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      Paris Opera Director Alexander Neef Broadens Its Repertory

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

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      Paris Opera Plans New Productions of Strauss and Britten

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

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

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

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

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

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      Metropolitan Opera’s Concert Honors Ukraine

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

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

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

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      ‘Wozzeck,’ the 20th Century’s Most Influential Opera, Turns 100

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      Alban Berg’s brutal classic, a tale of a lowly soldier’s degradation and death, continues to inspire artists.Theodor Adorno had to commiserate with Alban Berg late into the night on Dec. 14, 1925, after the premiere of “Wozzeck” at the Berlin State Opera.The problem was not that Berg’s first opera had been a disaster, that this unknown student of Arnold Schoenberg’s was poised to be sent back into his former anonymity and abject poverty.The problem for Berg was that his musically abrasive, politically unsparing work — based on a Georg Büchner play that he had seen in 1914 and immediately thought of setting to music — had been such a triumph that he started to question the work’s true worth. Adorno later recalled “literally consoling him over his success.”A success “Wozzeck” has remained in the 100 years since Berg finished revising the manuscript on July 16, 1922. The most radical opera of its time, still sounding strikingly modern in its centenary year, it became one of the most influential operas of the 20th century, along with works like Strauss’s “Salome” and Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande.”With its taut, swiftly scene-changing cinematic structure and its omnivorous stylistic appetite, not to mention its use of fleeting, devastating moments of tonality amid the precise constructions of its largely atonal score, the argument could easily be made that “Wozzeck” turned out to be, in fact, the most influential of them all.The premiere of “Wozzeck,” at the Berlin State Opera, received a front-page review in Das Theater, with a photo of Sigrid Johanson, left, as Marie and Leo Schützendorf as Wozzeck.Lebrecht Music & Arts/AlamyRight on cue come a range of performances, in celebration of an opera perhaps too dire to think of celebrating. A William Kentridge staging that played at the Met in 2019 runs through March 30 at the Paris Opera, with the conductor Susanna Malkki at the helm, before it arrives in Barcelona in May, with Matthias Goerne as its Wozzeck. A new Simon Stone production with the baritone Christian Gerhaher in the title role opens at the Vienna State Opera on March 21. And on Tuesday, Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra give a concert performance at Carnegie Hall, with Christine Goerke as Marie.Part of the overpowering force of “Wozzeck” comes from its plot. In 15 short scenes, Berg recounts the degradation and demise of Wozzeck, a destitute soldier abused by his captain, experimented on by a doctor, and wracked with suspicion that his partner, Marie, is being unfaithful with a drum major. Driven mad, Wozzeck murders Marie, then drowns himself. The curtain falls on their son rocking on a hobbyhorse. Whether he will escape the fate of his parents — and the general forces that bear down so ineluctably on what Wozzeck calls “we poor people” — is left unclear.What might explain the lasting power of Berg’s opera? And what has its influence truly been? Here are edited excerpts from interviews with artists who hold the work dear.Yuval Sharon, director“Wozzeck” was the first opera that made me believe in opera as a viable art form. It is this huge musical expression of the lives of really disempowered people. Thinking that opera could tell stories that are not just the stories of a privileged position, but could truly represent another point of view, and do it with incredible imagination, opened up the possibilities of what opera can still be.It’s one of the most compassionate operas that I know. It’s not the Beethoven model. It’s not speaking to that aspirational quality that some of us think music captures so well. There is no salvation in the piece, and that is precisely what is so powerful and urgent about it. It’s not going to be the horns that herald a miraculous overcoming of tyranny, like in “Fidelio.” It’s going to have to be us, in the audience, that will need to speak up for Wozzeck.William Kentridge’s production of “Wozzeck” at the Metropolitan Opera in 2019; Kentridge’s staging is now running at the Paris Opera.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesChristian Gerhaher, baritoneBüchner was much earlier than Karl Marx in his ideas, but they were similar. Büchner was not the founder of communism, but he was honest about the difficulties poor people face in creating a normal life. This is touching, without being too ideological.You have a work which deals with a horrific subject. What is going on is terrible, but the point as a singer and also in the audience is that you have this wonderful joy to see thoughts put into words and music in such a precise way. It is with practically no doubt the masterpiece of the 20th century. Nothing is decoration; nothing is neglectable; every tone is important; every word is important. It’s the essence of a quickly moving world, which is modernity.Brett Dean, composerWhat always struck me about “Wozzeck” was that although it came out of a score full of compositional thought which in itself was revolutionary in the history of music, Berg was the one who married process with engagement, married the head with the heart — or the stomach.Despite the strictness of studying with Schoenberg, he realized that you have to go where you need to go. The fact that, for example, in the interlude just before the end, he ingeniously reverts back to this early piano sketch in D minor, and realizes that’s what we need, right here, right now. From the point of view of a modernist, expressionist language, he’s able, willing and happy to embrace everything that he needs at the given time.Act III orchestral interludeVienna Philharmonic; Claudio Abbado, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)Susanna Malkki, conductorPeople talk about how difficult it is, and it’s not entirely untrue, but I think it’s mostly a question of it being incredibly dense, and rich, and profound. You have several layers that make it interesting every time you hear it. I have been personally surprised, since I finally got the score and started to study it, to see how much warmth and beauty and even humor there is. The piece is scarily perfect.Berg is incredibly smart, of course. But when the story becomes unbearable in its sadness near the end, he actually simplifies the music, which gives us room to really feel the pain, and the destiny, and all of that. He gives us time to digest everything, and then of course the final hit comes. It’s just absolutely awful.Stuart Skelton, left, and Waltraud Meier in “Wozzeck” at the Met in 2011.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesDavid T. Little, composerIt was the first piece that I had encountered that I felt was really looking at the tougher parts of life, and not looking away. I had always been drawn to the idea of opera, but looking at Mozart and Verdi, it felt like we were dealing with characters who were not real people, at least not to me, with my background. When I first saw “Wozzeck,” these were ordinary people dealing with extraordinary things, and in the case of Wozzeck, a world that is really bearing down on this character.I remember being shaken by that big, unison B crescendo near the end, just the sense of it being so inescapable. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the 12-minute crescendo at the end of my opera “Dog Days” is a B quarter flat; it’s a homage or reference to that moment. There’s life before that piece, and life after it.Act III, Scene 2Vienna Philharmonic; Claudio Abbado, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)Matthias Goerne, baritoneWhat Berg has made out of Büchner’s play, I think it’s the most perfect piece we have, in terms of story, the characters. Everybody is completely in shape in their character and you immediately find out what kind of person it is, and about their relationship to all the others.You have two different levels. You have this very depressing underdog, Wozzeck, who is in this position of slavery. He constantly needs money. He can feel that something in his relationship is not right. He becomes more and more crazy, and out of control. On the other side, it’s a tragic love story. He becomes a murderer. You have empathy, you feel something for him — but in the end he is killing a human being.Christine Goerke, sopranoI find Marie to be such a complicated and conflicted character. Like so many of us right now, she tries to find the joy in simple things in what seems like an uncaring world. She doesn’t have much, so she tries to do the best with what she has. She grasps at her moments of joy, and then feels guilty for them later. She feels that she should do better, she should be better, she should be content with what she has, and if she can do that — perhaps it will help her to avoid judgment. She is a mother who struggles to keep her own identity as a woman. I have been this woman. Depending on the day, I am this woman.Berg, the composer Brett Dean said, “was the one who married process with engagement, married the head with the heart — or the stomach.”Imagno/Getty ImagesFranz Welser-Möst, conductorWhat Alban Berg did in making the story so compact and emotionally so intense — I think to this very day, people are just totally gripped with the story, especially at the end. We always have an enormous empathy with children, and when that boy comes out and sings “Hopp, hopp!” that’s the latest point, if you have any human emotions, when you start crying in that opera.Schoenberg, when he wrote 12-tone music, never broke the rules that he set up. Berg did, because Berg was such a genius in the theater that he knew, like Mozart, that sometimes you have to break the rules to be more impactful.Act III, Scene 5Vienna Philharmonic; Claudio Abbado, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)Missy Mazzoli, composerThis was the first opera I saw live, at the Met in 1999, when I was 18. It awakened me to this idea that I now see as one of opera’s superpowers, which is to show us the darkest sides of human nature. In that 90 minutes I had this visceral experience of recognizing my own dark side, and allowing myself to go there because I was in the safe, velvet box of the theater.In a way, I’m shocked that it’s not more influential. I wish that opera had continued on this experimental path. “Wozzeck” was not an outlier; it was celebrated and performed everywhere. Berg lived off it for a long time, and had the honor of being denounced by the Nazis. Now opera has retreated — for the most part; there are many exceptions — into a safer, more palatable space. Part of me wishes we could bring back that momentum of the “degenerate” art. More

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      Review: Leonard Bernstein’s ‘A Quiet Place’ at the Paris Opera

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      In Paris, a new production of “A Quiet Place” makes a strong case for a work that has long struggled to join the repertory.PARIS — “We’re going to listen to music that describes emotions — feelings like pain, happiness, loneliness, anger, love,” Leonard Bernstein once said during an episode of his beloved, televised “Young People’s Concerts.”“I guess most music is like that,” he added. “And the better it is, the more it will make you feel those emotions that the composer felt when he was writing.”Bernstein was introducing Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, but he could just as easily have been speaking about his own music — even his grim and spiky final opera, “A Quiet Place.” With a libretto by Stephen Wadsworth, this piece has had a tortured history, struggling to find its form before and after its 1983 premiere. It was heavily criticized, and revised several times, culminating in 2013 with a version by Garth Edwin Sunderland that could give this work — in a genre that kept eluding Bernstein — a brighter future.That version, a sweeping rethinking of the piece’s dramaturgy and orchestration, has been altered again for the Paris Opera, which is giving Sunderland’s edition its most prominent staging yet in a new production that opened on Wednesday at the Palais Garnier.In the conductor Kent Nagano, the production has the world’s finest champion of “A Quiet Place,” who several years ago recorded Sunderland’s version and again leads it to brilliant and illuminating effect. And in the director Krzysztof Warlikowski, it has one of the European stage’s smartest interpreters of family dysfunction and sexual complexity, the opera’s central themes.At the end of Act II, Warlikowski adds a scene in which a boy sneakily watches that episode of “Young People’s Concerts” after his parents go to sleep. And in its best moments, the work gives you what Bernstein described on TV: the ability to make you feel the emotions he had when he was writing an at times painfully personal opera. It remains full of flaws — mainly, clichés of mid-20th-century American ennui — yet in its current form, it is also a piece of subtlety and suggestion, a short story with the weight of a novel, an example of masterly craft and postmodern style.“A Quiet Place” — the story of a matriarch’s death, and the reconciliation it brings her broken family, inspired by Bernstein and Wadsworth’s own losses — was originally created as a sequel to Bernstein’s satirical, jazzy one-act “Trouble in Tahiti,” from the early 1950s; they were first presented together as a punishingly long double bill. Bernstein and Wadsworth revised “A Quiet Place” to be a single, three-act work, with “Trouble in Tahiti” incorporated as flashbacks. That, too, made for a bloated evening, in length and in a maximalist scoring for over 70 musicians, including electric guitar and synthesizer.Sunderland’s version is leaner in every respect. He does away with “Trouble in Tahiti,” whose bitter effervescence collided ungracefully with the thorniness of “A Quiet Place,” and reduced some characters while expanding others, reinstating some arias that had been cut. He reorchestrated the score for just 18 players, and the running time was brought down to roughly 90 minutes, with no intermission.For the Paris Opera, Sunderland kept the brevity but fleshed out the instrumentation — a Goldilocks medium between 18 and 72 musicians — including added winds and brasses, along with a harpsichord and organ, which provides heft and naturalism in the Act I funeral without sacrificing the clarity of the 2013 version. The electric guitar and synthesizer, which inevitably evoke the 1980s, are thankfully still gone.Johanna Wokalek, front right, is an addition in the silent role of Dinah, normally just mentioned by name but here haunting the stage throughout.Bernd UhligTo further avoid seeming dated, Warlikowski’s staging, while set in 1983, is not a facsimile of its time. It takes place in a single room, faced head-on, of towering walls and with sets simultaneously familiar and impossible to place: that era’s fashions, surrounded by sleek, futuristic panels. Spaces like these — designed by Warlikowski’s frequent collaborator Malgorzata Szczesniak, and typical of his productions — can feel at once expansive and suffocating, and his characters tend to behave accordingly, both exposed and trapped.Warlikowski is otherwise largely deferential to the libretto — with a few affecting interventions. Dinah, one half of the unhappy couple of “Trouble in Tahiti,” isn’t in “A Quiet Place,” which begins with her funeral. But Warlikowski casts a silent actor (Johanna Wokalek) in the role, and she haunts the stage throughout, in a blending of time and memory that mirrors the non sequiturs of the libretto’s slides into reverie and role play.It’s one of several ways Dinah is present in this production, which opens with a video (by Kamil Polak) of her fatal car accident — likely a suicide, almost certainly under the influence — and, for the rending Act I postlude music, projects a portrait of her above the coffin and crematory. In it, she is the face of the post-World War II American ideal, but with the empty expression and double-edged smile of a James Rosenquist painting.Dinah and her husband, Sam — the baritone Russell Braun, a standout, delicate and with a vast emotional range of pain, anger and aimlessness — had two children. One is the gay, mentally ill Junior (the bass-baritone Gordon Bintner, elegant in his rage and woefully redolent of “Dear Evan Hansen” in his constant, visible neuroses); the other, Dede (Claudia Boyle, a soprano who warmed up to the role as the evening went on).A new member of the family is François, Dede’s husband (Frédéric Antoun, strained at the opera’s climax), whom she met through his former lover, Junior. If that suggests incestuous behavior, just wait: We learn that Junior and Dede also experimented with each other as children.From left, Antoun, Bintner, Wokalek, Braun and Boyle near the opera’s ending, in which the family discovers that its only way forward is forgiveness.Bernd UhligJunior enters the funeral in a garish, pink-and-purple cowboy outfit — a choice that makes sense later when he is represented as a boy wearing the same costume, being held and then rejected by his mother. The opera’s conflation of insanity and homosexuality has long been one of its problems, but Warlikowski helps slightly by treating Junior’s queerness as coincident with, rather than the cause of, his arrested development. Other things that have aged poorly, though, are baked into the text; Dinah’s misery-driven alcoholism is more worthy of sighs than sympathy.There were more innovative American operas that premiered in the 1980s: Philip Glass’s portrait of resistance in “Satyagraha”; or the grand, nearly mythic treatment of leaders in Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” and in John Adams’s “Nixon in China.” “A Quiet Place” benefits from no longer being so directly juxtaposed with them; it is now easier to meet on its own terms, neither avant-garde nor as eager to please as Bernstein’s earlier works.And while it can sometimes feel like a rote regurgitation of postwar culture and its miseries, the ambiguous ending is something of a departure from those clichés. In Warlikowski’s staging, Bernstein’s uneasy final chords accompany an image of Dinah’s family sharing a sofa. The only way forward for them is forgiveness — not the most common way for an opera to end, but a recollection of a classic: Janacek’s “Jenufa.”Look closely at the four of them: Sam and Junior, reunited; François; and Dede, who scoots, visibly uncomfortable, away from her husband. They are still suffering, in a cycle you could see continuing to the present day. The distinctly American darkness of “A Quiet Place” may be more relevant than we’d like to think.A Quiet PlaceThrough March 30 at the Paris Opera; operadeparis.fr. More