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      Opera Singers Help Covid-19 Patients Learn to Breathe Again

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesVaccine RolloutSee Your Local RiskNew Variants TrackerAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOpera Singers Help Covid-19 Patients Learn to Breathe AgainA six-week program developed by the English National Opera and a London hospital offers customized vocal lessons to aid coronavirus recovery.The singing coach Suzi Zumpe, top left, leading a rehabilitation program for Covid-19 patients that she runs with the English National Opera. Credit…ENO Breathe, via English National Opera and Imperial College Healthcare NHS TrustFeb. 16, 2021LONDON — On a recent afternoon, the singing coach Suzi Zumpe was running through a warm-up with a student. First, she straightened her spine and broadened her chest, and embarked on a series of breath exercises, expelling short, sharp bursts of air. Then she brought her voice into action, producing a resonant hum that started high in a near-squeal, before sinking low and cycling up again. Finally, she stuck her tongue out, as if in disgust: a workout for the facial muscles.The student, Wayne Cameron, repeated everything point by point. “Good, Wayne, good,” Zumpe said approvingly. “But I think you can give me even more tongue in that last bit.”Though the class was being conducted via Zoom, it resembled those Zumpe usually leads at the Royal Academy of Music, or Garsington Opera, where she trains young singers.But Cameron, 56, isn’t a singer; he manages warehouse logistics for an office supplies company. The session had been prescribed by doctors as part of his recovery plan after a pummeling experience with Covid-19 last March.Called E.N.O. Breathe and developed by the English National Opera in collaboration with a London hospital, the six-week program offers patients customized vocal lessons: clinically proven recovery exercises, but reworked by professional singing tutors and delivered online.While few cultural organizations have escaped the fallout of the pandemic, opera companies been hit especially hard. In Britain, many have been unable to perform in front of live audiences for almost a year. While some theaters and concert venues managed to reopen last fall for socially distanced shows between lockdowns, many opera producers have simply gone dark.But the English National Opera, one of Britain’s two leading companies, has been trying to redirect its energies. Early on, its education team ramped up its activities, and the wardrobe department made protective equipment for hospitals during an initial nationwide shortage. Last September, the company offered a “drive-in opera experience,” featuring an abridged performance of Puccini’s “La Bohème” broadcast over large screens in a London park. That same month, it started trialing the medical program.Jenny Mollica, who runs the the English National Opera’s outreach programs, contacted a respiratory specialist to suggest that the company could help out.Credit…Karla Gowlett, via English National Opera“The program really does help,” said Wayne Cameron. “Physically, mentally, in terms of anxiety.”Credit….In a video interview, Jenny Mollica, who runs the English National Opera’s outreach work, explained that the idea had developed last summer, when “long Covid” cases started emerging: people who have recovered from the acute phase of the disease, but still suffer effects including chest pain, fatigue, brain fog and breathlessness.“Opera is rooted in breath,” Mollica said. “That’s our expertise. I thought, ‘Maybe E.N.O. has something to offer.’”Tentatively, she contacted Dr. Sarah Elkin, a respiratory specialist at one of the country’s biggest public hospital networks, Imperial College N.H.S. Trust. It turned out that Elkin and her team had been racking their brains, too, about how to treat these patients long-term.“With breathlessness, it can be really hard,” Elkin explained in an interview, noting how few treatments for Covid exist, and how poorly understood the illness’s aftereffects still were. “Once you’ve gone through the possibilities with drug treatments, you feel you don’t have a lot to give people.”Elkin used to sing jazz herself; she felt that vocal training might help. “Why not?” she said.Twelve patients were initially recruited. After a one-on-one consultation with a vocal specialist to discuss their experience of Covid-19, they took part in weekly group sessions, conducted online. Zumpe started with basics such as posture and breath control before guiding participants through short bursts of humming and singing, trying them out in the class and encouraging them to practice at home.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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      Its Musicians Are Out of Work, but the Met Is Streaming

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeMake: BirriaExplore: ‘Bridgerton’ StyleParent: With ImprovRead: Joyce Carol OatesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookIts Musicians Are Out of Work, but the Met Is StreamingAnna Netrebko sang a recital live from Vienna as the opera company and its unions remain in a standoff.The soprano Anna Netrebko, the Metropolitan Opera’s reigning diva, concentrated on songs by Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Richard Strauss in her streaming recital.Credit…Metropolitan OperaFeb. 7, 2021The Metropolitan Opera rang in 2020 auspiciously, with a Puccini gala featuring Anna Netrebko, the company’s reigning diva.But in March, of course, just weeks before Netrebko was to return to the Met as Tosca, the company closed because of the pandemic. It has been shut for the past 11 months, canceling a slew of plans, including a new production of “Aida” for Netrebko, and furloughing hundreds of its workers without pay.On Saturday Netrebko returned to the company — in a sense — with the latest recital in its Met Stars Live in Concert series, streamed from the Spanish Riding School in Vienna and available through Feb. 19. In recent years Netrebko has moved into weighty dramatic soprano repertory. But for this occasion, accompanied elegantly by the pianist Pavel Nebolsin, she presented lighter material, mostly intimate songs by Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Richard Strauss.[embedded content]From the opening, Rachmaninoff’s “Lilacs,” she seemed to become the young protagonist of the text, singing with subdued tenderness and mellow colorings as she recalled the fresh fragrances of dawn and wistful happiness among the flowers. When Netrebko let go in bursts of full-voiced radiance, as in Rimsky-Korsakov’s exuberant “The Lark’s Song Rings More Clearly,” it was almost startling.Here were hints of the fearsome intensity and thrilling sound she brought to Act II of “Turandot” for the gala over a year ago. But watching her recital, it was hard not to think about what was missing this time: the Met’s musicians. Since the end of March, the unionized orchestra and chorus, among other workers, have remained furloughed, with talks between the unions and management at a standstill. Frustrations have been vented on social media over the Met’s decision to stream recitals like Netrebko’s while the company’s house artists remain out of work. (The orchestra is planning its own streaming concert, independent of the Met, on Feb. 21 at metorchestramusicians.org, featuring the star soprano Angela Gheorghiu; proceeds will go to the Met Orchestra Musicians Fund.)The issue has been hanging over the recital series, which began in July with Jonas Kaufmann and is a venture into testing whether opera audiences will pay for online content, as well as an attempt to keep fans and patrons of the Met engaged. Many of the recitals, by singers like Joyce DiDonato, Bryn Terfel and, most recently, Sondra Radvanovsky and Piotr Beczala, have been artistically rewarding and sensitively directed. But the orchestra and chorus are the core of the Met.Netrebko’s recital was originally planned for October, but in September, while performing at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, she was diagnosed with Covid-19 and briefly hospitalized. So it was a relief to have her looking and sounding wonderful. Her tendency to sometimes let a note slip off pitch was a bit more prevalent than usual. But I’ve always felt this criticism was a little unfair. Like many singers from Russian and Scandinavian traditions, she brings a cool Nordic cast to her sound and sings whole phrases with focused tone, saving vibrato for bursts of intensity. So even small imperfections of pitch stand out.Ms. Netrebko, center, appeared with the pianist Pavel Nebolsin, left, and the mezzo-soprano Elena Maximova.Credit…Metropolitan OperaOne hardly cares, given the splendor of her charismatic vocalism. Even when bringing affecting restraint to songs like Strauss’s “Morgen” or Debussy’s “Il pleure dans mon coeur,” she kept the operatic fervor stirring just below the surface, ready to unleash in climactic phrases. I loved how she began Tchaikovsky’s “Nights of Delirium” with hushed, milky tone, then slowly built intensity as the music expressed a young woman’s thoughts of sleepless, feverish nights consumed with memories of a lover. And she capped a beguiling performance of the aria “Depuis le jour” from Gustave Charpentier’s opera “Louise,” in which a young seamstress in Paris who has run off with a lover expresses blissful romantic contentment, with a softly shimmering high B.She was joined by the excellent mezzo-soprano Elena Maximova in a duet from Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades” and the famous Barcarolle from Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann.” During a break, the soprano Christine Goerke, the recital series’ host, spoke with Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, about Netrebko’s future plans, which include Elsa in a new production of Wagner’s “Lohengrin,” with Goerke as Ortrud. Count me in.But next up for her, if reopening this fall goes as planned, will be a concert at the company’s Lincoln Center home with its full orchestra in October. A return to live performance, with the Met’s essential artists fully paid, cannot come soon enough.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Times's Five Minutes Series on Classical Music a Hit

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeExplore: A Cubist CollageFollow: Cooking AdviceVisit: Famous Old HomesLearn: About the VaccineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHooking Readers on Classical Music, Five Minutes at a TimeDrawing on the passion of experts, a Culture desk series has doubled its audience for the genre.CreditCredit…Angie WangFeb. 3, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETMark Hamill was spellbound by a Mozart composition, but he couldn’t remember its name. The haunting choral masterpiece played near the end of the Broadway production of “Amadeus” more than 40 years ago, in which he performed the title role.So when Mr. Hamill, the actor who portrayed Luke Skywalker in “Star Wars,” was approached in June 2020 by Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times’s classical music editor, to suggest an irresistible Mozart piece, he responded with one request: Can you track it down?With some help from the team at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Mr. Woolfe identified the mystery earworm: a section of Mozart’s Requiem. Mr. Hamill played the composer hundreds of times on Broadway and in the first national tour of “Amadeus” in the early 1980s. But, he told Mr. Woolfe, “I never got tired of the sound.”Mr. Woolfe chatted with Mr. Hamill for the Mozart installment of The Times’s classical music appreciation series, “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love _____.” Once a month online, about 15 musicians, pop-culture figures and Times writers and editors each select the piece they would play for a friend tied to a theme, be it an instrument, composer, genre or voice type. This month’s theme, published today, is string quartets.The series aims to make classical music as accessible to readers as a Top 40 track, Mr. Woolfe said. You don’t need to know the difference between a cadenza and a concerto. “It’s about pure pleasure and exploration,” he said.Now two and a half years and a dozen segments into the project, Mr. Woolfe said he had been surprised at readers’ appetite for the series, regardless of the theme. “It’s like, ‘OK, ‘5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Mozart’ is super appealing,’” he said. “But ‘5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Baroque Music’? Or ‘5 Minutes That Will Make You Love 21st-Century Composers’? But those both did terrifically as well.”The name for the series came to him in the shower in 2018 as he was pondering ways he could make The Times’s classical music coverage accessible to a broader audience. “I was thinking about being at a concert or listening to a recording, and being like, ‘OMG, that note she hit!’” Mr. Woolfe said. “Then I had the idea of asking different people to pick their favorite little five-minute nuggets and presenting them like a playlist.”The first installment, in which he asked artists like Julia Bullock, the young, velvety-voiced soprano, and Nicholas Britell, the composer of the Oscar-nominated score for “Moonlight,” to choose the five minutes they would play to make their friends fall in love with classical music, became a runaway hit with readers, racking up more than 400,000 page views in its first week alone.That reception inspired him to expand the series — first to individual instruments like the piano, then to genres like opera and composers like Mozart and Beethoven. And the pandemic motivated him to ramp up the pace: Since last April, new segments have published on the first Wednesday of every month.“It has doubled our audience for classical music,” Mr. Woolfe said. “It’s gratifying that whatever we do, people are willing to explore and be into it.” But he added that he had been happy to hear that classical aficionados have enjoyed the series, too.David Allen, a freelance critic for The Times and a frequent contributor to “5 Minutes,” said he targeted both novices and experts with his selections. “I sometimes have thought deeply about finding pieces that are off the beaten track,” he said, like a little-heard piece from Bach’s organ music or a movement from a Mozart serenade.Mr. Woolfe also credited the appeal to the series’s vibrant, eye-catching animations, like pulsating cello strings or a silhouette of Mozart caught in a colorful confetti storm. “They enhance the playfulness and accessibility of the series,” he said.Angie Wang, the freelance illustrator who creates them, said she watched videos of the musicians and noted their characteristic movements, paying particularly close attention to wrist and elbow articulation. “I wanted to render them with delicacy,” she said. “The animations are a kind of visualization for the music.”One of Mr. Woolfe’s favorite aspects of working on the series has been getting to know artists outside the performance context in which he typically encounters them (“Renée Fleming is a really good writer,” he said), as well as talking to notable names outside the classical music world about a subject they are rarely, if ever, asked to discuss.“I get to see how people think in addition to how they perform,” he said. “It’s another facet of the personalities of artists.”Although the series was not conceived as an antidote to the polarization that has gripped politics and public health in the past year, Mr. Woolfe is glad it has worked out that way. “I’m so happy it’s been counterprogramming for people during the pandemic,” he said. “And I hope they’ll keep listening.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Sibongile Khumalo, South Africa’s ‘First Lady of Song,’ Dies at 63

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySibongile Khumalo, South Africa’s ‘First Lady of Song,’ Dies at 63Proficient across a range of genres, she had the hall-filling power of an operatic mezzo-soprano and the directness of a pop singer.The South African singer Sibongile Khumalo in performance at the Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn in 2007. Credit…Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesFeb. 1, 2021, 3:04 p.m. ETSibongile Khumalo, a virtuoso vocalist whose ease of motion between opera, jazz and South African popular music made her a symbol of the country’s new social order after the end of apartheid, died on Thursday. She was 63.Her family wrote on Instagram that the cause was complications of a stroke, and that she had endured a long illness. The post did not say where she died.Fleet and precise across a wide vocal range but particularly elegant in the upper register, Ms. Khumalo’s voice had the hall-filling power of an operatic mezzo-soprano and the directness of a pop singer. After making her debut as Carmen in a production in Durban, she earned wide acclaim for her roles in South African operas and plays, including “UShaka KaSenzangakhona,” “Princess Magogo KaDinuzulu” and “Gorée,” all of which toured internationally.At home she was equally known for her catchy original compositions and her renditions of South African jazz standards like the straight-ahead anthem “Yakhal’ Inkomo,” written by the saxophonist Winston Ngozi, which became a calling card.When the apartheid government fell and Nelson Mandela became the country’s first democratically elected president in 1994, Ms. Khumalo performed at his inauguration. Mandela famously referred to her as the country’s “first lady of song,” and the title stuck.The next year, when South Africa went to the Rugby World Cup — a moment of national reconciliation later immortalized in the film “Invictus” — Ms. Khumalo was invited to perform both her home country’s national anthem and that of its opponent, New Zealand. It was “the one and only time I’ve ever watched a rugby match, at any level, of any kind,” she told a television interviewer in 2017, laughing.In 1996 Sony released her debut album, “Ancient Evenings,” which included a number of originals and loosely adhered to a vocal-driven South African pop style. Over the next two decades she would release a steady stream of albums, earning four South African Music Awards. For her stage performances, she garnered three Vita Awards.In 2008 she received the Order of Ikhamanga in silver, among the country’s highest honors for contributions to the arts.Sibongile Mngoma was born in Soweto on Sept. 24, 1957, to Grace and Khabi Mngoma. Her mother was a nurse; her father was a scholar and musician who helped found the music department at the University of Zululand.Sibongile began studying at age 8 under a respected local music teacher, Emily Motsieloa, focusing on the violin. She was heavily influenced by the music of local healers and ministers at the nearby church, as well as the Western classical and pop records her parents played around the house.She also inherited her father’s passion for education and went on to earn undergraduate degrees from both Zululand and the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She later received honorary doctorates from Zululand, Rhodes University and the University of South Africa.She taught at Zululand, but she also sought opportunities to reach children who lacked access to major institutions. She held teaching and administrative positions at the Federated Union of Black Artists Academy in Johannesburg and the Madimba Institute of African Music in Soweto.Ms. Khumalo’s husband, the actor and director Siphiwe Khumalo, died in 2005. The couple had two children, Ayanda and Tshepo Khumalo. A full list of survivors was not immediately available.In 1993, she won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award at the famed Grahamstown National Arts Festival, and her star rose swiftly. She had already begun turning heads with a concert program, titled “The 3 Faces of Sibongile Khumalo,” that showed off her versatility across genres. Those “faces” were jazz, opera and traditional South African music.When Ms. Khumalo was a girl, her father had brought her to see Constance Magogo kaDinuzulu, a Zulu princess and musician known for her prowess as a singer and composer. “My dad made me sit at her feet to listen to her play ugubhu and sing,” Ms. Khumalo wrote in the notes to her self-titled 2005 album, referring to a Zulu stringed instrument. “I thought he was being very unkind to me because all the other children were out in the yard playing.”But decades later, she drew upon the experience when she collaborated with the scholar Mzilikazi Khumalo (no relation) to create “Princess Magogo KaDinuzulu,” billed as the first Zulu opera, centered on the princess’s own compositions. “It must have been destiny,” she said. “In my professional years the music came back and it began to make sense.”When “Princess Magogo KaDinuzulu” traveled to the United States in 2004, Anne Midgette reviewed it for The New York Times, praising Ms. Khumalo’s “talent and versatility.” Ten years after South Africa had achieved democratic rule, Ms. Midgette noted, Ms. Khumalo seemed to represent “a symbol of its new culture.”In a 2019 interview ahead of her performance at the Joy of Jazz Festival in Johannesburg, Ms. Khumalo said that no matter the symbolism, her main commitment was to the singularity of her own voice. “While exposing yourself and opening yourself up to what is out there, it is also important to remain true to yourself, so that even when you allow yourself to be influenced by others, you retain an identity that clearly defines you,” she said.Whatever the subject matter, she added, “it is the truth in what you express, and how you express it, that is paramount.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The Metropolitan Opera Hires Its First Chief Diversity Officer

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Metropolitan Opera Hires Its First Chief Diversity OfficerMarcia Sells has been brought on to rethink equity and inclusion at the largest performing arts institution in the United States.Marcia Sells, who has been hired as the first chief diversity officer in the Metropolitan Opera’s history.Credit…Eileen BarassoJan. 25, 2021Updated 1:32 p.m. ETMarcia Sells — a former dancer who became an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn and the dean of students at Harvard Law School — has been hired as the first chief diversity officer of the Metropolitan Opera, the largest performing arts institution in the United States.Her appointment, which the Met announced on Monday, is something of a corrective to the company’s nearly 140-year history and a response to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that followed the killing of George Floyd in 2020. It’s also a conscious step toward inclusivity by a major player in an industry in which some Black singers, including Leontyne Price and Jessye Norman, have found stardom, but diversity has lagged in orchestras, staff and leadership.Since last summer, cultural institutions across the country have made changes as the Black Lives Matter movement drew scrutiny to racial inequities in virtually every corner of the arts world. The Met was no exception: The company announced plans to open next season with Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” its first opera by a Black composer, directed by James Robinson and Camille A. Brown, who will become the first Black director to lead a production on the Met’s main stage. It also named three composers of color — Valerie Coleman, Jessie Montgomery and Joel Thompson — to its commissioning program.But to make broader changes at the Met, an institution with a long payroll and a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars, the Met is turning to Ms. Sells. As a member of the senior management team, she will report to Peter Gelb, the general manager. The human resources department will be brought under her direction, and her purview will be broad: the Met in its entirety, including the board.“Sometimes horrible events like the killing of George Floyd catalyze people, and they realize this is something we need to do — at the Met and across the arts,” Ms. Sells said in an interview about her plans to make the Met a more inclusive company that values the diversity of its staff and the audiences it serves.Mr. Gelb described Ms. Sells as an “ideal” candidate. “Not only does she have a history of accomplishment, but she also has a knowledge of the performing arts, having been involved in them herself,” he said in an interview. “And she loves opera, which is definitely a plus.”Ms. Sells began dancing as a 4-year-old in Cincinnati, an arts-rich city where she found herself both onstage and in the audience of the storied Music Hall, and where she saw a young Kathleen Battle sing as a student at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.“It had been part of my growing up to experience art,” she said.She later joined Arthur Mitchell’s company, Dance Theater of Harlem, then remained in New York to attend Barnard College and Columbia Law School. Ms. Sells described herself as “an affirmative action baby,” and said that as both a dancer and a law student she had encountered racism, both overt and insidious, that made her feel unwelcome.Ms. Sells recalled, for instance, a judge in the mid-1980s who told her that witnesses had to wait outside the courtroom. She said that she was actually an assistant district attorney, and he replied, “Wow, things have changed.”Diversity has been at the fore of her work as an administrator — at places including Columbia, the N.B.A. and eventually Harvard Law, where she has been the dean of students since 2015. Her mandate at the Met won’t be too far from that of Harvard, another institute often perceived as elite to the point of exclusivity.“It’s not just that you want to get it right,” Ms. Sells said. “There are a lot of eyes on you, but it’s a huge opportunity to show the way, as well as learn from other organizations that don’t have as big a name, are not as well known, and help shine a light on that work and on them.”She plans to start at the Met in late February. Among her early tasks will be to conceive a diversity, equity and inclusion plan that could be implemented across hiring, artistic planning and engagement; she will also examine structural inequities at the Met, and work with the marketing and development departments to broaden the company’s audience and donor base.The Met has been shut down because of the pandemic since last March, and most of its workers have been furloughed without pay since April. It is facing a major labor dispute with its unions, as well as more than $150 million in lost revenue from the theater’s closure. But Mr. Gelb said that the company hopes to receive assistance for diversity-related costs from foundations.What those costs are will become clearer as Ms. Sells settles into her new job. She said that she was ready, and motivated by the company’s recent recognition “of how structurally or historically the Met has not felt welcoming to people of color” and the range of possibilities for change.“I truly believe,” Ms. Sells said, “that this is the Met’s moment.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      He Called His Song ‘American Anthem.’ It Actually Became One.

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Biden AdministrationliveLatest UpdatesReview of Russian HackingBiden’s CabinetPandemic ResponseAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHe Called His Song ‘American Anthem.’ It Actually Became One.In his inaugural address, President Biden quoted Gene Scheer’s song, a patriotic hymn championed by the opera star Denyce Graves and recorded by Norah Jones for a Ken Burns soundtrack.Gene Scheer was watching the inauguration on television when President Biden suddenly began quoting “American Anthem,” a song he wrote more than 20 years ago.Credit…Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesPublished More

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      Elijah Moshinsky, Met Opera Director With Fanciful Touch, Dies at 75

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and Cases13,000 Approaches to TeachingVaccine InformationTimelineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storythose we’ve lostElijah Moshinsky, Met Opera Director With Fanciful Touch, Dies at 75Mr. Moshinsky, known for mixing traditional staging ideas with modern flourishes, also created productions for the Royal Opera and Opera Australia. He died of Covid-19.The director Elijah Moshinsky in 2015. Joseph Volpe, the Metropolitan Opera’s former general manager, said Mr. Moshinsky was “the closest thing the Met had to a house director.” He also worked in theater.Credit…Jeff BusbyJan. 21, 2021Updated 6:53 p.m. ETElijah Moshinsky, an Australian theater, television and opera director known for his productions at the Royal Opera in London, Opera Australia and especially the Metropolitan Opera, died on Jan. 14 at a hospital in London. He was 75.The cause was Covid-19, his family said.The best Moshinsky productions combined traditional staging ideas with modern, striking, sometimes fanciful touches, as in his 1993 version of Richard Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” for the Met, which is slated for revival in the 2021-22 season.That production reached the essence of Strauss’s opera, a delicate mix of grandeur and farce, providing “the thrill of beauty encased in irony, of sincerity at the end of self-consciousness,” Edward Rothstein of The New York Times wrote in a review.Mr. Moshinsky’s version featured an exaggeratedly bustling depiction of backstage preparations for an entertainment at the home of a Viennese gentleman, as well as a trio of eerily gigantic nymphs, their colorful dresses falling to the ground.“Ariadne” was one of nine new productions Mr. Moshinsky presented at the Met from 1980 to 2001, making him “the closest thing the Met had to a house director,” Joseph Volpe, the company’s general manager for much of that period, wrote in his 2006 memoir, “The Toughest Show on Earth: My Rise and Reign at the Metropolitan Opera.”Along with “Ariadne,” four are still in the Met’s active repertory, including a boldly stylized 1995 version of Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades” that had a film-noir feel, and a bleak, eerily contemporary, almost Expressionist 1996 staging of Janacek’s mysterious “The Makropulos Case.” Mr. Moshinsky’s last Met production was Verdi’s “Luisa Miller.”Mr. Moshinsky’s Met career began inauspiciously with a roundly criticized production of Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera,” a clumsily updated and poorly executed production starring Luciano Pavarotti. He returned in 1986 for Handel’s oratorio “Samson,” starring the tenor Jon Vickers in the title role, a stiff production that originated at the Royal Opera. But with that 1993 “Ariadne,” he announced himself anew.In attempting to bring a contemporary edge to his productions, Mr. Moshinsky was sometimes criticized for forcing what seemed quasi-modern elements and stark monumentality onto an otherwise traditional staging.His 1994 production of Verdi’s “Otello,” mounted for the tenor Plácido Domingo, was full of grandly operatic spectacle, yet some felt it seemed heavy-handed. It was dominated by “soaring columns and towering facades” that “alternately embrace and smother a great opera,” the critic Bernard Holland wrote in The Times.When Mr. Moshinsky followed his instincts to keep things traditional, the results were often effective. The critic Peter G. Davis, in a review for Classical Music, called the director’s 2001 production of “Luisa Miller” the Met’s “most satisfying Verdi effort in years.” Working within a “sensible but atmospheric setting,” Mr. Davis wrote, Mr. Moshinsky directed his characters “with skill, flexibility, and a sure understanding of who these people are.”He was also content, unlike some directors who come to opera from the world of theater, to work with singers who bring “outsized emotions” and “huge egos” onstage, as he put it in an interview with the BBC in 1993. Opera, he said, needed “people who can fill those emotional roles,” and part of his job was to engage with a performer’s temperament “to enable the best performance to occur.”Plácido Domingo as the title character and Renee Fleming as Desdemona during a dress rehearsal for a Moshinsky production of Verdi’s “Otello” at the Metropolitan Opera in 2002.Credit…Jack Vartoogian/Getty ImagesElijah Moshinsky was born on Jan. 8, 1946, in the French Concession in Shanghai, to which his Russian Jewish parents, Abraham and Eva (Krasavitsky) Moshinsky, had fled. He was the youngest of the couple’s three sons. Even though the family left Shanghai for Australia when Elijah was 5, he retained vivid memories of his early childhood, fortified by family stories and memorabilia, he said in the BBC interview.The Coronavirus Outbreak More