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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

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      Coming Soon: Met Operas Streamed Live Into Your Living Room

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      The company said it would begin offering live simulcasts this month on its website — but only for some customers.The Metropolitan Opera has over the past 16 years built a lucrative business around broadcasting operas live into movie theaters around the world, attracting an audience of millions for classics like “The Magic Flute” and “Madama Butterfly.”Now the company is hoping to build on that success: The Met announced on Monday that it would begin livestreaming some operas directly into living rooms for customers who live far from cinemas that broadcast its productions.The service, called “The Met: Live at Home,” is part of the company’s efforts to expand the audience for opera, at a time when it is grappling with financial challenges brought on by the coronavirus pandemic as well as longstanding box-office declines.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in a statement, “We wanted to make our live performances available to people who don’t have ready access to the movie theaters that carry the Met, whether you reside in the mountains of Montana or on assignment in Antarctica.”The service will be available in the United States and Canada to customers who live at a distance from movie theaters that broadcast the Met’s “Live in HD” series of operas each season; the exact distance will vary depending on the market. It will also be accessible nationwide in another 170 countries and territories where the Met does not offer live transmissions. Depending on the location, each opera will cost $10 or $20 to stream; viewers can watch the operas an unlimited number of times during a seven-day window.The Met is one of many cultural institutions experimenting with livestreaming, which became a popular way of staying connected with audiences during the pandemic, when in-person performances were curtailed. The San Francisco Opera last year began broadcasting some performances live for $27.50.The Met’s movie theater program began in 2006 and before the pandemic generated about $18 million in net profit for the Met each year.The new streaming service poses the possibility of cannibalizing some of those sales, though Gelb said using technology to limit its geographic reach would help mitigate that risk. He said the company had no plans to phase out the movie theater broadcasts, which have sold nearly 30 million tickets and are now available in about 2,000 cinemas in 50 countries.“We don’t want to replace the movie theater experience at this point,” he said. “We want to augment it.”The streaming service will be available starting on Oct. 22, when the Met begins its cinema broadcasts. (This season, 10 productions will be transmitted.) The first performance will be Luigi Cherubini’s “Medea,” which opened the Met season last week to largely positive reviews. More

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      An Opera Festival That Keeps Faith With Shutdown’s Innovations

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      Festival O, back for the first time since 2019, featured two works of dazed horror and a rare staging of Rossini’s “Otello.”PHILADELPHIA — When the pandemic goaded the performing arts to pivot to video, some institutions fared better (and more creatively) than others. Opera Philadelphia was among the most intrepid in America, commissioning a series of short films that embraced a new medium.The company produced a sober version of Tyshawn Sorey’s song cycle “Save the Boys,” as well as “The Island We Made,” a meditative nocturne by the composer Angélica Negrón, filmed by Matthew Placek and starring the drag diva Sasha Velour. The composers Courtney Bryan and Caroline Shaw contributed pieces, and Rene Orth delivered a vibrant dose of K-pop.But even, or especially, for adventurous arts groups like this one, the transition back to primarily live performance has presented a challenge: How to maintain — and even expand on — the lessons learned and experiments ventured over the past few years when returning to the kind of work made in the before times.Opera Philadelphia, once again, offers a way forward. As part of Festival O — its signature burst of productions each fall, and the first since 2019 — the company on Saturday premiered “Black Lodge,” which posited that film and live performance can productively coexist.The order of operations here was unusual: As Michael Joseph McQuilken, who wrote and directed the film element, writes in a program note, “It’s an exceedingly strange task to ‘movie a score’ … one tends to score a movie.”David T. Little’s music and Anne Waldman’s text, and even the tempos and timings, were set by the time McQuilken came on board. He wasn’t without leeway, though: Little and Waldman weren’t telling a clear story that McQuilken would need to depict, but were, rather, obliquely suggesting a grimly poetic vision of a man trapped in a post-life purgatory, reliving brutal encounters with the woman who haunts him.The music — for a rock band and amplified string quartet — embraces Little’s longstanding interest in the grittier side of pop, the dark, pounding industrial “nu metal” style of (I’ll date myself) Slipknot, Korn and System of a Down. Played live under the big screen on Saturday at the Philadelphia Film Center, this grinding score occasionally lightens for moments of mellower mournfulness. But every register, moan to scream, is handled with indefatigable goth aplomb by the charismatically wailing Timur, the film’s star and the frontman of the band, Timur and the Dime Museum.Drawing on David Lynch, William S. Burroughs and Stanley Kubrick, McQuilken’s accompaniment is a fast-cut horror-movie nightmare of ominous fluorescent-lit clinics, severed digits, screams in the desert, guns and hypodermic needles.The mezzo-soprano Kristen Choi, right, with Muyu Ruba in a raven mask in “The Raven,” based on Poe.Steven PisanoThis imagery, coupled with this sound world, evoked turn-of-the-21st-century music videos, which tended to feature starkly contrasting settings within a single piece; enigmatic or nonexistent narratives at a distance from the lyrics; luridly distorted colors; surreal staginess. There’s a reason, of course, that those music videos were three or four minutes long, as opposed to the 60-ish of “Black Lodge,” which is trippy — and wearying. (The film will stream on Opera Philadelphia’s website, at operaphila.tv, starting Oct. 21.)The theme of dazed horror at the border between life and death, past and present, continued in the festival’s production of Toshio Hosokawa’s atmospheric chamber monodrama “The Raven,” based on the classic Poe poem.“Black Lodge,” produced by Beth Morrison Projects, was presented as part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, but “The Raven” felt far more in the fringe-theater tradition. Directed by Aria Umezawa, it was a collaboration with the local performance company Obvious Agency, which provided a participatory prelude to the Hosokawa.On entering the grand old Miller Theater on Saturday, the audience was divided into groups, each of which was then led away by a performer acting as a facet of Lenore, the lost love in Poe’s poem. Heading backstage, my group’s leader played Healer Lenore, a self-help guru who used a question-and-answer session to cleanse us of daemonic energy — or at least make peace with it.The tone of this half-hour was goofy, with a recurring joke on Matt Damon’s name. Perhaps this was the point, but the scrappy clowning couldn’t have had less in common with Hosokowa’s eerie, deadly serious contemporary-Noh score, often hushed, occasionally ferocious.With the audience arranged onstage on three sides around the performers — the orchestra of 12, led by Eiki Isomura, completed the rectangle — the mezzo-soprano Kristen Choi was intense both in rasped quiet and full cry. The Lenores, including one stalking the paper-strewn playing space in a mask that was part bird, part medieval plague doctor, hovered about, but too little was done with the most obvious and elegant ghostly spectacle here: a small bunch of people in a vast empty theater.Daniela Mack as Desdemona and Khanyiso Gwenxane as Otello in Opera Philadelphia’s “Otello.” Steven PisanoAnother ornate space, the Academy of Music, holds the big productions, usually one per year, that anchor Festival O amid the smaller pieces. This time it was “Otello” — not Verdi’s 1887 classic, but Rossini’s far rarer version, from 1816, which Opera Philadelphia deserves great credit for staging.And for staging so admirably. Rossini’s serious operas are serious undertakings: long, notoriously difficult for singers and without obvious means for orchestras to show off. But conducted with steady energy by Corrado Rovaris, the company’s music director, the work felt both spacious and vigorous.The libretto’s differences from the Verdi (and Shakespeare) are sweeping, not least in the absence of the crucial handkerchief and in the importance Rossini places on the character of Rodrigo, who gets some of the most daunting music. The tenor Lawrence Brownlee, Opera Philadelphia’s artistic adviser, was up for the challenge: He has one of the sweetest sounds in the bel canto world, and tautly ringing high notes. If his tone sometimes paled in fast passagework at the final performance on Sunday, he was always winning.Rossini, as was his wont, features a slew of leading tenors; here the trio was filled out by Khanyiso Gwenxane, his voice bold and forthright as Otello, and Alek Shrader, sounding newly robust and insinuating as Iago.Desdemona is, in this version, a fully formed protagonist, something like Donizetti’s Lucia, and the mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack gave the character nobility and eloquence, her voice flexible enough to handle the coloratura and relish the text. She blended perfectly with the mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce, as her maid Emilia, who had a slightly lighter, less earthy, no less classy voice. (Rossini loves to show off tenor-tenor and mezzo-mezzo combinations, reaping excitement from the slightest distinctions.)The story, of course, takes place in 16th-century Venice and Cyprus, but for no obvious reason the director, Emilio Sagi, updated it to an unclear location in early 20th-century Europe — maybe England, maybe Switzerland — and to the whitewashed great hall of a manor house, with a huge staircase.The staging added little to what was essentially old-fashioned emoting. But with a fine cast and a steady hand in the pit, that was enough. More

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      A Trio of Dangerous Women in a Met Opera Week to Remember

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      The company started its season performing “Medea,” “Idomeneo” and “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” three of opera’s most distinctive scores, with care and passion.When you get the opportunity to see a bunch of operas in quick succession, the canon starts forming narratives for you.It suddenly seems obvious that Cherubini’s “Medea,” from 1797 — with which the Metropolitan Opera opened its season on Tuesday — found a germ of inspiration for its title character in the similarly jealous, witchy Elettra of Mozart’s “Idomeneo” (1781), which the Met performed the following evening.And if you, like me, were in the house once more on Thursday to complete this little marathon, you would have felt that Katerina Ismailova, the murderous, defiant antiheroine of Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” (1934), had been conceived in the tradition of Medea: a woman who earns our sympathy even as her crimes repel us.What a week. Three of opera’s most memorable scores, each distinctive, none overfamiliar, all performed with care and passion.The standards that dominate the repertory have not been banished: “Tosca” returns next week, with “La Traviata” to follow a few weeks later. But this opening trio shouldn’t be ignored by newcomers wary of rarer titles; any of these pieces could be enjoyed by anyone. It’s not just the chestnuts of Puccini and Verdi that are capable of speaking to a broad audience.That’s particularly true of “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” Shostakovich’s ferocious depiction of Russian society out of joint, with crime and corruption rampant. In 1994, the director Graham Vick yanked the piece out of its 19th-century setting into what was then the present day: a post-Soviet nation drunk on American-style capitalism, in a horny fever dream of suburban blue skies, comic books, AstroTurf and demented brides wielding vacuum cleaners like rifles.Nearly 30 years later, it remains one of the Met’s most vivid shows, and this scorching revival is an apt tribute to Vick, a visionary artist and opera company leader who died of Covid-19 last year at 67.The tenor Brandon Jovanovich sang with tireless brashness as the man-child Sergei, whose affair with the bored Katerina ends up ruining them both; the bass-baritone John Relyea growled powerfully as the father-in-law she poisons before she and Sergei kill his son. The chorus threw itself into the raucous staging, and the peppery supporting cast included Goran Juric (appearing at the Met for the first time, as a gleefully sinful priest) and Alexander Tsymbalyuk (a flood of sonorous earnestness as the Old Convict).But the opera is dominated by Katerina, its scheming Lady Macbeth. In an excellent Met debut, the soprano Svetlana Sozdateleva is seen-it-all yet soulful, and often magnetically still, as if dazed by the world veering around her. Her voice becomes strident and slicing as it rises in pitch and intensity, but it’s never ugly. When Sergei first seduces Katerina and she limply resists, singing, “I’m a married woman,” Sozdateleva conveys the line’s strange cool tenderness; it’s not sincere, but it’s not a joke.Also making a notable company debut was Keri-Lynn Wilson, on the podium. While Wilson, who is married to Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, is an experienced conductor, there were some grumbles when the season was announced about a plum gig going to the boss’s wife.But the quality of her work on Thursday spoke for itself. Shostakovich’s huge score surges from brooding quiet to deafening fierceness, and Wilson led the orchestra in those shattering brassy marches without being overbearing, and in the stretches of stunned lyricism while keeping the music taut and tense.Indeed, the subtlest, most plainly beautiful passages were among the best, like the glistening dawn as Katerina and Sergei woke up after the Dies Irae-ish crashes of her father-in-law’s funeral, and the soft, grim brooding of the convicts on the way to Siberia in the final act. Some frenetic scenes hadn’t yet settled into lock step on Thursday, but this was a very fine performance.From left, Kate Lindsey, Michael Spyres and Ying Fang in “Idomeneo.”Karen AlmondAnother maestro, Manfred Honeck, also made an impressive Met debut on Wednesday, in the aching melodies and choral grandeur of “Idomeneo” — like “Medea,” a story out of ancient Greece. James Levine brought this opera, about a royal family’s agonies in the face of Neptune’s demand for a human sacrifice during the Trojan War, to the company for the first time, in 1982, and he single-handedly willed it into something of a perennial here. (By the end of this run, it will have had just shy of 80 performances.)Though Mozart is now often the precinct of early-music specialists, Honeck, who leads the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and is a frequent guest across Lincoln Center’s plaza at the New York Philharmonic, is in Levine’s tradition of big-orchestra Classicism: full-bodied, with rich vitality, but without the racing cat-feet tempos that are fashionable these days.Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s neo-Classical staging is still imposing at 40, and clever in its play of ruins and scrims. The soprano Ying Fang, indispensable at the Met in Mozart, sings with both silky warmth and agile sparkle as Ilia, a Trojan princess in love with Idamante, the prince of Crete, where she’s been taken as a prisoner. As Idamante — marked by his father, Idomeneo, as the sacrifice to Neptune — the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey’s tone was elegantly hooded, a little smoky and shadowed.Making his de facto Met debut in the opera’s title role, after a pair of Berlioz concert performances with the company early in 2020, the tenor Michael Spyres sounded freer than he did as Idomeneo at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France a few months ago.But despite the graceful clarity of his declamation and the sweetness of his tone, he did not sound entirely comfortable in the long phrases of the aria “Fuor del mar,” and his extension into the upper reaches of his voice at the end of that number didn’t soar. (The fiery diction and burnished sound of the tenor Issachah Savage, in a small role as the High Priest, spoke to his potential future as an Idomeneo.)The soprano Federica Lombardi is even stronger floating phrases than she is spitting anger as the lovelorn, vengeful Elettra. This Greek princess is the opera’s strangest element, a force of wildness lurking on the outskirts of the plot. She feels like a character in search of an opera of her own — and she’d find it, in a sense, 15 years later, in “Medea.” More