aleksandra Kurzak, moving into heavier repertoire with Puccini’s opera, played the title diva as touchingly human.When Aleksandra Kurzak, a graceful lyric soprano with impressive coloratura, released an album of surprising, heavy repertoire from the Romantic and verismo eras two years ago, she seemed to announce: Staged performances are on the way.Her Tosca arrived at the Metropolitan Opera last March, and on Tuesday, she revisited the title role of Puccini’s tragedy in David McVicar’s attractive, if stolid, production. For a singer who made her house debut in 2004, scaling Olympia’s vertiginous runs and high notes in Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann,” “Tosca” is a departure. Wagnerians and Verdians have sung it; Mozarteans, too. But an Olympia? That’s rare.On Tuesday, Kurzak’s best moments were gentle ones. Tosca, an opera singer herself, is often portrayed as a volcanic personality, a creature made for the stage whose feelings constantly threaten eruption. But Kurzak’s softly focused heroine was the kind of performer who transforms before an audience. Jealous tantrums and high moral stakes spurred her to summon fire and grit.Kurzak seemed to manipulate her otherwise silky tone to make it bigger, darker and more dramatic. It sometimes sounded swallowed and breathy. Whenever she let a more fragile sound emerge, alighting on a silvery high note or shaping throwaway lines with color and care, it was captivating. The end of her “Vissi d’arte” — when most singers are recovering from the aria’s exposed climax — was exquisitely handled.It’s unusual to remember a Tosca for the small moments instead of the big ones, but Kurzak’s approach made her Roman diva touchingly human and acutely tragic.In the orchestra pit, Carlo Rizzi also mined Puccini’s lacerating score for tenderness. Scrappy filigree accompanied the Sacristan (a characterful Patrick Carfizzi) in his fussy, officious role as the opera’s designated comic relief. The strings shivered with romance during a transitional lull in Tosca’s Act I scene with Cavaradossi. Rizzi let notes hang in the air with a hint of menace, then turned up the intensity for the score’s splashy, hair-raising torments. In Act III, he painted a dusky morning scene and signaled the nefarious business of execution to come without shortchanging either effect.Michael Fabiano lent Cavaradossi a handsome, propulsive tenor. His middle voice has consistently been gorgeous, and his stage presence kinetic, but as recently as a 2018 “Mefistofele” and a 2019 “Manon” at the Met, his high notes were unreliable. No issue there: In “Tosca,” they rang out with confidence and muscularity, capped by a dome of sound. Fabiano’s full-throttle style in “Recondita armonia” revealed the heart of a revolutionary rather than an artist; and if soft singing in his Act III solos was weak, his desperately clinging to Tosca before his execution was rending.Luca Salsi, an engrossing, casually evil Scarpia, sang in a manner more like pitched speech, pointing his voice into the hall in a way that balanced the police chief’s debonair manner and thinly veiled malice. As Spoletta, Rodell Rosel was a smarmy henchman; as Sciarrone, Christopher Job was a rugged one.McVicar’s staging is so harmless, with just enough good taste to keep detractors at bay, that it already seems like a part of the Met’s furniture, despite being only five years old. Still, with the right performers bringing a sense of intimacy to its vast canvas, it feels like a success.ToscaThrough Nov. 4, then again next spring, at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More