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      Review: The Met Opera’s ‘Eurydice’ Tries to Raise the Dead

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      The composer Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s teeming, wearying adaptation of her play is a contemporary vision of the Orpheus myth.What does it sound like when you’re dead?“There are strange high-pitched noises,” a character in Sarah Ruhl’s play “Eurydice” writes to his daughter, who is still in the land of the living, “like a teakettle always boiling over.”Slippery, curdling tones, as if you were hearing sour milk being poured, score our first visit to the underworld in Ruhl and the composer Matthew Aucoin’s teeming, wearying adaptation of the 2003 play, which had its Metropolitan Opera premiere on Tuesday.Ruhl and Aucoin’s ambition, to offer a contemporary vision of the story of Orpheus and his attempt to rescue his wife from oblivion, resonates to the very origins of this art form. Jacopo Peri’s “Euridice,” from 1600, is the earliest surviving opera, and Claudio Monteverdi’s “Orfeo,” written a few years later, is the earliest still regularly performed. Orpheus operas clutter the next four centuries; Luigi Rossi’s gorgeous 1647 version had a rare production at the Juilliard School earlier this month.In Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s opera, the recently dead are overseen by three stones (from left, Chad Shelton, Ronnita Miller and Stacey Tappan).Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt’s not surprising that a tale about the greatest musician in history, a man who could make the very stones weep when he performed, keeps appealing to his descendants. The scenario offers composers a wedding party, a tragic death, an evocation of what lies beyond, an attempt at resurrection, a plangent lament — opportunities to shine, and to place themselves in a grand tradition.Aucoin, 31, doesn’t shy from taking on this lineage. His score is massive and assertive, but agile; it keeps moving, endlessly eclectic, but unified by a muscular grip on the pace, and played with tireless vitality by the Met Orchestra under the company’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.The sheer scale of Aucoin’s music is luxurious, but it never luxuriates for long, always rushing on to the next, different thing — as if, for all its splendor, it was afraid of losing our attention. A pummeling restlessness that evokes John Adams shares the manuscript with softly glistening bells; a riff on elevator-music bossa nova, with batteries of raucous percussion.The dancing at Orpheus and Eurydice’s wedding, a hint of pop music glimpsed through ominous shadows, is a little jewel. Hades, the god of the underworld who tempts her to her destruction, is a screechingly high tenor (here Barry Banks, relishing the extremity).Morley, with Hopkins, is the focus far more than in most operas about the Orpheus myth.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOrpheus (the baritone Joshua Hopkins) has a double (the countertenor Jakub Jozef Orlinski, in his Met debut). Down in hell, the recently dead are overseen by a trio of those weeping stones (Ronnita Miller, Chad Shelton and Stacey Tappan, all vivid). Unlike in most Orpheus operas, the main aria here goes to Eurydice (the soprano Erin Morley), gently bemoaning the pain of loving an artist: “Inside his head there is always something more beautiful.” Near the end, an effusion of Puccinian warmth yields to yet more punchy percussion, then a fanfaring pastiche of the Handelian Baroque before the work’s grimly quiet conclusion. A chorus chants offstage.It’s all a lot; it can feel like too much. Plain-spoken yet poetic, Ruhl’s play is the kind in which a scene is devoted simply to Eurydice’s father creating a room for her out of string — about the most heartbreakingly delicate act you can imagine. But Aucoin gives the sequence an orchestral accompaniment of Wagnerian grandeur, rising to a pitched climax, as if the father had just built Valhalla.And not long before that passage comes a similarly jarring instrumental interlude with the bruising intensity of something out of Berg’s “Wozzeck.” Later, as Orpheus emerges from the underworld — instructed, sigh, not to look back at his wife, who’s following him — a cacophony of drumming and brass makes the moment feel less appropriately dramatic than simply bullied.Opera feeds on too-muchness, of course, and the Orpheus myth is life-or-death stuff, not undeserving of big, fervent music. But given Ruhl’s winsome treatment, the resulting sensation is of Aucoin’s music swamping the story, rather than guiding and being guided by it. You take in the plot, but feel too overwhelmed to feel.A surfeit of scoring was also a problem in Aucoin’s last opera, the turgid “Crossing” (2015), about Walt Whitman during the Civil War. He wrote that libretto; thanks to Ruhl’s lucidity, “Eurydice,” first heard in February 2020 at Los Angeles Opera, is a clearer, stronger work. Her play, written a few years after her father’s death, added a twist, grafting onto the traditional myth a story about a parent and child grieving their distance.Hades (Barry Banks, relishing the part’s screechingly high tenor range) tempts Eurydice to her doom.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis structure puts much more focus than usual on Eurydice, the conjunction of these romantic and familial strands. But at the Met there is a misty blank at the center of the work: Morley, in a role that dominates the music and action, has a voice that is poised and precise — and so slender as to be almost inaudible for much of the opera. (Aucoin’s dense scoring doesn’t help, but she has problems being heard even in transparent moments.) There are artists with small instruments that nevertheless penetrate the vast Met; Morley’s does only in its highest notes.As a result, we never feel sufficiently compelled by her; it’s a reminder that the emotional impact of operatic characters emerges from singers’ vocal presences. It is easy to like this Eurydice, her presence sweet yet unsentimental, but it is hard to care about her as much as we must. Her love for Orpheus, her recognition of her father (the sober bass-baritone Nathan Berg), her fear and her maturation — we know these things are happening, but none of them really come to life.Aucoin and Ruhl have interpolated some unnecessary cuteness into a play already tipping toward twee. At the gates of hell, the stones instruct Orpheus not to sing there “unless you sing in a dead language” — so Hopkins and Orlinski duly start intoning Latin, in a parody of medieval plainchant.The countertenor double feels like the kind of idea that gets embraced at a brainstorming session. It’s true, the sound of Orlinski’s luminous voice making a halo around Hopkins’s robust lower lines can be quite pretty.But it’s a muddle figuring out what the double is doing onstage, particularly in Mary Zimmerman’s production, which gives him tiny angel wings but also has him often appear shirtless and brooding. Is he Orpheus’s trainer? His id? His creative side? A clever musical effect ends up clogging the drama. (Coincidentally, Terence Blanchard and Kasi Lemmons’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the Met’s season, also included a baritone’s high-pitched double, but with clearer dramaturgy: a boy soprano representing the main character’s younger self.)Zimmerman’s blandly fantastical “Eurydice” staging efficiently depicts the action — the elevator down to hell; the shower that makes the dead forget their lives; the looming, pocked walls of the underworld — but lacks magic and sparkle. (The stones, monumentally caked gray beings, are charming; Ana Kuzmanic is the costume designer.) One relief: The text is projected as it’s sung onto Daniel Ostling’s set, letting the audience focus fully on the action.“Eurydice” is most moving as a symbol of a shift in the Met’s artistic priorities. If you had said just a few years ago that the company’s music director would be conducting two recent American operas — this and “Fire” — in two months, no one would have believed you. Pandemic reshuffling made that happen, but Nézet-Séguin said in a recent interview that the past year and a half has left him newly committed to maintaining that pace and personally leading a pair of contemporary works each season.Brett Dean and Matthew Jocelyn’s eerie 2017 adaptation of “Hamlet” arrives in the spring. Premieres by Kevin Puts, Missy Mazzoli, Mason Bates, Jeanine Tesori and others are on the horizon, as are overlooked works of the past few decades, like Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.”What a time to be on this side of the underworld.EurydiceThrough Dec. 16 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      The Emails Behind the Opera ‘Eurydice’

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      For several years, the composer Matthew Aucoin corresponded with Sarah Ruhl about how to adapt her play into the Met Opera’s latest premiere.In 2015, the composer Matthew Aucoin emailed the playwright Sarah Ruhl to ask whether she would be interested in working with him on a new opera inspired by the Orpheus myth.Instead they ended up adapting her 2003 play “Eurydice” — a yearning, fanciful treatment of the Orpheus story in which Eurydice is reunited with her dead father in the underworld. The result premiered at Los Angeles Opera in February 2020, and arrives at the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday, directed by Mary Zimmerman and conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin.Aucoin and Ruhl wrote to each other for several years about turning the poetry of her play into a libretto, building character through music, and understanding the strengths and limitations of opera. They recently looked back at those messages and discussed them in a joint interview. These are edited excerpts from their correspondence and their present-day reflections.SEPT. 29, 2015, 10:45 A.M.Dear Sarah,Hi — my name’s Matt Aucoin. Your plays “Eurydice” and “The Clean House” recently reduced me to a blubbering awe-struck wreck. And then I happened to read an interview with you in which you said, “Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him.” I thought, “I really want to make a great, horrible opera with this person.”Pardon my forwardness — and my ignorance, for not knowing your work until now! — but I’m overwhelmed by your lucid musicality. I sensed instantly that you’re a poet — not in any highfalutin’ sense, but in a more practical one: It’s clear that you wrote (and write) poetry, and that poetry is a native tongue for you.Oh, about “longing looks back”: I have the same gene as every composer EVER, and I need to write an Orpheus opera.Might you be interested in creating one together?SEPT. 29, 2015, 11:59 A.M.Dear Matt,Thank you so much for the kind words about my plays. I also read an article about you and was struck by a phrase someone wrote about you — language becoming music, and music becoming language. I’m interested in that nexus, too. It’s true I used to write and still dabble in poetry, and it’s true I’d love to collaborate on an opera sometime. I listened to a very small clip of your music on your website and found it quite beautiful; I’d love to listen to more.I feel it might be awkward for me to retread the Orpheus territory from his point of view having already written “Eurydice.” My gut is that I’m more interested in adapting “Eurydice” into a musical piece. But it’s silly for me to make any pronouncements in an email without first talking. So let’s meet and talk.MATTHEW AUCOIN I had a separate Orpheus opera in mind that was entirely different, that was in a way an expansion of my piece “The Orphic Moment” — much darker, much more twisted. It took a meeting or two for me to be like, you know what, adapting “Eurydice” makes more sense. I tried to inject a bunch of my ideas into “Eurydice”; then I felt that the skeleton of the play was so strong that it resisted the foreign energy. So I very quickly decided that we could create a more unified world if we stuck to the play.SARAH RUHL I don’t remember it taking you very long to say, “Yes, let’s do that.” Always you were trying to make Orpheus more complex, since that was your way in. But Eurydice was so present for me as a character, and it wouldn’t make sense to retread the material from his perspective.AUCOIN I think the core of this piece, for me, is: What would you say to someone you lost if you could meet them again in this other space?RUHL It’s myth as container, as vehicle — rather than myth for myth’s sake.OCT. 15, 2015Some thoughts …Opera as magical realism: I think we should indulge our every magical-realist impulse in this piece. I tend to think opera works better when its creators embrace this quality, since it’s probably inescapable: If opera is real, its realism is magical. (It just doesn’t work when people try to house train it or to convince the audience that opera is no weirder or scarier or more surreal than, like, a sitcom.)— MattAUCOIN In opera, all speech is dream speech. That’s a law of nature on Planet Opera. Simply because everything is sung, what’s communicated will tend to have a dreamlike or surreal quality, no matter how much you might want it to sound like “Seinfeld.”RUHL I love what you say about dream speech. I’ve been wanting to write a piece about the idea that art is a dream we have together. When we’re sleeping, we dream alone at night. Art becomes an incredible vehicle in which we can have the same dream at the same time, while awake.APRIL 29, 2016It occurs to me that Orpheus has no parents; his lineage is disputed and totally confusing. I’m sensing that one difference between O + E is that even though Eurydice’s father is dead, she was deeply close to him, whereas Orpheus was always an orphan.We might see him first happily singing to himself, and then expressing his pre-wedding anxieties: He’s torn between his love for Eurydice and his overwhelming need to make music; he’s not sure where he came from; he’s never felt 100 percent human; and he’s unsure if he can give and accept the love he feels so powerfully for Eurydice.— MattAUCOIN I think there are two implied love triangles in the “Eurydice” dramaturgy. Eurydice is torn between her connection to her father and her relationship to Orpheus. And Orpheus is also kind of torn between Eurydice and music itself. I think that’s where the idea of the double [adding a countertenor’s halo of sound to the baritone role] came from.JULY 19, 2016, 7:43 P.M.I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Hades. The main thing, from my perspective, is that he’s a sociopath. He has a total lack of interiority and yet he is alone. Sounds like hell to me. So he feeds off Orpheus and Eurydice, both of whom have (if anything) too much interior life; they’re too likely to withdraw into their own worlds, and he knows that. He’s a parasite who sinks his teeth into Eurydice’s intellect and Orpheus’s music.I think it’s important that Hades’s lines are simple and direct — and emotionally wrong, awkward and unnatural, but in a way that’s unsettling rather than comical. I think the repetitions of “interesting” risk being a little too funny, especially when they’re sung.— MattJULY 19, 2016, 8:51 P.M.Do we care that we somewhat lose his absurdity (“It was delivered to my elegant high-rise apartment by mistake”)? The question about humor is maybe a larger question tonally about the piece. I use humor in the play to deflect and deepen the tragedy — it could be that doesn’t play the same in an operatic piece. I don’t want to totally excise the humor, but in the nasty man it just might not be singable.— SarahJULY 20, 2016, 4:20 P.M.I definitely want to keep the humor!!! I just think Hades needs to be dangerous — dangerously deadpan, at first. Which could be funny in its own right. For me the absurdity emerges when we see his gigantic empty loft. But at first, I’d love him to be eerily nondescript.— MattRUHL I’m so happy that Matt has been able to rhythmicize lines and retain their humor.AUCOIN The challenge with Hades is that it lies at an extreme of the male voice, but he should also sound quite deadpan. The music is absurdly high, but I wanted to create the sense that for him it’s completely normal.RUHL I love this idea that Hades is impersonating a person. And I think it’s wonderful how you figured that out in the singing of it.AUCOIN It’s a matter of rhythm and range. Hades’s music is the exact opposite of proper, correct text setting. When he says “How interesting,” he sings the word “how” on a high D flat for an entire bar. And in certain sections, every syllable is accented in this horrible way. It’s not human.JAN. 31, 2017I think what we are going for is condensing stage time, while distending mythic time … if that makes ANY sense!— SarahRUHL It takes longer to sing than to speak, so everything has to be shorter. But you want the mythic scope of it to still feel big. It’s a bit of a puzzle. How much can you feel like time is moving slowly in the underworld without actually subjecting the audience to a kind of slowness that they don’t want to be subjected to?AUG. 8, 2019FATHEREurydice is gone.This is a second death for me.I wonder about cutting “This is a second death for me.” It’s a little self-pitying. Might be more moving just: “Eurydice is gone. How do you remember to forget?”— SarahAUCOIN This is part of a longer scene where Eurydice’s father remembers the directions to his childhood home. In an early version of the score, he sang those directions very slowly, and it felt totally wrong — like moving through molasses. Sarah, Mary and I all independently came to the conclusion that he had to speak these lines, not sing them. The words carry so much emotion that, unusually for opera, song proved superfluous.RUHL I had the experience in writing the play as well. I had written a soliloquy that I would describe as an operatic soliloquy; it was poeticized and emotional. And it felt all wrong for who he was as a person.AUCOIN I think the shape of the drama is so devastating.RUHL The ending is very sad. I hope it gives people catharsis after this two years of not being able to grieve with others. I’ve watched two funerals on Zoom. It’s hard for me to have a good cry on Zoom; I’m not with other people, and I feel self-conscious with people watching me cry on video. It’s not that I’m inviting people to come and cry at “Eurydice” — but in a way, I am. More

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      Yannick Nézet-Séguin Is Now New York’s Conductor

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      After facing anger during a prolonged labor dispute, the Met Opera’s music director has returned to the podium, emphasizing new work.The set for “Porgy and Bess” had been pushed to the back of the Metropolitan Opera’s stage on a recent Wednesday morning, and in front, lines of chairs and music stands had been set up. The company’s orchestra and chorus were coming together for the first time with the cast of “Eurydice” — a recent adaptation of Sarah Ruhl’s wistful play, with music by Matthew Aucoin — to run through the score in what’s known as a sitzprobe.Inside the vast and almost empty Met auditorium, Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, typed on his laptop near the back of the theater. Ruhl was in the house; Mary Zimmerman, the director of the production, which opens on Tuesday, watched, too. Aucoin dashed around, listening for balances.At breaks, he rushed down the aisle to the pit to confer with the leader of any sitzprobe: the conductor. Here that was Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, who offered the ensemble bits of counsel, sometimes asking for delicacy and transparency (“more French in approach”), sometimes for lyricism (“violas and cellos, you could sing a bit more”).The orchestra flew through one breathless passage in the second act, making a gallop to the final burst. “Ecstatic and chaotic,” said Nézet-Séguin, 46, smiling from the podium. “Is this something we can do?”With the New York Philharmonic’s director a newly declared lame duck, Nézet-Séguin is entering an era as the city’s presiding conductor, the one whose artistic achievements blur into civic stature.Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesChaos has lately dominated: The pandemic shut the Met for a year and a half. During much of that period, its unionized employees — including orchestra musicians and choristers — were furloughed without pay as a stalemate over compensation cuts dragged on.But the response to the company’s return has been ecstatic. And at the center of it all — short and muscular, with close-cropped, bleached-blond hair and a taste for rehearsal athleisure — is Nézet-Séguin. Omnipresent and energetic, he has been one of the central figures in New York’s cultural re-emergence, and certainly the city’s most significant and visible classical musician at a transformative moment.Over Labor Day weekend, shortly after the Met reached a deal with its unions, he conducted Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony — the first notes the company had played together since March 2020 — in front of thousands outside the opera house. Audiences soon returned inside the theater to hear him lead a nationally telecast performance of Verdi’s Requiem, for the 20th anniversary of Sept. 11.Later that month, he began the Met’s season in earnest at the podium for Terence Blanchard and Kasi Lemmons’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” from 2019, the company’s first work by a Black composer. Nine days after that, he reopened Carnegie Hall with the Philadelphia Orchestra, of which he is also the music director, in the first of an astonishing nine dates for him at Carnegie this season. With the New York Philharmonic’s director, Jaap van Zweden, a newly declared lame duck, Nézet-Séguin is entering an era as the city’s presiding conductor, the one whose artistic achievements blur into civic stature.At the Met, he works from the ground-floor office once occupied by James Levine, who ruled the company for decades before being brought down by illness and allegations of sexual misconduct. Those troubles led Nézet-Séguin to ascend to the music directorship in 2018, two years ahead of schedule. Levine — who rarely led contemporary operas, let alone two in two months — died in March.When the Met’s unionized workforce was furloughed during the pandemic, some employees were angry that Nézet-Séguin was not earlier and louder in support.Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesThere has been a major change to the office. At the start of a recent interview there, Nézet-Séguin mimed tearing down a set of bookshelves that had blocked the view of Damrosch Park.“It feels symbolic,” he said. “It is to me. It’s about windows open and the fresh air of our repertoire and approach.”Despite the bright new light and the celebratory spirit of the past month and a half, the pandemic has been a dark period for Nézet-Séguin. During labor struggles, a music director’s position — closely connected to the players, but at the same time part of the administration — is intensely uncomfortable. There were musicians angry that Nézet-Séguin, who did not comment publicly on the negotiations until March, just after the orchestra agreed to begin accepting partial pay, was not earlier and louder in support.“It is a position that is unenviable,” Gelb said in an interview. “And one I hated to see him in. I’m used to catching fire during these disputes, and I hated to see him get it, too. I tried to keep him out of it; it was unfair for him to be in the middle of it. But I was not very good at protecting him.”The experience was unsettling for an artist whose rise to the top of his profession has been swift and sunny, and who is unused to hostility from musicians. (They tend to venerate him: “He’s the greatest conductor I’ve ever worked with,” said Harold Robinson, who is retiring as the Philadelphia Orchestra’s principal bass after 26 years.)“I didn’t know what to expect coming in,” Nézet-Séguin said of the orchestra’s first rehearsal after the furlough ended. “I said very little at the beginning. I said: ‘We lost many people. We lost members of our company. We lost people in our families, our friends.’ And the first notes were Verdi, actually. We just played it through. Let’s put all our emotions in this. And it helped.”Nézet-Séguin leading a rehearsal for the Met premiere of Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice.”Jonathan Tichler/Metropolitan OperaDavid Krauss, the Met’s principal trumpet, said in an interview: “There was some tension in the first half of the first rehearsal back. And by the second half, it was back to business as usual.”Not exactly business as usual. The pandemic, and the calls for racial justice that flared last year, fast-tracked the Met premiere of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” giving it pride of place on one of the highest-profile opening nights in the company’s history. The piece’s success — reviews were positive, four of the eight performances sold out, and the crowds were markedly more diverse than usual — has convinced Nézet-Séguin that works representing the experience of groups often marginalized in the classical canon, including Latinos and L.G.B.T. people, should be fixtures going forward.“This is showing us what we need to do,” he said, “and confirming what I’ve been wanting from Day 1.”But one question is whether, without the burst of publicity that accompanied the Met’s belated presentation of a Black composer’s work, new operas can hold their own at the box office. (To be fair, even classics have struggled to sell in recent years.) Test cases will come: While Nézet-Séguin has his eye on little-done corners of the repertory — he mentioned Gluck, Weber’s “Der Freischütz,” Korngold’s “Die Tote Stadt” and Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda” — he has decided that if the choice is between a rarity’s revival and a contemporary piece, the latter will get priority.“It should be at the expense, maybe, of some stuff I had wanted to bring back,” he said.“I had a lot of new pieces planned in the future,” Nézet-Séguin said. “But I was maybe thinking I would do one a year, or skipping some years. And now, no.”Jingyu Lin for The New York Times“We are reassessing all the operas I am going to be conducting,” he added, “because I don’t want this to be the exception, to do ‘Eurydice’ and ‘Fire.’ For me, this should be the norm. I had a lot of new pieces planned in the future. But I was maybe thinking I would do one a year, or skipping some years. And now, no.”Aucoin, the composer of “Eurydice,” said that Nézet-Séguin is a collaborator “to a degree that’s unusual for conductors.”“In the chaotic dance scene in Act I,” he added, “there’s this techno-esque line in the background, and my idea was that it should be only in the very bottom octave, the piano’s left hand and contrabassoons. I wanted it to be a pop song heard from another room. But it wasn’t registering. And he suggested we throw some bass trombone in there, and he was right.”On an early November afternoon in Philadelphia, Nézet-Séguin and his orchestra there presented an installment in the cycle of Beethoven symphonies they are also playing at Carnegie this season.Beethoven’s Second and Eighth framed “Sermon,” a suite of arias and spoken texts about race and struggle organized and performed by the young bass-baritone Davóne Tines. At its center is the calm, luminous sorrow of “Vigil,” written by Igee Dieudonné and Tines in memory of Breonna Taylor.New music can often feel randomly scattered onto an orchestral concert, added merely to give a progressive sheen to fundamentally conservative programming. But the mournful “Sermon” felt at home among the symphonies, both complementing and in tension with them, particularly as they were played by the Philadelphians with such graceful, sweet-not-saccharine polish and élan. Old and new, life and death, coexisted and enhanced one another.“That was the idea,” Nézet-Séguin said of Tines’s piece. “Giving him the space to tell us his story. I’m not a private, private person. I like to speak with you about my art; I like to go on television and share who I am as a person. But it’s not about me becoming more famous so that people give me attention. I’m not shying away from attention, but I want it to be helping the collective. I want to be the person who can help shed light on others.”“I’m not shying away from attention, but I want it to be helping the collective. I want to be the person who can help shed light on others.”Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesAt the end of February, Nézet-Séguin will achieve another repertory milestone at the Met, bringing Verdi’s “Don Carlos” there for the first time in its original French — rather than in the more common Italian, as “Don Carlo.” A few weeks later, as part of what is intended to be an ongoing collaboration between his two American institutions — he also leads the Orchestre Métropolitain of Montreal — he and the Philadelphia Orchestra will give the world premiere of Kevin Puts and Greg Pierce’s opera adaptation of “The Hours” in concert, before it is staged at the Met in a future season.The rebuilding of the Met is far from over. Eleven of its orchestra’s 96 regular full-time members retired or left their jobs during the pandemic. Should all be replaced? In what order? That is for Nézet-Séguin, in large part, to decide. And the company’s financial model, which keeps forcing the need for cuts and brinkmanship with the unions, is no closer to being permanently solved.“I can’t say we’re completely behind what happened last year,” Nézet-Séguin said. “We’re not. But at least these moments — this Verdi, this ‘Fire’ and now this ‘Eurydice’ — are helping everyone focus on what matters to us and how we can function together. And making a difference. It sounds cliché, but trying to make a difference in the world.” More

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      If Remote Work Empties Downtowns, Can Theaters Fill Their Seats?

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      Since the pandemic, San Francisco has embraced work-from-home policies. Now venues and concert halls are wondering if weeknight audiences are a thing of the past.SAN FRANCISCO — As live performance finally returns after the pandemic shutdown, cultural institutions are confronting a long list of unknowns.Will audiences feel safe returning to crowded theaters? Have people grown so accustomed to watching screens in their living rooms that they will not get back into the habit of attending live events? And how will the advent of work-from-home policies, which have emptied blocks of downtowns and business districts, affect weekday attendance at theaters and concert halls?Nowhere is that last question more urgent than here in San Francisco, where tech companies have led the way in embracing work-from-home policies and flexible schedules more than in almost any other city in the nation. Going to a weeknight show is no longer a matter of leaving the office and swinging by the War Memorial Opera House or the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall.“As people work from home, it is going to change our demographics,” said Matthew Shilvock, the general director of the San Francisco Opera. “It’s something that could be a threat. We’re all trying to wait and see whether there’s a surge of interest in live activity again or is there a continuation of just being at home, not coming into the city from the suburbs.”Arts groups are trying to gauge what the embrace of more flexible work-from-home policies will mean for their ability to draw audiences in a city whose housing crunch has already driven many people to settle far from downtown. Close to 70 percent of the audiences at the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Symphony — two nationally recognized symbols of this city’s vibrant network of performing arts institutions — live outside the city, according to data collected by the two organizations.“As people work from home, it is going to change our demographics,” said Matthew Shilvock, the general director of the San Francisco Opera, which presented a new production of Beethoven’s “Fidelio” this fall.Cory Weaver/San Francisco OperaSome economists see the trend of remote work persisting. “It’s likely we are going to have more people working from home than other places,” said Ted Egan, the chief economist for the city and county of San Francisco. “The tech industry seems to be the most generous for work-from-home policy, and employees are expecting that.”Twitter announced in the early months of the pandemic that it would allow almost all of its 5,200 employees, most based at its San Francisco office, to work at home permanently. At Salesforce, which has 9,000 employees, employees will only have to come to work one to three days a week; many will be allowed to work at home full time. Dropbox, which has its headquarters in San Francisco, also has adopted a permanent work-from-home policy. Facebook and Google, both of which have a significant presence in San Francisco, have implemented work-from-home policies.Egan said that the trend might pose more of a problem for the city’s bars and restaurants than for its performing arts institutions. “My suspicion is that performing arts are going to be less sensitive to working from home than other sectors,” he said. “It’s not the kind of purchase you do after work on a whim, like going for happy hour.”Attendance has been spotty as this city’s art scene climbs back. Just 50 percent of the seats were filled the other night for a performance of “The Displaced,” a “gentrification horror play” by Isaac Gómez, at the Crowded Fire Theater. “We had sold-out houses on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and much lower participation on Wednesday and Thursday night,” said Mina Morita, the artistic director. “It’s hard to tell if this is the new normal.”There were some patches of empty seats across the Davies Symphony Hall the other night, as the San Francisco Symphony presented the United States premiere of a violin concerto by Bryce Dessner, even though it was the third week of the long-delayed (and long-anticipated) first season for Esa-Pekka Salonen, its new music director. The concerto, with an energetic performance by Pekka Kuusisto, the Finnish violinist, was greeted by repeated standing ovations and glowing reviews.Attendance in October was down 11 percent compared to before the pandemic, but the symphony said advance sales were strong, suggesting normal audiences might return in spring.Twitter announced in the early months of the pandemic that it would allow almost all of its 5,200 employees, most based at its San Francisco office, to work at home permanently.Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency, via Getty Images“The audience is back,” Salonen said in an interview before he took the stage. “Not what it was, but they are back. Some nights have been a little thinner than others. By and large, the energy is good. Our worst fears have been dispelled.”The San Francisco Opera also began its new season with a splashy new hire: a new music director, Eun Sun Kim, who in August became the first woman to hold the position at one of the nation’s largest opera companies. She conducted a new production of Beethoven’s “Fidelio” this fall that incorporated chain-link fences and flickering video screens to update the story of the liberation of a political prisoner.Even so, the opera, which can seat 2,928 with Covid restrictions, sold an average of 1,912 tickets per show for “Fidelio,” its second production of this new season. That’s better than its second production in 2019, Britten’s “Billy Budd,” a searing work that does not always attract big crowds. But it drew fewer people than the opera’s second production in 2018, “Roberto Devereux,” which sold an average of 2,116 tickets a performance.“The urgency to be bold, to be innovative, to be compelling to get audiences to come back or give us a try for the first time has never been stronger,” Shilvock said. “There will be a hunger for things that have an energy, that have a vitality, that give a reason to come into the city.”Even before the pandemic, cultural organizations were dealing with challenges that threatened to discourage patrons, including a stressed public transportation system, traffic, parking constraints and the highly visible epidemic of homelessness. And many institutions were struggling to make inroads in attracting audiences and patrons from the tech industry, which now accounts for 19 percent of the private work force.Now, facing an uncertain future as they try to emerge from the pandemic shutdown, arts organizations are embracing a variety of tactics to fill seats..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Hope Mohr, the co-director of Hope Mohr Dance, said that her organization was spending $1,400 per night to livestream performances, so audiences could choose between coming into San Francisco or watching from their living rooms.“A hybrid experience — I have to do that from now on,” she said. “My company usually performs in San Francisco, and I have audience coming from all over the bay.”These calculations are taking place in an atmosphere of uncertainty and anxiety. It is not clear how much these early attendance figures represent a realignment, or are evidence of audiences temporarily trying to balance their hunger for live performances against concerns about the spread of the Delta variant — even in a city where 75 percent of the eligible population is fully vaccinated. Lower attendance figures have been reported by performing halls across the country.“The audience is back,” Esa-Pekka Salonen, the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, said. “Not what it was, but they are back. Some nights have been a little thinner than others. By and large the energy is good. Our worst fears have been dispelled.”Christopher M. Howard Opening nights have found performers relieved to be playing to real crowds again and audiences delighted to be back. “The convenience of at-home entertainment has made it not as desirable for some folks, ” said Ralph Remington, the director of cultural affairs for the San Francisco Arts Commission. “But that being said, even though the density of the numbers isn’t as great as it was prepandemic, the audiences that are coming are really enthusiastic.”Advance sales for “The Nutcracker” at the San Francisco Ballet, with one-third of the tickets going for just $19 a seat to help bring in new patrons (the average ticket price is $136), have been moving briskly.Danielle St. Germain-Gordon, the ballet’s interim executive director, said she hoped that working from home had made people eager to break out of their increasing isolation. “I would do anything to get out,” she said. “I hope that’s a good sign for our season.”At the height of the pandemic, about 85 percent of San Francisco-based employees worked from home; that number is about 50 percent now, said Enrico Moretti, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.“I think it’s possible that people are not going to commute from Walnut Creek at night to go to downtown San Francisco for the opera to the same extent,” he said. “But I don’t expect those office buildings will sit empty. There will be other people moving into them.”The Magic Theater, a 145-seat-theater in Fort Mason, just beyond Fisherman’s Wharf, has been experimenting with different kinds of programming, such as a poetry reading, and pay-what-you-can seats to lure patrons who live — and now work — far from the theater.“This is going to be an interesting year for everyone,” said Sean San José, its artistic director. “Are people going to come back? The zeitgeist is telling us something. Maybe we should listen. This ain’t a pause. We have got to rethink it.” More

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      Juilliard Stages an Orpheus Rarity From Opera’s Early Days

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      For over four centuries, the Orpheus myth has inspired opera composers. One was Luigi Rossi, whose 1647 retelling deserves more attention.What became known as opera originated in Florence, Italy, during late-16th-century equivalents of college dorm bull sessions.At the time, that cultured city was a hotbed of artistic experimentation. A group of composers, poets, singers, intellectuals and royal patrons formed a club for discussions that eventually led to an idea: to create a new hybrid of music and theater in the manner of Greek tragedies, which they believed had been written as sung-through dramas.There was striking consensus about the ideal subject for the first attempts at this art form: the mythological Orpheus whose songs had the power to entrance nature, soothe souls and even conquer death. When his wife, Eurydice, dies from a snake bite right after their wedding, the grief-stricken, resolute Orpheus descends to the underworld, charms Pluto himself, and receives conditional permission to lead Eurydice back to earth and back to life.The earliest surviving opera, by the composer and singer Jacopo Peri, titled “Euridice” after its heroine, was introduced in Florence in 1600. Two years later, Peri’s ruthlessly ambitious rival Giulio Caccini presented his own “Euridice,” purposely employing the same libretto (by Ottavio Rinuccini) and rushing his piece into publication before Peri had a chance. In 1607, Claudio Monteverdi, then working for the Duke of Mantua, presented the first truly great surviving opera, “L’Orfeo.”In the four centuries since that milestone, Orpheus has continued to claim the imaginations of composers. The latest is Matthew Aucoin, whose “Eurydice,” based on the 2003 play by Sarah Ruhl, premiered at the Los Angeles Opera early last year and opens at the Metropolitan Opera on Nov. 23.There are at least 75 known operas offering various takes on the Orpheus myth: later in the 17th century, from Matthew Locke in England, Charpentier and Lully in France and Reinhard Keiser in Germany, then from Telemann, Benda and Haydn in the 1700s. When Gluck decided, in the 1760s, that the time had come to reform and elevate the opera genre, which had become too flashy, what did he come up with? “Orfeo ed Euridice,” naturally.From left, Kevin Ray, Raehann Bryce-Davis and Stacey Tappan in Matthew Aucoin’s “Eurydice” at the Los Angeles Opera. The work opens at the Metropolitan Opera on Nov. 23.Emily Berl for The New York TimesInterest in the myth fell off somewhat during the 19th century. In fact, the great Orpheus work from that era was Offenbach’s delightfully witty and irreverent operetta “Orpheus in the Underworld,” which pokes fun at the obsession. But the subject came roaring back in the 20th century, especially the later decades, with major works by, among others, Hans Werner Henze, Harrison Birtwistle and Philip Glass. It’s extended to Broadway as well, in the musical “Hadestown.”Only a handful of Orpheus operas have entered the active repertoire. Among the overlooked works is Luigi Rossi’s “L’Orfeo,” which premiered in Paris in 1647, and is now receiving a splendidly performed and inventively staged production by Juilliard Opera and Juilliard415, the school’s early music ensemble, at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater.Rossi, who had enjoyed a thriving, if tumultuous career in Rome, relocated to Paris, where, under the sponsorship of Cardinal Mazarin, he was tasked with introducing French audiences to Italian opera. The result was his near-epic take on the Orpheus myth, presented in a reportedly spectacular production.In line with common practices of Baroque opera, the conductor Avi Stein, who drew spirited and stylish playing from a 16-piece ensemble, consulting with the director, Mary Birnbaum, trimmed and adapted Rossi’s score for the Juilliard production. The work’s more than two dozen characters were reduced here to a cast of 14 excellent young singers, some taking two or three roles. The original prologue and epilogue, allegorical paeans to the young Louis XIV, were replaced with shorter vocal pieces from Rossi’s catalog. With the score cut by about a third, the running time offered some two hours of engaging, often splendidly beautiful music.In this version of the tale, Orfeo and Euridice become pawns in the hands of capricious godly and allegorical characters: Venus and Amore, Pluto and Proserpina and personifications of Jealousy and Suspicion. There is also Augure, a diviner who can sense the future, and from the start the omens look forbidding for the newlyweds.Richard Pittsinger, left, as Orfeo and Roset as Euridice in the Juilliard production.Rosalie O’ConnorStill, their essential love, despite threats from outside and their own doubts and insecurities, come through beautifully thanks to the winning singing and youthful bearing of the tenor Richard Pittsinger as Orfeo and the soprano Julie Roset as Euridice. In this telling, Orfeo has a rival, Aristeo (the charismatic mezzo-soprano Xenia Puskarz Thomas), who has been struck by Cupid and desperately fallen in love with Euridice. In a bold interpretive touch, this production presents Aristeo as a woman. That tweak, as executed here, was no glib nod to sexual politics, but an intriguing reading of the erotic confusions that swirl within the characters and throughout this entire opera.Although the story unfolds in stretches of melodically enhanced recitative, Rossi’s score is unusually rich with vocal duets, trios and ensembles, arias and choruses with catchy tunes, orchestral ritornellos and dances galore (charming choreographic gestures by Jeffrey Page). Why is this wonderful opera not presented more often?Aucoin’s “Eurydice” — like Ruhl’s play, which she adapted into the opera’s libretto — tells the myth from the woman’s perspective. And in this fantastical modern-day version, there are tensions between the couple from the start. Eurydice loves Orpheus but gets impatient with his self-absorbed fixation on music. He doesn’t share her passion for books and words. In an intriguing nod to mythology, Orpheus is presented as two characters: an everyday guy and a spirit double who appears when the young man’s questing nature comes to the fore.When Eurydice dies, she embarks on a soul-searching journey in the underworld. That might seem like a leap from the original myth. But it is actually a crisis that many Orpheus adaptations have plumbed — especially, to my surprise and delight, the one by Rossi.L’OrfeoThrough Sunday at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; juilliard.edu. More

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      Review: In Her Met Debut, a Conductor Leads a Fresh ‘La Bohème’

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      Eun Sun Kim, who recently made history at the San Francisco Opera, had an auspicious arrival at the podium in New York for Puccini’s classic.Giacomo Puccini’s beloved “La Bohème,” with its lyrically rich and deftly written score, has the makings of a surefire opera. Yet the music is full of traps for a conductor, especially when it comes to pacing and rhythmic freedom; give singers too much expressive leeway, and things can easily turn flaccid.Even in a good performance of this well-known staple, it’s hard for a conductor’s work to stand out against the singers’ voices, which usually claim our attention. But on Tuesday, when “Bohème” returned to the Metropolitan Opera — in Franco Zeffirelli’s enduringly popular production, and with an appealing cast in place — the star of the evening was the conductor, Eun Sun Kim, in her Met debut.Last month, Kim made history at the San Francisco Opera as the first woman music director of a major American opera company. And at the Met this week, she did the job with musicianly care, assured technical command, subtlety and imagination. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard Puccini’s score so freshly played.On one level, Kim’s achievement was all in the details. From the opening measures of Act I, set in a cramped garret shared by the story’s struggling artists, Kim took a vibrant tempo held just enough in check to allow for the crisp execution of dotted-note rhythmic figures, sputtering riffs and emphatic syncopations. In the playing she drew from the orchestra, which sounded alert and at its best, she teased out distinct thematic threads while letting skittish, colorful flourishes work their magic and then waft away.Tuesday evening’s Rodolfo, the tenor Charles Castronovo, who sang with beefy sound and a touch of impetuousness, clearly likes to take ample time to deliver ardent melodic phrases. Kim gave him breathing room. Yet she showed that even while following a singer sensitively, a conductor can subtly nudge him along so a line does not go slack.She was equally alert to the characteristics of Anita Hartig, as Mimì, a soprano whose bright voice, even when high-lying phrases had metallic glint, came across with tremulous, affecting vulnerability. Hartig brought a conversational flow to the aria “Mi chiamano Mimì,” stretching one phrase to express a bashful, intimate feeling and slightly rushing another to convey nervousness. Kim kept the orchestra with her every moment, and the entire scene around that aria — the awkward, nervous exchanges between Rodolfo and Mimì as they first meet — had shape and drive.Kim’s way of conveying the structural elements of the score — which is not just a series of dramatic scenes but, in Puccini’s hand, a composition with an overall form — was just as important as her attention to details. Her work in Act III, the emotional core of the opera, was exceptionally fine. Mimì seeks out Rodolfo’s friend Marcello (the robust-voiced baritone Artur Rucinski) at the tavern where he and Musetta (Federica Lombardi, a vivacious soprano) are now living, to share her despair over Rodolfo’s constant jealousy. The singers were intense in their back and forth, but the long, arching melodic lines that hold this scene together are in the orchestra, and Kim brought them out with tautness and full-bodied sound.The whole cast was strong, including the firm yet warm bass-baritone Nicholas Brownlee as Colline and the youthful, spirited baritone Alexander Birch Elliott as Schaunard. There are 14 more performances of “Bohème” this season. The great news is that for all but four of them, Kim will be in the pit.La BohèmeThrough May 27 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Marian Anderson: A Voice of Authenticity and Justice

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      A new box set explores the singer whose Lincoln Memorial concert was a 20th-century civil rights milestone.The night before Marian Anderson’s 1939 concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, she called Sol Hurok, her manager, to ask if she really had to go through with it.Earlier that year, Howard University had tried to book Anderson for a recital at Washington’s only large concert stage, Constitution Hall, which was run by the Daughters of the American Revolution. The organization, which maintained a whites-only policy for performing artists, refused. A public pressure campaign to get the group to reverse its decision came to nothing, but Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her membership in protest, and through the efforts of Harold L. Ickes, the secretary of the interior, the Lincoln Memorial was approved as a new location.But the controversy surrounding the event swirled in newspapers around the country. No longer just a concert, it had become a civil rights battlefield. The pressure on Anderson was overwhelming.The Daughters’s discriminatory actions had stung Anderson deeply, taking her back to formative events in her life — especially when, at 17, she went to the Philadelphia Musical Academy seeking admission and a snippy secretary would not even hand her an application.But that was then. She had spent five rewarding years in Europe in the early 1930s, with more welcoming audiences and institutions. She found mentors, coaches and supporters; she began performing to acclaim. During one seven-month tour of Scandinavia, she gave more than 100 concerts.When the Daughters of the American Revolution would not allow her to sing at Constitution Hall, Anderson received permission to give a concert on the steps on the Lincoln Memorial in 1939.Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesReturning to the United States in 1935, she began performing extensively, doing circuits of colleges and concert halls where she was welcomed, starting with a crucial recital at Town Hall in New York. The New York Times critic Howard Taubman wrote, “Let it be said at the outset: Marian Anderson has returned to her native land one of the great singers of our time.” She made recordings, and she became wealthy: In 1938 her income was $238,000 (roughly $4.5 million today), though she was still a second-class citizen in her own country who on tour often ate dinner alone in her hotel room to avoid segregated restaurants.Anderson feared that her Lincoln Memorial concert would come to define her. And to a large extent, it did. But the full breadth of her artistry is newly evident with the release, from Sony Classical, of a new commemorative book, offering her complete RCA Victor recordings from 1924 to 1966 on 15 discs — timed to the 125th anniversary, coming in February, of Anderson’s birth in Philadelphia.The recordings are magnificent. There is her 1950 account of Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder” with the San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Pierre Monteux. Her splendid voice — a true (and rare) example of a contralto, the lowest-range female voice — is ideal for this music, Mahler’s settings of five piercing ruminations on the death of children.Deep, mellow tones provide the foundation of her voice. Even when she shapes midrange lyrical phrases and soars up to high passages with soprano-like radiance, the sound still somehow emanates from those awesome low tones. Her slightly tremulous vibrato can sometimes seem like shakiness. Yet the wavering more often exudes richness and warmth, and a touch of vulnerability. The feelings and emotions she draws from the words are overwhelming.Deep, mellow tones provided the foundation for Anderson, a true (and rare) example of a contralto, the lowest-range female voice.Afro American Newspapers/Gado, via Getty ImagesArturo Toscanini heard Anderson in 1935 in Salzburg, Austria — when, excluded from official Salzburg Festival performances because of her race, she performed in a hotel ballroom. Afterward the imposing maestro approached her and said, famously, that what he had just heard “one is privileged to hear once in a hundred years,” responding to the singular shadings and textures of her deep-set sound, and the extraordinarily nuances she could create through her wide range. (Naturally, Hurok seized Toscanini’s words and thereafter billed Anderson as the “voice of the century.”)Those qualities run through a recording of Schubert lieder, paired here with a sternly beautiful account of Schumann’s cycle “Frauenliebe und -leben,” mostly recorded in 1950 and ’51 and accompanied sensitively by the German pianist Franz Rupp, Anderson’s recital partner from the ’40s on. In Schubert’s “Ständchen” the long melodic arcs flow with wistful grace while never sacrificing tautness. In “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” Anderson truly becomes the young woman in the Goethe text, both terrified and thrilled at the desire a handsome stranger has aroused in her. There is a haunting, internal quality to Anderson’s performance, suggesting an innocent girl brooding over her confusions.There are many finely detailed lieder singers, though. What finally made Anderson so exceptional is a quality hard to define but impossible to miss: the authenticity that permeates her singing. In this regard, the most revealing recording in the new set may be a program featuring arias by Bach and Handel, mostly dating from the mid-1940s. (Robert Shaw and Charles O’Connell are the conductors).The pianist Franz Rupp, Anderson’s frequent collaborator, accompanying her in concert.Bettmann/Getty ImagesIn “Erbarme dich, mein Gott,” a sublimely sad aria from Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” Anderson’s singing is direct and honest, steady and true, at once calm and intense. Her performance of “He was despised” from Handel’s “Messiah” comes across as a fully lived-in experience. Indeed, when she sang this solo in a “Messiah” performance in Philadelphia in 1916, when she was still in her teens, a critic wrote that Anderson “felt with her soft, strong voice the sorrows of God.”Anderson grappled with hardships in her youth, especially the death of her father following a severe head injury while selling ice and coal at a train terminal, leaving a wife and three daughters. Just 12 at the time, Anderson, the eldest, was forced to delay high school for several years and take odd jobs. Her beloved grandfather — who was born enslaved in Virginia and, once freed, became a farm laborer and the first Anderson to settle in Philadelphia — died the following year.These events stayed with her as she learned to confront every challenge with affecting dignity. Was this the source of what I’m calling authenticity? It’s hard to say. But it surely accounts for her identification with spirituals — repertory she sang on every recital she gave, and works she invested with the same care she brought to German art songs. Several of the recordings in the new set offer her in affecting performances of spirituals. There are also collections of Christmas carols; an album titled “Songs of Eventide”; and more.Anderson’s way of confronting racism had been to offer herself as a model of Black excellence, rather than speaking out explicitly about politics. But by the 1950s, a new generation of activists began challenging segregation more directly. In 1951, the N.A.A.C.P. called for a boycott of a recital she was to give in Richmond, Va., because the audience was to be segregated.Anderson’s Met debut, as Ulrica in Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera,” was a success but came late in her career.Bettmann/Getty ImagesThe action worked: Three-quarters of the seats in the hall were empty. And soon after, Anderson became more outspoken and vowed not to appear before segregated audiences. (The roiling social, racial and political currents that affected her life and career are presented in an insightful documentary, “Voice of Freedom,” broadcast earlier this year and part of PBS’s American Experience series.)There was one more milestone to come. In 1955 Anderson broke the color barrier for soloists at the Metropolitan Opera, singing the small but crucial role of the fortune teller Ulrica in Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera.” In earlier years, European houses had approached her about performing in opera, but she declined, having had no opportunity to learn the repertory or develop her acting skills.But as the civil rights movement gained headway in America, Rudolf Bing, the Met’s general manager, realized that the company had to respond. He wanted an artist without controversy to be the first. And by then, who didn’t admire Marian Anderson?She was very hesitant. But, after some encouraging work with opera coaches, she decided to proceed; received $1,000 per performance, the highest fee at the house at the time; and came to embrace her pioneering role.When the production opened, the starry cast included Zinka Milanov, Richard Tucker, Leonard Warren and the young Roberta Peters, with Dimitri Mitropoulos conducting. Recalling the moment when the curtain went up, Anderson later wrote, “I trembled, and when the audience applauded and applauded before I could sing a note I felt myself tightening into a knot.”She was almost 58, past her vocal prime. But she did it, won solid reviews and a place in history. Sony’s set includes an album of excerpts from the opera recorded in a studio around the same time (though Jan Peerce replaced Tucker). Compelling moments in Anderson’s singing of the role suggest what her career in opera might have been.The American Experience documentary opens with poignant footage of Anderson on the morning of her Lincoln Memorial concert, going though sound checks on the platform, looking nervous and wary. For all her fears, the concert was a triumph. A mixed crowd of 75,000, more people than had ever gathered on the Mall, heard Anderson sing a 30-minute program that opened with “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” included Schubert’s “Ave Maria” and a Donizetti aria, and ended with a group of spirituals. Millions more heard it broadcast on the radio.In time, the Daughters of the American Revolution dropped its exclusionary policy at Constitution Hall. Anderson performed there in a war relief benefit in 1943. And it was sweet justice when, in 1964, she began an extended farewell tour with a recital there, too. More

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      Review: ‘Porgy and Bess’ Returns to a New Opera Landscape

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      The Metropolitan Opera’s revival boasts strong performances but raises difficult questions about race and American music.George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” is both easy and impossible to love.Its contradictions may have been captured best in Truman Capote’s “The Muses Are Heard,” his 1956 dispatch from a touring company’s historic stop in the Soviet Union. “Porgy,” he wrote, was like an allergen to Russian officials — its characters erotic, God-fearing and superstitious.But its reflection of America was a different story. “An exploited race at the mercy of Southern whites, poverty-pinched and segregated in the ghetto of Catfish Row,” Capote said, “could not be more agreeably imagined if the Ministry of Culture had assigned one of their own writers to the job.”“Porgy” — which returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Sunday after two years, its performances still exhilarating but its staging still blandly naturalistic — keeps raising questions over its three hours. And after a long pandemic closure, during which the Met, like the rest of the country, took a fresh look at racial inequities, those questions are increasingly difficult to sit with.Just a couple: Does “Porgy,” a leading contender for the Great American Opera, fulfill Antonin Dvorak’s prophecy that this country’s homegrown music would be founded on Black melodies? If so, did the work’s all-white creative team achieve that by exploiting stereotypes?Opera is rife with troubled histories and receptions. Of two works now playing at the Met, Puccini’s “Turandot” is set in a fairy-tale China out of late Romantic Orientalism; Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” ends with a startling paean to German nationalism. Classics like those tend to be defended with a logic that some have applied to “Porgy”: This is an art form that deals in broad strokes and the mythic. Who, then, are Porgy and Bess if not just another pair of star-crossed lovers?The soprano Angel Blue, left, as Bess and the bass-baritone Alfred Walker as a mighty and menacing Crown.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut that argument is on shakier ground with “Porgy” than “Turandot”; Gershwin’s work inevitably carries the baggage of American history. And its characters, mythic or not, can feel like cartoons of Black pain, violence and poverty. Black artists have had vastly divergent responses to the piece, but what James Baldwin called “a white man’s vision of Negro life” has remained ensconced in the repertory, held up by the same institutions that have long overlooked the work of Black composers.There’s no clear resolution to any of the problems that have dogged “Porgy” since its premiere, in 1935. But it is here to stay — a discomfort to be experienced, pondered and managed, not removed. It’s no coincidence that the Met accompanied this production’s debut two years ago with face-saving initiatives like talks, an album celebrating Black artists of its past and an exhibition to match, and the announcement that it would present its first opera by a Black composer. (That work, Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” opened the season in September.)If “Porgy” is the Great American Opera, it is more for its score — an innovative and seamless blend of grand opera, Broadway, and invented spirituals and folk melodies — than for its subject matter. (For that, we have the melting pot milieu of Kurt Weill’s “Street Scene,” the original sin of American greed in Marc Blitzstein’s “Regina” or stateside verismo in William Grant Still’s “Highway 1, U.S.A.,” to name just a few.)And at the Met, James Robinson’s production — a mostly timid, literal presentation of the libretto, by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward and Ira Gershwin — undercuts the defense of “Porgy” as timelessly mythic with its realistic direction and designs (by Michael Yeargan and Catherine Zuber). Even the preshow curtain, a towering photograph of Catfish Row, suggests something documentary. At odds with all this is the stylized and thoroughly modern choreography of Camille A. Brown.Much of the 2019 cast remains intact, including, from left: Latonia Moore as Serena, Eric Owens as Porgy and Denyce Graves as Maria.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut in the pit, the conductor David Robertson made an argument for the triumphs of Gershwin’s score, with stylistic shifts fluid and distinctly articulated. “Porgy” is also one of the great operatic portraits of a community; as such, its true stars are the chorus singers, matching the instrumentalists with vigor and richly textured delivery.As Porgy, the bass-baritone Eric Owens sang with limited power, but imbued each line with dramatic consideration. The soprano Angel Blue’s Bess was one of tragic juxtapositions: luminous in “Oh, the train is at the station” and shattering in the conflicted Act III reprise of “Summertime.” (That standard was first heard, lush and stylishly ornamented, at the start of the opera, sung by Janai Brugger as Clara).Much of the cast remains intact from 2019: Denyce Graves’s caring and comical Maria; Ryan Speedo Green’s mighty Jake; Alfred Walker’s similarly mighty but menacing Crown; Frederick Ballentine’s flamboyant Sportin’ Life; and Latonia Moore’s Serena, this production’s finest pairing of artist and aria in the showstopping “My man’s gone now,” and a commanding comfort in the later “Oh, Doctor Jesus.”Moore, Green and Blue — all Met regulars — come to this revival fresh from “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” As recently as last year, the idea of two operas with exclusively Black ensembles running at the company in the same month would have been fantastical. Thankfully, that’s no longer the case.Porgy and BessThrough Dec. 12 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More