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      Review: Two Tenors. Many, Many High Notes.

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      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

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

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      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

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

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      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

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

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      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

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      Review: An Espionage Opera Remains Enigmatic and Urgent

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      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

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      A Spy Opera (or Is It?) Returns to the Stage

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      Robert Ashley’s enigmatic “eL/Aficionado” is being revived to prove it can live on beyond his close collaborators.It was February 2020, and Mimi Johnson was pouring afternoon tea in the TriBeCa loft she once shared with her husband, the composer Robert Ashley.Johnson was reflecting on what was then the recent revival of “Improvement (Don Leaves Linda),” by Ashley, who died in 2014 and whose innovative operas generally involved the blurry boundary of speech and singing, smooth electronic accompaniment, and enigmatic, witty storytelling.Another revival, of Ashley’s early 1990s work “eL/Aficionado,” was supposed to follow shortly after. But because of the pandemic, Johnson was forced to shelf the nearly completed project, until Roulette in Brooklyn, on whose board she sits, approached her this year about reviving the revival; “eL/Aficionado” will run for three performances at Roulette, Thursday through Saturday.Mimi Johnson, left, and Tom Hamilton have been integral in recent revival of Ashley’s innovative, enigmatic operas.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesThese Ashley productions are designed not only to allow New Yorkers to see these rarely presented works again, but also to ensure they can live on once their composer’s close circle of collaborators has passed. For “Improvement,” Johnson and Tom Hamilton, a longtime creative partner of Ashley, painstakingly combed through Ashley’s archives to produce a new electronic score for the work, which was conceived as a recording and whose existing version thus contained vocals inextricable from the accompaniment.“If we don’t get these scores organized and the tapes updated and available, Tom or I might die,” Johnson said. “And it would be a whole lot harder for someone else to do these operas.”A simple way to convey their belief that the works can and should be performed more widely is to put them on with new talent. The original “eL/Aficionado” featured the baritone Thomas Buckner, a veteran Ashley performer, in the central role of the Agent. But Hamilton, the revival’s music director, was curious to hear the role sung by a mezzo-soprano.He and Johnson sought out Kayleigh Butcher, who has performed in opera companies and with new-music ensembles but has never before done Ashley. She is joined by another newcomer, Bonnie Lander, as well as Paul Pinto and Brian McCorkle, who have both performed in numerous Ashley works, including “Improvement,” “Perfect Lives” and “Crash.”Johnson still lives in the TriBeCa loft she once shared with Ashley, her husband, who died in 2014.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesHamilton, who collaborated often with Ashley, is the revival’s music director.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesAs with that 2019 production of “Improvement,” the revival of “eL/Aficionado” accompanies a new recording, to be released on Friday by Lovely Music, the influential new-music label that Johnson has run since the late 1970s. Hamilton, who also produced the album, believes that having two recorded versions available will serve both to guide future performers and to illustrate the potential for expressive freedom.“I think Kayleigh’s performance speaks to the viability of the work itself, and how it can change and grow in someone else’s hands,” he said. “And I suspect that in the future, groups will rely more on the recorded material than on the score to catch the style of the piece.”The opera features a spy, named simply the Agent, who has done a career’s worth of work for an unnamed organization and is now on trial facing three interrogators, one superior and two more junior. Through a series of obscure responses to them, sometimes resembling personal or real estate advertisements and sometimes psychoanalytic sessions, the Agent relates four stages of her biography in reverse chronological order, seemingly revealing what led her to a life of espionage.The taut braiding of speech and singing in “eL/Aficionado,” often performed in double time over the 72-beats-per-minute pulse of the accompaniment, would seem to allow for little creative variation. But while Thomas Buckner portrayed the Agent as a sullen figure expressing an almost ghostly contrition for his deeds, Butcher’s interpretation adds a defiant tone, as if the Agent is as confused as the audience as to why her work should be subject to scrutiny. A line like “Can you blame me for being skeptical? A mere boy. I don’t think he was 10 years old” turns from Buckner’s desperate appeal into a confident avowal.From left, Robert Ashley, Humbert, Sam Ashley and Buckner performing “eL/Aficionado” in Berlin in 1992.Giacomo OteriAshley was a fan of spy novels, particularly those of John le Carré, but he notes in the libretto that “eL/Aficionado” is “not a spy story” and that the audience should be aware that, as the Agent’s story unfolds, the events acquire an increasing air of unreality.Even so, the espionage trappings are significant in a work that makes up a quarter of Ashley’s tetralogy “Now Eleanor’s Idea,” which in its entirety is an allegory for American westward expansion. Johnson recalled that when she first came to know him, in the mid-1970s, Ashley was fascinated and troubled by the C.I.A.-orchestrated Chilean coup of 1973, which brought about the installation of Augusto Pinochet. She believes that the Spanish title of “eL/Aficionado,” which translates to “amateur” or “hobbyist,” is a nod to those events.One of the work’s four sections, “My Brother Called” — “brother” is a tradecraft term for a dependable operative — is an extension of an installation piece that Ashley had produced for a 1977 show at New York University. It consisted of stacks of Spanish-language newspapers arranged in a grid resembling city blocks, with a spot-lit telephone in the center. Ashley periodically called the phone, which filled the room with a mixture of his own indecipherable speech, Latin American music and sounds from a television.In “eL/Aficionado,” the Agent describes that piece and claims that “the meaning of the scene is impossible to describe” — as if to suggest that Ashley himself was unsure exactly what role he and other artists played in the country’s broader Cold War project.That ambiguity is one of many; the enveloping aura of mystery is the opera’s real achievement. Devoid of chase scenes, dead drops, tidy resolutions and most other familiar tropes of espionage narrative, the Agent’s swirling relation of images and memories — whose relevance even she is unable to gauge — creates an atmosphere of pure paranoia. In our age of fractured reality, mass surveillance and shocking regime changes, that quintessential 20th-century feeling, and the opera that makes use of it, are ripe for reappraisal. More

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      Glimmerglass Festival Unveils Its Leader’s Final Season

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      Francesca Zambello, who has overseen a dozen editions of the opera festival in upstate New York, will depart next summer.Next summer, the Glimmerglass Festival of opera and music theater in Cooperstown, N.Y., will return indoors in full force for the farewell season of its artistic and general director, Francesca Zambello, the festival announced on Friday.Zambello, 65, who is also the artistic director of Washington National Opera and an independent stage director, will have led Glimmerglass for 12 seasons when she leaves. In an interview, she said it was the right moment “for a page turn,” and that since she has been with the Washington company for less time, “I decided to extend my contract and devote myself there.”“Part of my heart is super sad, but I also think I don’t want to repeat myself,” she added. “I don’t want to be one of those people. I just want new challenges.”Among the hallmarks of her tenure at Glimmerglass have been the addition of original youth operas each season; an initiative at Attica Correctional Facility; a broadened repertoire that includes Broadway musicals, concert programming and new works; and the introduction of high-profile artists in residence such as Christine Goerke, Eric Owens and, for the 2022 season, Denyce Graves.Graves is scheduled to direct a new production of Bizet’s “Carmen” during next summer’s festival, which will run from July 8 through Aug. 21. It will be something of a homecoming for this mezzo-soprano: Carmen was one of her signature roles. Graves is also set to reprise her performance from this past summer’s outdoor premiere of “The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson,” Sandra Seaton’s play about the founder of the National Negro Opera Company, with music by Carlos Simon.The 2022 program also includes a new production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The Sound of Music,” originally scheduled for 2020 but postponed because of the pandemic; the premiere of “Tenor Overboard,” a Rossini pastiche with a book by Ken Ludwig, the Tony Award-winning playwright of “Lend Me a Tenor” and “Crazy For You”; and a double bill of Kamala Sankaram and Jerre Dye’s “Taking Up Serpents” and the premiere of Damien Geter’s “Holy Ground,” with a libretto by Lila Palmer. (Sankaram, the festival’s composer in residence next summer, also wrote the season’s youth opera, “The Jungle Book.”) More

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      Raymond Gniewek, 89, Met Orchestra’s Enduring Concertmaster, Dies

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      For 43 years he was a steadying force with the ensemble as he helped it become one of the world’s most esteemed.Raymond Gniewek, the concertmaster for the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra for 43 years and a quiet but vital force in elevating that ensemble to a new level of renown, died on Oct. 1 in Naples, Fla. He was 89.His daughter Susan Law said the cause was complications of cancer.Mr. Gniewek (pronounced NYEH-vik), a violinist whose solos invariably drew acclaim, was just 25 in 1957 when he was named the orchestra’s concertmaster. He had two obstacles to overcome.In a genre, opera, with a heavily European heritage, he was only the second American-born musician to hold the job at the Met. And he was the youngest member of the orchestra when he was made concertmaster, whose duties include advising musicians with much more tenure and experience.He managed to make it work.“I sort of waded my way through things, wasn’t too arrogant, and the musicians were very supportive,” he told The New York Times in 2000 in an interview occasioned by his retirement.The concertmaster, the leader of the violin section, is most visible in tuning up the orchestra before a concert, but is more crucially a conduit between the conductor and the rest of the players, helping to bring about the interpretation the conductor wants. That often means mastering a particular passage or effect, then demonstrating to fellow violinists the bowing technique or fingering needed to achieve it.“It’s my job to make technical translations of the desired sound,” Mr. Gniewek said in the 2000 interview. “And you have to show, not tell, because the same words can mean different things to different people.”Another part of the job is to ensure stability and continuity, especially important in an orchestra like the Met Opera’s that is often led by guest conductors. As the Berklee College of Music describes the job on its careers page, “While conductors may come and go — with differing styles and approaches — the concertmaster provides the orchestra with consistent and technically oriented leadership.”Mr. Gniewek found that being concertmaster could mean being an alarm clock. There is Met lore about a German conductor who would fall asleep during the dialogue of Carl Maria von Weber’s “Der Freischütz”; Mr. Gniewek would awaken him with a subtle, “Jetzt, maestro” (“Now, maestro”).Mr. Gniewek was credited with helping to raise the ensemble’s game considerably. When he was first named to the post, the orchestra was workmanlike at best. By the early 1990s it was playing concerts, making acclaimed recordings and being compared to the world’s great orchestras.“It plays with astonishing precision, nuance and insight,” Katrine Ames wrote of the Met Orchestra in Newsweek in 1991, adding, “Fifteen years ago that orchestra was little more than adequate: it gave some fine performances (usually Verdi) and some dismal ones (usually Mozart). To hear it was largely to ignore it.”Much of that improvement was credited to James Levine, who became the Met’s principal conductor in the 1973-74 season and was soon named its music director. But insiders knew that Mr. Gniewek was vital to executing Mr. Levine’s vision, something Mr. Levine himself acknowledged when Mr. Gniewek retired.“The single luckiest thing to happen to me since I have been at the Met,” he said, “is that Ray Gniewek was the concertmaster.”“I sort of waded my way through things, wasn’t too arrogant, and the musicians were very supportive,” Mr. Gniewek said of how he navigated becoming concertmaster in his mid-20s, when he was the youngest member of the orchestra.Raymond Arthur Gniewek was born on Nov. 13, 1931, in East Meadow, N.Y., on Long Island. His father, Jacenta, was a tradesman and barber who also played violin, and his mother, Leocadia (Kurowska) Gniewek, was a church organist and homemaker.After graduating from Hempstead High School, he attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., becoming a member of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra while an undergraduate. He graduated in 1953. In 1955, he was named concertmaster of the Rochester Civic Orchestra and assistant concertmaster of the Rochester Philharmonic.He had been Met concertmaster for almost a decade — and for some 1,700 performances — when he made his New York City recital debut in 1966 at Town Hall. Richard D. Freed, reviewing that performance in The Times, could barely contain his enthusiasm.“Mr. Gniewek has everything that could be wanted in a violinist — impeccable intonation, a technique so secure that he is free to concentrate on problems of interpretation and a pronounced flair for particular style,” he wrote.Early in his tenure, in 1958, Mr. Gniewek had to take the baton when the conductor Fausto Cleva fell ill during a performance of “Manon Lescaut.” That might have been a fantasy fulfilled for some concertmasters with conducting aspirations, but not for Mr. Gniewek.“I’d rather play,” he told The Times in the 2000 interview. “I have strong feelings about sound, the actual act of playing of the instrument. It’s what I do best.”Mr. Gniewek moved to Florida after retiring and lived in Naples at his death. His first marriage, to Doris Scott in the 1950s, ended in divorce, as did his marriage in 1960 to Lolita San Miguel. In addition to his daughter, who is from his first marriage, he is survived by his wife, the soprano Judith Blegen; a sister, Cecilia Brauer, who is also a musician; a stepson, Thomas Singher; seven grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Another daughter from his first marriage, Davi Loren, died in May.In 2000, in Met Orchestra concerts that were to be among Mr. Gniewek’s last, Mr. Levine gave him a rare honor by having him stand out in front at the program’s end to play Massenet’s Meditation from “Thais,” as an encore. When he did so at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Willa J. Conrad of The Star-Ledger of Newark wrote, “It was pure eloquence and grace, and as tribute to a particular musician’s legacy to a normally invisible orchestra, provided a particularly poignant close.”When he did the same at Carnegie Hall two nights later, the ovation — from the orchestra as well as the audience — stretched past the five-minute mark, lasting longer than the solo itself. More