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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

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      Singing, and Signing, Beethoven’s ‘Fidelio’ in Los Angeles

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      The Los Angeles Philharmonic and Deaf West Theater are working on an innovative production conceived for both hearing and deaf operagoers.LOS ANGELES — DJ Kurs has been the artistic director of the Deaf West Theater, a theater company created here by deaf actors, for the past 10 years. But he had never seen the Los Angeles Philharmonic or been to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, its renowned home, even though he grew up in Southern California.He will be there this week, though, leading seven actors from Deaf West in an innovative production of “Fidelio,” Beethoven’s opera about the rescue of a political prisoner, in a collaboration with a cast of singers and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The actors — along with a chorus from Venezuela whose members are deaf or hard of hearing and will also be signing — will be center stage on opening night Thursday, expressively enacting the lone opera of a composer who had progressive hearing loss while writing masterpiece after masterpiece. In this “Fidelio,” the singers will stay in the background.“Opera itself as an art form, it has not been accessible to our world,” Kurs, 44, said the other day through a sign-language interpreter. Deaf West, he said, had been approached in the past about collaborating on operas but had always declined.But after nearly two years of not performing because of the pandemic — and after watching an energetic tape of Leonard Bernstein conducting “Fidelio” — Kurs decided to accept this offer to work with the Philharmonic and its music director, Gustavo Dudamel.Indi Robinson and Gregor Lopes, deaf actors, rehearse a scene from Beethoven’s opera “Fidelio.”Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThe extraordinary nature of the endeavor was clear as singers and actors gathered last week for rehearsals at a United Methodist church in Toluca Lake, in the San Fernando Valley, some 10 miles from Disney Hall. Each day was a mix of languages, movement and simultaneous translations — between voiced German, Spanish and English and signed American Sign Language and Venezuelan Sign Language.For the production, 135 singers, actors, choir members (singing and signing), and orchestra players, along with Dudamel, who will conduct the production, will fill a stage that usually just accommodates an orchestra.“We are creating the dance of the double-cast,” said Alberto Arvelo, the director of the production, in which each character is portrayed by both a singer and an actor. “We have been conceiving ‘Fidelio’ for both audiences — we want to create to create an opera for a deaf audience as well. From the first bar of the opera.”For the actors, who are accustomed to performing in musicals including “Spring Awakening,” which has been part of Deaf West’s repertory, adapting to a more operatic style has been something of an adjustment.“It’s a challenging and terrifying experience,” said Russell Harvard, the actor playing Rocco, the jailer, after rehearsing a scene where he took Leonore to the dungeon to see her husband (husbands: a singer and an actor) sleeping on the floor. “I have never done anything like this before.”Josh Castille, a deaf performance artist acting the role of Florestan, left, worked with the director, Alberto Arvelo, center, and Ian Koziara, the tenor singing the role of Florestan.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThe actors have to translate German (the language of Beethoven’s opera, and one that few of them know, so lip-reading is not an option for most) into American Sign Language. And they have to get used to the florid, multiple repetitions of a single word or line in the score, all of which are second nature for opera singers used to coloratura runs, and find ways to convey, with signs, the big moments when a singer sends a single note soaring through the hall.“Oh gosh — it is stressing me out,” said Amelia Hensley, the actor portraying Leonore, who disguises herself as a man named Fidelio to get a job in the jail where her husband, a political prisoner, is being held, in the hopes of saving him.“I have to hold my sign for an incredibly long time because the note is held that long,” she said. “It’s difficult for me to understand because I don’t hear. And I want to make sure that the deaf audience will understand me and understand why I’m holding this out, because it’s not natural to the language to hold a sign that long.”This production of “Fidelio” is opening less than a month after “CODA” won the Academy Award for best picture, and Troy Kotsur, who used to be member of Deaf West, won the Oscar for best supporting actor, the first deaf man to be so honored by the academy. Deaf West is developing a musical version of “CODA.” (Dudamel and his wife, Maria Valverde, said in an interview they had seen the movie three times.)This production is steeped in classical music history, since Beethoven experienced hearing loss in the last decades of his life. (“Ah, how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than in others,” the composer and musician wrote in 1802 in an anguished letter addressed to his brothers that came to be known as the Heiligenstadt Testament.)María Inmaculada Velásquez Echeverria, the artistic director of White Hands Choir.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThat history intrigued Dudamel as he was arranging a 250th anniversary celebration of Beethoven’s birth just before the pandemic. “It was how to make the opera be part of these two worlds — the two worlds of Beethoven,” he said.And it is what drew Deaf West to this project; its members considered what Beethoven faced writing and conducting while dealing with a steady decline in his hearing.“Maybe he did it through feeling the vibrations of the music?” Kurs said. “I don’t know Beethoven’s exact process, but there’s a similarity to how I experience music. I’ve never heard music in my entire life, but I think that I understand it.”There is much debate among biographers and musicologists about Beethoven’s level of hearing at various points in his career. He wrote and revised “Fidelio” over the course of nearly a decade, from its first performance in 1805 to the substantially revised version of 1814. By 1813, he had several ear trumpets made. By 1818, he began carrying pads of paper for people to write down what they were saying to him. While he was able to continue composing as his hearing deteriorated, it became increasingly difficult for him to perform and conduct.“It never really affected his ability to compose or orchestrate because he was wildly creative throughout his life,” said Theodore J. Albrecht, a retired professor of musicology at Kent State University, who has written extensively about Beethoven.Jan Swafford, a Beethoven biographer, said the composer began reporting hearing loss as early as 1798. “He would not have lost pitch as much as color,” he said of its onset.In the original plan, before the pandemic, this production was to be presented in Europe, with Dudamel conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra along with the White Hands Choir, a group of deaf and hard of hearing performers associated with El Sistema, the music education program in Venezuela where Dudamel trained. After the tour through Europe was canceled, Dudamel revived the idea here in Los Angeles, this time working with his own orchestra and Deaf West, the renowned Los Angeles-based theater.Dudamel is familiar with the complexities of leading an orchestra, singers and a choir; he is also the music director for the Paris Opera. But this week, he will also be leading the deaf and hard-of-hearing actors from Deaf West and choir members from Venezuela.The conductor Gustavo Dudamel, left, worked with members of the opera’s cast and chorus at a recent rehearsal.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesDudamel told Kurs he had to some extent been prepared for this because of his work at the podium, especially as someone who conducts orchestras all over the world, with players who speak many different languages. (Some orchestra players disdain overly verbal conductors in any language, preferring to work through the music.)“In a way, a conductor needs to have sign language conducting the orchestra,” Dudamel told Kurs during a break in a rehearsal. “You cannot say anything. You can only show them.”Valverde, an actress and filmmaker, is producing a documentary about the White Hands Choir, whose members wear distinctive white gloves, and was there filming the choir as her husband led it in rehearsal.The aspirations of this performance will be signaled from first notes of the overture.The Venezuelan choir will use choreography and facial expressions to convey the power of the overture which opens the opera: The other day, it was wide smiles and hands raised to the air in a representation of fireflies. “Fidelio’s overture is especially optimistic,” Arvelo, the director said. “In such a dark story, the overture starts with this moment in major tones. We were like: How can we transmit this with images?”During the spoken stretches of the opera, the audience will hear nothing: the actors will communicate the dialogue in sign language, which will be translated on supertitles cast above the stage.The production will last for three nights.“I think it’s going to be a mixed audience,” said Chad Smith, the head of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “There will be a lot of the L.A. Phil audience who are coming to hear Gustavo and the LA Phil perform one of the great works from the canon.”Smith added that the hope was to also have people who are deaf or hard of hearing, who are in the space for “perhaps the first time.”The experience has proved to be as powerful for the opera singers as for the actors. Ryan Speedo Green, the bass-baritone who appeared as Uncle Paul in “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” at the Metropolitan Opera last year, and is the singing counterpart to Russell Harvard’s Rocco, said this was the most inclusive opera he had ever witnessed.“People want to see themselves onstage,” he said. “For once in my life, I’m going to be someone’s voice and they’re going to be my action. He is my body and my action and my intent and my physical interpretation. And I am his voice to the audience, to the hearing audience. We are one entity — Rocco. He is attached to me, as much as I am attached to him.” More

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      One Opera, Three Acts, Three Different Stagings

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      In Stuttgart, Wagner’s “Die Walküre” is being divided among a trio of creative teams with divergent visions.STUTTGART, Germany — In the late 1990s, the Stuttgart State Opera in Germany raised some eyebrows and hackles when it divided the four operas in Richard Wagner’s epic “Der Ring des Nibelungen” among four directors, one installment each.That was a major break with tradition: “Ring” cycles had traditionally been the work of a single directorial vision since Wagner himself supervised the first complete staging in 1876. It even became common to refer to a given production as “Patrice Chéreau’s ‘Ring’” — or Harry Kupfer’s, or Robert Lepage’s.But Stuttgart’s experiment was a critical and popular success, and the company is now taking that venture one step further. Each of the three acts in its new production of “Die Walküre,” the second opera in Wagner’s tetralogy, which opens on Sunday, has a highly different staging, each devised by a different creative team.Three unrelated interpretations, overseen by three groups of directors and designers, performed by one cast and one orchestra, for a single audience. Cornelius Meister, the company’s music director, said the term used in-house to describe the situation is “multi-perspectival.” But it’s also been a grand juggling act, with overlapping rehearsals, many rounds of costume fittings and a mounting air of suspense, with the company only getting a clear sense of how — or if — the acts might coalesce at the first full dress rehearsal, two weeks before the premiere.The company’s general director, Viktor Schoner — who arrived in 2018 and brought in Meister and the dramaturg Ingo Gerlach — said that the approach was “no big deal,” citing the longstanding practice in the dance world of combining a cluster of unrelated ballets into one evening.“Diversity is a topic of our time,” he said. “So we decided to ask different people.”“Walküre,” perhaps alone among the “Ring” operas, is well-suited to the approach, Schoner said. Each act tells a distinct (if connected) story, typically featuring scenes for two singers — allowing ample room for interpretive imagination.In Act I, directed by Pauline Kalker of Hotel Modern, the characters are recast as rats that have survived a calamity.Martin SigmundAct I is being staged by Hotel Modern, a Dutch theater company known for productions featuring scale models and animation sequences. The group is projecting live film — of a tiny, destroyed world — onto a rear-stage screen, as a way to dramatize the story of Sieglinde and Siegmund, passionate lovers as well as (initially unbeknown to them) fraternal twins, whose child, Siegfried, the title hero of the cycle’s third opera.Pauline Kalker, the member of the group’s artistic trio who has taken on directing duties for the act, said she saw the towering filmic set as “moving paintings.” The self-conscious, high-concept design intermingles grip-like technicians onstage among the singers. Hotel Modern recasts the characters as rats that have survived a calamity, and the singers occasionally wear and carry rat masks, while the film sequences recount scenes of devastation and brutality. Gerlach, the dramaturg, who acted as a liaison between the company and the three creative teams, said that the film was intended as the visual equivalent of “backup vocals.”The German lighting designer Urs Schönebaum, a frequent collaborator with Robert Wilson, is responsible for Act II. Here, Schönebaum uses lighting effects and a dark palette to dramatize the conflicts between Wotan, the chief of the gods; his outraged wife, Fricka; and his beloved but defiant daughter Brünnhilde. Schönebaum said that “lighting is part of the set,” and has come up with what Gerlach called “a refined visual approach” that is realistic compared with the other two contributions.The German artist Ulla von Brandenburg, who is based in Paris, is the creative force behind Act III, in which Brünnhilde’s Valkyrie sisters try to protect her from Wotan’s wrath. Von Brandenburg, known for using bright textiles in her videos and installations, has created multicolored, ever-shifting sets fashioned out of the same painted cotton that she has used for the costumes.Stuttgart has a huge off-site rehearsal facility, equipped with two halls the same scale as its theater’s main stage. Schönebaum, whose act requires exceptionally precise lighting, had to divide up crucial access to the real stage with the other teams, leading to a schedule that he called “extremely tight.”Brian Mulligan, the American baritone singing Wotan, appears in two of the three acts, and consequently had around 15 shoe, wig and costume fittings. (He said a fraction of that would be closer to the norm.) Even Schoner, who settled on dividing up “Walküre” in fall 2020, admitted it was a challenge choreographing a curtain call that would accommodate the three teams.Goran Juric, the Croatian bass who sings Hunding, Sieglinde’s brutish husband, worried that the evening might be “kind of schizophrenic for the audience.” That concern also arose among the company’s management. Siegmund’s sword is an important prop in all three acts, and early in the planning, Gerlach suggested that the same sword remain as a kind of Wagnerian leitmotif through the evening; that idea was rejected. Nevertheless, he said in an interview not long after the first dress rehearsal, continuities have emerged “without being planned by us.”Hotel Modern’s Act I film, for example, has a post-apocalyptic feel, including scenes of toylike cities apparently destroyed by war — images that echo in Schönebaum’s Act II, which ends with a dimly lit battle and a stage littered with corpses.The German designer Urs Schönebaum is responsible for Act II, marked by lighting effects and a dark palette.Martin SigmundThe opera itself ends with the disobedient Brünnhilde put to sleep by Wotan in a circle of fire, which von Brandenburg and her co-director, the French actor Benoȋt Résillot, render with a ring of LED lights that encases a body double floating above the rear of the stage. Using an elegant lighting effect, recalling the style of Act II, in the same spot and on the same scale as the film of Act I, the image serves — if coincidentally — to unify the production.The singers have also done their part to make connections. Though the opera has been reconceived, in effect, as three one-acts, Mulligan said he was making an effort to create a unified character.“I do similar gestures to remind the audience who I am,” he says, including holding his spear in Act II and Act III in a similar way.In keeping with what now amounts to a Stuttgart tradition, the other three “Ring” operas in this new cycle will each have different directors. “Die Walküre” arrives some five months after the company’s “Das Rheingold,” which got a circus-trash staging directed by Stephan Kimmig, starring Juric as a glam-rock Wotan. The new “Siegfried” is borrowed from the old cycle and directed by Jossi Wieler, while “Götterdämmerung,” directed by Marco Storman, will premiere in January 2023. Then, over the course of five days that April, audiences will be able to put all the pieces together.Meister said that Stuttgart is ready for the task. The 42-year-old conductor — who said he actually appreciated the convenience of simultaneous rehearsals in the off-site space, allowing him to dip in and out of different acts — has been jostling “Die Walküre” duties with Zoom meetings about the new production of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” that he is leading this summer at the Bayreuth Festival.Jostling of a different sort is to come at the “Walküre” premiere, when he will be joined onstage by a dozen or so members of the three creative teams for a communal curtain call set to number about 50. More

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      For This Opera Director, a Lot Is Riding on a ‘Handmaid’s Tale’

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      For her English National Opera debut, the company’s new artistic leader, Annilese Miskimmon, has chosen a work she hopes can bring in a new audience.LONDON — Annilese Miskimmon, the British opera director, looked tired and frazzled when she appeared on a recent video call. She was taking a short break from rehearsing “The Handmaid’s Tale” — the first production at English National Opera she is directing since taking over its artistic leadership in the middle of the pandemic. Those rehearsals had not been running smoothly, Miskimmon said, and had been hit by a recent surge in coronavirus cases in England. For a few weeks, the production had been rehearsing partly online.“This is Zoom stress more than opera stress,” she added, with an awkward laugh. She had already canceled two nights of the run, which now consists of just four performances, from April 8 through Apr. 14.Miskimmon said she chose “The Handmaid’s Tale” for her English National Opera debut because the company was founded on the idea of “opera for everyone.” The novel it is based on, by Margaret Atwood, is well known here, and its popularity has only grown thanks to the recent TV adaptation. Both of these, and the opera, by the Danish composer Poul Ruders, imagine a near future in which women are seen as little more than birthing machines. The story felt politically urgent, Miskimmon added. “Every day it’s getting more and more dangerous in some parts of the world to be a woman,” she said.A rehearsal for English National Opera’s produciton of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” The production’s run, which begins April 8, has been cut to just four performances.English National OperaFor opera watchers, Miskimmon’s decision to start with a dystopia may seem appropriate. In recent years, English National Opera has been hit by crises both real and imagined. Those have included funding cuts and resignations, as well as complaints about a dwindling number of performances each season. To raise revenue, the company — which only performs in English — now rents out its West End home, the Coliseum, to musical productions each summer.Miskimmon’s 2019 appointment was a surprise. The announcement came shortly after the American director Daniel Kramer resigned as the opera’s artistic director, two weeks after announcing his second season. Kramer had a never held a senior position at an opera house before joining the company, and many critics felt he wasn’t up to the job.Hugh Canning, an opera critic for several British newspapers, said he was “puzzled” that Miskimmon had left a job running the well-funded Norwegian Opera and Ballet in Oslo to take up the reins at English National Opera, also known as ENO. “Maybe she enjoys controversy,” he said.Others in Britain’s opera world agreed that Miskimmon had taken on a tough job. “Running any opera house is hard, but ENO is even harder,” said Gus Christie, the executive chairman of the Glyndebourne opera festival. As London’s “second” opera house, ENO was always competing for audiences with the much-better funded Royal Opera House, just a few blocks away, he added. (The British government gives the Royal Opera House about $32 million a year; ENO gets around half as much.)“If she can turn things around there, hats off to her,” Christie said.John Allison, the editor of Opera magazine, said that Miskimmon had gotten off to “a very good” start. During the coronavirus pandemic, she kept things at ENO moving when most British opera houses were shut, with a series of original ideas that raised the company’s profile. Those included a drive-in staging of Puccini’s “La Bohème” (featuring breakdancers and ice cream trucks), a made-for-TV performance of Mozart’s “Requiem” and a community outreach program in which ENO singers offered vocal lessons to people whose breathing had been affected by Covid.But most of the productions in Miskimmon’s first season had been planned before her arrival, including a staging of Wagner’s “Die Walküre” that will play at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 2025. “A lot is riding on this ‘Handmaid’s Tale,’” Allison said. “It’s her first big calling card.”The opera opens in the year 2195, with a lecturer describing the horrors of the Republic of Gilead, a theocracy in which women have no rights and where “handmaids” are forced to bear children for the ruling class.Annemarie Woods, the production’s designer, said that the creative team had researched totalitarian systems and thought about how artifacts of those regimes and their atrocities were preserved. The Coliseum’s stage will look like an exhibition space, Woods said, with items of clothing — including around 50 of the handmaids’ famous red hooded cloaks — suspended and lit like items in a Holocaust museum. Other “exhibits” will include a chunk of a wall where handmaids are executed, displayed like segments of the Berlin Wall.Kate Lindsey, an American mezzo-soprano who plays Offred, the opera’s main character, said she was enjoying rehearsing with Miskimmon, who “made every effort for people to have a voice in the room artistically.”“That’s a real sign of a confident director, and a really, really confident leader,” Lindsey said.Miskimmon said she wanted to turn ENO into a “truly national company” that collaborates with regional opera companies to stage major productions. Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesMiskimmon’s route to the heights of British opera is far from typical. Born in 1974, she grew up in Bangor, a small town outside Belfast, Northern Ireland, during the sectarian conflict that is known as “the Troubles.”She saw her first opera at 10 years old, when her father performed in an amateur production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” in a church hall. It was a distinctly lo-fi production: Her father’s costume for the role of Papageno was “a flat cap and some pan pipes on a string around his neck,” Miskimmon said.Yet Miskimmon soon fell hard for the art form. As much as opera was an escape from the violence of the Troubles, part of its appeal was that it also somehow reflected them, she said: At the time, Northern Ireland was a place where people didn’t feel they had much control over their destiny, since they could “go out for an ordinary day’s work, and be blown up.” In opera, Miskimmon said, “the characters are relentlessly driven toward heaven and hell,” without much agency, either. It felt “a much more honest, artistic representation of life.”At Cambridge University, where she studied English literature, Miskimmon directed some student productions. But she never thought she would become a professional director, she said, until she was invited to assist the British director Graham Vick at Glyndebourne. After working on seven productions there, she landed a job as the artistic director of the Opera Theater Company, Ireland’s national touring opera, before eventually moving to the Danish National Opera in Aarhus, and, later, the Norwegian Opera and Ballet in Oslo.Andrew Mellor, an opera journalist who specializes in the Nordic countries, said that Miskimmon was successful in Denmark, with several innovative productions that became talking points. Her take on Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” in Aarhus offered audiences two productions — one traditional, one contemporary — and began each night with a vote to decide which would be staged. Equally attention-grabbing was an opera Miskimmon commissioned there called “Brothers,” about Danish soldiers dealing with post-traumatic stress after fighting in Afghanistan.Her time at Oslo was more “turbulent,” Mellor said. The Norwegian company’s music director, Karl-Heinz Steffens, left before Miskimmon even started, and she “had a fight with its ensemble system” when she wanted to use more guest singers, Mellor said. Amid the conflict, Miskimmon staged several acclaimed productions, including one of Britten’s “Billy Budd” that featured a huge submarine onstage.“She’s no shrinking violet, and when she has an idea she pursues it,” Mellor said.Miskimmon said her “memories of working in Oslo are not ones of turbulence,” and added that, in her opinion, it had been “a very positive working experience.”Whatever happened in Norway, Miskimmon’s experiences of dealing with tough situations will hold her in good stead for her role at ENO, especially given the challenges the company has ahead.At the end of March, the company canceled a production of Michael Tippet’s “King Priam” that had been set to run in the 2022-23 season. Ella Baker, an ENO spokeswoman, said in an email that this was “with financial prudence in mind,” given the ongoing impact of the pandemic.The company also faces perhaps more significant financial challenges. Over the past year, Britain’s government has focused on a program called “leveling up,” designed to boost the fortunes of areas outside London. Although “leveling up” includes all sectors of Britain’s economy, arts funding has been a particular focus. Government subsidies for London-based arts organizations like ENO are set to be cut by a total of 15 percent later this year, so more money can be spent elsewhere. The government has said that some organizations may lose their funding entirely.Allison, the Opera magazine editor, said some British lawmakers have “always had ENO in their sights,” because funding opera is thought to be bad at the ballot box. With the Royal Opera House more prominent, ENO had “always looked vulnerable,” he said.During the hourlong interview, Miskimmon did not seem concerned by that threat, insisting that ENO already had plans to present more work outside London. Since starting at the company, she said she had been discussing how to turn ENO into a “truly national company” that collaborates with regional opera companies to stage major productions.Miskimmon added that she had a favorite saying: “A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.” She had repeated the adage so many times at ENO, including in rehearsals for “The Handmaid’s Tale,” that people must be getting sick of it, she said. But it suited her vision for the company, she added.“It’s about art, and it’s about life,” Miskimmon said. “We’re prepared to take big steps forward, because that’s what opera needs.” More