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      The Met Opera Takes on ‘Medea’ in the Shadow of Maria Callas

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      “Let’s talk about the elephant in the room,” the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky said after a recent rehearsal of Luigi Cherubini’s “Medea” at the Metropolitan Opera. “Everybody knows this opera because of Maria Callas.”Callas may loom over the legacy of this opera — her various recordings from the mid-20th century dominate the work’s discography — but her star power was never enough to bring it to the Met, which is staging it for the first time only now, with a new production by David McVicar opening the company’s season on Tuesday.Like many people, McVicar was unfamiliar with the opera until he began to study it for this production. It’s a rarity within a rarity — a seldom performed work from a composer who, despite celebrity and respect in his time, is known today for just a sliver of his output, if at all. A tourist at Père Lachaise, the cemetery in Paris where Cherubini is buried, is more likely to visit the neighboring grave of Chopin.“Every version of Medea has a slightly different narrative and slightly different accretion to the myth,” the director David McVicar said.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesBorn in 1760, a French-assimilated Italian who straddled music’s Classical and Romantic eras, Cherubini premiered his “Médée” in 1797 from a French libretto inspired by both the Euripides and Corneille tragedies. It’s a version of the Greek myth in which she, having helped Jason retrieve the Golden Fleece, exacts revenge on him after he abandons her.“Every version of Medea has a slightly different narrative and slightly different accretion to the myth,” McVicar said. “Euripides introduces the idea of the murder of the children for the first time, and the Baroque opera introduces myriad subplots, and twists and turns. This goes back to Euripides. It’s a Classical piece but also gothic: It belongs to a period of gothic Romanticism in arts and literature.”“Medea” has remained on the outskirts of the repertory for its difficulty.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesAfter the premiere, “Médée” didn’t catch on, and wasn’t the most beloved of Cherubini’s operas among fans like Beethoven. And his reputation after his death, in 1842, was certainly not helped by portraits — however accurate — such as the one in Berlioz’s memoirs, which include a scene of Cherubini, decades after “Médée” and by then the director of the Paris Conservatory, behaving with fussy villainy.But his fortunes changed in the 20th century. In 1909 “Médée” arrived at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, in an Italian translation, called “Medea,” that replaced the spoken French dialogue with new recitative. That version, which McVicar described as “bigger boned and more concise,” was revived in the 1950s by Callas, who went on to perform it widely, including at La Scala and the Royal Opera House in London.For that reason, the work is most familiar as “Medea” — which is how the Met is presenting it, in the Italian translation — though it has remained on the outskirts of the repertory for its difficulty, taken on by a select group of singers including Leonie Rysanek, Gwyneth Jones and Montserrat Caballé.Radvanovsky, center, with Ekaterina Gubanova, left, who sings Neris, and Axel and Magnus Newville, who play Medea’s children.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesThe Italian version replaced the spoken French dialogue with new recitative.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesMcVicar referred to the opera as a soprano version of “Hamlet” because once Medea enters, she more or less never leaves the stage, in various states of distress and fury.Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times“You need to have somebody who can sing it,” said the conductor Carlo Rizzi, who is leading the Met production. “If you have that, you do it. If you don’t, you don’t do it. It’s as simple as that.”Hikers, he added, might take on Mont Blanc or Kilimanjaro; but fewer will try Everest. McVicar, for his part, referred to the opera as a soprano version of “Hamlet” because once Medea enters, she more or less never leaves the stage, in various states of distress and fury.At the back of the stage is an enormous, angled mirror that reflects the action from an aerial perspective.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesIt’s a challenge that appealed to Radvanovsky. The idea for the Met’s production came in the wake of another season-opener, Bellini’s “Norma,” which featured the same trio of Radvanovsky, McVicar and Rizzi. She said that Peter Gelb, the house’s general manager, told her he was happy with her performance and asked what she would like to do next. “‘Medea,’” she answered.“Peter said, ‘Are you sure?’” Radvanovsky recalled. “And I said yeah because after ‘Norma,’ where can one go?”She felt that it was a logical fit for her voice — a way to combine her Met history of bel canto works, like Donizetti’s Tudor operas, and verismo classics like Puccini’s “Tosca.” The question was which language she would sing it in. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director, had wanted to do the French original and was at first attached to this production, but it was decided that they would follow Callas’s tradition, a better fit for both Radvanovsky and the Met.Following Callas’s tradition was a better fit for both Radvanovsky and the Met.Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times“I think both are valid,” McVicar said of the two versions. “But you have to be mindful of the house and the cast that you have. The French can work, but you need a much smaller theater, like the Opéra Comique in Paris. And frankly, the dialogues aren’t very good; they’re clunky and old-fashioned.”McVicar joined the production, not only because he and Radvanovsky have a long, fruitful relationship together in opera, but also because a work like “Medea” is where, he said, he feels most at home.“I’m very much identified here with big Italian war horses because I can do them,” he added. “But is that where my interests lie? I’d have to say no. I’m much more interested in something in the hinterlands, like this.” (That’s why he’d also like to work on Janacek operas in the future, with Radvanovsky, whom he could see in “The Makropulos Case.”)Radvanovsky, left, and McVicar. The stage design is deceptively minimal.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesWith a team in place, the premiere was planned for the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto — this “Medea” is a coproduction with that house, as well as with the Greek National Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago — but the pandemic upended that. Instead, the first run will be at the Met, and McVicar ended up designing it during the most restrictive lockdowns, when he couldn’t work in person with his usual collaborators. What started as a practical move, though, ended up being his way to stay sane, and creative, he said.McVicar returned to the opera’s origins, and thought about how its tensions and turmoil — “the sheer chaos that Medea is capable of unleashing,” he said — fits with its time, coming out of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, as well as Directoire style.That gave the production its look, with costumes “from the Directoire period, roughly speaking, and a real sense of gothic decay,” McVicar said. His stage design is deceptively minimal: a thrust corner with sliding doors that open to reveal both spare scenes and episodes of opulence. At the back is an enormous, angled mirror that reflects the action from an aerial perspective but also serves as a screen for special effects made from projections on the floor — “literally smoke and mirrors,” as he put it.The angled mirror onstage also serves as a screen for special effects.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesThe score, too, can seem simpler than it is, Rizzi said. It’s not written for a very large orchestra, and it doesn’t contain isolated melodies that the audience will leave the house humming. “That doesn’t mean it’s a bad opera,” he added. “It’s a different opera.”A conductor could interpret the music as Classical, but Rizzi has been working with the Met Orchestra to bring out the mercurial tumult that courses through Cherubini’s instrumental writing. The opening Sinfonia alone, he said, “is not a planting of a stake, it’s a wave of a tsunami.”Much of the opera’s shifting character also relies on Radvanovsky as Medea, who in McVicar’s staging is portrayed with expressive physicality. “She can be serpentine, or what we’ve been calling the Hulk, or a goddess,” Radvanovsky said. “It’s exhausting.”“I could not have thought of a better role to be singing right now than Medea,” Radvanovsky said. “It’s the best therapy you can ask for.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesStill, she added, this is a role that a soprano can’t approach with fear — neither of its history nor of its demands. As an actor, she has drawn on experience that parallels the action of the opera: recently, the dissolution of her marriage and the death of her mother. “I could not have thought of a better role to be singing right now than Medea,” she said. “It’s the best therapy you can ask for.”Beyond the music, Radvanovsky has been working with a personal trainer. “I wear a corset onstage, which is great for singing, but then you combine that with Pilates moves,” she said. “I have to be strong, in the best shape my body can be in. We talk about things as a sprint or a marathon. This opera is a marathon.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times More

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      Stalin Once Banned This Opera in Russia, but Audiences Still Enjoy It

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      “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” by Dmitri Shostakovich, a tale of love and betrayal once banned in Soviet Russia, is returning to the Metropolitan Opera.When Joseph Stalin gives your opera a scathing review in Pravda, history is bound to find a spot for you.Such was the case for Dmitri Shostakovich, whose “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” has certainly taken its place in the history books as a classic modern opera, but also as an infamous moment in opera history. In 1934, it was the toast of Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was known then, before setting off on a tour of the Soviet Union for nearly two years. But it was turned into a reviled piece of music after Stalin, wanting to see what all the fuss was about, attended a performance in January 1936 in Moscow.The Soviet leader called it “muddle instead of music, an ugly flood of confusing sound” and “a pandemonium of creaking, shrieking and crashes” in a review attributed to him in Pravda, then the official newspaper of the Communist Party. The opera was banned for decades in the Soviet Union, and Shostakovich feared being arrested. It returned to Russian stages, in a revised version, in 1962 under Nikita S. Khrushchev (though Shostakovich’s original opera is the standard now).As “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” returns after eight years to the Metropolitan Opera on Sept. 29 (for six performances through Oct. 21), the timing feels suddenly urgent against the backdrop of Russia’s war in Ukraine. This production, which premiered in 1994, was first directed by Graham Vick, who died in 2021, with sets and costumes by Paul Brown in a vaguely 1950s setting. For some, the opera stands as testament to one composer’s patriotism, but also to his disdain for the ruling party, all wrapped up in dissonant, volatile music and a raw depiction of lust, violence and the struggle for truth and freedom.“I think every single note he wrote was about him and how he saw the world he was living in, and in that context ‘Lady Macbeth’ is an absolutely seminal work,” said the British director Tony Palmer, whose film “Testimony” in 1988 starred Ben Kingsley as Shostakovich. “Most of the Russians knew instinctively that Shostakovich spoke for them, which says a lot about the power of his music. That’s why it will always resonate, particularly at this moment.”Keri-Lynn Wilson, the conductor, leading a rehearsal. This production will be her Metropolitan Opera debut.Evan Zimmerman/Met OperaThat resonance feels particularly strong for the conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, who is making her Metropolitan Opera debut with this production.“The parallel right now is that Putin is trying to destroy artistic expression just as Stalin did,” Ms. Wilson said, referring to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. “This opera, to me, feels like a direct affront to that, so this is a vehicle for me to channel this incredible anger that I have toward Putin.”Ms. Wilson, who is Canadian with Ukrainian roots, for the past several months has been conducting the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, which she conceived this spring, and organizing with her husband, Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. They helped line up the Ukrainian musicians, as well as performance dates and funding, with the assistance of the Ukrainian government, for a tour across Europe (and in Washington and New York), so moving from that experience to “Lady Macbeth” felt like a natural segue, she said.“I have cousins who are fighting, and they are writing to me and thanking me for what I’m doing with the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra,” Ms. Wilson said. “What it is for me is the feeling of doing justice to show that we can really perform Russian music while shouting at Putin.”Anger is a theme that runs throughout “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.” Based on the novella “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” by Nikolai Leskov, it tells the story of Katerina, a woman trapped in a loveless marriage who falls in love with a village worker named Sergei. The opera’s depiction of their affair is highly sexual, and after a couple of heat-of-the-moment murders gone wrong, the lovers are exiled to a Siberian labor camp and Sergei takes a new lover. The tragic ending, on an icy river, has some of Shostakovich’s most jarring and riveting music. It was a huge success — for a brief spell.“What a lot of people don’t realize is that there was an 18-month gap between opening night of this opera and when Stalin went to see it,” Mr. Palmer said. “There were more performances of this opera in Russia those 18 months than operas of Wagner, Puccini or Verdi.”Shostakovich in the early 1940s. He feared being arrested after “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” was banned in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.Sovfoto/Universal Images Group, via Getty ImagesDespite his fear of backlash after Stalin’s review, Shostakovich continued to be incredibly prolific. In 1937, he unveiled his Fifth Symphony, which was a triumph both with the Communist Party apparatchiks, who saw it as the composer honoring the roots of classical Russian music, and with the intelligentsia of Russian culture who saw it as a requiem for the Great Purge, which Stalin had unleashed the year before.“Shostakovich put everything that he defends as a human and a composer into ‘Lady Macbeth,’ but his genius is that he found a way to compromise and exist in that world after that,” said Kirill Karabits, the Ukrainian-born chief conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in England. “He wanted to remain true to himself but write in a way that satisfied the authorities.”“His music after ‘Lady Macbeth’ is different because it has so many layers,” he added. “He was hiding his criticism. Are his finales happy endings? Or are they happy endings through struggle?”Ms. Sozdateleva in rehearsal. She will make her Metropolitan Opera debut with “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.”Evan Zimmerman/Met OperaFor the Russian soprano Svetlana Sozdateleva, making her Metropolitan Opera debut in a role she has sung several times in Europe, the opera stands on its own for what Shostakovich intended as an artist and a human being: the power of love and betrayal.“The most important thing for me is the theme of all-consuming powerful love and how important it was for Shostakovich to portray such deep feelings and create such a complex character,” Ms. Sozdateleva said. “What’s remarkable is that by the end of the opera, she is a murderer, but the audience is sympathetic to her.”Shostakovich’s understanding of his heroine — and his own reality in the Stalin era — plays into the opera’s rocky history, not to mention its legacy as bold art full of messages and even musical notes that are still being deciphered.“If you wrote a line of poetry that said, ‘Stalin was a bad man,’ then you were dead,” said Mr. Palmer, the director of the Shostakovich film. “But if you wrote a harsh tune that says it, it was a lot harder to prove.” More

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      Charles Castronovo, an American Tenor, Is ‘at Home Everywhere’

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      The Metropolitan Opera is just one of the stops in a busy itinerary for Charles Castronovo, a New York-born singer who performs around the world.In an age of steep global competition, some tenors come and go. Not Charles Castronovo.Since leaving the Metropolitan Opera’s program for young artists just over two decades ago, he has proved his tenacity in a range of lyric and, steadily, more dramatic roles. He compares the requisite balance of vocal refinement and mental stability to a “yin and yang” relationship.“You have to be very sensitive to create something beautiful onstage,” he said by phone from London, “but at the same time remain quite strong because there are ups and downs in a career, let alone in life.”Mr. Castronovo, 47, has a full schedule at leading houses on both sides of the Atlantic where he has become a regular fixture. He started the season this month as Don Ottavio in a revival production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” at the Royal Opera House in London. Next up is the Teatro Verdi Salerno in Italy, where he will sing the leading tenor part in Cilea’s “Adriana Lecouvreur.”Also coveted in French-language repertoire, Mr. Castronovo will return to the Vienna and Berlin State Operas next year for Massenet’s “Manon” and Cherubini’s “Médée.” At both the Bavarian State Opera this December and at the Met, from May 26 to June 9, he will take on the classic role of Rodolfo in Puccini’s “La Bohème.”The tenor pointed to the sincere and direct nature of the character, a poet who becomes smitten with the fatally ill seamstress, Mimi: “He’s super in love, super romantic, super jealous, super crazy — all those things at once. And you think, why did he do this? But I find his reactions to the situation very honest.”Mr. Castronovo drew a parallel to Alfredo in Verdi’s “La Traviata,” a role that he has now sung over 200 times. “They act exactly how I would imagine a young guy in love would,” he explained.Mr. Castronovo with Irina Lungu in a 2011 production of “La Traviata” in Aix-en-Provence, France.Bertrand Langlois/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe music of Verdi will increasingly come into focus for the tenor, as his voice has grown richer and darker. This year, he will release his first solo album — of Verdi arias — on the label Delos.He said that the works of the composer’s middle period, in particular, were “really fitting like a glove.”“It has just a bit more oomph to it,” he continued. “It feels like the next step — probably because I have sung a lot of Mozart and other bel canto [repertoire].”Mr. Castronovo was born in Queens in New York City and raised in California. He credits his ability to tolerate constant travel to the roots of his mother, who immigrated to the United States from Ecuador at 16 (his father is originally from Sicily). “I can find a way to feel at home everywhere,” he said.The singer discovered opera as a teenager through a recording of Plácido Domingo in the title role in Verdi’s “Otello.”“For me, it was like the rock ’n’ roll of classical music because it was dramatic and sexy and strong,” he recalled. “So I listened to tenors’ CDs and tried to mimic them at home. Before I knew it, that was all I could do.”Once in his early twenties, Mr. Castronovo entered a prestigious track that included singing small roles as a resident artist at the Los Angeles Opera and joined the Lindemann Young Artists Development Program at the Metropolitan Opera. In 1999, Mr. Castronovo made his professional Met debut as Beppe in Leoncavallo’s “I Pagliacci.”“In the end,” he said, “you have to get onstage as much as possible. It’s a very different thing to sing a whole role in a studio or in a lesson.”Mr. Castronovo immediately landed leading parts at smaller American opera companies. In 2000, his career migrated to Europe with performances at the Savonlinna Opera Festival in Finland, then at the Berlin State Opera, Vienna State Opera and Royal Opera House.“It took off like crazy,” he recalled. “I am happy to have survived and to keep getting better. It’s [a question of] constantly readjusting; adding new roles; finding new challenges and overcoming them.”He said he was now at a point in his development where he could allow himself to focus less on vocal technique and more on dramatic expression.“I can concentrate more on the arc of the character and add a nuance here and there,” he said. “I feel comfortable enough technically to let myself go emotionally.”Performing as Rodolfo at the Bavarian State Opera last season, he became so carried away that he nearly screamed the character’s utterance of “Mimi” that ends the opera as the heroine dies of consumption, also known as tuberculosis.“When you get choked up and feel like crying, you cannot sing a perfect note,” he explained. “But I could only do it at the very end because I don’t have anything else to sing after that. It was actually perfect.” More

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      America’s Most Interesting Opera Destination? The Midwest.

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      Barrie Kosky and Yuval Sharon, two of opera’s finest directors, open new productions in Chicago and Detroit.New York City, despite its bona fides as a cultural capital, can be surprisingly provincial when it comes to opera.As ever-fewer international directors pass through with their productions — events that, once upon a time, could reliably be found at Lincoln Center’s festivals or the Brooklyn Academy of Music — and New York City Opera exists as a shell of its former self, the only major player left in town is the Metropolitan Opera, an increasingly adventurous if still conservative house.It’s a different story elsewhere in the United States. While the Met prepares to start its season next week, two other companies opened new productions on Saturday, with imaginative directors who won’t grace the Met stage any time soon but should: at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, a “Fiddler on the Roof” by Barrie Kosky, and at Detroit Opera, a version of “Die Walküre” by Yuval Sharon.I saw both over the weekend, which made for an unlikely pairing: “Fiddler,” Bock and Harnick’s golden-age musical, on Saturday, and the third act of “Walküre,” from Wagner’s “Ring,” on Sunday. But while there were subtle thematic connections between the two, they were more notable for simply happening — the latest examples of conceptual daring and directorial promise beyond New York City limits (among others this season, like productions of Ethel Smyth’s “The Wreckers” in Houston and Dylan Mattingly’s “Stranger Love” in Los Angeles).Kosky’s “Fiddler” staging reveals the musical as the masterpiece that it is: perennially relevant, smartly constructed and richly complicated.Todd RosenbergKosky’s “Fiddler” is an import from the Komische Oper in Berlin, the house he ran for a decade before stepping down this year. It’s both a preview — he will direct one musical each of the next five seasons — and a glimpse at his range as one of Europe’s leading directors, an artist capable of shattering minimalism, in productions like “Kat’a Kabanova” at the Salzburg Festival in August, and archaeological curiosity, in the obscure operettas he has reintroduced to Germany.There are hallmarks of his showman style throughout this “Fiddler,” but perhaps the most Koskyesque accomplishment here is his revealing of the musical as the masterpiece that it is — perennially relevant, smartly constructed and richly complicated — rather than what many critics have seen as borscht belt kitsch. His staging, in which no emotion is ever forced, is funny only in the way that life can be: dark humor in the face of absurdity, joy at a harmless misunderstanding.Most natural, perhaps, is the way in which Kosky’s take on the musical — unaltered, but for welcome Yiddish additions — unfolds as an act of memory, at once melancholy and warm. It begins with something like a summoning of the past: A child (Drake Wunderlich) rolls across the stage on a scooter, beats emanating from his headphones. At the center is a wardrobe; and inside is a violin, on which the boy begins to play the show’s opening theme. He pauses, and the tune continues with a whistle from within.Out from the wardrobe steps Tevye — Steven Skybell, who played the role in the recent Yiddish-language “Fiddler” Off Broadway and who again lends the character the sculptural dimensions of a Shakespeare protagonist — then the rest of the villagers from Anatevka. Among them are a wealth of sympathetic, skilled performers: Debbie Gravitte as a resilient Golde; Lauren Marcus, Austen Danielle Bohmer and Maya Jacobson as her and Tevye’s pathbreaking daughters; Drew Redington as a meek then audacious Motel; Adam Kaplan as a brazen yet desperate Perchik; Michael Nigro as a honeyed Fyedka; and more.Many more: This is a “Fiddler” beyond Broadway proportions, with a cast large enough to fill out a shtetl and a full orchestra, conducted with committed enthusiasm and dancelike flexibility by Kimberly Grigsby. Yet while the forces were operatic, the scenic design, by Rufus Didwiszus, wasn’t; the first act sprang out of and around a unit set of wardrobes and dressers stacked like a barricade, some of their doors and drawers opened to reveal lingering clothes, as if they had been hastily emptied and gathered in a public square. You could imagine it as a memorial.To what? Take your pick. “Fiddler” is specific, a tale of change coming rapidly to the traditions of Anatevka in the early 20th century; yet it has resonated time and again, whether for its themes of rigidity amid progress or for its depictions of intolerance and exile. The last Broadway revival, in 2015, was haunted by the Syrian refugee crisis. This year, it’s impossible to see the show’s characters — inhabitants of present-day Ukraine — haphazardly packing up their lives for an unknown future and not think of the war there.Yuval Sharon’s “The Valkyries,” at Detroit Opera, is presented on a bifurcated stage in which singers perform in front of a green screen, below a video produced live.Mary Jaglowski/Detroit OperaAnd yet Kosky’s staging is also entertaining. Otto Pichler’s choreography, a nod to and break from Jerome Robbins’s original, left the audience on Saturday roaring. And the production’s nearly three hours breeze by. It is the finest “Fiddler” I’ve seen, one that could be adapted with ease and success on Broadway — where, in addition to the Met, Kosky belongs.Sharon is also woefully absent from New York’s stages. The brightest director in the United States, he put on a drive-through “Götterdämmerung” in a Detroit parking garage when live performance was virtually nonexistent during the pandemic and, as artistic director of Detroit Opera, has made that city an opera destination — along with Los Angeles, where his company the Industry has created the most innovative, original productions of recent years.His excerpt from “Die Walküre” — the 85-minute third act, called here “The Valkyries” — reflects Wagner’s ambitions for the work’s stage magic, but also the state of opera performance in our time, by presenting it as a sci-fi movie filmed against a green screen and rendered live with the help of Kaitlyn Pietras and Jason H. Thompson from PXT Studio. Yet a casual audience member could also enjoy it at face value, a self-contained drama with the subtlety and punch of short fiction.The production places the “Ring” in the metaverse, with Valhalla as a digital creation whose back story is recounted by Sigourney Weaver in a video introduction. Having a queen of sci-fi make this cameo is among the show’s campy touches, like Carlos J. Soto’s winking costumes, which suggest “Tron” and its low-budget cousins of the 1970s and ’80s.On the bifurcated stage, singers (accompanied by Andrew Davis leading a reduced but undiminished orchestration by David Carp, to accommodate the theater’s smaller pit) perform in front of the green screen — on green props, and supported by stage hands in green body suits, who, for example, wave capes during the “Ride of the Valkyries.” At the same time, the film, which reflects changes in scale and placement on a digital landscape, is shown above. The singers, especially the soprano Christine Goerke, still earning her title as a reigning Brünnhilde, rise to the challenge of the close-ups with actorly delivery; she, facing an indefinite slumber atop a mountain as punishment, sobs with audibly shallow breathing.At quick glance, Sharon’s production has the appearance of window dressing; the action ultimately unfolds in a conventional way. But, as ever, the medium is the message.“The Valkyries” could be seen as a meditation on opera in the 21st century: the proliferation of video in stagings, as well as pandemic-era livestreams and the genre of studio productions that grew out of them. What, now, is a live performance? Sharon provokes a tension of perception, with the eye and ear unsure of whether to focus on the singers or the screen. What is lost, and gained, in their interplay? He doesn’t offer an answer so much as lay out a balance sheet that the audience is left to settle.If Sharon does make a case, it’s for the durability of an opera’s essence. No matter the format, “Walküre” is a rending portrait of love, family and regret; Sunday’s performance wasn’t any different. And, as in “Fiddler,” the emotional core of “The Valkyries” was drawn out in a way that was unforced and honest, yet stylistically distinct. New York would be lucky to have either show. More

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      5 Russian Bullets Dashed an Opera Singer’s Dreams. Then He Reclaimed His Voice.

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      While on a rescue mission in Ukraine, Sergiy Ivanchuk was shot in the lungs, apparently ending his chance at opera stardom. His recovery is a marvel of medicine, chance and his own spirit.Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.ULM, Germany — It was the most pivotal performance of his 29 years. There were no costumes, no stage, no orchestra pit. Instead, a lone pianist hunched expectantly over her instrument. For an audience, a handful of doctors and nurses watched from a cool white hospital lobby.Sergiy Ivanchuk — his face patched with bandages, legs trembling beneath his trousers — began hesitantly. But as his deep baritone held, confidence grew. By the time he finished with a Ukrainian folk tune, his song soared with the passion of a man brought back from the dead, a man reveling in a voice reclaimed.

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      “For three months, I thought I would die,” he told those assembled. “And now, I can sing again.”Not long before, Mr. Ivanchuk had believed he was on his deathbed, his lungs punctured by bullets, his body attached to a tangle of tubes.On March 10, Mr. Ivanchuk, an aspiring opera singer, had been working with humanitarian volunteers helping civilians flee the besieged Ukrainian city of Kharkiv when Russian forces attacked, and he was shot.Even if he managed to survive, he remembered thinking, surely his singing days were over.But a string of chance encounters, committed doctors and the love of a mother all led to that unexpected performance in a German military hospital this summer, giving Mr. Ivanchuk a chance to transform a tragedy into an opportunity to salvage his longtime dream of opera stardom.“So many different circumstances had to happen,” said Mr. Ivanchuk, wondering if science and his own spirit were the only factors in his recovery. “There is something. God or an angel saved me. There is something there.”“For three months, I thought I would die,” said Mr. Ivanchuk, shown in his room at a military hospital in Ulm, Germany.Lena Mucha for The New York TimesIn 2020, Mr. Ivanchuk was studying opera in Italy, and he had big ambitions: to perform on the stages of the Metropolitan in New York and La Scala in Milan.Then the pandemic closed borders around the globe. His music school was closed, and Mr. Ivanchuk was stuck in Ukraine, struggling with severe depression.Two years later, as the world began reopening, Russia invaded, and Mr. Ivanchuk found himself trapped in Ukraine once more: Men of fighting age were banned from leaving the country.His dream was rapidly fading — opera singers should complete their training by their early 30s. No one could guess when the war would end.The State of the WarDramatic Gains for Ukraine: After Ukraine’s offensive in its northeast drove Russian forces into a chaotic retreat, Ukrainian leaders face critical choices on how far to press the attack.How the Strategy Formed: The plan that allowed Ukraine’s recent gains began to take shape months ago during a series of intense conversations between Ukrainian and U.S. officials.Putin’s Struggles at Home: Russia’s setbacks in Ukraine have left President Vladimir V. Putin’s image weakened, his critics emboldened and his supporters looking for someone else to blame.Southern Counteroffensive: Military operations in the south have been a painstaking battle of river crossings, with pontoon bridges as prime targets for both sides. So far, it is Ukraine that has advanced.Yet like so many of his compatriots, Mr. Ivanchuk wanted to join the fight. Not on the front lines — “I’d be useless for that,” he joked — but by using his 30-year-old blue Lada sedan to drive civilians out of Kharkiv, the embattled city in eastern Ukraine, a few hours from his hometown, Poltava, where he had grown up in a musical family.It was a grueling routine. Every morning at 6, he drove to Kharkiv, laden with medicine and groceries for those still inside. Every night, he picked up residents fleeing the siege, who could not afford a taxi out. He slept a few hours at home with his parents, then started again.His mother, Olena Ivanchuk, awaited his return each night in silent torment. But on the morning of March 10, his mother had to speak: While dusting, she noticed the family’s religious icons had all fallen from the table, which she perceived as a dark omen.“When I told him, his face fell,” she said. “For the first time in my life, I told him: ‘My son, I fear maybe this time you won’t return.’”He left for Kharkiv anyway.Mr. Ivanchuk chose to aid the war effort by helping residents flee from Kharkiv. He was shot three weeks into the war.Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesThat night, Mr. Ivanchuk and his passengers packed his Lada to the brim with suitcases and pets. It was pitch black as they made their way out of town. Through the darkness, bullets suddenly whizzed past.In a terrifying game of cat and mouse, Mr. Ivanchuk sped along, trying to find the protection of a Ukrainian military checkpoint. But the Russian forces soon found their mark: 30 bullets hit the car. Five hit Mr. Ivanchuk.“I felt each and every bullet. First it hit one leg, then the leg once more. Then I saw my fingers destroyed,” he said. “After that, I felt a bullet in my side and back.”Four people and two cats were inside the car. Yet only Mr. Ivanchuk had been shot.He likely would not have survived if not for one of his passengers, Viktoria Fostorina — a doctor. With the help of the others in the car, she bandaged the wounds on his chest and back, preventing a collapsed lung.“At first, I was the one saving them,” he said. “But as it turned out, in the end, they saved me.”Somehow, he managed to drive the car to a Ukrainian military checkpoint before collapsing.The war was three weeks old; Mr. Ivanchuk had already rescued 100 people. As he felt himself losing consciousness in the hospital later, he prayed to God, and prepared to die.“I was thinking, ‘You’re only 29, and you’re dying,” he said, recalling his thoughts. “‘I could have lived longer. But I tried to help people, so maybe it’s a good thing.’”After searching for Mr. Ivanchuk for nearly two days, his mother found him at the Kharkiv hospital, where doctors warned he might not survive. She forced back tears, entering the room of her unconscious son with a smile.“I said, ‘Please, son, open your eyes.’ I told him: ‘One hundred percent, you’ll survive. You will live.’ I told him that several times.”An X-ray showing Mr. Ivanchuk’s hand injuries.Lena Mucha for The New York TimesMr. Ivanchuk remembers awakening to her smiling face. But he couldn’t speak: Tubes were coming out of his mouth. His body was in such pain, he could communicate only by twitching one finger.Ms. Ivanchuk recalled her son’s crying from the pain of his early operations. Later, his tears came from his realization he might never perform again.But fate stepped in once more.Mr. Ivanchuk’s story spread on social media, and a prominent Ukrainian opera singer convinced a talented surgeon in the country to operate on him. His lungs and liver began to heal.Though his recovery had begun, a dark struggle was still ahead, one he almost lost.For weeks, he lay among shellshocked young soldiers who sometimes jumped out of bed at night, throwing imaginary grenades, screaming at comrades to take cover.Mr. Ivanchuk grew paranoid that Russian spies lurked behind every door. And he grappled with the idea that rescuing people had cost him his dream.“It was a marathon of pain and psychological torment,” he said.He faced down those thoughts, thanks in part by drawing on lessons from his past struggle with depression. Psychotherapy during the pandemic had taught him to see his thoughts as brain chemistry, not his inner self. And he began to accept that faith alone could not heal him: “I still believe in the Creator — but a lot depends on us.”Mr. Ivanchuk playing the organ in the church hospital. The movement helps exercise his injured fingers.Lena Mucha for The New York TimesKeeping his goals confined to his hospital room, Mr. Ivanchuk and his mother celebrated even the tiniest step toward recovery. Taking life day by day, and forgetting his big ambitions, he was surprised to discover he felt more content than before the attack.“I used to think that without a dream, it was impossible to be a happy person,” he said. “But now, I see that happiness is actually just to live.”Once stable enough for travel, Mr. Ivanchuk was sent to Ulm, Germany, for advanced surgeries at a German military hospital.As a musician, he wanted to restore as much dexterity as possible to his mutilated fingers — he has played the bandura, a Ukrainian stringed folk instrument, since childhood.He tried not to think about opera until one night, on his third week in Ulm, when he began to sing in the shower. He chose Valentin’s aria from “Faust” — and was astounded to hear his old voice.Mr. Ivanchuk soon realized that not only were his dreams still possible — but that, in a wholly unanticipated twist to his nearly fatal injury, he was now better placed to pursue them.If not for the attack, he would have remained stuck in Ukraine. Moreover, he had landed in Germany, the best place in the world for a budding opera singer. Thanks to its subsidies for the arts, Germany has over 80 full-time opera houses.By late June, he was well enough to perform for the hospital staff.Mr. Ivanchuk greeting the hospital staff after he performed for the first time since he was wounded.Lena Mucha for The New York TimesFirst, he sang “Ave Maria,” for its spirituality. Then, an aria from “The Magic Flute,” by Mozart, to honor his German caretakers. The third song could only be Ukrainian and a tribute to the woman devoted to his survival — “My Own Mother.”She cried as he began. “I did not expect he could sing that loudly,” she said. “It is because he was doing it with his heart.”That evening, he was discharged.“He was extremely positive, he didn’t complain at all about his situation,” said Dr. Benedikt Friemert, the head orthopedic surgeon at the hospital, describing his patient’s recovery. “Quite the opposite: He was convinced that what he had done was right. He was unlucky and got injured, but he said: ‘Never mind, I’ll get better so that I can do what’s important to me.’ In other words: singing.”Mr. Ivanchuk, with a slight limp, a missing finger and a body peppered with bullet fragments, still faces a difficult journey. He has more physiotherapy ahead.He now rents an apartment in Ulm with his mother, and he has started receiving lessons from a Ukrainian opera singer, Maryna Zubko, who works at the local theater. One day, they hope to sing together there.“He has a beautiful voice,” said Ms. Zubko, who first encountered her pupil when a heavily bandaged man threw flowers at her feet after a local performance.Her hope for Mr. Ivanchuk is to spend a year recovering with her help then use his talent, and his story, to earn a place at a prestigious program in Europe or the United States to finish his training.He is dreaming again of the Met and La Scala. “I think in five years, I could make it onto one of those stages,” Mr. Ivanchuk said. “As long as no one else shoots me.” More

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      Review: In ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ John Adams Goes Conventional

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      This composer’s latest stage work, at San Francisco Opera, is his most straightforward, but also his least inspired.SAN FRANCISCO — John Adams’s operas have never been ordinary.His first two, “Nixon in China” and “The Death of Klinghoffer,” broke ground by treating events from recent history with enigmatic new poetry. The stage works that followed over the next 30 years included a reflection on the 1994 earthquake in Los Angeles, an adaptation of an Indian folk tale, and, since 2000, four pieces with patchwork librettos drawn from a broad assortment of sources: ancient and modern, poetic and prose.Adams infused the eclecticism — and the sometimes anti-dramatic artificiality — of these texts with music of fast-shifting colors and energy, of tenderness and unexpected, haunting effects. If the works varied in impact, none were like any other composer’s.But with “Antony and Cleopatra,” which premiered on Saturday at the start of San Francisco Opera’s centennial season, Adams, 75, has finally become conventional.He has done the same thing as many composers before him for his first opera created without the collaboration of the director and writer Peter Sellars, who for better and worse pressed him toward that quiltlike method of libretto-writing. Adams has chosen a great, eminently sturdy play from the past — in this case, Shakespeare’s tragedy of love and war — and trimmed it to a more manageable size, adding just a scattering of interpolations from other sources.The result is the clearest, most dramatically straightforward opera of his career — and the dullest. “Antony and Cleopatra” has the least idiosyncrasy of his nine stage works so far, and the least inspiration.With almost three hours of music, it slumps to a subdued finish. It could be described in a line from the play that was cut for the opera: “She shows a body rather than a life, a statue than a breather.”That sense of not quite coming to life, of not fully inhabiting the play through music, begins at the start. With the two lovers and their attendants crowded into Cleopatra’s bedroom, we are unceremoniously shoved into frenetic activity both onstage and in the orchestra — as if to prove that the work is, as Adams writes wishfully in a program essay, his “most actively dramatic.”But with the pace so breathless from the opening bars, and with the focus seemingly on getting as much text out of the singers’s mouths as possible, we are never able to really sit with the two main characters and feel the depth of their bond.Paul Appleby, center left, as Caesar, shaking hands with Finley. From left: Hadleigh Adams (Agrippa), Elizabeth DeShong (Octavia) and Philip Skinner (Lepidus) look on.Cory Weaver/San Francisco OperaAnd without the strength of their relationship being convincingly depicted, the precipitous ups and downs of that relationship lose their stakes, despite the baritone Gerald Finley’s weathered authority and the soprano Amina Edris’s focused vigor. (Edris deserves special credit for stepping in when Julia Bullock, for whom the role of Cleopatra was written, withdrew because of her pregnancy.)Largely eschewing arias, duets and other ensembles — its source is a play with notably few soul-baring soliloquies — “Antony and Cleopatra” skates along the emotional surface as it tries to keep up with the fast-moving story, lacking the expansive dives into thoughts and feelings that are the glory of Adams’s best work.So we never really feel we know these characters, though we see a lot of them: Despite the condensed form, this is a sprawling plot. Antony’s passion for Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, has upset the fragile balance of power in the Mediterranean world, with Caesar — his younger partner in ruling Rome — using it as a pretext to make war against him. Shakespeare’s genius was to make the lovers’ pairing, a union of two seen-it-all cynics, bracingly yet realistically volatile, with jealousy, betrayal and reconciliation from both sides.It is an unwieldy piece to wrangle into musical shape. An “Antony and Cleopatra” by Samuel Barber opened the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in 1966. Burdened by an extravagant Franco Zeffirelli staging, it was a notorious fiasco, but a revision — recorded, if infrequently performed — revealed a lushly perfumed, viably dramatic score.In that revised form, Barber’s “Antony” is nearly an hour shorter than Adams’s. Perhaps the main trouble with this new opera is simply the amount of text still in it — especially given the problems inherent in setting Shakespeare’s verse, which is so virtuosic that it’s barely legible when sung. If you catch it in the supertitles, a line like “Gentle Octavia, let your best love draw to that which seeks best to preserve it” is a challenge to grasp at a glance.Adams has long rightly been regarded as a master of intriguing orchestration, but his work here is surprisingly bland. Wisps of cimbalom, a hammered dulcimer with a tinny yet silky sound, would have more interest if that instrument hadn’t become something of his go-to evocation of the ancient Mediterranean: It is also a central feature of the passion oratorio “The Gospel According to the Other Mary” (2012) and the violin concerto “Scheherazade.2” (2015). Interludes bridge many of the scene changes, but even if these are generally bustling, they tend to feel like vamping, oddly characterless.There are some effective touches, particularly in more shadowy passages that the conductor, Eun Sun Kim, revels in without losing the pulse. Octavia — Caesar’s sister, who has been married to Antony in a last-ditch effort to cool the hostilities — replies to Antony after their wedding in vocal lines surrounded by an instrumental halo of hovering prayer, mysterious and alluring. The opening of the second act aptly depicts the stunned aftermath of Antony’s military disaster, with the mellow music for Cleopatra’s entrance having a dreamlike, distant suggestion of a foxtrot.Appleby’s Caesar rallies the crowd in a hectoring empire-building monologue.Cory Weaver/San Francisco OperaBut the tenor Paul Appleby’s bright stamina can’t keep his big speech late in the work — an empire-building monologue whose text is taken from John Dryden’s translation of “The Aeneid” — from being hectoring. And while Alfred Walker and Hadleigh Adams are both firm as aides to the Roman rulers, the bass-baritone Philip Skinner, as Lepidus, is alone in the cast in his ability to sing both richly and with perfectly intelligible diction.The inoffensive staging, by Elkhanah Pulitzer (who also consulted with Adams on the libretto alongside Lucia Scheckner), sets the opera not in ancient times but in the 1930s or so, with Art Deco elements and slinky gowns (by Constance Hoffman) winking at the glamorous Hollywood adaptations of the Cleopatra story.Mimi Lien’s spare set, starkly lit by David Finn, hides and reveals playing spaces as it opens and closes like an aperture, with some large structures looming in the back that recall the pyramids. Bill Morrison has contributed lyrically grainy black-and-white film projections of scenes including a sail on the Nile and a crowd ready to be whipped into frenzy by a dictator.This loose association of Caesar with later authoritarian leaders is pretty much the opera’s only contemporary resonance. After decades of pointedly political work with Sellars, in which those resonances could sometimes feel suffocating, Adams seems more than happy to make an opera that’s not “about” anything other than its plot.The outcome of that experiment is thin. But hopefully this is a transitional work for Adams, away from those patchwork pieces with Sellars and toward other styles of libretto, adapted or original, more compelling than this.“When you get to be my age, you’re not compared to other composers,” he said in a recent interview. “You’re compared to your earlier works.”Unfortunately, compared with those earlier works — among them true glories of opera history — “Antony and Cleopatra” is a dreary disappointment.Antony and CleopatraThrough Oct. 5 at the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco; sfopera.com. More

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      Three Divas Give Voice to ‘The Hours’ at the Met Opera

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      New York City’s opera event of the fall — an adaptation of “The Hours” having its staged premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in November — started with a pitch from Renée Fleming.Fleming, the superstar soprano, was mulling over new projects when Paul Batsel, her right-hand man, suggested “The Hours,” Michael Cunningham’s novel inspired by Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” which weaves together one day in the lives of three women across time: Woolf, writing her book; a midcentury homemaker named Laura Brown, who is reading it; and a 1990s editor named Clarissa Vaughan, who, like Clarissa Dalloway, is organizing a party, here for a friend diminished by AIDS.“The Hours” won Cunningham a Pulitzer Prize in 1999, and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 2002, starring a power trio of Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman. Crucially, that movie was scored by Philip Glass, whose soundtrack unified the three stories as lucidly as the motif of “Mrs. Dalloway” did.“I loved, loved, loved the film when it came out,” Fleming, who is singing the role of Clarissa, said in an interview. “It haunted me and stayed with me. The performances were so brilliant, and when I went back to it — all of these ideas, suicide, their lives as L.G.B.T.Q. people in New York City at that time, the period, all that was powerful for me. So when Paul suggested it, I thought: That’s perfect. Three divas, what could be better?”Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, agreed. A composer was already in hand — Kevin Puts, who won the Pulitzer Prize for “Silent Night” in 2012, working here with the librettist Greg Pierce — but the company needed two more stars. Enter Kelli O’Hara, a Tony Award-decorated musical theater actress with opera bona fides (even at the Met, where she was a standout as Despina in Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte”), in the role of Laura; and, as Virginia Woolf, the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, a house regular and audience favorite.The Philadelphia Orchestra premiered “The Hours” in concert form earlier this year, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Reviewing that performance, Zachary Woolfe wrote in The New York Times that, “the new work is, like ‘Silent Night,’ direct, effective theater, with a cinematic quality in its plush, propulsive underscoring, its instinctive sense for using music to move things along.”Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, will be in the pit when the opera arrives at the Met in November, directed by Phelim McDermott (most recently of “Akhnaten” fame) and choreographed by Annie-B Parson. Spread around the world but speaking together on a shared video call, the production’s three stars discussed how they are preparing for rehearsals and for bringing their characters to the opera stage. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.“It really is evocative,” O’Hara said of Kevin Puts’s score. “The more I listen to it, the more I have it circling in me; it’s one of those things that you become obsessed with.”Thea Traff for The New York TimesThese three roles were written with your voices in mind. Can you explain how that plays out in practice?KELLI O’HARA Can I just give a shout-out to Kevin Puts? To have a composer who’s living now and writing now and writing so beautifully now — Renée’s choice of him was so special. He came to a couple of sing-through sessions just to hear me and write a little bit more specifically. I do not take that for granted. To listen and make changes appropriately, he’s quite a mensch that way.RENÉE FLEMING He’s written a lot for me, and he knows my voice really well. The thing that works for me is that the phrases have separation between them, so you’re not really stuck in a high register or a challenging tessitura consistently. And that’s what makes it possible. I’m loving [singing] it in my living room, so let’s hope that translates to the big house.JOYCE DiDONATO I’m looking at the page, I’m looking at the score, and I’m like: Oh Kevin, that’s the money note that audiences will be waiting for. One of the cool things, as I’m working on it, is that I’m finding the groove very easily. It is being crafted for us, but the sign of a really good composer is that it’s clear this can have a life beyond this production. He’s writing it in such a lyrical way that a lot of different voices will be able to take this on. That’s what we want; we want these projects to have a legacy.What do you think makes this version of “The Hours” effective opera?FLEMING Libretti are hard because you have to reduce the number of words to a minimum in order to have room for the music, and that’s especially true here. Greg Pierce’s libretto is concise, and it’s colorful and just beautifully wrought.O’HARA It feels like there’s a constant movement of the drama. That makes it feel, in a way, cinematic. Some of the score as well. It really is evocative. The more I listen to it, the more I have it circling in me; it’s one of those things that you become obsessed with.FLEMING Kevin is not afraid to write something that’s moving and beautiful for the general public. And that is something that, in my lifetime, composers in opera have struggled with.DiDONATO This is an emotional story. Some of the recent pieces that I have seen are very graphic and angular and have sanitized, in a way, the emotion. And I don’t find it in any way maudlin and saccharine — which used to be good words in opera, but I understand why we hesitate to indulge in that. But that, in some ways, is what opera does best.One of the things I look for, certainly with a new piece, is: Why does this need to be sung? What I think they have done really brilliantly is the overlay, the way you can have the same emotional experience by different people in different contexts. And that’s something that can happen easily in opera and not so much in the cinema or theater world. There’s a scene where Virginia Woolf is trying to write, and she’s struggling with just getting the day started, and then Laura comes in and she’s reading it. We have the same words, one is being created and one is being received, and they both are being felt in very different ways. That adds a huge layer of complexity that really works on the opera stage.“We’re always competing against ghosts of the past who created roles,” said DiDonato, who plays Virginia Woolf. Ana Cuba for The New York TimesHow are you coming at these characters, which have been famously occupied by Hollywood stars? Kelli, in your case, this is the second time you are taking on one of Julianne Moore’s roles, after the musical adaptation of “Far From Heaven.”O’HARA I didn’t go back to the movie; that’s sort of a rule for me. If I’ve seen it, I won’t watch it again. Because the only way to make it human or different or new is to put your own vision through it and metabolize it in your own body, your heart and bring it forth. I think that’s what the three of us will do. Opera is very different from film. I haven’t even really considered it being up for comparison.DiDONATO We’re always competing against ghosts of the past who created roles. To me, the key is always, I do the research, but my job is to put the score in front of me and not create past versions. I learned that quite a long time ago. Go to the source, go to the score, the text, and you have to leave the rest behind.FLEMING Well, I’ve always wanted to play Meryl Streep [laughs]. But also, for me, this is one of the only times I’ve gotten to perform a period from my own lifetime. I still have clothing from the ’90s.O’HARA That’s wild. I’m going back to the ’50s. Just put me there all the time.DiDONATO You do get the cutest clothes from that period. I have a little bit of wardrobe envy.You have praised how “The Hours” — whether the book, the film or this opera — captures women’s feelings and experiences. All were created by men. What do they get right?FLEMING This is tricky, because obviously I was pressing for women in the creative team, so we have a choreographer. I think it’s important, moving forward, to appropriately give representation to the stories being told. Even the fact that Denyce Graves [in the role of Sally] and I are lovers in this. This may be something that people clock — that [the queer] community is not represented, at least in the principals. It’s very challenging, on so many different fronts.That said, I do think they did a very good job, and Michael Cunningham did a great job. I have a long relationship with Strauss and Hofmannsthal; there are historical pairings of librettist and composer that have really shockingly presented a woman’s inner life extremely well.“Kevin is not afraid to write something that’s moving and beautiful for the general public,” Fleming said. “And that is something that, in my lifetime, composers in opera have struggled with.”Thea Traff for The New York TimesO’HARA From the Laura Brown perspective, Michael Cunningham is writing his own mother. Look at Sondheim; there is this precedent of artists who work things out in their art. So I want to join them and bring out their story, and my own story with my mother, and my own experience of being a mother. You do have someone who’s writing from a very real place. I’ll come in, and I have to make this woman human and empathetic in the same way. But they are writing from deep knowledge and pain.FLEMING AIDS is at the center of Michael Cunningham’s book as well. A friend of mind said, “I’m glad the Met is finally producing a gay story,” and I thought: Huh, I thought this was about three women. There are different perspectives in this piece. It’s wonderful in that way.DiDONATO For me, I think they’ve captured the captivity sensation that Virginia felt, or that I imagine she felt at that time — the limitations put on her, what it was to be a creative genius as a woman. We do need representation at the table, as Renée is saying. But one of the magical things about the theater is that it’s always about getting in someone else’s head. And that can be me, a girl from Kansas City, trying to understand Virginia Woolf. It can be a man trying to understand a woman, a son about his mother. It’s dangerous if we start blocking those creative outlets.What’s exciting is that we are demanding that those doors are open to everybody. But I don’t think that means we should shut doors completely. We’d be missing out on a lot of great art. I think it’s thrilling that these men want to tell this story. Let’s have a woman write it as well. We have lots of “Barber of Sevilles” and “Figaros.” Let a woman write “The Hours,” and we can compare. More

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      Review: Michael Spyres’s Immense Sound Engulfs a Recital Room

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      Michael Spyres made an overdue New York recital debut at the Park Avenue Armory, whose intimate space could not contain his voice.Some singers thrive in a recital room. A small space invites extremities of intimate expression; audiences can become the confidants of a lovelorn raconteur. Other voices, though, are better fit for an opera house — voluminous to the point of superhuman strength, thrilling for their athleticism as much their artistry.Michael Spyres — a baritenor, that rare breed of singers, more prevalent in Rossini’s time, who nimbly span the ranges of baritones and tenors — would best be described as an opera house vocalist. His heroic and agile sound, booming at the bottom and capable of an effortless leap to Italianate exclamation at the top, is almost comically uncontainable somewhere like the snug Board of Officers Room at the Park Avenue Armory, where Spyres appeared with the pianist Mathieu Pordoy on Wednesday night.For New Yorkers, though, this was a rare opportunity to hear Spyres in any kind of environment. American-born and a major performer in Europe, he didn’t make his way to the Metropolitan Opera until 2020. (Thankfully he will be back, in Mozart’s “Idomeneo,” later this month.) He gave a concert with the tenor Lawrence Brownlee last season, a sensational program based on their album “Amici e Rivali,” but made his solo recital debut here only this week.On offer were three sets of songs, in as many languages, that showcase Spyres’s vast range — vocally, though not necessarily interpretively. His approach to performance, which prioritizes beauty over character, suits him well in a work like “Idomeneo,” but less so in lieder, which on Wednesday took on a kind of flatness despite his Olympian power, a level path along a mountain’s ridge.You could hear him almost struggling to restrain himself in Beethoven’s pioneering cycle “An die Ferne Geliebte,” a work that can be quietly personal but here was more in the mighty vein of that composer’s opera, “Fidelio.” And when he did shift between registers of strength, it was with less comfort than, say, his gifted ease in shaping long melodic lines. In Berlioz’s “Les Nuits d’Éte,” he lingered in a soft, exquisite falsetto throughout the song “Au cimetière: clair de lune,” but in the work’s opening “Villanelle” the move from forte to piano was accompanied by a gravelly transition.Pordoy, to his credit, matched Spyres with lush and luxuriant playing that got its own moment under the spotlight with the Liszt solo “L’Idée Fixe,” based on the longing theme of Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique.” It was an ultra-Romantic appetizer ahead of Liszt’s “Tre Sonetti del Petrarca” — although a heavy one, foie gras before a fatty steak. In that trio of songs, Spyres the Bel Canto star was most in his element: his tenor both riveting and rending, his high notes both tossed off and made to bloom with long crescendos.It was the kind of music that can leave an audience begging for an encore, which Spyres was quick to offer, coyly holding up a finger as if to ask for one more song. He started with the Beethoven rarity “In questa tomba oscura,” somber and slowly flowing, then said, “We can’t leave you on a low note.” So the crowd-pleasing sound world of Liszt returned one last time with “Enfant, si j’étais roi.”At one point during that song, his voice rang out so powerfully that, at an abrupt pause, it continued to haunt the room in the silence. You could have mistaken the sound for the resonance of a grand concert hall.Michael Spyres and Mathieu PordoyThis program repeats on Friday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. More