More stories

  • in

    A Behind-the-Scenes Eminence Shapes a Festival’s Future

    Pierre Audi, the artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory, is coming into his own as the leader of the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France.AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — On a recent Monday afternoon, the Grand Théâtre de Provence here was almost empty, a few hours before a concert performance of Monteverdi’s opera “L’Orfeo.”An organ was being tuned onstage, letting out a fluteish wheeze. In the wings, someone was warming up with the dashing brass fanfares at the start of the score.And Pierre Audi, the general director of the Aix-en-Provence Festival, which runs this year through Saturday and presented the Monteverdi, was painstakingly adjusting the lighting.“Warmer; it’s very dead,” he said to members of the festival’s technical staff as he stared at the glow on the back wall of the stage. The first act of “L’Orfeo” takes place in a meadow, which the performance would suggest with some treelike blurs of green behind the musicians. Audi wanted the color to be ever so slightly subtler, paler, more delicate.As the ensemble started to rehearse, he stood and watched, hands intertwined across his belly. The playing was spirited, but some of the singers’ bits of acting felt a tad awkward.“I haven’t done the staging,” Audi, 64, said under his breath in an accent not quite British and not quite French, with a sly smirk and an apologetic shrug. “I’m just doing the lights.”For the production “Resurrection” this year, Audi pushed for the abandoned Stadium de Vitrolles to be refurbished.Monika RittershausTaking it upon himself to do the lights for a mere concert wasn’t out of character for Audi — also the artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory in New York, the founder of the Almeida Theater in London, for decades the head of the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam, and altogether one of the most eminent behind-the-scenes figures on the global performing arts scene.An experienced stage director as well as a renowned administrator, Audi doesn’t just work on grand strategy and schmooze with donors. He also gets into the details of craft, closely overseeing rehearsals. (The chatter this summer was that he particularly needed to help shape Satoshi Miyagi’s vaguely Kabuki production of Mozart’s “Idomeneo.”) Directors respect him because he’s one of them.After succeeding Bernard Foccroulle, who stepped down after 11 successful years at Aix, Audi was able to present just one iteration of this annual festival before the pandemic hit. But last summer, and this one, he delivered tenure-defining coups.In 2020, when all of Aix’s performances were canceled because of the pandemic, Audi managed to hold rehearsals for “Innocence,” a new work by Kaija Saariaho, with just a piano. And he was able to shift the premiere seamlessly to 2021, when it was acclaimed as one of the finest operas of the 21st century.This year, he opened the season at a new venue, which was also an old one: the Stadium de Vitrolles, a massive black concrete box built in the 1990s that had been sitting abandoned on a hilltop in an Aix suburb for over two decades.“When I arrived as director, I said to the technical people, ‘I want to see it,’” Audi recalled. “They kind of said it wasn’t possible — for a year and a half. And I had to be really tough: ‘If you don’t show it to me, I’ll stop being the director.’ It was the last day of my first festival, in 2019, and we went in with one lamp.”The premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s opera “Innocence” in 2021 was one of Audi’s tenure-defining coups at Aix.Jean-Louis Fernandez, via Festival d’Aix-en-ProvenceThe graffiti-strewn building was in sad shape, but Audi, who had transformed a former Salvation Army hall into the Almeida in 1980 and was used to programming a vast raw space in New York, realized its potential.“I saw the height of it,” he said, “and I immediately looked at the real estate being very similar to the Armory.”For two years, he courted the local government in Vitrolles, which would have to shoulder much of the cost of the refurbishment. Audi began to plan a daring premiere production for the stadium — “Resurrection,” Romeo Castellucci’s staging of Mahler’s Second Symphony as a 90-minute exhumation of a shallow mass grave — without knowing whether the renovation would be ready in time, and without doing an acoustic test in the space.“He called me,” said the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, “and I think he thought he would have to make a case, to somehow justify it to me: ‘We have a sort of outré idea that Castellucci will stage Mahler 2 in a half-derelict old building.’ And I just said, ‘Yeah, I’m in.’ I think he was disappointed it was so easy.”It wasn’t until last July that Vitrolles formally greenlighted the project. But Audi’s bet paid off: Work was completed on schedule, and while some debated Castellucci’s concept, “Resurrection” was generally applauded, a proof of concept at the start of a series of productions exploring the possibilities of the memorable, malleable space.“The stadium is the signature of Pierre Audi’s term,” said Timothée Picard, the festival’s dramaturg. “And it’s absolutely connected to everything he’s done from the beginning of his career. To imagine new relationships between works, space, stage directing, audience. Projects we couldn’t do in traditional venues.”Speaking to a small group of young artists during this year’s festival, Audi said, “I never looked at opera as something that had to deal with my trauma or my origins.” But he has linked his interest in repurposing unusual structures to growing up in Lebanon, a country that lacked theaters.At the Park Avenue Armory, Rashaad Newsome’s “Assembly” was “completely different than what you might think would be interesting to him,” the Armory’s president said.Mohamed Sadek for The New York Times“Opening the stadium, for me, it felt natural,” he said. “You have to take any building and make it a space.”Born into a wealthy family in Beirut, Audi was raised there and in Paris and was educated at Oxford University in Britain. He was in his early 20s when he founded the Almeida, turning it into a center of experimental theater and music. Starting in 1988, he served for 30 years as the leader of Dutch National Opera, a period during which he spent 10 years also in charge of the Holland Festival.“The thing about Pierre was, it wasn’t going to be traditional old-fashioned opera,” said the administrator and coach Matthew Epstein, who advised Audi during that early period. “It was the expanding of the repertoire — both backward, toward Handel and Monteverdi, which he directed and became famous for, and forward, toward so much contemporary opera. He’s a real impresario.”As the Foccroulle era moves further into the past, Audi’s Aix is coming into its own. He has added more productions to the three-week schedule and a denser lineup of concerts, expanding the budget to 27.5 million euros ($28.1 million) this year from 21.4 million euros in 2018, with plans for more, while maintaining the size of the staff; the increase is going into the art-making.He is presenting more Italian opera than had been the case here — “Tosca” in 2019; Rossini’s “Moïse et Pharaon” and a concert “Norma” this year; “Madama Butterfly” to come — and also more French works, including Meyerbeer’s “Le Prophète” next year. Aix’s vibrant commissioning program will continue, setting it apart from the Salzburg Festival, the grandest of European summer opera events, which has focused recently on revivals of rarely seen 20th-century pieces rather than new ones.Audi has “a never-ending curiosity,” said Nikolaus Bachler, another veteran artistic leader.Violette Franchi for The New York TimesA sustained relationship with Simon Rattle and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra will begin in a few summers. And Audi would like to convert the Château du Grand-Saint-Jean, just outside Aix, into a theater and a home for the festival’s young-artist program — but that project, unlike the Stadium de Vitrolles, would require an immense fund-raising effort, especially as public subsidies are a gradually ebbing percentage of the budget.As for the stadium, next summer it will be used for another ambitious project, but something completely different than “Resurrection”: a trio of films that will accompany Stravinsky’s epochal early ballets, played live by the Orchestre de Paris under Klaus Makela.“The important thing,” Audi said, “is not to imitate what we did this year.”This is in keeping with his general resistance to resting on his laurels, to doing what is expected of him. Nikolaus Bachler, another veteran artistic leader, said, “What I admire most about Pierre is he has a never-ending curiosity.” Rashaad Newsome’s “Assembly,” which Audi presented at the Armory earlier this year, was “completely different than what you might think would be interesting to him,” said Rebecca Robertson, the Armory’s president.But along with the curiosity comes a pragmatic side, a commitment to seeing those visions through. “He’s always anchored in some kind of technical reality,” Salonen said, adding, of “Resurrection”: “If he thought it could be done, I immediately thought this was something interesting.”“Honestly, this idea, coming from almost anyone, I would have said, ‘You’re out of your mind,’” Salonen said. “But when it came from him, I listened.” More

  • in

    Lend Me a Jukebox Opera. Yuks and Tenor Required.

    “Let’s do a Rossini comedy that doesn’t exist yet,” the head of the Glimmerglass Festival said. Coming soon: Ken Ludwig’s “Tenor Overboard.”Comic operas tend to be crowd-pleasers: At last, a break from all the tragic deaths and doomed lovers. The problem is there aren’t that many to choose from. Opera companies can program “Così Fan Tutte,” “Il Barbiere di Siviglia” or “L’Elisir d’Amore” and a handful of others only so many times.So Francesca Zambello, the artistic and general director of the Glimmerglass Festival, came up with a novel idea. “I just said, ‘Let’s do a Rossini comedy that doesn’t exist yet,’” she said in a recent video conversation.In other words, a jukebox opera — “Tenor Overboard,” which is to have its premiere at the festival, in Cooperstown, N.Y., on Tuesday and run through Aug. 18.While the jukebox format is common enough on Broadway, it is much rarer in opera houses. Baroque opera lends itself to the genre better than most styles, from the “pasticcio” of yore, which recycled pre-existing works, to “The Enchanted Island” in 2011, a Metropolitan Opera commission in which the librettist Jeremy Sams inserted music by Handel, Vivaldi, Rameau and others into a plot borrowed from Shakespeare plays.Undaunted by this relative dearth, or maybe stimulated by it, Zambello called the playwright Ken Ludwig last summer to ask if he would be interested in writing the libretto for the project. He was a good candidate on two counts: He wrote the book for “Crazy for You,” the Tony-winning Gershwin jukebox musical, and his most famous play, “Lend Me a Tenor,” is a farce involving an opera star in the 1930s. (His new “Lend Me a Soprano,” with lead female characters in the same basic plot, opens at the Alley Theater in Houston in September.)Ludwig, an opera buff, jumped on the opportunity to collaborate, sort of, with Rossini. He decided to set “Tenor Overboard” in the 1940s and to cram it with what he called “the great tropes of comic opera.”“Often they are stories about love that can’t be fulfilled because the older generation is trying to stand in the way of the sexual urges of the younger generation: ‘You can’t marry that boy,’” he said in a video chat. “I also wanted a storm — they often change the story, as they did in ‘Barber of Seville’ and ‘The Italian Girl in Algiers.’”Rossini “was such a comic genius,” Ludwig said. “And I’ve tried to write a libretto that is comic in the same way, and in the same way my plays normally have that sense of rhythm.”Adrianna Newell for The New York TimesLudwig cooked up a story involving two New York sisters, Gianna (Reilly Nelson) and Mimi (Jasmine Habersham), trying to escape their domineering father and an arranged marriage for Mimi. They end up joining — in cross-dressing disguise, a narrative device beloved by Shakespeare, opera and screwball comedy alike — an all-male quartet called the Singing Sicilians on a ship sailing to Sicily. Naturally, mayhem ensues.“Tenor Overboard” relies more on theatrical dialogue than on the usual operatic recitative, so Ludwig’s libretto had to be fairly extensive — and funny. “Rossini has given you moments that clearly land comically because he was such a comic genius,” Ludwig said he told the singers. “And I’ve tried to write a libretto that is comic in the same way, and in the same way my plays normally have that sense of rhythm.”Ludwig also retooled the supertitles that accompany the arias, which are sung in Italian, trying to give some of them “rhyme and rhythm,” as he put it. “Opera supertitles do need to convey to people something and you want people to be looking at the stage,” said Zambello, who is directing the production with Brenna Corner, “but these also have a little bit of extra Ludwig humor.”From left, Matt Grady and Gavin Grady, with Stefano de Peppo. “Tenor Overboard” was hatched in about a year. “Rossini wrote his operas sometimes in a month so why shouldn’t we?” Francesca Zambello said.Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass FestivalAfter a general synopsis had been agreed upon, the hardest part was still to come: It had to be filled with music — which, in the end, came from 15 different sources.“We wanted to be absolutely sure that we weren’t just rehashing famous arias of Rossini,” Joseph Colaneri, Glimmerglass’s music director, said on Zoom. “Yes, we have the ‘Barbiere’ duet, but we wanted this piece to also represent lesser-known music by Rossini.”Colaneri became part detective, tracking down obscure versions of obscure operas online and in libraries, and part MacGyver, adapting some vocal scores to make them work in their new context. The text of the “Barbiere” duet, “Dunque io son,” that Colaneri referred to, for example, was slightly adjusted to make sense in the story. And because Ludwig’s main couple is made up of a mezzo and a baritone (a nod to “Dunque io son”), some transposing was required — Rossini tended to pair a tenor and a soprano for the love duets of his comic operas.Another challenge was the scene introducing the Singing Sicilians, whom we first meet at a Y.M.C.A. — because why not? Colaneri looked at male quartets in Rossini operas but couldn’t find anything suitable. So he turned his attention to short pieces the composer wrote for “soirées musicales” after he stopped writing operas, and spotted the patter song “La Danza” (recorded by Luciano Pavarotti, among others).Colaneri had to write a vocal arrangement for two tenors, a baritone and a bass — and more. “It has to work again in the second act because two of the men are replaced by the two women who are in disguise as men,” he said. “They’re singing in the female range, but I designed the piece so that it could work with mixed vocal styles.”“Some people would say, ‘How can you transpose Rossini?’” Colaneri said. “But Rossini did this himself all the time.”For Act 2, Colaneri had to find a basso buffo aria for the sisters’ father, Petronio (Stefano de Peppo). Instead of the popular “A un dottor della mia sorte,” from “Il Barbiere,” he chose “Io, Don Profondo” from “Il Viaggio a Reims” (an opera Rossini himself had harvested for parts, reusing some of it in “Le Comte Ory”). “To me, it’s the greatest of these buffo arias,” Colaneri said. “Rossini kind of went over the top with it. We knew we were going to have Stefano and that he would be able to pull it off.”Contreras and Reilly Nelson in this jukebox opera.Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass FestivalColaneri and his cast also had to deal with the vocal embellishments and ornamentation that are part of performing Rossini. The conductor suggested that the singers listen to Ella Fitzgerald’s live version of “How High the Moon” for an example of masterful improvisation, which he described as “harmonically off the charts.” He also worked closely with them to come up with ornamentations that fit their register and roles. “You can’t write ornamentation for someone until you hear what they can do,” Colaneri said. “You have to kind of suss that out.”As with most comedies, speed and timing are of the essence onstage and even off — “Tenor Overboard” was hatched in about a year. “Rossini wrote his operas sometimes in a month so why shouldn’t we?” Zambello said.Fans should be reassured that they will laugh with Rossini, not at him. “We are seeking to perform these pieces with all the musical integrity necessary to make them come off,” Colaneri said. “We’re taking it all musically very seriously, and putting a spin on it.”Still, it’s clear that Zambello wants this work, part of her last season as the head of the Glimmerglass Festival (she remains the artistic director of the Washington National Opera), to be unabashedly festive. “It’s Italy, Sicily, food — things that people love.”When asked if she was willing to embrace Ludwig’s love of farcical shenanigans and have someone hurl a plate of spaghetti for a laugh, Zambello smiled. “I’m resisting that,” she said. “But I think it’s going to work its way in.” More

  • in

    Angel Blue Withdraws From Opera, Citing ‘Blackface’ in Netrebko’s ‘Aida’

    The American soprano Angel Blue said she would not appear at the Arena di Verona after the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko and other performers wore dark makeup in its production of “Aida.”A leading American soprano, Angel Blue, announced this week that she was withdrawing from her planned debut at the Arena di Verona in Italy to protest its use of “blackface makeup” in a production of Verdi’s “Aida” that starred the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko.“The use of blackface under any circumstances, artistic or otherwise, is a deeply misguided practice based on archaic theatrical traditions which have no place in modern society,” Blue, a Black soprano with a growing international career, said in a statement on social media, adding that she would withdraw from her upcoming performances in “La Traviata,” another Verdi opera. “It is offensive, humiliating and outright racist. Full stop.”Many leading opera companies, including the Metropolitan Opera in New York, have only recently stopped the practice of having white singers darken their skin with stage makeup to perform the title roles in “Aida” and “Otello,” long after minstrel shows, blackface roles and other types of performances that rely on makeup that echoes racist caricatures disappeared from many stages. But the practice is still common in parts of Europe and Russia, and Netrebko has been a vocal proponent of wearing dark makeup.In an interview on Friday, Blue said she was disturbed when she saw photos of the production, including some that showed dancers and singers in dark makeup, circulating on social media on Monday evening while she was in Paris for another performance.“I was shocked; I just felt really weird in my spirit,” she said. “I just felt like I couldn’t go and sing and associate myself with this tradition.”Netrebko, who is trying to rebuild her career after losing a number of engagements following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because of her history of support for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, posted photos on her Instagram this week showing her in extremely dark makeup and braids as she sang the role of Aida, an Ethiopian princess, in Verona.One of the photos the soprano Anna Netrebko shared on Instagram of the makeup she wore in a production of “Aida” at the Arena di Verona in Italy.Soon, Netrebko’s Instagram page was flooded with more than 1,000 comments, with many people denouncing her for using makeup that they said was racist and recalled blackface. She was not the only one in “Aida” who had darkened her skin: Some of her co-stars performed in the dark makeup, as did a different cast that appeared in the opera when it opened last month.A spokesman for Netrebko did not respond to a request for comment on Friday. Netrebko has been a vocal defender of the practice, arguing that it helps maintain the authenticity of centuries-old works. When the Met tried to stop her from using makeup to darken her skin during a production of “Aida” in 2018, she went to a tanning salon instead. In 2019, appearing with dark makeup in a production of “Aida” at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, she wrote on Instagram, “Black Face and Black Body for Ethiopian princess, for Verdi greatest opera! YES!”The Arena di Verona noted in a statement that it had been performing this production of “Aida” for two decades, and that it was well known when Blue agreed to appear this summer.“Every country has different roots, and their cultural and social structures developed along different historical and cultural paths,” it said in a statement. “Sensibilities and approaches on the same subject might widely vary in different parts of the world.”It added: “We have no reason nor intent whatsoever to offend and disturb anyone’s sensibility.”While Netrebko has not addressed the recent controversy, her husband, the tenor Yusif Eyvazov, who also appeared in the production of “Aida” in Verona, lashed out at Blue. In a social media post, he called Blue’s decision “disgusting,” and questioned why she had not withdrawn last month when “Aida” opened, with a different cast that also used dark makeup. (That cast included the Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska as “Aida.”)Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met, where Eyvazov is a regular performer, sent a letter to Eyvazov on Friday calling his remarks “hateful,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by The New York Times.“There is no room at the Met for artists who are so meanspirited in their thinking,” Gelb wrote in the letter.Gelb, who cut ties with Netrebko this year because of her previous support for Putin, said in an interview that he had not yet decided whether he would penalize Eyvazov. “We’re considering what steps we might take,” he said.Blue said her decision was not personal, and that she was not targeting Netrebko or her husband.“My decision doesn’t have anything to do with them,” she said in the interview. “My decision has to do with my convictions,” she added, saying that she had felt moved to take a stand against “something that is hurtful to people who look like me.”Blue said she hoped that more opera houses would eliminate blackface as they work to bring diversity to the stage.“In order to keep opera relevant in today’s society, there’s no place for blackface,” she said. “I felt hurt by what I saw because I feel like that’s a tradition that they’re trying to hold onto that hurts people.”Eyvazov’s manager said he was unavailable for comment on Friday.The decision by Blue, who has become a favorite at the Met Opera in recent seasons and who appeared this summer at the Paris Opera in Gounod’s “Faust,” was praised by many fellow singers and American opera executives.The revival of “Aida” in Verona is among Netrebko’s first staged opera engagements since her return to performing in late April as she tried to repair her career after being shunned in the United States and parts of Europe for her ties to Putin. More

  • in

    At This Summer’s Aix Festival, the Only Laughter Is Bitter

    With two grim premieres among the offerings, Monteverdi’s sharp “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” was the highlight of a week of opera.AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — Few opera institutions have as strong a track record in new work as the Aix-en-Provence Festival. Two of the most significant pieces of the 21st century have originated here: “Written on Skin,” in 2012, and “Innocence,” which premiered last year.But the lesson of the festival is that you can’t just pop out a masterpiece a decade. You have to chug away with commissions, big and small, year in and year out, knowing that the vast majority will be, if not duds, then far from perfect.A tiny percentage of new operas end up with lasting importance, and that’s the numbers game Aix is playing. Sheer volume is key, as the Metropolitan Opera, with its recent pledge to present at least two contemporary titles a season, is learning.Aix, too, is putting on two premieres at this year’s edition, which runs through July 23. Neither fully satisfies, but I have great respect for the festival’s commitment to the contemporary as a pillar of its programming.The larger of the two is “Il Viaggio, Dante,” which dares to condense not just all three books of “The Divine Comedy” but also the poet’s early “La Vita Nuova” into two intermissionless hours. So Dante, recalling his past during a midlife crisis, is accompanied through hell and purgatory to paradise by a crowd: Virgil, his poetic model, as well as Beatrice, his eternal love; Santa Lucia, who spurs his journey; and his younger self.While Frédéric Boyer’s libretto spans a tremendous amount of material, the text doesn’t feel rushed, but as calmly solemn, prayerlike and formal as a ceremony of Gregorian monks, with choral incantations interjected throughout. And the prominent French composer Pascal Dusapin has responded with music of nearly unmitigated portentousness.His sound world is brooding, with grimly hovering drones, enhanced by electronic effects, under heated declamation. The orchestra rises to groaning roars — though these climaxes are more poised than raw — that tend to cut off abruptly, leaving the hazy resonance of bells and a shimmering battery of percussion before the next slow buildup.There is artful work here, as when a passage of droning is softly sandwiched by choral writing: a moist, mossy grumble below, women’s voices above. Young Dante — a trouser role, here sung by the clarinetty mezzo-soprano Christel Loetzsch — has a monologue of medieval-style spare purity mourning the loss of love. And near the end, Beatrice and Lucia’s vocal lines quiver and swoop like birds around a low, sober, sonorous chorale.The mythic, dreamlike pace recalls Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande” and Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle,” but Dusapin’s approach is without much variety or tension. Hell’s range of sinners presents a clear opportunity for Bartok’s strategy — evocative showpieces as different doors are opened — but the score of “Il Viaggio, Dante” remains resolutely, drearily homogeneous: dully dyspeptic even in paradise.One of this summer’s premieres at Aix was a Pascal Dusapin opera based on Dante with, from left, Maria Carla Pino Cury and Jean-Sébastien Bou.Monika RittershausWhatever the opera’s flaws, though, it is hard to imagine it being better presented than it was here. At its premiere on Friday at the Grand Théâtre de Provence, Kent Nagano led the orchestra and chorus of the Opéra de Lyon in a rigorously elegant performance. The baritone Jean-Sébastien Bou was a steady but intense, impassioned Dante.Most important, with a video prologue and a coolly stylish set, the veteran director Claus Guth shaped the oratorio-like piece into a form approaching coherent narrative. Set in our time, his staging shifts among a country-house interior, a forbidding forest and the netherworld of “Inferno” — here a spare, surreal space, part circus (sparkly white suit), part Kubrick (weird twin girls), part Lynch (ominous walls of curtains and eerie howling).Shorter — just an hour, with a mere handful of performers — is “Woman at Point Zero,” performed on Sunday at the black-box Pavillon Noir. Based on the Egyptian writer and activist Nawal El Saadawi’s 1975 novel about the pressures and limitations on women in a patriarchal society, the piece depicts a filmmaker interviewing a sex worker who has been imprisoned for killing an abusive pimp.Neither Dima Orsho (Fatma, the prisoner) nor Carla Nahadi Babelegoto (Sama, the interviewer) overplayed as their lines moved from speaking to light recitative-style singing to full keening in Laila Soliman’s focused, minimal staging.It was unusual and heartening to see an opera that had women directing, conducting, composing and libretto-writing, as well as starring. Kanako Abe led and abetted — slapping her side and making clicking and murmuring noises — six musicians of Ensemble ZAR, who played a multicultural array of instruments, including cello, accordion, duduk (an Armenian cousin of the English horn), daegeum (a Korean bamboo flute) and the bowed Persian kamancheh, among others. But Bushra El-Turk’s score created few new or intriguing colors from these unusual combinations, and Stacy Hardy’s libretto flattened the two women and their interaction into cliché.The other premiere is “Woman at Point Zero,” with music by Bushra El-Turk and featuring, from left, Dima Orsho and Carla Nahadi Babelegoto.Jean-Louis FernandezThe characters who feel the freshest at this year’s Aix Festival are populating Ted Huffman’s vivid staging of Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea.” Almost 400 years old, “Poppea” is startlingly contemporary in the gray zone of morality it occupies. Almost no one is entirely likable or unlikable; lust and ambition are simultaneously reveled in and condemned.At the jewel-box Théatre du Jeu de Paume — which seats fewer than 500, an ideal intimacy for Baroque opera — there is barely a set. Pretty much the only element is a huge pipe, half painted white, half black, hanging over the action, perhaps a symbol of the fate that never quite falls on the adulterous, power-hungry leads.Sexy onstage sex may be even rarer than sexy sex writing, but Huffman has guided his cast in scenes that are genuinely seductive, heated by Monteverdi’s exquisitely sensual music. The secret? For all its bare bodies and physical contact, this modern-dress (and undressed) production, which opened on Saturday, realizes that eroticism comes not just from lovers pawing each other, but also from distance. Similarly, having the performers spend their time between scenes at the sides of the stage, watching their fellow singers, somehow increases our sense of the characters’ depth and reality.To hear young, fresh artists in this piece, in this theater, was a joy. Fleur Barron was a wounded Ottavia, Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian an agonized Ottone, Alex Rosen an angry Seneca, Maya Kherani a delicate Drusilla. Miles Mykkanen was uproarious, but not grotesque, as the opera’s two old women; Julie Roset was an alert Amore; and there was subtle supporting work from Laurence Kilsby, Yannis François and Riccardo Romeo.Their tones inflamed and acute, Jacquelyn Stucker and Jake Arditti were a Poppea and Nerone driven nearly mad with desire. The chorus before their aching final duet, “Pur ti miro,” has been cut, keeping this coronation a private reverie on which we spy.Leonardo García Alarcón conducted a small but potent group from his ensemble, Cappella Mediterranea, with almost improvisatory spikiness, but without losing polish. (Playing with larger forces on Monday, Alarcón and Cappella Mediterranea’s concert version of Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo” felt a bit more diffuse, though Mariana Flores’s Euridice produced a serene final lament.)When it is performed at this level, “Poppea” is acidic and exhilarating. You giggle in astonishment at what these characters are capable of, and at what you’re capable of sympathizing with.This year’s festival is of superb quality but almost entirely without comedy: Besides the two bleak premieres, there are Romeo Castellucci’s mass-exhumation staging of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony, a contemporary-refugee Rossini rarity, an icy “Salome” and an “Idomeneo” evoking nuclear disaster. In that dour company, Monteverdi’s bitter laughter will have to do. More

  • in

    At the Opera, Humans Bear Witness to Atrocity, or Ignore It

    Whether in works by Mahler, Mozart or Rossini, directors at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France evoke mass death and refugee crises.AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — The bodies kept coming up.First one. Then another. Then a dozen. Then a hundred. After an hour of “Resurrection,” the opening night production at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, 160 decomposing corpses lay in neat, sickening rows on a stage covered in dark earth.The exhumation of a shallow mass grave is a grimly familiar sight: Sudan, Srebrenica, Veracruz, Rwanda, so many others. In March, Bucha, Ukraine, added to that litany a scene so eerily reminiscent of the one being staged here that the festival sent out an email assuring audiences that the director, Romeo Castellucci, had conceived the production a year before the war broke out.Three years ago at the Aix Festival, Castellucci presented “Requiem,” a staging of Mozart’s final work. In a series of enigmatic episodes, he set to the mournful, churning music an evocation of civilization’s full span, from birth — with plangent child singers — to vibrant, folk-dancing life, and shadowy implosion amid battles and nature’s destruction.His new piece, which premiered on Monday, is a pendant to “Requiem,” but Castellucci has done something quite different with Mahler’s 90-minute Second Symphony, known as the “Resurrection.” Rather than short episodes, here there is a single, almost unremitting action: We watch a United Nations team silently excavate a site where a catastrophe has taken place.This spectacle risks tastelessness. But “Resurrection” dwells on these anonymous professionals and their experienced, repetitive choreography so endlessly and matter-of-factly — in naturalistic, unhurried real time — that it transcends a sense of aesthetic or moral pornography. Instead, the experience of watching it evokes that of watching the news or reading the front pages: waves of sympathy and horror that yield to powerlessness and numbness.Esa-Pekka Salonen led the Orchestre de Paris in the Mahler symphony.Monika RittershausEven the Mahler looks on this unbearable pain with a kind of detachment. The stage action is directly spurred by the sprawling symphony only a few times, so the moods don’t match neatly; this isn’t a soundtrack, thankfully. For all the intensity of the imagery, there is rarely a sense of emotional manipulation.“Resurrection” weakens when it does feel manipulative, moving from the reality of vans and body bags toward more sentimental symbolism: a white horse galloping onstage at the start, innocence soon to be tarnished; a U.N. worker who refuses to stop digging; a final, clichéd benediction of rain.But the Orchestre de Paris’s performance of the score, under Esa-Pekka Salonen, was properly savage, even raw — though also relished, unrushed. This was deliberate, spaciously paced Mahler, lilting but never too sweet in its ländler second movement, its third-movement danse macabre as haunting as ever.Golda Schultz sang the soprano solos with quiet purity, but she barely registered next to the mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa’s consoling but commanding “Urlicht,” focused but rich. The bodies driven away, the stage finally emptied, the symphony’s stirring, stentorian choral finale was a promise of rebirth directed at a field of upturned dirt.The site of the performance had its own symbolic charge. During its brief initial existence in the 1990s, the Stadium de Vitrolles, a huge, gritty black concrete box on a hilltop in a suburb of Aix, hosted athletic and entertainment events, as well as an attempted far-right rally concert. It has been abandoned for over two decades; the graffiti on the walls and its industrial scale give it the impression of Berlin squatting in sunny Provence. This production is a ruin’s resurrection, too.The stadium shares a cavernous mutability with the Park Avenue Armory, where Pierre Audi, the Aix Festival’s director, is the artistic leader. You get the sense that in spaces like this, with productions that couldn’t happen anywhere else, Audi is most in his element as a programmer. The rest of the festival is taking place at more traditional theaters, and while the musical values are generally superb, it can all hardly help but feel blander, less of a special occasion than “Resurrection.”The soprano Elsa Dreisig as Salome was the most eyebrow-raising casting at the festival this year.Bernd UhligAt the Grand Théâtre de Provence, Andrea Breth has done her best to stage Strauss’s “Salome” without its traditional luridness. The Dance of the Seven Veils is a cool and collected promenade of body doubles, without a hint of nudity. Even the decapitated head of John the Baptist, climactically kissed by the title character, goes unseen inside a metal bucket.The action tends sleepily glacial: The dimly lit set suggests an ice floe, which the characters cross as if trapped in a grayscale dream. The most eyebrow-raising casting at Aix this year was the soprano Elsa Dreisig as Salome, a role usually taken by those who also sing Wagnerian heroines. Dreisig, just into her 30s, is better known for far lighter roles like Mozart’s Pamina and Zerlina.But, aided by Ingo Metzmacher’s delicate, languid, sometimes muted conducting of the Orchestre de Paris, she acquitted herself admirably on Tuesday, singing with sweetness and, yes, a girlishness that you rarely hear from those who play this teenage princess.Michael Spyres, left, and Sabine Devieilhe in Satoshi Miyagi’s staging of Mozart’s “Idomeneo.”Jean-Louis FernandezThus far — the festival runs through July 23 and features seven full productions, as well as a crowded concert program — Mozart’s “Idomeneo” has been the best played, with Raphaël Pichon conducting his ensemble, Pygmalion, with longing sensitivity on Wednesday. At the outdoor Théâtre de l’Archevêché, Satoshi Miyagi’s production has an air of ritual; the main characters stand in place atop plinths that slide gently around the stage. The lighting on occasion suddenly shifts to show the huddled masses working endlessly to keep this royal family in motion.The soprano Sabine Devieilhe sang with soaring grace as Ilia; the mezzo-soprano Anna Bonitatibus was a somber, secure Idamante; and the soprano Nicole Chevalier reveled in Elettra’s wide-eyed despair. But Michael Spyres, his tenor usually trumpeting, sounded uneasy in the title role, his phrasing abrupt and the top of his voice strained.Kayo Takahashi Deschene’s costumes are a blend of ancient Greece and Japanese Kabuki; Neptune’s wrath is here a stylized version of the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like in “Resurrection,” real-life tragedies are ambiguously but potently evoked — as they are, too, in Tobias Kratzer’s production of Rossini’s “Moïse et Pharaon.”The Aix-like set of Tobias Kratzer’s staging of Rossini’s “Moïse et Pharaon” suggests the audience’s ties to the opera’s themes.Monika RittershausKratzer, who has swiftly become one of Europe’s most in-demand opera directors, makes the opera’s enslaved Hebrews into contemporary refugees, the Egyptians into corporate types in smart suits. Only Moïse occupies a timeless sphere — with a hint of camp — in Cecil B. DeMillian biblical robes.Leading the orchestra of the Opéra de Lyon at the Archevêché on Thursday, Michele Mariotti kept the pulse vital even in the score’s longest-arching lines and most gradually building ensembles. And Kratzer is gifted at eliciting forceful yet restrained performances, particularly in tense but unexaggerated duets. The production’s video elements — digital static, projections of social media accounts, the Egyptian army’s unconvincing drowning — merely distracted from this human element. And the rare opportunity to hear the opera’s full ballet music was marred by forgettable, seething choreography.As Moïse, the veteran Rossini bass Michele Pertusi was authoritative in declamation, a bit less so in long-phrased prayer. The rising soprano Jeanine de Bique’s voice is fascinatingly wiry: sometimes shaded, sometimes pristine, always urgent. The mezzo-soprano Vasilisa Berzhanskaya sang with even strength as the pharaoh’s wife, Sinaïde.This “Moïse” ends with the Hebrews scattered among the audience for the final hymn of thanks for their deliverance. Onstage, bourgeoisie lounge at the beach, blissfully ignorant that they are tanning by the same sea where refugees have cast out in rafts, to live or die.Here, as throughout the evening, the back wall of the stage is one of Aix’s antique stone facades, with its idyllic Baroque fountain. It’s we in the audience on that beach, Kratzer is saying.But, like Castellucci in “Resurrection,” Kratzer does not seem interested in angry indictments, or pat accusations of complicity. His staging is, more subtly and powerfully, a sad, unsettling suggestion of our unmalicious but all-too-willing forgetfulness. More

  • in

    Kenward Elmslie, Poet and Librettist, Dies at 93

    He collaborated on operas with Jack Beeson and Ned Rorem and published numerous poetry books. Late in life, he was victimized by theft.Kenward Elmslie, who wrote poetry, opera librettos and stage musicals, and who late in life made headlines when his chauffeur bilked him out of millions of dollars and several valuable artworks, including one by Andy Warhol, died on June 29 at his home in the West Village. He was 93.The poet Ron Padgett, a friend since the 1960s, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause. Mr. Elmslie had been dealing with dementia for many years.Mr. Elmslie, a grandson of the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, became interested in musical theater while in high school, and in 1952 he met and became a lover of John Latouche, a lyricist who worked with Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington and others and had numerous Broadway credits. Mr. Elmslie is said to have helped Mr. Latouche on some of his projects, generally uncredited.After Mr. Latouche’s death in 1956, Mr. Elmslie continued to live in the house they had shared in Vermont, alternating between there and Manhattan. And he began to have success himself as a lyricist and librettist.He provided the libretto for the Jack Beeson opera “The Sweet Bye and Bye,” which was first performed by the Juilliard Opera Theater in New York in 1957. In 1965 he worked with Mr. Beeson again, on “Lizzie Borden,” an embellished version of the famed ax-murder case, which premiered that year at City Center in New York. It was probably Mr. Elmslie’s biggest success in opera.“The performers, the composer, the librettist, the designer and the director shared the bows at the end,” Howard Klein wrote in his review in The New York Times. “Many bravos were heard.”Ellen Faull and Richard Krause in a scene from the Jack Beeson opera “Lizzie Borden,” for which Mr. Elmslie wrote the libretto. It was probably Mr. Elmslie’s biggest success in opera.NET Opera, via PhotofestMr. Elmslie’s other opera credits included the libretto for Ned Rorem’s “Miss Julie” (1965). He also dabbled in songwriting — his “Love-Wise,” written with Marvin Fisher, was recorded by Nat King Cole in 1959 — and in theater, even accumulating a Broadway credit as book writer and lyricist for “The Grass Harp,” a musical based on a Truman Capote novel that opened in 1971 but, unloved by critics, closed days later.W.C. Bamberger, in the introduction to “Routine Disruptions,” a 1998 collection of Mr. Elmslie’s poems and lyrics, wrote that it was during lulls in his opera and lyric-writing work that Mr. Elmslie began trying his hand at poetry. He was plugged into the New York art and literary scene and had befriended Barbara Guest, John Ashbery and other poets. His first collection, “Pavilions,” appeared in 1961, followed by more than a dozen others, including “Motor Disturbance” (1971) and “Tropicalism” (1975).In the 1970s, as editor of Z Press and its annual Z Magazine, Mr. Elmslie published many of the poets he admired. His own work defied categorization. There was plenty of wit, as in “Touche’s Salon,” which shamelessly dropped names to evoke a 1950s gathering at Mr. Latouche’s penthouse:Meet Jack Kerouac. Humpy and available.His novel On The Road is unreadable. And unsalable.John Cage is sober, Tennessee loaded.Better not ask how his last flop show did.But his more serious poetry could be ambitious, as well as dense. Mr. Ashbery once said that it was like the notes of “a mad scientist who has swallowed the wrong potion in his lab and is desperately trying to get his calculations on paper before everything closes in.”Mr. Elmslie came to combine his various hats — librettist, songwriter, poet — both in his books, some of which were collaborations with visual artists, and in his poetry readings, which might find him in costume delivering a song in addition to reading his verses. Susan Rosenbaum, reviewing his 2000 book, “Blast From the Past: Stories, Poems, Song Lyrics & Remembrances,” in Jacket magazine, noted that the printed page didn’t do justice to his wide-ranging interests.“For an artist as multitalented as Elmslie, the book is a limiting format: One wants to see and hear his musical works in performance, to visit the galleries where his visual collaborations are displayed,” she wrote. “But the very ability to elicit this desire — to reveal poetry’s affinities with song, theater and visual art — is a measure of the talent of this unique poet.”Kenward Gray Elmslie was born on April 27, 1929, in Manhattan. His father, William, met Constance Pulitzer, Joseph Pulitzer’s youngest daughter, when he was working as a tutor for another of the Pulitzer children. They married in 1913.Kenward grew up in Colorado Springs and Washington, D.C., and graduated from Harvard University in 1950 with an English degree. In New York in the 1950s and ’60s, he mixed easily with an artsy crowd. A 1965 article in The Times about a trendy party in the Bowery had him among the guests, with Warhol, the photographers Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon, the pioneering electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and others, all gathered to hear a reading by William S. Burroughs.The year before that party, Warhol had given Mr. Elmslie one of his Heinz ketchup box sculptures, a classic example of Warholian Pop Art. More than four decades later, in 2009, the work was stolen, along with other valuable items and several million dollars. “Pulitzer kin hit in pop art scam,” the headline in The Daily News read.In 2010, James Biear, who had been Mr. Elmslie’s chauffeur and caretaker, was indicted in the thefts. News accounts at the time said he took advantage of Mr. Elmslie’s dementia, which was already in its early stages. In 2012 Mr. Biear was sentenced to 10 years in prison.In 1963 Mr. Elmslie began a long relationship with Joe Brainard, an artist and writer with whom he also collaborated on various projects. Mr. Brainard died in 1994. Mr. Elmslie is survived by a half sister, Alexandra Whitelock. More

  • in

    Is the Future of American Opera Unfolding in Detroit?

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Last September, as cultural organizations began their fall seasons in a state of crisis, unsure if audiences would venture from their homes in the midst of a pandemic, Yuval Sharon, the artistic director of the Michigan Opera Theater, decided to mount a show called “Bliss.” A restaging of a marathon piece by the Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson, “Bliss” requires its performers to replay the final three minutes of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” without pause for 12 hours. Sharon’s production took place in what was once the Michigan Building Theater, a former Detroit movie palace that closed in 1976; infamously, when architects determined that demolishing the theater would make an adjoining office building structurally unsound, the interior was gutted and transformed into a multilevel garage. The sight of cars parked beneath moldering Renaissance-style plasterwork and traces of long-gone balconies has long proved irresistible to Detroit ruin photographers, but no one before Sharon had ever staged a live performance among them. The production was pay-what-you-like, and those of us in the audience reached the performance space by walking up a ramp. Looking over its edge, I spotted a dusty Jeep parked on a lower level with the words LIONS SUCK traced on the windshield. A pair of low stages, minimally dressed to set a banquet scene, had been assembled, and the rest of the space was hauntingly lit, with an orchestra on the same level as the audience, whose members were free to sit or orbit at their leisure, entering or leaving at any part of the show, which began at noon and ended at midnight. Sharon paced the perimeter in a bow tie, a colorful jacket and yellow sneakers. Now 42, Sharon is the most visionary opera director of his generation. He founded an experimental company, cheekily named the Industry, in Los Angeles in 2012, and was met with near-immediate acclaim for stagings so wildly inventive they often dispensed with stages altogether. A 2013 production of “Invisible Cities,” the composer Christopher Cerrone’s adaptation of Italo Calvino’s imaginary travelogue, took place in Los Angeles’s Union Station, one of the busiest passenger railroad terminals in the country; performers moved around the space as concertgoers listened on wireless headphones (and commuters raced for their trains). A 2015 opera inspired by Julio Cortázar’s “Hopscotch” — a novel whose chapters can be read sequentially or by “hopscotching” around the book — recreated the format in Los Angeles traffic: Audience members would enter one of 24 limousines, each of which also contained performers, and proceed along one of three routes, occasionally changing cars or stopping at key landmarks to witness vignettes. Other Sharon productions have combined live singers with green screens and digital animation, stuck performers inside a giant glass vitrine and redeployed defunct air-raid sirens to broadcast music onto city streets. In 2017, Sharon was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant; the following year, he became the first American to direct at Bayreuth, the Wagnerian opera festival founded by Richard Wagner himself in 1876. The conductor Gustavo Dudamel — the music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where Sharon served a three-year residency as artist-collaborator — told me in an email that Sharon was a “creative genius” who “understands the heart of every piece and takes us there through a vision that is incomparable.” And yet Sharon’s boldest venture may have been the announcement, in 2020, that he would be accepting a position as artistic director of the Michigan Opera Theater — since renamed, at Sharon’s insistence, Detroit Opera. It’s hard to overstate the unlikelihood of a director as innovative and internationally celebrated as Sharon taking the reins of a decidedly regional (and in certain respects conservative) opera company like Detroit’s. But today, nearly two years into his five-year contract, Sharon has already radically elevated Detroit Opera’s status in the larger cultural ecosystem. His first production in Detroit — a drive-through, socially distant version of Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” in a downtown parking structure — received a rave from Alex Ross in The New Yorker: The piece “would have been a triumph in any season,” Ross wrote, but it “felt borderline miraculous” in 2020, during the first wave of the pandemic. Sharon went on to commission a revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” which had never received a full revival since its premiere at New York City Opera in 1986. Davis told me he’d taken meetings at the Metropolitan Opera over the years to discuss possible productions, but nothing had ever come of the talks; after the Detroit production was announced, though, “Yuval said the Met called him,” and arranged to bring the production to New York in 2023. I came early to “Bliss,” then returned again closer to the finish, grabbing a chair near Corey McKern, the baritone playing the philandering Count Almaviva. For the last 11 hours or so, the count had been begging forgiveness from his wife, and now McKern sat slumped on some steps at the edge of the stage. Kjartansson originally staged “Bliss” in 2011, but a decade later, its purgatorial repetition had become a perfect metaphor for our daily lives during the pandemic; the endless loop of penitent toxic maleness also had an amusing new resonance. On a personal level, more than whatever conceptual power the piece held, more than the ways in which repetition deepened and complicated the beauty of Mozart’s music, even more than the athleticism of the singers or the novelty of hearing them, unamplified, from only a few feet away, I was struck by the space itself. I’m a former resident of the city, and Detroit’s ruins were not new to me; to be frank, I’d been skeptical of the decision to stage the performance in the former Michigan Building Theater at all. So I was surprised to find myself tearing up during the final burst of applause at midnight. Had it been the amazing feat of endurance I’d just witnessed? The fact that this was one of the first live musical performances I’d seen in over a year? Or was it because we hadn’t been invited into this space simply to gawk at a memento mori, but rather to transform it into something transcendent, or at least to try?Mark Williams, the chief executive of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, told me that when he heard about Sharon’s move to Detroit, he was not surprised. He and Sharon had worked together at the Cleveland Orchestra, where Sharon directed a pair of acclaimed opera productions. But Sharon’s ambitions, Williams said, were bigger than guest directing; he was “the sort of person who would want to come into a space where he could really effect change, rather than going into a more established space and becoming more of a caretaker. So when he told me about Detroit, I thought, Gosh, that makes perfect sense. I believe that Yuval and Detroit Opera could really become the company that is showing America what opera can be.” As a deep partisan of the city, I say with all fondness: The future of American opera unfolding in Detroit was not a plot twist I saw coming. And yet, Sharon countered, Detroit might actually be “the perfect place to really push for what the future of opera can be.” He is not interested in a universalist, one-size-fits-all approach, where “La Bohème” ends up the same in Detroit as it does everywhere else: “No, it’s got to be totally of Detroit in the end. That, to me, is the path forward.” Couldn’t — shouldn’t, Sharon insisted — opera in Detroit look and feel and sound like nothing else in the country?In person, Sharon has the air of a convivial host. Boyish and elfin, with a slight frame and probing blue eyes, he’s a hugger, an easy laugher, a hoarder of both apt quotes by heavyweight European thinkers (Brecht, Barthes, Adorno, Kierkegaard, Peter Sloterdijk) and gossipy anecdotes (e.g. the one about the famous opera diva who phoned her agent in Europe so he could call the driver of her limo and have him lower the air-conditioning) — someone who “knows what he wants but is very polite, the opposite of an authoritarian director,” according to Matthias Schulz, the director of the Berlin State Opera, who sounded, when we talked, at once impressed and slightly puzzled by this approach.Earlier this year, Schulz invited Sharon to Berlin to revive his production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” which he first presented in 2019. “The Magic Flute” is Sharon’s favorite opera, and in his staging the singers are puppets dangling from strings in a children’s theater, with Tamino, the hero, costumed to resemble the manga character Astro Boy. (“The original version had tons of flying,” Sharon says. “We’re cutting that back.”) A few days before that revival opened, I met Sharon in front of Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art, where he arrived on a lime-green rental bicycle. He spent time in the city in the early aughts, when the KW, housed in an abandoned margarine factory, was among his favorite haunts. “I didn’t even check what was on,” he said as we entered, pulling a black N95 mask from the pocket of a sharp coat assembled from expensive-looking shingles of rough-hewed wool. “I always love what they do here.” It turned out that in the first gallery we were greeted by a quartet of stylized marionettes by the Austrian artist Peter Friedl. “Wow,” Sharon said. He pulled out his phone and snapped a photograph. Critics of his “Magic Flute,” he noted, didn’t like the marionette concept. He chuckled. “They thought of it as childish. I think it’s childlike. There’s a distinction!”Sharon’s 2019 production of ‘‘The Magic Flute’’ at Berlin State Opera.Monika RittershausThe original 2019 production was plagued with difficulties. The flying devices barely worked, and the original conductor, Franz Welser-Möst, dropped out three weeks before the opening for an emergency knee surgery. Audience members booed at the premiere. A zero-star review in The Financial Times began: “There are natural catastrophes, such as floods and earthquakes. And then there are man-made catastrophes, such as Yuval Sharon’s new production of Die Zauberflöte at Berlin’s Staatsoper.” Sharon has since acknowledged that the opening was “a disaster” — but the production did find its footing, and actually became popular, hence Schulz’s desire for the streamlined revival, which has become part of the Staatsoper’s repertory. “Matthias told me it became a cult favorite,” Sharon said, “which I think is a nice way of saying critics hated it but audiences like it.”I’d been scheduled to attend a rehearsal two nights earlier, but just before I left my hotel, I received an apologetic email saying one of the cast members felt uncomfortable having a journalist in the house. I would only be allowed to watch an hour of the proceedings from high in a balcony, far from everyone. Later I learned the context of my banishment from Sharon, who arrived in Berlin the day before: After a quick stop at his hotel he headed straight to the opera house, where the first thing he heard, from the same cast member who objected to my presence, was: This production is [expletive]. What are we doing? Sharon recounted the story with good humor, but he was obviously annoyed. “I was like, OK, you go sing your part, and I’ll deal with people who want to be here,” Sharon said. He sighed. “You can’t win ’em all. A big part of being a director is realizing that. And you know, watching it again? I thought, I still like all of this! If you asked me to do ‘The Magic Flute’ today, this is the production I’d do.”On opening night, I sat next to a girl who couldn’t have been older than 10 and had brought along a pair of opera glasses. The technical and conceptual audacity of Sharon’s productions tend to reap the most attention, but I’ve often come away from his work remembering smaller moments, funny or surreal, that grasp the emotional heart of the operas he’s deconstructing. In the case of “The Magic Flute,” one such moment came near the end, after Tamino rescues Pamina — and then, suddenly, the pair re-emerge in modern dress, the setting having shifted to a pristine replica of a 1960s suburban kitchen, jarringly rerouting the lovers’ fable-like quest narrative into a scene from a David Lynch movie, a version of Ever After both sinister and deflatingly mundane.The tenor George Shirley in rehearsal for ‘‘La Bohème.’’Dan Winters for The New York TimesThe standing ovation the show received would seem to justify Sharon’s self-confidence. But the skeptical cast member’s question gets at a nagging tension that hovers in the background whenever a provocateur like Sharon enters a more tradition-bound establishment — and there are few arts establishments more tradition-bound than opera, an endeavor that, perhaps for this very reason, seems perpetually in crisis. Devotees fret about aging audiences (the average Metropolitan Opera subscriber in the last season before Covid-19 was 65), cultural irrelevance, overdependence on wealthy donors, elitism, lack of diversity and of course the challenges of presenting what’s known as the “inherited repertoire,” which can make major opera houses feel more like museums displaying beautifully lit but familiar versions of beloved masterpieces. According to Marc Scorca, president of Opera America, many opera houses are financially healthy at the moment, thanks to recent federal stimulus packages — but “underneath that,” he says, “is huge concern about how the audience will rematerialize once Covid is behind us.” Sharon recognizes these challenges as being even more fraught in Detroit, where an already lean budget became leaner during the pandemic — and where, he told me, “the old metrics were, you have a 90-percent-white audience in a city that’s 80 percent Black.” He went on: “They lured me in with the sentiment that said, ‘We absolutely need to change.’ And I said, ‘Well, if change is really what you’re interested in, then, I mean — continuation is not what I’m here to do.’” Detroit Opera’s “Bliss” in the former Michigan Building Theater, which is now a parking garage.Noah Elliot MorrisonThe job in Detroit has been a return of sorts for Sharon, who grew up nearby, in Chicago. His parents, both Israeli, came to the United States when his father, Ariel, a nuclear engineer, attended Northwestern University. After Chernobyl, Ariel started a company that made nuclear-plant emergency simulators, a job that kept him on the road — often to Germany, where, “kind of the way American businessmen would go golfing together, clients there would take him to the opera,” Yuval told me. Ariel had always been an amateur music lover, noodling around on the family’s piano and insisting that Yuval (but, for some reason, neither of his siblings) stick with lessons. The pattern repeated itself with opera: As Ariel became more of a buff, his son, who thought the swords and dragons in Wagner were cool, would become his regular companion at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.The first opera Yuval saw, a production of “La Traviata” on a visit to Germany when he was 12 or 13, didn’t speak to him, but he still remembers a single, dreamlike moment from the otherwise traditional staging. In the final act, as Violetta lay dying in bed while a chorus sang offstage — party music, Sharon says, the moment where the woman realizes the world outside doesn’t care — a clown holding a balloon emerged from beneath her bed and sneaked out a window. “It was the only moment in which the reality of what was happening onstage was broken,” he says. The rest of the production rapidly faded, leaving little impression. But the image of the clown stuck in his mind. By middle school he’d become a self-described “loner kid”; by high school he was watching Bergman’s “Persona” for pleasure. He attended the University of California at Berkeley, majoring in literature but hoping to get into film or theater directing. After graduating he moved to Berlin, living in a flat with a coal stove and teaching English part-time. Living in the city was so cheap that he could afford to go out to plays, concerts and operas. Opera had never struck him as the sort of endeavor in which he could play a part; it felt fixed, like going to a museum or reading the Great Books. But in Berlin he saw opera directors with the freedom, thanks in part to state funding, to be wildly experimental, and realized an opera production could be more than a re-creation of something from the past.Sharon moved to New York in 2002. He helped found an experimental theater company, but he soon realized that all of his shows had musical elements. He was becoming more excited about his day job at New York City Opera, where he would eventually run a new-music program called Vox. Meeting composers and workshopping their operas with the orchestra, he found himself most enthusiastic about the pieces that didn’t feel as if they would make sense framed in a normal theater — those composed specifically for amplified voices, say, or incorporating electronic components. But starting a company to produce new opera seemed impossible in New York, and none of the cramped black-box theaters he could afford to rent felt like exciting visual spaces. In 2008 he began spending time in Los Angeles, working as an assistant director to Achim Freyer, a student of Bertolt Brecht’s and one of the avant-garde directors whose work he found inspiring in Berlin. Sharon says he got the job, working on a monumental staging of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, because “they needed someone who could speak German and who loved Wagner enough to make a two-year commitment.” Scorca, of Opera America, remembers the transplanted Easterner raving about how Los Angeles had a special freshness, an absence of cynicism and an openness to the arts. The Los Angeles Opera had been around only since 1986; Freyer’s production was to be the first complete “Ring” cycle ever performed in the city. “There was a whole arts infrastructure really being birthed,” Scorca says. “The Broad Museum hadn’t been built yet. Disney Hall was still relatively new. Something very special was happening, and there was a receptivity to the new that Yuval liked.” And unlike New York, Los Angeles had space to accommodate the scale of Sharon’s creative vision.“We were the new New York,” chuckles Cedric Berry, a bass-baritone who performed in the Industry’s first production, “Crescent City.” Set in a fictional city based on New Orleans after Katrina, the opera, by the Louisiana native Anne LeBaron, had been a favorite of Sharon’s since it was workshopped at Vox, and in some ways became his impetus for starting the Industry. He raised $250,000 from donors and grants and rented a warehouse in the Atwater Village neighborhood. “The music was the hardest piece I’ve ever done,” Berry told me. “But in addition to being an opera, it was an art installation” — Sharon had invited local visual artists to design immersive sets — “so the audience was on the stage, around the stage, you walked through them. My character was building a house. And they had cameras in your face, projecting video onto screens, so you had to be a smart actor, period.” The dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied, who was starting the LA Dance Project around the same time, recalls looking at a synopsis of the show “and thinking, This is the sort of thing very unlikely to work.” But by all accounts it did. The staging was high-concept; “I never make things easier, I make them more complicated,” Sharon admitted to me, while Berry says that “if it’s not something anyone in their right mind thinks is impossible, Yuval wouldn’t want to do it.” But Sharon remained laser-focused on performance and traditional technique, rooting out what Berry called “ ‘smacting,’ a kind of mock-acting, what people think of when they think of musical theater.” In a rapturous review, the Los Angeles Times classical-music critic Mark Swed described the Industry as “potentially groundbreaking” for the city. Millepied came away such a convert that the LA Dance Project collaborated with the Industry on its next project, “Invisible Cities.” For Sharon, Wagner’s theory of Gesamtkunstwerk, a “total work of art,” makes opera the “ultimate collaborative art form and the ultimate multimedia art form” — even if for Wagner himself the term “meant ‘everything comes from my brain, and it’s all unified.’” Sharon’s own concept for a 21st-century Gesamtkunstwerk is “multivoiced, a polyphony rather than a monotony.” The 2020 Industry production “Sweet Land,” for instance, had two directors, two composers and two librettists. And the polyphony of public space came into play during site-specific Industry productions like “Hopscotch,” injecting some degree of anarchy into the pieces. Berry, who performed the role of Kublai Khan in “Invisible Cities” in street clothes and a wheelchair, told me he was often mistaken by commuters at Union Station for “some random homeless person” who happened to be singing; during one performance, when Berry paused during one of his arias, a woman who had been listening took the opportunity to start belting her own song.Sharon’s “Lohengrin” at the 2018 Bayreuth Festival in Germany.Enrico NawrathOne of the composers for “Sweet Land,” the Pulitzer Prize winner Du Yun, told me that Sharon, from the outset of their unorthodox collaboration, encouraged the artists to let their imaginations run wild “as if there were no financial concerns.” Normally, she said, the artistic director of an opera company would be the one raising practical questions: “They’ll say, ‘We can’t do this, and here are a hundred reasons why.’ At the early meetings for ‘Sweet Land,’ that was me. It’s the first time I thought, Wait, am I conservative?” There’s an element of directing that’s practical, Sharon told me — “basically, managing time. But then you need another level, where you’re tapping into the realm of the impossible, what can barely be imagined. Sing in a moving car! Play violin while crossing a busy street!” In “Hopscotch,” an actor on a motorcycle pulled alongside the limousines in moving traffic to deliver lines sent to the vehicles’ speakers via wireless mics — after which, Sharon said, audience members would “start to wonder what else might be part of the show. A helicopter flew by and they assumed that was us!” Bringing the fictional into the everyday world highlights, for Sharon, the porousness of those boundaries, allowing witnesses to imagine transformative change in what might have seemed like an immutable reality. The space housing the Detroit Opera celebrates its 100th birthday this year. Originally called the Capitol Theater, it operated as a movie palace and live venue — Louis Armstrong, Will Rogers and Duke Ellington all performed there in its heyday — until 1985, when it was closed and left abandoned and unguarded for four years, with homeless people taking up residence inside and looters carting off one of the crystal chandeliers. When the Michigan Opera Theater purchased the building for $600,000 in 1989, its section of downtown Detroit had become so ruinous that “everybody thought we were really insane,” the company’s charismatic founder, David DiChiera, told The Times in 1999. But DiChiera started the company only four years after the 1967 Detroit riot, when businesses and residents were fleeing to the suburbs, and he’d made sustaining an opera company in a blue-collar town his life’s work. He cannily tapped automakers, among others, for funding, including for the restoration of what became the Detroit Opera House, which reopened in 1996 with a performance featuring Luciano Pavarotti. His programming leaned to the classical, but he also worked to reflect the demographics of the city, becoming an early advocate of colorblind casting (Kathleen Battle made her professional operatic debut at M.O.T.) and helping commission the 2005 premiere of “Margaret Garner,” an opera with a libretto by Toni Morrison based on the true story that inspired her novel “Beloved.” DiChiera stepped away from the institution in 2017 and died the following year, leaving the company in what the critic Mark Stryker described in The Detroit Free Press as an “artistic holding pattern.” In 2019, Stephen Lord, the principal conductor, resigned following allegations of sexual harassment at other companies. (Lord denied the accusations at the time.) Sharon, meanwhile, was planning to use a portion of his MacArthur grant to take a yearlong sabbatical in Japan; he’d been studying Japanese and had purchased a plane ticket for April 1, 2020. (“I know,” he said, after telling me the date. “It’s funny. It was like, April Fools!”)Gary Wasserman, a Detroit philanthropist and longtime supporter of the Michigan Opera Theater, had been following Sharon’s career for years; he told me he considered “Hopscotch” one of the most memorable theatrical experiences he’d ever had, comparing its intricacy to a fine watch. He caught a performance of “Sweet Land” before the pandemic, hoping he could lure Sharon to bring it to Michigan. After the pandemic arrived and the possibility of upcoming productions vanished, an M.O.T. board member asked him if Sharon might consider coming on as artistic director. Sharon flew to Detroit in June. He knew that if he accepted the job, he wanted to announce a fall production immediately — but performing inside the theater remained impossible. It was only when Sharon asked about the company’s other assets that he was told about the parking structure across the street. “Twilight: Gods,” mounted that fall, was Sharon’s drive-through abridgment of the final opera in Wagner’s Ring cycle — normally five or six hours, pared by Sharon to a slim 65 minutes or so, with groups of eight cars at a time moving from level to level to watch different scenes unfold while listening to the music via FM radio. It was an unambiguous triumph. “The last part of the Ring cycle is about a world order that’s collapsing, and the need, in a way, for it to collapse,” Sharon told me. Brünnhilde throws fire into her father’s hall “to literally burn it down, with the hope that a future humanity will arise that will be better. It’s, on one hand, pessimistic. On the other hand, I felt like it was what we were living through anyway.” The great dramatic soprano Christine Goerke came onboard to sing Brünnhilde; her steed, appropriately enough, became a Ford Mustang. Sharon and M.O.T.’s chief executive, Wayne Brown, personally greeted each car. Some theatergoers arrived in jeans or sweats, others in evening attire. Brown told me one group of attendees hung a chandelier in their car and brought flutes of Champagne. The meeting point for “Hopscotch,” a mobile opera directed by Sharon in 2015, in which 24 cars carried audience members throughout Los Angeles.Joshua LiptonOne thing that made Sharon’s work at the Industry so exciting was the way in which it seemed to exist in dialogue with the sprawling, messy history of the city around it. It’s still too early to say how Sharon’s vision will intersect with Detroit, but there have been strong hints. He tapped a local writer, Marsha Music, to narrate “Twilight: Gods” and give the story a Detroit voice. The production of “X,” of course, had resonance thanks to Malcolm (a.k.a. Detroit Red) and the Nation of Islam’s Michigan roots. “Blue,” a 2019 opera by the composer Jeanine Tesori and the librettist Tazewell Thompson about police violence, was performed last year at the riverfront Aretha Franklin Amphitheater, which Marsha Music called “historically a Black performance space,” marveling that, at least on the night she attended, “When the people walked up in there, it looked like Ebony Fashion Fair.” The nearly sold-out run of “X” was especially popular; three-quarters of its single-ticket sales were to new audience members, with more than double the usual number coming from Detroit residents.In April, Sharon directed the company’s first show back in the Detroit Opera House since the start of the pandemic: the inherited-repertoire favorite “La Bohème.” Sharon being Sharon, his version unfolded in reverse order, opening with Act IV, in which Mimì dies, and ending with Act I, in which she and her lover, Rodolfo, first meet. Detroit has died and been reborn so many times that Sharon’s reworking of the classic felt like an oblique nod to the city. Beginning with the sorrow that would befall these young people created a fantastic dramatic tension as the story proceeded, but an odd feeling of hope persisted as the story moved from the end of the affair to its blooming: Tragedy may be inevitable, but the lovers’ time together felt entirely worthwhile. The final scene from Sharon’s production of “La Bohème.”Andrea Stinson Photography/Detroit OperaNot everyone loved the idea. Sharon, when I saw him at the dress rehearsal, was delighted by a write-up on the website of The Daily Mail, the British tabloid, bearing the headline, “Detroit gives tragic classic opera La Bohème a woke reboot: City will stage production in REVERSE order to avoid ending where main character dies so audience leaves feeling ‘hopeful and optimistic.’” He began reciting various angry comments to me (“Excellent idea by the woke left”), cackling so loudly that a tech guy preparing to film the rehearsal shushed us. Taking a seat in the mostly empty house, Sharon leaned back to watch the run-through while an assistant director typed his murmured notes into a laptop: His beard looks too trim, make it messier. A couple of words in this supertitle are wrong. Move that stool out of the shadow or it’ll be too dark. And, when one of the characters stood in a particular position with his arm raised: Oh, no — that looks like the poster from “Hamilton!”At the gala opening two days later, a string quartet played songs by Taylor Swift and Daft Punk. The opera itself flew by, per Sharon’s design: “I wanted it to feel like Japanese calligraphy, where you can’t remove your brush from the page,” he said in a talk before the show. “That’s what I’d like this production to feel like: one brush stroke, quick. Like being young.” The minimalist set, by John Conklin, allowed Sharon to eliminate intermissions, which are usually necessary for scene changes, and the relative simplicity of the staging gave him time to focus on the performers, who now had to be prepared to sing the most difficult arias at the end of the evening; Edward Parks and Brandie Inez Sutton, playing the comic-relief lovebirds Marcello and Musetta, stole the show.“The challenge, when we do ‘La Bohème’ and more standard repertoire,” Sharon told me last fall, “will be, how do we bring an improvisatory spirit into something that feels more fixed?” — a spirit closer to that of “Bliss,” wherein the discipline required of the performers also came with enormous freedom. “For me, that’s one of the big experiments of coming into an environment like an opera house, and why ‘La Bohème,’ for me, is one of my biggest experiments.” Not merely doing it backward, he went on, but trying to figure out how to make an opera written in the 19th century feel as if it were being invented right there on the spot. “That discovery, in each and every repetition,” Sharon said. “That’s what you want to try and find a way to capture.” As his production neared its finish (technically the start), even throwaway lines accrued unexpected weight, landing sudden, sharp blows. In the conclusion of Act I, Mimì agrees to join Rodolfo at the Café Momus: “E al ritorno?” he asks. And when we come back? “Curioso,” she replies. Let’s see.Mark Binelli is a contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote a feature about a biker shootout in Waco, Texas. More

  • in

    ‘Country House Operas’ Offer a Glimpse of Opera’s Future

    Steeped in romantic history, smaller “country house operas” such as Grange Park Opera, west of London, offer a leisurely pace and less overhead.When the British TV host Bamber Gascoigne unexpectedly inherited a 350-acre estate in 2014 from his 99-year-old great-aunt, he was stunned by the inheritance tax bill he was facing, not to mention the upkeep of a crumbling 50-room house once briefly owned by Henry VIII.His solution: Set up a registered charity, or trust, to turn it all into an arts center, including a summer opera festival looking for a new home. Like an intervention by the gods in a Wagner opera, the tax bill was slashed, a 700-seat theater was built in about 11 months and the well-heeled came to frolic at West Horsley Place, which had been largely frolic-free for decades.The success of Grange Park Opera (its current season runs through July 17), about 23 miles west of London, is an example of a symbiotic relationship between old English country estates that benefit from becoming a British charity and a thirst for highbrow arts and socializing away from the bustle of the capital in the summertime.A recent performance of “La Gioconda” at Grange Park Opera. Marc BrennerIt is one of several so-called country house operas around Britain. Others include Garsington (in a temporary structure on the Getty estate) and The Grange Festival (in a dilapidated Greek Revival mansion, which was Grange Park Opera’s first home, starting in 1998). There is also Glyndebourne, which in 1934 began daylong outings to an opera in the country, complete with champagne while strolling the grounds, picnics on lawns or tucked away in garden corners, and lavish meals in dining rooms sheltered from the elements.“If you go to the opera in London, you have to scramble for a drink at the interval or gulp down something to eat in 20 minutes,” said Wasfi Kani, the founder and chief executive of Grange Park Opera. “But instead of just a few hours in an evening, you can make it a half day, have a walk in the country and enjoy your dinner at a leisurely pace.”That pace — and an unofficial dress code of tuxedos and evening gowns — also harks back to the opera of old. To some, the country house operas are not only steeped in the romantic history of upper-crust England, but, ironically, may also provide a glimpse of how opera may survive.“Houses like Grange Park are somewhat the future of opera because they are smaller and have less overhead, which is appropriate for dwindling audiences,” said the Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja, who returns to the festival this summer in “La Gioconda” after opening the opera house in 2017 with “Tosca.” “They built all of it in less than a year, and right up to the last minute. We were doing ‘Tosca,’ and the soprano was singing ‘Mario, Mario, Mario’ to the sound of drilling.”Christina and Bamber Gascoigne in 2017. The couple turned West Horsley Place, a centuries-old English estate, into the current home of Grange Park Opera.Grange Park OperaThe company, which usually stages four operas or musicals each summer, has an annual operating budget of around 4 million pounds, about $4.9 million, and a full-time staff of about 12 (with 300 to 400 part-time workers during the summer). Like most other country house operas, it is funded entirely by ticket sales and donations, receiving no government money.Mr. Gascoigne, the original host of the popular TV show “University Challenge,” died in February at 87. But his vision to make West Horsley Place a trust — similar to a U.S. nonprofit organization — is intact, and the opera company, a separate charity, has a 99-year lease on the estate.The core of the 50-room mansion dates from the 15th century, and Mr. Gascoigne’s great-aunt, Mary Innes-Ker, the Duchess of Roxburghe, was its last resident (her ashes are buried beneath the orchestra pit). She lived alone for years in an almost Miss Havisham-like existence where few visitors went beyond the front rooms. When she died in 2014, the home and grounds were in disrepair.“Every time there was a new drip, she thought: Get a new bucket,” Mr. Gascoigne was quoted as saying in 2018.Ms. Kani had been looking for a new home for Grange Park Opera, since its previous home was quite far for its core London audience. She read about Mr. Gascoigne and the house and debt he was being saddled with. It seemed like a moment to seize.A picnic on the grounds of West Horsley Place.Richard LewisohnTurning the property into an arts center with an opera house seemed like a fine idea to Mr. Gascoigne and his wife, Christina. Many of the home’s furnishings and artworks — along with silver, crystal, servants’ outfits and even a long-lost pencil and chalk drawing that thrilled Sotheby’s experts — were auctioned to offset the remaining tax bill and pay for repairs on the house. Mr. Gascoigne gave up about £20 million in assets to create the trust.“Grange Park Opera approached Bamber and me at the perfect time,” said Ms. Gascoigne, who was married to Mr. Gascoigne for 57 years. “What was a potential financial burden became almost a community service for Bamber in his final years.”And his legacy plays out in a five-year-old opera house and the meandering gardens, honoring opera’s leisurely origins when the European elite had little more to do on a given day than listen to opera and fuss with their formal wear.“I’ve always said that a third of them come because it’s an amazing place, a third of them come to see the opera and a third of them to say they’ve been there,” Ms. Kani said. More