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      Review: Handel’s ‘Serse,’ With Yuks and Exquisite Playing

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      The English Concert’s performance at Carnegie Hall showed off the ensemble’s elastic responsiveness.If you eat up Baroque shtick, as I do, the English Concert’s presentation of Handel’s “Serse” at Carnegie Hall on Sunday was probably right up your alley. Those with more rarefied taste were likely satisfied too, as the conductor Harry Bicket and his ensemble of early-music players offered up a surfeit of exquisite music-making.The English Concert’s annual Handel series — this performance was the first since a shining “Semele” in 2019 — gives New Yorkers the chance to hear Baroque opera and oratorios performed by period instrumentalists of a high caliber. A certain magic occurs when Bicket gives the down beat: The players unleash gleaming rays of sound from the Carnegie stage.The primary differences between the English Concert and a modern ensemble like the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, which Bicket has also conducted, are its transparent texture and alert responsiveness. The English Concert can slow the tempo or shave a few decibels off the volume from one bar to the next. There’s elasticity in the way the ensemble’s sound expands and contracts, reacting to fluctuations in the intensity of the characters’ feelings and enlivening music built predominantly from strings and continuo.Short ariettas and ariosos keep “Serse,” a comic love story, moving along. It’s peopled by serious historical characters — apocrypha be damned — and draws its humor from their unlikely humanization. Serse, the king, leverages his position to come between his brother, Arsamene, and Romilda — much to the delight of Romilda’s sister, Atalanta, who has designs on her beloved. In the process, Serse forsakes his betrothed, Amastre, who spends much of the opera fulminating while dressed as a man.At Carnegie, the jokes started early. Lucy Crowe’s Romilda made a surprise entrance by popping up from a seat in the viola section. Daniela Mack’s Amastre proudly brandished a disguise that consisted chiefly of wearing sunglasses. Mary Bevan’s Atalanta, an incorrigible flirt, made a pass at Bicket and then at someone in the front row. Twice. And there were more conductor shenanigans, a genre mainstay of recent vintage: Bicket interrupted a tense moment in the drama to deliver a most unwelcome letter. The audience loved it.The show’s star was undoubtedly Crowe, who tuned the color of her soprano to the music at hand. She summoned lovely, pastel tone and lambent high notes for “Nè men con l’ombre” and turned the brief but crucial duet “L’amerete?” into a fully realized scene. Clean attacks, silky legato and enchanting trills are at her disposal. If her refreshing impetuousness introduced a little roughness into her sound, it hardly mattered: She is a Handel singer to be heard.The expressive opportunities Handel gives singers constrained rather than liberated some of the other performers. The mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo, who released a stirring album of contemporary songs, “enargeia,” last year, was largely humorless as Serse, a self-involved autocrat who nevertheless must plunge into romantic fancies and explosions of temper. When the music aligned with D’Angelo’s stern portrayal, as in the fiery “Se bramate d’amar, chi vi sdegna,” it gave off sparks. Her voice sharpened into focus as she propelled the aria with biting sound and fleet runs.As Amastre, Mack’s dark, ruddy mezzo-soprano shone best against spare orchestrations. Paula Murrihy sang with polish but had difficulty finding the gravitas for Arsamene’s largely unadorned music. Mary Bevan relied on cute bits instead of phrasing to convey Atalanta’s coquettishness but connected in the character’s wounded moments. William Dazeley’s Elviro, a study in buffoonery, sneaked genuinely impressive high notes into his comic-relief responsibilities. As Ariodate, Neal Davies showed off a trim bass-baritone with some pep in it.With three hours of glorious music, the English Concert nearly banished memories of the three years it took for the ensemble to return. Next up: Handel’s “Solomon” — in only 10 months’ time.The English ConcertPerformed on Sunday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      ‘To Be or Not to Be’: Is It the Question or the Point?

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      At the Metropolitan Opera, Brett Dean and Matthew Jocelyn’s adaptation of “Hamlet” nods to different, surprising versions of Shakespeare’s text.“Hamlet” is our culture’s supreme emblem of a great artist’s freedom to create something radically new. Shakespeare found a way to represent the inner life as it had never been represented before: the pressure of compulsive, involuntary memories; the haunting presence of a dead father; a son’s angst in the wake of his mother’s remarriage; the suicidal thoughts of a young person forced to make impossible choices in a corrupt world. It is here, if anywhere, that Jorge Luis Borges could claim with a straight face that Shakespeare was God.In fact, the creation of “Hamlet,” which was first written and performed in late 1599 or 1600, took place within severe, all-too-human constraints. A part owner of his theater company, Shakespeare was almost certainly urged by his fellow shareholders to write a play about the Danish prince. They would have noted the success of at least one earlier stage version of an old revenge tale that was already well-known (and that continues to be recycled, as in the new film “The Northman”). In addition to writing for a commercial enterprise in a cutthroat mass-entertainment industry, he was working with an all-male cast of 12 that performed in the afternoons on a stage without scenery or lighting; he had to keep a wary eye on the government censors; and he had to please a large audience that ranged from the educated elite to the illiterate.Given these constraints, his achievement is all the more stunning. To see the originality of “Hamlet,” simply consider the astonishing number of words in the script that are used for the first time in print (and, in some instances, never again): fanged, fret, pander, compulsive, unnerved, unpolluted, besmirch, self-slaughter, blastment, chop-fallen, down-gyved, implorator, mobled, pajock, and many, many more. It is as if Shakespeare were driven to invent a whole new idiom to express what he had discovered in a familiar story.And it was not only a matter of unusual words. The play, written in characteristically supple iambic pentameter, has an unforgettable music of its own, a set of rhythmic surprises sprung in the opening spondee — “Who’s there?” — and developed in a thousand different ways. It is a music epitomized, even for those who have no idea that “Hamlet” is composed in verse, by the cadence of the most famous line in its most famous soliloquy: “To be, or not to be: that is the question.”Clayton, right, as Hamlet during a recent rehearsal at the Met.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNow imagine the challenge of trying to write an opera based on this of all plays — as Brett Dean has done with his “Hamlet,” which had its premiere at the Glyndebourne Festival in 2017 and arrives at the Metropolitan Opera on May 13.“Hamlet” is a musical challenge before which even Giuseppe Verdi hesitated. In 1887, in what is for me the greatest of all transformations of Shakespeare into opera, Verdi miraculously captured the music of “Othello.” With the help of the librettist Arrigo Boito, who radically cut the tragedy, the composer found a way to give the three protagonists sublime melodic expressions of their ardent, anxious desire, steadfast love and fathomless hatred.To make this transformation work successfully, of course, many things in Shakespeare’s text had to be jettisoned, and the motivations of the characters had above all to be clarified. In the play, for example, Iago’s rationale for destroying Othello is famously unclear; in the opera, “Otello,” Verdi gives Iago a stupendous, full-throated credo: “I believe in a cruel God who has created me in His image.”Small wonder that Verdi — who also adapted “Macbeth” and fashioned “Falstaff” out of “The Merry Wives of Windsor” and “Henry IV” — contemplated taking on “Hamlet” but ultimately changed his mind. What would he have done with a plot whose every action is plagued by uncertainty, and with characters whose every motivation is ambivalent?A handful of composers, most notably Ambroise Thomas in the mid-19th century, ventured into this territory, but none of them managed to penetrate very far into its forbidding depths. That is, until Dean wrote his adaptation, which captures something of the authentic “Hamlet” music — in all its strangeness, dissonance and haunting beauty.But the word “authentic,” in relation to “Hamlet,” is misleading. The opera’s gifted librettist, Matthew Jocelyn, grasped what Shakespeare scholars have come to understand, that there is no single definitive text of the play. It survives in three early printings that have at least some claim to authority: the brief version (Q1), published in 1603 in the small-format size known as a quarto; the much longer quarto version (Q2), published the following year; and the version included in the celebrated First Folio (F) of 1623.Each text differs from the others in crucial ways, and almost all modern editions of the play adopt elements from more than one of them. (Even editors who dismiss Q1 as hopelessly defective usually follow it in having the ghost appear in the famous closet scene not in armor, but in his nightgown.) Moreover, the texts of Q2 and F are each too long to fit comfortably into what Shakespeare called “the two hours’ traffic of our stage.” From the beginning, the playwright seems to have expected any given production to pick and choose, shaping “Hamlet” for its particular time and occasion. All versions are the result of choices, cuts, alterations.All of this clearly lies behind Jocelyn’s evident sense of freedom in refashioning the text, which in any case would have had to be reduced in length to serve as the libretto. Only about 20 percent of the lines in the full-length play make it into the opera, leaving room for the music, as Dean has said, to be the protagonist.What is striking, given the drastic cuts, is how much of what has obsessed the readers and audiences of “Hamlet” over the past several hundred years powerfully resonates in this operatic reimagining. Hamlet’s voice reaches the edge of desperation then swoops into bitter comedy before veering toward tenderness and back to manic grief. The murderer Claudius has a gift for smoothness and authority that lightly conceals something like false notes. The countertenors, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, thinly flatter and echo both each other and their interlocutors. Ophelia’s descent into madness releases in her an erotic aggression that astonishes and alarms Gertrude. Chords in the orchestra and chorus are extended, drawn out and dispersed, as if they were searching for a resolution that eludes them.John Tomlinson, above, as the Ghost of Old Hamlet, and Clayton in the Glyndebourne production.Glyndebourne Productions Ltd.; Richard Hubert SmithJocelyn also cunningly reweaves the text, an intervention apparent from the opera’s first moments. An offstage chorus sings a funeral chant for the old king made up of words and phrases — “noble dust,” “quintessence of dust,” and the like — that come from very different places in the play. Hamlet enters alone and, half-singing, half-speaking, intones the words “or not to be … or not to be … or not to be.” The fragment from the celebrated Act III soliloquy is followed in this opening aria by fragments taken from his other soliloquies, along with a line — “What ceremony else?” — lifted from a different character, Laertes, who speaks it in Act V, at Ophelia’s grave.From the start, then, it is made clear that we are not to expect that the opera will work its way dutifully through the text or develop individual characters in the way that Shakespeare’s play does, most famously through soliloquies. Rather, we have entered what we might call “The Hamlet Zone.” Here, words do not stay in their place or belong only to the character who speaks them. In his death throes, Polonius sings the lines about the play-within-the-play that both he and the chorus have earlier sung.When Hamlet asks the visiting players to give him a passionate speech from their very best play, they begin to sing “To be or not to be.” And in Ophelia’s madness, she sings not her words alone but words that Hamlet has spoken to her, words that weigh like rocks dragging her down to a muddy death. “The Hamlet Zone” is a place in which words are broken up, transferred and shared, and in which the voice of one character is woven together, in both harmony and dissonance, with that of another.Such, after all, is the special power of opera.Dean does eventually give us one of Hamlet’s soliloquies more or less in its entirety, and it is the soliloquy we have been waiting for since the opening fragment “or not to be.” But there is a surprise in store. Not only does Hamlet drop the opening “To be” — as if he were already too far along toward not being — but the speech also takes an unexpected turn:… or not to be… or not to be… or not to beTo be … ay, there’s the point.Is this faithful to Shakespeare? Yes, in a way. Jocelyn has chosen the version of the soliloquy that appears in Q1. Scholars typically cite this to demonstrate why they call this text of the play the “Bad Quarto.” My students at Harvard usually laugh when I show it onscreen. But it is not the least bit funny here. As Hamlet sings it, the monosyllabic “point” works perfectly, in a way that “question” would not. A play and an opera, however deeply bound up with each other, are not the same. Ay, there’s the point.Stephen Greenblatt is the author, among other books, of “Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare” and “Hamlet in Purgatory.” He is the Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard and the general editor “The Norton Shakespeare.” More

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      Dropping Anna Netrebko, the Met Turns to a Ukrainian Diva

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      The Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska, replacing one of Russia’s biggest stars in “Turandot,” is using her platform to defend her country.The call from the Metropolitan Opera came one afternoon in early March.Liudmyla Monastyrska, a Ukrainian soprano, was in Poland, shopping for concert dresses ahead of a performance. Her phone rang, and it was Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, on the other end. He was blunt: His company was in a bind.Ukraine had recently been invaded, and the Met had parted ways with the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko over her previous support for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Gelb wanted Monastyrska, a charismatic singer known for her lush sound, to replace Netrebko in a revival of Puccini’s “Turandot,” which opens on Saturday.Monastyrska, 46, was reluctant. In 2015, after a punishing run at the National Opera of Ukraine in Kyiv, she had vowed never to perform the title role of “Turandot” again, worn down by its demands. And she was nervous about getting caught in the politics of the Russian invasion and alienating Netrebko, one of opera’s biggest stars, whom she has known for seven years.Gelb reassured Monastyrska, promising that her appearance would help bring attention to the plight of the Ukrainian people.“I was surprised, but I felt it was important for me to sing,” Monastyrska said in an interview. “I wanted to help however I could.” She still felt uneasy, though. “I don’t like to sing other people’s contracts,” she said.Throughout her career, Monastyrska has made a studied effort to avoid politics. She does not have a Facebook page and tries not to read the news, preferring to focus on her family, her faith (she’s Ukrainian Orthodox) and her artistry.But in recent weeks, as the war in Ukraine has intensified, she has found a political voice. She has criticized Netrebko’s meandering statements on the invasion, saying that Netrebko’s opposition to the war and attempts to distance herself from Putin have come too late. She has railed against the Russian government (“They are killing people for no reason,” she said in the interview) and denounced artists who continue to support Moscow.Yonghoon Lee, left, and Monastyrska in a recent rehearsal for “Turandot” at the Met.Lila Barth for The New York TimesHer profile will likely rise in the months ahead. Next season, she will step in for another artist who has come under fire for her ties to Putin, replacing the Russian soprano Hibla Gerzmava in a Met revival of “Tosca,” the company said on Thursday. (Gerzmava had been criticized for signing a letter in support of Putin in 2014.)And the Met announced this week that Monastyrska will be front and center when the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, a newly formed ensemble of Ukrainian musicians, tours Europe and the United States this summer. She will sing “Abscheulicher,” an aria from Beethoven’s “Fidelio” that touches on themes of peace, injustice and humanity.“She is a powerful, vocal symbol of the Ukrainian cause,” Gelb said in an interview, “and it will be manifested every night of the tour, when she’s singing Beethoven’s words against oppression and call for freedom. The opening recitative of the aria she is singing could be addressed directly to Putin.”Gelb said he chose her for “Turandot” primarily because of her “very beautiful and incredibly powerful voice.”“It’s a voice that can knock ‘Turandot’ out of the park in a house like the Met,” he added. “The fact that she’s Ukrainian is an extra element of poetic justice that certainly didn’t go unnoticed.”Born in Kyiv, Monastyrska trained in Ukrainian conservatories and spent much of her early career in opera houses there. Her break on the global stage came in 2010, at 35, when she was asked to sing, with only a week’s notice, the title role in Puccini’s “Tosca” with the Deutsche Oper in Berlin.She made her Met debut in 2012, taking up the title role in Verdi’s “Aida.” In The New York Times, the critic Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim described her performance as a “triumphant house debut,” saying she had arrived at the Met a “fully mature artist.”“She is gifted with a luscious round soprano that maintains its glow even in the softest notes,” da Fonseca-Wollheim wrote.Monastyrska became known for sensitive portrayals of opera’s most famous characters, including Lady Macbeth, Manon Lescaut and Abigaille in Verdi’s “Nabucco,” which she sang at the Met in 2016. Her blossoming career brought her into the same orbit as Netrebko, who is four years older. She described Netrebko as a “very warm person” and a “fantastic singer”; once, Monastyrska was invited to Netrebko’s apartment in New York for a party around Thanksgiving.Monastyrska in the title role of “Aida” at the Met in 2012.Andrea Mohin/The New York TimesShortly before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the two crossed paths in Naples, Italy, where they were appearing on alternate nights in the same production of “Aida.” During a rehearsal, Monastyrska said, Netrebko approached her and told her that she opposed the idea of war between the two countries.Later, Netrebko came under pressure to publicly denounce the war and Putin, whom she had supported in the past. She had endorsed his re-election and was photographed in 2014 holding a flag used by Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine.After condemning the war but remaining silent on Putin, Netrebko saw her engagements in Europe and North America evaporate. She issued a new statement last month seeking to distance herself from Putin, saying that she had met him only a few times and that she was not “allied with any leader of Russia.”How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 6Gavriel Heine. More

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      Review: Joyce DiDonat’s ‘Eden’ Comes to Carnegie Hall

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      The star mezzo-soprano’s new concert program seeks to restore humanity’s connection to the natural world.It’s hard to imagine what New Yorkers are supposed to do with the seeds of an eastern red cedar tree, given how narrow our window sills are, but they were slipped into the program books of Joyce DiDonato’s concert at Carnegie Hall anyway.That performance, on Saturday night, was a stop on a global tour to accompany her new album, “Eden,” which seeks to restore our connection with, in her words, “the awe-inducing majesty” of the natural world.“I’m a problem solver, a dreamer, and — yes — I am a belligerent optimist,” DiDonato, a star mezzo-soprano, writes in the album’s liner notes (which were reprinted in the program), implicitly acknowledging the project’s potential naïveté.DiDonato isn’t the only singer preoccupied with climate change. In October, the soprano Renée Fleming released “Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene,” an album with a geologically minded title but a beautifully focused program. Contrasting Romantic-era songs that exalt nature and contemporary works that feel alienated from it, she charted an unfortunate decline in humanity’s relationship with the environment through music.In “Eden,” DiDonato picks up that strain, with an attempt to return listeners to the weakened but still-welcoming arms of Mother Earth. The album’s track list, echoed in the lineup at Carnegie, teleports listeners among different eras — touching on Ives, Mahler, Handel, Cavalli and Gluck — but never really recovers its pace after a detour to a pre-Romantic age.DiDonato’s vibrato, which oscillates so quickly it seems to effervesce, is built for highly ornamented Baroque melodies. But her lively interpretations and imaginative use of straight tone broaden her palette of vocal colors and allow her to inhabit other eras. Whether her varied programming can tell a focused story is another question.On tour, DiDonato has turned “Eden” into a semi-theatrical production — directed by Marie Lambert-Le Bihan and with lighting design by John Torres — that goes some way toward unifying the material. Many of the selections were strung together without pauses, which, without opportunities for applause, made for a grippingly immediate, fitfully inspiring evening.The program began with Ives’s cosmic and mysterious “The Unanswered Question.” As smoke filled the darkened hall, the conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, bathed in light, coaxed a shivering sound from the strings of Il Pomo d’Oro. (Emelyanychev leads the group on the album as well.) DiDonato walked the perimeter of the audience, singing the trumpet’s part as a wordless incantation.Rachel Portman’s “The First Morning of the World,” a song commissioned for “Eden,” used flowing woodwinds to conjure bird song in a gorgeous evocation of humanity’s origins. As the lights went up, the delicate pleasures of Mahler’s “Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft” followed. A 17th-century sinfonia, played with quicksilver energy by the ensemble, created a bridge to the past. That’s when things got weird.DiDonato assumed the role of a terrifying angel of justice singing from Josef Myslivecek’s oratorio “Adamo ed Eva.”Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesDiDonato launched with gusto into a slight, strophic song by the Italian Baroque composer Biagio Marini. Its stepwise melody and fervent strumming was accompanied by the instrumentalists stomping their feet to the beat. Emelyanychev leaped from his seat at the harpsichord and broke out a recorder for a solo.Then DiDonato assumed the role of a terrifying angel of justice with an aria from Josef Myslivecek’s “Adamo ed Eva,” an oratorio about the biblical expulsion from Eden. As the orchestra lent Baroque jauntiness to Myslivecek’s proto-Mozartean style, DiDonato channeled the text’s threats of plagues, fire and bloodshed. Blinding red light flooded the auditorium.The concert began to lose its plot, but as that happened, DiDonato became freer to entertain. For Gluck’s “Ah! non son io che parlo,” an aria barely related to the evening’s themes, she tapped into an impressive chest voice and negotiated the aria’s leaps with full-throated relish. Teetering tantalizingly close to extremes of color, speed and volume, she drew raucous applause.After that barnburner, she lost steam. DiDonato’s voice was patchy in the long lines of Handel’s “As with rosy steps the morn,” from “Theodora.” The orchestra, seemingly overwhelmed by the stylistic pastiche, clumsily negotiated the dynamics of Mahler’s soul-cracking “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.”During encores, DiDonato introduced young people from the educational program Salute to Music and the All-City High School Chorus for an original song, performed with passionate directness and pieced together by a music teacher in Britain from the melodies and lyrics of his students. (DiDonato’s tour has entailed working with youth choirs at each stop.) “Look how powerful it is when we make something together,” said DiDonato, who sang Handel’s enchanting “Ombra mai fù” with the children huddled around her.DiDonato has referred to “Eden” as a “wild garden.” And at Carnegie Hall it was: colorful, fecund and perhaps in need of pruning.Joyce DiDonatoPerformed at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Simon Stone Stages ‘Lucia di Lammermoor’ at the Met Opera

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      A new production of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” directed by Simon Stone, sets the classic work in a fading postindustrial town.Simon Stone paused during a recent rehearsal at the Metropolitan Opera, looked up at the stage, and surveyed his new production of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor.” Nadine Sierra, singing the title role in a secondhand wedding gown, was preparing to descend the rusting fire escape of an old house for her famous, climactic mad scene.“She’s covered in blood at this point, so it won’t be as pretty,” Stone said, explaining how Sierra will look when the staging opens on April 23. “Or maybe it will be even prettier.”Pretty or not, this mad scene will be different than any “Lucia” — any production, period — in the Met’s history. Many directors have updated classic operas, like the company’s most recent “Rigoletto” stagings, set in 1960s Las Vegas and Weimar-era Berlin.But by transporting Donizetti’s bel canto tragedy to present-day America for his Met debut, Stone is breaking new ground. And risking boos: Luc Bondy’s 2009 “Tosca” is a reminder that playing around with the classics can infuriate a house that doesn’t welcome departures from tradition.“There is always a chance of upsetting people who don’t want to see something different,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “I do think that over the years during my tenure, even the older elements of the audience have become more adventurous. That doesn’t mean everyone’s going to love it, but hopefully everyone is going to be stimulated.”The production features live film projected above the stage for a split-screen effect.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesAs Sierra slowly made her way down the fire escape, she was surrounded by fragments of a faded postindustrial town: a drab motel, a pawnshop, a liquor store with an A.T.M. to pick up cash for drug deals. Where the opera’s libretto depicts a decaying and desperate aristocracy in 16th-century Scotland, Stone has found contemporary resonances and turned the Met stage into something of a graveyard of the American dream — a landscape of opioid abuse, economic hardship and the last, dangerous gasp of white male power.Both Stone and Sierra are veterans of European houses, where a production like this wouldn’t be out of the ordinary; at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, for example, Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” has a similar look in David Bösch’s 2016 staging, with a group of older men exerting outsize control over their economically depressed community. And Peter Sellars directed distinctly American contemporary takes on Mozart in the 1980s. But the new “Lucia” is uncharted territory for the Met, and a test for traditionalists.“I hope people give it a chance and not be prejudiced before they are able to sense it a bit,” Sierra said in an interview. “Art is ever-evolving, and if we’re always stuck in the same thing, we’re only speaking about history; we’re not creating history.”BORN IN AUSTRALIA and now based in Vienna, Stone, 37, is best known to New Yorkers as a theater director who adapts classic texts about desperate women to mirror modern times. His “Medea,” which ran at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in early 2020, was a stripped-down portrait of a marriage in free fall. And when his unsparing and fluid treatment of Lorca’s “Yerma” — an argument for how the internet can make urban life feel as petty and small as the original play’s rustic village — traveled to the Park Avenue Armory in 2018, it attracted raves.It also caught Gelb’s eye. “I was enormously impressed by the magic of the production,” he recalled. “It was a tour de force of directing and storytelling.”The soprano Nadine Sierra, who is singing the title role, said, “I’ve never had a camera in my face before.”Victor Llorente for The New York TimesGelb approached Stone, who was then just emerging as an opera director, and they arrived at “Lucia,” which will not be the last of his productions at the Met. His staging of Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” which premiered last summer at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, is coming to New York in a future season. And Gelb said that they have also discussed a potential show created from scratch, in which Stone would serve as librettist and director.Stone’s opera résumé has leaned on 20th-century and contemporary works, such as Aribert Reimann’s “Lear,” Korngold’s “Die Tote Stadt” and, most recently, Berg’s “Wozzeck.” But having directed “La Traviata” in Paris in 2019 — transforming Violetta into a digital influencer — he said he was attracted to the classic Italian repertory because “there’s something so dramaturgically strong” about it.“I find with 20th-century opera, your job is to make it as accessible and clear as possible,” he said. “But with Italian operas, the music is so timeless and recognizable. It’s like Shakespeare: You’re not going to surprise people with what happens at the end of ‘Hamlet.’ What you can do then is really explore the contemporary relevance of these classics. So it’s a different job; you can flex your muscles as a director more.”Some might say that relevant art needs no updating because it registers regardless of context, the way a poem or novel can speak clearly across centuries. But Stone prefers to make those connections literal — in the service, he believes, of the audience.“The ‘marginalized’ men who used to be in charge, who now think they have to fight for their last shred of dignity — it’s a genuine problem in America,” Stone said of the context for his “Lucia” production.Victor Llorente for The New York Times“Opera is the most beautiful and total of art forms, and it sparks every fiber of your being as well as provokes all of your thoughts and fantasies,” he said. “And I don’t think that can really happen if you consider a distance from it and think, ‘That’s set somewhere else, at another time, and that’s not about me.’”Hence a “Lucia” for the age of white nationalist rallies and the Jan. 6 insurrection. “The ‘marginalized’ men who used to be in charge, who now think they have to fight for their last shred of dignity — it’s a genuine problem in America,” Stone said. “Everything’s changed: The economy’s fallen apart, and the ideas of masculinity have been turned upside down, and they act out and they create political mischief.”Caught between the conflicts of men like that is Lucia — her bully of an older brother, Enrico (Artur Rucinski), scheming to keep her from the man she loves, Edgardo (Javier Camarena), and forcing her to marry a more promising match against her will. Driven to murder by it all, she is, Stone said, “a woman trying to survive, to create a future for herself, to be independent, but being ground to dust by the patriarchy around her.”A COMMON FEATURE of Stone’s hyper-realistic opera productions is a turntable. His sets rotate, changing — sometimes drastically — with each revolution. At the Met, live film gathered by onstage cameras will also be projected above the action, giving the show a split-screen appearance to convey parallel stories and, increasingly, Lucia’s slipping sanity.Like many Stone productions, this “Lucia” features hyper-realistic sets.Victor Llorente for The New York Times“I’ve never had a camera in my face before, but I’ve always somehow been able to think of the acting onstage in a film-like way,” Sierra said. “Maybe that’s because as a kid I did theater. So this is marrying the two sides of me.”Flexible architecture is also crucial to Stone’s style. In Act II of his “Tote Stadt,” the house of Act I is shattered and surreally spread throughout the stage. Similarly, the town of this “Lucia” begins to match its protagonist’s mind, eventually arriving at a fragmented cluster of buildings in the mad scene.“The emotional impact of space is transformed continuously depending on what happens there and what angle we look at it from,” Stone said. “The most extreme version of that is when the architecture doesn’t make sense anymore: doors and staircases to nowhere, walking out of a food mart and into a living room.”Among his inspirations has been the dreamy illogic of Michel Gondry’s film “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” Opera, he said, should be the same: “If it’s going mad, it always feels weird for the production not to go mad.”Stone’s treatment of architecture, he said, comes from a belief that “the emotional impact of space is transformed continuously depending on what happens there and what angle we look at it from.”Victor Llorente for The New York TimesStone was still refining the details in recent rehearsals, with a meticulous eye on the speed of the turntable and whether one of the singers should be wearing a jacket instead of a cardigan. With such specificity, Gelb said, “it’s a show that’s going to keep the Met on its toes.”Still, Stone said, he eventually had to step back and make room for the music. The conductor, Riccardo Frizza, said that he was aiming to match the production by bringing out “the modernity of this score,” with a focus on transparency and emphases on certain words in the libretto. At the same time he, was also seeking to balance the orchestra’s sound to resemble the historically informed approach he takes at the Donizetti Festival in Bergamo, Italy, where he is the music director.When a performance snaps into place, Frizza said, the score’s enduring themes emerge naturally: “The way Donizetti builds the whole structure around Lucia from the beginning to the mad scene — he was a great man of theater, but also one important for showing us the whole face of a woman in this opera.”At the very least, her story speaks to the soprano portraying her. “I’ve been through things, like men trying to control my situation or break my heart or put me through a roller coaster of dominance versus being submissive,” Sierra said. “And that’s really what ‘Lucia’ is about.”Sierra, who has sung the role before, has found it easier to interpret in a contemporary setting. “It’s more natural than my trying to play someone from the 16th century,” she said. “Now I can do Lucia almost like playing myself. I think the audience is going to feel it a little bit stronger than my portraying a girl of the past.”That is among the reasons Stone hopes that those who come to see the show will not struggle with it. He went so far as to call the production conservative for its insistence on clarity.“I don’t think people need to be shocked by it,” he added, “and I don’t think anyone who is watching and listening to the music and being there in the moment, rather than stuck in the past in their mind, won’t have a great time. I’m a show person. I want the audience to have fun.” More

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      With ‘Waiting for the Sibyl,’ Kentridge Looks Into the Future

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      The South African artist developed a piece about how difficult it is to see around the next corner. Ironically, the work anticipated the uncertainties of pandemic life.LONDON — Billions of us have spent the past two or so years trying to divine the future. Will I get Covid-19? How bad will it be? When will the coronavirus pandemic end? Will it ever end? Reliable answers have been scant; even if we’ve been cushioned from the worst effects, many people have been camping in a sort of existential waiting room, living in near-permanent uncertainty.Appropriate timing, then, that the Barbican arts center in London is about to stage a chamber opera, by the South African artist William Kentridge, about how difficult it is to see around the next corner. Titled “Waiting for the Sibyl,” it retells the myth of a Greek prophetess whom mortals once pestered with exactly these sort of exasperating questions.A scene from “Waiting for the Sibyl,” which premiered at the Teatro Dell’Opera di Roma, in Italy, in 2019.Stella OlivierThat prophetess, the Cumaean Sibyl, was said to have spit out her written answers on oak leaves, but there was a catch: If the wind scattered the leaves, she would not help put them in the correct order, leaving her clients none the wiser. The opera is a reminder that humans have been trying to get a jump on what’s coming next for perhaps as long as we’ve existed — and that maybe we’d be better served by living in the present instead.In a recent interview in London, Kentridge said that, ironically, he hadn’t seen the piece’s relevance coming: He had begun work on “Waiting for the Sibyl” more than two years before the pandemic.“Those questions of mortality, fate, who are we in this world, have been the bread and butter of artists for millennia,” he said. “But that’s been brought right to the forefront now.”Commissioned by the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma in Italy and debuted there in September 2019, the roughly 40-minute piece consists of short, fragmentary scenes without dialogue. At first, it seems as cryptic as anything produced by a Greek oracle. A cast of nine singers and dancers enact moments from the legend. In one, a performer writhes in stuttering flashes of light in front of a screen displaying messages like, “I have brought NEWS” and “THE MOMENT HAS GONE.” Later, the cast dances while surrounded by scraps of prophecies on leaves of paper.The prophecies themselves are wry: “Resist the THIRD MARTINI,” “DISCARD LAST YEAR’S SOCKS.” But the parallels with our pandemic experience are often eerie. “FRESH GRAVES are everywhere,” reads one. Another is even more plangent: “My turn is when?”Making the opera had been an intricate process, Kentridge explained. The work was compiled from odd phrases he’d seen in books of English, Russian and Hebrew poetry and from a 1916 book of proverbs compiled by the South African writer Solomon Plaatje, which he made into a libretto of sorts.“A libretto is a straitjacket: You put it on willingly, but nonetheless it is a restriction,” Kentridge said. This opera “is a totally different experience.”Alex Ingram for The New York TimesThese scraps of text were then workshopped with the singers alongside the composers Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Kyle Shepherd. Together, they translated the phrases into African languages including Zulu, Setswana and Sesotho and Xhosa, and developed an improvised musical score.Sometimes, the music refers to traditions such as call-and-response isicathamiya choral singing; elsewhere it is deliberately jumbled. To draw all of this together, Kentridge created art work — drawings, ink washes, sculptures, palimpsests of old letters and reference books — which he turned into animated projections and stage designs.Like so many of his works, the result is a “collage,” Kentridge said. While he has designed and directed operas before — notably a madcap spin on Shostakovich’s “The Nose” (2010) and a brutally monochrome version of Berg’s “Wozzeck” (2017) — being able to create his own universe was liberating, he added.“A libretto is a straitjacket: You put it on willingly, but nonetheless it is a restriction,” he said. “This is a totally different experience.”Mahlangu said that, for himself and the singers, the Greek source material seemed remote at first. Yet as they developed the piece, it began to resonate with African mythologies and storytelling traditions. “Many people in South Africa believe that when people die, they don’t actually die,” he said. “They continue to look after the living. There is a sibyl in each and every one.”He added that this story of prediction and counter-prediction also resonated with the volatile politics of contemporary South Africa, which became even more turbulent amid the pandemic, as the country’s unemployment rate climbed to a dizzying 35 percent. “Here we are constantly in the state of wonder and worry,” Mahlangu said: “‘What is the next step? Where will we be?’”Now 66, Kentridge is unusual — almost unique — among contemporary artists in having achieved as much acceptance in theaters and opera houses as in museums and contemporary art spaces. He began his career in the mid-1970s as a Johannesburg-based illustrator and printmaker, but his practice has expanded to include whimsical short films, elaborate installations and majestic pieces of public art.A still from “City Deep,” an animated film by Kentridge about South Africa.William KentridgeOften his subjects reference classical literature or art history; almost always they reflect on South Africa’s bitter legacy, as in his new animated film “City Deep” (2020), a response to Johannesburg’s contentious history. A documentary on the making of the movie will be screened at the Barbican alongside “Waiting for the Sibyl.”In an era of conceptual and digital art, Kentridge has remained defiantly figurative and analog: His hulking charcoal drawings, loose sketches in Indian ink and flickering projections are immediately recognizable. Even when working on collaborative projects, the bulk of his time is spent laboring alone with ink, or charcoal, and paper, the artist said. “The physicality is essential. It’s the medium through which the thinking happens.”Much as he enjoys making gallery-based shows, he loves the challenge of theatrical commissions, he added. “The opera house says, ‘We’ll give you a canvas, 17 meters wide, 11 meters high. And we’ll give you another 18 meters of depth,’” he said. “And I get to make an hour-and-a-half drawing in the space.”With opera houses and concert halls closed, he hunkered down in Johannesburg and made a series of nine films about his studio practice, which are now being edited. He has also been preparing a career retrospective at the Royal Academy in London (set to open in September after pandemic-related delays), and making an animated film response to Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, which will be performed live at the Lucerne festival, in Switzerland, in June.“There are always a few too many projects,” he said with a laugh. “But I can’t blame anyone but myself.”In an era of conceptual and digital art, Kentridge has remained defiantly figurative and analog: His hulking charcoal drawings, loose sketches in Indian ink and flickering projections are immediately recognizable.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesRe-encountering “Waiting for the Sibyl” in light of the coronavirus had been salutary, he added: Though the opera was partly about the limits of human knowledge, partly about mortality itself, it also contained seeds of hope.“In the long run, none of us are going to get out of this alive, but while we are here, we can acknowledge that,” he said. “We can still work wisely and optimistically. Comfort must be taken where it can be found.” More

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      Harrison Birtwistle, Fiercely Modernist Composer, Dies at 87

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      His labyrinthine, theatrical works placed him in the first rank of 20th-century English composers, though his music was often tagged as “difficult.”Harrison Birtwistle, whose intensely theatrical compositions and uncompromising modernism made him the most prominent British composer since Benjamin Britten, died on Monday at his home in Mere, England. He was 87.His death was announced by a spokesman for his music publisher, Boosey & Hawkes.Mr. Birtwistle’s granitic, earthy works revealed their secrets slowly, and their structures were labyrinthine. Dissonant, weighty and to some ears forbidding, they often dwelled on similar themes from piece to piece, interrogating kindred ideas from different angles, developing ideas touched on earlier.“I can only do one thing, and there is nothing else,” Mr. Birtwistle, who was active mainly in Europe, said in 1999.What Mr. Birtwistle did, however, he did in a unique style of indelible permanence. Reviewing “The Shadow of Night,” the critic Paul Griffiths wrote in The New York Times in 2002 that that orchestral work was “like all its predecessors: something strikingly new but heavy with echoes from the past and, indeed, the future.”“This is music made to speak now, authoritatively,” he added, “and (like little else in our time) made to last.”Myth provided much of Mr. Birtwistle’s subject material. In “Gawain,” which was given its premiere at the Royal Opera House in 1991, the legend was Arthurian. Greek sources wove a more constant thread, from instrumental works that borrowed ancient structures like the early “Tragoedia” (1965), to his most successful operas: “The Mask of Orpheus,” a massively complex expansion of the tale that won the prestigious Grawemeyer Prize in 1987, and “The Minotaur,” an unsparingly graphic work with baying crowds and a rape scene; it had its premiere at Covent Garden in 2008.“Birtwistle’s score is relentlessly modernistic, its astringency serving to underscore the opera’s violence and unremitting tension,” the critic George Loomis wrote in The International Herald Tribune.“One did not expect this crusty composer to turn mellow at 73, and he has not done so,” Mr. Loomis continued, adding that “this is not music from which one derives much sheer pleasure, but it is intently theatrical.”Mr. Birtwistle’s interests were always primarily in drama and form, whether writing for the opera house or the concert hall. His compositions tended to be deeply ritualistic, as blocks of material were etched and etched again in sounds dominated by woodwind, brass and percussion.Orchestral players were sometimes treated as if they were akin to characters in a theater. In such works as “Verses for Ensembles” (1969), “Secret Theatre” (1984) and “Cortege” (2007), instrumentalists played musical and dramatic roles, moving between ensembles and around the stage. The moving “Concerto for Violin and Orchestra” (2009-10) engaged the soloist Christian Tetzlaff in a series of duets with individual players, dissecting and reforming the genre even while extending it.Mr. Birtwistle was inescapably an English composer, taking inspiration from distant predecessors, such as the Renaissance musician John Dowland, and incorporating even old techniques like the medieval hocket. He had no time for the pastorals of more recent forerunners like Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose influence on his earliest works was quickly abandoned.Mr. Birtwistle delved instead into the more harrowing side of nature, as in his unearthly “The Moth Requiem” (2012) for female voices, and the volcanic “Earth Dances” (1986), a vast score that divided the orchestra into six bubbling, geological “strata” of instruments, each erupting over separate time scales. It was often compared to Stravinsky’s classic “Rite of Spring.”“You can find Birtwistle’s music ‘difficult’ or not, or like one piece more than another,” the composer Oliver Knussen said in “Wild Tracks,” a diary of conversations between Mr. Birtwistle and the journalist Fiona Maddocks. “But it seems to me that you can’t be indifferent to it. And that’s the mark of a great artist, I think.”Mr. Birtwhistle, right, with the Hungarian conductor Péter Eötvös in London in 1988. Some performances of his work drew heckling.Neil Libbert/Camera Press LondonHarrison Birtwistle was born on July 15, 1934, in the mill town of Accrington, England, north of Manchester. He was the only child of Fred and Madge (Harrison) Birtwistle, who together ran a bakery.Harry, as Mr. Birtwistle was universally known, trained not as a composer but as a clarinetist, taking up the instrument at age 7 and first playing in the local military band and in small theaters. At the Royal Manchester College of Music, which he entered in 1952, he played clarinet in small contemporary music ensembles, some of the work written by his fellow students his fellow students Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr, who went onto significant careers of their own.The gritty urbanism and industrial brass of Mr. Birtwistle’s youth drew him to sounds he heard in avant-gardists like Stravinsky and Varèse, Messiaen and Pierre Boulez, who all became strong influences. (Mr. Boulez himself later conducted and recorded many of Birtwistle’s works.) But few of Mr. Birtwistle’s own early pieces survive, and his first published composition, “Refrains and Choruses,” was not given its premiere until 1959.After national service, for which he played in the band of the Royal Artillery from 1955 to 1957, Mr. Birtwistle took teaching jobs while continuing to compose. His breakthrough came in 1965, with the premiere of “Tragoedia” and the awarding of a Harkness Fellowship to study in the United States. As a visiting fellow at Princeton University he completed “Punch and Judy,” a murderous operatic take on puppet shows that premiered at the 1968 Aldeburgh Festival in England. Britten, who died in 1976, reportedly left halfway through.Following spells teaching at Swarthmore and the State University of New York at Buffalo — the latter at the invitation of the composer Morton Feldman — Mr. Birtwistle was appointed the music director of the National Theater in London from 1975 to 1983. His scores for “Hamlet,” “Volpone” and Peter Hall’s production of the “Oresteia,” among other plays, were lost.Mr. Birtwistle cemented his reputation in the 1980s with an extraordinary series of scores that included the orchestral “Secret Theatre” and “Earth Dances” as well as “The Mask of Orpheus,” a four-hour masterpiece with a libretto by Peter Zinovieff. It was so elaborate that it took its composer more than a decade to write.“For Mr. Birtwistle, there is no ‘main action,’” John Rockwell of The New York Times wrote after the premiere of “Orpheus” at the English National Opera in 1986. “He has deliberately thwarted the narrative flow, or even the epic progression, of normal opera in favor of a dizzying montage of flashbacks, repetitions, reconsiderations and parallel actions.”The music was “unrelentingly dense and driven” on a first hearing, Mr. Rockwell added. “But if one allows oneself to start accepting the opera’s gnomic conventions, its earnest search for the underlying truth behind our culture’s notions of music, poetry, sex, love and death take on an undeniable power.”Mr. Birtwistle’s work was always controversial. His “grim, raw, amorphous soundscapes make few concessions to narrow ears,” as the critic Alex Ross wrote in 1995. For the 1994 revival of “Gawain” at Covent Garden, two antimodernist composers coordinated a heckling campaign against what one called Mr. Birtwistle’s “sonic sewage.”The following year, “Panic,” a raucous work for saxophone, drum kit and orchestra, was featured in the Last Night of the Proms. Its appearance in that traditionally jingoistic ceremony caused some in the press and the public to sputter with rage.“I was treading on a sacred cow and the attendant manure,” Mr. Birtwistle later joked. He denied that his music was all that difficult, and refused the premise of questions about the accessibility of his compositions. “Panic,” he laughed, was “the nearest piece I’ve got to fun!”Mr. Birtwistle, who was knighted in 1988, married Sheila Duff in 1959. She died in 2012. He is survived by three sons, Adam, Silas and Toby, and six grandchildren.Asked by Ms. Maddocks in 2013 whether there was a continuity in his life from his childhood to his years as a composer, Mr. Birtwistle, whose gruff public persona hid a warm and witty personality, said that he had “achieved much more than I ever imagined.”“I’ve never felt I had ambitions for myself, only for my idea, and for it materializing into something worthwhile,” he added, laughing.“But I’m still here, still trying. And I’m still exactly the same.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      Anna Netrebko, Shunned in Much of the West, to Sing in Monte Carlo

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      After Russia invaded Ukraine, the soprano lost work in the West because of her past support of President Vladimir V. Putin. She was invited to sing this month in Monaco.Anna Netrebko, the superstar soprano whose international career crumbled after the invasion of Ukraine because of her past support of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, has been invited to sing in Monaco this month at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo.Ms. Netrebko was initially scheduled to sing the title role of Puccini’s “Turandot” at the Metropolitan Opera in New York at the end of April, but the company, like many in the West, parted ways with her over concerns that she had failed to sufficiently distance herself from Mr. Putin after he began the war in Ukraine.Instead, Ms. Netrebko will now appear in Monaco, singing the title role in another Puccini opera, “Manon Lescaut,” in four performances at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo, the company announced on Thursday. They will be her first engagements since the invasion began in late February, but she has other appearances planned later this spring.“I am overjoyed to be unexpectedly making my stage debut at the Monte Carlo Opera,” Ms. Netrebko said in a statement. “It is going to be made even more special by performing with my husband, tenor Yusif Eyvazov, in the same Puccini masterpiece that marked our first encounter at the Rome Opera in 2014.”Ms. Netrebko has faced a wave of cancellations at leading opera houses. She once endorsed Mr. Putin’s re-election and, in 2014, she was photographed holding a flag used by Russia-backed separatists in Ukraine.After initially denouncing the war but remaining silent on Mr. Putin, Ms. Netrebko saw her engagements in the West evaporate. So Ms. Netrebko issued a new statement last month seeking to distance herself from Mr. Putin, saying she had only met him a few times and stating that she was not “allied with any leader of Russia.” Her words prompted a backlash in Russia, with a theater in Novosibirsk, Siberia, canceling an appearance and a senior lawmaker denouncing her as a traitor.Opéra de Monte-Carlo on Thursday defended its decision to hire Ms. Netrebko, saying she had done enough to distance herself from the war.“Anna Netrebko made a statement two weeks ago regarding the war and her relationship with Putin,” Christiane Ribeiro, a spokeswoman for the opera house, said in an email. “She has taken a clear position against the war in Ukraine. As a consequence, she has been declared an ‘enemy of the homeland’ by the speaker of the Duma and a theater in Novosibirsk canceled her appearance.”Opéra de Monte-Carlo described its decision as artistic, noting that Ms. Netrebko is to replace the Italian soprano Maria Agresta, who canceled because of illness.In her statement, Ms. Netrebko said, “I wish my friend and colleague Maria Agresta a full and speedy recovery.”How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 7Valentin Silvestrov. More