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      Lise Davidsen and Nina Stemme Star in ‘Elektra’ at the Met

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      At the Metropolitan Opera, Nina Stemme and Lise Davidsen are a blazing pair as sisters in a revival of Strauss’s work.Behind the glorious excess of Strauss’s “Elektra” — the libretto’s mythic setting, the score’s unsparing terror — is something smaller: a starkly framed family portrait, albeit one knocked off the wall and scratched up by shards of shattered glass.That has always been at the core of Patrice Chéreau’s production, which returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Friday night. But in this revival, you could home in even closer to just its two sisters, antipodal soprano roles sung by Nina Stemme and Lise Davidsen with floodlight luminosity and painfully human sensitivity.Chéreau’s staging, which premiered at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2013 before coming to the Met six years ago, doesn’t seem to have aged a day. And it’s difficult to imagine that happening soon with a placeless production that suits the timelessness Sophocles’ classic tragedy — which Hugo von Hofmannsthal adapted into a play for the age of Freud, then into a libretto for Strauss’s opera.The set, by Richard Peduzzi, is the grand and severe courtyard of the vaguely Mediterranean home of a vaguely elite family in vaguely contemporary dress (designed by Caroline de Vivaise). Where the production gets more specific is in its departures from the libretto: its absence of caricature and villainy, its climactic dance of death instead a scene of stillness and life continuing in agony. Mostly bloodless where it could be a massacre, it is a study of a family irreparably fractured by trauma.This concept demands singers who can truly act. And Stemme rises to meet it, if not always in voice then in dramatic intensity, which has only grown since she sang the title role in the Chéreau production’s first outing at the Met. She is never at rest: rocking as she stares straight ahead, her eyes wide open with laser focus on avenging her father, Agamemnon.When Stemme sang of his death — a murder committed by Elektra’s mother, Klytämnestra, and her lover, Aegisth — her voice didn’t always cooperate, especially at the low end of her range. At times she visibly braced herself for the role’s most punishing outbursts. Yet she delivered them as if with dragon’s breath, matched only by passages of aching delicacy.Davidsen, as Elektra’s sister Chrysothemis, gave her best performance at the Met this season — able to show a fuller range than in Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” last fall, and more in control of her immense instrument than during a recent run of Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” and a benefit concert for Ukraine, in which she sang that composer’s “Four Last Songs.” Typically a better actor through her voice than her physicality, here she carried as much character on her sorrowful face as Stemme did in her eyes.Relaying the news that her brother, Orest, had died, “thrown and trampled by his own horses,” Davidsen let out a chilling wail — not for the last time in the evening. Originally trained as a mezzo-soprano, she has a full-bodied lower range that is just as thrilling to witness as her candescent high notes, and a commanding softness in more conversational moments.She and Stemme were supported throughout by a Met Orchestra in excellent form under the baton of Donald Runnicles, whose reading of the score was sensitively aligned with that of Chéreau. The opera has sounded scarier and more chaotic — its blood bath met with bombast in many interpretations — but Runnicles insisted on the possibility of dramatic momentum at a more restrained scale. And the evening was no less exciting for it; if anything, it was riveting in its revelatory transparency, the layers of expressionistic color, sweetness and Wagnerian abundance stacking in counterpoint or weaving in and out of one another with grace.There were standouts elsewhere — Hei-Kyung Hong as an authoritative and rending Fifth Maid — but also lapses among the principals. Michaela Schuster’s Klytämnestra was one of obvious gestures and a strained voice, which she occasionally sought to salvage with near-Sprechstimme declamation. Chéreau’s production hinges on a sympathetic Klytämnestra; she didn’t quite achieve that. And men were shadows of their past appearances. Greer Grimsley’s resonant bass-baritone was here faded and effortful, and not always easy to follow. As Aegisth, Stefan Vinke was barely audible — an upsetting turn for a tenor who has sung roles like Siegfried, perhaps barking but at least with penetrating power.You couldn’t help but feel bad whenever they sang alongside one of the starring sisters. Which is always: Stemme never leaves the stage. It is, after all, her show — and, for this run, Davidsen’s, too.ElektraThrough April 20 at the Metropolitan Opera; metopera.org. More

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      Anna Netrebko Faces Backlash in Russia After Attempt to Distance Herself From Putin

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      The star soprano Anna Netrebko lost work in the West over her ties to the Russian president. Now, following an about-face, she has been called a traitor at home.The Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, one of opera’s biggest stars, faced backlash on Friday in her home country after she tried to distance herself from President Vladimir V. Putin amid his invasion of Ukraine.Ms. Netrebko issued a statement on Wednesday that appeared to be an attempt to revive her international career, which has crumbled recently because of her past support for Mr. Putin. In the statement, she condemned the war and said she was not allied with him.In Russia, where Ms. Netrebko has a large fan base, her words were met with criticism. She was denounced on Friday as a traitor by Vyacheslav Volodin, a senior lawmaker who has been an outspoken critic of artists who oppose the war.“You can’t call it anything other than betrayal,” Volodin wrote on his Telegram channel. “There is a voice, but no conscience. The thirst for enrichment and glory outweighed the love for the motherland.”And the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theater in Siberia canceled a coming appearance by Ms. Netrebko, saying she seemed more interested in her global career than “the fate of the motherland.”“Today is not the time to sacrifice principles for more comfortable living conditions,” the house said in a statement on its website. “Now is the time to make a choice.”Ms. Netrebko could not immediately be reached for comment.Since the war started, Ms. Netrebko has faced a wave of cancellations around the world because of her ties to Mr. Putin. Her performances at the Metropolitan Opera — where she had sung for 20 years and become its prima donna — have been canceled indefinitely. Other leading opera houses, including in Munich and in Zurich, have also scrapped coming engagements.In her statement this week, Ms. Netrebko sought to distance herself from Mr. Putin, saying that they had met only a few times. “I am not a member of any political party nor am I allied with any leader of Russia,” she said, describing herself as a taxpayer in Austria, where she now resides.While she condemned the war in Ukraine, she did not explicitly criticize Mr. Putin, and did not directly address her record of support for him.It remains unclear whether she will succeed in reviving her career. The day she issued her statement, the Paris Opera announced that she would star in a production of Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” this fall. (Alexander Neef, that house’s director, said in a statement on Wednesday that the company was evaluating the situation.) The Met responded by saying it was not prepared to change its position; Peter Gelb, its general manager, said, “If Anna demonstrates that she has truly and completely disassociated herself from Putin over the long term, I would be willing to have a conversation.”Ms. Netrebko once endorsed Mr. Putin’s re-election and has over the years offered support for his leadership. In 2014, she was photographed holding a flag used by Russia-backed separatists in Ukraine. In her statement this week, she said, “I acknowledge and regret that past actions or statements of mine could have been misinterpreted.”Now, she risks becoming persona non grata in her homeland and abroad.“She’s damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t,” said Simon Morrison, a professor of music at Princeton University who studies Russia. “She’s canceled for her years of pro-Putinism, then she critiques the war to save her international career, and then gets castigated at home for caring more about her gigs than ‘the fate of Russia.’”Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting. More

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      Paris Opera Director Alexander Neef Broadens Its Repertory

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      Alexander Neef plans an innovative approach to keep audiences happy, even as he works to stem financial losses.To have taken over as director of the Paris Opera one year earlier than planned, just as the longest strike in the company’s history was morphing into the worst global pandemic in a century, might reasonably have rattled Alexander Neef.But if it did, he doesn’t show it. This German impresario, who dresses with elegance and speaks with care, is not, shall we say, operatic in his manner.In fact, even at the suggestion that he was offered a poisoned chalice when he took over in 2020, Mr. Neef, 48, did not take the bait. “It hasn’t been a bad ride,” he said in a video interview. “In the end, you accept and then you assume.”One reason that he was perhaps not unnerved by the challenge was that he had already worked at the Paris Opera, as casting director for the director Gerard Mortier from 2004 to 2008. “A lot of the staff was there when I was last there, and people had some kind of idea who they were dealing with,” he noted.But another reason was that, faced with the cancellation of hundreds of performances, the French government stepped in with an enormous package of emergency aid worth 86 million euros, or nearly $95 million. And it was no small asset that Mr. Neef was chosen for the job by President Emmanuel Macron himself. “A lot of my colleagues who were appointed by him feel that there is an investment in our success,” Mr. Neef said.Mr. Neef attending the inaugural concert by Paris Opera’s music director, Gustavo Dudamel, at the Palais Garnier in September.Pascal Le Segretain/Getty ImagesStill, when it comes to opera managers, there is no consensus on how to measure success. Are they applauded for using their fund-raising skills to help balance the books? Are they remembered for putting on large productions featuring star performers with little concern for the cost? Clearly audiences are more interested in what takes place onstage than in the vagaries of opera house budgets, but just as clearly, they are related.For the public, then, the least exciting aspect of Mr. Neef’s strategy is to stem the Paris Opera’s losses by the 2024-25 season, by which time emergency government support will probably no longer be provided. With this in mind, and with about 250 of the 1,500 members of the company’s staff expected to retire by 2025, he said he hoped not to have to replace them all, thereby saving 50 to 100 salaries.But how its limited resources are used also serves to determine an opera house’s standing. And here again, Mr. Neef has some innovative, albeit simple, ideas. For instance, he prefers not to have the Paris Opera’s two large theaters — the Palais Garnier and the Bastille Opera — resemble “permanent festivals,” with splashy productions that are never revived.“Every one of my predecessors produced a new ‘La Traviata,’ which is rather unusual because that means a new ‘La Traviata’ every five years,” he said. “I think the strategy is that we create a ‘La Traviata’ we can keep for a longer period, and in that case we can create many other things that are not in our repertory.“Now we’re rehearsing Massenet’s ‘Cendrillon,’ which has never been in the Paris Opera repertory,” he went on, “or we’re doing Bernstein’s ‘A Quiet Place’ for the very first time. It’s not about being cautious, it’s about broadening the repertory and not investing in a production that you do once and never again.”That approach was apparent this season, Mr. Neef’s first, which ends in July, and in the 2022-23 season, which he announced this week. It also embraces an interesting change in emphasis wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic.“Over the past few decades,” he said, “there has been a transfer of power from the institution to the audience, which has been reinforced by the pandemic. I think audiences have a much larger awareness today that we need them. We need them as ticket-buyers, as donors and as citizens who are convinced that an organization like the Paris Opera has a role to play.”But pleasing audiences is no easy task. “I always say that we have 2,700 seats at the Bastille and we have 2,700 audiences every night,” he said, adding that what counts is how people interact with the production. “I think indifference is our biggest enemy, because when people are bored at the opera or they don’t really know why they came, that is way more dangerous than a strong negative reaction.”As it happens, experience shows that Paris audiences quite often heckle directors and designers, while the reaction to lead singers can go from polite applause to wild, cheering enthusiasm. And the talent of the singers seems to count more than their fame, which is no doubt lucky because, as Mr. Neef noted, “it’s not what it used to be 20 years ago when you could literally rely on certain names to fill the theater.”Anna Netrebko as Donna Leonora in “La Forza del Destino” in London in 2019. She is scheduled to sing the role next season in Paris.Bill CooperOne name that has traditionally sold tickets is that of the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, who has been excluded from the Metropolitan Opera of New York for two seasons for not repudiating President Vladimir V. Putin following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the published 2022-23 season of the Paris Opera, however, Ms. Netrebko is still down to sing the role of Donna Leonora in “La Forza del Destino” in December.“We printed the program before the invasion, and we’ll evaluate the situation between now and November to see if it’s possible for her to appear or not,” Mr. Neef said. “It’s a tricky situation. It’s not the government’s position, and it’s certainly not my personal position now, to go to all or certain Russian artists and say, if you don’t publicly denounce the situation, we cannot work with you.”As it happens, a production of Mussorgsky’s “Khovanshchina” with a largely Russian-speaking cast ended its Paris run six days before the invasion, while lead singers in a production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” with performances during the first three weeks of the war in Ukraine, included two Russians, one Ukrainian, one Belarusian and one Romanian. “I think most of them felt they didn’t know exactly what was going on and they’d like to be invisible,” Mr. Neef said.Mr. Neef has a five-year appointment as director of the Paris Opera with the possibility of a second similar term, so any discussion of his legacy is wildly premature. But it could include an initiative he is planning for next season: Taking his inspiration from many German opera houses, he plans to create a troupe of 15 to 20 professional singers who will be on salary (and not work as freelancers, as most soloists do) and will take on all but the biggest roles.Mr. Neef said he believed that greater job stability had become more appealing to cast members over the past two years. “There’s a lot of interest in being resident in one city,” he said, “either because you have a family, or the attraction of going to a new city every few weeks is not as high as it used to be.”So, just as some lead dancers in the Paris Opera Ballet Company have fan clubs, it may not be long before once-unknown members of the new troupe have an ardent following of their own. More

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      Paris Opera Plans New Productions of Strauss and Britten

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      Human complexities to take center stage in new productions of classics, including works by Strauss and Britten.PARIS — There is never anything very normal about opera. After all, no other art form demands such extreme suspension of disbelief. But after the disruptions caused by strikes and the Covid-19 pandemic, normality is the cherished goal of the Paris Opera as it unveiled its program for the 2022-23 season this week.“An unwelcome guest in our lives, the pandemic has reminded us just how ephemeral and fragile all life is,” Alexander Neef, the opera company’s director, wrote in a news release introducing the season. “Yet by upsetting time and our certainties, it has made the same life more valuable.”Quoting Falstaff in Verdi’s eponymous opera, “tutto nel mondo è burla” (“all the world is a farce”), he added: “I know of no better antidote to instability than to embrace life. And what better way to do so, at the opera, than by bringing meaning and poetry.”One delight of opera is that a poetic libretto penned a century or more ago can assume fresh meaning with each new production: Audiences know the story line but not how it will be interpreted.The baritone Ludovic Tézier at a classical music awards ceremony last year in Lyon, France. He is to perform as the Danish prince in Ambroise Thomas’s “Hamlet.”Jeff Pachoud/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFor the upcoming season, which opens Sept. 3 with a reprise of Pierre Audi’s production of “Tosca,” Mr. Neef has scheduled a rich array of operas, including new productions of Richard Strauss’s “Salomé,” with the South African soprano Elza van den Heever in the title role; Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes,” with Deborah Warner making her Paris Opera debut as a director; and Ambroise Thomas’s “Hamlet,” with the French baritone Ludovic Tézier as the Danish prince.In a new production of Charles Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette,” France’s new favorite tenor, Benjamin Bernheim, will share the role of Roméo with Francesco Demuro, while Elsa Dreisig and Pretty Yende will alternate as Juliette. This opera, scheduled for next summer, will offer an interesting contrast to “I Capuleti e I Montechhi,” Bellini’s version of the same story, albeit borrowed from a different source, which is to be presented this fall.The Bellini opera is just one of three next season to be directed by the Canadian Robert Carsen. His acclaimed production of “Die Zauberflöte” will return in September, with the powerful German bass René Pape sharing the role of Sarastro with Brindley Sherratt and Ms. Yende alternating with Christiane Karg as Pamina. Mr. Carsen, whose celebrated 1999 Paris Opera production of Handel’s “Alcina” returned here during the current season, will now also direct the same composer’s “Ariodante.”One production the Bastille Opera revives with some regularity is Peter Sellars’s celebrated version of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” much of which is set against the backdrop of a powerful video by Bill Viola, with his trademark images of water, fire and nakedness. With Gustavo Dudamel, the Paris Opera’s new music director, conducting, Mary Elizabeth Williams will be Isolde to Gwyn Hughes Jones’s Tristan.Renée Fleming is scheduled to sing the role of Pat Nixon in a new production by Valentina Carrasco of John Adams’s “Nixon in China.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe season will also note two anniversaries. This year’s 50th anniversary of President Nixon’s bridge-building trip to Beijing will be recalled in a new production by Valentina Carrasco of John Adams’s “Nixon in China,” with Thomas Hampson as the American leader and Renée Fleming as his wife, Pat.The other production, “The Dante Project,” which premiered in London last October, is a ballet by Wayne McGregor to a score by the contemporary opera composer Thomas Adès. It is inspired by last year’s 700th anniversary of the death of Dante, the poet-author of the “Divine Comedy,.”Just as Puccini will be present with “La Bohème” as well as “Tosca,” Verdi is no less a must in every opera season, here represented by two revivals. “La Forza del Destino” is an austere production by Jean-Claude Auvray, with Anna Netrebko and Anna Pirozzi sharing the role of Donna Leonora, Russell Thomas as her lover Don Alvaro and Mr. Tézier as her vengeful brother Don Carlo di Vargas. The second, “Il Trovatore,” another stirring tragedy, returns in a production set around World War I by Àlex Ollé of the Catalan company La Fura dels Baus.The furious pace of 24/7 news today certainly tests directors hoping to give a current edge to operas composed decades or centuries ago. But for Mr. Neef, when productions are inspired by the works of great authors, from Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde, there is something unchanging in the way they “all delve into human complexities, the subtleties of consciousness and the tensions between the sexes and generations.” More

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      Review: Michel van der Aa’s ‘Upload’ Asks Old Questions With New Technology

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      Michel van der Aa’s work, a seamless interweaving of opera, film and motion-capture performance, arrives at the Park Avenue Armory.“I am certain that you exist,” a daughter tells her father, only to reconsider: “I am certain that you do not exist.”Her ambivalence is understandable. The question of what it means to be human — to exist — is an old one, and, arguing with her father, this woman is not about to find an answer. Only more questions, which accumulate at a breakneck pace in Michel van der Aa’s “Upload,” a seamless interweaving of opera, film and high technology that had its American premiere at the Park Avenue Armory on Tuesday.This work would seem to contain more than it possibly could in its 85 minutes: a tutorial-like explanation of how a clinic offers immortality by backing up consciousness to the cloud, one man’s journey through that process and his daughter’s conflicted response as he returns to her — no longer alive but, well, not dead. Throughout, the score shifts among electronic and acoustic sounds, just as the production moves between — and occasionally collides — live performance, prerecorded scenes and motion-capture technology.But van der Aa, an artist of big swings, operates here as composer, librettist and director with the restraint of a confident master. In a way that hasn’t always been the case with his works marrying novelty and tradition, there is no dazzle in “Upload” that isn’t closely tied to the dramaturgy.Bullock plays a daughter coping with her father’s new life as consciousness uploaded to the cloud, over scenes that shift between film and live performance.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThis is the third version I’ve seen, starting with a solely cinematic one that premiered online last summer. European audiences can stream it at medici.tv; Americans will be able to do the same starting April 1.The “Upload” film made trims to the score that focused its storytelling and had editing that more clearly separated the piece’s use of different media. It’s effective, though much less affecting than the proscenium presentation at the Dutch National Opera last fall, which restored the introduction — poetic fragments of phrases about the body, sung like plainchant in the dark — and an intimate coup de théâtre at the climax.Van der Aa’s creative team has been a constant, among them the dramaturgs Madelon Kooijman and Niels Nuijten, and Theun Mosk, who designed the smoothly integrated set and lighting; Tom Gelissen and Paul Jeukendrup, the nimble sound; and Darien Brito and Julius Horsthuis, the Hollywood-level special effects.Further tweaks have been made for the Armory’s capacious drill hall. Particularly striking now is that climactic move, an audience-spanning screen that was closer than in Amsterdam — a low ceiling — and more immersive. (But from Row G, it also made my craning neck hurt.)Williams, left, in a scene that blends live performance with film, featuring Ashley Zukerman as a Silicon Valley-like chief executive.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThat moment delivers a wash of patient quiet and humanity after 80 minutes of brisk drama. “Upload” has elements of the darkly speculative series “Black Mirror” and the comparatively hopeful “Years and Years,” but its preoccupations are as timeless as they are the finest genre fiction.Not that “uploading” is fully fictional. It is our future and present: an already stated ambition to upload consciousness to a decentralized blockchain, prefigured by the traces of ourselves we already deposit throughout the internet — our images and inner thoughts slowly building what the clinic of “Upload” (shot at the modernist Zonnestraal sanitarium in the Netherlands) would call a Mind File for our digital afterlife.How that file is created is detailed in filmed sequences starring Ashley Zukerman (“Succession”) as a stereotypical Silicon Valley type, hubristically enthusiastic and uninterested in waiting for government regulation, and Katja Herbers (“Evil”), as an empathetic psychiatrist who also has a streak of overconfidence. The technology is available only to a privileged few, the kind of people who would fly to space recreationally. Or, here, buy eternal life at the cost of death — to avoid the complications, both ethical and ecological, of multiple uploads.For these scenes, van der Aa writes less of an opera score and more of a soundtrack, uneasy yet excited, with jittery strings, chaotic percussion and electronics that warp into crackling white noise — all played, with propulsive momentum, by Ensemble Musikfabrik, under Otto Tausk’s committed and commanding baton. Van der Aa’s music takes on a different style, though, for scenes featuring the work’s two singing roles: the unnamed father and daughter.We meet them — the baritone Roderick Williams, delicate and ever sympathetic, and the soprano Julia Bullock, silvery at the top of her range, equally at ease in pop directness and lush lyricism — after he has been uploaded, without her knowledge. Their interactions have the naturally rhythmic vocal writing of Janacek or Debussy. Left alone, she tends to be accompanied by more traditional sounds, such as a piano or strings, while the father’s musical vocabulary is firmly, irreversibly electronic.Bullock with Williams, who, as an uploaded consciousness, is shown onstage through motion-capture technology.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTheir thread of the plot has a short story’s simplicity: She scrutinizes his new self, with constantly changing feelings, then has to decide whether to terminate him, to let him die again. That is because something went wrong in the upload process, which ordinarily buries trauma — in this father’s case, the recent, debilitating, loss of his wife.Briefly paused for the first time as an Upload, the father realizes that his grief is still agonizingly present, and that he’s doomed to endure it forever unless he is, well, deleted, which only his daughter can do. The opera leaves them on the night before her fateful decision. When that curtain shoots out over the audience, it shows them in split-screen projection — as if lying together while on separate planes of existence, singing the poetic fragments of the opening, now more pained.The curtain then lifts, revealing a stage from which the orchestra is gone, but electronic music lingers. A video shows the father’s memory anchor, meant to keep an Upload from drifting, unmoored, into digital space. It’s a virtual rendering of a childhood scene, chasing lizards around a stone wall in the countryside, that begins to glitch and degrade, leaving only a white expanse.Is the continuing score, in the absence of an orchestra, a triumph of technology? Does the conclusion depict the father’s deletion — or even the inevitable decay of all digital files? There are no answers here. If van der Aa offers anything, it is a guarantee of death, and of the unavoidably human response: to grieve.UploadThrough March 30 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. More

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      Review: ‘The Hours’ Will Bring Renée Fleming Back to the Met

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      Kevin Puts’s new opera had its premiere in a Philadelphia Orchestra concert presentation before coming to New York this fall.PHILADELPHIA — Three women are left alone onstage.The orchestra is low as they begin to sing. Their voices (two soprano, one mezzo-soprano) gradually swell and intertwine in a radiant, aching trio about all that separates them from one another — and their essential union.This is, famously, the ending of Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” which five years ago was the last work the superstar soprano Renée Fleming sang at the Metropolitan Opera. But her performance, a farewell to the canonical repertory, did not mark a full retirement. Fleming said she would continue to concertize, and left open the possibility of returning to staged opera for new pieces written with her in mind.So on Friday here in Philadelphia, it felt like a moving nod to her distinguished career that a radiant, aching trio of women (two sopranos, one mezzo) left alone onstage — a trio about all that separates them from one another, and their essential union — is also the coda to “The Hours,” which will bring Fleming, for whom it was composed, back to the Met this fall.There the work, Kevin Puts’s new adaptation of the 1998 novel and 2002 film about the reverberations of Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” in the lives of three characters in different places and eras, will be conducted by the company’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. And on Friday, at the Kimmel Center, Nézet-Séguin led its world premiere in a concert presentation with another ensemble he leads, the Philadelphia Orchestra.With a libretto by Greg Pierce, “The Hours” is even prettier and more sumptuous than “Silent Night,” a grandly scored yet sweetly humble opera about a cease-fire over Christmas during World War I, for which Puts won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012. The new work is, like “Silent Night,” direct, effective theater, with a cinematic quality in its plush, propulsive underscoring, its instinctive sense for using music to move things along. For all its shifts and overlaps of time and place, it’s an entirely clear piece, its sound world never too busy or difficult — never too interesting, perhaps — to muddy the waters.The opera’s composer, Kevin Puts, grips Nézet-Séguin’s hands after the performance, with Greg Pierce, who wrote the libretto, behind him.Jessica GriffinFleming has the role Meryl Streep played in Stephen Daldry’s film: Clarissa Vaughan, a prosperous book editor in late 1990s New York City who is preparing a party for her friend, a famous poet dying of AIDS. She suffers regrets and despair, as do other two women: Laura Brown (the acclaimed Broadway soprano Kelli O’Hara), a Los Angeles housewife in 1949; and Woolf herself (the mezzo Jennifer Johnson Cano on Friday, but Joyce DiDonato at the Met) in a London suburb, trying to surmount her depression long enough to write “Mrs. Dalloway” in the early 1920s.In Michael Cunningham’s delicate novel, these three are linked in a carefully wrought knit of Woolfian prose and coincidences, among them that Clarissa Vaughan shares a first name with the title character of “Mrs. Dalloway,” who in Woolf’s novel — which Laura Brown is reading as she fights anomie and the urge toward suicide — is also making a party.The film version is far more lugubrious, not least in Philip Glass’s melodramatically undulating score, which so defines the movie’s mood — its dusky, urgent strings inseparable from Nicole Kidman’s Woolf and her puttied aquiline nose striding off to drown themselves — that there is something brave in another composer taking on this material.Puts has gotten from Glass’s Minimalism a taste for using repeated figurations as a kind of sonic carpeting, but his repetitions are much less insistent. The opera begins in a watery blur, with a choir, sounding simultaneously floating and precise, chanting fragments of Woolf’s classic opening line: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”The events of the opera, as in the book and film, are studiedly modest, taking place in a single day. Clarissa goes to the florist, visits her dying friend, and muses on what her life would have been like had she not, years ago, broken off a budding romance with him. Woolf chats with her husband about page proofs, forms phrases and greets her sister’s family. Laura attempts to bake a cake for her husband’s birthday before escaping to a hotel to read alone.With each of the two acts unfolding in an unbroken stream, Puts moves smoothly between parlando sung conversation and glowing lyrical flights. The stylization of opera allows him to bring his characters together in the same musical space, even if they are otherwise unaware of one another. So there are, for example, ravishing duets for Woolf and Laura, one in which they sing lines from “Mrs. Dalloway” in close harmony over trembling strings. Puts is acute in using the chorus, which will presumably be offstage in a full production, to convey further shadows of these women’s interior lives.Prepared with remarkably limited rehearsal time for a two-hour work with a substantial cast, this was a lush yet transparent account of the score, performed with polish and commitment. The opera leans heavily on this orchestra’s storied opulent strings, as well as on its characterful winds and brasses, and precision at a large battery of percussion instruments (including a celesta, used frequently, in a cliché of dreaminess).Puts’s work is attractive and skillful. Yet much of it, despite lots of activity and ostensible variety in the orchestra and among the singers, gives a sense of engulfing sameness of musical texture and vocal approach. The arias, if you set the words aside, are more or less interchangeable: pristinely soaring. The saturated orchestral colors recall Nelson Riddle’s symphonic pop arrangements and Samuel Barber’s gently reflective soprano monologue “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.” But Riddle songs are just a couple of minutes long; “Knoxville,” about 15. Over a couple of hours, it’s lovely but wearying.The ’50s style for Laura’s world — mild Lawrence Welk-type swing, choral writing like TV jingles — feels obvious. And some moments of highest drama smack of the overkill that mars the film, as when the threat of Woolf’s devastating headaches is marked by pummeling darkness, yawning brasses and instrumental screams.New fantasy sequences, demarcated in concert with sudden shifts of lighting, telegraph a bit too crudely how much these women want to run from their lives. Woolf’s imaginary interaction with a contemporary male novelist who speaks about how much she’s meant to him — an invention of the libretto — is cloying and overwrought, drenched in bells.The more intimate and understated, the better for Puts’s music, and the cast embodies both those qualities. Cano sings with mellow sobriety — and, in Woolf’s darkest moments, stricken intensity. O’Hara’s voice is silvery at the top and full in the middle, her pain registering gracefully.As Clarissa’s poet friend, Richard, the baritone Brett Polegato sang with lightly sardonic airiness. The tenor William Burden sounded shining and eager as his old lover, Louis. The tenor Jamez McCorkle, the mezzo Deborah Nansteel and the bass-baritone Brandon Cedel were steady, sonorous presences as the main characters’ much put-upon romantic partners.Fleming began with some paleness of tone, but grew in command through the evening, past her characteristic propriety to a kind of somber nobility. Clarissa dominates the opera’s final scenes, when “The Hours” is at its finest: the emotions sincere and persuasive, the music fervent.And at the end, the three women come together, perceiving one another in a way they cannot in the novel or film and arriving at a simple moral: “Here is the world and you live in it, and you try.” There was poignancy in having a great diva, now 63, singing the nostalgic leading role, a woman taking in all she has done — and realizing she still has more to give.The HoursPerformed at the Kimmel Center, Philadelphia. More

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      Metropolitan Opera’s Concert Honors Ukraine

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      A concert to benefit relief efforts featured a young Ukrainian singer, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” and the Met’s prima donna of the moment.Vladyslav Buialskyi stood center stage at the Metropolitan Opera, his hand on his heart, and sang the national anthem of his country, Ukraine.That was on Feb. 28, when the house reopened after a month off from performing and the Russian invasion of Ukraine was just a few days old. The company’s chorus and orchestra joined Buialskyi, a member of the Met’s young artists program, in a message of solidarity with him and his suffering people.Exactly two weeks later, on Monday, Buialskyi, a 24-year-old bass-baritone from the besieged port city of Berdyansk, stood center stage once more, his hand again on his heart, and sang the anthem with the orchestra and chorus.This time it wasn’t a prelude to Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” but the start of “A Concert for Ukraine,” an event hastily organized by the Met to benefit relief efforts in that country and broadcast there and around the world.Banners forming the Ukrainian flag stretched across the travertine exterior of the theater, bathed in blue and yellow floodlights. Another flag hung above the stage; a few in the audience brought their own to unfurl from the balconies. Seated in the guest of honor position in the center of the parterre, Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations, responded to an ovation at the start by raising his arms and making resolute V-for-victory signs.The Ukrainian bass-baritone Vladyslav Buialskyi, a member of the Met’s young artists program, was featured in a performance of Ukraine’s national anthem.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThe Ukrainian flag hung above the Met’s chorus and its orchestra, led by the company’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesIt has been a trying time for the Met, which broke with Anna Netrebko, its reigning diva, over her unwillingness to speak against the war and distance herself from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.But the conflict has also given the company — still bruised by labor battles despite remarkable success staying open during the Omicron wave — a sense of unity and moral purpose. Who would have predicted a few months ago that the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, broadly reviled within the ranks for imposing a long unpaid furlough on many employees during the pandemic, would get applause from some in the orchestra as he declared from the stage that they were “soldiers of music”?His remarks had a martial tinge, saying that the Met’s work could be “weaponized against oppression.” But much of the concert, led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director, was consoling, with favorites like Barber’s Adagio for Strings, here fevered and unsentimental, and “Va, pensiero” from Verdi’s “Nabucco,” with its chorus of exiles longing for their homeland, “so beautiful and lost.” Most powerful was Valentin Silvestrov’s delicate, modest a cappella “Prayer for the Ukraine,” written in 2014 amid the Maidan protests against Russian influence.The soprano Lise Davidsen, the company’s prima donna of the moment, sang Strauss’s “Four Last Songs.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesRichard Strauss’s “Four Last Songs” wasn’t quite on message, with its autumnal vision of accepting death’s imminence. But it provided a vehicle for the Met’s prima donna of the moment: the young soprano Lise Davidsen, currently starring in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos.”At opening night of “Ariadne” two weeks ago, Davidsen kept inundating the theater, seeming intent on proving just how much vibrating sound can flow out of her. It was thrilling, and a little much. At the performance of the opera on Saturday afternoon, she seemed consciously trying to restrain herself — even a bit tentative, fumbling a phrase in her opening aria and only gradually building to a true compromise of power and nuance.On Monday, Davidsen again seemed to be finding her way. Her high notes in the first of the “Four Last Songs,” “Frühling,” had a steely edge rather than soaring freedom; in “September,” she sounded muted in lower registers; and in “Beim Schlafengehen,” her phrasing was stiff. But she began “Im Abendrot” with a soft cloud of tone and proceeded with unforced radiance to an ending that felt light and hopeful.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 7Olga Smirnova. More

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      On a Stage 5,000 Miles Away, He Sings for His Family in Ukraine

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      At the Metropolitan Opera, the bass-baritone Vladyslav Buialskyi has become a symbol of his country’s struggles.Sometimes lately, when he hasn’t been rehearsing Verdi or Tchaikovsky at the Metropolitan Opera, or practicing Italian with a diction coach on Zoom, the bass-baritone Vladyslav Buialskyi takes out his phone and sends a one-word text message: “Mama.”The message is meant for Buialskyi’s mother, who is more than 5,000 miles away in his hometown, Berdyansk, a small port city in Ukraine that has been under siege since the Russian invasion began last month. His mother has been unable to flee because she is caring for his grandmother, who is 88 and has difficulty walking. Anxious about his mother’s safety, Buialskyi sends her messages around the clock, awaiting the replies that confirm she remains safe and reachable.“It’s a huge nightmare,” said Buialskyi, 24, who is enrolled in the Met’s prestigious young artists program. “You wake up each day hoping it’s not real, but it’s still happening.”Since the start of the invasion, Buialskyi has become a symbol at the Met of his country’s struggles. On Monday, when the Met hosts a concert in support of Ukraine, he will be featured in a rendition of its national anthem. He played a similar role last month, at the outset of the invasion, when the chorus and orchestra performed the anthem before a performance of Verdi’s “Don Carlos.” Buialskyi — who was making his debut with the company in a small role that evening — stood center stage, his hand over his heart. Ukrainian news outlets later aired clips of the performance.Buialskyi, center, singing the Ukrainian national anthem with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and chorus on Feb. 28.Jonathan Tichler/Metropolitan Opera, via Associated Press“It was incredibly moving, because you could see how much it meant to him,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “The fact that it was such an emotional experience for him made it even more emotional for me and the other members of the company.”Gelb said he hoped the performance of the anthem on Monday would “show the world and our audiences that we are in solidarity with Ukraine.”Buialskyi said he was uneasy about the attention. But he said he wants to use his platform to help his friends and family back home.“I hope it inspires people not to give up,” he said. “Even though I’m far away, I want to be doing what I can.”Buialskyi grew up in eastern Ukraine, along the Sea of Azov, in a city known for its beaches and its port, a hub for coal and grain exports. The only child of an accountant and a driver, he showed an early interest in singing. As a two-year-old, he mimicked jingles on television and sang Ukrainian folk songs.His mother initially had visions of sending him to a college specializing in automotive studies, worried about the career prospects for an artist. But she soon recognized his gift, and at 17 he began conservatory studies, practicing standards of the repertoire like “Largo al factotum,” from Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville.” His idol was Muslim Magomayev, a pop and classical singer from Azerbaijan.He came to the Met in 2020 as part of its Lindemann Young Artist Development Program. The program’s participants take up tiny parts in Met productions, and this season Buialskyi is playing the role of a Flemish deputy in “Don Carlos” and a captain in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin.”Buialskyi rehearsing “Eugene Onegin” at the Metropolitan Opera.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesOne evening last month, on his way back to his apartment in Washington Heights after finishing up meetings at the Met, he got a call from his mother, who said she was hearing explosions. He checked news sites and soon realized that Moscow had begun invading Ukraine. Berdyansk is near the Russian border and was one of the first cities to be seized by Russian forces. Some citizens tried to resist the invasion by singing the Ukrainian national anthem, according to news reports.“I was just so scared,” Buialskyi said. “People who are not there right now still can’t believe that war is actually happening in our day and age.”His Met colleagues have rallied behind him, asking for updates on his family and donating to a crowdfunding effort he started to support Ukrainian families and soldiers. Russian artists at the Met have also reached out, he said, checking on his family’s safety.Melissa Wegner, the executive director of the Lindemann program, said she had been impressed with Buialskyi’s resolve in the face of trying circumstances.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 5Anna Netrebko. More