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      Gianna Rolandi, Spirited Soprano With a Radiant Voice, Dies at 68

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      Ms. Rolandi, an acclaimed Vixen and Lucia, made her mark at the New York City Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago.Gianna Rolandi, an American soprano who brought effortless coloratura technique, bright sound and a vibrant stage presence to diverse roles over a 20-year international career, died on Sunday in Chicago. She was 68.Her death, in a hospital, was announced by the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Ms. Rolandi had earlier been the director of the company’s Ryan Opera Center, a training program. No cause was specified.Her husband was the renowned British conductor Andrew Davis, who will step down on June 30 after nearly 21 years as music director and principal conductor of the Lyric Opera.Ms. Rolandi’s auspicious 1975 debut at the New York City Opera, as Olympia in Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann,” came when she was 23 and just out of the conservatory. She took over the role on short notice when the scheduled soprano withdrew. (Three days later she made what was to have been her official debut, as Zerbinetta in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos.”)She quickly won attention for the agility and radiance of her singing — and for, when it was called for, a beguiling sassiness. Beverly Sills, City Opera’s greatest star, became a crucial mentor to Ms. Rolandi in the 1980s, when Ms. Sills retired from singing to become the company’s general director.Along with career guidance, Ms. Sills gave Ms. Rolandi insight into roles she herself had performed to acclaim, among them the title role in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” Elvira in Bellini’s “I Puritani” and Cleopatra in Handel’s “Giulio Cesare.”Reviewing her feisty performance as Zerbinetta with the company in 1982, The New York Times’s Donal Henahan wrote that “in Gianna Rolandi the City Opera had a Zerbinetta capable of creating pandemonium in any opera house anywhere.”Her “deft and virtually unflawed handing of her big, florid aria, one of opera’s most feared obstacle courses for coloratura soprano,” he added, “brought the performance to a halt for as extended an ovation as this reviewer has heard at either of our opera houses this season.”Ms. Rolandi starred in two notable “Live From Lincoln Center” telecasts of City Opera productions: “Lucia di Lammermoor” in 1982, and, the next year, the title role in Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen,” an enchanting folk-tale opera centering on a community of forest animals and a few humans.Ms. Rolandi in the title role in the 1981 City Opera production of Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen.” Beth Bergman“The Cunning Little Vixen” was largely unfamiliar to American audiences when City Opera introduced its colorful production in 1981. It was performed in an English translation of the Czech libretto, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas and directed by Frank Corsaro, with sets and costumes realized from designs by Maurice Sendak.Ms. Rolandi was cast as the bushy-tailed, impish Vixen. It was “one of Ms. Rolandi’s finest roles to date,” the critic Thor Eckert Jr. wrote in The Christian Science Monitor, adding that she acted “with feline grace and an occasional touch of crudity just right for the role.”Her Metropolitan Opera debut came as Sophie in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” in 1979. But despite some acclaimed performances at that house, including the title role of the Nightingale in Stravinsky’s “Le Rossignol” in 1984 and Zerbinetta in 1984-85 (with Jessye Norman as Ariadne), she made just 17 appearances with the Met over six years.Even while appearing with major houses in America and Europe, Ms. Rolandi was content to call City Opera her base.“I feel like I’ve grown up here,” she said in a 1982 interview with The Times. The company “is a blessing for me,” she added. “You get exposure and you don’t have to leave home.”Carol Jane Rolandi was born on Aug. 16, 1952, in Manhattan. Her mother, Jane Frazier, from Winston-Salem, N.C., was a successful soprano who met Dr. Enrico Rolandi, an Italian obstetrician and gynecologist, while performing in Italy. They married and settled in New York.In 1955, when Ms. Rolandi was not yet 3, her father died in an automobile accident. Her mother moved with her and her brother, Walter, to the South, began teaching, and had a 30-year career as a professor of voice at Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C., where Ms. Rolandi grew up.Though drawn early to the violin, Ms. Rolandi kept listening to opera recordings and was increasingly captivated by singing. She studied both violin and voice at the Brevard Music Center, a prestigious summer music institute and festival in North Carolina. She continued her studies at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.Her City Opera debut came shortly after her graduation from Curtis. She went on to sing major roles in more than 30 operas with the company, including the American premiere of the Israeli composer Josef Tal’s “Ashmedai” in 1976 and the world premiere of Dominick Argento’s “Miss Havisham’s Fire” in 1979.Overall, though, she was not drawn to contemporary opera, as she acknowledged in a 1993 interview with Bruce Duffie, later broadcast on the Chicago radio station WNIB. It’s crucial for composers to “make the vocal part singable so you can make a line,” she said, and she did not like pieces that were “all over the place.”“The old guys had it right,” she said: “a nice line.”Ms. Rolandi and her husband, the conductor Andrew Davis, in 2005. The couple moved to Chicago when Mr. Davis became music director and principal conductor of the Lyric Opera there.Cheri EisenbergAfter an earlier marriage to Howard Hensel, a tenor (who appeared with City Opera) and actor, Ms. Rolandi met Mr. Davis in 1984 when she sang Zerbinetta at the Met, a production he was conducting. “We didn’t hit it off particularly well then,” she recalled in a 2006 interview with The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.They later met again at the Glyndebourne Festival in England. “This time it was different,” she said in that interview, “and the fireworks started to happen.” They married in 1989 and lived for some years in England.In addition to her husband, Ms. Rolandi is survived by their son, Ed Frazier Davis, a composer, baritone and conductor, and her brother.Ms. Rolandi retired from the stage in 1994 and focused on teaching. She and her husband moved to Chicago after Mr. Davis’s tenure with the Lyric Opera began in 2000. The next year she was appointed director of vocal studies at the company’s opera center; in 2006 she was promoted to director of the program, a position she held until 2013. Among the notable singers who worked with her in the program were Nicole Cabell, Quinn Kelsey, Stacey Tappan, Erin Wall and Roger Honeywell.Ms. Rolandi always cited the mentoring she received from Beverly Sills as her main inspiration for wanting to nurture young singers. Ms. Sills was “my teacher, my coach, my psychiatrist and finally my friend,” she told the critic Heidi Waleson in an interview for “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias,” Ms. Waleson’s 2018 book about City Opera.She was, Ms. Rolandi said, “my biggest cheerleader and fiercest critic.” More

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      South African Opera Star Says She Was Mistreated by French Police

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      Pretty Yende, an acclaimed soprano, says she was forced to submit to a body search at a Paris airport. “I felt stripped of my human dignity,” she said.The South African soprano Pretty Yende expected her visit this week to France, where she is starring in a production of Bellini’s “La Sonnambula,” to be relatively uneventful.But when she arrived at Paris’s main airport on Monday, Yende was taken aback. The French authorities told her she did not have the proper documents to enter the country. They took her for questioning and forced her to submit to a body search that she described as invasive.“I felt stripped of my human dignity,” Yende said in an email. “It was absolutely uncomfortable.”Yende took to social media to share her experience, saying she was “stripped and searched like a criminal offender” during the ordeal, which lasted more than two hours. While she was not asked to remove her clothes, she says, the police told her, without explanation, to take off her shoes and kept her in a cold, dark room. She suggested that she had been singled out because she is Black.“Police brutality is real for someone who looks like me,” Yende wrote on Facebook, adding that she feared for her life.Yende’s account was shared widely online, with fans and artists expressing outrage and calling the incident an example of racism and discrimination in French society.The French authorities disputed Yende’s portrayal of the incident, saying they acted in accordance with standard procedures. The police say Yende was forced to submit to a pat-down but say it was carried out in a professional manner by a female officer. They acknowledge her cellphone was taken away; she was given access to a landline phone while she was being held at the airport.“We made the usual checks,” the National Police said in a statement. “We did what we do with any passenger facing the same problems.”The police said Yende, who landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris around 3 p.m. Monday on a flight from Milan, did not have a valid visa to enter France. Yende presented a provisional residence permit from Italy, where she lives, but the French authorities said she needed a separate one-time visa. Yende and her lawyer say she had all the documents required by law to gain entry.The authorities eventually issued Yende a visa and allowed her to go around 6 p.m., after speaking with managers at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, where she was to perform on Tuesday.The South African embassy in France said it was aware of the incident and had raised it with the French authorities.“Notwithstanding these unfortunate events, we are pleased that Ms. Yende is continuing with her scheduled performances in Paris,” said Lihle Mancoba, a spokeswoman for the embassy.Yende, 36, is a renowned figure in opera, a charismatic coloratura soprano who has performed on many of the world’s leading stages, including the Teatro alla Scala in Milan and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.Born in a small town in South Africa, she has won wide acclaim in an industry historically dominated by white performers. Since last week, she has been singing the role of Amina in “La Sonnambula” at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.Yende received an enthusiastic ovation for her performance on Tuesday night, her fourth time in the role this month. But she said her experience at the airport was never far from her mind.“It was very, very hard for me,” she said in an email after the performance. “I was shaking and couldn’t focus.” More

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      A Black Composer’s Intense Opera Gets a Rare Staging

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      William Grant Still’s one-act “Highway 1, U.S.A.” runs in St. Louis through June 17.The composer William Grant Still was a student of the renowned experimentalist Edgard Varèse, an arranger for the blues icon W.C. Handy and the creator of the enduringly winning “Afro-American Symphony.” Thanks to his rich catalog of symphonic and chamber music, Still, who died in 1978 at 83, was widely known as the pathbreaking “dean” of Black American composers.But his operas have struggled to gain a foothold in the repertoire. “Troubled Island,” about the Haitian revolution and its aftermath, boasted a libretto by Langston Hughes and additional lyrics by Verna Arvey, a writer who was married to Still. It premiered at New York City Opera in 1949, but continues to wait for a second production. (A fascinating, if scratchy, recording of the premiere can be purchased from the Still estate.)Still was known as the “dean” of Black American composers, but his operas have struggled to gain a foothold in the repertoire.Carl Van Vechten Collection/Getty ImagesStill’s one-act stunner “Highway 1, U.S.A.,” premiered in 1963, has also been a rarity. But it will enter the limelight this weekend with the opening of a new staging, directed by Ron Himes, at Opera Theater of St. Louis. (It runs there through June 17.)In its two scenes — which together last under an hour — the filling-station owner Bob and his wife, Mary, deal with the ingratitude and arrogance of Bob’s younger brother, Nate, a spendthrift academic whose studies were underwritten by the couple. The plot — its lurid flights counterbalanced by the wholesome devotion of Bob and Mary — swiftly deals with complex, compelling ideas about familial expectation and duty.Conducted by Leonard Slatkin, a veteran advocate for American music, and featuring a cast of rising stars, the St. Louis production is an early highlight of opera’s fledgling return to live performance as the pandemic eases.But this “Highway” likely wouldn’t have happened without the pandemic. In a phone interview between rehearsals, the soprano Nicole Cabell said that both she and the baritone Will Liverman had originally been scheduled to perform “Porgy and Bess” in St. Louis this summer.Though widely loved, “Porgy” — written by white artists — has long overshadowed works by Black composers; the pandemic, in this case, overturned its typical dominance. “Porgy,” Cabell said, was “obviously a production that was too big.”St. Louis realized that its contracted soprano and baritone leads could play the married couple in Still’s “Highway.” And Cabell credited the company with finding a way to forge ahead with an operatic work of “cultural significance.”Liverman said that, after 15 months away from performances with an orchestra, “it’s a special thing to come back to work and do a piece by a Black composer, especially after all of the things that have happened with the pandemic, and George Floyd, and how we’re changing our conversations about inclusion.”“It jumps around quite a bit, in terms of the mood,” said Cabell, left, with Gibbs.Eric WoolseyStill was a fan of Wagner from an early age, an affection that can be seen in the fluid way he handles narrative transitions. “Nobody has arias that have really clear endings, in my opinion,” Cabell said.“I feel like you have to be on your toes if you sing Mary,” she added. “Because she is, of course, struggling with lots of conflict: her love of Bob, her suspicion of Nate, her desire to expose him. It jumps around quite a bit, in terms of the mood.”The tenor Christian Mark Gibbs, who plays Nate, described the effect as “conversational.” Like the other singers, he had not had deep exposure to the work of Still before this production.“I heard of him, through the course of some of my studies,” Gibbs said. “I did question, while I was in school: ‘Oh, how come we don’t look at any of those things?’ But then you get back to your studies.”Nate doesn’t have a lot of stage time. He enters mean in the second scene, and only gets meaner. The character’s motivations are barely sketched as the plot moves toward a twisty climax.“He does leave a lot for your imagination,” Gibbs said. “I can come up with a great back story for this character, before he even sings his first line.”Himes, the director — who has moved the setting slightly forward, into the 1960s — has his own view of Nate’s troubles: “He may have been a victim of some racial attacks, while he was in school. He is probably suffering from some kind of trauma.”The cast in St. Louis is relishing what amounts to a highly unusual opportunity in opera. “I think there’s a special energy for them, being an all-Black company,” Himes said. “That’s very rare for all of them in their careers so far, in this classical world.”There have been few productions or recordings of the work. In the 1970s, Columbia’s Black Composers Series included a pair of excerpts from the opera on an album. It took until 2005 for a complete studio recording to be released, featuring the St. Olaf Orchestra led by Philip Brunelle. (The Mary on that recording, Louise Toppin, also directed a production at the University of Michigan in 2019.)Gibbs said he has found himself memorizing the other characters’ music. “I walk around singing some of Bob’s melodies all the time,” he said. “I grew up listening to a little jazz and listening to blues and gospel. It has that soul type of feeling.”That’s the case even though Still, a committed integrationist, didn’t want his work to be viewed merely through a racial lens. “In this opera, there’s no race mentioned at all,” Gibbs said. “That’s another area where it’s open. It can be done by multiple people. He wanted it to be done by various cultural groups.”Slatkin, the conductor, said he has inserted small touches — including “an occasional flutter-tongue” — to give the orchestration behind Nate’s music a bit more bite. He added that some of the score’s harmonies reminded him of Kurt Weill, but that the music has its own clear identity: “As I’ve really gotten into it, I find that there’s something very fresh and appealing about it.”“Still’s voice — simply historically, because of when he lived, what he did and what he accomplished — needs to be heard,” Slatkin said.St. Louis plans to film the performances with an eye to streaming the work later this year. For Liverman, that documentation is crucial. “That’s the thing with Black composers in general,” he said. “I think the music’s out there. It’s just not performed enough. You’re not going to find a million interpretations, like ‘Winterreise’ or something like that. A lot of those works are just hard to come by.”But he thinks the power of “Highway” will speak for itself. “The show moves right along,” he said. “It’s sort of like a short film or an episode on a show — and it works beautifully in that way.” More

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      10 Classical Concerts to Stream in June

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      The Met Orchestra’s return, an opera from Paris and a Philip Glass circus work are among the highlights.With in-person performances just beginning to return in many places, here are 10 highlights of the online music content coming in June. (Times listed are Eastern.)Dallas Symphony Orchestra/Met OrchestraAvailable through June 4; dallassymphony.org.One of the most dramatic musical coups of the pandemic came a month ago, when players from the Metropolitan Opera’s orchestra — which went unpaid for nearly a year — traveled to Texas to join the Dallas Symphony Orchestra for benefit performances of Mahler’s First Symphony. It was a reunion with Fabio Luisi, who was the Met’s principal conductor for more than five years and is now the music director in Dallas. The filmed result is fresh, vivid and cumulatively quite moving. ZACHARY WOOLFE‘Circus Days and Nights’June 1 at noon; malmoopera.se; there are several more livestreamed performances through June 13.Circus juggling was one of the highlights of Phelim McDermott’s recent staging of Philip Glass’s opera “Akhnaten.” Might that have given Glass a new idea? Whether it’s coincidence or not, his latest stage work — a collaboration with the librettist David Henry Hwang and the circus director Tilde Bjorfors — is being advertised as a “never-before-seen fusion of circus and opera,” streamed live from the Malmo Opera in Sweden. SETH COLTER WALLS‘Desert In’June 3 at noon; operabox.tv; available indefinitely.Filmed opera continues to take pandemic-prompted steps forward, including this pivot to episodic narrative. Available on Boston Lyric Opera’s operabox.tv platform, “Desert In” is an eight-part mini-series in which a married couple runs what is described as “a mysterious motor lodge where guests pay to be reunited with lost loves.” (The episodes, projected to last between 10 and 20 minutes each, will roll out on a weekly basis, two at a time.) The rotating creative team is promising, with composers like Nathalie Joachim and Nico Muhly taking turns writing episodes, for a cast that includes the star mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard and the cabaret performer Justin Vivian Bond. SETH COLTER WALLSDetroit Symphony OrchestraJune 3 and 4 at 7:30 p.m.; dso.org; available through June 17 and 18.Kent Nagano, an insightful and dynamic conductor, is presenting two 45-minute programs with the Detroit Symphony — both of which, in characteristic Nagano style, offer intriguing pairings of old and new. On June 3 he leads Toshio Hosokawa’s Percussion Intermezzo from “Stilles Meer,” an opera written in response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, alongside Schubert’s ebullient Fifth Symphony. The next day he pairs Britten’s “Fanfare for St. Edmundsbury” with Arvo Pärt’s “Cantus in Memory of Britten,” before concluding with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 in C, with the elegant pianist Gilles Vonsattel as soloist. ANTHONY TOMMASINIAdam Barnett-Hart of the Escher String Quartet, which livestreams a program of Bartok and Sibelius on June 10.Ian Douglas for The New York TimesEscher String QuartetJune 10 at 7:30 p.m.; chambermusicsociety.org; available through June 17.Scheduled for December of last year, before the pandemic intervened, the exciting Escher String Quartet performs live from the Rose Studio under the auspices of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. The program opens with Bartok’s final quartet, first performed in 1941 and a work that arrestingly combines aching grief — his mother died and World War II was grimly unfolding — with teeming intensity. The concert ends with Sibelius’s unconventional and engrossing “Voces Intimae” in five movements, written in 1909. It’s the “kind of thing,” Sibelius wrote of this work, that “brings a smile to your lips at the hour of death.” ANTHONY TOMMASINIKronos FestivalJune 11 at 10 p.m.; kronosquartet.org; available through Aug. 31.Global in scope, this is the first of three meaty streamed programs which, together with some ancillary offerings and films, make up this intriguing festival of new work presented by the Kronos Quartet and its creative foundation. The premieres include music by Nicole Lizée, Soo Yeon Lyuh, Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté and Mahsa Vahdat; other pieces are by Clint Mansell, Jlin and Pete Seeger (his sadly ever-relevant “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”). ZACHARY WOOLFE‘Le Soulier de Satin’June 14; chezsoi.operadeparis.fr; available indefinitely.As the summer sun invites you outside, the last thing you may want is to stare at a screen for over six hours. But if you have the patience — or if a rainy day keeps you indoors — set aside time for the Paris Opera’s latest premiere: the third in its cycle of works inspired by French literature, as well as Marc-André Dalbavie’s third opera. It’s an adaptation of Paul Claudel’s sprawling drama “Le Soulier de Satin” (“The Satin Slipper”) — in preview clips rich with misty orchestration and long melodies — directed by Stanislas Nordey, conducted by its composer and starring the bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni and the mezzo-soprano Eve-Maud Hubeaux. JOSHUA BARONE‘Terra Nova’June 17 at 7:30 p.m.; 5bmf.org; available through Dec. 31.Those passing by the Brooklyn Public Library’s main branch at Grand Army Plaza on a hot recent Saturday afternoon could experience an unexpectedly sophisticated new song cycle musing on the tangled history of exploration and colonization. Written by the bookish performer-composer collective Oracle Hysterical and played with the quartet Hub New Music, the sometimes propulsive, sometimes sultry music was superb when Majel Connery was airily singing, and foundered only in two long, talky sections at the end. It will be released for streaming in a version filmed at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art on Staten Island. ZACHARY WOOLFETo close her time as composer in residence at the Chicago Symphony, Missy Mazzoli has planned two streaming concerts.Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesCSO SessionsJune 24 at 12:01 a.m.; cso.org/tv; available through July 23.Missy Mazzoli closes her tenure as the Chicago Symphony’s composer in residence with two rich streaming programs of new and recent music. This, the second of the concerts, includes the premiere of Courtney Bryan’s “Requiem,” which draws on different mourning traditions and is scored for vocal quartet, winds, brass and percussion; there are also works by Gilda Lyons, David Reminick and Tomeka Reid on offer. (The first program, which goes online June 10, is no slouch, either, featuring pieces by Nicole Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith and Mazzoli herself.) ZACHARY WOOLFEPhilharmonia OrchestraJune 24 and 25 at 2:30 p.m.; philharmonia.co.uk; available until Sept. 16 and 17.One of the great partnerships in music — the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the excellent Philharmonia Orchestra in London — ends in June with Salonen’s final concerts as principal conductor. (Rest assured, the group seems in good hands with his successor, Santtu-Matias Rouvali.) Both programs are meaty affairs: one beginning with Beethoven’s First Symphony and ending with Sibelius’s Seventh, bookends to Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto (with Yefim Bronfman) and Stravinsky’s “Symphonies of Wind Instruments”; and the other surveying Bach through the eyes of 20th-century artists, along with the premiere of Salonen’s “Fog,” adapted for orchestra, and Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, with Mitsuko Uchida the tantalizing soloist. JOSHUA BARONE More

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      Taiwan Was a Covid Haven for Performers. Then Cases Flared.

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      One of the few places where performances continued steadily for much of the pandemic has had to shut down theaters just as they are reopening elsewhere.TAIPEI, Taiwan — For much of the past year, Taiwan has been a sanctuary for performing artists, the rare almost-Covid-free place where audiences could cram into concert halls to hear live music and sip coffee together at intermission.The island played host to modern dance festivals, full-fledged productions of “La Traviata” and “The Phantom of the Opera,” and a recital of Bach’s cello suites by Yo-Yo Ma, which was attended by more than 4,000 people.But a recent surge in cases — Taiwan’s worst outbreak since the start of the pandemic — has brought a halt to cultural life on the island, forcing performing arts centers, concert halls and museums to shutter just as they are coming back to life in the rest of the world.Performers from Taiwan and abroad have been caught in the middle, grappling with lost income and an avalanche of canceled engagements.“Everything blew up,” said the American clarinetist Charles Neidich, who recently made the 7,781-mile trip from New York to Taipei only to have his first live performance in more than 400 days canceled.Neidich, who had been engaged to play a clarinet concerto by the American composer John Corigliano with the Taipei Symphony Orchestra, endured two weeks of hotel quarantine, one of the strict measures that had helped Taiwan tame the virus. Then Taipei went into a state of semi-lockdown last week, so he packed up and went home.“This is my non-adventure,” he said.The outbreak, coming as the government’s vaccination program has gotten off to a slow start, is forcing Taipei to shut down just as other cities around the world are finally reopening. In London, the theaters of the West End brought up their curtains last week. Officials in New York announced that Radio City Music Hall would soon allow full capacity, maskless crowds back inside, as long as they have been vaccinated.The American clarinetist Charles Neidich flew from New York to Taipei to give his first live performance in more than a year, but the concert was canceled.I-Hwa Cheng for The New York TimesTaiwan’s experience is a reminder of the ongoing uncertainty of life in the pandemic, the threat posed by the virus and its power to upset even the most carefully crafted of plans. Semi-staged performances of Verdi’s “Falstaff” have been called off. The French musical “Notre Dame de Paris” has been postponed.Even though the number of cases in Taiwan is low compared with many parts of the world — 283 cases were reported on Tuesday, fewer than in New York City — the authorities are doubling down on restrictions, hoping that lockdowns can bring the virus under control within weeks or months as Taiwan tries to speed its lumbering vaccine rollout.Artists are optimistic that concerts, dances, plays and museum exhibitions will soon return.“This is a place used to earthquakes and typhoons,” said Lin Hwai-min, the founder of Cloud Gate Dance Theater, a contemporary dance troupe, which has delayed performances until later in the summer. “The crisis comes, you deal with it and you come back to restore everything.”Over the past year Cloud Gate has suffered financially from the cancellations of its planned tours to the United States and Europe. But with infections near zero in Taiwan and residents hungry for entertainment, the company has offset those losses with strong demand at home, premiering new works before sold-out crowds.“It used to be so surreal that we could perform,” Lin said. “Now for the first time we are confronting the reality of the virus, like our peers in Western countries.”Taiwan’s closing of its borders early in the pandemic and its strict public health measures, including mask mandates and extensive contact tracing, turned the island of 23.5 million into a coronavirus success story. But the emergence of more contagious variants in recent months, a relaxation of quarantine rules and a vaccine shortage gave the virus an opening.Before that, the lack of widespread transmission in Taiwan made it easier for performance venues to operate near full capacity. And theaters and concert halls enforced tough public health measures that have been adjusted depending on the number of confirmed cases.At many venues, attendees were required to provide their names and phone numbers to be used for tracing in case of an outbreak. Masks and temperature checks were required. Some concert halls barred the selling of food and drinks. Seats at some spaces were staggered to resemble flowers, in an arrangement that came to be known in Taiwan as “plum blossom seating.”Despite the vigilance, there were occasional scares. More than a hundred people were forced to quarantine in March of last year after coming into contact with the Australian composer Brett Dean, who tested positive for the virus after performing in Taiwan. The incident was front-page news in Taiwan, with some people fuming that Dean — whose “Hamlet” is scheduled at the Metropolitan Opera in New York next season — had been allowed to perform even though he had a cough.Lydia Kuo, the executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra, which collaborated with Dean, said the scare taught the orchestra the importance of maintaining strict health measures even when infections were near zero.“We were facing an unknown enemy,” she said. “We were lucky to face this reality very early.”Taiwan’s still-active cultural scene attracted talent from around the world over the past year when many artists were without stable work and confined at home. There were visits by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the German organist Felix Hell, and Ma, the renowned cellist, who chartered a flight to the island for a tour in November.Many musicians with roots in Taiwan have also returned, some for an extended visit. Ray Chen, a violinist, came back in August at the urging of his family and has taken part in about 20 live concerts, master classes and music education outreach events since then. He said he was struck by the care people showed toward one another and the widespread adherence to public health rules, even when Taiwan went months without any reported infections.“Everyone is willing to play a part,” Chen said. “Everyone values life.”Taiwan’s strict approach has not been popular in all corners of the artistic world. After the outbreak this month, some artists questioned the government’s decision to close performance venues, concerned that it would hurt performers’ income.Lang Tsu-yun, a Taiwanese actress who leads a theater troupe, provoked controversy when she suggested, in a sharply worded Facebook post, that the restrictions would be devastating to arts groups.“Do you know how long we rehearse?” Lang wrote. “Do you know how many of us are working hard?” (After coming under criticism for her comments, Lang deleted the post and apologized.)A masked crowd at a performance at the National Concert Hall in Taipei in November, when low numbers of coronavirus cases allowed for a virtually normal cultural life.Ann Wang/ReutersThe government has provided tens of millions of dollars in subsidies to arts groups during the pandemic, but some performers say the grants have not been enough to offset losses. Officials say restrictions on large gatherings are necessary to curb the rising rate of infections.But for visiting performers caught in the middle of the latest surge, the experience has been frustrating.The violinist Cho-Liang Lin was excited to arrive in Taiwan last month, his third trip to the island since the start of the pandemic. After livestreaming for months and playing in empty halls in the United States, where he lives, he had come to relish the energy of live performances in Taiwan, where he was born, despite the mandatory quarantine.Then this month, Lin’s concert with the Taipei Symphony Orchestra, with which he was going to perform Korngold’s Violin Concerto, was canceled two hours after his first rehearsal. He was also forced to cancel a summer festival for young musicians that he leads in Taipei. He was devastated, going out with friends to drink Scotch.“All that work and waiting around went for nothing,” said Lin, who returned home to Houston last week. “I can’t help but notice the irony here. The model citizen of the world now has become a bit of a problem child.”Amy Chang Chien contributed reporting. More

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      Mixing Healing and Strife, the Met Opera Sings Again

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      The company’s continuing labor tensions hovered over two consoling concerts featuring its orchestra and chorus.On Sunday evening, 430 days after the coronavirus pandemic closed the Metropolitan Opera, the company returned.Members of the Met’s orchestra and chorus, conducted by its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and joined by four soloists, twice presented a 45-minute program for an audience of 150.The location wasn’t the company’s home at Lincoln Center; instead, the concerts were held at the Knockdown Center, a door factory turned rough-hewed art and performance space in Queens. But these were truly, finally Met forces, brought together amid the contentious labor disputes that still threaten the company’s official reopening, planned for September.“What a privilege it is to say good evening to you, to welcome you here,” Nézet-Séguin told the audience before beginning the concert. The purpose, he added, was primarily to “resume what we do” — that is, to make music. But the performances were also intended as an expression of gratitude to essential workers; some tickets were set aside for emergency medical staff affiliated with Mount Sinai’s hospital in Queens.Owens sang an aria from Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesNézet-Séguin, left, conducted as Costello sang.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesHovering over the concerts were the Met’s continuing labor tensions. The company’s closure has cost it some $150 million in revenue, and its many union workers were furloughed early in the pandemic. Peter Gelb, the general manager, has, like administrators at performing arts institutions everywhere, been trying to exact long-term concessions from the Met’s labor force, which the unions are strongly resisting.Just days ago, the Met reached a deal with the union representing its chorus, dancers and some others. But talks with the orchestra musicians, who agreed in March to begin accepting some payments in exchange for returning to the bargaining table, are ongoing. And on Thursday, the union representing the stage hands, who have been locked out since December, held a boisterous rally outside Lincoln Center.Without glossing over the strife, the Queens concerts (I attended the second) came across as a genuine gesture of good will and shared artistic commitment. Nézet-Séguin told the crowd that he and the artists had tried to devise a program that reflected the hardships we’ve all endured, but also offered comfort and hope.The program also made it clear that the Met is attempting to address longstanding issues of inequity brought to the forefront of the nation’s consciousness in months of demonstrations against racial injustice last year. Three of the four superb solo singers were Black, and the offerings included an aria from Terence Blanchard’s opera “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which is planned to open the Met’s season in September — the first work by a Black composer ever presented by the company.Blue sang the tender “Ave Maria” from Verdi’s “Otello.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAustin sang an aria from “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the Terence Blanchard opera planned to reopen the Met in September.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOn Sunday the young baritone Justin Austin sang “Peculiar Grace,” in which Charles, the main character in the opera — which is based on a memoir by Charles M. Blow, an opinion columnist for The New York Times — thinks back to his troubled youth, growing up poor in Louisiana, “a Black boy from a lawless town,” he sings in the words of Kasi Lemmons’s libretto.“Where everyone carries a gun,” Austin sang with burnished sound and vulnerability,” “I carried shame in a holster ’round my waist.”The concert opened with the 12 choristers and 20 orchestra players giving a soft-spoken account of the poignant “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem. Then the soprano Angel Blue brought radiant sound and aching sensitivity to the “Ave Maria” from Verdi’s “Otello.”Next came several excerpts from Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte,” starting with the overture, which here sounded less an introduction to a comedic romp than a sublime prelude to a tale of a quest for wisdom, purpose and love. The young quester, Prince Tamino, sings an aria of smitten devotion to an image of the lovely Pamina, touching music sung ardently here by the tenor Stephen Costello. And when the stentorian bass-baritone Eric Owens sang Sarastro’s “In diesen heil’gen Hallen,” whose German words translate to “Within these sacred portals revenge is unknown,” seemed fitting for the Knockdown Center, which felt like a spacious yet intimate community sanctuary.An audience of about 150, included some tickets reserved for emergency workers from Mount Sinai’s hospital in Queens, was allowed into the concerts.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe program continued with Blue and the choristers giving a serene account of “Placido è il mar” from Mozart’s “Idomeneo”; Blue and Costello in a duet from Verdi’s “La Traviata”; Blue and the chorus in the consoling “Laudate dominum” from Mozart’s “Vesperae Solennes de Confessore”; and, to end, Owens and the chorus in the affirming final scene of “Die Zauberflöte.”The Queens concerts were not the only demonstration on Sunday of the Met trying, in the face of continuing hardships from the pandemic, to keep its mission going. Typically, the finals of the company’s National Council Auditions attract a large, enthusiastic audience to the opera house, where 10 or so young finalists in this prestigious competition perform two arias each onstage, with the orchestra in the pit.This year the entire competition, which has been renamed for the Met donors Eric and Dominique Laffont, took place online. On Sunday, 10 impressive finalists performed live from various locations across the United States — as well as two from Seoul, where it was early in the morning. Rather than a full orchestra, each singer was accompanied by a pianist; not surprisingly, the quality of the transmissions varied, and assessing these young voices remotely hardly compared with hearing them at the house. I did not envy the judges.Raven McMillon, a soprano from Baltimore, was among the five winners of the Met’s annual young artists competition.via Metropolitan OperaStill, the five winners all came across as gifted singers with great potential: Emily Sierra, a mezzo-soprano from Chicago, who brought a rich, secure voice to arias from “Die Fledermaus” and “La Clemenza di Tito”; Raven McMillon, a soprano from Baltimore, who sang radiantly in selections from “Cendrillon” and “Der Rosenkavalier”; Duke Kim, a tenor from Seoul, who was excellent in Tamino’s aria from “Die Zauberflöte” and gleefully tossed off the nine high C’s of “Ah! mes ami” from “La Fille du Régiment”; Emily Treigle, a mezzo-soprano from New Orleans, who gave assured accounts of arias from “Orfeo ed Euridice” and “La Clemenza di Tito”; and Hyoyoung Kim, a coloratura soprano from Seoul, who seemed set for a big career singing from “Lakmé” and “Rigoletto.”The other, also worthy finalists were Brittany Olivia Logan (soprano), Erica Petrocelli (soprano), Timothy Murray (baritone), Murrella Parton (soprano) and Jongwon Han (bass-baritone).You couldn’t help but think that several of them will end up singing someday with the company at the Met’s theater. It was a prospect that made reopening the house an even more exciting and urgent matter. More

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      Met Opera Protest: Union Rallies Against Proposed Pay Cuts

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      The Metropolitan Opera hopes to reopen in September after its long pandemic closure, but simmering labor tensions have called that date into question.As New York prepares for the long-awaited reopening of its performing arts sector, with several Broadway shows putting tickets on sale for the fall, it is still unclear whether the Metropolitan Opera will be able to reach the labor agreements it needs to bring up its heavy golden curtain for the gala opening night it hopes to hold in September.There have been contrasting scenes playing out at the opera house in recent days.On the hopeful side, the Met is preparing for two concerts in Queens on Sunday — the company’s first live, in-person performances featuring members of its orchestra and chorus and its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, since the start of the pandemic. And it recently reached a deal on a new contract with the union that represents its chorus, soloists, dancers and stage managers, among others.But the serious tensions that remain with the company’s other unions were put on vivid display outside Lincoln Center on Thursday, as hundreds of union members rallied in opposition to the Met’s lockout of its stagehands and management’s demands for deep and lasting pay cuts it says are needed to survive the pandemic. The workers’ message was clear: their labor makes the Met what it is, and without them, the opera can’t reopen.The Met’s stagehands have been locked out since December. James J. Claffey Jr., president of their union, Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, said that the season cannot open without them.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“That’s not the Met Opera,” said James J. Claffey Jr., president of Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which represents Met stagehands, pointing over to the opera house. “The greatest stage, the largest stage — it’s empty. It’s nothing without the people that are right in front of me right now.”Masked stagehands, musicians, ticket sellers, wardrobe workers and scenic artists packed the designated rally space, greeting each other with elbow bumps after more than a year of separation. They wore union T-shirts and carried signs with messages like, “We Paint the Met” and “We Dress the Met.” The same chant — “We are the Met!” — was repeated over and over throughout the rally.The protest made clear the significant labor challenges that the Met must overcome to successfully return in the fall.Although the opera season is not scheduled to begin until September, the company will need to reach agreements with Local One, which represents its stagehands, much sooner to load in sets and hold technical rehearsals over the summer. The Met has been hoping to bring a significant number of stagehands back to work beginning in June, but Claffey said union members were holding out for a labor agreement.The Met locked out its stagehands in December after contract negotiations stalled. The union has been fiercely opposed to the Met’s assertion that it needs to cut the payroll costs for its highest-paid unions by 30 percent, with an intention to restore half of those cuts when ticket revenues and core donations returned to prepandemic levels (the Met has said the plan would cut the take-home pay of those workers by about 20 percent).“Regardless of the Met’s plans, Local One is not going to work without a contract,” Claffey said in an interview. “There’s a lockout when you didn’t need us, but when you really need us, it’s going to transition from a lockout to a strike.”Although the Met recently struck a deal with the union representing its chorus, tensions remain high with the unions representing its orchestra and stagehands.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Met said in a statement on Thursday that it had “no desire to undermine” the unions it works with but that it had lost more than $150 million in earned revenues since the pandemic forced it to close, and that it needs to cut costs to survive. The statement said the Met had “repeatedly” invited the stagehands’ union to return to the bargaining table.“In order for the Met to reopen in the fall, as scheduled,” the statement said, “the stagehands and the other highest paid Met union members need to accept the reality of these extraordinarily challenging times.”The rally was organized by Local One, which represents the Met’s roughly 300 stagehands. Speaking outside the David H. Koch Theater because metal barriers blocked the path to the Metropolitan Opera House, union leaders railed against the monthslong lockout that has prevented its workers from returning to the Met in full force.“A lot of us stagehands have had to pivot or leave the industry entirely,” said Gillian Koch, a Local One member at the rally. “And we are showing up to say that is not OK, and we all deserve to have our careers after this pandemic.”Tensions rose even higher when the stagehands learned that the Met had outsourced some of its set construction to nonunion shops elsewhere in this country and overseas. (In a letter to the union last year, Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, wrote that the average full-time stagehand cost the Met $260,000 in 2019, including benefits; the union disputes that number, saying that when the steady extra stagehands who work at the Met regularly, and sometimes full-time, are factored in, the average pay is far lower.)The stagehand lockout has not been absolute. Claffey said that at the Met’s request, he has allowed several Local One members to work at the Met under the terms of the previous contract, particularly to help the union wardrobe staff who are on duty.But although the Met has now reached a deal with the American Guild of Musical Artists, which represents its chorus, it has yet to reach one with Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, which represents the orchestra. Both groups were furloughed without pay for nearly a year after the opera house closed before they were brought back to the bargaining table with the promise of partial pay of up to $1,543 per week.Adam Krauthamer, the president of Local 802, pointed out that because of the Met’s labor divisions, other performing arts institutions were ahead of the Met in reopening.“Broadway is selling tickets; the Philharmonic is doing performances; they’re building stages right before our eyes,” Krauthamer said in a speech at the rally. “The Met is the only place that continues to try to destroy its workers’ contracts.”The rally had the backing of several local politicians who spoke, including Gale Brewer, the Manhattan borough president, and the New York State Senators Jessica Ramos and Brad Hoylman, who had a message for the Met’s general manager: “Mr. Gelb, could you leave the drama on the stage, please?” More

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      Met Opera Announces Its First Live Concerts Since Shutdown

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      Despite ongoing labor tensions, members of the company’s orchestra and chorus will perform with soloists and Yannick Nézet-Séguin.The Metropolitan Opera will perform again for a live audience, 430 days after the coronavirus shut down its theater.Members of the company’s orchestra and chorus, joined by prominent soloists and led by its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, will give two concerts at the Knockdown Center in Queens on Sunday, the Met announced on Wednesday. The concerts will go on despite continuing labor tensions at the Met, which have threatened the intended reopening of its Lincoln Center home in September.Scheduled for 6 and 8:30 p.m. on Sunday, the program, called “A Concert for New York,” includes selections by Mozart, Verdi and Terence Blanchard, whose “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” is planned to reopen the Met on Sept. 27 and will be the company’s first opera by a Black composer. The soloists for the Queens performances will be Angel Blue, Stephen Costello, Justin Austin and Eric Owens; 12 Met choristers and 20 orchestra musicians will take part.Whether the Met will be able to reopen in September is not yet clear. While New York officials have announced plans to loosen pandemic restrictions around the performing arts — prompting major sectors, like Broadway, to lay out their plans for a fall return — the Met, which says that it has lost $150 million in earned revenues since it was forced to close, has been seeking pay cuts from its workers, like other arts organizations. Many of its unions are resisting, and the company has locked out Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which represents its stagehands.The union representing the Met’s chorus members, soloists and some other workers recently struck a deal on a new contract, though the details will not be made public until the union members vote on ratifying it later this month. The orchestra players’ union, Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, is still in negotiations with management over how deep and lasting pay cuts will be.In March, after nearly a year of unpaid furlough, the musicians and chorus members agreed to begin receiving up to $1,543 per week in exchange for returning to the table to negotiate longer-term contracts. For the concerts on Sunday, each union performer will be paid an additional $1,000.Since last summer, the Met has livestreamed pay-per-view recitals featuring soloists and musicians from outside its orchestra, drawing criticism from furloughed orchestra members. The orchestra began staging its own virtual concerts and collecting donations to distribute to musicians in need. The concerts on Sunday will be the first in-person performances under the Met’s brand since March 11, 2020.“As the city’s largest performing arts company, we are determined to participate in New York’s reopening,” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in a statement, “even though there is much still to be settled with our unions and in preparing the opera house for next season.”In keeping with the state’s current rules, Sunday’s 45-minute concerts will each have an audience of 150 people, who must provide proof of vaccination, a negative PCR test taken within 72 hours of the show or a negative antigen test within six hours of the start time. Tickets will be distributed by a lottery system, including a portion set aside for emergency medical workers with Mount Sinai’s hospital in Queens.Because the concerts are taking place in Queens, Local One does not have jurisdiction over the stagehand work. That work instead goes to Local Four of the union, though Local One has agreed to make a limited number of its workers available to load large instruments, music stands and chairs at the Met.While the concerts promise a display of unity amid labor tensions, union members are planning a rally on Thursday in front of Lincoln Center, where they are expected to voice opposition to the Local One lockout and the Met’s proposed pay cuts, which the company says are necessary for it to survive the pandemic and beyond. More