Opera

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Music

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

      by

      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

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Marian Anderson: A Voice of Authenticity and Justice

      by

      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

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

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

      by

      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

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Review: Two Tenors. Many, Many High Notes.

      by

      Lawrence Brownlee and Michael Spyres came together for a sky-scraping Rossini concert at the 92nd Street Y.Fans of N.F.L. RedZone — the TV channel that whips around the country each Sunday during football season to show you, it promises, “every touchdown from every game” — will have felt a familiar sensation on Wednesday at the 92nd Street Y.There, with the tenors Lawrence Brownlee and Michael Spyres belting out Rossini as if their lives depended on it, the audience got what Brownlee called from the stage the “barnstormers” of the bel canto repertory — and only the barnstormers. Out the window were the plots, the characters, the sets. What was left was an operatic RedZone: the highest stakes, the highest notes — we’re talking up to E flat or F over C — over and over, in dizzying profusion.This was a lot of fun, particularly because Brownlee and Spyres are two of the finest, most sky-scraping bel canto tenors in the world today — though, while Brownlee has long been a Metropolitan Opera star, the astonishing Spyres has just occasionally appeared in New York.Their rousing recent duo album, “Amici e Rivali,” from which the Y program was adapted, posits them as the inheritors of two distinct Rossinian traditions. Brownlee, his tone slender and silvery, sounds (we imagine) something like Giovanni David; Spyres, with a voice beefier and more baritonal, though no less agile, evokes Andrea Nozzari, with whom David often faced off onstage in the early 19th century. (Having multiple leading tenor roles in a single opera was commonplace with this composer.)In concert as on the album, the main joys were the rarities, from the likes of the Crusades drama “Ricciardo e Zoraide” and the Tudor potboiler “Elisabetta, Regina d’Inghilterra.” The duet “Donala a questo core” from “Ricciardo” was a thrilling combination of slow-burning lyrical verses and fiery shared coloratura.I wish that the Y program had followed “Amici e Rivali” and included more from “Ricciardo” and less from “The Barber of Seville.” The concert’s long opening sequence from that chestnut did prove that Spyres could handle the baritone role of Figaro, and his famous “Largo al factotum,” with tongue-twisting, very-low-to-very-high aplomb; not for nothing is his new solo album called “Baritenor.”But Brownlee wasn’t showed off best in Count Almaviva’s thanklessly glittering “Cessa di più resistere,” while a six-hand piano transcription of the “Barber” overture — with the evening’s game accompanist, Myra Huang, joined by Thomas Lausmann and Bryan Wagorn — seemed more fun for the players than the audience. (And other than to give these poor guys and their cords a rest, and to burden Huang still more, no one needed another overture transcription, of the one from “Guillaume Tell,” later on.)The two singers each got a stand-alone number from Rossini’s delightful song repertory, with Spyres particularly melting and burnished in the passionate “L’Esule.” And a closing suite from “Otello” — very different than Verdi’s version — found both in rich, fluent voice in the arias “Che ascolto?” (Brownlee) and “Ah! sì, per voi gia sento” (Spyres) and the explosive duet “Ah! vieni, nel tuo sangue.”I wish we had gotten a taste of the French Rossini, provided on the album through “Le Siège de Corinthe.” But that language did arrive in the form of an encore interloper by Donizetti: the unavoidable showpiece “Ah! mes amis” from “La Fille du Régiment,” with Brownlee and Spyres gleefully trading off the notorious, numerous high C’s.Lawrence Brownlee and Michael SpyresPerformed on Wednesday at the 92nd Street Y, Manhattan. More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      A New Era Takes Shape at the World’s Opera Capital

      by

      Serge Dorny and Vladimir Jurowski, the leaders of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, are starting their tenure with Shostakovich’s unruly “The Nose.”MUNICH — Serge Dorny quietly opened a door to the cavernous rehearsal hall of the Bavarian State Opera here one recent evening to see how Shostakovich’s “The Nose” was coming along.Dorny, the company’s general manager as of this season, leaned over an open score for the work, an absurdist satire based on Gogol’s short story about a Russian official whose nose drops off his face and starts a life of its own. Then he took a seat to watch preparations for what would be the first premiere of his tenure, and the first to be conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, the new music director.The singers were taking direction from Kirill Serebrennikov, who was shaping the production by video call — through messages relayed to his co-director, Evgeny Kulagin — because he is not permitted to leave Russia while on probation for corruption, a charge widely believed to be politically motivated.Jurowski sat on a stool, conducting the cast and a nearby pianist. Every so often, Shostakovich’s unruly score would come to a halt as Serebrennikov interjected like the voice of God, booming through speakers but unseen.During one pause, Dorny smiled into a webcam perched to give a view of the rehearsal space. “Hello, dear Serge!” said Serebrennikov, still invisible. Seemingly satisfied, Dorny exited the room as quietly as he had entered.Kirill Serebrennikov, freed from house arrest but not permitted to leave Russia, directed the new production of “The Nose” by video call.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesMore than just “The Nose,” which opened Sunday and is streaming at staatsoper.tv, was taking shape that night: The production is a sign of things to come at the Bavarian State Opera.Its reputation as the world’s opera capital was preserved and strengthened by leaders like Peter Jonas and his successor, the widely beloved Nikolaus Bachler, who left the house this summer. Dorny and Jurowski aspire to maintain their legacy, while also expanding the company’s stable of artists and repertory — starting with “The Nose,” written in the 1920s but never before presented at the Bavarian State Opera.“There are going to be new sounds, new colors and new tonalities — but in a kind of continuity,” Dorny said in an interview. “You should never fill an empty box with the same thing as it used to be.”Some clues as to what to expect from Dorny’s tenure in Munich can be found in his transformative, nearly two-decade run as the leader of the Lyon Opera in France, which included high-profile commissions from the likes of Kaija Saariaho and Peter Eotvos, as well as rarities, innovative takes on standards and additions to the repertory from the 20th century.“In music history since ‘Orfeo,’” Dorny said, “there have been about 50,000 to 60,000 titles, and something like 80 are being played. In order to keep it a lively art form — for opera to not be a mausoleum — we have to widen that.”Dorny is planning to make more use of the Bavarian State Opera’s resident ensemble, which he said had been relegated to minor roles in the past.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesAmong the new productions in Munich this season are Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen,” Britten’s “Peter Grimes,” Berlioz’s “Les Troyens” and Penderecki’s “The Devils of Loudun.” Dorny teased a future staging of Ligeti’s “Le Grand Macabre” and said that a premiere by Brett Dean, about Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I, would come in the 2023-24 season. Jurowski said he would like to work with Olga Neuwirth and Mark-Anthony Turnage, among other composers.Jurowski added that he is “consciously avoiding the repertoire of Kirill Petrenko,” his predecessor as music director and the shy star of Munich’s recent history, who regularly earned louder ovations than even the house’s most famous singers before he left to become the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic.Commuting to Munich from his home in Berlin, where he also leads the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, Jurowski has his own musical identity. A champion of 20th-century opera, as well as of composers from his native Russia, he has been less known for the classics of Verdi and (Petrenko’s specialty) Wagner. He said he is happy to cede to guest conductors titles like Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” and “La Forza del Destino,” and Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” and “Lohengrin.”Vladimir Jurowski, the Bavarian State Opera’s new music director, says he will stay away from works closely associated with his predecessor, Kirill Petrenko.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesHe would, however, like to conduct Verdi’s “La Traviata” — but only with the right team, because he sees it as “a Chekhov play with music.” The same goes for “Aida,” which he called “Ibsen with elephants.” (He’ll do it as long as there are no elephants.) Despite his distaste for early Wagner, he would be interested in a “Flying Dutchman” on period instruments. And he would like to collaborate with the Bavarian State Ballet, possibly to commission new choreography for Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake,” “The Sleeping Beauty” and “The Nutcracker.”Joining the traditional summertime Munich Opera Festival this season will be an earlier event — called Ja, Mai (Yes, May) — focused on contemporary music. It will include three new productions of works by Georg Friedrich Haas, 68, realized by artists including the directors Claus Guth and Romeo Castellucci and the conductor Teodor Currentzis.“This will be an annual event,” Dorny said, “in which we galvanize all our energies to this very moment where we can give full attention to this repertoire and new work.”“We want to make sure,” he continued, playing on the French word for “last,” “that a world premiere is not a world dernier.”The audience in Munich has historically been game; before the pandemic, the company sold on average an extraordinary 98 percent of its capacity. Opera lovers were also drawn to the famous singers who call the State Opera home, such as Jonas Kaufmann, Anja Harteros and Christian Gerhaher. In an interview last summer, Kaufmann said, “We are now looking into a future that is maybe less, shall we say, written.”Evgeny Kulagin, center, the co-director of “The Nose,” passing on instructions from Serebrennikov to the cast.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesBut Dorny has no intention of ignoring the stars of the company’s recent years. “You’re talking about some of the great statesmen of singers,” he said. “At the same time, we also have a responsibility to imagine the future, to avoid the cul-de-sac. It’s important that we create the stars of tomorrow.”To that end, he plans to feature the house’s resident ensemble more prominently. Dorny — who in interviews was invariably diplomatic, beginning any talk of the past with phrases like “This is not meant to be critical” — said that too often, stars had been brought in for principal roles, relegating in-house singers to minor parts. He would prefer “a kind of middle way,” making room for high-profile guests yet prioritizing the ensemble, which he wants to populate with promising voices like the soprano Elsa Dreisig and the baritone Boris Pinkhasovich (currently in “The Nose”).If there was a history Dorny wasn’t interested in speaking about, it was his time in Lyon. Over lunch in his office, he gestured to a stack of boxes and said, “It’s there, still closed, but I don’t necessarily need to unpack.”Daniele Rustioni, Lyon’s principal conductor since 2017, who will lead the new “Troyens” in Munich next spring, described Dorny as someone who “works nonstop” and looks for collaborators who are “super committed.”“I’ve seen this in conductors,” Rustioni said. “Riccardo Muti was really living in the theater, and when I met Tony Pappano, he was the first one coming in and the last to leave. But I’ve never seen that in general managers until Serge.”Shostakovich’s opera, from the 1920s, was being prepared for its first-ever performances at the Bavarian State Opera.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesBut Rustioni believes Dorny’s work paid off. “He left the theater in good shape,” Rustioni said, “and you don’t need me to say that he put Lyon on the international map.”The French critic Christian Merlin also said that Dorny had “brought an international standing” to Lyon. “He rejuvenated and modernized it. He established with the audience a relationship of confidence, which made it possible to open up people to other repertoire or aesthetics without the reluctance of the ordinary conservative opera audience. The opera house regained its position in the heart of the city.”Unlike Lyon, though, the Bavarian State Opera is a repertory house; it presents multiple works at once, and with more turnover. Such volume, Dorny said, makes it easier for the company to occupy a central space in Munich’s cultural scene — and makes it more crucial to live up to that potential.He and Jurowski have known each other since the late 1990s; both had posts in Britain, and worked together at the Glyndebourne Festival there. “At the moment it’s a very good relationship which we have to develop and explore even further,” Jurowski said. “But as a starting point, we’re starting on the same artistic platform of a vision.”Jurowski, left, and Dorny have known each other and worked together since the late 1990s.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesThat extends to the State Opera’s orchestra, which Jurowski described as “the oldest and most traditional in Munich, but also the easiest and most open-minded.” For them, playing Strauss and Wagner is “like a press-button thing,” he said, but he also knows they are willing to experiment, such as when he led them six years ago in Prokofiev’s “The Fiery Angel.” That production was directed by Barrie Kosky, a recurring Jurowski collaborator — including on a new staging in Munich during the pandemic of “Der Rosenkavalier,” which will return next spring.In an interview, Kosky called Jurowski “the most dramaturgical of conductors,” someone who begins work on a production with lengthy discussions, close text readings and constellatory approaches to interpretation. (They had originally been tapped to run the Bavarian State Opera together, but Kosky, who is concluding his tenure at the Komische Oper in Berlin this season, decided to go freelance instead of managing another house; after “Rosenkavalier,” they will reunite for a new production of “Die Fledermaus.”)Kosky, who described Jurowski as a charming cross between an El Greco monk and a Dostoyevsky character, said: “He loves operetta, he loves literature and film and philosophy, and he comes into rehearsals with DVDs of art-house films from 30 years ago. And he infuses all of that, this curiosity about the world, through the music.”More than just a single nose is lost in Serebrennikov’s staging of the opera.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesJurowski said his preparations for “The Nose” involved a lot of conversations with Serebrennikov — especially in person, whenever Jurowski was in Russia for work — long before rehearsals began. “We are completely d’accord,” he added, “in terms of this production,” in which the hapless protagonist is depicted as being alone in having just one nose, while everyone else wears grotesque masks adorned with many of them. Serebrennikov’s staging subtly raises political questions like the one the German critic Bernhard Neuhoff posed in his review of the premiere: “Is it normal to be human when everyone is inhuman?”Speaking by phone after opening night, Dorny said that what Jurowski and Serebrennikov achieved together was “powerful”: a production that offered a fresh visual and metaphorical take on the piece, and a musical performance that was “quite definitive.” He was pleased with the audience’s sustained applause, but even happier overhearing them discussing the opera afterward.“It’s a very good opening piece for the Bayerische Staatsoper,” Dorny said. “It should not just be that you walk out and you forget what you’ve seen, but that you take it with you — that it stays with you. That is what I would like to achieve.” More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Review: Wagnerian Comedy Is No Joke in the Met’s ‘Meistersinger’

      by

      The sprawling opera returned to the Met after seven years, with Antonio Pappano on the podium and an excellent cast.There were swaths of empty seats at the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday evening, when Wagner’s sprawling comedy “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” returned to the house after seven years.Was it the limits on foreign tourists, lifting soon? Persistent fears about the Delta variant, despite a vaccinated and masked audience? More permanent changes to viewership habits, egged on by the pandemic? Wariness about a performance of very Wagnerian, six-hour length?It’s likely all of the above, and more; arts institutions around the country are grumbling about soft ticket sales as they reopen. But whatever the reasons at the Met, it’s a shame: This “Meistersinger” is excellent, a paean to a community joyfully bickering and making music together that touched me deeply in this period of reckoning with all we lacked for a year and a half.A love story intertwined with a song contest, set in a storybook vision of medieval Germany, it brings back to the company after 24 years the eminent conductor Antonio Pappano. He takes on one of the scores most closely associated at the Met with James Levine; the last time someone other than Levine led a run of this opera there was 1985.With Levine in “Meistersinger,” there was grandeur, richness, not heaviness but glowing weight. Pappano, the longtime music director of the Royal Opera House in London, offers a lighter, lither reading, not rushed but evenly flowing, airy even when agitated. From the prelude to the first act — more lyrical than majestic — this was tender, mellow Wagner, most notable in quieter moments: the warm curlicues of the orchestral reactions to the song rules in the first act, the glistening music of nightfall in the second, the hushed prelude to the third.As the cobbler Hans Sachs, the leader of Nuremberg’s guild of tradesmen who moonlight as singing poet “masters,” the baritone Michael Volle is fiercely articulate. He is not the kindly Santa Claus figure often associated with this role, but rather a changeable, ambivalent, even peevish, very human Sachs.Klaus Florian Vogt — the tenor playing Walther, the knight who bursts onto the Nuremberg scene with an innovative approach to songwriting and a crush on the young Eva Pogner — remains one of the oddest major artists in opera. His appeal has been his uncannily pure voice, which, emerging from classically handsome blond looks, gives him an otherworldly quality in otherworldly roles like Wagner’s Lohengrin.But that voice has in recent years been turning more nasal and glassy. While some high notes, particularly toward the opera’s end, sail out like sunshine, and while he’s an effortlessly noble presence, Vogt’s sound is ever more an acquired taste.There are no equivalent quibbles about this revival’s playful, assertive Eva: the soprano Lise Davidsen, whose voice is luminous when soft and startlingly big at full cry. Her soaring embrace of Sachs and sublime start to the quintet that follows in the third act aroused only excitement about the remarkable Met season she is embarking on, with the title role of Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” and Chrysothemis in his “Elektra” to come.The baritone Johannes Martin Kränzle was comically bumbling but sang with straightforward earnestness as Beckmesser, the officious town clerk competing (at least in his own mind) for Eva’s hand in marriage. The resonant bass Georg Zeppenfeld, one of Europe’s finest Wagnerians but an unaccountable absence from the Met over the past decade, was splendidly genial as Veit Pogner, Eva’s father. The tenor Paul Appleby was lively as Sachs’s apprentice, David; the mezzo-soprano Claudia Mahnke made a characterful Met debut as Magdalene, Eva’s attendant; and the bass-baritone Alexander Tsymbalyuk sang with calm consolation as the Night Watchman.It is to Volle’s credit that he doesn’t stint the darkness that suddenly engulfs the piece in its final minutes, when Sachs, trying to persuade the victorious Walther to join the masters, grimly warns of foreign encroachments on the country and its “holy German art.” It’s a call taken up with rally-style fervor by the crowd, and it’s hard not to hear in it premonitions of what was to come in Nuremberg four decades after Wagner’s death.The Met’s utterly literal, quaint staging by Otto Schenk and Günther Schneider-Siemssen, now nearly 30 years old, offers no comment on this notoriously explicit swerve toward chauvinism — nor on the sense many have had that Beckmesser represents Wagner’s antisemitic obsessions, nor on much of anything else beyond the letter of the libretto.But Volle, at least, forces us to reckon with a scene as discomfiting as any in opera — a vivid depiction of the ease with which communal celebration can tip into nationalism, a reminder that even good guys can harbor awful leanings. Sachs’s monologue isn’t a reason not to perform “Die Meistersinger.” It felt on Tuesday, more than ever, a reason it should be seen.Die Meistersinger von NürnbergThrough Nov. 14 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Edita Gruberova, Dazzling Soprano With Emotional Power, Dies at 74

      by

      A Slovak coloratura, she was a fixture at the opera houses of Vienna and Munich, artfully balancing technical brilliance with deep expression.Edita Gruberova, a Slovak soprano who enchanted audiences with gleaming, vibrant and technically dazzling singing over a 50-year career, becoming a leading exponent of the coloratura soprano repertory, died on Monday in Zurich. She was 74.The cause was a head injury from a fall in her home, said Markus Thiel, a music journalist and her biographer.Ms. Gruberova, whose career was mainly in Europe, was a true coloratura soprano. She had a high, light and agile voice that was easily capable of dispatching embellished runs, all manner of trills and leaps to shimmering top notes.She excelled in the roles associated with her voice type, especially in the early 19th-century bel canto operas of Bellini (Elvira in “I Puritani” and Giulietta in “I Capuleti e i Montecchi”), Donizetti (the title role in “Lucia di Lammermoor” and Elizabeth I in “Roberto Devereux”) and Rossini (notably Rosina in “Il Barbieri di Siviglia”).Reviewing her 1989 performance as Violetta in Verdi’s “La Traviata” at the Metropolitan Opera, the critic Martin Mayer wrote in Opera magazine that Ms. Gruberova “trills without thinking about it,” could “sing very softly and still project into the house,” and “soars over ensemble and orchestra in the great third-act finale.” Many opera devotees considered her a successor to the formidable Joan Sutherland.Ms. Gruberova knew that opera fans were often swept up in the sheer pyrotechnics of a coloratura soprano’s singing. That was the easy part, she said in an interview recorded at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1986, where she was starring in “Lucia di Lammermoor.” The hard part was conveying emotion through the technical feats.This, she said, “is what people want to hear from me, or what they hear from me and like.” Even a coloratura’s high notes, including a big final high note in an aria, “must also be the expression from emotions,” she said. It must “say something” and not be “for display.”Reviewing that 1986 “Lucia di Lammermoor” in Chicago for The Christian Science Monitor, Thor Eckert Jr. wrote that Ms. Gruberova had given “an astonishing demonstration of her art.”“The level of poise, of sheer vocal mastery, of musical and dramatic insight” were unmatched on the vocal scene of the time, he said. Her performance of the Mad Scene, he added, was “a study in the communicative power of histrionic simplicity.”Yet there were dissenters on this occasion, including John von Rhein, the critic for The Chicago Tribune, who wrote that she had treated the scene as if it were “merely a florid showpiece.”To her many admirers, however, Ms. Gruberova artfully balanced technical execution and emotional expression, a quality described in a 2015 Opera News article by the soprano Lauren Flanigan. Ms. Flanigan was an understudy to Ms. Gruberova in the title role of Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena” in Barcelona in 1992.In that troubled queen’s first aria during the run, Ms Gruberova “was by turns girlish and direct, vulnerable and overbearing,” Ms. Flanigan wrote, adding, “Her voice was compelling me to pay attention and listen.”Ms. Gruberova in 1970. A teacher arranged for her to audition the previous year at the Vienna State Opera without the knowledge of Czechoslovakia’s Communist authorities.Erich Auerbach/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesEdita Gruberova was born on Dec. 23, 1946, in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (in what is now Slovakia), the only child of a German father, Gustav Gruber, and a Hungarian mother, Etela Gruberova. Her father, a laborer, was a volatile man who drank to excess and was imprisoned for anti-Communist activities when Ms. Gruberova was a child. Her mother, who worked on a collective farm, a vineyard, had a pleasant singing voice and encouraged her gifted daughter’s singing in school choirs and local ensembles.Ms. Gruberova attended the Bratislava Conservatory and continued her studies at the city’s Academy of Performing Arts. While still in training, Ms. Gruberova performed with the Lucnica folk ensemble and appeared with the Slovak National Theater. She once played Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady.”She made her official debut in 1968, in Bratislava, as Rosina in “Il Barbiere di Siviglia.” That same year she won a voice competition in Toulouse, France, and the acclaim led to appearances with an opera ensemble in the central Slovakian city of Banska Bystrica.Her teacher at the conservatory, Maria Medvecka, arranged for Ms. Gruberova to audition for the Vienna State Opera in 1969. She did so secretly so that the Czech authorities would not find out.An engagement there as the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” followed in 1970 and brought her considerable attention. That year she emigrated to the West. She would go on to give more than 700 performances with the Vienna State Opera, the last a farewell gala concert in 2018. She became a mainstay as well of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich.Mozart’s Queen of the Night was also her role in a highly praised debut at the Glyndebourne Festival in England in 1973 as well as in her Met debut in 1977. A breakthrough came in 1976 when Ms. Gruberova sang Zerbinetta in a new production of Strauss’s “Ariadne aux Naxos” in Vienna, with Karl Böhm conducting.The reviews were sensational, especially for her brilliant rendering of Zerbinetta’s long showpiece aria, when the character, a coquettish member of a comedy troupe, tries to persuade the heartsick Ariadne to forget the godly lover who has abandoned her and look to other men.The eminent Böhm, who had worked closely with the composer, famously commented at the time, “My God, if only Strauss had heard your Zerbinetta!”Performing primarily in Europe, Ms. Gruberova made only 24 appearances with the Met through 1996, including performances as Verdi’s Violetta (another of her trademark roles), Donizetti’s Lucia and Bellini’s Elvira.In 1970, she married Stefan Klimo, a musicologist and choir master. The marriage ended in divorce in 1983. She is survived by two daughters, Barbara and Klaudia Klimo, and three grandchildren. From 1983 to 2005 she was in a relationship with Friedrich Haider, an Austrian conductor and pianist.Ms. Gruberova leaves a large discography of recordings, including classic accounts of operas by Strauss, Mozart, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi, and albums of arias and songs. She appeared in several films of operas, most notably two directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle: Verdi’s “Rigoletto” in 1982, singing Gilda to Luciano Pavarotti’s Duke of Mantua, with Ingvar Wixell in the title role, and Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” in 1988, singing Fiordiligi.Ms. Gruberova’s last performance in opera was as Elizabeth I in Donizetti’s “Roberto Devereux” in Munich in 2019.In 1979, while singing Zerbinetta at the Met, she was briefly interviewed for the afternoon radio broadcast and made comments about the role that seemed pertinent to her own character.“I don’t see her as a soubrette but as a young lady who has lived, you could say, with quite a past,” Ms. Gruberova said. “But she does not take anything too seriously, because she can laugh it off. She doesn’t know the meaning of the word melancholy.” More

    • 100 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      Review: An Espionage Opera Remains Enigmatic and Urgent

      by

      Robert Ashley’s “eL/Aficionado” is receiving a rare revival that is a testament to its vitality.You can’t help but feel some sympathy for the protagonist of Robert Ashley’s opera “eL/Aficionado” when she says, “The meaning of the scene is impossible to describe, if one looks for meaning in the ordinary sense.”It’s an evergreen sentiment when it comes to Ashley’s idiosyncratic and innovative works, atmospheric enigmas that stretch everyday spoken language to its extremes by elongating it and emphasizing its contours — elevating the ordinary to something, well, operatic.An avant-gardist who worked closely with a recurring set of collaborators to realize his vision — which generally involved a deceptively simple harmonic foundation under deceptively simple vocal technique — his work is difficult to revive, especially following his death in 2014.But in recent years his operas have begun to pass to a new generation, through the invaluable efforts of Mimi Johnson, his widow, and Tom Hamilton, a longtime colleague. The latest revival — of “eL/Aficionado,” from the early 1990s — opened Thursday at Roulette in Brooklyn; it joins its fellow presentations since his death in offering a testament to the work’s enduring vitality. (A new “eL/Aficionado” recording is also out from Johnson’s label, Lovely Music.)Ostensibly an espionage thriller told through the fragmented biography of an operative known only as the Agent, “eL/Aficionado” is the second installment in the tetralogy “Now Eleanor’s Idea.” But it stands alone as a subtle evocation of 20th-century politics and the paranoia of the Cold War. Like much of Ashley’s work, however, it defies simple description, with Dada-esque digressions and casual turns toward the cosmic.In the most explicit departure from the opera’s initial run and recording, the Agent, a role written for the baritone Thomas Buckner, is in this revival recast as a mezzo-soprano. Kayleigh Butcher, a contemporary music veteran making her Ashley debut, performs the part with technical assurance and commanding interpretive depth.Kayleigh Butcher (front, with McCorkle) plays the Agent, the opera’s protagonist and a role originally written for a baritone.Wolf DanielAs the Agent, she — a pronoun change that now extends through the libretto — recounts her career to a trio of interrogators (all of whom wear suits and sunglasses, with one, the most senior of the bunch, seated apart and elevated on a platform upstage). Butcher performs the closest thing to traditional singing, full-voiced and vibrato-rich — though crucially unassuming, never rising to true grandeur but nonetheless building tension through language: an emphasized syllable or a single letter deployed to dramatic effect.Over the opera’s 72 minutes, the interrogation becomes increasingly unreliable. It could be real; it might not be. There are clues, perhaps, in the surreally minimalistic set — by David Moodey, after Jacqueline Humbert’s designs from 1994 — which consists of just the Agent’s and interrogators’ desks, along with two Ionic columns and a free-standing window whose curtains blow gently and mysteriously. There are also suggestions in the libretto of dreams and analysis, and the slippery nature of memory. Nothing, it seems, is certain.The Agent’s tale moves with alluring and hypnotic momentum — at 72 beats per minute, to be exact, a common pace in Ashley’s music. The electronic score (designed and mixed live by Hamilton, the production’s music director) might seem a bit dated, its dreamy synths consistent with the era of “Twin Peaks” or “The X-Files.” But consider how Ashley’s influence, long pervasive in the work of artists like Laurie Anderson, reaches operas of today, such as “Sun & Sea,” which with a similar soundscape won the top prize at the Venice Biennale and is currently selling out on tour.The minimalistic set by David Moodey (after Jacqueline Humbert’s designs from 1994) consists of the Agent’s and her interrogators’ desks, along with two Ionic columns and a free-standing window whose curtains blow gently.Wolf DanielAnd like “Sun & Sea,” a disarmingly relaxed collection of dispatches from a world in climate crisis, “eL/Aficionado” operates on different registers. Personal ads, recited throughout, are peppered with comedy; the cast comes together as a chorus for manic real estate advertisements. These asides might mean everything, or nothing at all.Personals, with their economical writing, are by their nature poetic, and rise to the operatic in the rhythmic and lyrical speech of the junior interrogators. As one of them, Bonnie Lander relishes the percussiveness of “Passion for Piero, Palladio, Puccini, pasta”; the other, Paul Pinto, gets his turn with the staccato phrasing of “Successful. Super-smart. Sensuous. Sensitive. Cuddly. Affectionate.”The senior interrogator (Brian McCorkle) also blurs the line between speaking and singing, prolonging phrases and, later, pre-empting the Agent’s lines with identical ones, whispered as if fed to her. He provides a preamble for each scene, beginning with “My Brother Called.” (“He is not my brother in the ordinary sense,” the Agent explains. “It is a word we use in the department. It means someone you can count on.”) Subsequent set pieces recount tests and assignments, with interjections of the bizarre and unbelievable — things that the Agent is told to take to her grave.For patient listeners, there are revelations. Those ads, it turns out, are code. “The person described as ‘sought’ is the same person in a different code,” we are told. “I believe it is a kind of confirmation, both for the listener — whoever that was — and for the speaker. A double-check against the memory.”But it’s possible that this code was just another test for the Agent, who, disenchanted, left “the department” at some point before the interrogation. “Most of what happened makes no sense to me,” she admits in the penultimate scene.Jaded and distrustful, she gave up on looking for meaning long ago and suggests the interrogators do the same. That is what pervasive uncertainty does to the mind — a life of never knowing what is a test and what an assignment, what is code and what is simply language.This deeply unsettled feeling might have been endemic during the Cold War. But it has never really left us. Confusion to the point of exasperated resignation, we’ve seen, can be weaponized to influence elections. It can turn a public health crisis into a deadly mess. With “eL/Aficionado,” Ashley achieved what opera — or all art, for that matter — is at its most vital: urgent and, for better and worse, timeless.eL/AficionadoThrough Saturday at Roulette, Brooklyn; roulette.org. More