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      Packing Your Purse (or Pockets) for a Night at the Opera

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      When I was in graduate school in Manhattan, my friend Bernard and I went to the opera without eating supper.Bernard and I had met at a fancy food market in SoHo where we both had part-time jobs behind the bread station. I was going to be a famous writer and he a famous set designer. But in the meantime, we spent our bread wages on the cheapest Family Circle tickets at the Metropolitan Opera, then hummed the arias from “Eugene Onegin” and “La Bohème” while we sliced seven grains and stacked up the baguettes.Our shift lasted past dinnertime, and the sandwiches and flutes of Champagne at the intermission bars were beyond our students’ budget. So we always came packing snacks — hearty, filling bites that could sustain us through “Götterdämmerung” but were small enough to stash inside my vintage beaded purse.Ready for intermission with, from left, brownie shortbread bars, almond-stuffed dates and hand pies. Don’t forget the napkin.Winnie Au for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Jade ZimmermanIn nice weather, we munched egg salad sandwiches and homemade chocolate truffles perched at the edge of the fountain in Damrosch Park adjacent to Lincoln Center. When it was stormy, we would eat leaning against the rails of the balcony, watching fancy patrons savor their intermission baked alaskas at the Grand Tier restaurant below, assuming that one day in the distant future, that would be us.That distant future has arrived, and I’m still toting intermission nibbles to the Met in the same vintage purse. I plan to continue this season as well (the Met reopens Monday). But these days, I’m accompanied by my husband, Daniel, whose essential contribution is a (possibly illicit) flask full of bourbon or pre-mixed Manhattans tucked into his pocket.By now we could spring for sandwiches and Champagne at the bar, or even the Grand Tier, but we rarely do. My picnics, which are made to order — and, I think, a much more fun way to pass the 30 to 40 minutes of an average Met intermission — have become part of the opera ritual. And this year, picnicking offers another advantage: pulling your mask down to eat outside at Damrosch Park can be a Delta variant-savvy way to go.Ms. Clark with the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo. Before his days of starring as Akhnaten at the opera, he picnicked on a bench, too.Winnie Au for The New York TimesOver the years of Falstaffs and Salomes, I’ve learned a few best practices when it comes to packing these petite opera tidbits.The first and foremost is to minimize the mess by avoiding sloppy, saucy morsels. I like to think of opera snacks in the same way that I’d choose hors d’oeuvres for a party. Neat, self-contained finger foods that can be nibbled in one hand while you hold a drink in the other work best, preferably things that taste good at room temperature.I’m partial to small tea sandwiches stacked with onion, cucumbers or smoked salmon for the first intermission, followed by some kind of sweet bite — say, almond-stuffed dates or homemade brownie shortbread bars, for a sugar jolt — to get me through that final act. Phyllo pastries filled with anything from ground lamb and feta to butternut squash and mint, or all manner of sweet or savory hand pies, could also work well.Then there are maki rolls, as long they’re filled with vegetables or something cooked. You don’t want raw fish sitting under your seat for the entire 100 minutes of the first two acts of “Don Carlos.”At top: savory options, including hand pies, kimbap and tea sandwiches. Below, the sweet: truffles, stuffed dates and brownie shortbread bars. On the side, a tin of sea salt and a flask, for washing it all down.Winnie Au for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Jade ZimmermanThe countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, who is reprising his star turn as Akhnaten in the 2021-22 season, used to bring homemade kimbap or avocado-cucumber maki to eat on a bench in the park back when he was a student, and these are an excellent option that you can either make or buy.“I certainly picnicked a lot when I used to attend the opera as a youth,” he said. “As a performer, backstage picnicking is a whole other level of intrigue with meals that will make you sing well but not look zaftig in your costume.” (Perhaps particularly because Mr. Costanzo spends part of Akhnaten with almost no costume at all.)Once you’ve decided which snacks to bring, you should consider the packing vessel (you’ll want something that can fit in a small purse or bag). That old plastic yogurt container may work just fine, but a cute and colorful bento box or metal tiffin container is a lot snazzier to set atop your lap. And a thin linen napkin can save your opera finery from splashes and drips.One thing you must avoid is ever going to the opera hungry. The mid-20th century writer Joseph Wechsberg describes the consequences at the Viennese opera house in his epicurean memoir, “Blue Trout and Black Truffles.”Egg salad sandwiches have the protein to sustain you.Winnie Au for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Jade ZimmermanMr. Costanzo has to snack smartly backstage, given his revealing costume.Winnie Au for The New York Times“Sometimes my stomach would start to make rumbling noises just as the tenor sang a pianissimo, and everybody looked at me. Some well-fed people made ‘shsh-t!’ It was very embarrassing,” Mr. Wechsberg wrote.His response was to bring raw bacon sandwiches sprinkled with paprika to munch during the first act of “Die Walküre.”“While Siegmund and Sieglinde sang their beautiful duet about sweet Love and Spring, the sweet scent of paprika seemed to descend, like light fog, all over the fourth gallery.”It’s best to bring the sort of finger foods that can be nibbled in one hand while you hold your drink (or your food stash) in the other.Winnie Au for The New York TimesOf course, eating in the auditorium during the opera at the Met is always forbidden, and especially now. But eat paprika-sprinkled sandwiches at the second interval, and the sweet scent will carry you most of the way through Act III.Bernard and I once made one of Mr. Wechsberg’s opera sandwiches, though I admit that after much deliberation, we cooked the bacon before showering on the paprika, and stuffed it all in between slices of sourdough, courtesy of the fancy food shop where we worked.We were still wrapped in our light fog of paprika as Brünnhilde fell to dreaming in her magic ring of fire, our bellies content, all our senses alert, our hearts full.If only my past self could see what a culinary gift was passing down to future me. And an entire tier of opera patrons has been saved from indiscreet rumblings during the pianissimos. More

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      ‘Aria Code’ Explores the Meaning Behind the Music

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      The podcast hopes to extend the appeal of opera, “an art form that comes with a fair bit of baggage,” to a larger audience.For many fans, the highlight of any opera is a standout aria, like “O mio babbino caro” from Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi” or “Vesti la giubba” from Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci.”But there’s more to these works than one intense tune, and many listeners are turning to opera-themed podcasts to better understand the layers of this emotion-filled art form.One such podcast among many is “Aria Code,” a collaboration by the classical music radio station WQXR and the Metropolitan Opera in New York and hosted by Rhiannon Giddens. A singer, composer and musician originally from North Carolina, Ms. Giddens studied opera at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and helped found the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a string band in which she sang and played fiddle and banjo.Rhiannon Giddens, a singer, musician and composer, said she jumped at the chance to host “Aria Code,” in part because of “the sheer universality of opera.”Karen Cox for The New York Times“Aria Code” uses the tagline “The magic of opera revealed, one song at a time” and humorous episode titles like “Once More Into the Breeches: Joyce DiDonato Sings Strauss” and “Breaking Mad: Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor.”The series has expanded its audience in this, its third season: Downloads of the podcast have increased more than 20 percent from season 2, according to its co-creator and lead producer, Merrin Lazyan.The podcast has also helped the Met reach its audience while the opera house was shut down for nearly 18 months by the Covid-19 pandemic. (The opera officially reopens on Monday, although it played host to an audience on Sept. 11 for a live performance of Verdi’s Requiem.)Gillian Brierley, assistant general manager of marketing and communications at the Met, said by email that the podcast was one way the Met was “reaching out not only to opera lovers but also to new audiences, bringing to life the range of emotions in opera through vivid storytelling and interviews as well as treasured recordings from our audio archives.”The seed of the idea for “Aria Code” came from Ms. Lazyan, who studied classical voice performance at the Royal College of Music in London. At WQXR in 2017, she suggested a segment in which a Met artist would explain the “Queen of the Night” aria from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” scored using the Met’s archival recordings. But colleagues saw wider potential, proposing a series “that could potentially open up an art form that comes with a fair bit of baggage to a wider audience,” she wrote in an email.Merrin Lazyan, the show’s co-creator and lead producer, planted the seed for the podcast with an idea in 2017.Rick StockwellAs the format evolved, Ms. Lazyan said, a team from WQXR and WNYC Studios (the podcast division of New York Public Radio) hit upon including multiple guests and people from outside the opera world to make the topics more relevant to modern lives. (Episodes conclude with a recorded Met performance of the selected aria.)“We realized that the best version of this show would be one that delights existing opera fans, but is also accessible to an audience that’s new to opera, or perhaps even skeptical of it,” she said. “We didn’t want to water it down, but we did want to break through the barriers.”In choosing an aria for an episode, Ms. Lazyan works closely with the Met. “Prepandemic,” she said, “all of the selected arias and artists were featured in the Met’s current onstage season, and we did our best to align episode releases with their production schedule. This year, we chose arias from both their canceled and upcoming seasons.”To keep “Aria Code” interesting, producers aim for a mix of well-known operas and what Ms. Lazyan called more obscure gems, along with a variety of voice types and even languages.“When it comes to the other guests on the show — the musicologists and dramaturges, the scientists and doctors, the athletes and writers and more — I choose them,” she said, sometimes with input from Ms. Giddens and others.Finding the right host was also key, she said, calling Ms. Giddens a “dream host for so many reasons.”“It was important to us to find someone who understands and appreciates this music, but is not necessarily an opera insider,” Ms. Lazyan said, but a guide for “lifelong opera lovers, people who are curious but have only dipped a toe in, and people who thought it was all a bunch of senseless caterwauling.”Ms. Giddens’s “focus in her own music is on excavating the past and telling bold truths about our present,” Ms. Lazyan said, “which is exactly what ‘Aria Code’ aims to do as well.”Ms. Giddens in the studio at WQXR, which produces “Aria Code” with the Metropolitan Opera.Max Fine/WQXRMs. Giddens said she jumped at the chance to host in part because of “the sheer universality of opera — these deeply emotive stories reflect the best and the worst of human nature, done with mind-bending talent and artistic collaboration.”She added that she has always been interested in equal access to the arts. “If given the chance,” she said, “people who hate the idea of opera could actually love it, if exposed to it in the right way.”That’s not always easy. “Helping listeners connect to the emotion within opera can be a challenge offstage,” Ms. Lazyan conceded.“For some arias, the sheer athleticism of opera performance is front and center,” she said. “Singing is such a personal and internal process, and it can be difficult to verbalize the nuanced inner workings of an artist’s technical and interpretive approach.“But hearing a singer describe how hitting the high note at the end of an exuberant coloratura passage feels like being up in the heavens among the stars, and simultaneously hearing that final high note ring out like a bell as the singer is talking about it, makes this process immediate and thrilling for listeners.”Other arias “welcome a much more personal and intimate kind of storytelling,” Ms. Lazyan said. “For those, I seek out guests with a personal experience that parallels the events or the emotional heart of the music.”For “Madama Butterfly,” the psychotherapist Kyoko Katayama “told the story of her mother, whose love affair with an American G.I. who abandoned her, pregnant, in Japan was an uncanny parallel to the abandonment and betrayal of Cio-Cio San in the opera,” Ms. Lazyan said.“Throughout the episode, you hear Kyoko’s story in parallel with the ‘Butterfly’ story. You hear how deeply personal it is, and that really opens the door to a different way of feeling the power of this music.”While the music and its composer can be the main draw, what about the librettists who fashioned the words?“Aria Code” certainly doesn’t ignore them, but the opera director Keturah Stickann, based in Knoxville, Tenn., puts them squarely in the spotlight in another podcast, “Words First: Talking Text in Opera.” She highlights librettists, she said by email, “because I feel like they sort of disappear when talking about a work. I like to make sure we say their names.” More

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      The Podcasts Opera Pros Tune To

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      Many favor shows about classical music, of course, but they also listen to shows about pop songs, “The Moth” and Conan O’Brien.“Aria Code” is an increasingly popular podcast. But what else do opera professionals listen to? Here are some recommendations. (Their comments, by email, have been edited and condensed.)Merrin Lazyan, co-creator and lead producer of “Aria Code”:I’ve enjoyed the podcasts produced by Glyndebourne Opera and LA Opera, as well as the new one from San Francisco Opera called “North Stage Door.” The Met’s other podcast, “In Focus,” is a great source of information about the history and context of various operas.Another music podcast that I enjoy, which features some opera but isn’t opera-specific, is “Soul Music” from the BBC. It’s a little like “Aria Code,” in that each episode includes several people talking about a single song and capturing its emotional resonance. But when I’m out for a run, there’s no Maria Callas or Marian Anderson, just Madonna and Michael Jackson.Sondra Radvanovsky, a co-host of the “Screaming Divas” podcast, performing in a recital in Spain in 2019.David Borrat/EPA, via ShutterstockKeri Alkema, Ms. Radvanovsky’s co-host on “Screaming Divas,” onstage in “Tosca” in London in 2016.Robbie Jack /Corbis, via Getty ImagesNicky Spence, tenor who will sing the role of Laca in “Jenufa” starting Tuesday at the Royal Opera House in London:Opera singers are often plagued with earworms of the music we’re in the midst of learning or performing, so I often take solace in the world of spoken-word podcasts. I’m a huge fan of Jess Gillam’s podcast “This Classical Life,” where she chats casually about classical music in a really accessible way with a fellow young musician. They don’t try to make classical music hip, but they are very cool with some great content. It’s the perfect gateway into the genre.Another lovely, informative podcast is “AA Opera!” headed by two young ladies — Ash and Avi — who manage to interview the starriest names in opera but make it sound like you’re just sitting at their kitchen table, which joyfully demystifies the concept of opera’s being grand.My guilty aural treat is “Screaming Divas” with opera royalty Sondra Radvanovsky and Keri Alkema. They take on my favorite folk in interview including Jamie Barton, Ben Heppner and Kate Lindsey as they pick through everything from popular culture, turning left at sex toys and of course, opera!Cori Ellison, an opera dramaturge who is a member of the Vocal Arts faculty at the Juilliard School and has appeared on “Aria Code” and other podcasts:“Aria Code” is absolutely top of the heap, intriguingly and beautifully curated, with high production values. “He Sang She Sang” is a slightly older but also terrific opera podcast by the radio station WQXR [co-hosted and produced by Ms. Lazyan]. Also very worthwhile are the “OperaHERE” podcasts by the Michigan Opera Theater and podcasts by the English National Opera; Opera North from Leeds, England; “The In-Tune A-Z of Opera” by the BBC; LA Opera; Seattle Opera; Minnesota Opera; and Glyndebourne in Sussex County, England.Charlie Harding, left, and Nate Sloan, co-hosts of “Switched on Pop.”Ellyn JamesonGillian Brierley, assistant general manager of marketing and communications at the Met:“Switched on Pop,” produced by Vulture, is a great music podcast that analyzes pop songs, interweaving musicological tidbits in a very approachable way. They had a great four-part mini-series with the New York Philharmonic called “The 5th” about Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in celebration of the composer’s 250th birthday.“Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” is among the non-music podcasts favored by the soprano Amy Burton.Team Coco/Earwolf, via Associated PressAmy Burton, New York-based soprano who has sung at the Met and the White House and teaches at Juilliard and the Mannes School of Music:Opera can be intimidating to people who don’t speak foreign languages, or who are put off by the grandeur and scale of it all — the gigantic forces, the lengthy evenings, the audacity of the emotions expressed. “Aria Code” could really help people find their way into the art form. And for those who already love opera, it may provide a deeper understanding.However, my tendency after a day of teaching opera singers is to listen to podcasts about subjects other than music. By listening to poets, comedians, filmmakers and other artists, I feel it recharges my batteries creatively, both as a singer and a teacher. I wish I could recommend other music podcasts, but in my free time my focus is more on language — “The Writer’s Voice,” “The Plot Thickens,” “The Moth,” “Coffee Break French” — and “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” because I need laughter. More

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      Oedipus Takes to the Stages in Berlin

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      Four interpretations of the Greek myth have been produced in the German capital, all with resonances for our moment.BERLIN — “The city reeks with death in her streets,” the chorus laments in Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex.” Thebes is in the grip of a deadly plague. The king summons a prophet to divine the will of the gods, who accuses the monarch, “You are the cursed polluter of this land.”The theme of nature striking back, revolting against unnatural acts, is one that resonates 20 months into the Covid-19 pandemic and after a summer of climate-change-related extreme weather events, including flooding in Germany, deadly heat waves in Canada and fires in Greece.All that may help explain why, at the beginning of the theater season in Berlin, Sophocles’ tragic hero, the original mama’s boy, has been center stage in a quartet of new productions at some of the city’s leading companies.Arguably the most eagerly awaited was Maja Zade’s new play, “ödipus,” a contemporary reworking of the myth, which premiered at the Athens Epidaurus Festival this month and recently transferred to the Schaubühne. Michael, a young employee at a German chemical company, is dating his much older boss, Christina. Their relationship begins to fray over the handling of an investigation into a chemical spill, and Michael learns that the accident also caused the death of Christina’s first husband. Several revelations later, Michael puts two and two together and realizes that — spoiler alert — he killed his father and slept with his mother.The Kazakh director Evgeny Titov’s surreal production of “Œdipe” is far and away the most brutal of Berlin’s Oedipal offerings.Monika RittershausAny hint of ancient Greek cosmology is scrubbed clean from Zade’s version. The most explicit reference we get to myth in Thomas Ostermeier’s sleek and sterile production is a small statue of a sphinx perched on a kitchen counter. Jan Pappelbaum’s sparse set, framed by neon lights, has a sitcom-like realism. The dialogue, dispatched by the four-person cast around the kitchen table or a backyard grill, is stiff and largely functional. The actors struggle more against a poorly made play than they do against fate.The only one who succeeds is Caroline Peters as Christina, who, even more than her young lover, is the center of Zade’s play. Peters shows her talent for transcending mediocre dramatic material just as she did in the recent Schaubühne production of Simon Stone’s “Yerma.” At the climax of the production, she explains the awful truth to Michael. Her face is projected in close-up on a screen (the only time that the intermittent video serves a purpose), allowing us to register her every twitch during the lengthy speech. She pulls off the tricky monologue like a doctor steeling herself to give a patient a terrible diagnosis, putting aside her bedside manner because there’s no way to sugarcoat a revelation this horrific.Along with the gods and fate, Zade’s play also dispenses with the chorus, a mainstay of Greek drama, who provide a collective counterpoint to the individuals at the center of the drama. Chanting in unison, they also fill in background information and comment on the action, serving as something of a conduit between the main actors and the audience.This chorus, on the other hand, assumes center stage in the Deutsches Theater’s highly ritualistic “Oedipus,” a largely faithful production of Sophocles’ play directed by Ulrich Rasche. The contrast in tone and style with the down-to-earth realism of Ostermeier’s production could not be more striking.Rasche has devised an extremely precise mode of Maschinentheater, a theatrical approach that relies heavily on elaborate scenic elements and stagecraft. His industrial and dark productions derive much of their sweaty vitality from intense physical performances and droning music. His “Oedipus” is based on an 1804 translation by the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, whose language is archaic and pungently lyrical. The cast, treading in place on a constantly rotating stage, enunciates the text crisply and with studied intensity.The Deutsches Theater’s highly ritualistic “Oedipus,” a largely faithful production of Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” directed by Ulrich Rasche. Arno DeclairNico van Wersch’s score includes an electric bass, Moog synthesizer and microtonal keyboard. The chorus chants in unison, creating a percussive atmosphere that harmonizes with the concentric rings of color-changing fluorescent lights that tilt from the ceiling. The effect is arresting for the first hour, but then quickly turns soporific. Rasche takes his time — just shy of three hours — and the slow-moving production is maddeningly deliberate.Music played an even more prominent role in Berlin’s second pair of Oedipal productions.The British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage was a 20-something upstart in 1988 when he wrote “Greek,” which recently opened the Deutsche Oper Berlin’s season. This short, two-act opera is many things, including a scathing political and social commentary about Thatcher-era England and a self-conscious sendup of opera as an art form that, at its origin, sought to resurrect the spirit of ancient Greek drama.A spunky and potty-mouthed comic strip opera, “Greek” transposes the action from ancient Thebes to East London. Oedipus becomes Eddy, an angry young working-class man looking to better himself while fleeing a horrible fate predicted by a carnival fortune teller that has become a running gag in his family.In the Deutsche Oper’s parking lot (a corona-averse location also used last year for a reduced production of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold”), four singers pranced and strutted in the young German director Pinar Karabulut’s cartoonishly campy production, wearing colorful variations on ancient Greek garb, down to orange, purple and green curly wigs and beards. There’s a fair amount of spoken text, which the members of the all-American cast dispatched with exaggerated cockney accents when they weren’t belting out the eclectic score, which careens from dance hall crudeness to poignant lyricism.Dean Murphy in the British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage’s “Greek,” staged in the parking lot of the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Eike WalkenhorstTurnage’s irreverent work is one of the more recent musical versions of the Oedipus myth, a list that includes Stravinsky’s 1927 “Oedipus Rex” and the Doors’ “The End.” Among the most powerful is George Enescu’s 1936 opera, “Œdipe,” an underperformed 20th-century masterpiece that recently opened the Komische Oper Berlin’s season. (In a rare coincidence, a new production of the opera also kicked off the season at the Paris Opera.)The Kazakh director Evgeny Titov’s surreal production is far and away the most brutal of Berlin’s Oedipal offerings. The set resembles a derelict madhouse and is frequently awash in blood, from the tragic hero’s difficult birth to his transfiguring death in Colonus. In between are graphic depictions of Laius’ disembowelment and of Oedipus putting out his own eyes.Enescu’s musical language fuses various early modernist styles with traditional Romanian melodies and harmonies, which the orchestra of the Komische Oper, under the baton of its general music director, Ainars Rubikis, performs with assurance and intensity. The lengthy title role features ample Sprechgesang, a vocal style halfway between song and speech. The British baritone Leigh Melrose’s searing performance is as much a dramatic feat as it is a musical achievement. Of all the Oedipuses haunting the German capital, his is the most affecting, tragic and believable.Enescu began writing “Œdipe” shortly after Sigmund Freud first theorized the Oedipus complex, and the composer’s Oedipus is an archetype of modern man who, despite his quest for knowledge and self-understanding, is blind to himself, incapable of outrunning destiny and the agent of his own destruction.Is it any wonder that some of today’s leading theatermakers have turned to this 2,500-year-old existential detective story as we grapple with the catastrophes affecting our bodies and our planet? Like the ancients, we get the myths we deserve, not the ones we want.From left, Renato Schuch, Caroline Peters and Christian Tschirner in “ödipus,” by Maja Zade, directed by Thomas Ostermeier at the Schaubühne Berlin.Gianmarco Bresadolaödipus. Directed by Thomas Ostermeier. Schaubühne Berlin, through Sept. 26.Œdipe. Directed by Evgeny Titov. Komische Oper Berlin, through Sept. 26.Oedipus. Directed by Ulrich Rasche. Deutsches Theater Berlin, through Oct. 17. More

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      Carmen Balthrop, Soprano Known for Joplin Opera Role, Dies at 73

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      After winning a vocal competition in 1975, she starred in “Treemonisha,” which ended up on Broadway. She also sang for a senator.The soprano Carmen Balthrop made her Metropolitan Opera debut on April 6, 1977. Thirteen days later she made an entirely different sort of debut, in a hearing room of the United States Senate.That day Ms. Balthrop, still early in a career that would take her to opera and concert stages all over the world, was one of a number of people testifying at a meeting of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee in support of funding for the arts.It was a dreary and underattended meeting, with Senator Mark O. Hatfield, Republican of Oregon and the subcommittee chairman, the only member of the panel present. Dreary, that is, until Senator Hatfield, skeptical of the funding request, challenged Ms. Balthrop’s assertion that opera singers were a disciplined and hard-working lot.“He said, ‘Come on, are you really that disciplined?’” she told Knight-Ridder afterward. “And he said he’d like to hear some of the results. I said, ‘Why, certainly.’”She stood up and sang “Signore, ascolta” from Puccini’s “Turandot.”“He was delighted and declared a recess,” she said, “and later on, we got the money.”Ms. Balthrop, a noted Black star when opera was still early in its efforts to become more diverse, died on Sept. 5 at her home in Mitchellville, Md. She was 73.Her husband, Patrick A. Delaney, said the cause was cancer.Two years before that impromptu Senate performance, Ms. Balthrop’s career took off after she wowed audiences at the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in April 1975, winning that competition. During the finals, she had sung that same “Turandot” excerpt, as well as “Che sento? O Dio!” from Handel’s “Julius Caesar,” performances that had been broadcast live on National Public Radio.“The announcement of Miss Balthrop’s victory brought cheers from the audience, which had clearly approved of her singing,” The New York Times reported.Later that year she landed perhaps her most prominent role, the title character in “Treemonisha,” Scott Joplin’s folk opera about an 18-year-old Black girl who is trying to lead her people to a better life. The opera, written before World War I, was not produced in Joplin’s lifetime, but in 1972 a version of it was staged in Atlanta, and three years later the Houston Grand Opera mounted a production with Ms. Balthrop in the lead.The opera was performed in Houston seven times as part of a free opera series, with thousands attending. At the final performance, the opera’s finale, “A Real Slow Drag,” was reprised three times for the enthusiastic crowd.That production moved to Broadway. At the time, Elizabeth McCann was managing director of Nederlander Productions, which brought the show to New York. (Ms. McCann died this month.) She told The Times that the ability of Ms. Balthrop, who was then 27, to portray a teenager was a large part of the reason.“Carmen Balthrop, who plays the title role, is just tremendous,” she said. “The part needs an enchanting and innocent girl with strength. How often do you get a combination like that?”Ms. Balthrop as Pamina in Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte.” She made her Metropolitan Opera debut in the role in 1977.James Heffernan/Metropolitan Opera ArchivesCarmen Arlene Balthrop was born on May 14, 1948, in Washington. Her father, John, worked in the printing office of the Department of Justice, and her mother, Clementine (Jordan) Balthrop, was a homemaker.As Ms. Balthrop often told the story, she set her career goal early — when she was 8. Her father had a hobby: In the basement of the family home, he would tinker with radios and televisions. She had an assigned Saturday chore: to clean the house while her mother went to the market.“One Saturday I was running the vacuum cleaner, and I turned it off because I heard something very unusual coming from the basement,” where her father was testing a radio and speakers, she told “The Opera Diva Series,” a web interview program, in 2011.“I went to the top of the steps and I called out,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Daddy, what’s that?’ He said, ‘That’s opera.’”Specifically, it was the voice of Leontyne Price, the groundbreaking Black soprano.“Something was awakened in me,” Ms. Balthrop said, “and I began from that moment on to try to re-create that sound myself.”She graduated from Theodore Roosevelt High School in Washington in 1967 and earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Maryland in 1971. The next year she received a master’s degree in music at the Catholic University of America.Her Met debut in 1977 was in “Die Zauberflöte,” in which she sang the role of Pamina. She performed with numerous other opera companies and symphonies, including Washington Opera, Deutsche Oper of Berlin and Opera Columbus in Ohio, where in 1999 she performed the title role in the world premiere of “Vanqui,” an opera about the travels of the souls of two slaves composed by Leslie Burrs and with a libretto by John A. Williams.Ms. Balthrop began a career as a teacher at the University of Maryland in 1985. She also filled administrative roles there, including coordinator of the voice and opera division.A marriage to Dorceal Duckens ended in divorce. In addition to Mr. Delaney, whom she married in 1985, Ms. Balthrop is survived by a daughter from her first marriage, Nicole Mosley; her daughter with Mr. Delaney, Camille Delaney-McNeil; and three grandchildren.In a blog entry on the University of Maryland website, Ms. Balthrop once wrote of being surprised by Ms. Price, who turned up unexpectedly at a rehearsal when Ms. Balthrop was preparing to perform in San Francisco.“There was no one in the hall,” she wrote of their encounter. “I was standing there with the voice that inspired me to sing. Every time I think about it, I just well up, because I don’t think people get to meet their idols very often.” More

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      Review: For Armory Recitals, a Modest but Memorable Return

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      Paul Appleby and Conor Hanick presented a song program focused on cycles by Beethoven and Berg.The past few weeks have brought heartening signs that classical music is coming back to New York after the devastating pandemic closures of the past year and a half. The Metropolitan Opera reopened the doors for an inspiring performance of Verdi’s Requiem on Sept. 11. The New York Philharmonic inaugurated its new season last week.On Monday evening a much more modest, but no less meaningful, return took place when the tenor Paul Appleby and the pianist Conor Hanick presented a song recital in the elegantly intimate Board of Officers Room at the Park Avenue Armory.Just over 90 people, a near-capacity crowd for the salon-like space, attended this intelligent and beautifully performed program of German lieder — lasting two hours, with an intermission, just as concerts generally used to before everything stopped. The program repeats on Wednesday, and two more artist pairs fill out the fall in the space: Will Liverman and Myra Huang next month, and Jamie Barton and Warren Jones in November.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesAppleby is best known for opera, including the title role in Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” and David in Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” which he sings next month at the Met. Yet he has long been devoted to the song literature, including many new and recent works.This Armory program arose from his desire to pair two song cycles, Beethoven’s “An die ferne Geliebte” and Berg’s “Altenberg Lieder” — both of which, as he wrote in program notes, “address ways of coping with unfulfilled wishes, with dreams that did not come true.” To place these cycles in context, he performed selected songs by Schumann and Schubert that also grapple with loss and pain and offer coping mechanisms — including, as Appleby put it, “numb nihilism.”Both cycles were historically momentous. Beethoven’s set of six songs, from 1816, offered a template for the 19th-century German song cycle. The poems, by Alois Jeitteles, present a protagonist thinking of his lost home, his distant beloved, his unfulfilled love. The songs flow from one to the next, giving the cycle the sense of a unified, if episodic, narrative. Appleby sang the tender pieces with warmth and heartache, and brought almost eerie vitality to moments of heady nostalgia. Hanick, a brilliant pianist more often heard in thorny contemporary scores, played with crispness, nuance and grace.Berg’s 1912 work, which sets five short texts by the German writer Peter Altenberg, was originally written for mezzo-soprano and lush orchestra. The public reaction when two of the songs were introduced at a concert in Vienna was so hostile that their aggrieved composer never had them performed again. But the work pointed the way to a new 20th-century musical language. Appleby and Hanick performed a version with a piano reduction that allowed the tenor — with a relatively lighter, lyric voice — to bring out subtleties in the vocal lines. And Hanick’s playing was a revelation of clarity and bite.There were lovely accounts of all the Schubert and Schumann works. I was especially gratified to hear these artists call attention to little-heard songs from Schumann’s later years, like the dreamy “An den Mond,” which opened the wonderful program, and the autumnal, harmonically tart “Abendlied,” which ended it.Paul Appleby and Conor HanickRepeats Wednesday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.com. More

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      A Cabaret Star and an Opera Star Walk Onto a Stage …

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      The punchline is “Only an Octave Apart,” featuring the unlikely collaborators Justin Vivian Bond and Anthony Roth Costanzo at St. Ann’s Warehouse.“This show has been 10 years in the making,” the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo said recently.He was talking about “Only an Octave Apart,” an undefinable event — A staged concert? A revue, maybe? — which he created with Justin Vivian Bond and which runs at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn from Tuesday through Oct. 3.On paper, the two seem to be unlikely collaborators. Bond, 58, is a throaty-toned pioneer of the alternative cabaret scene, both as a solo artist and as half of the duo Kiki and Herb. Costanzo, 39, is a classical star whose luminous voice takes him to opera houses and concert halls around the world. (In the spring, he’ll return to his body-waxed role as the titular character of Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” at the Metropolitan Opera.)But Costanzo’s voracious taste for collaboration has encompassed artists as disparate as the painter George Condo, the ballet dancer David Hallberg and the fashion designer Raf Simons. And Bond recently appeared in an opera, Olga Neuwirth’s “Orlando,” in Vienna in 2019.Costanzo is a countertenor who is returning to the title role in Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” at the Metropolitan Opera in the spring.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesBond is an alt-cabaret artist who rose to fame as half of the duo Kiki and Herb.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesSo it’s not entirely implausible that they’ve ended up together at St. Ann’s, where their set list ricochets giddily from Gluck to Jobim to the Bangles, and the artistic team includes the director Zack Winokur (“The Black Clown”), the fashion designer Jonathan Anderson and the composer Nico Muhly on arrangements.Bond and Costanzo’s partnership is more organic than most “when worlds collide” projects, which often feel as if an enterprising impresario had pulled random names out of a hat and precipitately pushed the unlucky artists onstage.“We were seeing each other because we were friends, not because we were intending to collaborate,” Bond said, sitting with Costanzo after a recent rehearsal.Back in 2011, Costanzo was in the audience at Joe’s Pub for one of Bond’s cabaret outings. When Bond mentioned from the stage that the guest artist for an upcoming performance had just dropped out and there wasn’t a replacement, Costanzo leaned over to a friend and whispered, “Me!”The friend, the photographer and director Matthew Placek, also knew Bond and made the introductions. Costanzo nabbed the guest spot and prepared a Handel aria, but he was also keen to join voices on “Summertime.”“You said no,” Costanzo recalled to Bond in the interview. “Then right before the show started, I was practicing it and you were like, ‘All right, all right, we will do it as a duet.’”The inspiration for “Only an Octave Apart,” and the title number, came from a television special Carol Burnett and Beverly Sills recorded at the Met in 1976. Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThe combo was a success. “We sounded so good together,” Bond said. “Of course, that song’s problematic and we can’t sing it anymore, but it gave us an opportunity to see our chemistry onstage, which was really fun.”So much so that they are back for more, though the initial impetus was rather pedestrian: Costanzo wasn’t sure what to do next for his record company. “I just didn’t want to make ‘Scarlatti Cantatas’ or something,” he said. “I mean, they’re beautiful, but it’s been done.”Teaming up with Bond provided a creative solution. (And this won’t be their last partnership of the season. They will come together at the New York Philharmonic in January as part of the “Authentic Selves” festival that Costanzo is organizing.)The inspiration for “Only an Octave Apart,” and the title number, came from a pop-culture footnote: a television special that Carol Burnett and Beverly Sills recorded at the Met in 1976. A similar encounter of disparate influences and high and low culture (or at least what audiences associate with high and low), flavored with vaudevillian touches, will now be played out at St. Ann’s.At first, even the longtime Bond collaborator Thomas Bartlett — who is the show’s music director and producer of the album version of “Octave,” which comes out in January — was skeptical.“When the idea was pitched to me, it sounded a bit like a fun joke,” he said in a video call. “It didn’t occur to me that Anthony’s voice would make Viv’s voice feel rich and kind and wise in this way, and that Viv would make Anthony sound even more ethereal.”Bond, Costanzo and Bartlett came up with a wide range of material. Some of the songs are duets, like Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush’s “Don’t Give Up.” Some are solos in conversation with each other, such as when an aria from Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen” segues into the early-20th-century ditty “There Are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden.” Some are classics from the cabaret repertoire, like “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.” And some are the kind of free associations in which Kiki and Herb used to specialize, like a surprisingly effective medley of “Dido’s Lament” — also by Purcell — and Dido’s “White Flag.”“We’re holding our own space, but we’re doing it together,” Bond said.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesDespite the mingling of their musical universes, the performers stay true to their respective styles. “We’re not crossing over,” Bond said firmly. “We’re holding our own space, but we’re doing it together.” They do not scat-sing Purcell, for example, and Costanzo does not imitate the disco singer Sylvester’s famous falsetto when the pair covers his track “Stars.”“I was like, how do I take an application of this voice and technique that feels honest and that sings the song?” Costanzo said. “I listen to opera singers try to sing pop and it’s so lame, because inevitably they wind up trying to sing some classical arrangement to a pop song.”During a recent rehearsal, Bond often left space for future improvisation. “I’m going to come out, they’re going to see me, I’m going to milk it for a moment,” Bond said at one point, describing an entrance. Costanzo, on the other hand, is used to the precision of classical music, where every note and step is carefully planned.“Sometimes my frustration with opera is that all spontaneity dies in pursuit of perfection,” he said. “I want to uphold and cherish the tradition, but in order to make it feel alive, it needs some kind of being in the moment and spontaneity.”“But it’s challenging because I am always looking for structure and Viv is always like, ‘Don’t box me in because it’s not going to be as good,’” Costanzo said.Still, Bond pointed out that there is a safety net. “I obviously don’t want Anthony to feel uncomfortable, or that he’s going to be in any way undermined or not feel that he’s going to be seen at his best, so we’ve been establishing points where things definitely have to happen,” Bond said.Working out the sound of a crow’s caw, the pair seemed ready for their spotlight — at the most stylish comedy hour ever. “I’ve never laughed so hard in the rehearsal process,” Winokur, the director, said.But if there are many jokes in the show, the performers are in on them.“Being a countertenor, whenever I open my mouth, even at the Met, people go, ‘Why is he singing like that?’” Costanzo said. “I go work with kids and they laugh the minute you start singing. Which I love, I welcome it, but I’m like a novelty in that way, which I enjoy exploiting.”“As a classical musician,” he added, “you can be gay or queer or whatever, and then you go do your show. You are not expressing yourself as much in that theatricality or your identity. You are embodying a character. This project feels like, for whatever reason, this real theatrical expression of who I am.”Bond suggested, “It’s expressing your artistry through a place of truth, as opposed to trying to make something that is artificial seem true.”Costanzo laughed and said: “See? Viv is so good!” More

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      Fake Rock Nearly Crushes Opera Star: Accident or Sabotage?

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      Feuding stagehands, falling props: It might sound like the plot of an opera, but in France it has been the subject of a court case.LONDON — The tenor Robert Dean Smith was lying onstage — eyes closed, pretending to be dead — when he felt something very close above him.Smith was appearing as Tristan in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” at the Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse in France, and he assumed that what he sensed looming was his colleague, the soprano Elisabete Matos, who was singing Isolde. She’d probably decided to alter the choreography and had come to stand over him, he thought.But when Smith opened his eyes, he saw a 467-pound fake rock hanging just inches from his face. “I panicked and just threw it out of the way,” he recalled of the 2015 incident in a telephone interview. He rolled out from underneath the object, and quickly got to his feet — which likely confused an audience that had watched Tristan die a short while before. (His co-star kept singing throughout.)The cause of this dangerous mishap was at first a mystery. But the reality turns out to be so bizarre that it could be an opera itself.Robert Dean Smith and Elisabete Matos onstage in “Tristan und Isolde” at the Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse in 2015Partrice NinLast week, a court in Toulouse found a stagehand at the theater guilty of tampering with the computer system that controlled the prop rock’s descent. The production, which was directed by Nicolas Joel, intended for the object to stop about 30 inches above the tenor, and its continued descent at the performance in question was only stopped when another member of the technical staff realized something had gone wrong, according to a report in La Dépêche du Midi, a local newspaper.According to the prosecutors, the stagehand, Nicholas S., whose surname has not been revealed by French newspapers out of respect for his privacy, had long been in conflict with a rival stagehand, Richard R., whom he hoped would be blamed for the error. Two months before the incident, Nicholas S. had won a court case where he accused Richard R. of assault.Nicholas S., who denied the allegations that he had tampered with the computer system, was given an eight-month suspended prison sentence and made to pay a symbolic one-euro fine to the Théâtre du Capitole. His lawyer did not respond to requests for comment.Smith, the tenor, said he had never imagined someone had been trying to hurt him or had tampered with the equipment. “I’ve seen too many accidents onstage,” he said. “I’ve seen trapdoors open with people on them, and doors and walls fall down onto people.” Smith once cut his hand open while playing Don José in Bizet’s “Carmen,” because someone had forgotten to blunt the knife.In 2008, Smith was actually the beneficiary of such a mishap — making his Metropolitan Opera debut, as Tristan, after the tenor Gary Lehman was injured during a prior performance because of a prop malfunction. Lehman had been lying on a palette on a steeply raked section of the stage when the palette broke loose from its moorings and plummeted into the prompter’s box. Lehman hit his head and could not take part in the next performance.Given the frequency of accidents onstage, that the 2015 incident was the result of feuding stagehands was “just really bizarre and very unfortunate for the theater,” Smith said.After the 2015 performance, the tenor apologized to Matos for his part in ruining the show. After that, he said, he had tried to ensure he died onstage in positions where he could keep his eyes open to see if anything was coming.Constant Merheut contributed reporting from Paris. More